1,094 karma · joined October 14, 2014
Give devs interesting work by having them solve interesting problems. If the technology stack is the "interesting problem" then you are wasting this developer excitement on something less valuable than higher-level business problems. Go up the stack, get devs excited to work on those higher-level problems, and spend less of that expensive dev time on high-risk software that has questionable impact on those higher-level problems.
I went to school pre-2000, so the Internet existed, but was not as prevalent as it is today. What struck me most in the article is how easy it is today to cheat today. Real-time group chats, easy sharing of screenshots and quizzes, the volume of easily-copied content off the Internet, and tools available 100% of the time simply put fraternity list of historical quizzes and copied texts in the library to shame. The ease of cheating today is one less barrier that people have to cross to compromise their morals.
I think if a goal of post-secondary education is to prepare their populations for professional success, then you're right, simply punishing cheaters does not achieve that goal. But our world today is full of examples where it's easy to take the less moral or ethical road and suffer little to no consequences. Hopefully, schools will not succumb to that too much.
I'm still not sure if it was the song or the shock of seeing your teacher pull her clothes off. While I can still remember the song by heart, I also shudder every time I sing it.
I worked for a major Usenet provider for 20+ years.
The mechanisms for posting large binary files essentially created a separate application layer on top of the protocol. uuencode was replaced with yEnc, and the applications built in parity checking to handle the provider problems with missing articles. Article subjects were co-opted in semi-standard ways to allow applications to combine individual articles into files, but eventually, they just started posting files of unique message IDs (NZBs) to websites or specific groups, completely bypassing the need to even look at article lists. That ended up being a requirement anyway, because some groups got so big, readers could not realistically download lists of new articles anyway.
That is still the norm. Massive files are still split across 1000s of posts, and the most popular binary groups are now "dump" groups, where the only thing common about the posts is that they are binary files of some kind. What's crazy is that even though Usenet readership has declined, Usenet posting volumes have continued a very steady increase.
In the U.S, parents of public school students did not choose this. The broader electorate chose this, but many who drive the discourse around education are not parents. They are media personalities, politicians, and people without children in the public school system. That's not to say that parents do not have any responsibility for the current situation, but the choices of the broader electorate are generally not the choices of parents.
Knowing that, it is easy to say that the power providers who signed these deals eat the costs, just like insurance companies. Again, the reality is more complicated. A large number of power /generators/ had to pay very high rates to buy power on the open market when their generation capability went offline and they had contracts to provide power to the downstream providers. That is what happened to the Brazos cooperative. Should they be screwed?
What I do not hear anyone talking about is that the biggest reason for the spike in power was ERCOT adding cost to the market prices in order to entice generators to get more power on the grid quickly. ERCOT has the authority to supplement energy prices with "adders" up to the max allowed cost of $9000/MWh. ERCOT did this for almost the entire duration, even when the market price for power was only at the astronomically high level of $250/MWh. No one is really discussing whether ERCOT should retroactively unapply these adders as a means of clearing things up. Given that $9000/MWh was not enticing /anyone/ back on the grid (burning that money to unfreeze pipes and valves would have gotten capacity back online faster), ERCOT could easily justify pulling those back. Generators who were online would still make plenty of profit, and the rest of the power ecosystem in Texas would not struggle with a bankruptcy event.
What is likely to happen is that consumers will end up holding the bag. Griddy customers already feel this, but everyone else will see this in the form of higher negotiated rates over the next decade. This article shines a light on the true nature of the beast, though. Neither the PUC nor anyone else roaming the halls of the Texas legislature are going to support the consumer. The consumer is simply not represented by the lobbyists in downtown Austin.
Section 230 says that ISPs are not treated as the publisher or speaker of what their users publish or say. That does not mean that prosecutors cannot try to find companies criminally responsible for allowing users to post illegal content on their platforms, especially if they have knowledge of such content. See Backpage. And even if the companies win, the battle itself is quite damaging.
Furthermore, Section 230 says nothing about how the court of public opinion will treat the provider. These companies are thinking about more than just the legal repercussions. If their business suffers because people do not want to do work with companies that support this kind of content, then all the Section 230 protections in the world will not bring in revenue.
I agree with the author that the iPhone is "ugly." Rather, I think that the iPhone's aesthetic solutions for its technical challenges are inelegant. In particular, the notch is so big it may as well function as a thick bezel and the square camera arrangement and placement seems like it was dictated by a specific technical solution without any influence from the design team.
In the past, I feel like Apple would have argued that their elegant solutions were "better" and thus commanded a premium for it. Now they are happy to compromise their aesthetics for technical capabilities. I cannot think of a product released during the second coming of Jobs that made that compromise so obviously. Still, Apple commands the same premium, so that leads people to obsess over the aesthetics.
In all seriousness, I think the performance issue of ad-blocking is much more beneficial to me than the cross-site tracking. While cross-site tracking may end up being more nefarious or theoretically worse, the slowdown in reading and interaction is a definite real-world pain solved by blocking ads, even same-site ones.
I believe ad blockers like uBlock Origin also do some dynamic detection of behavior so that certain types of ad-serving that come from hosts you do not want to block. CBS Sports, for example, requires special handling -- in Google Chrome, accomplished by a separate extension for uBlock Origin -- to properly block ads on their site without destroying login and video functionality. This kind of blocking cannot be performed with host lists.
With that said, I am throwing my hat into the "I disagree" camp. I do not find the new design unusable. It is not slow for me (American cable ISP, Firefox browser, uBlock Origin enabled, JavaScript enabled). My experience is just as fast as the old design. I have direct access to both the shared link and comments (the title now goes to the comments and the shared link is the orange link to the right of the title). I admit I did have to retrain my brain to the new design's conversation-focused design vs. remote-link-focused design, but that took all of a week. I do not have any slowness managing text formatting, but then, I do not comment a lot and I do not write long comments. I appreciate that the new design, on most subreddits, appears cleaner and the information, for me, is more clearly laid out. To me, the site appears "prettier." With the ad-blocker on, some of the sidebar ads get blocked. I do not know how that impacts my experience.
I have also not experienced any of the page loading errors that people have described. Not once, unless it was a known outage causing the Internet to collectively scream.
I am mostly a reader on reddit. I visit my subreddits twice a day, during what are probably peak usage times in North America.
Boxcryptor offered a client for macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS that worked really well, and if you needed Linux support, one could install EncFS and use it transparently on that platform. Boxcryptor charged for a creating volumes with more advanced EncFS settings, but if you created the EncFS volume with those advanced settings using EncFS itself (e.g. on a Linux machine), the free version of Boxcryptor could read and write those volumes with those settings.
In 2013, the people who ran Boxcryptor wrote a second version that implemented a proprietary, unpublished encryption and/or file management scheme. They relegated the previous version to an unmaintained Boxcryptor Classic product and eventually removed it.[3] The proprietary version is what is offered today.
IF you want Boxcryptor-like functionality today, the EncFS4win project[4] is a good solution for Windows. EncFS can be installed via Homebrew[5] on macOS and its volumes mounted via a shell script or some FUSE GUI managers. You can install EncFS on Linux and use gencfsm[6] for a GUI manager. The Windows, macOS, and Linux implementations all use FUSE for exposing the encrypted files via a native filesystem interface. For Android, Encdroid provides an application browser for volumes. I am unaware of an iOS solution. I use the FUSE systems to keep certain sensitive cloud documents synced between my Windows, macOS and Linux machines while still being able to edit and use them like normal files on those systems.
EncFS does have a few attack vectors they have been slowly addressing. It also suffers from the same problem that all cloud-synced file-based encryption systems suffer; someone could restore your cloud files to a previous known version without your knowledge. The file-based encryption does not prevent what is in effect a replay attack. A research paper proposed a solution -- CryFS[7] -- with some solutions for this problem, but the implementation is immature.
(edited for formatting)
1. https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/
2. https://vgough.github.io/encfs/
3. https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/6-years-of-boxcrypto...
5. https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/encfs
Adding the tower or cables would have done nothing to strengthen the bridge. The engineers in the article suggest that the second shorter section of the bridge to be built afterwards may have alleviated some of the stresses on the north truss beam, but the truss itself was unorthodox, so they cannot say anything for certain.
I think a lot of homeowners feel this way and aren't in way "speculators", but they're a non-vocal population.
By the way, I put "bought" in quotes because it often seems like I'm renting it from the state.
A perfectly secure, perfectly anonymous network that no network-neutral party will service because of the levels of abuse which come from it is no stronger a solution than an insecure, de-anonymized solution. The parent blog post implicitly acknowledges this -- the poster disables exit handling for SMTP and BGP traffic because of that traffic's likelihood for abuse and the resulting effect on the exit node, even though such traffic might have legitimate uses. Practical requirements of node functionality trump ideology, in the case of SMTP and BGP traffic at least.
While Tor operators may accept abusive traffic as a result of their greater goal, the upstream providers of their nodes may not. The ability to reliably deliver traffic for all customers, Tor and non-Tor is key to their business. If that ability becomes compromised, they take action to preserve their business.
> The majority of Tor traffic is legitimate users accessing the web anonymously, through insecure networks like Public WiFi, etc.
> Finally, just like with everything else, we have malicious users. [...] That last, tiny portion of users is the primary reason people don't run more Exit Nodes.
> Despite malicious users being the minority of Tor users, as an absolute number, there are many of them.
Where are the facts that form the basis of these statements? I've seen studies about geographic and network demographics, and there was the disputed study about how much Tor traffic was related to child-porn, but has someone done a study on how many users are engaging in abusive behavior through Tor exit nodes?
Regardless of the number of users, a better question may what percentage of the traffic is abusive? It doesn't matter if a minority of the users are abusive if the majority of the traffic is abusive.
Tor administrator's tendency to dismiss abusive conducted through their exit nodes as "that's just the way it is to protect anonymity" reminds me of Twitter's early lack of action against abusive verbal attacks on its service. Tor's anonymity is analogous to Twitter's free speech, but in both cases, abuse of those freedoms defines the need for some practical protections in order to maintain them.