Unlimited Information Is Transforming Society

Attali was an adviser to the French President and writes in the French obscurantist style, and most of the book is a history of the past, not the future. But...

Attali does talk about the issues of:

everything-as-a-service;

corporate surveillance and hyper-invasive employee behaviour control (think: FB, Goog, MS, your employer with keyloggers etc);

decreasing relevance / capability of leading nation states, especially the US (demonstrated by this little virus thingy);

interregional and inter-ideological conflict (China cyberhacking turned up to 11, climate refugees);

a turning against (crony) capitalism, which has failed for nearly everybody (by externalising costs, and shifting risks onto households). Extinction Rebellion is an early, embryonic example of this, I think.

And he was writing all that back in the early 2000s.

Frankly it’s a bit of semantic muddle in my own head. For example, is my browsing history “data” or “information”? So for my own personal dictionary, “data” means basically ‘measure’, and “information” is ‘processed data’.

When Britain conquered New France, Britain promised that French Canadians would retain cultural rights, including the freedom to practice the Catholic religion, protection of the French language, and the continued use of aspects of French civil law in the legal system. It is that last aspect of Britain's commitment which the authors of the US Declaration of Independence found so offensive.

(Strangely, when the US agreed to buy Louisiana from France 27 years later, the American objection to the French legal system appeared to have vanished, and Louisiana still partially uses French civil law to this day.)

Other commands that take password arguments include ldapsearch/ldapmodify/etc (-w argument), mysql (-p/--password option), and Oracle sqlplus (sqlplus user/password@db)

Best practice is that you don't put passwords in command line arguments, and find an alternative method of supplying the password to the utility (such as reading it from a password file, or using non-password-based authentication mechanisms such as Kerberos). Despite that best practice, I'm sure plenty of people still do it.

People also sometimes accidentally paste passwords from a password manager into their shell and they end up in their shell history. This can easily happen if you are meaning to paste it into some kind of interactive command such as ssh or su and the command doesn't execute the way you expected.

If you discover you have passwords in your bash history, editing it to remove them (or even deleting it entirely) is a sensible thing to do.

Shell history was never meant to be an auditing measure. There are products out there that will record SSH sessions (by acting as a recording proxy between the client and the server); if you need a list of commands executed for auditing purposes, those sort of products are the proper answer, not expecting people's shell history to be left intact.

> The entire process took about eight seconds. And then he did what he had always done since he first started programming computers: he deleted his bash history. To access the computer he was required to type his password. If he didn’t delete his bash history, his password would be there to see, for anyone who had access to the system.

It seems that deleting his bash history was something _routine_ that he did every time, not some one-off thing to fix an occasional mistake.

They happen to just own the largest scale implementation of that medium, much like a publishing house.

Of course, having watched friends become parents it's also quite clear that becoming a parent changes one's brain in some fundamental ways so it's possible you have a point ;)

Recent example, of a quack medical treatment involving giving babies alcohol:

> Prior to alcohol's removal from the recipe, Woodward's maximum recommended dose of gripe water contained an alcohol content equivalent to five tots of whiskey for an 80kg adult. It was only in 1992 that Britain mandated that alcohol be removed from Gripe water, and in 1993 the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered an automatic detention of all shipments of Woodward's Gripe Water into the U.S.

Giving babies alcohol, in various forms and often in quite large amounts, was part of the ‘conventional wisdom’ for a long time (though never really endorsed by medical science). If peoples’ guts were so wrong then, I wouldn’t trust them now.

Without enough storage, you get energy when you have sun or wind, not when the train must depart the station. So what happens in practice? We use other energies to compensate. Now if renewable end up partially replacing fossil fuels like coal or oil, that's good: every joule we get from the wind, we don't have to get it from coal.

If however you compensate with nuclear plants, that's almost a one sided loss for the environment: you still need to maintain the nuke plants to guarantee minimum available power, but you use them less because renewables offload some energy from them. Carbon wise, this is a pure loss: you end up using more concrete & more steel to get energy from the wind (or the sun), and you don't even shut down nuke plants in return (or if you do, you end up trading nuclear for fossil, which is beyond ridiculous). Moreover, those nuke plants are now less profitable, since we need less total energy from them. If you want to reduce risks, that's not a good idea: less profit means less budget, and maintenance may suffer. The only advantage is a slight reduction in nuclear waste, and those are mostly not a problem (just bury them).

Don't get me wrong, renewable energy is the future, one way or another. Nuclear power is only a stop-gap measure, it won't last forever — just like fossil fuel. Right now though, that's a stop-gap measure I welcome with open arms.