First of all, the article makes it seem like whites are protected while blacks aren't. That isn't the case, everyone in a group gets equal rights to censorship.

However this is a clear example of Simpson's Paradox, if you split up your sample set enough, you get contradictory results.

This is a direct result of SJW demands for censorship with a healthy dose of discrimination, you get a patchwork of rules that is neither based on word of law or common sense and can be cut and paste to fit pretty much every model.

You can boil down and extend every SJW argument using the same logic and see that what they are asking for is not protection but discrimination.

You are aware, I trust, that Ukraine and Russia are effectively at war, right? Why this need for convoluted conspiracy theories when the most parsimonious explanation is that Russia waged a cyberattack on Ukraine? Maybe Russia didn't give a flying fuck whether anyone could eventually decrypt the data or not, if hte point is just to cause damage. It's like asking "Why didn't they send in the Army Corp of Engineers to rebuild the bridge they just bombed to oblivion?" answer being, they just wanted to bomb the bridge to oblivion.

It doesn't always "have to be Putin" but there is a reason why it frequently is Russia.

1) They have the resources. No country has a better human resource for hacking than Russia. They have a large highly trained tech-savvy population. They've put more effort into teaching people to be computer literate than almost anywhere else. They also have a wild-west type law enforcement that overlooks a lot of hacking and allows people to hone their skills that way.

2) They have a motive. Russia is semi-openly hostile to most countries that lay to it's West. They have a policy of constantly testing our defenses. They frequently fly planes into other countries airspace to see how quickly they will react, the cyber warfare is more of the same testing. They're seeing how we will react.

3) They have a leader who doesn't give a damn what other countries think of them. Putin wants what is best for Russia and doesn't care if that makes people in other countries not like him. He doesn't want to be known as clean or honourable- he just wants to restore the empire. Furthermore, his background is in espionage. Being sneaky is in his blood.

Moreover, Russia has been engaging in a sustained cyber-warfare campaign in Ukraine, up to and including taking down the power grid and hacking cells of military personnel to gain information on troop positions. Making it look like ransomware was probably more an afterthought in hopes that paranoid firewall admins worldwide would block Ukrainian IP addresses... they really don't care that it eventually gets attributed to them.

I rolled my eyes this morning when I heard the company of origin was in the Ukraine and was not very surprised to see this article today.

If employees are given 9% fewer hours and getting less overall pay and are presumably doing the same jobs they were before the wage increase, then they must be 9% more efficient and saving businesses money.

I bet businesses around the country are going to push for higher minimum wages now -- they'll save money and get more efficient workers.

A ton of research has been done on minimum wage and the consensus is that is has negligible effect on employment. Sowell is basically the go to economist on the neocon side, and is a fan of people like Hayek.

These are illuminating in regard to any discussion of the economic impact of the minimum wage:

http://thehill.com/homenews/ho...

"Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Monday that House and Senate lawmakers should receive a $2,500 per month housing allowance — something he explained would help ease housing costs for members who can’t afford two mortgages or rents."

And this:

https://boingboing.net/2017/06...

"Rep Jeb Hensarling [R-TX/+1 202 225-3484/@RepHensarling] is the sponsor of HR 10, the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017, which will ban investors from putting petitions to the shareholders and board of publicly traded companies, except when investors own more than 1% of the company for at least three years."

Except these companies don't have high-paid lobbyists so he's unlikely to care.

"...they want the FCC to do its job and address the problem Congress created when it repealed..."

This is a grossly false assertion.
The FCC's job is to implement the law as directed by Congress, not the other way around.

Amit Pai is that he is a Republican. That equals liar and hypocrite for those of you keeping track at home.

Look at his record of the things he's done so far. ALL of them favor big ISPs, and NONE of them favor the consumer.

The man is completely bought. He has absolutely no business heading the FCC, which is all about regulating communications and the PUBLIC airwaves.

I don't understand why so many people in this country, especially those who aren't wealthy, continue to support politicians that not only don't work for the people, but are so BLATANTLY and OBVIOUSLY corrupted by big corporate money and influence.

This is quite horrifying. If Canada thinks that Canadian courts can order Google to delete results everywhere in the world, then the same argument says Chinese courts can order Google to delete results everywhere in the world.

Blame who?

It would seem Canada's court is claiming global jurisdiction. I think quite a few governments would have a problem with that.

The Canadian Supreme Court, however, downplayed this objection and called Google's fears "theoretical." "This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values, it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods," wrote Judge Rosalie Abella.

So Canada agrees with the U.S. that Canadian pharmacies illegally selling prescription drugs to Americans should be de-indexed from Google worldwide.

Whether this is a free speech or an illegal trade is irrelevant and a straw man. The key issue is whether another country can apply their laws in your country. Maybe considering a case with Canada on the benefiting end of the "illegal" trade might give the judges some perspective.

The US decided on its own that any data which touches american soil is subject to american laws. This has been tested in the financial world where transactions that were legal in the country they took place were "bounced" in and out of the USA and the yanks deemed that they therefore were subject to their laws, which did not allow that activity to be legal.

The individuals in question were extradited to the US, and such is the extreme cost to defendants to produce witnesses and to support a lawsuit - esp. against the federal government and even more so when all those witnesses are from another country (and therefore have to be transported and accommodated at the defendants' expense for the duration of the trial), that they were unable to defend themselves and had to plea bargain a jail sentence.

Look up the Natwest three
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

with POKEs, duh

I don't have a college degree either but I got into this field in 1997 in the same way. I did attend college for almost 3 years though. I had been programming since a child and had been messing around with computer hardware as well. This is not a new thing. I have friends who did the same a LONG time ago.

The other thing is, this person's ability to tinker with computer assembly and a community college information technology course has little or no application to a role of Computer Security Analyst. I know about this, I've been in nearly every IT and Software Development role there is. When I was a Computer Science major there were also Information Technology roles and the like and those were for people who can't hack it in full on Computer Science. I have a close friend that was like this. He fully admits he couldn't hack it. Brilliant at Physics, not so much at Computer Science. So, he switched to Information Technology.

The other thing is, this problem of not hiring people has nothing to do with people lacking education credentials. People with Computer Science degrees can't find jobs. Today, many companies require ridiculous amounts of experience sometimes they even ask for more years of experience than a particular technology has existed. I do believe in many cases they make the requirements ridiculous just so they can whine and say they can't find "qualified candidates" and have to turn to H1-B Visa.

If we are going to talk about how to make more economic opportunity for people in this field, two things will make the most positive impact in this situation: 1) Companies revive the philosophy to hire smart people and provide on the job training that they might be missing for the company's particular technology preferences and 2) Shut down the unethical H1-B visa game by instituting better criteria and increasing oversight. For #1, I mean I don't understand. Let's take the NFL for example. Bill Parcells would go coach the worst team in the NFL, unlock their true potential and then make them Super Bowl winners. Why can't we do the same thing in this field and why shouldn't we?

Its not so much that college has lowered quality so people can pass to survive, they've lowered quality so more people can pay to attend. It is literally a business at this point, not an educational institution. A college degree is hitting that point where it costs more than a house mortgage, which is INSANE! And while some might try to argue this claim, remember that a college education is per-person, whereas a house generally can fit multiple people.

Seen too many people drop out of college with maybe a year to go to graduate. Some make good money and work for a few years, but they are always at a disadvantage when the job markets tightens up and they find themselves looking for a new job.

This is the important part most people don't consider when they give advice based on their past experience. When I talk with someone in IT with no degree, their opinion about how useful a degree is is generally dependent on if they were out of work sometime around 2001 or 2008. This is when the degree is most important. Sure it isn't too hard to find an IT job without a degree in 2017 when the economy has been doing great for 5+ years. But once the next recession hits you'll find HR departments filtering inbound resumes based on degree real quick.

It is a significant risk to work in a knowledge based industry without a college degree. Some people never get burned, and they'll probably attribute that to skill and hard work instead of dumb luck. But there is always another recession down the road to potentially bring them down to reality.

An accountant who obtained training 20 years ago can still find value and use most of those skills today. That is not the case for those in IT, and more people outside of IT need to understand that instead of looking down upon the highly skilled IT professional who can still provide great value without being a ringknocker with a sheepskin under their belt.

This statement might be true for lower-end IT jobs, but it's bullshit for development work.

A computer science degree from a decent school teaches students a number of things including data structures, algorithms, hardware architecture, project management, etc. Lists, sets, and maps haven't fundamentally changed in decades. Algorithms don't change either. Dijkstra's algorithm were first published in 1959. Hardware architecture hasn't changed all that much over the years. As for project management, the main significant change in that time is that agile processes have become popular. Agile isn't exactly hard to pick up. All of this knowledge I've personally used in my years since graduation and plan to continue to use in the future. In fact, having this base level of knowledge helps me pick up and understand new technologies, which come and go.

Developers definitely benefit from computer science degrees. That's true even 20 years after the fact. Frankly, I wouldn't hire a developer without a degree. Yeah sure, maybe I might miss out on that diamond in the rough. I'd rather not deal with the uncertainty. With a degree, a developer shows that they've been exposed to a basic set of information and persevered through difficult circumstances.

FBI agents told employees they were not in trouble, and that the bureau was merely gathering facts [...]

Translation: They did not have valid warrants.

"In a classic FBI investigative tactic, agents visited the homes of the employees at the end of the work day..."

Unfortunately they weren't home but in a Vodka-Bar doing 'overtime' so they had to drink Russian tea with their wives.

You don't need a warrant when lying to the FBI is a felony by itself.

They don't even need to convict you of whatever crime they were interested in nor do you even need to be guilty of anything, if you lie to them you have committed a felony and will go to jail for that.

So either spill your guts completely and risk being charged with being an accessory to a conspiracy or something equally vague (hoping you're not worth the effort) or just don't even talk to them.

That's why you should never talk to police

Here goes: systemd, the cause of all modern Linux problems.

systemd is completely backward in how unix systems are built. You're supposed to have tiny programs do one job and do it well. systemd is a huge monolith that's assimilating everything on its path.

Wait, why does that sound familiar?

Anyone know if the authors of systemd are getting paid by Microsoft, by any chance?

SystemD has 617 issues open and there is no sign of all issues being resolved this decade.

What problem do the systemd guys think that they're solving by adding a half-assed dns resolver to systemd? Is it just because they can't stand to have any software that's not under their direct control?

I'm not saying that systemd is the answer, but... the old init system worked great if all you ever needed was an init system. That is to say your machine got everything plugged in on boot, always on a wired network and always on AC. The only thing you need the init system for was to get you from cold hardware to a running state, then it could declare "my work here is done" and go into retirement until it was time for shutdown. For some people that's all they need, good for you. Anything dynamic has been a mess. Suspend/resume/hibernate, hot-plugging/unplugging, wired/wireless, connected/not connected to network, AC/battery, power management, docked/undocked, switchable graphics, the list goes on and on.

The track record is not much better when it comes to shared resources like window managers, composited desktops, sound cards etc. that need some kind of mediator like a compositor or sound server. You can of course say that every application should solve this on their own, but the truth is that we know they don't and there's a huge patchwork of solutions that try to make applications play nice, often competing so this application will only work with that system-level service. I can understand that you don't want to support two init systems (SysV, systemd), four sound servers (PulseAudio, ALSA, Jack, OSS), two window managers (X11, Wayland) and so on.

For this you want a modern POSIX, call it an "application execution environment" if you will. A running mediator between the applications and their surroundings, not just at boot but as long as the machine has power. Maybe this could be solved by a hundred small services of various kinds or at least that's its a better solution than one gigantic mess. But to pretend it's all working great is something of an exaggeration, to say the least.

Fuck Toshiba. Generally decent products over the years but they were never properly backhanded for selling that milling machine to the Soviets... who we've busted our asses protecting them from. Fuck 'em with a sharp stick.

...we need to scrutinize it in ways we would never do with other people...

The level of scrutiny is directly proportional to the propensity for conveying inaccurate information.

The electoral college had its place in the early days of the US republic but it's a completely useless relic by now. It's by no means hard anymore for people to know the presidential candidates and know EXACTLY who they are voting for, there is no need for a trusted middle man who'd go and act on their behalf anymore.

Give the man a cigar... That is exactly the right answer, but most Americans just struggle trying to explain the college's purpose. I have the most fun with Republicans, they are usually the ones who earnestly believe the USA would sink into the seas in a rain of fire, brimstone and liberalism if the electoral college did not guarantee the conservative populations of sparsely populated states a much higher voting power than they'd have in a system where win without gerrymandering by gaining the majority of the popular vote, so it tends to be Republicans who end up to defending the electoral college and gerrymandering to the death.

Yes, and if Amazon did buy the Washington Post to take advantage of any losses, that's perfectly legitimate as well, not that that is actually what appears to be happening.

Quick fact check: Amazon doesn't own The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos -- in his personal capacity -- does.

Quick sanity check: As long as Bezos runs Amazon, Amazon effectively owns The Washington Post.

Definitely this.

Shareholders chasing him out isn't about him being a bad leader, but them just protecting their interests and the company's PR standing.

An "uninterested" third party CEO criticizing him and saying there was a standard of leadership he failed to achieve opens the door to other CEOs being held to higher standards or facing criticism, too. So Mayer's defense of him seems not unexpected.

On the other hand, I think she does have some kind of point about this. To my naive mind, scaling a company like Uber up as fast as it has sounds like surfing a landslide that only gets bigger and faster. You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.

As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.

The irony in all of this is that we pay CEOs like they were all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and deserve to reap 99% of the rewards of the entire organization because they were 99% responsible for all of it getting done. This seems dubious on the surface, more so when executives like Mayer make the (possibly reasonable) excuses that he really isn't all-seeing, all-knowing. I mean which is it, CEOs are superhuman or they're not? If not, why pay them like they are?

You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.

As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.

More than likely this is the case, and that is his failing. As you correctly pointed out, a CEO can't deal with every minutia of a company. Their job, therefore, is to set the culture and expectations such that the peons who deal with the minutia do the "right" thing. A good leader knows that simple signals can have ripples throughout a whole company. Founding a company on bro culture leads to a company where harassment is tolerated.

If financial success of a company is the only important metric, then sure Travis is a phenomenal leader.

More like if the ability to raise venture funding is the only important metric. Financially, for everything except venture money, they're doing rather badly.

Let's not bullshit or pretend that being "techie" makes it somehow better. Malware = terrorism. And yes, that swings both ways.

Actually Malware = Extortion in this instance

Yeah, I know, my machine got infected. I know 'cuz I got a call just the other day from a very helpful person. "Hello, I'm from The Microsoft, ok? I'm calling you about your computer, ok? Your computer is infested with the viruses, ok?" He helped me straighten it out. Cost me $300 and my machine runs a little slower now, but I'm sure it was worth it.

You are exactly the person the GP was referring to.
You acknowledge that you (or some business) has purposefully chosen software that ONLY runs under windows. That software goes out of its way to ensure you can not run it under emulation (as opposed to embracing those common libraries and making minor updates to make it compatible, as other providers have done). Then you embrace the hole you were shoved into, rather than finding software to avoid these endless recurring issues.

There was no mention of Linux anywhere in the GP post, but you dragged that in. You say you're a linux fan, but I don't buy it. You refer to this guy like he's a nutter, and then associate him with Linux. How is that something a Linux fan would do? Or maybe you referred to Linux because you believe it's secure and/or less vulnerable to these issues?

It's not like you simply don't remember the past, and so are condemned to repeat it. You know it, and still make that decision. Yep, you deserve what you know you are going to get.
[Morrison] https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Seems you conveniently forgot what ultimately caused all of this shit.

Microsoft leaving an unpatched security hole in their OS for well over a decade caused all of this. It remains to be seen whether they did this INTENTIONALLY in collusion with the CIA/NSA, trusting in "security by obscurity", or through plain old negligence/incompetence. It's pretty obvious that when the chips are down they will plead the latter, but many suspect it's the former.

The CIA or any organization like it wants unicorns. They want the tiny subset of the Venn diagram where people are bold thinkers AND organizationally compliant rule followers.

Like high-end spec-ops, not only do they want really tough super-athletes, they want high intelligence, independent thinkers AND chain of command rule followers.

It's a small subset of people that match all those qualities.

If somebody is willing to steal a $1 candy bar, do you really want to trust them with information...

Yeah. My immediate thought is that it might even be intentional; having known and and easy-to-exploit vulnerability in a non-essential system would be a really great way to weed out these kinds of idiots. I don't think it's unreasonable for intelligence agencies to test their employees in one form or another.

Contractors did not realize the "free" in FreedomPay means free speech not free beer.

A supermarket left open but unstaffed all day with no security would suffer amazing amounts of loss. But whose fault would this be?

[emphasis mine]

The people who stole the stuff. It's ALWAYS the fault of the person who stole the stuff. 100% of the time. If I don't lock my door and people clean out my house that makes me an idiot, but the person that cleaned it out is still the guilty party. (The insurance company may exercise their "idiot clause" and not reimburse me for my stuff because of my negligence. But that's not relevant to the conversation, the thief is still a thief, and should get the appropriate punishment if caught.)

So why reward the incompetent by expecting an unrequired level of honesty from users?

I agree, this is terrible programming. There are definitely ways around spotty connectivity, and FreedomPay has most definitely let their customer down by not adequately protecting their interest. I'm sure you wouldn't have to hunt around too long for a civil lawyer that would be willing to sue FreedomPay for their negligence, but that doesn't excuse the workers who exploited that negligence.