drharris

I thought this has become standard procedure for high-profile hacker types. It comes down to uneducated LEOs (all over the world) that think hacking/computing is the modern-day equivalent of sorcery or magic, and thus the person of interest has nearly unlimited powers if you let them near a device, another person that has access to a device, or even other inmates that have access to people that have access to devices. I think once Mitnick was put in solitary, it just became the way things are done now.

> by any stretch of the imagination

You do realize they do stuff like this (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24557333), right? No stretch of the imagination? I'd also say fomenting a culture of fear is a terrorist activity (and by definition, their end goal). Right now the US government are experts at creating such culture.

Clever, but try explaining that to these people. Most barely seem to have a high school diploma, much less understand encryption.

Survey-based approval ratings are pretty much meaningless, as they don't necessarily lead to change. Many people who claim to disapprove of the President would not vote for any other option were they given a chance today. This is called "tacit approval" as I mentioned. People might disagree, but it doesn't lead to any measurable difference in how they act politically. SNL had a great skit on this several weeks back when Kerry Washington hosted.

Not going to happen. Our bipolar government means that at any given time, at least 45% of the nation tacitly approves of the way things are going, just given the political party in power. Of those that disapprove, most don't care all that much and only a very small percentage would actually be willing to fight for real freedom. Pit that number against the current military and police structure that exists basically to maintain its own power (hint: it is rare they actually protect and serve the American citizenry) at the discretion of Government, and what do you wind up with? Not any sort of real revolution. We're already screwed before it begins.

> patience dealing with command lines that just get in your way of getting shit done.

It should probably be clarified that you're talking primarily about start-up costs, and primarily about web applications. I think amortized over the long run, MS services can save you money (definitely at the enterprise level, less so with small teams). Not always, but I've seen many teams hack away on Python or Rails, and hit a giant wall about 80% of the way in. Enter a consultant to save the day (spoken as a past freelancer who charged pretty decent rates for this kind of work). Of course that can happen on the MS stack too, but you can get support from MS with MSDN. Volume MSDN licensing is not cheap (though, free with Bizspark), but considering you get a full suite of MS products it is a no-brainer when developing anything on the Microsoft stack. I think there's some debate left in regard to web applications, but when it comes to desktop software dev or SOA, there's not really a viable alternative. In the end, it costs good money, but you get really, really good development software.

Also, I'd say that I'm more than willing to pay good money for VS, if it means not using Eclipse. I would easily lose $600 worth of time trying to get open source development tools to play well together. Microsoft's IDE technology is so far beyond anything in the FOSS world it's not even a debate anymore. Only mod it needs is Resharper. :)

I don't think that really ends any discussion. Some FOSS is good, a lot of it is horrible. Some of it I would use in production, the vast majority I would not.

I'd agree their billing leaves something to be desired, if that's what you're talking about. I think they're trying to centralize all their services into a single environment, but it is failing miserably. Xbox live and Azure services do not necessarily need the same billing platform.

I can't speak much to their OS/Office products. They allow me to do my work with minimal frustration, but it's not particularly enjoyable either (of course, neither is setting up a decent Linux distro). At home I prefer a Mac, when I use a non-iOS device at all. I'm mainly talking here about their development tools and platforms, which are really second to none.

I'm an unapologetic .NET lover, and the comments on the subreddit largely hold true. In the end, culture is the biggest differentiator. MS has excellent tooling and support, but nobody knows about it. They have Bizspark, which is one of the best startup-focused programs I've seen (literally tons of free stuff for your runway), but once again nobody knows about it. Azure is probably the most innovative, stable, clearly-priced cloud platform in the industry, but nobody knows about it. If you want to write Javascript/Node with full IDE support, Microsoft has you covered, but nobody knows about it. F# is probably the best FP language in existence, but nobody... well, the point is made.

The only people that know about the new things MS comes out with are the few of us .NET developers also with a foothold in the Startup scene, and old enterprise companies who bought into the stack back in VB5/C++/MVC days.

The other uphill battle is young people's view on technology. Most of them would rather platform-hop in the same way people change churches (and for much the same reasons). New = better, and Microsoft = old, so no need to even see what they have to offer. Young people with ample free time have always driven the software industry, and young people want to use things built by startuppy or nonsensical names. "Microsoft? They actually have software in the name? No thanks!"

Finally, it's an issue of evangelism and online/community presence. Because enterprise is the bread and butter of MS, MS tends to target those kind of people more. It's not that they don't try to capture new minds, but when you attend an event where you're the lone startup guy among 50 enterprise people, how do you think presentations are going to be focused? When your community seems to be centralized on your corporate domain, are you really going to attract someone who isn't willing to type in "microsoft"? New platforms get popular not because they're actually better, but because they're cooler. Either cooler sounding, there's a new type of tutorial (to-dos and 5-minute-blogs are played out, people), or it's got a guy with weird hair promoting it, using Jobs-esque language like "beautiful" or "elegant". Of course it's elegant at version 0.9 before it really does anything. Look at Rails now that it actually does stuff.

Anyway, mini-rant over. I think MS deserves more attention than they get, but ultimately they dig their own grave by not investing more in capturing that next generation.

>there's no need to alarm the general public until concrete evidence is brought to light.

Taken further, there's no need for anyone to be alarmed until concrete evidence is brought to light.

Presumably because they're spending time on their actual technology rather than fiddling in Photoshop and keeping up with patching the latest Node.js vulnerabilities on a web-appified version?

I'm related to 7 teachers, across 3 different states. They have much more education than I do (Masters degrees with lots of continuing graduate education hours), and make less than half the salary. It's not a myth. Keep in mind these are not hourly plant workers or night managers at a grocery store, they are highly educated professionals who work the equivalent time of a salaried year in my profession.

A big part of education startup failure is conflict of interest among all the parties. For an individual teacher to adopt a new technology is not super difficult; you just have to solve a real pain point, or show that your tool can help them actually teach students. The problem here is that teachers have no money. Not only are they rarely given discretionary money to use for the classroom, but they're severely underpaid professionals who are notorious for already spending lots of personal money on their students. No way to monetize this group effectively.

The second layer is District/State boards of education. The problem here is educating (ironic) these former educators on what the classroom needs. Often, these people believe that the technologies available the last time they were in the classroom are sufficient for teachers to do their work. Additionally, teachers have very little pull in this group, as most are elected/appointed officials. This group actually has considerable influence money-wise, as there is a lot of money earmarked for technological purposes. But by and large they are not aware of technologies that are not prefaced by Microsoft, Dell, or IBM.

The ancillary of the second layer is the district/state IT department. Let's just say that the best people in IT don't wind up here, because the pay and work environment are horrible. To save costs, you're constantly looking into open source solutions. Likely, these people will believe your excellent product can be easily replaced by a Wordpress install with a bunch of plugins. Maybe it's really because they just want to prove they can program like any professional (hint, they cannot). So, no support from IT for you.

The final layer is at the federal level, people who make policies. Your best bet here is to have a 20-year Senator who will vouch for your product, lobby for you with all the other old people involved in setting educational policy. Here's a hint though - people think Common Core is a radical change but it's half a century in the making and really doesn't change what anybody was already doing except for adding more testing. Long story short, if your product isn't another way to test students in a standardized manner, you'll get no traction at this level.

So, good luck!

I really like this, and while I wouldn't code in just any font, this one seems to lend itself. Only nitpick would be breathing room around parentheses and "." in method calls. Right now it's a bit tight. Love this article though, definitely some cool stuff going on in this space.

Very nice! I have a "scratchpad" project for fiddling around with things, but this might wind up a permanent tab on my browser. Less overhead than a VS project, for sure.

... and now they're all gone. This metric does not matter, as you cannot compare people posting pictures meant to be semi-[permanent, public] with people (primarily of lots-of-free-time age) posting ephemera.

Nah, that's an alias for the director.

Haha, this was a thought of mine... Thanks to Mr. Snowden we've seen what their excellent photoshop work can accomplish.

I kinda like the original solutions better. The card with picture on one side, lines of text on the other, and rolodex-holes at the bottom. I've seen about 50 different styles of this icon, and while it should probably be standardized a bit, I think people understand it. And a vector based design would easily fit into the same arbitrary bubble they chosed. No reason to reinvent something that's taken on its own aesthetic over the past decade. But good job trying to challenge status quo.

Hey, it's probably not outside the realm of possibility on this site.

Subscribe them all to EFF newsletter?

I'm 30 and didn't really understand it, but I work with teenagers quite a bit. My generation was very excited about putting things online, permanently, a monument to our selves. Things like blogs, facebook, even twitter are pretty much permanent; you're putting your information and ideas out there for anybody to see. What I gather from kids now is that they don't care about permanence so much as connecting with people. So they're leaving FB for the most part, for ephemeral services like Snapchat and Whatsapp (another one I don't understand). They like the idea they can communicate with a single person and have it disappear. They won't be haunted by a bad picture (or naughty ones) the rest of their lives. They don't have to "think" about what they're doing (which I see as a problem, but they think this way). Nothing's permanent, so it's all about the raw conversation.

That said, as a tech guy, every one of the kids I talk to says something like "but I wish it did ___" or "but I'd really rather use ___ if it worked a certain way". I believe Snapchat is successful for maybe one more year, tops, until some other startup gets even more in touch with the latest trends. I would have taken the $3bn and run. FB's and Twitter's days are also numbered, judging by the teenager beliefs today.

For those wanting a good idea (I don't care about this space enough), teenagers are really interested in micro-celebrity. Some of their favorite bands, actors, etc. are local to them, are generally not big hits, etc. but communicate individually with them (even through Snapchat). One of Twitter's big reasons it worked was because of big celebrities communicating directly to fans. Kids now seem to not care at all about big celebrities. If you can find a way to even more easily connect smaller celebrities/bands to young fans and allow personalized interaction, you just found a potential next big thing.

> The erasure had the effect of hiding Conservative speeches in a secretive corner of the internet like those that shelter the military, secret services, gangsters and paedophiles.

Just need a Nazi reference to get the royal flush.

I thought this was going to be one of those one-word websites that said "Nothing". There's nothing wrong with either OOP or FP, only something wrong when people misapply them.

Personal examples hardly prove a point, but I'm a seasoned, nearly exclusive (11yr) .NET developer and I can probably code the pants off the average ruby/python developer off the street. As can many of my coworkers. See, we use this old-school knowledge of design patterns, MVC, and SOA instead of worrying about whether our code is clever enough. Do you sometimes have to interview people who learned a few buzzwords and somehow passed an MSCD test but don't understand what encapsulation means? Yes. Just like you get people in the Ruby world who opened a console and typed in "rails new" and now they have a new resume topic.

Competent programmers exist in all types of jobs with all types of platforms. In fact, I would argue that those of us who don't jump to every new fad language that comes out may likely be more productive by default. Instead of worrying about what frameworks we're going to use to supplement our Node+Json+Rails+Bootstrap+Coffeescript+blergh security nightmare, we just start coding.

Unicode filenames allow you to do cool stuff:

http://static.pg4.io/☹.html

I would not call this a dark pattern. You browse backwards through your personal library hierarchy, what happens when you reach the top of your hierarchy? It takes you to the entire world of music. Your personal library is a subset of the world. Sneaky? A bit, but hardly a "dark pattern". It isn't being nefarious about it, just saying "Oh, so you browsed all the way up and didn't find anything you wanted? Let us help."

Seriously, it's a work of art in itself. Reuters tends to be a bit more formulaic and boring with titles, but I can't imagine a better one for this piece.