secstate

Totally agree with this sentiment. I found a mastodon instance that has some really fantastic people on it, and I only dip into the federated stream when I'm up for a rollercoaster of opinions. Federation has to be the future because it's the only model that allows toxic communities to self destruct, or productive communities to flourish.

My take is that most people don't know what the hell they're doing most of the time. We're all trying to figure it out. When I was 20 I was copy-pasting the hell out of Rails examples. By being curious and actively incorporating ideas I've come across I've begun (15 years later) to have opinions on things in software development. Am I ever going to be a kernel contributor, or figure out implement compiler optimizations? Unlikely. But I love my job and the people around me support my continued education (in docker and everything else). That's all you can ask for.

I love xkcd, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. This comic was written by the same person who wrote this one: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

I grew up messing with GNU/Linux, so I know what it means to tweak kernel parameters and not have working wifi. But in the past five years of using Ubuntu full-time I haven't had a single issue with out of the box stuff working on any of a number of Lenovo machines.

Hell, I even have 16.10 running on a Macbook Pro from 2013. Curiously, the baked on RAM chip has a bad patch on it somewhere and macOS chokes when doing a full re-install, yet Ubuntu seems more fault-tolerant about memory and runs mostly fine (there are display corruptions when first booting, but putting it to sleep and waking it up causes them to go away until the next reboot).

Meanwhile I would argue macOS has become much worse given the closed-nature of the software and the price premium to use it. It's hard to complain about having to tweak things when the OS is free/libre.

And your comment - cynically - assumes that no one knows how to cook anything. A friend of mine who works in a VA hospital sends every patient home with a cheat sheet on how to cook vegetables to make them delicious and has seen fantastic uptake, especially when the card comes with an explanation of how much better your life can be if you'd stop eating refined sugars and pre-packaged foods.

Incidentally, I'm working in healthtech right now and I have looked at this a million different ways, and the first and biggest problem is the quality of the data and trust of the data. You make a big deal about after I explicitly authorize access, but once you've granted access, that's it ... what's to stop the doc from copying some info from your chart?

More relevant, what happens if you lose access to your data? Or it becomes corrupted? Now, because you owned your data, it's only your responsibility. You know who's not going to put up with that? Anyone who can afford to hire someone else (like a doctor) to keep track of their chart for them so that stupid stuff doesn't happen.

Most people don't realize that many of the connected health record problems have already had high quality solutions provided in the form of VistA (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/VistA). It's interface would make a startup designer cry, but medical professionals find it highly effective. Especially the network effect of being able to hand charts off and coordinate care, which would be very difficult in a decentralized health record world.

I suppose my experience in large corporations is limited. But I'm going to hazard a guess that for all but the biggest corps "company sanctioned" is a not an official term, and that most have given little-to-no thought about all the various ways they need to keep track of the way their employees communicate.

Keeping in context with the OP, Slack allowing admin access to all conversations is a cover-your-ass corporate move, not a solid new tool to combat workplace cultural issues. Perhaps once in a blue moon employee surveillance and bad culture might intersect and prove useful. But that should in no way be used to justify corporate surveillance.

As an elected government official, I understand the importance of papertrails and record-keeping. But the mere fact that so many companies USED SLACK WITHOUT THIS FEATURE, means most had no qualms about side channels being un-auditable before. And now this is just sweet sweet honey to corporate overlords.

I think the bigger problem that the OP pointed at is that whatever adjectives you attach to this, surveillance is almost always the wrong way to change behavior, unless your desired outcome is to make everyone suspicious of everyone else.

What's stopping these folks from creating an out-of-company channel to do the bullying and attacking in coordination via that means, or tricking the victim into joining them in the new side channel?

The answer to bullying or shitty office behavior is not monitoring. That cover-your-ass because the real answer is hard. Improve your company culture. Fire people who are detrimental to the team. KNOW YOUR TEAM! So often I hear about these things and what you find is a shitty manager who has no idea how to be a manager and says "well they get their work done."

What's stopping the harassers from setting up a secondary Slack install for coordination of such nefarious ends?

The only use I can see for this would be evidence after the fact. Surveillance is almost never the proper way to enforce acceptable standards of behavior.

But nothing is stopping them from cloning and pushing up to BitBucket or a private git hosting service. You merely have the appearance of cleanliness with none of the security.

The only way to really protect yourself is with a contract that stipulates the repo and any clones a contractor may have access to must be destroyed upon termination of the contract.

This a bit like AI. It's 2018. Where are your vertical farms? You want to talk efficiency, soil on the ground will be more efficient than soil in the air for at least the next 50 to 100 years.

Eventually we'll even live in starships and colonize distant planets if we don't kill ourselves first, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that will not be our defacto mode of living in my life time, and the same goes for vertical farms.

Slightly off topic, but to your last point: I've done some thinking about this, and the idea that a civil liberty granting you access to firearms will help in a government coup or if the government really comes for you seems laughable on it's face. Your best bet is not a wild-west style shoot out, but alliances. Local government, corruption in the national guard or local sheriff's dept. When the federal government comes for you, you don't need one (or 15) firearms. You need friends in high places.

Check out orgzly: http://www.orgzly.com/

Thanks for the data! Is it unreasonable to think that as energy efficiency of things (cars, heating systems, airplanes) improve and we move towards renewable energy that the inefficiency of rural life could become offsetting and the value of nature on the human psyche is allowed to return to our culture?

I realize that's more of a value judgement and not objective. But there are definitely costs associated with living in dense urban places. Regardless of efficiencies we are definitely still living in a post-industrial-revolution world, and people did not voluntarily cram themselves into giant cities then, so some sort of reversion when it's possible makes sense. Vast populations of urban people in China would rather not have to move into the city.

Not sure my feelings were hurt. I was just pointing out a value judgement when I saw it.

Gonna post before reading (mistake alert), but was just reading The Patient's Playbook by Leslie Michelson and it begins by talking about what a clustercuss the US healthcare system is.

You'd think your primary care physician would know what medications you are on, and what specialists you'd seen, but they don't work like that unless you laboriously tell them everything you received when they weren't staring at you. It's inefficient to say the least. And it's borderline negligent too.

Well, the top listing is manufactured by "Wishpower" so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's probably not Google.

I'd be careful with "simple facts." Rarely do they turn out to be simple. Show me the evidence that dense urban areas are economically AND environmentally more efficient. The environment part seems especially suspect.

To a large degree we're still living in the shadow of the industrial revolution, when workers flocked to cities for work. As a telecommuter, my quality of life is a thousand fold higher than my co-workers in the D.C. or Dallas metro areas where it seems many people find themselves alone in a sea of humans and chronically maligning poorly planned mass transit.

Oh wow. Personal preference is thick in that last statement there. I can't stand places with wet and dry seasons. I can't imagine wanting to live somewhere without snow in the winter. "Great year round weather" is a value judgement.

Maybe there's something I missed about GPUs and mining, but how can an amateur rig like these hope to keep up with ASIC rigs? Can you profitably mine with residential electricity and GPUs still? How long can that possibly last?

That's all perfectly fair criticism about a specific type of OSS advocate. But the discussion here is not actually about "it's more secure because it's open" and really about "it has a higher likely-hood of being secure because all of the code is fully audit-able"

Again, heartbleed is a terrible example because many many people have complained for a long time about the cruft building around OpenSSL. Do you think i don't read the code of an open source python module before I roll it into a project? Would I ever consider including a python module in my code that came to me as a binary blob (not that this possible ... yet)? Not on your life.

The reality is it's shitty that I have to trust corporations with closed source firmware and I wish it were otherwise.

These are all terrible arguments, sir. There is absolutely no way to make an argument that closed-source software is just as auditable or secure as open-source software. There will always be methods of trust required when you use things other people made, but when software is developed in a black box, with NDAs you didn't know existed, or 0-days known about for years, you simply CANNOT make an analogy to heartbleed. Heartbleed was one vulnerably in a poorly maintained OSS library. It is foolish to use it as your primary example of the failure of OSS security when there are tens of thousands of closed tickets on Github, Bitbucket and Gitlab to that would argue OSS is easier to audit and easier to openly discuss ihfosec issues.

By coming up with the same examples over and over again in lower threads you are coming close to trolling this thread and ought to stop and come up with a better argument for why a corporate system-on-a-chip system is inherently just as safe as hardware developed with open source firmware.

My bad ... I tldr the whole thing and didn't get to the WeWork part :( #readerfail

Not that I disagree with the specifics here, but I think there's a happy medium to find. Individual boxed offices for every employee is not efficient use of space most of time. While it's popular to kvetch about open plan offices now, when the pendulum swings back there's plenty to complain about the isolation and dead air of a private room (most are no bigger than closets).

Personally, I think the move towards working from home is tremendous. Perhaps it is a failure of office, but maybe that's okay. Offices are something of a hold-over from the days of the Empire State Building and insurance companies with 10,000 employees processing hand written forms. Maybe open plan offices with the expectation that most folks wont spend all their time there is a better default?

That's true. Really it would turn this into a last-mile problem where rural communities that didn't have the land value to justify big infrastructure projects would have terrible roads.

But I pay my taxes!

Just kidding. This is a brilliant solution, but government doesn't like brilliant solutions. The more you can hide the cost of things, the easier it is to embezzle and/or fund pork barrel projects. I say this being an elected official in a small town. It's embarrassing how much everyone is just looking out for themselves.

My first lesson when I joined the local government was that the situation is just as bad as you thought it was, maybe even worse. Small, vindictive, selfish minds.

IANAL, but there have been laws on the book prohibiting bartering in any substantial amount for a while. Of course, the IRS is not going to chase you down for swapping with your neighbor, but large scale "bartering" is definitely frowned upon. What's to stop people bartering a yacht for a house and avoid taxes?

I think the problem there, is that you then basically wind up with Git on the backend and an SVN-like layer over the front. Which seems a bit silly. SVN is a very robust project that works really well. Why not add git-like porcelain to SVN if you're gonna force devs to have an network connection so they don't have to download a giant git working directory.

Smart people are working on all this, so I'm sure there are reasons, but in the all the instances where I've had to interact with a monorepo, it was because the tech debt was too high to pay off to break it apart, not because it was better.

And if you're indebted to the point where you have no point in paying it off, you damn well better have leveraged assets against it (i.e. a cash cow of a business, like MS Word or Facebook)

I feel like this is all the same absurd realities as with Flight M370.

A vessel carrying 33 lives into the path of a hurricane was relying on hourly EMAILS from a for-profit weather aggregation service? What the hell? Why wouldn't you have up to the minute satellite transmissions of developing whether on every ship that leaves port?

It seems the world is poorer, and people greedier, than can possibly be imagined.

Sigh ... they've worked really hard over the past 10 years to remove the definite article from Maine Maritime Academy, and then bam Yankee Magazine goes and uses it all throughout this otherwise fantastic article.

Good old Farmington, but I'm actually in the midcoast, which is a world apart from central and northern Maine.