I could see this happening to a senior citizen. Seniors often get up in the middle of the night. Can you imagine the startle they might get if Alexa starts laughing? It could be enough to set off a heart attack.
It's not even funny either. Could you imagine a senior citizen being frightened into a heart attack if Alexa suddenly started laughing in the middle of the night? Maybe machine learning is going to far now....
I must admit that this is not shocking! After all, it is a Facebook product and Facebook makes its money by harvesting data and re-selling it. I have a bridge to sell anyone who is surprised at this. It's cherry, only lightly used.
This juicy little tidbit comes from their website: "Retina-X Studios is sharing information about the illegal hackings and cooperating with the appropriate authorities. The perpetrators of these illegal acts have been motivated by their unfounded opposition to the private activities of parents and employers on devices they own and with the consent of users of the devices. The perpetrators, who will likely never be identified or brought to justice, have shared their actions with online publications to gain attention. They are cowards who work in the dark and use the media to promote their agenda. Retina-X apologizes to our customers for any inconvenience this situation has caused, but our first priority is to you. We appreciate the loyalty you have shown our company and these valuable services."
Nope, sorry assholes. Wrong answer! The Retina-X motherfuckers are the ones that are the bad guys here. They openly promote a surveillance society. They call the hackers cowards but people who need to spy on others are cowards. Fuck you, Retina-X!
Since Bitcoin seems to be in the cross hairs for how many CPU cycles it wastes, has anyone computed what Wordpress environmental impact is?
How many countries power grids does it take to serve all of the Wordpress sites in the world? How many people actually need a fully dynamic website?
I'm glad to see that static site generators are making a comeback. I have more than enough computing power in a $5 VPS to host nginx serving static content.
Few people need a fully dynamic website. It is actually not hard at all to update a static one periodically for a small business. For dynamic content like blogging, there is a great platform called Ghost at http://www.ghost.org/ where you can simply use an sqlite database for your blog content. I do this.
IMHO, WordPress is the Windows of the CMS world. It is a frighteningly poor security record and it is just bloated and not admin friendly at all. If you need a good blogging platform, check out Ghost at http://www.ghost.org./ Rather than using PHP, Ghost uses Node.js. Ghost is also much easier to create themes for. Furthermore, Ghost is leaner and uses markdown language for blogging.
Using a general purpose assembly robot to flip burgers at a normal grill seems like a poor solution. Why not use a conveyor oven ? Or a two sided contact grill for one or two patties.
This is actually what Burger King does. They stick the patties on a conveyor belt that goes through a flame broiler and comes out the other side. You don't need a whole lot of technology to automate burger making.
Tencent IP addresses also just happen to be the single largest source of brute force SSH attempts on my VPS. Despite reporting this to the email addresses listed in their whois profile, of course, it gets ignored. So any claims of "we don't engage in cyber warfare" coming from China are simply bold-faced lies. You can imagine if Tencent is willing to do this, you know they're harvesting all of the information that they can from your phone and about you. Stop helping the Chinese machine make money.
In short, activists inside and outside of China are using GitHub to write and share code for software to circumvent the government's "Great Firewall" in one way or another...they did not succeed in taking GitHub offline, so they decided to show their technical prowess and their sheer (if amplified) bandwidth abuse potential by conducting a second attack. They're still trying to take GitHub offline, badly, people need to be made more aware this is happening...the last time was only three years ago and it was a shocking attempt at China to try and impose censorship of the Internet, as they see fit, inside the firewall AND out. This isn't a conspiracy theory or conjecture, China are very definitely waging an online "war" of sorts and this is more or less a demonstration of their capabilities.
This doesn't shock me in the least because 90% of brute force attempts on my tiny VPS that hosts my blog come from Chinese IP addresses. It's gotten so bad that I just block the whole country. I download the zone file from http://www.ipdeny.com/
Why do people do stupid shit like this? Github is neither a bad actor nor deserving of this. Why don't they go after the fucking Trump Organization or Oracle or something like this.
As an OpenBSD enthusiast as well, I would like to see my phone run it. But, I don't think desktop OSes generally run well on mobile platforms. We've learned that time and again from Microsoft's attempts at making a square peg fit a round hole one size fits all. It would take a really superbly engineered mobile desktop environment to be added to OpenBSD for it to work.
I hate upgrading shit just for the sake of upgrading. I can't justify getting rid of something in perfect working order just because something new is released. I just wait until something breaks, then go out and buy the best replacement I can at the moment, which will last me another several years.
I was glad when AV gear reached the good enough point (1080p and DD 5.1 surround for me), then PCs (after I quit hardcore gaming, I doubt I'll ever need more than an i5 and 8GB of RAM and 1TB HDD for the foreseeable future), now smartphones.
All my devices have all the features I want, and more.
Having said all that, I'm glad we got to the good enough point with smartphones. Hopefully, the prices of high end devices can start coming down now.
I am right there with you. I have a laptop from 2012 that still works great. My smart phone is some budget ZTE that I only bought to replace the previous one where the screen cracked. It's now almost a year and a half old and I'll just keep it until it dies. I've long since discovered that there is no merit to buying a flagship phone, or for that matter, even a flagship computer.
Since the summary and article specifically refer to Americans... we write checks, not “scribble cheques”.
(And I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote a check, although I do have a checkbook - I use my debit card, and pay bills via my bank’s online bill pay)
It's just another poorly written Op/Ed article that shows just how little the author understands how the world really works. This author really exemplifies the old saying that, "Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one." And, I just proved my own point. Feel free to have a laugh at my expense.
lol. technology advancement != progressiveness or whatever that word means.
chill. go visit china. they are moving fast in tech, that's all this article is implying.
I don't want to give them any credit whatsoever for technology advancement. Technology advancement without freedom to dissent is meaningless.
This is only considering one singular comparison. This little story is trying to make China look more progressive and nothing could be further from the truth. If you speak out against the Chinese Communist Oligarchy, you and your entire family are subject to brutal imprisonment, labor, and re-education camps. Chinese economic reforms are only there to pacify and mollify the people and to distract them from getting together in large groups espousing any form of dissent. Dissent in China not only punishes the offender, but punishes his or her family. Once a family has a member that has been branded as a dissenter, that branding effects future generations of the family. Anyone whom thinks that China is more advanced than we are is severely ill-informed.
The US Education system does not reward critical thinking skills, maybe it actually does a lot to discourage it. Here is an example. Until my 11th grade year, I was always taught history from a text book. My 11th grade history teacher actually said that he refuses to use history books because they water down and distill history to one point of view and that they discourage critical thinking. In fact, he opened our eyes to the fact that history is taught from a single perspective, the white, male one. This made me finally understand why sections on outright Native American abuse and ethnic genocide was relegated to small blurbs inside the book. The text books all taught American History from the manifest destiny, white male superiority perspective. History came alive for me that year because he really and truly taught it from as many different angles as possible. Instead of relegating the Cherokee Trail of Tears to a small blurb that we had to read, we dove into it head first. We were assigned readings by research historians on the topics instead of reading some distillation calculated to indoctrinate a the white male superiority particular way of thinking. In most classic textbooks, Andrew Jackson was a storied hero. More accurate accounts portray him as being quite a bit more human: i.e. theories he suffered from alcoholism and that he was a scoundrel being not of any great upstanding character. Furthermore, the readings he assigned did not paint the Cherokee as perfect and they have done some things that are abhorrent too. The best way to encourage learning is to foster critical thinking. Critical thinking makes learning exciting.
Programming is probably becoming harder because computers are far more complex than they were in the days of Commodore 64. In order to be a good programmer you have to understand how to write software that can take advantage of multi-processor and multi-core systems. The article is wrong that programmers should not have have strong system administration skills. True masters of BSD and Linux are both competent systems admins and developers. Good developers must understand how their computer operates. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that anyone that aspires to software development should first become a competent system admin. If you do not know how your computer operates, performance tuning, good security practices, etc., how can you write good code - you end up with stuff that is riddled with security holes and memory leaks.
If you're that concerned about privacy and security, you can spin up a BSD or Linux VM, install OpenVPN, and go to town. It will only really be beneficial if you're using insecure public hotspots, because at some point, your data has to exit the VPN and go out to the internet at large.
Slashdot Mirror
They're on a fixed income. They couldn't afford one anyway.
You're missing the entire point. They could still get one as a gift.
I could see this happening to a senior citizen. Seniors often get up in the middle of the night. Can you imagine the startle they might get if Alexa starts laughing? It could be enough to set off a heart attack.
It's not even funny either. Could you imagine a senior citizen being frightened into a heart attack if Alexa suddenly started laughing in the middle of the night? Maybe machine learning is going to far now ....
I must admit that this is not shocking! After all, it is a Facebook product and Facebook makes its money by harvesting data and re-selling it. I have a bridge to sell anyone who is surprised at this. It's cherry, only lightly used.
This juicy little tidbit comes from their website: "Retina-X Studios is sharing information about the illegal hackings and cooperating with the appropriate authorities. The perpetrators of these illegal acts have been motivated by their unfounded opposition to the private activities of parents and employers on devices they own and with the consent of users of the devices. The perpetrators, who will likely never be identified or brought to justice, have shared their actions with online publications to gain attention. They are cowards who work in the dark and use the media to promote their agenda. Retina-X apologizes to our customers for any inconvenience this situation has caused, but our first priority is to you. We appreciate the loyalty you have shown our company and these valuable services."
Nope, sorry assholes. Wrong answer! The Retina-X motherfuckers are the ones that are the bad guys here. They openly promote a surveillance society. They call the hackers cowards but people who need to spy on others are cowards. Fuck you, Retina-X!
Since Bitcoin seems to be in the cross hairs for how many CPU cycles it wastes, has anyone computed what Wordpress environmental impact is?
How many countries power grids does it take to serve all of the Wordpress sites in the world? How many people actually need a fully dynamic website?
I'm glad to see that static site generators are making a comeback. I have more than enough computing power in a $5 VPS to host nginx serving static content.
Few people need a fully dynamic website. It is actually not hard at all to update a static one periodically for a small business. For dynamic content like blogging, there is a great platform called Ghost at http://www.ghost.org/ where you can simply use an sqlite database for your blog content. I do this.
IMHO, WordPress is the Windows of the CMS world. It is a frighteningly poor security record and it is just bloated and not admin friendly at all. If you need a good blogging platform, check out Ghost at http://www.ghost.org./ Rather than using PHP, Ghost uses Node.js. Ghost is also much easier to create themes for. Furthermore, Ghost is leaner and uses markdown language for blogging.
Using a general purpose assembly robot to flip burgers at a normal grill seems like a poor solution. Why not use a conveyor oven ? Or a two sided contact grill for one or two patties.
This is actually what Burger King does. They stick the patties on a conveyor belt that goes through a flame broiler and comes out the other side. You don't need a whole lot of technology to automate burger making.
Tencent IP addresses also just happen to be the single largest source of brute force SSH attempts on my VPS. Despite reporting this to the email addresses listed in their whois profile, of course, it gets ignored. So any claims of "we don't engage in cyber warfare" coming from China are simply bold-faced lies. You can imagine if Tencent is willing to do this, you know they're harvesting all of the information that they can from your phone and about you. Stop helping the Chinese machine make money.
Yeah, how did "Don't be evil" work out for you?
It happened for the same reason it happened in 2015:
https://www.theverge.com/2015/...
In short, activists inside and outside of China are using GitHub to write and share code for software to circumvent the government's "Great Firewall" in one way or another...they did not succeed in taking GitHub offline, so they decided to show their technical prowess and their sheer (if amplified) bandwidth abuse potential by conducting a second attack. They're still trying to take GitHub offline, badly, people need to be made more aware this is happening...the last time was only three years ago and it was a shocking attempt at China to try and impose censorship of the Internet, as they see fit, inside the firewall AND out. This isn't a conspiracy theory or conjecture, China are very definitely waging an online "war" of sorts and this is more or less a demonstration of their capabilities.
This doesn't shock me in the least because 90% of brute force attempts on my tiny VPS that hosts my blog come from Chinese IP addresses. It's gotten so bad that I just block the whole country. I download the zone file from http://www.ipdeny.com/
Why do people do stupid shit like this? Github is neither a bad actor nor deserving of this. Why don't they go after the fucking Trump Organization or Oracle or something like this.
How much is this behemouth going to cost? It cannot be cheap.
Why would he have radio emissions while running a bitcoin miner?
Vietnam is a communist dictatorship. I hope Internet censorship doesn't come as some sort of surprise ...
It's actually a communist oligarchy with a general secretary and ruling party.
As an OpenBSD enthusiast as well, I would like to see my phone run it. But, I don't think desktop OSes generally run well on mobile platforms. We've learned that time and again from Microsoft's attempts at making a square peg fit a round hole one size fits all. It would take a really superbly engineered mobile desktop environment to be added to OpenBSD for it to work.
I hate upgrading shit just for the sake of upgrading. I can't justify getting rid of something in perfect working order just because something new is released. I just wait until something breaks, then go out and buy the best replacement I can at the moment, which will last me another several years. I was glad when AV gear reached the good enough point (1080p and DD 5.1 surround for me), then PCs (after I quit hardcore gaming, I doubt I'll ever need more than an i5 and 8GB of RAM and 1TB HDD for the foreseeable future), now smartphones. All my devices have all the features I want, and more. Having said all that, I'm glad we got to the good enough point with smartphones. Hopefully, the prices of high end devices can start coming down now.
I am right there with you. I have a laptop from 2012 that still works great. My smart phone is some budget ZTE that I only bought to replace the previous one where the screen cracked. It's now almost a year and a half old and I'll just keep it until it dies. I've long since discovered that there is no merit to buying a flagship phone, or for that matter, even a flagship computer.
No shit, sherlock. Of course it isn't about human rights. I don't want to give any country any credit for advances so long as they lack human rights.
Since the summary and article specifically refer to Americans... we write checks, not “scribble cheques”.
(And I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote a check, although I do have a checkbook - I use my debit card, and pay bills via my bank’s online bill pay)
It's just another poorly written Op/Ed article that shows just how little the author understands how the world really works. This author really exemplifies the old saying that, "Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one." And, I just proved my own point. Feel free to have a laugh at my expense.
lol. technology advancement != progressiveness or whatever that word means. chill. go visit china. they are moving fast in tech, that's all this article is implying.
I don't want to give them any credit whatsoever for technology advancement. Technology advancement without freedom to dissent is meaningless.
This is only considering one singular comparison. This little story is trying to make China look more progressive and nothing could be further from the truth. If you speak out against the Chinese Communist Oligarchy, you and your entire family are subject to brutal imprisonment, labor, and re-education camps. Chinese economic reforms are only there to pacify and mollify the people and to distract them from getting together in large groups espousing any form of dissent. Dissent in China not only punishes the offender, but punishes his or her family. Once a family has a member that has been branded as a dissenter, that branding effects future generations of the family. Anyone whom thinks that China is more advanced than we are is severely ill-informed.
The US Education system does not reward critical thinking skills, maybe it actually does a lot to discourage it. Here is an example. Until my 11th grade year, I was always taught history from a text book. My 11th grade history teacher actually said that he refuses to use history books because they water down and distill history to one point of view and that they discourage critical thinking. In fact, he opened our eyes to the fact that history is taught from a single perspective, the white, male one. This made me finally understand why sections on outright Native American abuse and ethnic genocide was relegated to small blurbs inside the book. The text books all taught American History from the manifest destiny, white male superiority perspective. History came alive for me that year because he really and truly taught it from as many different angles as possible. Instead of relegating the Cherokee Trail of Tears to a small blurb that we had to read, we dove into it head first. We were assigned readings by research historians on the topics instead of reading some distillation calculated to indoctrinate a the white male superiority particular way of thinking. In most classic textbooks, Andrew Jackson was a storied hero. More accurate accounts portray him as being quite a bit more human: i.e. theories he suffered from alcoholism and that he was a scoundrel being not of any great upstanding character. Furthermore, the readings he assigned did not paint the Cherokee as perfect and they have done some things that are abhorrent too. The best way to encourage learning is to foster critical thinking. Critical thinking makes learning exciting.
Programming is probably becoming harder because computers are far more complex than they were in the days of Commodore 64. In order to be a good programmer you have to understand how to write software that can take advantage of multi-processor and multi-core systems. The article is wrong that programmers should not have have strong system administration skills. True masters of BSD and Linux are both competent systems admins and developers. Good developers must understand how their computer operates. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that anyone that aspires to software development should first become a competent system admin. If you do not know how your computer operates, performance tuning, good security practices, etc., how can you write good code - you end up with stuff that is riddled with security holes and memory leaks.
My favorite is Alpine because it is systemd-free, light-weight, and security-focused.
If you're that concerned about privacy and security, you can spin up a BSD or Linux VM, install OpenVPN, and go to town. It will only really be beneficial if you're using insecure public hotspots, because at some point, your data has to exit the VPN and go out to the internet at large.