How about all the other things that can be found in one's browser history, such as Google searches, or, say, one's own name on some websites, such as Facebook when viewing one's own profile?
The summary is incorrectly worded. It should read "Contrasted with the EFF's..."
But worse than that, the paper itself is horribly written, especially the abstract. The threat presented is not de-anonymization within the social network (since usually most profiles are real people anyway) but rather de-anonymization of visitors to arbitrary websites if those visitors also have social networking URLs in their browser history.
Now, the big privacy hole here is browser history stealing, which is four years old. All this paper does is refine this mountain of privacy-invading information using social networking URLs that might be found there.
If you want the right to be a social misfit but are willing to work in an economic environment that may not be able to fund all of the security and other IT policies you desire, then work for a small company.
If you are willing to wear a tie and conform to corporate culture, and thrive on having a large budget for compartmentalized IT functions and security and implementing corresponding policies, then work for a either Fortune 500 company or a government agency.
If you want the best of both worlds, then start your own company.
If you want the best of both worlds and further you do not want to risk capital, then take a time machine to the late 1990's.
Or, you could just be thankful you have a job at all in today's economy.
With pre-filled forms, the IRS would want to ensure that all sources of income were reported. That would mean lowering of reporting thresholds on employers, thereby increasing the burden on employers. E.g., employers can currently save paperwork by opting to not report (1099s) service contractors (e.g. independent plumbers called in for a one-time repair) if the amount paid was less than $600 during the calendar year. And households can opt to not report babysitters (W-2s) if the amount paid was less than $1400 during the calendar year.
And when I say "paperwork", it's not just an inconvenience -- there is a number attached to it. In the wake of the 1993 Nannygate, a handful of nanny payroll services popped up. They charge $50/month, or $600/year. That's a significant percentage -- and waste of the U.S. economy -- for those who need only, say, $2,000 or $3,000 per year of babysitting.
Now, I personally usually get around that limit by alternating between two babysitters, but the first year I moved to Denver I didn't know that many and had just one, and forked out the $600 for the payroll service.
So with universal mandatory reporting with no or drastically reduced reporting thresholds, is everyone going to rush out and pay $600/year for a payroll service just to hire a babysitter a few evenings a year? No, it'll just be under the table, thereby making everyone a criminal, with selective enforcement, or political blackmail, as with Zoe Baird.
In the case of small businesses, all this mandatory reporting just raises the barrier to entry of new small businesses, limiting social mobility, increasing the class divide, and since most new jobs come from small businesses, limiting job creation.
If the goal is tax filing simplification, then just eliminate the income tax, or raise the thresholds significantly. The federal income tax is a charade anyway, given the federal government's ability to print money. The federal government existed for over a century without an income tax. E.g., the Civil War was funded by Lincoln printing "greenbacks".
All four examples from TFA have the common theme of one outsourced group does the development, and a different group does the maintenance, resulting in loss of institutional and system knowledge. This is a flaw in outsourcing approach. The solitication should be for development and system lifetime maintenance, with contractual penalties for failure to respond to or fix problems.
I avoided PCs until 1988. I was not able to find a job doing software development on any of the good home computers, such as the Amiga I had at home, so I got a job doing software development on PCs. And in 1988, I had to support CGA and EGA.
According to TFA, the US DOJ started investigating the FBI over this issue in 2006. Why aren't FBI agents in jail right now? And why didn't the Washington Post ask this question?
How is it that VGA was good for 15 years (1987-2002) and now we have, counting conservatively, three standards in 8 years (DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort)? DVI itself has multiple incompatible sub-standards. Before VGA, CGA/EGA was good for 6 years.
Is it a lack of engineering foresight, or is it a cable war with companies jockeying for position?
I've noticed that new Dells are now coming with DisplayPort, and discovered that Dell was one of the instigators.
Another unrelated observation: this could obsolete USB, and thus USB thumb drives, and thus yet another data storage format becomes oprhaned. This was inevitable. USB has had a good 14 year run so far. It couldn't last forever, despite what people thought about USB "being different this time" regarding being able to access old data -- that somehow it was going to be different from floppies and tapes.
"100% Accuracy" implies a positional error of zero meters (to infinite decimal places), which is obviously not what they're talking about. Amazingly, this mistake is not just in the Slashdot summary, but in the cached FA as well.
If we go to the referenced Nature article abstract we see that the development "yields programmed targets in all cases."
The correct terminology then would be "100% Success Rate" not "100% Accuracy".
P.S. Presumably "success" is defined by something like "90% Accuracy", to put an ironic spin on it. But it makes no sense to speak of accuracy in terms of percentage without a reference, such as "a single atom". So the criteria was probably something like X nanometers accuracy.
The most common incidence of acceleration in today's world is the car. For non-sports car, the strongest acceleration is taking a corner. Take a corner fast in a car, and the human might say "hey!" but the pizza could likely be destroyed.
There you have it: using wires in a science project violates school policy.
There's a new DVD out called The War on Kids. The thesis is that schools are prisons and are about surveillance, metal detectors, and control. One of the best parts is where they are receiving a tour through a school, and they ask to see the library, which has a high-security metal door with metal grate over the glass. The principal can't find the key and asks, "did you really need to get in here?"
AOL is such ancient history that an AOL address is no longer bad. In all seriousness, it says that the person values keeping in contact with people from the past, establishing relationships for the long-term, and thus that this is a trustworthy and established person.
"The price of maintaining comment-free code is well known."
Well, of course, if you take an industry average -- because you have the following:
Inexperienced programmers thrown into an old and unexciting "maintenance" project (often H1B's who have no choice but to stay on the job). To understand someone else's code requires years of experience in that genre of language (if not that particular language itself) to understand the common idioms and patterns to reverse engineer. The maintainer needs to be able to say, "oh, yes, that is what they're doing." Like Scotty did with the Mac.
Illiterately named symbols. Let me explain what I mean by "illiteracy". I mean the inability to think and to communicate. Any well-thought out comment could instead be put into a variable name with a little thought. As an example, one of the worst offenders is "type". A variable called "DisplayType" is meaningless and communicates no information. "GraphicsAdapter" is much more descriptive, and more OO.
Exacerbating the above is code that was written in the era before auto-complete and by those who couldn't type. Those people tended to create variable names that were too short, often just acronyms and abberviations.
I use comments only in the following situations:
A one-line hyperlink for an entire module or source code file that links to the algorithm or approach I am implementing.
Documenting how I am working around a compiler or API bug.
Documenting how I am working around a bad database schema (this can lead to all sorts of kluge code).
Adding a TODO or noting temporary code.
If it's code not written by me, documenting shortcomings and limitations of it.
Mark off sub-sections of code, especially in super-long procedures. (In the interest of preserving code locality, I do not break up super-long procedures unless the sub-procedures are actually called from somewhere else.)
In the spirit of Knuth's literate programming, I will often do ASCII art to create UML diagrams -- always for state machines, and sometimes even for class diagrams when they are deep. Obviously, my execution is different than Knuth's -- no special tools are needed to extract the documentation -- just an ASCII editor, and that is the beauty. Not only do I know the diagrams accompany the code, I know the recipient will both know they exist and be able to read them without additional tools.
I think that censoring ads is a little different than censoring search results.
There is little difference, and the point I was making was that as a business, it's all OK, provided they disclose editorial bias. If an information business is duplicitous and hides funding sources or biases, then that constitutes fraud, which should be illegal.
Lastly, there is NOTHING wrong with a biased search engine as long as the people using it understand the bias. Business, environmental, left wing, right wing, socialist, communist, capitalist and what-ever-ists might like to have a search engine that gives them results according to their political views.
Exactly. And it should be the FTC that regulates it, not the FCC. FDR created the FCC to censor political speech under the guise of allocating limited spectrum. Since the Internet is not restricted by limited spectrum, the facade has been thrown off and the FCC is only about censorship in relation to the Internet.
As I've argued before here, bias is good, as long it is disclosed. It was the Progressive Era that ushered in "neutrality", as if there could ever be such a thing, which has only allowed biased views to masquerade as unbiased views.
What is Google's bias? For starters, they should more prominently disclose their association with the federal government. I still remember Google censoring my AdWords in 2002 for "anti-GOP views" (at a time when Bush was leading the U.S. into a an unjust war).
To grab a bit of perspective on the actual speed of these modems, consider that a letter consists of eight bits. A speed of 300 bits meant that this modem could only send out around 30 letters a second.
While one might think things have improved by four orders of magnitude (10,000x), thanks to Parkinson's Law, they have only improved by two orders (100x). Navigating to the washingtonpost.com home page takes 7 seconds to load on my 2.5-year old 2GHz desktop with Firefox. CTRL-A and CTRL-C then paste into Notepad yields a 15K text file. 15 * 1024 * 10 bits / 7 seconds = 19.2K.
When Google was in the rocess of buying YouTube, people were saying it was going to be the death of Google since YouTube was a trove of pirated works. That was common sense. But you are right, the DMCA protects Google/YouTube, defying common sense. (It wasn't clear at the time to the public that YouTube could hide behind the DMCA; in fact, it was YouTube that ushered in that practice.) Of course, 90+ year coyrights also defy common sense. If we had 14+14 year copyrights again that stimulate rather than stifle the arts, the DMCA takedown system would be counterproductive.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between beta and production code when it comes to the code that runs Facebook?
How about all the other things that can be found in one's browser history, such as Google searches, or, say, one's own name on some websites, such as Facebook when viewing one's own profile?
But worse than that, the paper itself is horribly written, especially the abstract. The threat presented is not de-anonymization within the social network (since usually most profiles are real people anyway) but rather de-anonymization of visitors to arbitrary websites if those visitors also have social networking URLs in their browser history.
Now, the big privacy hole here is browser history stealing, which is four years old. All this paper does is refine this mountain of privacy-invading information using social networking URLs that might be found there.
It wasn't until the fifth word that I realized the U.S. wasn't under attack.
If you are willing to wear a tie and conform to corporate culture, and thrive on having a large budget for compartmentalized IT functions and security and implementing corresponding policies, then work for a either Fortune 500 company or a government agency.
If you want the best of both worlds, then start your own company.
If you want the best of both worlds and further you do not want to risk capital, then take a time machine to the late 1990's.
Or, you could just be thankful you have a job at all in today's economy.
And when I say "paperwork", it's not just an inconvenience -- there is a number attached to it. In the wake of the 1993 Nannygate, a handful of nanny payroll services popped up. They charge $50/month, or $600/year. That's a significant percentage -- and waste of the U.S. economy -- for those who need only, say, $2,000 or $3,000 per year of babysitting.
Now, I personally usually get around that limit by alternating between two babysitters, but the first year I moved to Denver I didn't know that many and had just one, and forked out the $600 for the payroll service.
So with universal mandatory reporting with no or drastically reduced reporting thresholds, is everyone going to rush out and pay $600/year for a payroll service just to hire a babysitter a few evenings a year? No, it'll just be under the table, thereby making everyone a criminal, with selective enforcement, or political blackmail, as with Zoe Baird.
In the case of small businesses, all this mandatory reporting just raises the barrier to entry of new small businesses, limiting social mobility, increasing the class divide, and since most new jobs come from small businesses, limiting job creation.
If the goal is tax filing simplification, then just eliminate the income tax, or raise the thresholds significantly. The federal income tax is a charade anyway, given the federal government's ability to print money. The federal government existed for over a century without an income tax. E.g., the Civil War was funded by Lincoln printing "greenbacks".
The problems with PayPal are so infamous that no less than Fortune/CNN listed five alternatives
All four examples from TFA have the common theme of one outsourced group does the development, and a different group does the maintenance, resulting in loss of institutional and system knowledge. This is a flaw in outsourcing approach. The solitication should be for development and system lifetime maintenance, with contractual penalties for failure to respond to or fix problems.
Because someone will come out with a mass storage product that can utilize speeds higher than USB.
I avoided PCs until 1988. I was not able to find a job doing software development on any of the good home computers, such as the Amiga I had at home, so I got a job doing software development on PCs. And in 1988, I had to support CGA and EGA.
According to TFA, the US DOJ started investigating the FBI over this issue in 2006. Why aren't FBI agents in jail right now? And why didn't the Washington Post ask this question?
Is it a lack of engineering foresight, or is it a cable war with companies jockeying for position?
I've noticed that new Dells are now coming with DisplayPort, and discovered that Dell was one of the instigators.
Another unrelated observation: this could obsolete USB, and thus USB thumb drives, and thus yet another data storage format becomes oprhaned. This was inevitable. USB has had a good 14 year run so far. It couldn't last forever, despite what people thought about USB "being different this time" regarding being able to access old data -- that somehow it was going to be different from floppies and tapes.
If we go to the referenced Nature article abstract we see that the development "yields programmed targets in all cases."
The correct terminology then would be "100% Success Rate" not "100% Accuracy".
P.S. Presumably "success" is defined by something like "90% Accuracy", to put an ironic spin on it. But it makes no sense to speak of accuracy in terms of percentage without a reference, such as "a single atom". So the criteria was probably something like X nanometers accuracy.
The most common incidence of acceleration in today's world is the car. For non-sports car, the strongest acceleration is taking a corner. Take a corner fast in a car, and the human might say "hey!" but the pizza could likely be destroyed.
There's a new DVD out called The War on Kids. The thesis is that schools are prisons and are about surveillance, metal detectors, and control. One of the best parts is where they are receiving a tour through a school, and they ask to see the library, which has a high-security metal door with metal grate over the glass. The principal can't find the key and asks, "did you really need to get in here?"
Learning is against school policy.
In my experience, pizza holds up less well to acceleration than people do.
Is he concerned enough to give up his job teaching others how to make robots?
AOL is such ancient history that an AOL address is no longer bad. In all seriousness, it says that the person values keeping in contact with people from the past, establishing relationships for the long-term, and thus that this is a trustworthy and established person.
The Mayans were right about 2012!
Well, of course, if you take an industry average -- because you have the following:
I use comments only in the following situations:
More soberly, I would say the IED is the gadget that most "defined the decade" as Engadget's headline touts.
There is little difference, and the point I was making was that as a business, it's all OK, provided they disclose editorial bias. If an information business is duplicitous and hides funding sources or biases, then that constitutes fraud, which should be illegal.
Exactly. And it should be the FTC that regulates it, not the FCC. FDR created the FCC to censor political speech under the guise of allocating limited spectrum. Since the Internet is not restricted by limited spectrum, the facade has been thrown off and the FCC is only about censorship in relation to the Internet.
As I've argued before here, bias is good, as long it is disclosed. It was the Progressive Era that ushered in "neutrality", as if there could ever be such a thing, which has only allowed biased views to masquerade as unbiased views.
What is Google's bias? For starters, they should more prominently disclose their association with the federal government. I still remember Google censoring my AdWords in 2002 for "anti-GOP views" (at a time when Bush was leading the U.S. into a an unjust war).
While one might think things have improved by four orders of magnitude (10,000x), thanks to Parkinson's Law, they have only improved by two orders (100x). Navigating to the washingtonpost.com home page takes 7 seconds to load on my 2.5-year old 2GHz desktop with Firefox. CTRL-A and CTRL-C then paste into Notepad yields a 15K text file. 15 * 1024 * 10 bits / 7 seconds = 19.2K.
Hey, it's like I'm back running my 1992 BBS.
When Google was in the rocess of buying YouTube, people were saying it was going to be the death of Google since YouTube was a trove of pirated works. That was common sense. But you are right, the DMCA protects Google/YouTube, defying common sense. (It wasn't clear at the time to the public that YouTube could hide behind the DMCA; in fact, it was YouTube that ushered in that practice.) Of course, 90+ year coyrights also defy common sense. If we had 14+14 year copyrights again that stimulate rather than stifle the arts, the DMCA takedown system would be counterproductive.