consonants

This is a very common tactic in the grey-market internet realm. A dishonest proprietor raises "concerns" about the other's business on an open community forum, creates FUD. Then the other comes on with a new account, and accuses the accuser of xyz. Whoever has a better standing in the community usually wins out.

It's brilliant because it works. It also only works in a market that is shielded from making informed decisions about the service/product/behind-the-scenes shit because the information isn't easily accessible or understood.

Given that this is a business that isn't hiding in the shadows, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

edit: I should add, it works because eventually it becomes a contest of personalities and the argument drifts away from what started it into some other territory. The FUD is never resolved so it winds up being True to the market.

It's also scary because of the amount of forged information, like official documents, lab reports, inventories, invoices, messages etc are forged by the hands of the dishonest proprietor.

Honestly, if it isn't resolved file a civil suit for libel. The internet will not resolve this and will make it worse.

Addict in recovery. I'm glad I was never pigeonholed into Suboxone treatment. Once you are addicted its no better getting off of than Methadone: a month of withdrawals vs what could have been three days.

>This goes for Alcoholics too.

This is terrible advice, there are a million non-addictive anti-seizure meds you can be put on so you don't just fucking seize out while at the store. Gabapentin through sodium valproate. Benzos are just a replacement addiction, though, and are just as dangerous to kick.

If this stayed on the frontpage we would be swimming in gold. Oh well, time to read them all and lose some faith in humanity

Threads like this provide a moment to gaze into the abyss

>New Zealand.

Hahahaha. NZ bent over backwards to let the US decimate mega. Let's be honest, we have/had basically each of those countries be complicit in extraordinary rendition, extradition, or compliance with US IP-law.

What do you honestly think will happen when we, in the name of international security and terrorism prevention, ask them to hand over a few computers instead of, well, people?

Advertised cryptography/anonymizing services really can't exist in a climate where all rules are thrown out the window because terrorists.

Thanks. To add to your quote above, from the paper:

> In Study 2, we extend our investigation by considering alternative explanations. In Study 1, it is possible that our con- trol condition decreased benevolence-based trust. In the control condition in Study 1, the confederate sent no message. This might have seemed impolite. To investigate this alternative explanation, we include two different comparison conditions in Study 2. We include a traditional apology (‘‘I’m sorry to interrupt.’’) and neutral greeting (‘‘How are you?’’).

> In addition, we extend our investigation by exploring superfluous apologies in a new domain. In Study 1, both the unfortunate circumstance (the random action of the computer) and the outcome (behavioral measure of trust) were related to the trust game. In Study 2, the apology (for a flight delay) is unrelated to our measure of trust (lending a cell phone). We expect that an apology for a flight delay will increase trust even when the subsequent interaction is unrelated to the flight.

I don't want to jump to conclusions as that is a glaringly obvious control and I find it hard to believe a researcher worth their salt would leave out such a control group.

Does anyone have a link to the full paper?

edit: grammar

If Bitcoin is truly a covert operation led by the government to attract criminals, they would be funding this through a completely unrelated subsidiary who either provides grants to research institutions or contracts the work out.

In either case the code will be shit. The problem with this argument is that it is incredibly hard to prove without knowing the circumstances behind bitcoins inception.

Contextual color-temp changing is nothing new at all. Putting a GUI wrapper on it and publishing for two dominant consumer platforms is real innovation I guess.

All carriers are shit, T-Mobile is no exception.

Funny that the scene for his analogy in the beginning ends with the image of talking heads bantering about a fluff piece, and then he follows with a fluff piece for programmers. The genius is in the mocking subtext.

You've got to be shitting me: 'voting with their money' is not at all a valid point, nor would it ever trump that of an elected representative.

Notice that Starbucks and Amazon are american lifestyle companies, of course there is going to be an appeal to the lower income class for services that are immediate and cheap. Since they are paid a poverty wage, they are too busy working to have the time to do things like go out for lunch or cook a meal.

A woah, guess what? Those business models perpetuate the same conditions that lower work environment standards, wages, employee health and morale. It's a positive feedback system that needs to be nipped in the bud before it completely devours the French economy.

That's a cool claim, do you have a source that isn't from mises.org?

Tell me more about functioning markets and how they can only be prevented by government force.

First I've heard of spiped/tarsnap, what makes it more secure?

Ah, but the opportunities available for the poor to grab what they can will likely have them facing the rough side of well-financed and increasingly militarized police force.

You can play by your own rules but the reality is that if you do so as a poor person you will end up being fucked by the law. Subversive unethical behavior is solely the domain of those who can afford to commit it or those too shortsighted to care.

Yup, it's been stated over and over by terrorist organizations that this is one of their intended goals. Thinking about where we were as a country around the time of the 1998 embassy bombings and where we are today would be jarring if I wasn't so desensitized to it.

Off-topic, but pertains to Docker images:

Do people usually roll out their own images from source/based on verified binaries from the parent distribution's repositories or are base images provided by the community?

No. Also, I believe they can garnish wages and repossess property to pay off loans if it looks like the client won't ever be able to pay the debt back.

In carrying out its fiduciary duty the firm that issued the loan came to the conclusion that the person would be reasonably able to pay the loan back with interest. Of course, since the risk of default is off the table with student loans, why not hand out a bunch of money that will get paid back with some accrued interest before it is discharged, if it ever is at all?

In a world where fake private schools didn't accelerate the loan bubble, and one that probably treats student loans like any other debt, it would be a different story. Boils down to whether or not they think the prospect of their client finding gainful employment after school is worth taking on the risk of the client defaulting.

I will postulate that recent consumer hardware is almost guaranteed to have a backdoor for peripherals that grant privileged introspection into the system.

For example, Stuxnet relied on creating a botnet to spread and then wait for a call from home before sabotaging the target computers in an Iranian nuclear facility. It accomplished this with multiple 0-day vulnerabilities. It was incredibly well thought out, comprehensive, and opportunistic. Those factors made it expensive. It also targeted specialized industrial hardware, hardware that lacked consumer features and thus common attack vectors.

My assertion is that it is less time, resource, and opportunity necessitating if a common vector of attack is baked in.

It could be abstracted enough that it isn't an obvious 'hey guys, check out this wide open security hole we built into our hardware' to watchful eyes, but an (un)intended consequence of the system if the backdoor isn't component based.

People keep blowing me away with their willingness to be evil for a profit, so I would bet some palms were greased and some reciprocal 'tips and favors' circulate between a hardware manufacturer and a federal intelligence agency at our expense.

It could be that hardware RNG that comes with your board. CPUs also have encryption standard instruction sets.

And then we can look at the firmware that runs on our components. Then the kernel..

It's a security nightmare all the way down.

Why is corporate espionage and sabotage by our guys something that is permissible?

We push for free trade agreements to neuter foreign businesses' competitivity, and then we still put them under surveillance; how is this okay?

The reasonable solution to the problem of terrorism is creating more terrorists.

<tinfoilhat>I bet an exploit was found that through operating a certain number of clients Tor's anonymity or hidden services can be compromised</tinfoilhat>

FBI did just this and pushed a special update to bug a member of a mob's dumbphone a relatively long time ago.

If someone is using your service and is suspected to be committing a crime through it, as a provider you can be subpoenaed to be reasonably complicit in an investigation on said individual. That can involve keeping temporary logs, contact information, message content, or being placed under total network surveillance without notice.

Or they can just seize the servers again and you can hope _everything_ is secured on the provider's end.

The site's premise is a honeypot for just the kind of people the government would like to keep an eye on.

I want to take a step away from the personal privacy violations here, and approach from an angle that (unfortunately) would motive those with money to lobby against this: your business secrets are out there being collected and reviewed by an organization composed of the smartest and most secretive people in our country.

There really should be no doubt at all that there is corporate espionage and insider trading going on. On one hand, if the NSA approached this with giving helpful 'heads up' when a US-based multinational's overseas factory might be planning to strike, or provide their foreign competitors' private dealings etc etc, they could win brownie points.

But you know it won't stop with screwing around with overseas business. If they are not already, you can bet that internal insider information is going to be traded and sold. You can't trust a rogue, so as long as it is not dismantled they are indirectly if not directly a hostile threat to your ability to conduct business.

Last I checked, you can at any time be requested by the US government to do exactly that: to keep logs or give them access.

My point is that they are on the radar, it's a matter of when not if they get an order to start keeping logs or an agency deems it okay to seize their hardware again.

As long as they are in the US, or a nation that bends to our will, it is not a secure provider.

It's been little over a year since the FBI seized their servers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/may-firstriseup-server...

edit: I also believe they were complicit in ousting several of their users who allegedly used their service for illicit reasons a while back when they were competing with hushmail, safemail, and the lot. This is from memory, and I have no proof to back it up. Grain of salt and all that

You will need a teaching degree and a degree in CS to be considered. Have that planned out now.

Private tutoring in any subject will help immensely.

>So if you yourself admit that you won't voluntarily donate money and help the poor unless you really have some extra, what moral right do you think you have to tell other people they should?

He is acknowledging that the trend the of the public as a whole is to let the poor rot. Morals come in when he recognizes that this is wrong, and can be solved by society as whole. Not specific people.

>Why do you think it's ok to take care of your family and friends less and care about strangers more?

This safety net isn't exclusive to 'everyone else'. It is in place to catch everyone, including your family and friends, and their family and friends, and those who might not have family and friends. How is paying a measly some annually/quarterly caring about strangers more? It doesn't necessitate taking care of your own less, and is a straw man on your part. To me, it is a pittance of a tribute to the fact that 'others exist, ugghhh'.

> if somebody forces you to help the poor, are you really becoming a better person?

That does not matter. What matters is that someone isn't starving, homeless, or without medical care.

My analogy was to provide a stepping stone towards understanding why you aren't an island and, yes, that your success depends on EVERYONE as a whole. Not just specific people.

I used to be an libertarian, so I crafted my analogy to appeal to the self-made Only I Deserve The Sweat Of My Brow type of person. As programmers, we live in a bubble. We tend to think we are smarter than everyone else. We forget we are in the same boat as everyone else. And if we look around, we are sinking. We just happen to be in the crows nest, so we have a while til we will have to worry.

Society is not a voluntary cooperation. It has fees and dues. If you feel collecting those fees and dues are against your morals, then please pay back what you've taken and exit society to stop reaping its fruits.

WRT to your point. The non-aggression principle is a well thought out red herring. Guess what happens if you violate a contract? Guess what happens if you are the wrong side of a property dispute? Guess what happens if you violate court orders?

You can complain about the monopoly of force, but it is better than the alternative. That force keeps you from being stripped of your possessions by the masses. That force ensures you can do honest business. What do you think keeps people from holding a gun to your head and taking everything you've got?

If the government didn't ensure corporations property rights and ability to collect dues, do you honestly think they wouldn't be enforced through the guns of a private entity? One that has no accountability to the public? Today, we see the rise of private security agencies as the wealth gap increases.

You are taking from society and then stubbornly trying to find any way to not give up some of your bounty.

You are essentially stealing, and complaining that it will get you in trouble with the government. The same exact thing will happen if you work at an Apple store and take a new iMac, because you sold ten today therefore deserve to take one home. You will end up in jail in both cases.

You do have a choice in paying taxes just as you have a choice in stealing that computer. You can leave society, just as you can leave the Apple store. Don't complain when men with guns try to stop you if you go ahead and steal.

We have tried having private entities handle what governments govern. It was disastrous. It was business as usual.

If people don't pay taxes and dissolve government, then infrastructure will crumble. Violent factions will arise. Warlords and fiefdoms will manifest. Businesses will escape the hostile and uncertain landscape. We will look like Somalia did a few years ago. Thankfully, government has restored some order to the area as of recently.

Worst of all, it maximises for suffering. Even today, when we do have programs in place by the government to address social issues, suffering is rampant. How can you fail to see this? And if you do, how can you defend the maximization of suffering so you can save some pennies?