Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
Because every company operates in a perfectly competitive market with identical products, perfect information for all participants, and zero costs of switching suppliers?
Look, Econ 101 is a decent start, but it's only a start. There's a lot more to be learned after that.
The trouble is, that assumes there *is* a better secured competitor.
My experience is that there are lots of small companies all taking a fairly relaxed attitude to security, whose market niches are sufficiently narrow that they only have a handful of competitors - who are similarly relaxed.
And the cost to the customer of switching providers is often quite significant, too. Think data migration. It's not the sort of thing you want to do every year.
So yeah, in theory the company that invested in more security up front has a potential advantage - but then, so does the company that doesn't (because it saves the cost of that investment). And advantage against whom, anyway?
OK, I went to the trouble of reading that whole slab of debate. It clearly shows that all parties are well aware that the snooping powers will be available to a wide range of people for a wide range of purposes. That much is not even questioned. So I'm not sure what specific lying assurances you're trying to draw my attention to.
RIPA stands for "Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act". It does what it says on the tin - it sets out a framework of rules that public agencies are expected to conform to, and mechanisms for ensuring that they do it.
It was only ever about "terrorism" in so far as that was the current buzzword when the act was being passed. The Home Office and other usual suspects lobbied aggressively that these snooping powers would help deal with terrorism - and as far as it goes, this was true. But no-one ever claimed that this was the only possible or permissible application.
How many home owners have their own cameras?
The oft-quoted figure for the UK included cameras set up, owned and monitored solely by property owners and shopkeepers. An equivalent figure in the US would have to include all of those, plus police bodycams, car dashcams, every visual sensor set up anywhere by anyone to monitor anything. Are you *sure* there aren't that many?
Biden didn't "reverse" anything. He just dithered, which in practice turned out to be not very different from Trump's vacillating.
Decent summary here.
Biden is decent, but not smart. Trump is smart, but also the biggest crook in America. Of the two I would still take Biden, but I'd want a better choice.
I always have the same response when this nonsense comes up. "If you think I've been trafficking in this material, send a goon squad to sieze my hardware. Once you've got it, you should be able to decipher anything on it. That's fair enough, it's no different from what governments have been doing for centuries.
"If, on the other hand, you don't have any evidence to back up a warrant for that, then GTFO. Your suggestion is to drastically reduce the barriers and costs of snooping on me, and I see absolutely no reason why any person of goodwill should support it."
I am not nearly as pleased as some commentards about this story. The reason being, Mojang has conspicuously left the door open to change its policy later, which I interpret as "when they've figured out how to make money from it."
I enjoy playing Minecraft with my kids. Would hate to see it being monetised.
all cars now have ecall trackers and mobile connection builtin
Citation needed. My car doesn't.
Now what is that they say about no cars allowed at weekends
I have no idea, what do "they" say about it? Nobody - literally not one person - has said it to me, whatever it is.
Funny that no-one was allowed any say in this
Any say in what, exactly? Please be more specific and include citations in your paranoid ranting, then at least we'll know what you're talking about.
Look up "legal tender".
If I owe you $1000, and I give you 10 (genuine, central bank issue) $100 notes, my debt to you is paid. You can't demand some other form of payment and get a court to enforce it. If you can't handle the cash, that's entirely your problem.
(There is a grey area around contracts that stipulate a specific method of payment, but that's contract law, which is always stupid.)
The bank takes cash. Your utility providers take it. The tax office takes it. You want to clear a debt, cash works. Always.
Crypto - doesn't.
If you had hundreds of millions of users worldwide, and developed a new platform that makes it far easier (from your point of view) to maintain and secure your applications and your customers' data - wouldn't you be doing everything you can think of to persuade them to move over?
No matter what MS does, there will be some people saying it hasn't changed. It's easy to interpret someone's actions in the worst possible way, if that's what you've been training yourself to do for 30 years.
OK, I mentioned a threshold for total number of users. That would mean small sites don't have to take too much trouble collecting all this data.
On reflection, I would also add an exemption for any site whose users are required to pay more than $10 per month to use it. That would take care of educational and quality entertainment sites. It would also fix a floor on the charges of streaming services, which would suppress predatory competition in that market.
As to sites that still qualify, they can claim what they like about what the user is doing, but the tax collector doesn't care. All he needs to know is, how long per day did each individual user spend on servers controlled by this business. They collect this data anyway, you can bet they share it with advertisers, so they can jolly well share it with the taxman too.
Yes, because Moore forbid that Facebook users might switch away from their Facebook portal for a few minutes.
What we need is an attention tax. Web operators to pay $x per person per hour that the user spends continuously connected to their services. (With some TBD thresholds for total number of users, % of users continuously connected for more than x time, etc.) Make them, literally, pay for hijacking people's brains this way.
There's a huge difference between "choosing to mention a handpicked selection of people who you think particularly inspired you to create something", versus "being obliged to list every teacher you ever had, every book you ever read and every person who ever, deliberately or not, taught you anything".
The latter is what the critics are calling for here, and it's ridiculous.
Is there any law against ministers meeting with execs of major companies? (Or minor ones, for that matter?)
I hate being forced into the position of seeming to defend Uber, but seriously - if people are going to throw words like "criminal conspiracy" around, I wish they would be a little more focused in what they're complaining about.
Well... yes, but that assumes the new monkeys learned from the old ones, and there was no effort to change ways. Uber claims that it's gone to great lengths to prevent exactly that from happening in this case.
Please don't misunderstand, I have no time for Uber and have never registered with or used them. But imprecise, misguided or not-thought-through attacks tend to do more damage to the attackers than to the target, particularly if the target has the best legal, political and PR armour money can buy.
Maybe, maybe not. Now all this private info has been leaked, maybe we'll see the idea get tested in court. But until then, I think we should be very cautious about accusing specific people of specific crimes.
For instance, is it a crime to fail to report wrongdoing by your predecessor in a job? To the cops? I don't know, but I imagine the answer varies depending where you are, as well as the severity and degree of wrongdoing.
I agree, but I feel bound to point out that the "we've changed" line is being advanced as a PR defence, not a legal one.
If there are specific legal repercussions incoming, they will be met with equally specific defences designed to deflect, repel, or in the worst case to limit their damage. Which is what anyone faced with legal charges does, whether a company or an individual.
There are zero- or near-zero net carbon options that can work either constantly (e.g. geothermal) or on demand (e.g. biomass).
Note that these are not experimental or theoretical alternatives, but well proven technologies with extensive portfolios of usage in many countries worldwide. Heck, we used biomass before coal. It worked okay then, and it works much, much better now.
Well, not really - the whole "somebody else's playlist" thing would (probably) be a real passion-killer.
You know what some people are into? Yeah, well, if you don't, then cherish your ignorance, because you almost certainly don't want to. Having to watch that sort of thing for hours on end... sounds absolutely horrible.
Amusingly enough, lots of people back then mocked MS for using the file extension to denote the file type. So I suspect there might have been a slight cringe factor at work, and a desire to justify their previous decisions.
The irony being that in Windows, the file extension - not its header - really does determine what application gets invoked when you click on the file.
Right. Now all you need to do is develop dedicated channels with foolproof malware scanning for every type of file that can be transmitted, and make sure they're free and as easy to use as email. (In thinking through the "security" aspect, remember that malware can be buried several layers deep. In this story, for instance, there's an .iso file containing a malware .exe, but there's no reason in principle why it couldn't contain a well-formed .7z file containing another .iso file containing a web server that would deliver the actual payload.)
When you've done that, get back to us and we'll discuss managing the changeover.
Err... That sounds like the kind of security that has been rightly derided as ineffective before. Any check that amounts to "add a click to the workflow" is not going to make anything better.
I'm quite baffled by this report. It requires the victim to click on unknown files, not once, but twice. This is the standard for "so clever that only a state actor could come up with it"?
Surely all that would do is move the attack up a level. Put the typo in the account name, then the package can have the name spelled correctly.
How about an automated check for names that were very similar to existing ones, triggering a deeper review of the content being posted?
Quite possibly, but it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Lots of people would say some version of "that's all very interesting, but you haven't actually answered the points raised, have you?"
After all, it worked for Trump. He took both money and support from the Russians, plenty of people pointed it out, and he just shrugged and said "so what?"
Physical sabotage would be far worse "bang for the buck". One, it'd be a lot more bucks - a simple cyber-trolling operation is dirt cheap, especially when compared with an alternative that requires someone to commit actual crimes and risk jail time. And two, it would be a momentary setback, which at most would increase costs a bit or maybe delay operations for a few months.
By doing it this way, it's not only cheap, it also has a decent chance to create a permanent grassroots opposition movement that will obstruct development for years to come.
Yes, so I keep hearing.
But the fact is, this "being sold" is a pretty painless experience, really. Nobody is putting a collar round my neck, making me stand on a block and pose for bidders. It's a lot less intrusive than, for instance, applying for a job, or a passport, or registering to vote. Let alone actually crossing an international border.
I don't think this hyperbolic language ("being sold" my arse) is doing the job you want it to do.
Nope, both much too high profile in their own time. When the Boomers were young, the hot topics were things like sexual liberation, nuclear apocalypse, popular beat combos, communism. Those aren't the things they're being blamed for now.
It was the Boomers who won Roe in the first place, and took the UK into the Common Market, but somehow the millennials don't seem inclined to thank them for it.
If I had to guess, it will be something that comes out of either China or Africa.
"Us gen-Xs" did at least as much as the boomers to screw up the environment (remember all those cheap flights back in the 90s?), the economy (do you own your own home?), the political environment (the average age of the current cabinet is about 50, just sayin'), and the internet (all that crufty legacy code so full of exploits? - that was us, that was).
We're the generation that's running things now, we don't get to blame the boomers any longer.
And you know what? - in about 40 years' time, the millennials' grandchildren will be rounding on them too. "How could you be so stupid?", they will say. I don't know what they'll be talking about, but there'll be something so stupendous, so overwhelmingly important, so obvious that everyone should have seen it coming before. It's the way of history.
If you think 1k per month isn't worth having, by all means send it to me. I can find a good use for it.
But I suspect your figures are pulled out of your arse anyway.
Right... So the average CS *graduate* in the UK makes 44k, according to figures from the universities (who, granted, do have an interest in talking this figure up, but for want of a better figure I'll take it for now), Compared with a minimum wage of just over 20k per year (assuming a 40 hour week).
So, setting aside for now the considerations of quality of life, career prospects, career security, long term savings and the respect of their peers, you're right - the difference after tax is within shouting distance of what you've indicated - for a new graduate. Ten years later, mind, it'd be a different story.
Well, it depends on context. During the old Cold War, for instance, any system that promised to intercept incoming missiles could be seen as undermining the premise of "MAD", and therefore as active preparation for launching a nuclear attack.
Of course that doesn't apply to this case, but it's an example of how a defensive system can be provocative.
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