EdHominem

Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt when their press release contains actual lies? When someone lies to me everything they say becomes suspect. It's the standard we expect individuals to live up to, why do you want to give more slack to a company?

Further, so what? There's always some problem. They should either suck it up and work harder or come clean and give users actual choice in how to respond.

The correct way to do this is immediately release a bulletin to admins to block the affected service, then push a patch to disable it, then push a patch to fix and reenable it when they feel ready.

It's only unwinable because Microsoft refuses to take a PR/cash hit of telling people to stop using something while it's broken.

You know who sounds really petty though? The whiners taking Microsoft's side despite them missing the bug in the first place and sleeping on the report, and now attacking the person who reported it.

> They're patching it, but not on this person's schedule so he's causing microsoft and USERS problems they didn't have before.

Not in the slightest. You do not understand how the internet works. The vulnerable systems were vulnerable yesterday, and are vulnerable today because MS didn't think it was worth hurrying to patch them. Users' harm was caused by Microsoft who gave them a broken product, and by any hypothetical hackers, not by a security researcher telling the public what the hackers probably already knew.

Microsoft had a chance to release an emergency bulletin as soon as they were informed of the vuln, with mitigation steps. (ie, block SMB, etc) They didn't, and in fact spent time recommending useless things (Win10, Edge) that only serve to slander competitors by implication, and pimp more of their products.

Microsoft needs the understand that the new timeframe for releasing mitigations, if not patches, is closer to 24h than 24 days. But even if they hit that metric, they don't deserve any fanfare until they do it without lying or misdirecting.

Downvoters: RTFA - The Microsoft reports are intentionally misleading wrt. steps customers need to follow to be safe, and they claim to be better that their competitors (Apple, etc) in this regard despite obvious and consistent proof to the contrary. Microsoft is responding to security concerns with marketing speak, and they're knowingly setting their customers up for catastrophic data loss or hacks by recommending useless fixes.

Maybe right away, but at what point do I not care about casinos, and resent my tax money helping them enforce their system? Also right away.

I get that it's "cheating", but I really don't care. Not at all. When predators get preyed upon it's funny. I only wish they were taken for more.

For all this "play responsibly" talk, we know that they survive on those who don't, and the last thing they want is for the addicted to wise up. So I have as much sympathy for them as for street-corner drug dealers and I'm sorry our rules protect them.

That's not true though. No law can override your requirement to report a crime. If one does, it obviously isn't valid.

He had every reason to think this was the minimum he had to do. Which has been shown to be true.

If that country kills people or keeps slaves then surely I'm not being intolerant by fighting and enslaving them, I'm adopting their views. /s

Also, if you're sacrificing someone and I tolerate it, there's no reason I can't listen to the victim and take you out as a favor. Tolerating doesn't mean blindly accepting.

> How did you know you wanted a Bluetooth speaker, or that such a thing exists?

Because I want a speaker and my phone supports Bluetooth.

> you knew what speakers are, and you knew what Bluetooth is

Umm, yeah. And if I didn't know what Bluetooth was I'd still know I wanted a speaker. The fact that my phone supports it - even if I didn't know what it was - would lead me to wanting a speaker that supported it.

> If I make a better mousetrap, but then tell no one and never leave my farm, will the world beat a path to my door?

The ads proclaiming best mousetrap ever, never are. So from my PoV all I lose by you not advertising is another rip-off.

Try renting the mousetraps with a "Purchase if we catch X mice per month" agreement. Prove their efficacy instead of spewing empty words.

> but the devil is in the details. Is [...] advertising?

An argument that there are shades of gray isn't a valid answer for the complaint that people enthusiastically push the boundaries of black-hat.

> What makes advertising advertising, [...]? I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with fuzzy concepts like social capital.

The fact that someone pays to force it on you. Also, that the people writing the advertising would say anything for the sale, rather than being honest.

Bash is portable across other OSes... They could work on a good port. Or, remove some bash-isms from the code so it would work in another shell if that was an issue.

I understand they took the initially easy route. But it'll be harder for everyone to use that code now, including them.

> "We’re working with the git community to move more of these scripts to native cross-platform components written in C"

Sad. Rather than fix the root problem they rewrite the product in a less-agile language and require everyone to run opaque binaries.

They probably even think they're doing a good thing.

Why are you (and others) so negative about feedback? We can't get better at something unless we realize why we aren't doing it well.

> what other great power has ever done so, unless it was for their benefit?

Right, it's for their benefit. Not just morally, but economically and geo-politically.

Which is why we want to make sure we can stop the problem rather than watching the tragedy unfold as we powerlessly flail against ourselves. (ie, waiting until we label something a genocide before trying to help.)

> As a non-American, we are fucking lucky that America not only doesn't extord us for loot

They're generally happier to gain a stronger position than to be up a few bucks. It's long-term thinking.

> I am personally really happy that Putin knows there will be consequences if he rolls west.

Ditto, but these days I believe less and less than the USA would do anything. Or at least until it's too late.

Well, it's certainly a deal than neither of us would take, but if the person bought intelligently and drove conservatively, it could be a win for them.

Certainly to the point where I don't want to forbid them making that contract if they see fit. And the fact that Uber profits as well doesn't change the driver's rights in dealing with them. If the driver got a separate loan from the bank we wouldn't be having this discussion. Smart or not, it's their right.

The issue is all in the one company having too much control - like miners in a company town being under the thumb of a landlord and boss who were the same and shared information about the employee. That does bother me and I might want to pass a law to forbid that, to ensure there's a wall between those roles.

I can't imagine that anyone worldwide was going to buy their first and only smartphone, but decided to spend more to get a special high-security black phone, and is then without a phone because of this. And even if they were, I'd rate the safety of even one user who'd accidentally click through the warnings and make a call that should have been secure but wasn't, as paramount.

If my smoke/heat/etc detector starts to fails I don't want it silently dropping back to a smoke-only detector. I want it to start beeping loudly and refuse to stop.

> If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or secure

Having to flash a new OS onto it is an appropriately sized clickthrough for a warning of that magnitude. Like being woken in the night to change a smoke-detector battery.

They gave the people to another government because of a treaty signed before anyone currently alive was born.

Yes, I do expect the UK to "renege" in the sense that I expect everyone else to support self-government for Hong Kong. Maybe not to fight for it with them, but at least not to support the abusers with petty arguments of legality, etc.

> which while I wish they could, they aren't in a position to say no to china

Right. The same way Taiwan is a separate country, and a great one, but we pretend it's Chinese and essentially property of China because we don't want to get in a fight.

But might doesn't make right. We shouldn't give it the veneer of decency and legality. It's slavery through and through.

If North Korea or Iran acted that way we'd call it like it is.

Copying an API is just reciting a bunch of facts. Individual details which aren't protected, stripped from the protected context of the work as a whole.

If you're saying that the API reference itself can be copyrighted, yes, I agree. My typesetting of it, my method ordering, etc. All protectable. But not the facts on which it's based.

> If you wrote out a prose description of [...]

Of course that would be fine, but you don't have to go that far.

And I could take your prose description and strip the prose from it and turn it back into an API description. In that scenario, whose copyright do you think is being violated? The original work which I've never seen, or yours?

No, it was legal because it was a requirement which overrode all lesser orders.

No law can compel you to break the law, or cover up abuses of it.

> I don't get your point about "after the fact.

To pick a name is creative. To use that name afterword is not - it's literally referring to something by its given name.

My mother was being creative, you're just reading my business card.

> Even minor things like order of operands are creative choices.

They can be. But where they're standardized, they aren't.

If the API specifies these things they're now functional.

> An API is not just a "listing of resources.

Actually, that's all it is. The implementation lives somewhere else.

> It involves all sorts of creative choices in terms of what abstractions to expose, how to expose them, etc.

Right, and the API itself is a non-creative listing of them.

I'm not violating copyright by telling you that one of the characters in Harry Potter is named Dumbledore, nor would I be if I listed all the characters and the facts about them, despite that by necessity as a work of fiction they're all creative.

> The Snowden leaks were quite probably illegal.

Not at all. It was required behavior. Until the government enacts a useful whistleblowing program someone who witnesses criminal actions has literally no legal choice but to leak. Ignoring it and hoping it goes away is the illegal option.

I want my institutions to be fixable from inside but when they aren't, I simply want them fixed.

Re Downvoter - I understand that you're upset but lashing out, especially against the truth, doesn't help.

> They're creative, rather arbitrary designs.

Which isn't relevant. Harry Potter is a creative work, including the character names, but the page numbers those characters appear on are not.

Similarly, Java is a creative work, and maybe even the interfaces are "creative" in that they aren't totally determined by the domain. But after the fact they're just a listing of resources, like a list of characters in a book.

Nobody is trying to say that "Dumbledore" isn't property of JKR, but everyone agrees we can discuss him and his characteristics. We can flip to pages where he appears, etc.

The court got bamboozled on this one.

> And applying that reasoning to code leads to the weird result that the "functional aspects" of all code (not just APIs) should not be copyrightable.

Right. You can't copyright the concept of adding one to another number, nor the code. You're copying the C-lang spec, not inventing "x++" yourself.

In the mix with creative elements, the work as a whole is granted protection that isn't available to the parts. Nobody says JKR owns "wizard", or the concept of wizards at boarding school, despite owning the copyright on her book about wizards at boarding school.

That's not the part they most need to be able to do. They merely need to be able to understand an argument without getting distracted by tricks.

The actual analysis of the code is something that they could then listen to expert findings about.

That's because they've been given the position and it's gone to their heads.

If new architecture had to be reviewed by a representative sampling of your workmates, randomly selected for each review, I don't think you'd have such issues.

There's a difference between pursuing someone in court to make them pay taxes and kidnapping them to take them to a hostile regime and hold them indefinitely.

China acts as if it owns people of Chinese descent. Such as the Taiwanese. And they're more concerned with collecting them all rather than treating them well.

Hong Kong and Taiwan would flee China if they could. Many countries would run to be a US Protectorate. Totally different scenario. And it's essentially all because of personal freedoms, which start with not being property.

Ahh, right, right. The people were given to one country by another. Silly people.

Yes, North Korea has a full-ownership policy too. I hear it's quite efficient.

No, critically it comes with an off switch for when you find it's been compromised.

If you didn't want that, there were cheaper phones - even counterfeit.

Not if they're saving you from being shot. One of the features of a secure-phone is failing secure.

If you want a regular phone running whatsapp, use that.

Nope, the thing that triggered Manning to leak was being told to ignore evidence and collaborate in framing innocent Iraqis for treason.

The issue is that you probably wouldn't do two tests if you'd planned a short one. So you'd randomly get an overly strong, or overly weak, result.

The actual effect depends on your data and how noisy it is, and if that correlates to external factors, etc.

You need to know the characteristics of your data then you can decide on your desired confidence and only then pick a test designed to give you that based on your data.

Follow-up - Rogue One sucks in 3D. It's only an annoyance, blocking the set for some stupid spaceship models that wouldn't have been impressive compared to Babylon 5.

Also, the movie is Star Wars so there's no drama whatsoever. Literally everyone in the film is killed within seconds of their mission being accomplished.

This isn't a gameboy. If you want toy security I can sell you a phone painted black. But if you want to stay alive when the Syrian police are hunting your people you might want to rethink that.

I know people click through warnings. If that warning could keep them alive, as a dev I'd better do something that'll get their attention.

Also, if they only softly bricked these phones the counterfeiters would just click-through the warnings and sell the phones that way. They have to essentially burn them, for the safety of people who need to be their customers.

The users of the counterfeit phones had no way of knowing the phone was fake and probably contained physical and software backdoors.

Crypto devices should brick themselves if they discover they've been tampered with.

It's a clear case of seller fraud and if you use a good marketplace (ie not the one starting with E) you can get a refund through the platform. And maybe get information to use in suing the seller.