91 karma · joined July 8, 2016
edit: getting source
So it seems to boil down to, "It seems like most of our critics are those upwardly-mobile Jews." Another sad chapter in the descent of WikiLeaks from a journalistic organization that was a reason to hope for humanity into a the Daily Mail for the Kremlin instead of GCHQ.
Do you have other evidence to bring to the table? Do you have reason to doubt a.) or b.)?
If you meant to imply they could abuse this capability to get a warrant, I'll be concerned about it when they have any trouble getting warrants.
Because I didn't even think it was particularly controversial that the official story is bunk. Making no more assumptions about the circumstances of his death (ie, who or how), a conspiracy would be required to produce an official explanation that was lean of some inconvenient facts. But I'm always in the market for convincing evidence that I'm wrong.
You misunderstood me, and it is true that I did not speak plainly. The Internet is a global resource which we cannot legislate because it isn't something we have authority over. A counterargument might go, "so is the radio spectrum, and we regulate that," and that is so, but I don't think you'd like an Internet where it's illegal to send someone an email if there country hasn't signed a treaty with your country (as it can be, simplistically, with ham radio).
> All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable.
Pickpockets and hitmen are a drain on society in every conceivable way, but to say you're being unfair to telemarketers is a bit of an understatement. When they call trying to get me to fill up empty spaces on cruises so they don't feel like ghost ships, they are offering me something that (if you squint and pinch your nose) has value, and Carnival certainly sees value in what they're doing. Who is getting fleeced here?
Are they in a line of work that I wouldn't be comfortable with? Yes they are, but that doesn't make them the same as thieves and murderers. I can understand not being interested in entertaining moral relativism, but a nuisance is just not the same thing as a threat, and treating them as similar leads to poor decisions.
> Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient cost. It's societally much less of a problem.
Which of these is an existential threat, receiving unsolicited sales pitches, or running out of fossil fuels?
> I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason.
I said you were being very general, presumably I had a reason too.
> ...see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the value is delivered or when the sale is made?
Don't salespeople deliver value to their employer when they make a sale? Isn't it their job to make sales and engineer's (or whatever specialty's) job to create whatever valuable thing will be delivered to the customer? Do you get paid for things you don't do?
> You could also see how much ad agencies do to test the value of products before they hype them.
Is it the ad agency's job to make sure my Anker cable won't overvolt my battery? Or is that the role of Anker and relevant regulators?
> Or whether they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the wrong expectations.
We can agree this is definitely their responsibility, and to forgo it would be dishonest.
And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal. It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet.
> Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job.
These are differences of kind, not degree.
> That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to support them in any way.
Feel free to spend your money how you please, but do we really have to write it into the law?
Why is junk mail legal but spam is not? It's because Congress could understand the mechanics of junk mail, not because junk mail has any sort of moral or societal value lacking in spam.
> In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.
This is a pretty cynical view of marketing. Do you work somewhere with a marketing department? Is that what they do?
My bet is on December. My hedge is that I counted wrong.
Edit: I counted wrong. <digit><digit><space>[April,March] works just as well.
But stay safe and have a good life anyway, traveler.
I'm afraid you've missed my point, because I don't use those services either. No man is an island. And very few of them are OpSec masters, either. For instance, consider how unique that precise set of tools is, how easy it is to fingerprint browser extensions, and how you've effectively announced your identity in a public forum.
(Edit: Though doing that without JavaScript would be a pretty neat trick. I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to do if you can convince tags to load sequentially, so you can send requests to your server interleaved with requests for add-on resources, and observe timing. I'm thinking many levels of nested iframes ought to do the trick. But I don't know that for a fact.)
What I am trying to say is that this is hard, and we cannot solve anything by oversimplifying or victim blaming.
Because we are all those fools. Do you use gmail? If you don't, do you email people who do? Do you use Facebook? Do people talk about you on Facebook, even if you don't have an account? Do you email people who give Facebook their contacts? Is that even something you can find out?
Trust is transitive. If someone close to you along your social graph is being observed, you are being observed indirectly. If many people around you are being observed, you are being observed rather closely.
The world is rich in complexity and devoid of absolutes. I've yet to see someone build an ivory tower with the foundations to stand more than a small shove.
> You would be surprised!
How often do you audit OwnCloud's source code? (I'd describe it as "naive.")
Our food production, waste and water treatment, hospitals, etc run on electricity, sure. But 80% doesn't seem anchored in reality.
I feel like this irrationality about the risks posed by a blackout is what the article is meant to address.
If we find out about clandestine activities (by governments or by private citizens), it is often decades later. Given that the capabilities have existed and been widely discussed for some time, it doesn't seem any more speculative to assert that there have probably been assassinations as that there haven't been. Radio connections don't leave behind much evidence.