It's interesting — this both appeals to my intuition and is hard for me to completely wrap my head around... I can see it but I realise that I don't naturally think like that.
366 karma · joined May 10, 2011
The original link also points incidentally to a nice, recently updated survey of cryptography laws around the world. [2]
[1] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/p...
If so, what kinds of implications would this have to us? Is this quasar radiation merely an observable thing, or could it disturb communications or something along those lines?
Edit: no doomsday paranoia implied. :-)
What's happening is in fact a little bit more complex than that. Both browsers create the pre element (you can verify that by typing that URI and hitting the tab key to switch focus from the address bar into it).
Now, where Chrome renders a line-sized pre element even when it's empty, Firefox renders it as a 0px element until you feed text into it (that's probably its standard behaviour for pre elements without a child text node, but I can't be bothered verifying that).
Boy, I love getting a rush out of figuring out something completely irrelevant! :-)
My phone kept (mis)reading UPC-E values from the XL QR code!
(If that still doesn't work, out of curiosity, what browser are you using?)
So yes, it lets people shoot themselves in the foot; yes, people will most likely shoot themselves in the foot; but no, that's not the main problem and in fact you can hypothetically use twine + twitter in a more or less private manner.
The problem is that broadcasting through Twitter makes you depend on a service by a company, where you could just as easily have come up with a solution that works with a publicly-known protocol which can be deployed by many parties (the closest match here would be status.net).
Then again, their point is precisely to make using the bloody thing easy. It's increadible how the easy way to make things usable always implies lots of trade-offs in security, privacy, openness and whatnot... No wonder people who solve usability problems the right way are so valuable.
[1] DEFCON 18, "Web services we just don't need": http://youtu.be/mbZccSwgbIU (it runs almost 1h, and is equal parts hilarious and pointless).
It's cool to be in a social network before everyone else. It's cool to give out invites to your friends. Lacking an invite-only system, it's cool to be in an English-only social network.
I know I'm generalising a bit (and I should point out that I'm not ranting—the whole thing amuses me more than anything else), and of course I'm only accounting for half of the issue here, wherein something becomes "cool" (how the place ends up being ultimately stormed into by the entire Brazilian population is a problem I honestly haven't thought about much). But this is really how it starts, every time.
Now, why Badoo is popular is an entirely different question. I've no idea. Then again, to call it fringe is to elect a mainstream alternative: from my understanding of the article, Badoo IS the mainstream location-based dating site, isn't it?
[1]: Definitely shorter than what I'd suggest as an alternative—Mark Pilgrim's history of HTML5 <http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html>.
(PS - @DanielRibeiro: what a small world, a friend of mine works at the company you used to be CTO of!)
So to add insult to injury, is it possible that this ad is somehow contextual or targeted?
To be sure: he chose a minimalist ("under-designed") webpage on purpose to make a point. To wit: well-crafted Design (as opposed to Art Direction) can produce a User Experience orders of magnitude better than beautiful Art Direction that's not functionally tied to the content it surrounds.
EDITed to add: In fact, at no point does the author say that minimum is preferrable to flamboyant. What he says in his conclusion section, rather, is: "Design without context is not design. It’s noise." That is: form without function is not design, and in fact it adds noise to the overall message.
Another EDIT: I stand corrected about the definition of Art Direction. It is so much more than just the bling, and it's also supposed to be functional. But "pointless bling is noise" is still how I read the original article. Here's a nice link on Art Direction vs Design: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/art-direction-and-design/
Course resources: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/cgi-bin/
(To clarify: I'm talking about schools in São Paulo, Brazil. No names mentioned because I've no first-hand experience — maybe they do have better courses and my friends are the ones picking the language-and-framework–related subjects.)
My point being: we were geek before it was cool.
(Come to think of it, that might not be totally acurate either. The "proud geek" generations of the 80s and 90s, though slightly marginal to mainstream culture, at least were proud to wear the moniker. Before that there were the labeled geek generations, to whom the word was indeed a very uncool slur. Maybe I'm closer to the Seth Cohen generation than I'd care to admit.)
EDIT: in fact, I find the those fictional theoretical physicists' grasp of physics appalling — and I don't even pretend to know that much physics!
So on the one hand, you have DropBox with unlimited storage and a limited, upgradeable number of users. On the other hand, you have Google, with limited, upgradable storage, and unlimited users.
If only Google's storage was a bit more usable. (Also, I have a hunch an AWS-based solution may be cheaper depending on some other variables.)
Like I said, the problem is not so much the package and price as it's the fact that it's the only package they're offering right now. I see very few use cases in practice for unlimited storage and limited users.
EDIT: s/unlimited storage/200 GB per user/ where applicable
Dropbox is the absolutely easiest cloud storage service out there, that's certain, and I'm sure many people will find this a fair package with a fair price. But I suspect most teams of up to 5 people will find this price way above the opportunity cost of setting up and getting used to a different cloud storage service.
It bears repeating: I'm not saying it's a bad package, and it would be foolish of me to assume that the market will perceive this price the way I did. But I do think they should have started offering something simpler and cheaper, and worked their way up to plans like the one they just launched.
I suppose what I'm about to say can be construed as a stock phrase, but I mean it very literally: the overall tone and quality of his articles are that of a stereotypical angry teenage blogger (perhaps modulo the author's journalistic knowledge of the tech field).
> It's like Batman's Robin getting upset with Holmes' Dr. Watson.
Ugh.
I suppose that's what that pitiful CAPTCHA is in place against!
> People can remove their information from MasterCard's analysis by providing their card number on the "Data Analytics Opt-Out" page at www.mastercard.us/privacy.
There are three different opt-outs available (roughly "stop tracking my browser", "stop tracking my email", and "stop tracking my card"), and apart from a CAPTCHA, it's really very frictionless to opt-out.
Now time to read into how exactly they define "opting out" and what that entails to me and my data.
EDIT: apparently, they're serving those opt-out forms via Akamai, so I get a lovely "SSL Error" page in Chrome when I hard type the "https". Cute.
> It is unfortunate for clarity of economic thinking that
> the price of labor’s services should have received an
> entirely different name from other prices. This has
> prevented most people from recognizing that the same
> principles govern both.
But he gets everything wrong in his second sentence. There's a word for wages as opposed to prices because of how language evolved: put simply, we intuitively perceived wages as something different from prices and felt the need to give them a name of their own. This has nothing to do with science.
So in fact, when we're confronted with a theory where two concepts turn out to be the same thing, that can mean one of two things:
- IF the theory is sound, and grounded on enough evidence as to demonstrate that our intuitive perception was wrong all along, THEN indeed wages are no more and no less than prices. That would be an "aha" moment worth a prize or something.
- ELSE, if the theory isn't sound enough, or doesn't have enough evidence as to defend the notion that wages are merely prices, THEN we're forced to conclude that the theory is merely construing that, and opt-into that belief at our own discretion.
So far we see no theory, so his argument that the two names have "prevented most people from recognizing that the same principles govern both" wages and prices has no meaning whatsoever. And where is his theory? Nowhere to be seen, he's using some commonsense assumptions about prices [2], but he doesn't establish anything scientific enough to defend the ambitious notion that wages are no more and no less than prices. In fact, whenever he applies those vague notions he has of prices to wages, he's begging the question that this gratuitous cross-application of concepts is sound.
Now, since the whole chapter is based on an assumption which the author fails to defend and the application of that assumption to a number of discrete case studies which don't paint the whole picture of what happens once a minimum wage is established (betraying also the much defensible premise of the entire book that we should look at all the consequences of policies to all groups of people through all time)... then I can only assume that the whole chapter is scientifically worthless, and whatever resonates with me in it has to do with my ideologies and not with evidence or soundness of reason.
[1] http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap19p1.html
[2] Which might as well not hold against evidence on their own, come to think of it.
EDITED for clarity (as this is a long comment), added a new thought as footnote #2.
One Daniel Hausman, introducing Cambridge's Philosophy of Economics [1] anthology edited by him:
> > Premises assumed without evidence, or in spite of it;
> > and conclusions drawn from them so logically, that
> > they must necessarily be erroneous.
> > – Thomas Love Peacock, Crochet Castle
>
> Ever since its eighteenth-century inception, the science
> of economics has been methodologically controversial. Even
> during the first half of the nineteenth century, when
> economics enjoyed great prestige, there were skeptics like
> Peacock. For economics is a peculiar science. Many of its
> premises are platitudes such as "Individuals can rank
> alternatives" or "Individuals choose what they most
> prefer." Other premises are simplifications such as
> "Commodities are infinitely divisible," or "Individuals
> have perfect information." On such platitudes and
> simplifications, such "premises assumed without evidence,
> or in spite of it," economists have erected a
> mathematically sophistical theoretical edifice, whose
> conclusions, although certainly not "necessarily
> erroneous," are nevertheless often off the mark. Yet
> businesses, unions, and governments employ thousands of
> economists and rely on them to estimate the consequences
> of policies. Is economics a science or isn’t it?
To guard yourself against accidentally lending these postulates too much credit, I think the best technique has been described by an economist [2]:
> So in answer to the current question I am proposing that
> we now change the usage of the word Aether, using the old
> spelling, since there is no need for a term that refers to
> something that does not exist. Instead, I suggest we use
> that term to describe the role of any free parameter used
> in a similar way: that is, Aether is the thing that makes
> my theory work. [...]
>
> Aether variables are extremely common in my own field of
> economics. Utility is the thing you must be maximizing in
> order to render your choice rational.
>
> Both risk and risk aversion are concepts that were once
> well defined, but are now in danger of becoming
> Aetherized. Stocks that earn surprisingly high returns are
> labeled as risky, because in the theory, excess returns
> must be accompanied by higher risk. If, inconveniently,
> the traditional measures of risk such as variance or
> covariance with the market are not high, then the
> Aetherists tell us there must be some other risk; we just
> don't know what it is.
[1] isbn:0521709849
[2] http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-impr...
The problem is, extreme eventually happens.
Nazi Germany has been such a commonplace rhetorical device on the Internet for so long [1] that we end up easily dismissing it when it's indeed a useful comparisson. This, for many reasons, would be one such case (we can debate that through email if you want), but let's dismiss it anyway.
The important fact here is that bucket loads of (your) personal data are being processed, correlated with each other and stored into centralized server clusters — which have become very tangible assets.
If someone ill-intentioned — a government, an interest group, a company — gets a hold of these assets — through power, through craft, through acquisition — they can use it to target you for whatever their purpose.
In a warfare scenario, that could mean targeted, granular misinformation; targeted terrorism through AI-generated blackmailing, tailored on an infividual level; mass identity hijacking. It could make war a personal matter like it has never been before.
(And on the other side, there's the Nazi Germany scenario where, unbeknownst to you, you are being blacklisted for a genocide to come — after all, the first step is classification. [2])
The fact that we're living rather peaceful times doesn't mean that a potential weapon like these databases should go unregulated; and the fact that we see no storm in the horizon doesn't mean we shouldn't care about the possibility.
As long as you can imagine what sorts of bad things could be done with that personal data, the argument is: you should care because you don't know for a fact what tomorrow will look like.
[1] If Wikipedia is to be believed, it's been 20 years now since Godwin's Law was first formulated!
[2] http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/8stagesofgenocide...
My intuition right now is that they're pseudonymous at best, and that the average user is very quick to provide credentials that would associate the pseudonym to their actual names and other personal info.
Can anyone provide an assessment (or better yet, a link to one) on just how anonymous those anonymous devices are?
(@saddino: this response is not directed at you partly because I'm not sure whether you're being technical or sarcastic — or both.)
[1] http://www.jenders.com/2011/10/18/take-this-lollipop-and-the...