Re: Gullibility
I just saw three of them arrive in one mailbox - they sailed through all the email scanning, people are worried and they get an email about health safety measures ... they will be clicking on the button to open the file.
5379 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
I took a DEC 11/23 from work to the local CP/M user group with three VT100 terminals so that they could see multitasking - it was fun, they could not believe that it was possible on a computer that just rolled into the room on four casters. For the demonstration, I fired up Adventure and let them play it.
While I have always supported Open Source applications and made a lot of my code available, the end result of open source is that when you release the application, you don't make any money anymore - everyone respects you, thanks you (and occasionally criticizes you) but in the end it's just hari-kari, the application environment cannot be reincarnated - you have to move on to another dimension in time and space, if you want to eat.
Nobody in the movie business would buy this story, it's only the tip of the iceberg - send it back to the writers for a rework to develop the back story.
What was happening behind the scenes? Clearly a lot more than this little dribble of information "reveals" - I think there's probably enough happening behind locked doors to make the story into a 30 episode series.
When a new virus pops its little head up you will find a lot of people studying it - there was a lot of off-line discussions about CORVID-19 prior to it getting posted on Facebook, the majority of discussions saw it as a serious infection but not a big concern, there was research starting into vaccines too. Once it appeared on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram everyone on social media realized that this could be the end of the world and that everyone would die and it would be the politicians fault.
So I wonder who started those posts?
Science papers are normally published in journals and unless you have purchased a subscription to the journal all you see is a short summery and a request to subscribe. The actual details of the research are not available to the public unless you purchase them or spend a while on Google searching for other referances that may have leaked released a PDF copy for students course studies.
I guess potentially the move to on-line courses, caused by COVID-19, could help general research.
I was asked to help a neighbor get setup to work from home this weekend to handle the corporate billing and payments, she had a load of questions they wanted answered so I sat down at her laptop and logged in ... into Windows Vista Business Edition.
We discussed it and she went off to buy a new laptop.
The potential is that there could be another asteroid belt further out. There have been suggestions for a long time that there's a larger object out there to explain some minor discrepancies in the inner orbits of planets, could there be just a couple of billion tones of small debris? A disturbance in the outer ring, or the formation of the outer ring, might explain the Late Heavy Bombardment about 4 billion years ago that reshaped the Earth.
This is going to be a very interesting research area for the next 20 years.
The figures always look bad initially because it's easy to count the numbers that die, but impossible to count the numbers of people who have the disease and take a few days off before going back to work. Yes - it's bad if you die but it appears that the majority of people have few symptoms beyond feeling like they have the cold and the flu, cough a bit, feel sick for a bit and then get better. Until testing becomes widespread these people do not count as infected so the bad numbers always look worse initially.
Microsoft's first attempt a security was shouted down everywhere, OK, so Vista wasn't a perfect solution but it was a start and everyone was running around saying that it was a disaster because it made users actually have to work at security.
But it's not just the computers and users that are the problem, every computer is connected to the internet and the standard ISP supplied access device has issues too and anyone can hook up to the internet and try and break into your computer.
Security in the internet today is like making everyone walk around naked all the time and then complaining about the backroom chatter.
"...US government's ongoing efforts to demonize encryption for leaving law enforcement in the dark and AG William Barr's public opposition to encryption, technical experts expect the guidelines will force technology platforms to avoid encryption..." - El Reg
All the early Z80, 8080 multitasking problems were all in the people writing code who had grown up on single task systems and never considered multitasking before. I used to demo multi-masking to 8080 and Z80 coders and they were always amazed that it was even possible, let alone what the implications were. LOL
These days, corporate management and sales control the development of new products - ask them which they want developed, a secure processor, or a super fast processor - you know what they are going to sell...
Security? "It will be a while before anyone hacks it and in the meantime we'll sell a hell of a lot of the fast processors." Welcome to today's world.
Jenny Talia documented this attitude on youtube - F.O.C.U.S.
If I wanted to transmit anything secret then I'd do it in plain text encoding - banning encryption will not solve the problem. So what's the problem? It's us - society that creates conditions and environments where people think that all kinds of abuse are justified in one way or another. Child abuse is wrong - but we're all OK with a society that thinks that "austerity" has no side effects and that rich people will always be good people. Nobody ever discusses what is "good" anymore, we're only told that some things are bad ... if you get caught.
Private Eye reported it very early on and diagnosed it as a software problem - but the Post Office refused to even consider that it might have been their fault and didn't even investigate the issue - they just claimed that because their accounting software showed a discrepancy then it was evidence that postmasters everywhere were stealing.
But it's a corporate problem really, we need to punish the corporate officials be making them retire with a golden parachute - maybe they could get a new job managing Brexit now.
Right, but these days, even if it's illegal, law enforcement has no ability or funding to actually enforce the law. It's a worldwide "austerity" effect - we have scammers everywhere and unless they steal from rich people they are very rarely prosecuted for internet crime. Yet we hound other people just because some body thinks they stole a couple of paracetamol in Wales. But steal on the Internet or via a phone call and nobody is interested at all.
It's hard to know what actually happened - the CIA are pretty good at that - but it smells like some of the bosses are getting blamed for the leak and want to get a conviction and move on while ignoring the actual cause. There's a long history of this type of action in most spy agencies.
I believe that the official line is that we need to leave the EU and all European influence on UK laws, European influence over Britain has been going on for over 2000 years now - it's time to return to the days before those damn Europeans invaded ... will the next political baby be called Boudicca?
We're taking back control - we need to start prohibiting every other country from speaking English, it's OUR LANGUAGE, not theirs, we need to take back control - that's the direction that we're heading.
Can it get any stupider?
I just did a search and a message popped up on the screen saying that they had detected the Corona Virus on my computer and I should download a anti-corona app to fix it... it's worked great ... oh wait, my bank is calling ...
What do we "know" about the virus? Virtually nothing, it appears to be widespread, possibly much more so than we've observed and while some people have died, most of the deaths would have been expected had they caught the flu or measles. While the governments are all running around taking a shit in public, they are all busy blaming someone else for the virus transmissions.
Most likely we will know all the facts in about two years, until then you can panic if you want but it doesn't help. Sure, wash your hands and don't wipe your nose on someone else's sleeve - but that's what we should be doing anyway. Nothing new about this.
Flaky news, little bits falling off from time to time, what's true and what's not? We'll figure it out eventually, if we're lucky.