So, I was curious about this, and did a little digging. For reference:
The elements of California extortion are:
The defendant threatened to do one of the following to the alleged "victim":
a. Unlawfully injure or use force against him/her, a third party, or his/her property,
b. Accuse him/her or a relative or family member of a crime, OR
c. Expose a secret involving him/her or a family member, or connect any of them with some kind of crime, disgrace, or scandal;
When making the threat or using force, the defendant intended to force the "victim" into consenting to give him/her money or property or to do an official act;
As a result of the threat, the "victim" did consent to give the defendant money or property or do an official act; AND The "victim" then actually did give the defendant money or property or perform the official act.
So the exchange of the ransom is required to meet California's legal definition of "extortion". Naturally, most professionally run IT shops or prudent individuals will have backups and may not pay the ransom, but the damage still may be substantial simply due to lost time and productivity. This new law creates a specific exception for ransomware, making the deployment of it a crime equivalant to extorsion, regardless of whether or not a ransom payment is made. From the text of the bill itself:
This bill would define ransomware as... [describes ransomware]... The bill would provide that a person who, with intent to extort money or other consideration from another, introduces ransomware into any computer, computer system, or computer network is punishable as if that money or other consideration were actually obtained by means of the ransomware...
Given this information, it appears that unpaid ransomware attacks were NOT considered "extortion" under California law. This new law provides both a legal definition for ransomware (must have gotten some help from a competent IT person here), and closes that loophole... which, btw, seems like sort of a terrible loophole for extortion as well, but whatever.
We see further evidence of this in the first sections of the bill, which pretty much seems designed to shut down this loophole:
523. (a) Every person who, with intent to extort any money or other property from another, sends or delivers to any person any letter or other writing, whether subscribed or not, expressing or implying, or adapted to imply, any threat such as is specified in Section 519 is punishable in the same manner as if such money or property were actually obtained by means of such threat. (b) (1) Every person who, with intent to extort money or other consideration from another, introduces ransomware into any computer, computer system, or computer network is punishable pursuant to Section 520 in the same manner as if such money or other consideration were actually obtained by means of the ransomware. (2) Prosecution pursuant to this subdivision does not prohibit or limit prosecution under any other law.
TLDR version: This law was needed due to the peculiarities of California's extortion laws.
I suspect this is the electrical equivalent of the conversion to metric in the US. Yes, it makes sense. Yes, it has a lot of advantages. No, it's not going to happen so easily, because of simple inertia. Lots of good ideas never happen because it's hard to make a transition to anything new once the old system is well established and functional. I mean, look at how long IPv6 is taking to get off the ground, even with the pressure of having run out of IPv4 addresses.
I'm just thinking about the enormity of the change this would require. First, consider building and construction codes, and electrician licensing and training. Next, we need whole new sets of standards for lights and wall sockets, as you obviously need to make them different to prevent accidents. Consumer electronics would need to support both standards for the next 50 years (at least with converters), because most people are not going to rewire their house. And that doesn't even get into the question of how to deal with different power requirements. They'd have to run off a common standard, but I'm not really qualified to say if that's even practical. I've always presumed electronic devices are designed with different volts/amp requirements for a reason. There are probably other issues that I haven't even considered as well.
The logistics of all this are a bit staggering if you consider the whole picture.
I have an HTC One M7 myself. Notice that, in fact, it's not a seamless metal back. There are small plastic strips that cut across the top and bottom, and the sides are plastic as well. I'd presume that's not an aesthetic choice, but for reception purposes.
I've always gotten good reception with that phone, so I do wonder what the advantage of the glass panel is over the HTC's segmented design. Maybe they patented it? Who knows.
Not at all. I think you're taking me a bit too literally. I was just providing a counter-example based on my own experiences. And in fact, I was trying to careful not to claim that this was universally true, but apparently that message wasn't conveyed clearly. Let me highlight that qualifier, since you seemed to have missed it.
One of the biggest fallacies I see is automatically assuming that increasingly efficient automation and production necessarily translates into fewer jobs. It often can, of course, but it doesn't necessarily have to.
All I'm arguing is that we can't be certain that mass unemployment will be the result. I never claimed it wasn't possible. What makes your future vision infallible? I'd love to know.
My understanding is that the glass back helps to improve radio reception. It's apparently a significant problem for the newer all-aluminum phone designs. The aluminum blocks reception, and there are various ways of coping with it, typically by compromising the solid aluminum back with other materials.
This tends to follow typical trends of "industry leader" vs "also-ran". What would an industry leader have to gain by establishing well-defined standards? In contrast, standards are critical for the also-rans to compete.
Don't think for a minute that AMD wouldn't do the same were they in Intel's shoes. They play nicer because they're the underdog right now.
Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time, your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population precisely because there are so many people to provide products and services to.
Speaking as a programmer who writes rather technically complex software (videogames), I have to say that the notion my job is going to be replaced in my lifetime by AI seems mind-blowingly optimistic (not a new thing for AI proponents), probably made by people who have no clue about how many rather specialized problems I have to solve on a daily basis for which you'd literally need not just human-level intelligence, but highly specialized human level intelligence. That's because a big part of my job is interacting with the artists and designers on the team and helping to solve problems on their behalf.
One of the biggest fallacies I see is automatically assuming that increasingly efficient automation and production necessarily translates into fewer jobs. It often can, of course, but it doesn't necessarily have to. Increased efficiency can also act as a force multiplier, producing more products for less, or perhaps a bigger, better product, only with the same number of people.
To use my own industry as an example, the videogame company where I worked for quite a few years has been hard at work developing new technologies to allow their content creators to be more efficient. Each time we do that, we have a leg up on the competition, because we can then more efficiently create our virtual worlds. We don't fire designers, we create bigger and more complex worlds with the increased efficiency. What would happen if we wrote an AI that could generate content all on its own (think of a radically improved procedural generation algorithm)? Would we fire the game designers and artists then? Nope, probably not. Instead, I think we'd use the AI to create the bulk of our virtual world, and use the human artists and designers to hand-craft the most important bits to the game that really require a human touch.
Fine, we can call it what it really was, which was political propaganda. How else do you explain that a single laptop getting infected with malware gets elevated to the level of national news?
And no, this wasn't a simple mistake. A simple mistake is getting a name or peripheral fact incorrect, and we can forgive that so long as corrections are made, because we're all human, and all make mistakes. Rather, the entire premise to the original story was shown to be false, but the story still remains in almost its entirety. Not a single call to Burlington Electric was made prior to publishing... the simplest, most basic fact checking you'd expect of a professional journalist or organization. Quite simply, this was journalistic malpractice. Only one of two possibilities seem likely - either the WaPo organization is simply incompetent and doesn't understand how to do proper journalism, or they rushed the story out because they had their eye on a political narrative they wanted to push, and facts be damned, this couldn't wait. This is not the first time they've been caught doing this either, when they promoted an absurd "fake news blacklist" with questionable sources a bit over a month ago.
Even some thoughtful left-leaning journalists are having a hard time swallowing these latest reports about Russian hacking, as they're all too aware of how governments are perfectly willing to lie when it suits their purpose (on both sides, mind you). All I ask is that you look at these reports through the lens of a skeptic, and ask why these stories are getting pushed to the front of the newsfeed. And what has changed so that so many people are willing to believe our three letter agencies without question, when they've been caught in lie after lie after lie these past many years? Why the change in heart when it comes to these Russian hacking reports, and subsequent stories that seem to neatly dovetail into that line?
That's about the most lame "retraction" I've seen to a fake news story. The entire central premise has been destroyed, but 98% of the article remains unchanged. That's not a retraction. Also of note:
Original Slashdot headline:
Russian Hackers Penetrated The US Electricity Grid, Say Officials (washingtonpost.com) Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday December 31, 2016 @10:34AM from the power-play dept.
blah, blah, fake story
Conveniently, now Slashdot now doesn't have that lingering headline showing they fell for this idiocy as well. I thought I'd just post it for posterity here.
We sorta need a better way to describe dota2 than "free to play". Most games with this moniker then allow you to buy power in the game (and for the most part expect it). Dota2 does not suffer from this.
True, but I'd rather we accurately label games that are "pay to win" or "pay to play" as something like "Freemium", leaving "free to play" to describe games like Dota2 or Guild Wars 2.
I'd say the most significant factor is that Unity and Unreal engines are multi-platform. Steam's native support certainly contributed, of course, but it's very difficult for a game developer to justify spending a lot of engineering effort to support 1% of the market unless you have some significant resources to spend.
Ah, of course! It's clearly a plot by the DNC to promote their "fake books." I have a suspicion of what deviltry we'd find in that innocent-sounding "Why Do My Ears Pop?" book:
Susie: "Hey Mom, why do my ears pop?"
Mom: "Because Republicans are bad and want to hurt you. What you're feeling is the concentrated evil of failed Republic policies leftover from the Reagan era."
The article does point out a bit later that this particular library didn't participate in that program, so it appear that there wasn't a financial motivation. This was mentioned, as it may be a motivation for OTHER libraries doing the same thing.
By holding onto clearly unpopular titles (not one checkout in a year or two), they were ensuring that potentially newer and more popular titles had no space in their library. I'm not sure how anyone could believe this was in the best interest of the library.
I can only think of a few motivations. An arrogant: "We know what's best for you." or "Everything new is crap" attitude, or perhaps purging books simply means more work for the librarians, and so this seemed easier to them. I'm leaning towards the latter explanation, as a kid's book titled "Why Do My Ears Pop?" doesn't exactly seem like high literature worth preserving for all time.
George Dore, the library’s branch supervisor who was put on administrative leave for his part in the episode, said he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf. He said the same thing is being done at other libraries, too.
And this makes no sense. If the books were not being checked out for years at a time, why would they have to later re-purchase the book?
Neither is Clojure, F#, Erlang, Elixir, Elm, Dart, Julia, Rust, Kotlin. Does that mean we shouldn't use these languages?
Not necessarily. But it's important to understand that popularity of your technology of choice - languages included - usually tends to be a positive thing. It means there's a larger community of developers, which in turn means better tools, more libraries and frameworks, and of course, it's also easier to find programmers who are already up to speed with that technology.
While it's true that any decent programmer can learn any language (I've done so several times on the job), it does takes time, meaning for projects in more niche languages, any programmer you hire is going to cost more as they learn both learn the project AND a new language.
Honestly, I've never been one for learning a programming language you don't actually use in practice. I've always felt that if you have a need to use it for a specific reason, you'll learn it, and get proficient with it. But unless you're solving significant problems with your language, I don't think you've actually "learned" it, no matter how many books you've read or toy projects you've thrown together. That's not enough to really get your claws into it, learning the good as well as the bad.
to lure those who were more talented with a keyboard than an AK-47 rifle
Sigh... The Russian military doesn't use AK-47 rifles anymore, and haven't for a very long time.
Anyhow, next I'm sure we'll see the story of Russians hacking the electrical grid as part of our coordinated "Russian hacking themed" stories. I just got one more of those stories on a local news site, telling us because of the Russian hacking, we'll soon be forced to change our passwords regularly and use funny characters in them, and stop reusing passwords in order to stay secure. How inconvenient! In addition to the obvious facepalm here, that this has been required for good security all along, it also misses the point that the Russians didn't break into the DNC because of a weak password.
Russians and Chinese have been hacking us for a long time (and we're certainly doing the same), but now it's part of a political narrative, so I guess we'll be treated to a stream of hacking boogeyman stories like this for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I was curious about this, and did a little digging. For reference:
The elements of California extortion are:
The defendant threatened to do one of the following to the alleged "victim":
a. Unlawfully injure or use force against him/her, a third party, or his/her property,
b. Accuse him/her or a relative or family member of a crime, OR
c. Expose a secret involving him/her or a family member, or connect any of them with some kind of crime, disgrace, or scandal;
When making the threat or using force, the defendant intended to force the "victim" into consenting to give him/her money or property or to do an official act;
As a result of the threat, the "victim" did consent to give the defendant money or property or do an official act; AND
The "victim" then actually did give the defendant money or property or perform the official act.
So the exchange of the ransom is required to meet California's legal definition of "extortion". Naturally, most professionally run IT shops or prudent individuals will have backups and may not pay the ransom, but the damage still may be substantial simply due to lost time and productivity. This new law creates a specific exception for ransomware, making the deployment of it a crime equivalant to extorsion, regardless of whether or not a ransom payment is made. From the text of the bill itself:
This bill would define ransomware as... [describes ransomware]... The bill would provide that a person who, with intent to extort money or other consideration from another, introduces ransomware into any computer, computer system, or computer network is punishable as if that money or other consideration were actually obtained by means of the ransomware...
Given this information, it appears that unpaid ransomware attacks were NOT considered "extortion" under California law. This new law provides both a legal definition for ransomware (must have gotten some help from a competent IT person here), and closes that loophole... which, btw, seems like sort of a terrible loophole for extortion as well, but whatever.
We see further evidence of this in the first sections of the bill, which pretty much seems designed to shut down this loophole:
523. (a) Every person who, with intent to extort any money or other property from another, sends or delivers to any person any letter or other writing, whether subscribed or not, expressing or implying, or adapted to imply, any threat such as is specified in Section 519 is punishable in the same manner as if such money or property were actually obtained by means of such threat.
(b) (1) Every person who, with intent to extort money or other consideration from another, introduces ransomware into any computer, computer system, or computer network is punishable pursuant to Section 520 in the same manner as if such money or other consideration were actually obtained by means of the ransomware.
(2) Prosecution pursuant to this subdivision does not prohibit or limit prosecution under any other law.
TLDR version: This law was needed due to the peculiarities of California's extortion laws.
We've already seen ransomware that either allows a victim to pay, or to infect at least two other paying victims, using a customized version of the malware for tracking purposes.
I suspect this is the electrical equivalent of the conversion to metric in the US. Yes, it makes sense. Yes, it has a lot of advantages. No, it's not going to happen so easily, because of simple inertia. Lots of good ideas never happen because it's hard to make a transition to anything new once the old system is well established and functional. I mean, look at how long IPv6 is taking to get off the ground, even with the pressure of having run out of IPv4 addresses.
I'm just thinking about the enormity of the change this would require. First, consider building and construction codes, and electrician licensing and training. Next, we need whole new sets of standards for lights and wall sockets, as you obviously need to make them different to prevent accidents. Consumer electronics would need to support both standards for the next 50 years (at least with converters), because most people are not going to rewire their house. And that doesn't even get into the question of how to deal with different power requirements. They'd have to run off a common standard, but I'm not really qualified to say if that's even practical. I've always presumed electronic devices are designed with different volts/amp requirements for a reason. There are probably other issues that I haven't even considered as well.
The logistics of all this are a bit staggering if you consider the whole picture.
Well, to be fair, this is Slashdot. Debating is what we do here.
Curly brace style. Vim vs Emacs. C vs C++. Perl vs Python. Spaces vs Tabs. It can get pretty ugly. And that's before politics was thrown into the mix.
I have an HTC One M7 myself. Notice that, in fact, it's not a seamless metal back. There are small plastic strips that cut across the top and bottom, and the sides are plastic as well. I'd presume that's not an aesthetic choice, but for reception purposes.
I've always gotten good reception with that phone, so I do wonder what the advantage of the glass panel is over the HTC's segmented design. Maybe they patented it? Who knows.
Not at all. I think you're taking me a bit too literally. I was just providing a counter-example based on my own experiences. And in fact, I was trying to careful not to claim that this was universally true, but apparently that message wasn't conveyed clearly. Let me highlight that qualifier, since you seemed to have missed it.
One of the biggest fallacies I see is automatically assuming that increasingly efficient automation and production necessarily translates into fewer jobs. It often can, of course, but it doesn't necessarily have to.
All I'm arguing is that we can't be certain that mass unemployment will be the result. I never claimed it wasn't possible. What makes your future vision infallible? I'd love to know.
My understanding is that the glass back helps to improve radio reception. It's apparently a significant problem for the newer all-aluminum phone designs. The aluminum blocks reception, and there are various ways of coping with it, typically by compromising the solid aluminum back with other materials.
Touchy
That's spelled touché.
This tends to follow typical trends of "industry leader" vs "also-ran". What would an industry leader have to gain by establishing well-defined standards? In contrast, standards are critical for the also-rans to compete.
Don't think for a minute that AMD wouldn't do the same were they in Intel's shoes. They play nicer because they're the underdog right now.
Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time, your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population precisely because there are so many people to provide products and services to.
Speaking as a programmer who writes rather technically complex software (videogames), I have to say that the notion my job is going to be replaced in my lifetime by AI seems mind-blowingly optimistic (not a new thing for AI proponents), probably made by people who have no clue about how many rather specialized problems I have to solve on a daily basis for which you'd literally need not just human-level intelligence, but highly specialized human level intelligence. That's because a big part of my job is interacting with the artists and designers on the team and helping to solve problems on their behalf.
One of the biggest fallacies I see is automatically assuming that increasingly efficient automation and production necessarily translates into fewer jobs. It often can, of course, but it doesn't necessarily have to. Increased efficiency can also act as a force multiplier, producing more products for less, or perhaps a bigger, better product, only with the same number of people.
To use my own industry as an example, the videogame company where I worked for quite a few years has been hard at work developing new technologies to allow their content creators to be more efficient. Each time we do that, we have a leg up on the competition, because we can then more efficiently create our virtual worlds. We don't fire designers, we create bigger and more complex worlds with the increased efficiency. What would happen if we wrote an AI that could generate content all on its own (think of a radically improved procedural generation algorithm)? Would we fire the game designers and artists then? Nope, probably not. Instead, I think we'd use the AI to create the bulk of our virtual world, and use the human artists and designers to hand-craft the most important bits to the game that really require a human touch.
Fine, we can call it what it really was, which was political propaganda. How else do you explain that a single laptop getting infected with malware gets elevated to the level of national news?
And no, this wasn't a simple mistake. A simple mistake is getting a name or peripheral fact incorrect, and we can forgive that so long as corrections are made, because we're all human, and all make mistakes. Rather, the entire premise to the original story was shown to be false, but the story still remains in almost its entirety. Not a single call to Burlington Electric was made prior to publishing... the simplest, most basic fact checking you'd expect of a professional journalist or organization. Quite simply, this was journalistic malpractice. Only one of two possibilities seem likely - either the WaPo organization is simply incompetent and doesn't understand how to do proper journalism, or they rushed the story out because they had their eye on a political narrative they wanted to push, and facts be damned, this couldn't wait. This is not the first time they've been caught doing this either, when they promoted an absurd "fake news blacklist" with questionable sources a bit over a month ago.
Even some thoughtful left-leaning journalists are having a hard time swallowing these latest reports about Russian hacking, as they're all too aware of how governments are perfectly willing to lie when it suits their purpose (on both sides, mind you). All I ask is that you look at these reports through the lens of a skeptic, and ask why these stories are getting pushed to the front of the newsfeed. And what has changed so that so many people are willing to believe our three letter agencies without question, when they've been caught in lie after lie after lie these past many years? Why the change in heart when it comes to these Russian hacking reports, and subsequent stories that seem to neatly dovetail into that line?
Was it as easy as changing previously posted Slashdot headlines?
That's about the most lame "retraction" I've seen to a fake news story. The entire central premise has been destroyed, but 98% of the article remains unchanged. That's not a retraction. Also of note:
Original Slashdot headline:
Russian Hackers Penetrated The US Electricity Grid, Say Officials (washingtonpost.com)
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday December 31, 2016 @10:34AM from the power-play dept.
blah, blah, fake story
Conveniently, now Slashdot now doesn't have that lingering headline showing they fell for this idiocy as well. I thought I'd just post it for posterity here.
We sorta need a better way to describe dota2 than "free to play". Most games with this moniker then allow you to buy power in the game (and for the most part expect it). Dota2 does not suffer from this.
True, but I'd rather we accurately label games that are "pay to win" or "pay to play" as something like "Freemium", leaving "free to play" to describe games like Dota2 or Guild Wars 2.
I'd say the most significant factor is that Unity and Unreal engines are multi-platform. Steam's native support certainly contributed, of course, but it's very difficult for a game developer to justify spending a lot of engineering effort to support 1% of the market unless you have some significant resources to spend.
Ah, of course! It's clearly a plot by the DNC to promote their "fake books." I have a suspicion of what deviltry we'd find in that innocent-sounding "Why Do My Ears Pop?" book:
Susie: "Hey Mom, why do my ears pop?"
Mom: "Because Republicans are bad and want to hurt you. What you're feeling is the concentrated evil of failed Republic policies leftover from the Reagan era."
Susie: *cries*
The article does point out a bit later that this particular library didn't participate in that program, so it appear that there wasn't a financial motivation. This was mentioned, as it may be a motivation for OTHER libraries doing the same thing.
By holding onto clearly unpopular titles (not one checkout in a year or two), they were ensuring that potentially newer and more popular titles had no space in their library. I'm not sure how anyone could believe this was in the best interest of the library.
I can only think of a few motivations. An arrogant: "We know what's best for you." or "Everything new is crap" attitude, or perhaps purging books simply means more work for the librarians, and so this seemed easier to them. I'm leaning towards the latter explanation, as a kid's book titled "Why Do My Ears Pop?" doesn't exactly seem like high literature worth preserving for all time.
George Dore, the library’s branch supervisor who was put on administrative leave for his part in the episode, said he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf. He said the same thing is being done at other libraries, too.
And this makes no sense. If the books were not being checked out for years at a time, why would they have to later re-purchase the book?
Neither is Clojure, F#, Erlang, Elixir, Elm, Dart, Julia, Rust, Kotlin. Does that mean we shouldn't use these languages?
Not necessarily. But it's important to understand that popularity of your technology of choice - languages included - usually tends to be a positive thing. It means there's a larger community of developers, which in turn means better tools, more libraries and frameworks, and of course, it's also easier to find programmers who are already up to speed with that technology.
While it's true that any decent programmer can learn any language (I've done so several times on the job), it does takes time, meaning for projects in more niche languages, any programmer you hire is going to cost more as they learn both learn the project AND a new language.
Honestly, I've never been one for learning a programming language you don't actually use in practice. I've always felt that if you have a need to use it for a specific reason, you'll learn it, and get proficient with it. But unless you're solving significant problems with your language, I don't think you've actually "learned" it, no matter how many books you've read or toy projects you've thrown together. That's not enough to really get your claws into it, learning the good as well as the bad.
Do you trust all the three letter agencies when they tell us they need to plant backdoors in all our phones and computers to keep us safe?
Republicans like me have been here a long time. There just didn't used to be so many political stories here on Slashdot.
From the article/summary:
to lure those who were more talented with a keyboard than an AK-47 rifle
Sigh... The Russian military doesn't use AK-47 rifles anymore, and haven't for a very long time.
Anyhow, next I'm sure we'll see the story of Russians hacking the electrical grid as part of our coordinated "Russian hacking themed" stories. I just got one more of those stories on a local news site, telling us because of the Russian hacking, we'll soon be forced to change our passwords regularly and use funny characters in them, and stop reusing passwords in order to stay secure. How inconvenient! In addition to the obvious facepalm here, that this has been required for good security all along, it also misses the point that the Russians didn't break into the DNC because of a weak password.
Russians and Chinese have been hacking us for a long time (and we're certainly doing the same), but now it's part of a political narrative, so I guess we'll be treated to a stream of hacking boogeyman stories like this for a while.
people who really understand the low-leveling functioning of the system
We calls thems electrical engineers where I'm from.
You fancy higher-level people.
--Physicist
Hey, how's it look way up there?
-Mathematician
Perhaps so, but "real AI" is still complete science fiction, and likely will be for the duration of my lifetime.
UBI allowing people to play video games 24/7
As a videogame developer, the future is looking bright.