246 karma · joined January 14, 2016
- a key is made public, and we have to call a user or refund them (for retention purposes)
- a key is made public, and we revoked the key, potentially breaking the customers builds/deploys and potentially knocking a customers stuff out (if, for example, a key is disabled during a push to production).
In fairness, your operation of the vehicle has a substantial impact on the outcome of operating the vehicle, the the decision loop that your brain implements while driving is largely incapable of effectively processing and executing on the volume of information and variables that are in play in the circumstances that lead to high speed collisions.
Anecdotally you might feel in control, but it is probably worth noting that most people, drunk or sober, tired on fully awake, fully alert or texting, felt like they were in control when they were suddenly the cause of, or involved in a collision.
Having the commit will make it maore feasible to fund vehicles that are intended for a specific area, and the pool model allows Uber to recover margin during pricing surges and users who don't want to pay the commit (after all, the discount on the fare would only apply to the portion of the pool fare ascribed to the subscribed to the passenger).
Depending on the city, better might be faster, more available, less racist, less intense experience, cleaner, etc, etc, etc.
They don't need to be cheaper in most places, at least not yet.
I don't buy into enough of the eco system, but do Apple devices sharing an Apple ID to sync over LAN/WLAN instead of hitting icloud?
Setting aside the purely utilitarian aspect of being required to use a piece of software to do a task or as part of a job, consistency increases efficiency by reducing the amount of time spent understanding the deviations from expectation in the user interface.
Open source tools to run a CA / PKI have existed for a good long time, they just haven't been easy to use.
Automated certificate issuance software has also existed for awhile, but it hasn't been terribly awesome.
The bigger issue is trust - launching a new CA is quite expensive since you need to invest and build all the technology and processes, then get them all audited, and then present the results to the various organizations who control who control which CAs are trusted (see https://cabforum.org/)
The motivation for running a CA has typically been financial - even vendors that provide free certificates (StartSSL, Comodo, etc) have done so as path to moving customers to paid services.
Lets Encrypt/ISRG was kicked off by a group of folks who care deeply about security and had the technical chops and inside knowledge (some (all?) of the founding team) were from Mozilla and had both guidance and experience dealing with the CAB.
In short, there is no good reason not to have done this, and independent of this, another team within Mozilla had started to think about how we could tackle this before we found out the LE work was in flight :)
It is.
> And let other people work on it and just cover 3 people managing this + architecture costs.
Um, Lets Encrypt, in the course of the last year has inadvertently become one of the largest issuers, and has become critical infrastructure for many of it's users who would suddenly have to pay for certificates, assuming they configured LE certs and Strict Transport Security. If LE was only 3 "managers" + cloud infrastructure, it wouldn't be reliable.
> You don't need 2.9 mil per year to process 60k certificate requests a day with system that is practically finished. What else is there to do which open source community could not do it itself?
The service isn't "practically finished", they need to continue to improve the service to reduce costs, improve the operations capabilities of the service as it grows, From LE: Staffing is our dominant cost. We currently have eight full time employees, plus two full time staff that are employed by other entities (Mozilla and EFF). This includes five operations/sysadmin staff, three software developers, one communications and fundraising person, and an executive director.
>Thousands of companies and developers use letsencrypt, a lot of potential man power to help if you ask me. You could easily cut costs 5-6 times. Or am i missing something here?
You are missing alot... this is not an open source project that anyone other than an existing CA can consume and hit the ground running. If any other major CA decided to consume Boulder, and offer it as a service, they could eat LE for lunch, but for anyone else, they need a massive investment in the logistics of becoming a CA.
Over and above that, LE is a team run on a shoestring, and yet they are building out infrastructure that is likely to be highly targeted by a broad range of attackers. Wether it's DoS, folks trying to get mis-issued certs, or a number of other objectives, that they are running and keeping the service up with that few people and that little money is an impressive feat.
IDK, wildcard certs encourage really bad practices, and I don't see the LE team liking the idea of issuing them.
EV certs means a significant increase in costs to actually go through the processes required (audits, etc) so that browsers will accept them, and then the increased costs of doing due diligence when issuing certs. Unless they want to grow in that direction, it seems like a poor business choice.
Yes, it means they run the risk of going insolvent; despite the fanfare, and the pace at which they have moved themselves into a critical niche on the web, they are still an open source project, and are supported by sponsorships and donations.
I expect that there are some significant players that would invest to keep them around, but it can be hard to continue to making an impact when you subsist off of crumbs.
Anyone who's career depends on FOSS should at least read https://files.puzzling.org/wayback/pay-for-foss/
Contrast the distribution of available technology across the globe throughout history. While there are still pockets of people stuck between the neolithic and bronze age, for the most part, more people have access to more technology than ever before.
Economic disparity is enormous, but the general quality of life for those not living in societies in active war zones, or for societies that don't have despots or leaders that are deliberately withholding technology and resources ('lost tribes' that are not lost, simply xenophobic, or nations like North Korea where state inflicted poverty and restricted access to technology is a means of control).
> comments dismissive of my sense of wonder (several comments)
I disagree, but then again, my experiences are subjective ;)
> Accessible, yes. But the true workhorses of Internet are Porn and Advertising.
Yes, you are correct. I don't agree with your assertion that there is a new generation of kids hooked on porn, but I could be convinced if you shared links to peer reviewed studies.
I agree with you on advertising, but then again, we only had two decades of experience with a connected culture, and we haven't even achieved 'hyper-connectivity' in the sense that everyone is connected, all the time. Time will tell if the advertisers win, but there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Humans are addicted to connection (in the human sense), and the first generation of connected adults are proving to be more discerning and aware of privacy than people expected when it comes to using technology to connect to other people.
> Dismissive comments about examples of greatness
If you don't think Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are examples of greatness, how about:
Physicists
- Stephen Hawking
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
- Richard Feynman
- Banksy
- Photographers Steve McCurry (Afghan Girl, an iconic photo), Nick Ut (photo from Vietnam war)
- Richard Serra
- Vik Muniz
Each notable for their contributions on the front of research and practical application as opposed to specific technologies
- Benoit Mandelbrot
- Ron Rivest
- Adi Shamir
- Len Adelman
- Alan Turing
- Edsger Dijkstra
> Going and colonizing Mars or any other world is a short term solution.
No, it's not. A short term solution would be doubling down and investing in building facilities that meet modern atmospheric expectations and attempting to survive as we burn the rest of the world down around us. A short term solution would be attempting to stifle the economic progress of undeveloped countries as they ride the fossil fuel train to something like economic equivalency instead of investing in and being the early adopters that drive down the cost of environmentally alternatives such that other countries can modernize themselves.
Another short term solution would be to trigger a set of EMPs in orbit that would knock out the last 100 years of technological development and force us to build technologies that don't rely on the ready availability of fossil fuels while we reacquire our current level of sophistication.
Going to another planet, and learning how to survive there, including how to properly manage and keep an environment pristine and survivable in a sustainable fashion (a core requirement to survive in a hostile environment) is most certainly not a short term solution.
> It is just that my imagination hasn't been so dried up that I cannot imagine something more wonderful than a rocket taking off.....
“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” ― Terry Pratchett (oh, also, another contemporary great person!)
Yes, we did. I don't know that we will have to abandon it, but we do know that human civilization is on the precipice of change, largely in part due to our relentless pace of technological process and reduction in global inequality. Setting aside income and wealth distribution on an individual level, most technology available to humans is more broadly available to humans across the globe than at any time in history. We failed to improve away from fossil fuels for largely economic reasons, and have caused irreparable damage to our ecosystem as result. That doesn't mean we haven't done incredible things along the way, and it doesn't mean that human civilization is going to come to an end, it simply means that it will change.
> Imagine that you were living in a time period when electricity was invented.
There is the rub. Electricity wasn't invented, it was discovered. From the conventionally excepted discovery of electricity to the invention of devices which can be used to generate and distribute electricity, development of modern infrastructure and advances, and the most recent experimental batteries (and if you don't think batteries are experimental, take a good look at Samsung's recent failures), we have been on a 2500 year journey (the first documented history of electrical phenomen was the triboelectric effect, and documented in amber by ancient greeks) to get where we are.
We have vastly improved our understanding of how electricity works, but we haven't yet mastered it. We probably will never stop finding new and interesting ways to capture new forms of energy with the express goal of generating electricity, and it is almost certain that we haven't begun to imagine the different ways it can be used.
Along the way, we have used electricity to improve virtually every aspect of human life.
> Can you imagine how people felt when they saw the first cinema?
Yes, approximately. It suspect it felt as amazing and futuristic as the first time I connected to a BBS. It probably felt approximately the same way it did when I got my first internet connection, and decoupled my ability to learn from my (at the time) poor financial circumstances.
> When they heard voices that came across the town?
Yes, because I remember the first time I had a video call with my girlfriend when I was on a business trip.
> When they saw the first locomotive?
Yes, because I watched with glee as the Challenger shuttle took off, and then confusion and sadness when the Challenger accident unfolded in videos played on the news (I was 8 at the time).
> Imagine that you were living in a time when all the great people that we learned about in the history classes were alive.
Education in the sciences and the arts is more accessible than at any time in human history, in large part due to the advent of the internet. Think of all of the great people who will emerge over the next few generations!
> How many great people, how many great writers, how many great singers and poets of the current times do you imagine students after fifty years will be learning?
Has it occurred to you that the reason that we don't know all of the great minds and great artists that have emerged in the last century largely because the glut of invention, ingenuity and art has drowned our ability to single out greatness?
The great contemporary achievement is not that we have somehow failed to live up to our potential and there are no longer great people, it is that we have reduced the barrier to achievement so dramatically that almost anyone simply needs to try to have the opportunity to succeed in the way that only a select few were able to in the past.
In what era could the child of a refugee grown to build one of the greatest technology empires we have seen? Steve Jobs is and will be one of our contemporary greats; his story of building Apple, being pushed out, building a new empire, and triumphantly returning to control of Apple and leading it into a golden age is quite literally legendary (seriously, it's an amazing story, even overlooking Jobs behaviour, personality, and all the dramatic license that my summary takes! Do you really believe that it was 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae or is it just a beter story when you leave out the Thespians and Thebans?). In what era could the child of an upper middle class family build an means of connecting more than one billion people each day? Mark Zuckerberg is and will be one of our contemporary greats.
If Elon Musk achieves even a fraction of his dreams, he will be renowned in history as one of the most important contemporary great people. Whoever gets the credit for colonizing Mars may go down in history as the reason there still is a human species, depending on how the next century plays out :)
If you think we live in boring times, you would do yourself a service by taking some time out to explore what happened to your sense of wonder, and maybe try living without the modern conveniences invented in the last 30-100 years, even for a week.
On the moon it means you need enough solar power in batteries to power your gear, and to power appropriate spectrum lighting for plant growth.
If you can rely on solar power more reliably, then you can construct (significantly more complex than those required on earth) green houses which still benefit from natural light.
Google and Apple both rely on ecosystems to attract and retain users, and Samsung doesn't have a competitive (or compelling) ecosystem. <end north american centric summary of problem>
I don't know if Samsung has the same problem in other markets, but I know that Firefox Marketplace does/did.
Mozilla has no technical leadership problems, but they have some huge people and business leadership problems, and until they figure out a path forward, the path will continue to be a meandering trail to the bottom :(
What?
Setting aside the fact that this can already be done in numerous different ways on many platforms, how is this a win?
It's hard enough for developers to write correct code, let alone maintaining the correctness of that code while loading and executing unknown code from other parties (see web browsers, and the last 20 years of security bugs related to plugins, extensions, addons, etc).
Seriously though, almost every vulnerability that gets disclosed can have the "this is all overblown, and any security minded company won't have this problem", and yet we are all dealing with the long tail of malicious software and services hosted on vulnerable infrastructure...
If I can't run the entire stack I use for dev under the subsystem then I will go the other route, which is to continue using VMs. I am excited about the initial release, and the prospect of being able to use Windows for all of the regular things I do, but it's clear that this isn't ready for primetime even as a dev tool.
But TBH, if I am going to go through the trouble of MITM'ing the site, then I am going to rewrite the site to:
* include my awesome fingerprint
* link to my awesome key
* link to my l33t entry on keybase
Side note - the CA model has issues, but in what world is pointing users to a VC funded startup that has only been around for two years "safer" than the flawed, but well understood security model of the CA system?
I don't mean to impugn Keybase, from watching them I like what they are doing, but bootstrapping trust based on content they control is hardly ideal, and I would be shocked to hear someone say that Keybase is more reliable or more trustworthy than the CA/Browser Forum (10 years old) and the browser vendors (>20 years old depending on vendor/code base).
Yes, it's nuanced, because poverty and decision making is a complex issue :)
It's opportunity cost - you have the choice between eating fresh food, with the risk that it will spoil, or the choice of eating lower cost and frequently processed foods that have a longer shelf life.
There are also alot of factors to this - in a given week of budget the price difference between a processed product and fresh product might be radically different, but fresh food is almost always available throughout much of the developed world. There is another hidden cost here - when I see something I haven't tried before I will buy it and learn how to prepare it, but when I was poor, I didn't - it wasn't worth the risk that I would ruin the food, or that I wouldn't like it, and throwing away even a small amount of food was an intolerable waste. Less of a risk these days when even most people living at or below the poverty line have the ability to access the internet to learn, but in the late 90s, I was loathe to take those chances. There may be nutritionally rich, low cost options, but if people are too poor to have had regular exposure, or come from a culture unfamiliar with the foods available at reasonable prices locally, then poor eating choices will continue to be propagated.
The decision is not always a choice to eat the less healthy food over the more healthy food, it is a choice to marginally increase the level of food security you have by choosing less "healthy" options that have a longer shelf-life and offer a discount in bulk.
I hate this myth. It glosses over some of the most difficult choices that people in poverty have to make on a regular basis.
"Quantity has a quality all it's own." - various sources
This is anecdotal, and entirely based on my own experiences as I grew up in poverty (by Canadian standards, which is substantially better than most of the world). YMMV when evaluating this if you come from a part of the world that has more extreme cases of poverty.
Eating healthy foods is not inherently more expensive than eating unhealthy foods, but it is a risk management decision.
When you have a small budget and you have to make choices about where you will spend your money, you tend to make choices that insulate against risk. If you have a tight budget then you buy foods that provide the best economic value, not the best nutritional value. That means buying bulk, low cost food so that you can ensure that you have some food left at the end of the week, which might help reduce the amount you have to spend on food next week. This exacerbates the "healthy eating" myth because if you are buying foods that you hope last, you are disinclined to purchase foods that expire, so rather than buying fresh meat, produce, etc, you will instead purchase canned or frozen foods.
Everyone that I grew up with that has elevated themselves above their roots has a similar perspective - it's not that we could buy better food, it just didn't make sense to do so back then.