Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
In case you hadn't noticed, it's a bit late for that.
My suspicion is that this leak is intended as a warning shot to other prominent Brexit supporters, who shall be nameless, whom the Russians might want to influence slightly. "Look, we have this from your own spy master. Imagine what we might have from you, and what we might do with it." - is the none too subtle subtext.
Of course there is a third status, specially written into law because "on the internet". But I think that - like most laws that were only ever passed because "on the internet" - is a mistake.
And even that law is not very effective. In practice, ff the operator can control the content, then they must. Remember some of the outcries about this or that company not removing some offensive content? They happen all the time, both from left and right wingers, and every company ends up bowing to that pressure.
That's why social media companies start out big on freedom, but as their numbers and reach and fame grow, invariably they start to clamp down on what is and isn't acceptable content. Invariably. Facebook trod that path, Twitter did it, and I daresay Truth Social will do it if it lasts long enough.
Moreover, if the operator is going to hide behind the author's legal liability, then the operator needs to take responsibility for identifying the author and making him/her available to the courts. If they can't or won't do that, then the liability lands straight back on them.
Well, consider the propagation of content. A church bulletin board has a specific location, it's accessed by a finite community of people, and they have a reasonably well understood expectation of the range of content they are likely to find there. Even if you put it online, it'll have a URL and a page header that makes all this fairly clear.
And the community are all more or less known to one another, everyone knows who the trickster is who's likely to post the notice about the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
That's not comparable to any social media company I've heard of. Even Truth Social has a larger community and much broader terms of reference.
I have to say, I find the idea of transparency about moderation rules appealing. Unfortunately, legislating for that would probably also run foul of the First Amendment ("abridging the freedom [...] of the press").
I've been saying for a while that something like this should happen.
Social media companies need to make up their minds what business they want to be in. Are they platforms, or are they publishers?
If platforms, then they get their coveted legal immunity - but they don't get to censor, or promote, content. All those "engagement" feed algorithms would be useless.
If publishers, then they can censor and promote and moderate all they like, but the flip side is that they're responsible for the output. We shouldn't give them a pass on that just because there's more content than anyone can track. That's the business they chose to be in, it's their job to solve the problems it brings.
If that was really what they were doing, most of us wouldn't mind.
But it's not. "Nonsense" is a very generic term, it can be about absolutely anything. But only one very specific type of "nonsense", about one very specific topic, is under debate. That gives away the real agenda, which is nothing to do with "protecting impressionable children" and everything to do with "virtue signalling to impressionable adults".
People keep getting born. That's where the trouble starts.
They grow up, and want to move out of their parents' home. But where to move to? Gone are the days (if ever) when they could just wander into the woods, or the wilderness, and build a cabin for themselves. All the land is already owned by someone. Mostly, by very rich (and therefore influential) people.
So they either have to pay whatever the asking price is for land this week, or resort to shenanigans. Option 1, which you'll note is only available to people who have quite a lot of resources to start with, helps to make the rich richer and keeps the poor in their place.
Option 2 is the beginning of "not getting along". (Although of course you can also use shenanigans to make yourself richer and then buy the land fair and square, thus combining both options. That's also "not getting along".)
Every war ever is ultimately about "who gets to live where". Putin, for instance, thinks that Ukraine should be populated by people who think of themselves as Russians, loyal to Mother Russia, and to that end he's trying to scatter people who think of themselves as "Ukrainian" to far-flung parts of Russia. (Or Europe, that works too, so long as they don't go back.)
Why is all this relevant to the GGP post? Because "Why can't we all just get along?" is hopelessly naive. It's something that can only be said with a straight face by a very young person who not only knows nothing about history or politics or demography or social sciences in general, but is also largely unaware that there is anything to know about these subjects. And so is the GGP sentiment: anyone who's spent more than about two minutes thinking about the subject already knows that it's not going to happen, and why. It falls under the heading of "aww, that's sweet" if the speaker is a teenager or younger, otherwise it's just irritating.
Quite. Of course China is trying to steal those sorts of secrets. So too, I hope, are America and Britain and France and Germany and Israel, among others. If anyone were to tell me definitively that any of these countries doesn't have an active espionage programme aimed at these institutions, I would be very disappointed in them.
Your logic is incomplete. There is no self-evident reason why the usage of data by third parties must be detrimental to us.
We're all agreed, we all pay for the "free" Internet. What this article is about is the mechanism by which that payment is made, collected and monetised.
My kids' school has taught them to distinguish between effect and affect. I assume it's theoretically done the same for all their peers, but there's always the kids who are too cool for spelling.
As for "impacted", that hasn't been new since I was doing my time as a tech journalist - in the 1990s.
The eggcorn that bothers me most, because I see it so often from people who ought to know better, is "free reign" (or, relatedly, "reign in").
"Please" is usually superfluous in dialogues.
The number of people who will actually read the dialogue is inversely proportional to its length. Most people will manage up to about five words, but beyond that the ratio drops off rapidly. So every word counts.
Saying "please" actually makes your message harder to read. You can make a good case that it's also, perversely, discourteous, because it's unnecessarily and unproductively increasing the cognitive load on the reader.
Expected errors are the ones that have distinctive, though not necessarily helpful, error messages. They're often called exceptions. Some people insist there is a difference between errors and exceptions, but I've never been convinced.
Unexpected errors are the ones that management said to ignore. In theory, they would make that call on the basis that handling the error elegantly is not a cost-effective use of development time. In practice, I often suspect the real reason is that it would be too embarrassing to admit the possibility of this error happening, and would make the entire project look like a colossal waste of time.
"Spam, QAnon, phishing..." one of these things is not like the others.
Spam may be illegal in some cases in some jurisdictions, but there's not nearly enough clarity or consistency about these laws to regulate it meaningfully. QAnon is just free speech, it's fine unless it crosses the line into incitement or some other related offence.
Phishing, on the other hand, is flat out criminal. No ifs, ans or buts.
There is zero reason to suppose that any given engineer would make any better a ruler than Boris. The one sphere of politics where we know engineers are significantly over-represented is among Islamic terrorists.
On the whole, I'm still in favour of a broadly democratic system to choose our leaders. Granted this is, literally, a popularity contest, and the chances of it being won by the person who'll do the best job in government is slight - but what that analysis overlooks is that the key to the job is simply to be recognised as the leader. If a lawyer or a journalist or a preacher or a crook can convincingly win an election, they've already done the most important part of their job.
"Facts" have nothing to do with it. There is no way that the statement "Firefox is dead" can coherently be called a "fact".
For one thing, "dead" is a metaphor from the domain of biology. It's not clear what, if anything, it would mean in the context of software. Nor is it clear that "software" is the context the OP is talking about - maybe the applicable domain is "business" or "market share" or something else. But whatever it is, I don't see how Firefox can be called "dead".
1: this article. New versions are still being released. The software is still in active maintenance.
2: Firefox's market share is steady at a far from negligible 9%. Opera is lower, and shrinking. Safari is about the same, and rising. Chrome - is actually losing share, very slightly.
3. Mozilla still very actively participates in web standards and governance, through the W3C and other bodies and initiatives, some of which (like MDN) it leads. It carries weight in these fora solely because of Firefox. Firefox is routinely included in published benchmarks and tests.
So whatever the domain you're talking about, claims of Firefox's demise are greatly exaggerated.
The company I worked at was "open source", at first, in the sense that anyone with the right software and skills could view the code anytime they liked. But, as my then-boss said, the database had almost 1000 tables and more than 3 million lines of code, poorly (if at all) commented and inconsistently designed, and if anyone seriously has time to wade through all that, good luck to them.
His successor as CEO was less liberal in outlook - and a marketer rather than a coder - and one of the first changes he made was to encrypt all the code. It was shortly after that I left.
Yep, cost-plus accounting has a lot to answer for.
I used to work writing user documentation for a software company. But eventually they realised that if the customer looked up the answer to a question in my docs, the company got nothing from that; whereas if they raised a support query, that was billable hours. The job became a lot less satisfying after that.
Horse, to use your own words, shit.
A quick Google for "right to privacy at work" shows that even in the USA, employers don't simply have carte blanche to spy on their employees however and wherever they like, no matter whose equipment they're using. And in most other developed countries, there are significantly stronger protections.
If you don't like it, then quit and go to work someplace with less focus on individual "rights".
That's simple: China is in the process of installing itself as Russia's "protector", in the 17th century sense of the word.
(I guess the modern analogue would be something like "owner".)
They're adding spyware to Russian systems in the same way, and for much the same reasons, as some employers add it to the systems of WFH employees.
You mean, like the UN Charter or the Budapest Memorandum? No, nothing there about not invading Ukraine, except that's the whole fucking point of those documents that the US and Russia both voluntarily signed up to.
The Budapest Memorandum is particularly significant because in it, Russia pledged to respect Ukraine's borders at that time, not to initiate military force or threats against them, and specifically not under any circumstances to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against them. See how that's going?
For consumers of the vital services, the corresponding question is "how much more are you willing to pay for them?"
Given the amount of whining already about planned increases in power prices, I doubt if the public would look favourably on a new "security tax" to apply right now, immediately.
But that's what you're proposing.
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