The same narcissism that makes you believe that you are right?
Not all people value the same things. That we can't give up freedom for security is still just an idea. How much of western culture is really better than something else and just not because we're prosperous.
The difference between bobcostas55's "narcissism" and the communists, is that bobcostas55 is allowed to express his. Holy shit, do I really have to point explicitly to Egypt, Iran, China, Venezuela Russia and the old USSR to show examples of what happens when expression of dissenting thoughts are banned?
Too bad I got tired of sharing and explaining mine in this forum. None of those countries you mention are actually prosperous to a larger degree. Is really shouldn't be that hard making an effort to think outside of you own though pattern should it?
I think the idea that we can fight extremism with freedom of speech is wishful thinking. There's very clear indication that pictures as those published not only increase extremism in muslim communities, but also in far-right groups. I also think we are being a bit arrogant if we think that it's a few pictures and not global conflicts that are the main reasons for the existence of these attacks.
So attackers that explicitly call out "offensive" materials as the reason for their attacks are simply unaware of their own motives? The calls for Rushdie to be killed was due to global conflicts, not his writings?
Let's keep in mind that shifts in zeitgeist can shift somewhat quickly --the rise or decline of racism, or the rise or decline of women's rights (say in Russia or China). Things can change due to how people perceive things... but at the same time I don't think anyone outside those societies are or should feel responsibility for how societies change with change in the world...
It'd be like saying, yeah, Japan in the 70s - 80s was at fault for the steel workers in America feeling alienated, emasculated and crushed. No, absolutely not. We needed to adjust, not the Japanese. The world at large changes, you need to change with it.
They are aware of their own motives, but they are probably not aware of why they have those motives in the first place. Offensive materials drive a person to violence, but the question you should ask is "what created this type of person, who kills over a cartoon?"
Note that this does not excuse the actions of the murderer. They are still responsible and still must be punished. But you can punish murderers for their crimes, and adjust your policy so that you don't create so many murderers. They are not exclusive goals.
I'm not so sure about that. What _drove_ the Spanish to drive out the Arabs from Iberia and execute those that stayed behind? What made them act like that? Or what made the Huns go and conquer half of Europe and kill about half of those and subjugate the rest? Was there something which could have prevented that had the Europeans just been different in some way?
Sure, I agree! The policy of being polite, of not calling people out on inane beliefs is what generates these problems. We have failed as a civilization where someone ends up believing it's OK to kill someone for renouncing their faith, for instance.
People don't really care about fighting extremism, they just want to be right.
The whole things is just a charade. Not because we suddenly want to stand up for free speech and civil rights. But because we are so terribly afraid of being just as wrong as the extremists. That we would know of, if not instigated, the terrible faith of hundreds of thousands of muslims in the last decade and didn't really do anything about it.
I'll upvote something that actually discusses how this effects our freedom rather than just some "let's all be upset". As far as I know western politicians have been far more effective at undermining our freedom and increasing extremism than the terrorists could ever have been on their own.
I'm not so sure. I think the biggest mistake programmers make is learning the same thing over and over again. It's much easier to find someone that can implement a basic server in ten different languages than someone who now the many different aspects of a desktop application. It's like everyone is a mediocre butcher that also does fish and vegetables, but you can't find any chefs. Probably myself included.
Hm. I think the most important lesson here is that we need to treat "communication data"[0] more like we treat financial or medical data. If there isn't already there should be a rule in security that says that anything that's actively being used can't also be secure. They had year and year of data just lying around that people had mentally filed under "communication". It's kind of like web security where you lock down all your servers and then some developer leaks all the credentials on pastebin.
[0] There's probably a better word for this. A basically mean volatile data i.e. e-mail, working documents, logs etc.
The industry term for this is unstructured data, basically anything that isn't kept in a database.
There's more you have to consider as well, you don't want to actually just archive anything older than a year. You want to set a rule that says: "archive anything created more than a year ago that hasn't been accessed in the last 3 months".
Further, there's all sorts of documents like the ones mentioned in the article that should be continuously monitored for and quarantined "passwords.txt" or Word docs with Social Security or Credit Card numbers in them.
Then you can get really sophisticated and start doing heuristic analysis of user behavior, setting alerts when Jim in accounting's account starts accessing marketing plans or when the account activity spikes beyond 5x what their regular usage is tracked at.
Full disclosure: the company I work for - http://www.varonis.com - makes software that does all of these kind of tasks.
Easier said than done. I routinely pull up emails from a year and a half ago for reference, and it'd be a giant pain if I had to request access to some sort of secure archive for them.
Maybe it's necessary to move in that direction (and maybe emails stick around only if you've specifically flagged them?), but you're going to have to drag people kicking and screaming into that kind of system. Gmail search has spoiled us.
My proposition: Anything worth referencing later is worth filing properly.
That may mean transcribing instructions into a stand-alone checklist, writing up formal user stories, or the like. However, those acts also clear away a lot of cruft that can otherwise make it nigh-impossible to find the needed info. I've run many a Gmail search, only to find that a valuable email was buried under innumerable "Not quite what I wanted" ones.
For a lot of internal data it's having and using the appropriate systems in the first place. It's like VCS. You don't e-mail someone code anymore. You make a branch or whatever and then reference that in your communication.
You do need a good alternative systems of course. But once those old e-mails isn't around anymore you would have to use the other system to still have access to the data.
I'm not even sure current e-mail systems are such a good tool. I would think chat for internal things and some CRM type system (leveraging e-mail) would be better. But yes as you said, easier said than done.
It's not easier said than done because it's technically difficult, it's easier said than done because you have to shove it down users throats and they're not going to be happy about it. And because there's an associated cost to productivity.
Worth it to avoid something like Sony's indecent? Probably. Easy to convince the non-technical decisionmakers of that? I'd bet not.
We all know how broad "intended usage" can be defined. Google has a cookie that is required for logging in into gmail (clearly intended usage), but is reusing that exact same cookie for tracking purposes.
Until there is actual legal precedence after people sueing businesses abusing these abilities, I have no idea how to interpret these laws other than "they are very broad and vague".
I don't think the laws are vague so much as how we use cookies today. With different mechanisms for different purposes it would (could) be much more transparent to the end users how things work. It would be more like the "save password" feature in various browsers. Of course since all the major browsers vendors also make money from ads this isn't really in their interest.
In what situation would this be otherwise? "I'm going to do something that takes time and money and ultimately hurts me" - Masochists of America, unite under one CA?
Even if Jesus Christ managed a certificate authority, someone would complain. Everyone - even G-d - has a conflict of interest.
That's exactly what I'm saying, you can't expect one entity to solve this.
There's clearly some good people working at worthwhile things at Google. My concern is that a lot of those things doesn't end up being pushed by Google. Not only because it might hurt themselves, but because of non-obvious outside influence.
We shouldn't forget that many things we accuse the NSA for like lack of accountability, overzealous collection of data, the undermining of privacy etc. are all things we can expect from a corporation.
We also expect the GDP of over half of our society from corporations - the balance from government and non profits.
My point was that everyone has self interest, if one that's influential and has resources comes up with a proposal that is reasonably transparent and beneficial, it seems self-destructive to reject it out of distrust.
I don't necessarily think it's a bad proposal. It's seems rather good actually. Google is still one of the most tracking entities on the Internet and they can't really argue with NSLs even if they wanted to.
I just think the US government is the best organization in the world in asserting pressure and that Google, even if they really wanted to (which isn't clear), isn't going to end up with an agenda hugely contradictory to the US governments wishes. The US has a long history of using industry for geopolitical goals and the tech industry isn't any different.
If we do end up with a system that is in line with peoples fundamental rights I'll be the first one to commend them for it though.
That's not really my position to represent though. As an engineer you have to be firm if the issue is worthwhile. Just because the tech industry is a largely a vertical oligopoly doesn't mean we should support it. Technology would be a better place if the parties opposing security, robustness, privacy etc. would have to take an active stand against it rather than being able to hide behind vague design decisions. I do also think there are things that aren't worthwhile to be fighting for though.
"won't". It hasn't been adopted by even a significant portion of the internet yet, and based on these discussions I'm fearful it will turn out exactly like IPv6.
Not all people value the same things. That we can't give up freedom for security is still just an idea. How much of western culture is really better than something else and just not because we're prosperous.