Yet those same people are more than capable of eBaying from their smartphones or tending their Farmville herds during their lunch break - I'm sorry, I don't buy it. It's not that people are somehow incapable of understanding how to scan and email a document, it's more likely they've never been shown so they are falling back to the default. For the sake of five minutes spent writing up some documentation we're happy to yoke ourselves to out-dated technology because it's easier to blame the dumb user. That's just laziness on the part of whoever is responsible for providing the hardware solutions.
I've always wondered if "cut-throat razor" was a term coined by the disposable razor people, or if it predates that. I can't imagine ever wanting to use a product that's commonly referred to by such a grisly monicker, although I suppose it's a timely reminder to those who do use it of the consequences if they're not careful (and I suppose kitchen knives are just "stabby death blades" by another name...)
To send a fax, all you have to do, is dial a number, just as you would on a normal call, then press Send. That's it. No passwords, no blue screens of death, malware or any other crap to worry about.
I believe that's a false assertion - the vast majority of people who are in a position where they have to send faxes (the eponymous "office workers") already use a PC in their day job. They already have to deal with all that crap. Having them use a different piece of kit to send faxes doesn't remove those issues, it just adds yet another thing to the list. The person who doesn't deal with any technology except a fax is a rarity in today's business world (even the maintenance guys who spend > 95% of their time doing manual stuff here still use the PC for email/logging timesheets/purchasing/intranet/etc).
Then there are the people using it, in the few firms I've worked in, the secretaries most important skill was looking good and making coffee, relying on something as complex as a PC to store important documents on would be pure idiocy.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this except to say most places I've worked, the secretarial staff are the ones who have actually had some level of training (even if it's just on the job training) to do just this kind of thing and it's the likes of sales people and the like, who never saw a need to use a computer, who need more hand holding, but even then there's nothing so complicated that it can't be summarised in a dozen bullet points on one sheet of A4, or mapped as a flow diagram for the really hard of thinking (and in the last few years even the most hardened luddites are coming over to the PC way of thinking with the advent of extremely cheap PCs/netbooks/smartphones and social networking making it more socially acceptable to spend the evening in front of a computer). Even the handful of places I worked where the fax was used usually had a handbook or printed sheet near the device explaining how to use it (any technology is "complicated" if you've never encountered it before), scanning and emailing a file is not particularly any more difficult.
Then there's the hardware factor, every firm I've seen changes hardware at best once a decade, usually they even keep around the stuff bought twenty years ago when it was founded, and say what you will, but a fax machine survives a lot better than a PC used by ignorants.
This is actually one of the areas where I think the PC definitely wins out. Even places that have a fax machine tend to have, well, A fax machine. If it breaks and you need to send an urgent fax, you're out of luck. Email, on the other hand, can be sent from any PC and most offices have something approach 1 PC per person, not to mention sending it from phones etc. Then when you realise that a PC can do the same job as a fax machine the "synergies" (ugh) of dumping the one and using the other seem obvious.
I've seen a few cases where they used scanner/printer combo over the internet. It was an interesting experience. Sending 40 mb tiff's over email is not something you see every day, and can make for awkward conversations when you see a stack of dozens of similar emails waiting to be sent.
Again this is nothing that can't be solved with a simple flow chart or bit of training (or even installing software that defaults to "scan as.jpg" and leaving tiffs as a selectable option for those who understand the consequences). You're far more likely to generate queues at a fax machine if you have several people wanting to send multipage documents throughout the day, with email they just all send from their own PC and any queue is transparent to them.
I sign my name so little these days that whenever I am called on to do so, it always looks like I'm trying to forge my signature (the guilty look as I try to remember how it goes, then the result is usually something that's close but never that close to the original). The sooner we come up (or should I say implement widely, since there are already solutions out there) with a reliable electronic method of signing documents instead of relying on what was always a dodgy premise (that nobody would be able to write something down the exact same way I wrote it down), the better!
Well the point is that there are better solutions than fax that leverage technologies that are probably more indispensable to the average office, so why have two methods of doing something when you can achieve the same results with one? Business is meant to be good at identifying cost saving opportunities, so it's surprising fax machines manage to survive that (although I question the extent to which they do, maybe it's just a UK thing but the last time I even saw a sheet of faxed paper was over a decade ago).
The point is you have zero way of knowing whether the person sending you a fax or the person receiving your fax is actually using a physical fax machine - so even if you value security (yet understand it so little that you think a fax is the most secure way to transmit data), it doesn't mean the people you're doing business with necessarily agree. Once you accept that potentially ANY communication sent/received by fax may have passed through a computer, you have to accept that the fax inherently brings with it all the loopholes you claim the computer has. As for "People who can't afford a $100 fax machine (and a $25/mo phone line for it) don't need the security" that's a ridiculous statement. I've worked for companies who don't even own a fax yet are dealing with confidential materials by email daily - what they tend to do is organise for said emails to use some level of encryption (either signing the emails or just physically encrypting the files sent). This has the added benefit that the disgruntled, just fired employee on his way out of the building doesn't get the chance to grab a sheet of your "confidential" data from the fax machine on his way past.
Given the industry's reputation for overworking and underpaying, I can't say I'm that surprised. The real problem is they all seem to get away with it, on the whole customers don't care unless it has a direct negative impact on them, and even then if it's too much effort to go elsewhere they don't seem to care. It seems to be the herd mentality at work, there are so many users/purchasers that everyone thinks it won't be them that gets hurt... right up until it is.
Invoices etc. are only the easy way to provide proof of purchase, they're not the only ways. If you paid by card you can maybe show them your bank/credit card statement. If all else fails maybe you send them a photo of you at home holding the product or they telephone you and ask some details from the disk/card (okay this could be faked if you know someone else with the product, but it's still going to limit abuse to the friends of legitimate users).
Sure they will complain that it's effort on their part when it wasn't their fault, that's what people do, but they're far less likely to dump Steam as their distribution system which is ultimately what Valve care about. Compared to banning someone's account outright it's the obvious solution (well, unless AMD/Codemasters are prepared to foot the bill and right off the losses - can't see that happening any time soon).
I thought the same thing - I can't imagine Valve would ban users if there is any risk of banning legitimate users, that would be opening them up to a huge backlash from users. More likely they'll just void the keys and Codemasters/AMD will have to set up a different scheme to compensate the legitimate purchasers.
This is a huge issue and no doubt a big reason for the voter apathy (why turn out to vote when the person you voted for backs out of the policies you liked). There should be some kind of social contract attached to the hot button topics that means they aren't allowed to do a U-Turn in office without a referendum on the subject. Then the polititicians can decide what their important "This WILL definitely be implemented" topics are and flag them as such in their manifesto and we, as voters, would get to see if they were serious about those issues (if they're just throwaway issues they wouldn't be flagged and we could see it was just lip service) and have some way to enforce our will once we've given them power. Obviously this will never happen because governments are in the business of protecting themselves, not pandering to the will of the electorate.
The real reason is even simpler than that - the people who ultimately make the buying decisions, middle management, don't want to risk their jobs. The choice is go out on a limb and choose an OSS solution or do what everyone around you has done for the last 20 years and buy MS. If you go OSS and something goes wrong, you will be the one facing the music, if you go MS and something goes wrong, their sales/support/PR people face the music. There's little incentive to be anything other than incredibly risk averse (this was especially the case before the banking crisis, when it was simple to get sign off for high budget IT projects, I'm not sure to what extent that's changed in the last couple of years).
He didn't say they're not evil, he said they're no more evil than most other companies. Lots of companies have proven that as soon as they're in a position of power, they're happy to abuse that power to further their goals. That doesn't mean the guy without a gun is less evil than the guy with, just that he lacks the tools to do as much damage.
Can I get virgin to stop sending adverts to my home addressed ' To the occupier'? can I heck. Actually, the more they send the stuff the more unliekly that I will ever even consider buying anything from Virgin.
You'll be lucky. I'm actually with Virgin and have been for a few years and I still regularly get their "To the occupier" spam. They can't even be bothered to filter out their existing customers because it's cheaper to just spam everyone. Even better, for the six months after I last moved house I was getting spam addressed to me forwarded from my old address. Because they screwed up the moving dates they had to cancel my old account at the old address and set up one at the new address - that somehow got logged in their system as "this guy has left, spam the hell out of him to try and get him back", even though they had everything they needed to realise I'd moved home AND they had the new address where I was already a customer! Luckily that stopped when I stopped getting my mail forwarded, the people at the old address are probably still getting it.
Actually I'm getting increasingly annoyed with their poor service, I'm half tempted to save up all the letters I get from now until I decide it's less hassle to leave and then just return to sender when they ask my reasons for leaving.
I pay about a nominal annual amount and receive not only my own domain name with unlimited email addresses, but hosting thrown in as well. I think the package I'm on works out to about £35 per annum. If you wanted just a domain and email I'm sure it's even cheaper. There's absolutely no reason not to be able to obtain an email address for job searches etc without having to rely on some global corporation (sure, I'm with a big hosting company but if I decide I don't like them I can take my domain with me and leave), and if you go with a cheap hosting package it's arguably going to improve your chances of finding a job as you can stick a brief resumé on the domain and stand out a little from all the @gmail addresses (not that I have anything against gmail - I have an account with them and also a long-standing hotmail account that I keep around and use for buying stuff to divert spam away from my "work" email). There is no service any of these companies provide free that I can't get free or for a small fee elsewhere.
You appear to have completely missed the point. This is about the end user having the ability to walk away from Google, not the advertiser. The point is, if Google abuse their position in terms of their users, even though the users aren't the customers in a traditional sense, they risk driving people away and they'll have less "product" (a smaller userbase) to sell to the advertisers. The advertisers, meanwhile, will just go and do business with whoever hasn't alienated their user base. Maybe you need to leave the thinking to others:)
There are still plenty of parallels. The government expects the BBC to produce shows that attract viewers (even where it's meeting the remit to niche audiences it still needs to attract those audiences). Ultimately that means the product is the purchaser, since we pay for the service via taxation, but the BBC is still responsible for delivering a certain number of eyeballs in return for its funding.
I can see how some people might want to stream the morning news or music or something, in which case gesture based control would solve the wet hands + electronics issue, but even then it seems like the solution they're proposing is massive overkill and will apply to a very small number of people.
For a really cheap alternative physical product, something like this might help take the concept from the screen to the real world. It was my first experience as a kid at putting some instructions into a real life object and having it follow them, and setting up a basic maze or something would help them think through the problem of how to navigate it end to end.
If you have a system for constructing your passwords your security has already failed. At that point it's not if your secrets get out, it's when. I'd imagine this password was specifically generated to make the user think about what he was accessing and is likely not indicative of some structured system.
First of all the government should be accountable for all of its actions. The governement runs FOR the people, so the people CANNOT steal from the government. It BELONGS to the people.
Playing devil's advocate here since I'm broadly in favour of Wikileaks' goals, but governments would argue they run FOR the people but often AGAINST other governments, and that releasing information is sometimes counter to that second goal, either by exposing security flaws or economic weakness or alienating potential allies or the like.
Because we don't yet live in a world where enterprises subscribe to transparency, so this is necessary to protect Wikileaks in the real world. There's no double standard here - plenty of people who own guns for security would happily live in a world that had zero guns, they're just afraid to give theirs up first while others still have access. Same thing with GPL and copyright - in an ideal world we wouldn't need to protect OSS with copyright, but we live in a less than ideal world so we have to play by some of their rules or they'll just steal all of our toys.
The 360 supports a limited set of file types for streaming. I'm guessing what his workaround is doing is some on the fly conversion of a file type into a streamable type - the advent of this hack means he will be able to install an OS that natively supports his original file types.
Maybe the exploits are quickly picked up by pirates, but to say every exploit comes down to piracy is just plain wrong. We've seen people crack all kinds of systems from watches to robot vaccum cleaners - you can't say that's about piracy, that's good old fashioned human curiosity. It's true that once you crack something people will look for things they can do with the crack, and when it's a games console one of those things is an obvious extension, but even if piracy disappeared this instant people would still crack locked down devices for the same reason some people climb mountains.
Yes, the best you could hope for is that they'd give you a caution for wasting police time. Worst case they'd use this to demonstrate that you had ongoing reason to believe someone was using your connection and they'd bring a related criminal charge for your negligence in not acting on that and securing your network. Either way anecdotal evidence suggests be helpful if the police come to you but otherwise just don't get involved, it's rarely rewarded with thanks.
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Yet those same people are more than capable of eBaying from their smartphones or tending their Farmville herds during their lunch break - I'm sorry, I don't buy it. It's not that people are somehow incapable of understanding how to scan and email a document, it's more likely they've never been shown so they are falling back to the default. For the sake of five minutes spent writing up some documentation we're happy to yoke ourselves to out-dated technology because it's easier to blame the dumb user. That's just laziness on the part of whoever is responsible for providing the hardware solutions.
I've always wondered if "cut-throat razor" was a term coined by the disposable razor people, or if it predates that. I can't imagine ever wanting to use a product that's commonly referred to by such a grisly monicker, although I suppose it's a timely reminder to those who do use it of the consequences if they're not careful (and I suppose kitchen knives are just "stabby death blades" by another name...)
To send a fax, all you have to do, is dial a number, just as you would on a normal call, then press Send. That's it. No passwords, no blue screens of death, malware or any other crap to worry about.
I believe that's a false assertion - the vast majority of people who are in a position where they have to send faxes (the eponymous "office workers") already use a PC in their day job. They already have to deal with all that crap. Having them use a different piece of kit to send faxes doesn't remove those issues, it just adds yet another thing to the list. The person who doesn't deal with any technology except a fax is a rarity in today's business world (even the maintenance guys who spend > 95% of their time doing manual stuff here still use the PC for email/logging timesheets/purchasing/intranet/etc).
Then there are the people using it, in the few firms I've worked in, the secretaries most important skill was looking good and making coffee, relying on something as complex as a PC to store important documents on would be pure idiocy.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this except to say most places I've worked, the secretarial staff are the ones who have actually had some level of training (even if it's just on the job training) to do just this kind of thing and it's the likes of sales people and the like, who never saw a need to use a computer, who need more hand holding, but even then there's nothing so complicated that it can't be summarised in a dozen bullet points on one sheet of A4, or mapped as a flow diagram for the really hard of thinking (and in the last few years even the most hardened luddites are coming over to the PC way of thinking with the advent of extremely cheap PCs/netbooks/smartphones and social networking making it more socially acceptable to spend the evening in front of a computer). Even the handful of places I worked where the fax was used usually had a handbook or printed sheet near the device explaining how to use it (any technology is "complicated" if you've never encountered it before), scanning and emailing a file is not particularly any more difficult.
Then there's the hardware factor, every firm I've seen changes hardware at best once a decade, usually they even keep around the stuff bought twenty years ago when it was founded, and say what you will, but a fax machine survives a lot better than a PC used by ignorants.
This is actually one of the areas where I think the PC definitely wins out. Even places that have a fax machine tend to have, well, A fax machine. If it breaks and you need to send an urgent fax, you're out of luck. Email, on the other hand, can be sent from any PC and most offices have something approach 1 PC per person, not to mention sending it from phones etc. Then when you realise that a PC can do the same job as a fax machine the "synergies" (ugh) of dumping the one and using the other seem obvious.
I've seen a few cases where they used scanner/printer combo over the internet. It was an interesting experience. Sending 40 mb tiff's over email is not something you see every day, and can make for awkward conversations when you see a stack of dozens of similar emails waiting to be sent.
Again this is nothing that can't be solved with a simple flow chart or bit of training (or even installing software that defaults to "scan as .jpg" and leaving tiffs as a selectable option for those who understand the consequences). You're far more likely to generate queues at a fax machine if you have several people wanting to send multipage documents throughout the day, with email they just all send from their own PC and any queue is transparent to them.
I sign my name so little these days that whenever I am called on to do so, it always looks like I'm trying to forge my signature (the guilty look as I try to remember how it goes, then the result is usually something that's close but never that close to the original). The sooner we come up (or should I say implement widely, since there are already solutions out there) with a reliable electronic method of signing documents instead of relying on what was always a dodgy premise (that nobody would be able to write something down the exact same way I wrote it down), the better!
Well the point is that there are better solutions than fax that leverage technologies that are probably more indispensable to the average office, so why have two methods of doing something when you can achieve the same results with one? Business is meant to be good at identifying cost saving opportunities, so it's surprising fax machines manage to survive that (although I question the extent to which they do, maybe it's just a UK thing but the last time I even saw a sheet of faxed paper was over a decade ago).
The point is you have zero way of knowing whether the person sending you a fax or the person receiving your fax is actually using a physical fax machine - so even if you value security (yet understand it so little that you think a fax is the most secure way to transmit data), it doesn't mean the people you're doing business with necessarily agree. Once you accept that potentially ANY communication sent/received by fax may have passed through a computer, you have to accept that the fax inherently brings with it all the loopholes you claim the computer has. As for "People who can't afford a $100 fax machine (and a $25/mo phone line for it) don't need the security" that's a ridiculous statement. I've worked for companies who don't even own a fax yet are dealing with confidential materials by email daily - what they tend to do is organise for said emails to use some level of encryption (either signing the emails or just physically encrypting the files sent). This has the added benefit that the disgruntled, just fired employee on his way out of the building doesn't get the chance to grab a sheet of your "confidential" data from the fax machine on his way past.
Given the industry's reputation for overworking and underpaying, I can't say I'm that surprised. The real problem is they all seem to get away with it, on the whole customers don't care unless it has a direct negative impact on them, and even then if it's too much effort to go elsewhere they don't seem to care. It seems to be the herd mentality at work, there are so many users/purchasers that everyone thinks it won't be them that gets hurt... right up until it is.
Invoices etc. are only the easy way to provide proof of purchase, they're not the only ways. If you paid by card you can maybe show them your bank/credit card statement. If all else fails maybe you send them a photo of you at home holding the product or they telephone you and ask some details from the disk/card (okay this could be faked if you know someone else with the product, but it's still going to limit abuse to the friends of legitimate users).
Sure they will complain that it's effort on their part when it wasn't their fault, that's what people do, but they're far less likely to dump Steam as their distribution system which is ultimately what Valve care about. Compared to banning someone's account outright it's the obvious solution (well, unless AMD/Codemasters are prepared to foot the bill and right off the losses - can't see that happening any time soon).
I thought the same thing - I can't imagine Valve would ban users if there is any risk of banning legitimate users, that would be opening them up to a huge backlash from users. More likely they'll just void the keys and Codemasters/AMD will have to set up a different scheme to compensate the legitimate purchasers.
This is a huge issue and no doubt a big reason for the voter apathy (why turn out to vote when the person you voted for backs out of the policies you liked). There should be some kind of social contract attached to the hot button topics that means they aren't allowed to do a U-Turn in office without a referendum on the subject. Then the polititicians can decide what their important "This WILL definitely be implemented" topics are and flag them as such in their manifesto and we, as voters, would get to see if they were serious about those issues (if they're just throwaway issues they wouldn't be flagged and we could see it was just lip service) and have some way to enforce our will once we've given them power. Obviously this will never happen because governments are in the business of protecting themselves, not pandering to the will of the electorate.
The real reason is even simpler than that - the people who ultimately make the buying decisions, middle management, don't want to risk their jobs. The choice is go out on a limb and choose an OSS solution or do what everyone around you has done for the last 20 years and buy MS. If you go OSS and something goes wrong, you will be the one facing the music, if you go MS and something goes wrong, their sales/support/PR people face the music. There's little incentive to be anything other than incredibly risk averse (this was especially the case before the banking crisis, when it was simple to get sign off for high budget IT projects, I'm not sure to what extent that's changed in the last couple of years).
He didn't say they're not evil, he said they're no more evil than most other companies. Lots of companies have proven that as soon as they're in a position of power, they're happy to abuse that power to further their goals. That doesn't mean the guy without a gun is less evil than the guy with, just that he lacks the tools to do as much damage.
Can I get virgin to stop sending adverts to my home addressed ' To the occupier'? can I heck. Actually, the more they send the stuff the more unliekly that I will ever even consider buying anything from Virgin.
You'll be lucky. I'm actually with Virgin and have been for a few years and I still regularly get their "To the occupier" spam. They can't even be bothered to filter out their existing customers because it's cheaper to just spam everyone. Even better, for the six months after I last moved house I was getting spam addressed to me forwarded from my old address. Because they screwed up the moving dates they had to cancel my old account at the old address and set up one at the new address - that somehow got logged in their system as "this guy has left, spam the hell out of him to try and get him back", even though they had everything they needed to realise I'd moved home AND they had the new address where I was already a customer! Luckily that stopped when I stopped getting my mail forwarded, the people at the old address are probably still getting it.
Actually I'm getting increasingly annoyed with their poor service, I'm half tempted to save up all the letters I get from now until I decide it's less hassle to leave and then just return to sender when they ask my reasons for leaving.
I pay about a nominal annual amount and receive not only my own domain name with unlimited email addresses, but hosting thrown in as well. I think the package I'm on works out to about £35 per annum. If you wanted just a domain and email I'm sure it's even cheaper. There's absolutely no reason not to be able to obtain an email address for job searches etc without having to rely on some global corporation (sure, I'm with a big hosting company but if I decide I don't like them I can take my domain with me and leave), and if you go with a cheap hosting package it's arguably going to improve your chances of finding a job as you can stick a brief resumé on the domain and stand out a little from all the @gmail addresses (not that I have anything against gmail - I have an account with them and also a long-standing hotmail account that I keep around and use for buying stuff to divert spam away from my "work" email). There is no service any of these companies provide free that I can't get free or for a small fee elsewhere.
You appear to have completely missed the point. This is about the end user having the ability to walk away from Google, not the advertiser. The point is, if Google abuse their position in terms of their users, even though the users aren't the customers in a traditional sense, they risk driving people away and they'll have less "product" (a smaller userbase) to sell to the advertisers. The advertisers, meanwhile, will just go and do business with whoever hasn't alienated their user base. Maybe you need to leave the thinking to others :)
There are still plenty of parallels. The government expects the BBC to produce shows that attract viewers (even where it's meeting the remit to niche audiences it still needs to attract those audiences). Ultimately that means the product is the purchaser, since we pay for the service via taxation, but the BBC is still responsible for delivering a certain number of eyeballs in return for its funding.
I can see how some people might want to stream the morning news or music or something, in which case gesture based control would solve the wet hands + electronics issue, but even then it seems like the solution they're proposing is massive overkill and will apply to a very small number of people.
For a really cheap alternative physical product, something like this might help take the concept from the screen to the real world. It was my first experience as a kid at putting some instructions into a real life object and having it follow them, and setting up a basic maze or something would help them think through the problem of how to navigate it end to end.
If you have a system for constructing your passwords your security has already failed. At that point it's not if your secrets get out, it's when. I'd imagine this password was specifically generated to make the user think about what he was accessing and is likely not indicative of some structured system.
First of all the government should be accountable for all of its actions. The governement runs FOR the people, so the people CANNOT steal from the government. It BELONGS to the people.
Playing devil's advocate here since I'm broadly in favour of Wikileaks' goals, but governments would argue they run FOR the people but often AGAINST other governments, and that releasing information is sometimes counter to that second goal, either by exposing security flaws or economic weakness or alienating potential allies or the like.
Because we don't yet live in a world where enterprises subscribe to transparency, so this is necessary to protect Wikileaks in the real world. There's no double standard here - plenty of people who own guns for security would happily live in a world that had zero guns, they're just afraid to give theirs up first while others still have access. Same thing with GPL and copyright - in an ideal world we wouldn't need to protect OSS with copyright, but we live in a less than ideal world so we have to play by some of their rules or they'll just steal all of our toys.
The 360 supports a limited set of file types for streaming. I'm guessing what his workaround is doing is some on the fly conversion of a file type into a streamable type - the advent of this hack means he will be able to install an OS that natively supports his original file types.
Maybe the exploits are quickly picked up by pirates, but to say every exploit comes down to piracy is just plain wrong. We've seen people crack all kinds of systems from watches to robot vaccum cleaners - you can't say that's about piracy, that's good old fashioned human curiosity. It's true that once you crack something people will look for things they can do with the crack, and when it's a games console one of those things is an obvious extension, but even if piracy disappeared this instant people would still crack locked down devices for the same reason some people climb mountains.
Yes, the best you could hope for is that they'd give you a caution for wasting police time. Worst case they'd use this to demonstrate that you had ongoing reason to believe someone was using your connection and they'd bring a related criminal charge for your negligence in not acting on that and securing your network. Either way anecdotal evidence suggests be helpful if the police come to you but otherwise just don't get involved, it's rarely rewarded with thanks.