Unfortunately, they will be conditioned to think that programming is something you need to pay for the privilege of doing and that control over your own computer is something you need to skirt the rules in order to gain. At least that is the message that an iPad sends its user (in this case, a teenage student).
I remember being interested in computers before I even owned one, and running around trying to use computers that my friends' parents had purchased. I also remember writing programs for those computers, without having to pay for the privilege, and being able to write programs that could completely control those computers. If I had been given an iPad, things may have turned out differently; my curiosity would have remained strong, but now I would be forced to beg for $99 to get a developer account or to settle for an emulator on a Mac. Or, I could have tried to jailbreak my iPad, which if it had been issued to me by the school would probably have resulted in some serious disciplinary action (much akin to the action I faced for performing a very simple hack on a desktop computer in my school).
Why not issue laptops that the children are allowed to explore and hack? Yes, occasionally a student will screw their system up (I did this plenty of times), at which point they can either fix it themselves or the school can reimage it. At least then the school will not be complicit in training these kids to think that programming is something that should be reserved for those who pay for the right to do it or that "consumer grade" computers are meant to be for consumption only.
Writing software should be a part of modern education, and should be considered basic literacy. Computers are everywhere, and more and more jobs involve computers, yet vast numbers of people -- including people who grew up with computers -- are helpless when it comes to computers, relying on other, more educated people to solve all of their problems for them. It is not that I expect most people to be expert programmers or to be on the level of Donald Knuth; rather, they should be able to write some simple macros and scripts. This, in my view, is equivalent to expecting people to be able to compose a paragraph or to perform long division (oh, wait, we cannot even expect that out of a lot of people).
Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in?
Considering how poor of a description that is, I would say that the answer would have to be "yes." The best minds of our generation are tasked with determining strategies for financial companies (a non-trivial problem), or they are in research labs in either private industry or universities. Some are working on getting people to click on advertisements, but it is by no means the be-all and end-all of jobs that attract skilled mathematics and computer science graduates.
I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
I can think of a few ways:
Lots of high resolution video chat. If both ends have 105 Mbps connections, why would we not engage in a high res video chat?
Seeding large torrents for popular files
Using advanced cryptographic protocols (maybe this will be more of a concern 10 years from now, but some of these protocols demand quite a bit of bandwidth).
Mirroring for some moderately popular Linux distro
Running a Tor exit (yes, high bandwidth Tor exits are something the world needs)
Yes, it is certainly possible for someone to hit a 250GB cap, if they are not "just another consumer." What is the point of getting so much bandwidth if you are not going to put it to good use?
The problem is that people who have no clue wind up using FTP in places where security is needed. We need to stop encouraging people to use FTP and start encouraging a switch to something else.
RIM could refuse to do business in countries that require them to undermine their own customers' security. Of course, that would mean closing themselves off from certain markets, and thus losing profits...and so what I said was 100% correct.
I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.
Nor would it be unfair to look at what has happened to the film camera industry in the last 15 years or so, and say that digital cameras have a negative effect on that industry. Likewise with the typewriter manufacturing industry.
The moral of the story is this: adapt or die. Adapt to new business challenges and conditions. This is what the music industry has had trouble with for over a hundred years now. Player pianos, phonograph records, AM radio, FM radio, tape recorders, MP3 and digital music formats, and the Internet have all been labelled as technologies that are killing the music industry. In each case, the music industry eventually relented, adapted, and saw higher profits than they had earlier.
Nobody feels any sympathy for businesses that fail to adapt to changes in the market and in technology. Especially not when those businesses have a history of abusing the legal system and trying to bankrupt college students.
Besides, B-school is about parties and sex, not cracking books all night and all weekend
Sacrificing some mod points to reply to this. That is exactly the sort of attitude that is killing us when it comes to higher education: that parties and sex are what college is all about. The media drills this image of college into everyone's heads, and freshman show up expecting to see orgies and gallons of liquor everywhere on campus.
How slowly? Could you download all Slashdot comments in a profitable amount of time? You would also have to use a download pattern that is not obviously automated (e.g. sequentially requesting each link on a page).
In short, it is not the easiest thing to do. It is like trying to pass the Turing test (which software is getting pretty good at doing, as it so happens).
Only because one side of the battle never bothered to fight. Nobody was forced to go to social networking websites and post their life story, anyone could encrypt their email and IM conversations, and ad blocking software is widely available. Large amounts of the information that these companies are aggregating could have been made far more difficult to obtain if the majority of computer users could have been bothered.
Sadly, the Internet has become more of an adversarial game than a way to unite people.
However, there are patterns of browsing that are clearly not human. Humans do not make 100 requests in a 10 second timespan, nor do humans traverse every post made by every user.
Yes, it is imperfect and you might ban an occasional human, but this is essentially the situation we have with spam filtering. It is a bit sad that the Internet is becoming so adversarial, but that is what we face.
Which is exactly why we need to encrypt our emails and IMs. I have found that encrypting IMs is a hell of a lot easier to do with OTR, at least when dealing with non-technical folk, than encrypting email with PGP or S/MIME. OTR is non-intrusive, easy to install, and verification can be done without subjecting people to the pain of fingerprints (I never thought hashes were so hard to check, but most people seem to get turned off as soon as they see hexadecimal numbers).
Unfortunately, Facebook has set us back even further when it comes to encryption, but that is another story entirely.
My thoughts exactly. I don't like Zuckerberg and wouldn't put any unethical behavior past him, but this Ceglia guy has a pretty bad reputation, and forging email headers is a middle school level trick. My money is on Ceglia losing this one and being sent to prison.
The United States also criminalizes the following:
Possession of certain herbs
Use of certain computer software
Boycotting products made in certain countries
Buying products from certain countries in countries where it is otherwise legal
Additionally, the US government has been known to selectively apply obscure or overly broad laws to persecute minority groups, including black people and Muslims, and to harass adherents to certain social movements (hippies, hackers, socialists, anarchists, populists, etc.).
Is China worse? Maybe. The Chinese government has certain engaged in many questionable practices, including many of the things I listed above. That does not exonerate the United States, nor does it mean that it is absurd for the Chinese to claim that the United States is being hypocritical.
nothing compares to China's outright abuse of its people
Ironically, the United States currently imprisons more people than China, and most of those prisoners are not violent offenders. Yes, the Chinese have a record of abuses, but that does not exonerate the United States.
On the other hand, as far as anyone can tell, they did come up with the idea, and they did have an agreement with Zuckerberg that he would implement it. Now, this business with trying to renegotiate their settlement is another matter, but I can certainly think of greedier people.
...his work could have opened up the possibility of games from small development companies and individuals. You know, the sort of people who cannot afford Sony's fees.
His original hack led to the OtherOS removal
No, Sony removed it, because they have no respect for their customers or the countries they attempted to evade taxes in by using OtherOS to label the PS3 as a personal computer.
we got slews of updates as Sony tried to stay one step ahead, which was just a giant headache for people who just wanted to play a damn game.
Sounds like Sony is to blame for the headache. Frankly, not blaming Sony for botching their ECDSA implementation and opening the door to a simple cryptanalytic attack seems a bit preposterous to me. They could have used NSS, OpenSSL, Microsoft's implementation, or any of dozens of other vetted and widely reviewed cryptography libraries which wouldn't have that sort of glaring error.
I honestly cannot understand gamers who defend Sony, as if Sony was some kind of innocent company under siege from evil hackers. Sony has a history of disrespecting their customers, but you defend them. Hotz tried to open the PS3 up and tell other PS3 owners how to unlock their own property, and you blame him for Sony's actions.
Technically, that is what the Internet looked like originally. Guess what? Home users still managed to connect to BBSes and Fidonet. Social networking still happened online, and so did news delivery and discussion.
I would argue that courts are the only place where copyrights matter at all. Nobody thinks about copyright except in terms of, "Can I distribute copies of this without facing a lawsuit?"
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, they will be conditioned to think that programming is something you need to pay for the privilege of doing and that control over your own computer is something you need to skirt the rules in order to gain. At least that is the message that an iPad sends its user (in this case, a teenage student).
I remember being interested in computers before I even owned one, and running around trying to use computers that my friends' parents had purchased. I also remember writing programs for those computers, without having to pay for the privilege, and being able to write programs that could completely control those computers. If I had been given an iPad, things may have turned out differently; my curiosity would have remained strong, but now I would be forced to beg for $99 to get a developer account or to settle for an emulator on a Mac. Or, I could have tried to jailbreak my iPad, which if it had been issued to me by the school would probably have resulted in some serious disciplinary action (much akin to the action I faced for performing a very simple hack on a desktop computer in my school).
Why not issue laptops that the children are allowed to explore and hack? Yes, occasionally a student will screw their system up (I did this plenty of times), at which point they can either fix it themselves or the school can reimage it. At least then the school will not be complicit in training these kids to think that programming is something that should be reserved for those who pay for the right to do it or that "consumer grade" computers are meant to be for consumption only.
Writing software should be a part of modern education, and should be considered basic literacy. Computers are everywhere, and more and more jobs involve computers, yet vast numbers of people -- including people who grew up with computers -- are helpless when it comes to computers, relying on other, more educated people to solve all of their problems for them. It is not that I expect most people to be expert programmers or to be on the level of Donald Knuth; rather, they should be able to write some simple macros and scripts. This, in my view, is equivalent to expecting people to be able to compose a paragraph or to perform long division (oh, wait, we cannot even expect that out of a lot of people).
Where is that anti spam plan answer card? We need it here...
Is it that time of the day already? Time for a free software vs. open source vs. "I just want something I can use damn it!" flamewar...
...because things were different when the FBI was pressuring Symantec to deliberately whitelist FBI viruses and malware?
Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in?
Considering how poor of a description that is, I would say that the answer would have to be "yes." The best minds of our generation are tasked with determining strategies for financial companies (a non-trivial problem), or they are in research labs in either private industry or universities. Some are working on getting people to click on advertisements, but it is by no means the be-all and end-all of jobs that attract skilled mathematics and computer science graduates.
I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
I can think of a few ways:
Yes, it is certainly possible for someone to hit a 250GB cap, if they are not "just another consumer." What is the point of getting so much bandwidth if you are not going to put it to good use?
The problem is that people who have no clue wind up using FTP in places where security is needed. We need to stop encouraging people to use FTP and start encouraging a switch to something else.
RIM could refuse to do business in countries that require them to undermine their own customers' security. Of course, that would mean closing themselves off from certain markets, and thus losing profits...and so what I said was 100% correct.
"It is not fair to ask us why we are putting our profits ahead of our customers' security needs."
I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.
Nor would it be unfair to look at what has happened to the film camera industry in the last 15 years or so, and say that digital cameras have a negative effect on that industry. Likewise with the typewriter manufacturing industry.
The moral of the story is this: adapt or die. Adapt to new business challenges and conditions. This is what the music industry has had trouble with for over a hundred years now. Player pianos, phonograph records, AM radio, FM radio, tape recorders, MP3 and digital music formats, and the Internet have all been labelled as technologies that are killing the music industry. In each case, the music industry eventually relented, adapted, and saw higher profits than they had earlier.
Nobody feels any sympathy for businesses that fail to adapt to changes in the market and in technology. Especially not when those businesses have a history of abusing the legal system and trying to bankrupt college students.
Besides, B-school is about parties and sex, not cracking books all night and all weekend
Sacrificing some mod points to reply to this. That is exactly the sort of attitude that is killing us when it comes to higher education: that parties and sex are what college is all about. The media drills this image of college into everyone's heads, and freshman show up expecting to see orgies and gallons of liquor everywhere on campus.
Slowly if needed to avoid arousing suspicion..
How slowly? Could you download all Slashdot comments in a profitable amount of time? You would also have to use a download pattern that is not obviously automated (e.g. sequentially requesting each link on a page).
In short, it is not the easiest thing to do. It is like trying to pass the Turing test (which software is getting pretty good at doing, as it so happens).
The battle for online privacy was lost long ago.
Only because one side of the battle never bothered to fight. Nobody was forced to go to social networking websites and post their life story, anyone could encrypt their email and IM conversations, and ad blocking software is widely available. Large amounts of the information that these companies are aggregating could have been made far more difficult to obtain if the majority of computer users could have been bothered.
Sadly, the Internet has become more of an adversarial game than a way to unite people.
However, there are patterns of browsing that are clearly not human. Humans do not make 100 requests in a 10 second timespan, nor do humans traverse every post made by every user.
Yes, it is imperfect and you might ban an occasional human, but this is essentially the situation we have with spam filtering. It is a bit sad that the Internet is becoming so adversarial, but that is what we face.
Any advice, other than do not use these services would be welcome. The dos and donts.
End to end encryption for all email and IM. We have had strong encryption available to us for decades now.
Which is exactly why we need to encrypt our emails and IMs. I have found that encrypting IMs is a hell of a lot easier to do with OTR, at least when dealing with non-technical folk, than encrypting email with PGP or S/MIME. OTR is non-intrusive, easy to install, and verification can be done without subjecting people to the pain of fingerprints (I never thought hashes were so hard to check, but most people seem to get turned off as soon as they see hexadecimal numbers).
Unfortunately, Facebook has set us back even further when it comes to encryption, but that is another story entirely.
My thoughts exactly. I don't like Zuckerberg and wouldn't put any unethical behavior past him, but this Ceglia guy has a pretty bad reputation, and forging email headers is a middle school level trick. My money is on Ceglia losing this one and being sent to prison.
Additionally, the US government has been known to selectively apply obscure or overly broad laws to persecute minority groups, including black people and Muslims, and to harass adherents to certain social movements (hippies, hackers, socialists, anarchists, populists, etc.).
Is China worse? Maybe. The Chinese government has certain engaged in many questionable practices, including many of the things I listed above. That does not exonerate the United States, nor does it mean that it is absurd for the Chinese to claim that the United States is being hypocritical.
nothing compares to China's outright abuse of its people
Ironically, the United States currently imprisons more people than China, and most of those prisoners are not violent offenders. Yes, the Chinese have a record of abuses, but that does not exonerate the United States.
On the other hand, as far as anyone can tell, they did come up with the idea, and they did have an agreement with Zuckerberg that he would implement it. Now, this business with trying to renegotiate their settlement is another matter, but I can certainly think of greedier people.
Yes, it is insane to want to pay $300 for a Cell system, when IBM wants thousands. What a bunch of whining children.
Nothing Hotz has done has helped them in any way
His original hack led to the OtherOS removal
No, Sony removed it, because they have no respect for their customers or the countries they attempted to evade taxes in by using OtherOS to label the PS3 as a personal computer.
we got slews of updates as Sony tried to stay one step ahead, which was just a giant headache for people who just wanted to play a damn game.
Sounds like Sony is to blame for the headache. Frankly, not blaming Sony for botching their ECDSA implementation and opening the door to a simple cryptanalytic attack seems a bit preposterous to me. They could have used NSS, OpenSSL, Microsoft's implementation, or any of dozens of other vetted and widely reviewed cryptography libraries which wouldn't have that sort of glaring error.
I honestly cannot understand gamers who defend Sony, as if Sony was some kind of innocent company under siege from evil hackers. Sony has a history of disrespecting their customers, but you defend them. Hotz tried to open the PS3 up and tell other PS3 owners how to unlock their own property, and you blame him for Sony's actions.
Technically, that is what the Internet looked like originally. Guess what? Home users still managed to connect to BBSes and Fidonet. Social networking still happened online, and so did news delivery and discussion.
I would argue that courts are the only place where copyrights matter at all. Nobody thinks about copyright except in terms of, "Can I distribute copies of this without facing a lawsuit?"