bandushrew

hmm? 'Rape' has auto suggestions.

In general I dont think that consumption of child pornography is much of a crime, the harm has been done by then, and some poor sad git masturbating over a 3 year old isn't going to make it any worse.

Personally I would rather they put significant resources into catching those people who create it, than into changing search engines and blocking dns addresses so that everyone can pretend it doesn't exist.

yes? why wouldn't they?

One thing that is needed for startups and to achieve 'lots of innovation' is a market where wealth is well distributed. Where wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, fewer decisions are made about how to spend it. In a 'healthy' economy where the wealth is well distributed, lots of differing decisions are made about where to spend it and there is room for lots of small companies doing many different things. Once wealth is concentrated, and fewer people are spending it there are less decisions being made and there is less room for lots of small companies.

One of the great harms caused by an economy where the government and just a few big players are doing the spending is that innovative small companies depend entirely on partnership with large companies to get past the gatekeepers and do well.

You cannot control payment to employees like that, companies just find a way around those kinds of laws.

Better to regulate the institutions themselves so that they dont get 'to big to fail', don't get to combine access to cheap money with access to the financial markets, don't get to insure themselves and so forth.

heh. Thats a good response, thanks.

I do wonder whether transfers work if your bank account has been frozen?

They are drama queen-ish though, I agree. Luckily that doesn't stop them from being a journalistic entity.

So your argument is that the arrest and ongoing prosecution of Assange(sp?), the shutdown of services from paypal++, visa, master card, bank of america, Western Union and Amazon had pretty much no noticeable effect on donations, was not the result of a coordinated effort by the US government and the real reason donations are down is because they haven't released any more leaks?

sounds entirely plausible to me. would you like to buy a bridge?

++Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Wau Holland Foundation, mentioned that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks, before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account.

hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection.

We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like.

What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo. Lots of mumbling about how wikileaks should have redacted <whatever> and no outrage at all about how easy it was for this voice to be silenced by our government as soon as it suited them.

Interesting, I really dont agree. I have two roles that I regularly play as a developer, one is 'creating a solution from scratch', and in that situation - as you have said, I dont really need to be aware of these kinds of possibilities, just because I can avoid the problem entirely. Unfortunately the other role I frequently play is 'performing work on something someone else has built', and in that case I rarely have the ability to throw out everything that is there and start from scratch - which means I have to have an understanding of this kind of thing and know what kinds of changes will provide the greatest 'hit' in terms of security, while balancing those changes against the possibility of breaking existing work.

Besides, I find knowledge useful in a general sense.

Why do you believe only black hats should be able to understand various sql injections tricks like this?

?? I dont understand that attitude. I call myself a professional programmer, Ive understood the importance of sanitizing my inputs for some time, and I still thoroughly enjoyed reading the article.

What am I doing wrong?

I dont agree, I think that the discussion of the shipping container and the security issues it has created provided some very interesting (to me) context to the story. I particularly enjoyed the quick discussion of the round trip the DHS took on achieving 100% scanning of container ships - from there to 'oh, hey, we'll make sure they all get scanned before they leave the remote port, thats exactly the same thing right?'

That was a brilliant read, thanks.

where can I find more discussions like that?

I hear what you are saying, but what they have done is derived the their IDs based partially on their current choice of architecture. If, for any reason, they would like to change their architecture later, suddenly they have a real problem.

That feels flaky to me. Its a nice techy solution, and the write up was interesting, but there are definitely a few weak points in their implementation. Their computers have to be absolutely in sync for time, their ID space is entirely guessable once you know the algorithm and they have effectively hard coded their current architecture into their software.

I was all ready to sign up as well, I do have a twitter account and I was still put off.

My twitter account is, like my facebook account and my google+ account, private to those whom I know and trust. why would I give that information to some random website?

Dude, if I am a facebook user who has not logged out, they can send cookies as much as they like.

The browser manages this - if they are logged in, set a cookie that will be sent to the hypothetical 'like' subdomain of facebook, if they are logged out, remove the cookie.

This kind of functionality is really not rocket science, there are dozens of ways to implement it and I feel kind of stupid talking about it.

There are reasons for facebook not doing this, but they are not technical ones.

hmm? without pretty specific knowledge of the problem set facebook is trying to solve with its current set of code I am clearly unable to offer a solution that will resolve them all.

However, if one of the problems that they wanted to solve was 'we dont want to track user data unless they are logged in', they would have solved it by now.

The fact that they haven't means either (a) they just haven't thought about it or (b) they have thought about it, but do not want to solve it.

they dont really have a point, cookies are nailed to a specific domain or sub domain. If they really wanted to they could easily associate the like button with a subdomain of facebook if the user isn't logged in, such that the cookies associated with the user login don't get sent.

They don't really want to.

it is a terrible analogy, I agree. I didn't choose it.

anyway, lets keep beating on it.

If I were to agree to keep the possessions of thousands of people safe under my roof, I would expect to have someone working around the clock to find a way into my home.

I am not condemning Sony's engineers at all, I dont know any of them, but even so it is my absolute belief that they knew damn well how broken the system was, and that they told their management repeatedly that it needed to be fixed or customer data could be at risk.

I am condemning Sony, if they agree to take my possessions and to keep them secure, they had better damn well expect to have a continuous stream of people deliberately attempting to break in.

If I had taken the possessions of thousands of people, and promised to keep them safe in my house, and then a burglar broke in and stole everything.

I deserve to be condemned.

sure, the burglar should be punished for the simple crime of theft that he committed.

but I took the possessions of thousands of people and failed to make them secure, despite promising to do so.

Especially if I took all those possessions and then used a 5 dollar lock from the local shop, instead of investing in something that may actually make secure the possessions I promised to keep safe.

One interesting thing that the theory does is it reminds us that behavior and risk is a two pronged game - we accept the level of risk we are comfortable with, and we indicate our acceptable level of risk by our behavior.

oddly enough, not really.

The argument is that if drunk driving became common (because it was legal) then other drivers and pedestrians would adjust their behavior according to the increased risk.

Based on that, you would expect a spurt of additional deaths early on, as we adjusted to the new risk, and then the numbers would drop again.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me, certainly if I knew that every third driver was drunk, I would behave differently on the roads (ie, would never go near them).

"The design allows you to pick a tab and then scan its contents to see commands that apply to the task you’re trying to accomplish."

? That is learning where the command lives, you just happen to be comfortable with the places you should look first.

Man, what a fantastic idea. Mildly interesting at the moment, but start running a static analyzer bot over everything, and its golden.

should probably be an opt-in service, but WOW it would rock.

I think the onus of proof lies with the person seeking the truth.

He presented no statistics at all, you presented statistics that are clearly entirely ignoring a important figure.

Neither of you seem to be at all interested in seeking the truth, each just advancing their own personal agenda.

meh.

Its a fact that the data you provided does not take into account 'participation' drop off. If you want to continue presenting statistics like that, maybe you should find a set of data that encompasses the more obvious problems?

That is perfectly true, but an entirely different point to the one the grand parent was making.

I have dozens of faults. If I spent my time trying to change them all I would have very little time to spend on my actual life.

...and my actual life takes up a lot of time...

As adults, I think its pretty mature to accept ourselves the way we are, and move on without wasting time agonizing over our many imperfections.

Faulty or not, I still have stuff I need to do.

I suspect that hinges greatly on your definition of a functioning society.

To be honest I am not following your points at all well.

hmm? Tax rates are lower now than they were in the 90s.

surely you should have an answer to that question before you start claiming that 30% is screwing you?