Posts by MNGrrrl

Walking a tight rope

The people crapping on her need to take a step back and look at this from a leadership position. She never partook in those behaviors, and was not an active participant. She's condemned the behavior, and the only reason anyone knows about this is because of a breach of privacy. The sum total of what people have against her is that she was part of a Facebook group that all of her colleagues were in, but did nothing while in that group. Nothing.

Good people can walk into shit situations, shit jobs, with shit culture. They've got two choices -- try to make it better and lead by example, do nothing, or punish people. Punishment won't go far when the problem is so entrenched; There's many, maaaany stories of people in law enforcement coming out against the actions of their colleagues and it usually ends badly for them. Stop looking at this like you're in the first world with your perfectly running law and order society; It's a corrupt institution and people are shitting on the one person who apparently /didn't/ participate for not doing more. In her position, anyone reading this would have melted into a puddle trying to do what you've got in your head to do, which is hero through fixing an entire organization with an entrenched culture, without any support from outside.

And that last part is key: She doesn't have any support. Not from the public. Certainly not from the Executive branch. Not from Congress. No... just a few democrats who managed to swing one half of the legislative branch and they want to get some political currency out of this... by *also not helping*.

Sorry. I'm a realist... and by all accounts this woman did what most people with a conscience would do: Worked quietly, kept an eye on things, and tried do what good could be done. Because it's lonely when you're at the top of an organization. And leaders who don't have their directions followed stop being leaders. Being in a position of authority is a constant balancing act between meeting internal organizational needs and advancing your own goals. She might not have done as much as she could, but let's be honest: She probably did more than any of the other candidates would have. Sometimes, "not enough" is the high bar guys. I think this is one of those cases.

When I see that she's got enough funding and support to gut the entire org and rebuild it with an eye towards combating this culture, and politicians and the general public willing to accept that basically means major staffing shortages and a shit show for a couple *years* while the whole show reboots, I'll be more willing to pickup a pitchfork. But come on -- what kinda chance would she even have had? You've read the same news I have.

No, we can fix it

We can fix this. Sixty years ago planes were disintegrating in midair. It was so bad the public was demanding action, and so the government (mine, united states, probably elsewhere too) created an investigative and regulatory body -- the FAA and NTSB. Together, they literally combed the wreckages, identifying engineering failures, human failures, and separating fact from fiction. Manufacturers were required to show their work, with the designs available for public inspection. Designs were tested in laboratories and certified as ready for use. Deaths plummeted. Planes got safer. And within just twenty years, planes went from one of the deadliest ways to travel to one of the safest.

What my industry needs isn't laws about encryption, or more laws to punish criminals. What we need is proper engineering standards, enforced by a regulatory body that holds companies that make software and hardware accountable. We don't have that now, and that, more than any other reason, is why our industry is a shit show of failure. Failure is the norm in this industry, with most IT projects -- about 70%, failing to either be implimented at all, not meeting requirements, or going over budget. These are institutional failures, and it's been encouraged by a lack of public awareness and a false narrative that says we have to tolerate failure to be on the 'cutting edge'.

We do not.

DNS Terror

It's not Muslims terrorizing the internet -- it's these ass hats. Countries should just start their own DNS servers and fracture the root server system. Basically cut the head off the snake. Of course, it'll leave the internet in ruins but it's already a dumpster fire thanks to these clowns.

ICANN is just another example of how the United States refuses to play nice with the rest of the world. I am ashamed of my country's conduct, on- and offline. I'm totally serious -- Europe should shove their collective foot right up the ass of our tech companies, along with these kinds of organizations that project US policy while claiming to be neutral.

Go FCC Yourself

The sarcasm here is fatal.

Not a good test

Radiation inside the Van Allen belts is very low; Except for solar flares it's a non-issue. About 99% of the total solar radiation is deflected by Earth's magnetic field. For Mars, it's another story -- it weighs in at nearly .7 sievert per week. For comparison, the ISS receives about 150 mSv **per year**. It's not a valid test because the environment isn't anything like it would be out there. Regular PCs are already on the ISS, with no real ill effect other than a few extra reboots here and there.

Title

"New AI tells people sane people they're crazy 25% of the time".

FTFY

This is why they fail

It'll never float; if they were serious about endorsing free market values they'd chop municipal exclusivity agreements and mandate that telecommunications infrastructure providers (ie, cables and bandwidth) must be operated as a legally distinct entity from internet service providers. In other words, anyone can purchase bandwidth and make internet service available on the wires; And such contracts should be time limited. Turn the bandwidth available into a free marketplace, and then leave those with the infrastructure the avenue for profit being building more damned infrastructure.

Hi El Reg!

I don't know that it's a conspiracy theory to call bullshit on a wall of silence, denials, and refusals, El Reg -- and I'd take you to task on the letter you attached. They're claiming they couldn't shut down the API. Why not? Just about any IT department you ask would tell you it shouldn't be hard to simply turn off the API for awhile. The API should be rate limited too. Most public-facing APIs are.. so how did the bots blow past all that? There's a lot of inconsistencies in the FCC's story -- I wouldn't call it a conspiracy to say they're bullshitting when the only evidence they're providing is soothing words that, indeed, they can be trusted. All indications are they well and truly can't. Also, Hi, El Reg. I linked your article to my, uhh, "conspiracy theory". :P

Translation

"We don't have a problem and we're working to fix it as quickly as possible." -- Samsung, Creator of the Self-Immolating Phone

How to tell if they're "evil" drones or "good" ones

A lot of people are asking how we can tell the good from the bad. Actually, it's not really that hard. These quadcopters that are the rage right now can't carry much, and they have such a small airframe that what they're carrying is immediately visible. As I'm sure we've seen, these things have crashed into people before -- even right into their heads. I'm not saying it doesn't hurt, or can't cause some injuries, but as a weapon... you'd be better off throwing a large rock at them.

The police don't really need to worry about these as long as there aren't a lot of them to obscure a real threat, or big enough that the airframe can carry an actual payload. A drone that weighs 50 pounds is gonna make a lot of noise. It will announce its presence. It will be an obvious potential threat. If the FAA simply lowered the weight requirements for what "recreational" is, or altered some of the rules to say that the interior of the airframe can't exceed certain dimensions, it would be "safe enough" for the public to use. Not perfect safety, but decent.

And for people worried about drones hitting actual aircraft: Your quadcopter is not a goose. It will never be a goose. It does not pose the threat a goose does. And we build airplanes to survive geese. If you fly your quadcopter into the flight path of a 777, the only thing it will do is, if it's *really* close to the beginning of the runway it might muck up ILS, but very probably not -- so all its going to do is hit the plane, turn into shrapnel, and the pilot will make a comment saying "Welp, someone just lost their toy" and turn on the windshield wipers to brush its remains off... assuming there was enough of it left. If it gets eaten by an engine, the engine won't really care. Any damage will be minor enough the next maintenance overhaul will see and scrape it off. Basically, a few pieces of burnt plastic or a few flecks of metal lodged in a burner. Maybe.

It's much ado, about not much.

bad dog, no cookie for you

It never ceases to amaze me how often these sorts of "For the children!" types think websites should do the job of the police. Guys, you don't want that. When you give corporations police powers, the result is a train wreck that is terrifying to behold... and it'll be in your backyard. The best thing to do is to simply disable reporting being viewed by employees for things people believe are illegal (not the same as against terms of use) and direct them to their local law enforcement at that point in the process... and then have a department set aside to coordinate legal requests/inquiries and streamline the process as an outreach program. Ultimately, it's not the job of a corporation to police people, but it makes sense from a public safety standpoint to be cooperative and make it easy for them to do their job, when and where practical (which won't be the same from one company or website to the next).

Besides... what's legal in one part of the world isn't in another. Even just using this singular example "child porn" -- everyone thinks it's so clear cut but it isn't. Age of consent varies by country. In some countries, like the United States, they've also come down on "depictions" of under-age sex -- which has landed a number of anime collectors in hot water and has led to all manner of collateral damage because how, exactly, do you tell the age of a cartoon? Whether the character is 9, or 900, a lot of times... they look the same, in the same style. How about writing a memoirs or "tell all' by (childhood) rape survivors? Well, legal in some places... not in others.

That's where they get you: They're hoping for a knee-jerk instead of a reasoned and rational response to something. And that's the crowbar they lever into people's civil rights. Not even just rights in their own country -- Websites have had to play second fiddle to every country's idea of what's considered obscene or not. Some muslim countries want to ban pictures of women who aren't basically a burlap bag with eyes. Some countries want certain political viewpoints suppressed (Hi Germany, China, Russia, United States, Britain... *everyone in the everywheres*), and it's utterly impossible to meet all of their demands and still have a website. There is nothing you can say in the world that won't get cheered on by one group and pisses off another.

Until the governments of the world decide to stop having their little turf war over who gets to own the internet, there's only one of three viable answers: Don't get involved. Get involved, but only with the government where your server(s) are located... and convince the many-headed fuckbeast of world government to write a goddamn treaty already about this and setup a proper way of streamlining and handling these requests and what people's rights and responsibilities are when running a website, server, service, etc.

How do we pay for it? THIS.

Ah. The perennial debate whenever 'how do we pay for it' comes up regarding social media, journalism, fake news, etc. It does indeed all reduce to that question, and Twitter, as big and well-known as it is, hasn't learned the lessons of previous generations of mass media.

Let's take El Reg as one example -- According to their own statistics, 9.5 million people read it. Let's say they have a staff of 150 people or so, most of them support (not writers/journalists). For comparison, the NY Times has a staff of about 3,400; I figure for a very focused niche website that mostly does analysis of other news sources -- ie, not much investigative journalism, that's not an unreasonable figure. At an average pay of $36k USD (for all employees, not just journalists), and assuming labor makes up about 1/3rd of total costs -- a typical business figure, we'll round up to $100k of resource need for the organization times 150 people... that's an operating budget of about $15 million per year. So those 9.5 million people could contribute *** $1.57 per year *** and support the organization. Now in practice, most people don't -- We'll say only 5% (a high end figure for advertising responses) do. That 5% of the readership could flip $31.58 per year and cover everyone, or $2.63 per month. To be clear: These are estimates, not actual figures. An actual staffer can (and maybe will?) step in with better numbers, but let's start here.

It's not unreasonable to expect $2.63 per month from the top income earners in the field who would be reading this site, and the remaining 95% of slackers who get it for free could keep doing so, but more to the point excerting influence on their peers which increases eyeballs and 'mind space'. By becoming the de facto go-to for IT news through word of mouth, readership grows and revenue grows as well.

That's not an unreasonable business model; There's just one problem -- the people most likely to donate are the ones with the lowest incomes. Those with high income proportionally donate less. A lot less. So we obvious need some kind of tiered system; A combination of one time donations, recurring income (subscriptions), but also a need to keep content free. Top income earners often do recurring donations, but the rank and file opt for one-shots (often after tax returns).

When you look at how the news industry has approached this problem, the varying methods from paid-only viewing to donations-only, to premium content, it becomes clear these numbers -- while perhaps not completely accurate -- are illustrative of the overall picture.

Now, me personally... I think the best thing to do, if we take online advertising out of the picture, is to fall back on a tried and true method: Tiered donations with varying 'prizes'. People are much more likely to donate (and in larger amounts) if they get something in return, even as a token. A t-shirt, hat, etc., are all commonly done, and also help fulfill advertising objectives *but with explicit engagement and consent of the consumer*. Wearing an El Reg shirt is both a statement, and a choice. It's not shoved down people's throats and as a result those people become good sources of word of mouth, both actively and passively.

In the United States, we have the Public Broadcasting System, or PBS. It's a television channel and network, supported by tax dollars and donations. They have donation drives bi-annually. Roughly 50% of their revenue is generated through donations, which brings in $220 million (donations only); About 95 million unique people watch it each year. It is a rough analog to the BBC, but with much poorer funding and support at the federal level or the general public. But remember, the internet is global, while television is not. PBS has a market cap of about 320 million people -- the current US population. Europe has nearly 800 million; About 854 million people speak/read english worldwide. That's your market cap for a website that speaks/writes only english. The tech industry in the US weighs in at about 6.5 million people; So if Europe is similar, that's another 16 million on the top, or about 22.5 million people in the industry, of which El Reg has tapped 9.1 million, or nearly half. Aggressive advertising could top that in 5 years to majority; ie, they could expect to grow to another 20% of current size in good conditions with proper investments. Will that happen? Probably not, but it's a goal to shoot for. 20% more El Reg also means they could take a proper run at investigative journalism, maybe enter new markets like video and mass media (television).

As you can see, the numbers for donations-only support and what it would take for El Reg to make rent are roughly the same -- PBS gets about $2.30 per viewer per year. I estimated about $1.57 or so for a typical business -- not a media business, but the average across all markets as a business entity. El Reg could operate with significantly less overhead (ie, more of its budget would be labor) because it doesn't need all that equipment, transmitters, etc., but conversely wouldn't benefit from any advertisements (commercials), so it would probably break even on this figure, worst-case.

So there you have it: The donation model is viable for journalism, it just requires a radical re-thinking of how to engage its readers/viewers. The most visible problem in the field right now is that the internet generation and the people trying to engage them have forgotten the lessons learned by previous iterations of mass media: Namely, you can't ask people for money without giving something tangible back. A faceless static form asking for credit card information is neither engaging nor effective. Donating needs to be a center-piece of the organization, not a bag hung on the side, with proper care and attention paid to cultivating it. Patron may be successful as a whole, but many of it's content creators are simply clueless on this because they don't have an organizational support or backing from a knowledgable and dedicated staff who handles the donation side of things and promoting it. They are, in effect journalists trying to be marketing directors. Obviously, it's had limited effectiveness, popular opinion notwithstanding.

Real problems not found?

Having solved all other problems, *uckerberg now sets his eyes on deleting 'revenge' smut? What about the flagrant abuse of minorities and a steadfast refusal to fix the problems with the 'real name' policy that led to so many drag queens, transgender people, and other marginalized groups being targeted with their automated reporting system and then booted off their system? Yeah, you've got a pile of new gender options on the signup page, but you canned the person responsible and then cancelled their account. Repeatedly. Anyone can use a bot to make a couple hundred fake accounts and then all set them to report another account and get it booted. It's all automation. Automated abuse.

Artificial intelligence can't fix real stupidity.

*uckerBerg does it again

It's funny how they'll fight any attempt by the government (any government) to get into its systems, and routinely engages in civil rights abuses from privacy to racism, sexism, all the -isms really -- in fact, that's basically what 'the social network' is... a way to turn '-isms' into profits. They do all of this, and yet people insist they can't live without it and the industry showers them with accolades and hails them as a 'success story'.

Really. You know, we thought the internet would bring knowledge and democracy to the world, and instead it puked up cat videos, porn, trolls, and fake news. Those of us who helped launch this mess look on it rather like many parents of adult children... with great disappointment. We love it anyway because of its potential... not as much how it turned out. Now tell me honestly... how could anyone create something as soul-crushingly inhumane and toxic as Facebook and not want to put a pillow over its face while it sleeps and end it for the good of all mankind? To have created that... I'd feel not unlike someone who raised a kid who later became a serial terrorist who murder-rapes his way through life.

At least the internet was borne out of good intentions and still has the potential to be all of those things. Facebook is like what would happen if robo-Hitler had angry hate sex with a warehouse filled with discarded phone books and AOL CDs. It can't help but be made of pure evil.

Epic fail

First, an explanation: Mobile phones are actually a globbed together mix of systems, not a single device as the average consumer believes. There is the communication stack -- the 'phone' part of your smart phone, and then there is the main system, the 'smart' part of your phone where all the apps and such live. Other systems that are hung off the main system include GPS, WiFi/Bluetooth (usually integrated), camera, and sometimes a GPIO (Generic Pin I/O) plug-in for a notification LED, auto-sensing headphone jack, camera flash, etc. These are each so-called 'systems on a chip' which are baked into your phone via a generic internal bus (USB for example). The main system accesses it via a primitive set of I/O calls.

This design is to minimize development costs -- want to add a camera? You don't need to redesign the entire stack, just glom it to the bus and do the interface in software. The downside is that the system you're attaching can't be updated easily, if at all. Making matters worse, the internal bus used isn't usually something like USB where there is a clear device/host barrier (ie, the device can't access main memory); It is usually a bus (like PCI) that has access to every other peripheral and can raise interrupts, access main memory, etc. These SoCs follow the same pattern internally -- often they, themselves, are glommed together frankensteins with the glue logic sitting in firmware.

The end result is your phone is basically a network internally, and what you're accessing (touchscreen, buttons, microphone) is just one device on this network. Worse, Android (unlike Apple) suffers from severe fracturing, meaning it's up to the manufacturer to release updates for each specific device. It's easier to just tell their customers to buy a new phone every year rather than properly support it with security and OS updates for its expected service life -- ie, until the hardware is simply not capable of doing what the user wants anymore.

So yes, shame on Broadcom for crappy development practices, but this is really an industry problem. We can't keep borgifying our devices and assimilating everything into the everythings, then not supporting it, and expect it not to end in disaster. IT: The only branch of engineering where a trend of decreasing reliability and increasing costs doesn't alarm anyone. Because let's be honest: If we built our houses like we build our information systems, the first wood pecker to come along would destroy civilization.

What you don't know

You Europeans need to know that the United States did not roll out a "chip and pin" system. It's a chip. The end.

---

There is no pin required -- you can press credit or cancel to bypass it and this is common knowledge. This was originally done as part of a "transition" away from the old system, while merchants still used old equipment. It's been many years. The old equipment is still there, and so is the "transition" period. So yeah, physical card fraud has gone up, because the new cards are actually less secure: It is one factor authentication -- "I have card. Gimme money." And you *can* get money at most places by simply asking for cash back. Which means... you don't need an ATM to get cash, just a candy bar to buy.

We didn't roll out EMV to decrease fraud, but to shift costs from banks to merchants, re: card-present (CP) transactions. But I mean, think about it... these pieces of plastic just need to be present to turn holding on to it into cash, albeit for a limited time. And as for people thinking skimmers can't be used? Most of the chipped cards also have RFID tags. Walk by someone carrying it. Conduct a card-present transaction by sending the challenge/response over the internet to another location. Bonus: Add bluetooth so the 'fake' card can emulate the real one.

EMV does nothing to stop man in the middle. It was fundamentally broken from day one -- and criminals need only use their heads and a tiny amount of finesse to overcome it.

Point missed.

That whooshing sound is the point going over the previous posters' comments. I used OTR when I had a friend in China, who worked for their telecom company. He helped install parts of the 'great firewall of china', but being an ex-pat, still wanted to talk to his buddies at home. Said firewall does a lot of keyword searching and other such, but it isn't exactly an intelligent beast. Much like the Great Transparent Proxy that the USA uses (funny, nobody considers that...), it is designed for bulk collection and processing and when we were using it, OTR was a very niche thing nobody really knew about -- thus the GFOC wouldn't notice or flag encrypted communication over a protocol and configuration that it was looking at as plain text: It would just see a long stream of random characters that wouldn't match any of its filters.

Software like this isn't just for 'criminals' or 'terrorists'... it's also for the people who are well aware of the surveillance in the world and simply want to be left alone. My friend wasn't engaged in some clandestine intelligence operation... mostly, we just talked about video games, caught up on what people were doing back here he knew when he was state-side... very ordinary stuff. But in an era where bringing a fingernail clipper on a plane can get you years in prison, even the most mundane things can become a danger when an overzealous government thug sees an automated alert and, lacking any higher level brain function, roflstomps his way all over some innocent person's face.

We don't live in civilized society anymore. We need tools like this. Everyone does -- because even if you are the kind of naive idiot who thinks your government is the best simply because *you* were born under it... there's over two hundred other governments filled with the same kind of naive idiots, and very likely think *you* are the enemy. Unfortunately, this level of stupidity is exceedingly common... and while I'd love to put them in a room together and let them wallow in their mutual stupidity -- I have to live on this planet too.

Validation on a magic number alone was stupid even in Roman times. At least they rolled up parchment on a stick to cipher things. And yet here we are.

The companies should be held liable for this kind of criminal stupidity. Even sophisticated encryption still usually has a second form of authentication besides the keys. And we only use stupidly large prime numbers because they are so hard to find. That is the only reason it works. Ccard numbers are largely sequential and very limited in the number of valid possibilities.

I'm disappointed the criminal element took this long. Step up your game people, you're slipping.

Its bad

The subhead tells me everything i need to know: not responding counts as a "yes". In other words it's so bad the only ones who would vote for it don't know it's happening

Oh, please.

First, the W3C shouldn't be doing this, but the W3C is also irrelevant. It hasn't been a forum for engineers and leading industry professionals for a long time, and that's why its initiatives have become bloated, unimplimented, and standards have become ad hoc or de facto instead of guided by a deliberate design process.

That said, they (all the corporations) have been shoving DRM down people's throats and... other... orifices, for a long time now. It's inevitable it will eventually get into browsers, standards committee approved or not. And for people thinking boycotting websites or companies will somehow be effective, I've got some bad news: There's never been a successful boycott of a website or a large company that amounted to anything, because people aren't organized politically. Not just here in 'Murica, home of the yellow-haired angry groundhog, but anywhere. There is nowhere in Europe where there is a powerful organization with a strong membership base and enough influence that it could tell enough people to blacklist a website or corporation enough to matter.

I'm ideologically opposed to DRM, but I'm also a realist. We lost this fight, a long time ago. At this point in the game, it would take substantial resources and an unprecidented groundswell of public support and political engagement to make a difference. My country can't even organize itself to make health care a basic government service, and this is something that is quite literally life or death. The idea of people organizing to fight back against DRM, or for their own privacy, is as fanciful as selling plane tickets to the moon.

Which by the by, people thought would be a thing back in the 40s and 50s. We also thought we'd have the flying car, "learning caps" that would transmit knowledge, and a cure for cancer. None of those things happened, but the contemporaries of the era made the same mistake we did: They thought the trends in technology they were seeing at the time would continue, and that people would see good ideas and work to make them a reality.

You know, like the internet... we thought it would spread democracy and knowledge throughout the world, uniting humanity in a way never before seen. What we got was porn, cat videos, and the cancer that is social media. If I'd been amongst the creators of the internet in the 70s and 80s and saw what my creation had become... I would be filled either with an insatiable murderous need to tear it all down, or liquor because of my newly-discovered drinking problem.

That's where idealism in technology gets you if you aren't careful. Sad, but true. I'm not saying don't give up on idealism -- indeed, it's only people who have ever tried, that ever made a difference. What I am saying is don't hope that people will follow you. If you're in this field, do it for the love of the work not what you hope it'll be used for. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to be in the right place, at the right time, as the right person, to be the one who starts a paradigm shift towards something better. But for the most part, we can only look on our creations with the same loving eyes that a parent looks upon their child -- they will not turn out the way we expected, and often not even the way we wanted. If you became a parent to get those things, you did it for the wrong reason. All creative acts have this in common.

Fake news? Use your brain, people.

Before you scream "Fake news!" you need to ask yourself how plausible it is. This should have been the first question anyone asked, rather than knee-jerking themselves in the balls. And you all deserve a kick in the balls for tagging this 'fake news'. Let's start with what the man has said, in front of fifty cameras and a dozen microphones -- which is that he wanted to "open up" libel laws so he could sue newspapers and pretty much anyone who disagrees with him. And he's not exactly a stranger to throwing sueballs at people for this -- he's been doing it his entire life.

What, exactly, makes you think this story about a teen getting a C&D for an anti-trump website is "fake" news, but not the other, er, fifty or so examples in the past couple of years? Or perhaps you believe there is a giant liberal conspiracy, complete with Elvis flying around in a UFO, and it's all just made up. I've gotten REALLY tired of this "Fake news" rhetoric, so I'm going to lay it out on anyone who uses that phrase -- Dig your head out of your back side. The letter is *very* likely legitimate. A zebra doesn't change its stripes. This isn't just in-character for the man, it's central to the definition of him. He wouldn't be our Snowflake in Chief if he wasn't busy sitting in a golden throne at the top of his dick-shaped tower, with his name stamped on the side, in gold letters, posting defamatory and denegrating tweets at all hours of the night about anyone who disagrees with him. This is a man who believes Obama is hiding under his bed, watching him masturbate.

Here are just a few examples, brought to you by a google search...

--

Club for Growth gets C&D.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/22/donald-trumps-cease-and-desist-letter-annotated/

New York Times gets C&D

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/breaking-trump-sends-cease-desist-letter-nyt-demand-retraction/

Co-author of Trump's "Art of the Deal" book gets C&D

http://abovethelaw.com/2016/07/biglaw-partner-eviscerates-trumps-cease-and-desist-letter/

Clothing retailer gets C&D

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-lawsuit-shirts_us_5602b000e4b0fde8b0d085c6

And another

http://www.alleghenyfront.org/pittsburgh-company-gets-cease-and-desist-letter-over-anti-trump-t-shirt/

Here's one he sent to Ted Cruz

http://www.hannity.com/articles/election-493995/watch-ted-cruz-responds-to-donald-14392135/

And here's Spicer, the spokesperson for Trump, mentioning in passing how many people present had received C&Ds...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/sean-spicer-paul-manafort-donald-trump-russia

Hang yourself.

This is a noose around the neck of open source developers. Open source means you don't need someone's permission or their blessing -- if they get run over by a bus or turn into a fire-breathing dickface, your project survives because they can't cut away key sections of it. If Linus Torvalds tomorrow decided to set fire to Linux and tell people they had to pay him now to use Linux, people could simply say "Screw off" and continue on with what they have now.

That's the big benefit of open source, and all the package managers used, like github, rpm, dpkg, etc., etc., etc., all can be forked and new repositories established, should a dickface event occur. NPM offers no guarantees you won't invest in it, only to find out in a year they changed their mind and you have to pay now. And if you think that would never happen, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Steer clear, guys. It isn't worth it.

'Murica

The problem is that most employment contracts in IT contain some variation of "Any IP/patentable thing you make while working here is ours", with some extra language that basically suggests anything to do with a microprocessor is "proprietary" or a "trade secret", thus developing it on your own time still means they can steal it because you used the aforementioned "proprietary/trade secret" knowledge learned on the job. And because the judges in this country were all elected from the brain slug planet, they generally run with that. It takes a very expensive legal battle, with many lawyers, and many appeals, to get some semblance of sanity out of the system.

In America, and to a lesser extent western society in general, someone has to own *everything*, and it slants heavily towards corporations owning it all because there's the perception that is better for society than letting an individual keep it. It's also how all music, software, and other copyrightable goo had language snuck in by a congressional scribe (ie, it was never voted on, and was done by someone whose job description is to correct spelling errors and the like) that added a whole clause making all of it a 'work for hire' -- meaning if you get money for it, it's owned by the person who purchased it, not you. Sell it for anything at all, and you lose all your rights as an artist.

This is about as useful as those people that tried to send modified http requests with embedded cookies saying something to the effect of "By continuing this connection, you agree to my terms, which supercede your terms." Needless to say, it had zero legal weight. Sorry, but this move by github means absolutely nothing unless they're willing to setup a straw man case and get a precident set that it does, indeed, supercede other contracts without exception.

And I seriously doubt Github is going to blow hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) to try to overturn decades of corporate rape of creative works. Remember, our court system entertained a multi-year hundred-plus million dollar legal battle with several suits... over whether or not beveled edges on a cell phone was a valid patent. The courts reversed repeatedly as it went up the appeals chain. There have been similar examples of exceptional absurdity in our courts. The open source community should well remember SCO and it's unending battle with the entire universe (IBM principally, but they've gone after many organizations) which has been going on for over a decade in various forms, and the courts still keep entertaining it.

It would be cheaper, and more efficient, to simply round up the legislators, business leaders, lawyers, and judges responsible for the mess and dump them into a volcano. Or a shark pit... i'm flexible. I don't know there's enough sharks in the ocean, however, so volcano currently tops my list.

If only my country still had a brain...

Funny you should mention the Wizard of Oz. I believe it was a quest to find a heart, a brain, and a few other bits of humanity. While that story had a happy ending, this one surely won't -- my country lacks the courage, brains, or heart to take the bolt cutters to Google and break it up.

It is the role of the government to step in and break businesses that gain monopoly power, and it's pretty clear at this point that's what Google is. It's time to shut this down. If necessary, by marching the military in and burning the data centers to the ground -- though I should think there's a better way! When people start wondering if Google owns them, as in the whole of their personhood, we as a society have lost.

HELL THE F*CK NO.

We cannot use technology to solve social problems. PEOPLE solve social problems, and that's it. Every asshat who has tried it has failed spectacularly, occasionally with horrifying results for the larger society. It's the height of hubris to think we can create a technological thing that can make better people. The Germans tried it... it started WWII. The Romans tried it. The world fell into hundreds of years of war. The Christians tried it... it led to the Crusades. You cannot make people better. They are, what they are.

And the idea of letting robots care for the elderly is disgusting. These people need tender and loving hands, not being locked away in a robot factory to spend their last days. What a shameful display by our leaders to even consider such a thing. Throw any businessman who suggests such a thing into the gladiatorial arena and let the bastard get eaten by a lion. It'll get my clap.

Er, "new" particle?

Okay, I'm confused -- how are these "new" particles? My understanding is these aren't stable formations. They are essentially pieces of subatomic matter that are so energetic they become a temporary aggregate. It's like saying two cars passing on the freeway are actually one car, because they happen to be in the same lane, bumper to bumper. At that scale, it might be more accurate to say one car is partly or even completely overlapping the other because particles are also waves, but they are not coalescing into a single entity; They're simply so energetic as to be interacting with one another or overlapping, but in no way bonding.

I'm not saying this isn't interesting -- discoveries like this help us better understand the limitations of the Standard Model and in turn may lead to a better understanding of how and why it breaks down at very high energy levels, but to say they've found *new* particles is, I believe, inaccurate. They've found some new states for previously identified particles. I understand this is rather like finding a new phase of water -- many have been identified beyond solid, liquid, and gas, but that doesn't mean we've discovered something *other* than water, merely other ways of *organizing* water and understanding its behavior -- in other words, the state of it.

Maybe a physicist can weigh in here, but I believe the media has misunderstood what is being reported.

Trivial fix

I contacted an organization after doing my own research into photo-sensitive epilepsy, and learned much the same as this guy did. Unlike this guy, it was because I'm a programmer and had concerns over a game mod with user-customizable lighting, which included rapid strobing and complex lighting effects that could, non-deliberately, lead to disaster.

As an ethical and old school hacker, I believe knowledge is power and it should be free. Everyone should have free access to computers, whether they're American, or Iranian, christian or muslim, rich or poor, black or white -- disabled, or not. The benefits to humanity having that knowledge at their fingertips outweighs all other considerations -- an idea that is perhaps too radical for today, but nonetheless, I profess it.

I know technology can sometimes cause people problems -- this website tends to catalog such failures with gusto. But when it crosses the line and starts restricting people's access to knowledge -- and affecting people's physical well-being certainly fits that mandate -- then it falls on me to uphold the unspoken principles of my community and fix it.

And to be blunt... this is a very simple problem to fix. Almost every kind of graphical interface pins down to either OpenGL, or DirectX -- and the computational requirements to scan frames progressively and mitigate potential 'strobe' events is trivial. It can be implimented in hardware, software, or both, with minimal overhead. Unfortunately, because of how the industry f*cked itself sideways with it's stupid copyright and trademark laws, and endless patents on total non-innovations by people from the brain slug planet... there's no easy way to get at the part that needs fixing, and fix it.

Which is exactly how they (Apple, Microsoft, Google) want it. And if you ask me, it's about time we kick them firmly in the balls and tell them to put the safeguards in place to protect a vulnerable segment of the population -- if for no other reason than that we should not fear that our technology will try and kill our kids when we're not looking. Japan found this out the hard way when Pikachu flew through the air in flashing red and yellow strobes... followed shortly by children flying through the ER, accompanied by flashing blue lights. Television is usually safe, because they know about the problem and scan everything prior to it being aired.

Our computers, unfortunately, remain ticking time bombs for jerkwads like this guy to abuse on a whim -- and there is no reason we couldn't have stopped him from succeeding. This isn't like gun control or bomb building where there's maybe a question about whether it's for protection, or someone with an oddly specific set of legally-purchased items -- this is completely preventable, detectable, and has no legitimate application.

And while yes, I think this guy deserves a long send off to prison... two things: First, premeditated murder requires clear intent and a reasonable likelihood it could actually result in death. Giving someone seizures can lead to death, but as even this case demonstrated -- it doesn't necessarily. Which makes it some variety of homicide, reckless endangerment, etc. Stop trying to lawyer up, people -- leave that to the police. Just say he was a dickhead and deserves a long time behind bars to think about the exact level of stupidity that landed him there, not sit here and try to pick apart what crime he should be charged for. But if you really need one, here's one: Criminal Stupidity. Which should, in my estimation, be punishable by taking the warning labels off everything in the house and letting McMoron El Stupidnuts live there for a couple months. When the time's up, open the door. If he walks out, he's a free man. If he doesn't... we're free... of him.