Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Then SFTP would be the alternative, especially since Secure Shell is now the preferred remote login method, and SFTP uses Secure Shell as the wrapper. Meaning if you ssh onto your server, then you should be able to sftp onto it just as easily.
"What killed the GameGear was the awful battery life, 90mins on 6 AA batteries on the one I owned. Nintendo Gameboy could run for hours on a set of AA batteries as it prized battery life and surrendered the graphics and CPU speed to give a playable experience."
AND the backlight. This also killed the Atari Lynx, which was similarly specced. A color portable was simply was too far ahead of its time, as shown by the state of the art in portable televisions (did you know Sega made a TV adapter for the Game Gear?). Color LCD tech and backlights then simply drew too much power. Nintendo finally added backlighting with the Game Boy Advance, as only by that point did the battery and display and lighting tech make sense.
Honest question. If the First Amendment says what it says, how can libel and slander laws be established, given they necessarily abridge freedoms explicitly mentioned in the text, and said text contains no exceptions to allow for restraining such in the name of rights clashes?
Indeed, how did the Supreme Court justify the Schenck decision (the "Fire in a Crowded Theater" decision)? What rights clashed with the First Amendment in that case?
Trouble is, each thread already has roadblocks:
Education: No one wants to learn. You can't fix Stupid.
Enablement: The check-cutters don't care and will fire anyone who dares defy them at the drop of a hat.
Enforcement: They also likely have the clout to evade or change any kind of enforcement you can think of.
IOW, the only people with the actual power to make it happen either don't care or are actively against it.
"The only way to stop insecure code being shipped is to make it expensive to do so,"
To elaborate, capitalistic pressures actually work in the OPPOSITE direction. It's usually expensive to NOT ship secure code because, more often than not, those that don't do it can cheap out and undercut the competition (because the clients lack the mentality to prize security--they're in the same boat of cheap first and to hell with the rest). And for those that get caught, they either just vanish or find it cheaper to lawyer their way out of it. And because of competitive sovereignty, there's usually a way out of any problem if you have the resources. You'd practically need a Machiavellian Prince to force them to comply, and they could probably just pool together and arrange a coup anyway.
The TL;DR version: Security will always be an immediate cost, meaning it will be prioritized to be reduced (it's just physics--think door locks). And the human condition favors reducing immediate costs versus considering long-term risks.
Perhaps it all becomes a case of staring down the avalanche. If inaction means your last big client pulls out and you're essentially done, desperation sets in. Expand that, and you may find towns or even larger may hinge on deadlines, meaning livelihoods, even outright lives are at stake...
"No. They can connect server-side to the third party, and transfer browser fingerprints / IP addresses etc., and the third party can try to collate this, but this is hit and miss."
But constantly improving. Soon, basic fingerprinting using essential elements will be unique enough to disregard cookies for everything but shopping carts.
It isn't, and it ceases to exist. If people plunked a penny each time they wanted to search the Internet, they start having skin in the game and start caring about quality. Not only that, this creates a legally-binding transaction, meaning sales contracts and laws concerning them come into play, putting the providers under scrutiny.
As for other media, newspapers are still sold, even with advertisements. Plus, non-Internet media has the inherent disadvantage (inherent in our case) of lack of specificity.
Part of the problem is not just the information itself but the speed at which it can spread. The printing press vastly accelerated the spread of information (good or ill), and the Internet has accelerated it to nearly the absolute limit. This is compounded by the reaction times of the parties involved. Nimble organizations can react quickly but run the risk of flying off the handle. Stable ones can thinks things through but may not react quickly enough when something comes fast. Governments and the like tend to the fall into the latter and are having trouble reacting to information that spreads and changes at a moment's notice combined with a public that is trending toward the former.
How would you enforce it? Countries have sovereignty, and as soon as one does it (especially one like Singapore--tiny and therefore low-maintenance as well as a tourist destination, especially for the rich, and therefore awash in multiple currencies--IOW, try and stop them), everyone else risks being left behind...
"Wake up!"
Forget it. They're much like the people I see all the time hammering away at slot machines and "skill games" like they're arcade shooters, plunking away all their cash in the blink of an eye, then hobbling themselves off to the ATM machine to do it all over again.
At all hours of the day.
Even during the whole COVID thing.
With their buddies. WithOUT their masks on.
Basically, some people will just never learn. The worry is that they'll take the rest of us with them...
"Which file? The file you are looking for, of course."
WHICH file are you looking for is the key. You're trying to identify a mystery file that may not have a coherent-enough structure to properly identify it. There's also the possibility of "chimera" files that can correctly identify as more than one type of file simultaneously. Plus, suppose it's something like a raw data stream and therefore unstructured by default.
Put simply, one size cannot fit all. After all, DNA can't distinguish between monozygotic twins.
Plus there's the matter of baggage. Your proposal means the file manager needs to include a ZIP support library, which opens up potential holes.
"The problem here with just in time business models is that they are intentionally one step away from diaster..."
Because to do otherwise is also disastrous. Keeping back stocks sounds nice until you learn that others who don't bother are able to cut costs and undercut you, and suddenly you don't have business worth having a back stock. IOW, it's cutthroat; threading the needle is the only way to survive. Too fat and you get undercut, too lean and you lose out to those who did back stock, and there's no real way to predict which way the future will swing.
"...how many times do we have to keep bailing big business out when it would be cheaper to cut the head off the monster and return control to someone who sees beyond todays profits..."
Is it? What if it's the ONLY supplier left? What do you tell the unfortunate cogs who have nowhere else to get their essentials because the last grocer in a 10-mile radius just shut down forever?
"The usual way to overcome that is to publish your public key on a public forum or a public repository. If someone manages to hack into that forum/repository and change the key, you will know as soon as you log onto that forum and see that the key you published has changed. Similarly, if someone were to publish a bogus key to the public platform in your name, you would see that fraudulent post. You can then shout long and loud in clear emails and messages that someone is trying to impersonate you."
The problem behind that problem, of course, is that if someone is impersonating you, they can just turn the tables on you and say your attempts to cry impersonator are themselves that of an impersonator. Now you're trapped in a "he said, she said" conundrum, and in a First Contact Problem, there's no shared context with which to make the ultimate judgment. It becomes a coin flip.
"Do I think that a solution exists? I am convinced of it."
I'm convinced there isn't. Because like I said, with enough influence and enough meta, everything is fungible. This includes the limits of what is fungible.
Reagan once said the ten words no one wants to hear are, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." I can think of seven that are even worse for civilization in general: "I can make it all go away..."
The problem behind the problem is the human condition. People are going to cheat; plain and simple. Worse, the problem gets meta, and people become good at cheating at cheating (think cheating to get away with cheating). And because cheating can get meta, some lowlifes can get pretty ingenious about cheating, using as many meta levels as needed to get away with it.
Sometimes, that's the problem with "Keep It Simple, Stupid." Simple sometimes isn't very adaptable. Thus why most gas-guzzling cars don't use Wenkel engines. Wenkels are powerful and simple as far as gasoline engines go, but they're not the most efficient in an age where that is increasingly an issue. Similarly, people seem to find all sorts of ways around tax codes (and at a meta level, getting the tax codes changed in their favor, too).
If we want to solve the problem long-term, we're probably going to need a better breed of human first.
"Remember when Tanzania tried their COVID test kits on a goat and piece of fruit and the tests came back positive? Remember the stories where medical personnel submitted unused test swabs that then tested positive?"
No, and no.
And you have to wonder if stories like these are perhaps reverse propaganda: scare tactics meant to stir panic and distrust. I mean, how long has it been since we entered a DTA world?
The possible scenario here is a fire-and-forget drone that is able to fly autonomously without further direction. That's a tough one to beat without some direct method because at that point it's self-contained and can't otherwise be redirected. A directed drone will need a live link which can be jammed and/or tracked.
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