tetrep

> Instead of implementation a 'garbarge collector' they chose to automatically close a file when its not shown on the screen.

Does that mean you lose the ability to undo actions when you switch buffers? That sounds horrible if you're editing multiple files.

Do you extend the same principles to homosexual men? Are homosexual women exempted?

I find it easier to not have to consider the sexual preferences of my coworkers when I'm interacting with them.

Edit: I should add, if someone is going to attack my character, they're going to do it regardless of what I do. I'm not going to go out of my way to prevent that.

Similar to using encryption everywhere you can: it makes the use of it non-suspicious. The last thing I want is for being alone with a coworker to be implicitly suspicious because the new norm is this sillyness.

Ditto for the touch bar on Macbooks (although that doesn't fix the issues for OS X in general).

While it's certainly true that we don't have a complete understanding of nature, I think we can safely assert that dead things don't feel, and I'm completely unaware of any evidence to the contrary (and I would think its existence would be quite noteworthy).

I don't think we need to call it a "belief" anymore than we need to say Russel's Teapot not existing is a "belief." We certainly could go down that route, but then virtually everything becomes a belief and we're left with a much less meaningful term.

I kinda feel like this argument is similar to an nihilist telling a logician that nothing is true.

Just like gambling, alcohol, opiates, etc?

Besides the wealth of extremely addictive substances (and activities) that are legal (some regulated), there's also at least one illegal drug that you're never going to be (chemically) addicted to: LSD.

The "we're protecting you" logic behind making arbitrary drugs illegal is nonsense. It's even more weakened by the fact that at least a few of the illegal drugs with "no medical purpose" have, in fact, some medicinal use: Marijuana for anti-nauseau, combating eating disorders, and pain relief, and MDMA for PTSD.

By that same logic, Vim and Emacs are even more dead than Leo, which they most certainly are not.

Are you saying that supply can't scale to demand? Because what you've described, a limited supply and increasing demand, is commonly solved by increasing supply. Unless we're at 100% coffee output for the Earth, which I don't think we currently are.

> Current bitcoin holders can only see gain if new "investment" (I find that term funny since it's a "security" with no fundamentals) comes in. That's pretty much the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

That's 1/2 a Ponzi scheme, the other 1/2 is an entity promising you a return. I think you'd need to commit some fraud along the way too. If someone said "For every 5 dollars given to me, I will provide a share, and dispense 1/(2*N) dollars to all other shareholders, where N is the number of other shareholders (N=0 for the first donation, 1 for the second, etc)." Would that be a Ponzi scheme? There's no fraud, so I don't think it would be, despite having identical mechanics.

If you're comfortable uploading something to a server, you should be comfortable with that server (and any of it's owners/operators) reading it.

While I also didn't know those sites let other people download the samples, that doesn't change how much I trust them, since my model has changed from "whatever randos own this website see this file" to "whatever randos own this website, plus whatever randos they appoint, can see this file". In either case, I must trust "whatever randos own this site", and so them delegating that trust shouldn't change much.

There's a bit of a grey area around uploading something to a VPS host that you control, but unless you signed an agreement explicitly saying that your stuff won't be looked at, expect it to be.

And for the sake of cliche, it's safest to just assume anything you upload to the internet is public. Don't assume otherwise unless you really really need to, and make sure there's at least some legal and/or cryptographic protection for you if you're going that route :)

> He's not a "hacker" who is doing security research, he's a malware creator selling malware.

There's no reason he can't be both. We can both like him for stopping WannaCry, and dislike him for (if true) marketing/distributing malware based on Kronos.

Although I agree with your general sentiment, I'm confused as to why the security community is chilled by this. The court case should be public, so we'll be able to judge the evidence ourselves.

You don't need a college degree to do pentesting. I don't think anyone credible in the industry cares where you got your education, as long as you know what you're doing (or in the case of juniors, are able to learn).

Not quite that, but rather vigilantes mugging you when you're most vulnerable, and then returning the money later when they're confident you can safely hold onto it.

I wonder if the vigilantes will return the money with interest...

And that's why nobody makes fakes or knock-offs, right? Because they'd lose their customer base once their customers purchase the product and find out it is not genuine.

They're are large profit margins to be made off of either cutting drugs (if you're nice, with something inert, if you're not, just with something cheap) or for things like LSD, selling research chemicals that are similar yet different and massively cheaper to manufacture/buy than the real thing.

While I like the comic, I really wanted to give up before I got through the actually relevant/interesting bottom. The whole setup was really bad for someone who doesn't know and doesn't care about the characters. The author really could have just skipped directly to the "I'm going to go write over my junk DNA" bit and it would have been fine.

Edit: So I assume people gave up and downvoted for the seemingly random comic.

> Why can't it just be a personality thing...

For the same reason a cold isn't "just my body." Just like a virus can put your body in a bad state, so too can various stimuli to your mind. You don't just chalk it up to "how things are", you attempt to resolve it. For a cold, your body does that on it's own and you mostly just wait it out. Mental health issues can be similar (I'm just feeling off today), or they might require some effort on the part of the sick person to resolve. Either way, you don't treat it as a personality quirk, as that undermines the severity of the issue (it really is a health issue) and implicitly shifts the blame to the person who is sick[0].

> When you start labelling it mental health, all you're doing is self-diagnosing yourself...

I don't see it as any different than self-diagnosing your cold as a physical ailment. Sometimes people are not capable to doing meaningful work due to their mental state, and people should feel comfortable saying that they need a sick day for their mental health.

[0]: Which, it could be their fault. But ideally we want to describe issues without implying blame. But just like you could unable to work due to a hangover, you could knowingly put yourself into a scenario that you know (or should know) will put you in a bad mental state.

Edit: Forgot the dirty laundry quote. I want to comment on that too.

> It's not controversial, there's even a term for it - airing dirty laundry.

Airing dirty laundry is providing "too much information", saying "I need a sick day for mental health" doesn't strike me as an inappropriate amount of detail anymore than "I need a sick day for physical health". I suppose you could shorten it to "I need a sick day" if knowing any more information is too much.

Can't you drop privileges immediately after getting the privileged socket? Why do you need to hold on to them?

You're missing some important net losses, notably, they've lost almost as much 1/4 of this year than all of last year (continuing from where you stopped):

$(47.0) million, and $(54.9) million, respectively, and in the three months ended March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2017, we generated net income of $3.0 million and incurred net losses of $(52.2) million,

While a biased article, it does chronicle the lengths Purdue Pharma went through to push their drug, OxyContin: http://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/

I think a lot of the difficulty of management is not in the description of you duties, but rather the difficulty in finding the "right" thing to do, which is very difficult when it comes to soft skills, which almost always lack any quantitative way to measure directly, and must be inferred from secondary and indirect metrics.

> The solution was to get out the egg of the dry mixture and allow people to add it themselves.

I'm no foodie, but wouldn't dehyrdated/dried eggs be far less appealing taste and/or texture-wise? If not, why don't we see them around grocery stores? It seems like it'd be great to have non- or even just less perishable eggs.

> No small companies to buy = no progress.

Which is perfectly fine for incumbents.

As terrible as XML parsers can be, they've never been as bad as "XMLdoc = eval(XMLString)". I'd be more likely to trust a JSON parser not written in JavaScript than an arbitrary XML parser, but that's only because of the XML specification itself, which includes such features as including arbitrary content as specified by URLs (including local (to the parser) files!). Great ideas when you can trust your XML document, not so great otherwise.

For when it's fixed, the error page occurring is the generic 500 error for ISS: "Server Error in / Application."

screenshot: http://imgur.com/L58Cip3

I don't see the value in this over a tablet with a stand. The tablet is portable, can do more things, and already exists in many people's homes.

Why not get a tablet with a basic cover/stand? It has far more overall utility and isn't difficult to use.

> I don't see how removing anonymity is inherently by its very nature a bad thing. It seems likely it would be like everything else, you'd need to legislate the legality of certain things given that all activity is non-anonymous, etc.

I see a few issues with such massive violations of privacy:

1. Slippery slope: Knowledge of people's private lives is extremely valuable, and nobody with the power to collect or use it is going to relinquish it, if anything they're more likely to try to get more, until they have absolutely everything. This isn't inherently bad, as concentrated power is very easily abused. We have a wonderful case study of this with the NSA, their ever expanding powers, their willful breaking what few legal limits are imposed upon them, and their inability to prevent themselves from breaking their own policies about abusing access to their treasure trove.

2. Benevolent dictator: This privacy invasion will most certainly work it's way back to the government, which has severe implications for civil disobedience and political dissent in general. While it's all peaches when the government is "nice", you're never going to have all citizens agree with the government, and future politicians abusing previously allocated power/resources is extremely likely (not that there has ever been a government administration worthy of invading everyone's privacy to begin with).

3. Drawing a line here is not only a great place, it also lets everyone consolidate resources to fight for a known good state. There's a lot of information to be gleaned from the data, and it's unlikely that everyone can commit fully to understanding the ramifications of letting this information out, much less understand how it will be used, or how it can be used. And much like giving the legislation a pile of money with legislatively imposed spending limitations, they're going to be constantly fighting to tweak and remove those limits. And its so much harder to be constantly vigilant when there's dozens of laws governing what can or cannot be done with the data, before we even presume that we agree with those laws to begin with.

4. As noted above with the NSA, it's not possible to trust custodians of this treasure, they're only human, and they're bound to abuse their power at some point. But we don't just have to worry about people with legitimate access obtaining this data, we also have to worry about hackers grabbing it from poorly secured servers, which seems to be an inevitable computer event, even more so for such massively useful information.

> Companies should defer judgement to the courts rather than make arbitrary moral judgements.

Uh, no. Please no. I do not want the courts to arbitrate morality. That's a far far far more dystopian world than one where corporations do (supposing I accept their false dilemma). Companies can, in theory, be created by any person, with any moral alignment. That is not the case with governments (minus authoritarian ones, which function in the context of moral-defining as more or less the same as a company).

Additionally, deferring to the courts also leads to the ever terrible "this is moral because it is legal" and "this is immoral because it is illegal."

There is not a correct authority on morality to which you can defer. You cannot offload such decisions and wash your hands. Any moral decision you make, including deferring to some other moral-decider, is entirely your responsibility.

Note: I'm doing the naughty thing of morals=ethics. I know this is pedantically not the case, but I'm 99% sure that is what the article means. And, in general, this is also what everyone means outside of targeted discussions.

> ...if someone is infected with spyware they're probably better off infected with secure spyware.

I think this is a great ethical issue within the security community. There's many arguments against working for a company you have ethical disagreements with, but that becomes much more grey when it comes to security. Sure I might not agree with the mass surveillance of the government, but wouldn't I rather help the NSA not leave piles of malware sitting around on C&C servers than let it be exposed to even more malicious actors?

Security could use a hippocratic oath.

> FlexiSPY has not published a vulnerability disclosure policy or committed to no legal action against hackers. Both protective steps would be required should their program be hosted on HackerOne.

I'm surprised HackerOne doesn't have a policy surrounding this already. Are hackers who submit issues to HackerOne not protected?

> We will not take action against them based exclusively on moral judgements.

Hooray, kinda. I think this is a maxim that HackerOne could extend to not making moral judgements relevant at all, and to instead institute policies that reflect HackerOne's current morals. This increases transparency and allows HackerOne to say "We reject you because your company's goals/actions/whatever explicitly contradict our policy that everyone wear unicorn hats on Tuesdays".

> Their business conduct is not in line with our ambition to build a safe and sound internet where the sovereignty and safety of each participant is respected.

I think now would be a good time for HackerOne to write this stuff down. A very brief look at their site and the only thing I can see relating to this is the tagline "Make the internet safer together." From which sovereignty implications can be drawn, but having such policies explicitly stated and publicly available not only allows for transparency in decisions, but also works as an advertisement, "Oh hey, this company wants to protect my digital sovereignty, neat!"

> The line that if it compiles, it’s probably correct is often true.

That is the meat of why Haskell is so great. I've never so reckless refactored code as much as I do in Haskell, I just wait for the compiler to tell me what I missed and go back and fix it up. I'd never do that in C, C++, Java, etc; it'd be suicide.

And while that's still not a great fleshed out explanation, it's a great oversimplification of the symptoms of a programming language with a great type system. And that type system is more or less the only reason to use Haskell.

As other people in this thread have commented, Haskell has fantastic abstract libraries, which let you do abstract things, the most useful of which that I'm aware of/understand is parsing. Parser combinators are a very natural fit for Haskell, and making DSLs with them becomes practically trivial to do.

Edit: I think the author takes for granted the general praise that Haskell gets, and was attempting to temper it with his practical experiences using the language.

> ...that I always write my letters in a language they can understand, etc.

And more importantly, with legible handwriting! The FBI has limited resources and we wouldn't want them to waste time deciphering your handwriting only to learn what you've said to your lover, while a terrorist's handwriting goes unanalyzed.

I like this line of reasoning, that we must modify our behavior to enable surveillance. It switches things around from the traditional perspective, which is that we're doing extra things to increase our privacy, to instead be that we're doing extra things to decrease our privacy (using weak crypto, no crypto, adding and removing ssl here, etc).

They're also a work laptop option for Google employees.