Posts by captain_solo

Heavier regulation would only further consolidate the power in the hands of a few because it increases the barriers to entry and is extremely vulnerable to the lobbying efforts of the large established players. In fact that's exactly how we got here.

Timmy was pushing for NyetNeutrality too, I guess its good that he at least seems to recognize that most of the actual power is in these higher level content/platform oligarchs.

It's much easier for many of these so-called experts to identify problems than to solve them. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee is part of the crowd that built the thing, doesn't Kernighan's lever posit: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

I tire of the faulty comparison to tapping phone lines.

the government still has exactly the same legal access to internet comms that they had to phone comms. They never had a legal authority over the plaintext meaning of phone calls, just access to the datastream.

Asking for a key/backdoor/magicunicornfartdust to decrypt the content would be like them having the capability to force a criminal using a phone to explain his coded message or provide them his one time pad for example - in other words, a capability that today they don't have and is a protected right of the communicating parties to not incriminate themselves by refusing to explain what a code means or give the investigators a key.

Not to mention the fact that the governments have proven untrustworthy when it comes to securing and properly protecting the legal rights of citizens when it comes to things like National Security Letters, Attorney General Waivers, FISA applications, and all the other non-warrant access methods they have adopted, misused, and refused to protect with systems that would deliver their so-called "legitimate" access and not allow either hackers or rogue employees to use it for nefarious purposes.

OTOH, if they were trying to push the market in the direction of end to end encryption and services refusing to hold keys for their customers or hold the liability of having access to their customers' data, they are doing a bang up job.

"This is no cave" - Me

The transformation led by CIO conferences and magazines to "commodity computing" and "open source" because that would be better has shown itself to be a gigantic fraud.

Next lets move all the compute to a few large unnacountable cloud providers running on that rickety infrastructure scaffolding pasted together with a bunch of bespoke orchestration and automation, that will be better.

Serverless means we don't need any CPUs at all right?

Surgeon General's warning on the login screen?

This site Produces Chemicals Known To The State Of California To Cause Cancer, And Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm.

I mean pretty much everything else in the world is on this California list, so...

I am curious to see the impact on sales of X86. Intel especially.

People who refresh gear on a cycle might delay to wait for silicon that is unaffected - which could take a couple years! People who were racing to get off Power or SPARC might do the same or might refresh in place on those platforms instead of paying for a migration.

I have customers who were thinking about migrating custom mainframe apps for their core business and manufacturing operations to SAP on X86/Linux which they might halt or slow down for the same reasons.

Even more so because of the slowdown caused by the patches, the exploit might not get them to move, but having to buy 20-40% more gear? That might blow up an already tight business case. The affect on cloud will also be interesting depending on how the providers react from a price/performance perspective.

Clearly not a Dyson sphere as those never lose suction and would have cleared up the dust by now

It's likely because you're holding it wrong.

Chroot, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones. It doesn't really take the wisdom of Solomon to know that nothing is new under the sun. Many of these problems have been solved before, and the whole "lets get away from VMs" is hilarious after most of my customer spend years and millions migrating off better UNIX technologies to get everything to "VMWare/Linux/X86" because the CIO read about it in a magazine.

The business model was a problem in that world for sure, but the tech wasn't.

So this is where John Ralphio Sapporstine and Tom Haverford ended up after the failure of Entertainement720

This is why you have to know your threat model. I understand and accept that much of what I consider "encrypted" in my daily internet use, from SSL to something like Signal even, is probably not secure from a determined state actor who is targeting my traffic. There is mathematics knowledge in the Cryptonomicon of the U.S. Intel agencies that has never been revealed and likely only shared maybe with the U.K. given the nature of the relationship there since WWII efforts to defeat encryption.

The resistance to end to end encryption by these entities means they likely can't decrypt en masse probably because of processing requirements, but if you are a target they can spend a little processor time on, assume they have some of these tricks buried in the algorithms to ensure they can reverse most commercially available implementations.

I assume also that other nation-states have similar if not equal capabilities, although they probably have less leverage to incorporate such backdoors into commercial products than the U.S. since the game was pretty much invented here.

Because Oracle "Cloud @ Customer" is reckoned for in "Cloud" not in "Hardware" it might be skewing these numbers toward Cloud and making the hardware revenue number look more precipitous than it actually is. Makes sense because they don't sell the gear, but a subscription to the gear, but still a bit apples and oranges. Especially since the margins in cloud whether public or @customer are likely better and there is a more predictable future stream from a subscription than a one time purchase there is likely no panic over the on-prem decline. Oracle from day 1 of the Sun acquisition has de-prioritized general purpose on-prem in favor of engineered and now cloud systems. They were never looking to expand and grow that particular business of running other people's software on their gear/OS that Sun was so successful at for a long time.

I guess we can wait a few more weeks before pasting this fig leaf back on.

No one seems to care and the junk has been waving in the breeze for a while now. They don't even try to argue it being constitutional anymore, just "we need it for safety" and think that will get it by.

Given the careless handling and how misuse of this capability to go after political rivals has been actually done, forget hypotheticals, it is a serious breach of the public trust that long term cannot be ignored.

Was it foolish to think that getting all this stuff out in the open would lead to it being dealt with and curtailed? There are very few lawmakers who care about this, and that should scare we the people.

Minority Princess? (Female Tech CEO) or is this related to Disney's acquisition of the First Order?

That's a NiceHash you've got there, be a shame if something happened to it.

Many emergency medical calls involve people who have spent decades doing stupid things to their bodies. This guy just packed a lifetime worth of such into a single afternoon.

The fact that they are willing to do this when it is publicly known what is going on is pretty scary to me. They obviously don't fear the electoral process, perhaps they don't know what the next step is in the process of destroying a democratic system once they have nullified the will of the people.

If they reauth all of this bullshit without any meaningful reform, it would be nice to see some tech money flow to some of the more religious open source zealots to build some tools and platforms to allow compatible standards based implementations that will just make everything go dark. Also it would be nice to see more direct action from the big 5 but that is just not going to happen until they realize how much they have to lose and we aren't there yet because there aren't meaningful alternatives.

I used to think that the solution was that executives should be responsible legally for customer data kinda like executives are responsible for customer money in financial services accounts, but then, the government doesn't hold those turds responsible either and there are laws in that context already they are just not enforced except for cases where the big guys want a competitor taken out and use their bought and paid for government stooges to get it done.

Until the government isn't completely complicit in the rapine of customer information from domestic corporate networks for their own dubious and possibly evil purposes, they have no credibility to hold private executives to account.

Also, look at the security history of the legislative branch, a bunch of whom had some really sketchy foreign nationals running a small business looking after their IT while also perpetrating a variety of real estate scams and offshoring a bunch of cash to Pakistan...nothing to see here folks, move along.

#Religion

#87 - Let him who speaks against the truth concerning Open Source Software be anathema and accursed

I'll agree to this as soon as the government agrees to only use backdoored encryption also and gives we the people the keys so we can see what the elected and unelected ruling classes are doing

If they aren't doing anything wrong, they shouldn't have any reason to hide it.

There's a reason the article uses the descriptor "Enterprise"

Sure if you are a small company who can easily and cheaply pivot to containers and various layers of services in an Amazon or Azure public cloud you probably won't be running to Oracle or Microsoft software necessarily or trying to set up a super integrated hybrid cloud strategy.

If you are a large enterprise company who is looking at a 10 year slog to get your thousands of custom applications deployed across your enterprise with interconnected and complicated integration from the top ot the bottom of your stack that you spent millions or perhaps billions of dollars having Accenture, PWC, or whoever designing and building for you out of a decades long variety of best of breed (at the time) solutions, then being able to lift and shift that to a hybrid or public cloud without huge re-design, or by being able to aquire an engineered and standardized Microsoft or Oracle stack that you can consume with cloud-like methodologies/APIs as well as funding by pay as you go, but still keep the gear and the network inside your own probably more capable and complicated network design that can't yet be matched by most of the public cloud guys, especially if you are rightly concerned about Multi-tenancy, then this is an area where there is potential growth for these vendors.

If nothing else it gives them time to work over their software portfolios and make them "cloud native" "serverless" "dockerized" "microservices" and whatever other unicorn magic is the buzzword of the next disruptive fad. These companies have the resources and have shown at least enough willingness to pivot that they will likely survive the Cloud transition, as well as the horizontal re-scaling of compute to the edge that undoubtedly will follow...

Is it effective retroactively like their Sales compensation contracts? Will LE, SC, and MH have to work for a couple years for free to pay back the debt from their income now deemed undeserved from the past couple years?

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Godwin's Law doesn't apply to the actual swastika wearing National Socialists down in VA, but it certainly applies to the commentards on this article. I hope the incidences were intentional and ironic, but alas, I think not.

This makes as much sense as "Net Neutrality"

What's good for the goose...

If true "neutrality" were legislated all those firms would be regulated because they all carry significant amounts of traffic on their infrastructure and have a vested interest in preventing disruptive competitors from moving into their territory. "Big Internet" was fine with the Executive branch unilaterally implementing things that gave them specific leverage over the companies that provide the access to their services over very expensive last mile infrastructure which they were unable to replace/bypass, they are less fine with the whole debate being carried out completely and in public where their own lack of care for their users and their own desire to quash fair competition from upstarts will be on display. Implementation by the FCC limited the scope to the infrastructure players and protected the non-ISP techies, but congress could regulate across the whole stack and they are and should be afraid of what that would do to their own desire to dominate markets.

The real issue here is that Title II does not equal net neutrality. We basically here have a government body using powers it doesn't have to solve a problem that doesn't exist by applying a law from the early 1900's written to address the Ma Bell system.

The real reason Netflix,Facebook,Google,Amazon are on board with this is not just to fight the cable companies, but to make it harder for the next Netflix,Facebook,Google,or Amazon to come at them. In the process, it eliminated the ability of the consumer protection agency to deal with the cable companies and set up a perfect scenario where they can lobby the FCC to help them raise prices as well as collect new fees that were formerly not applied to internet providers.

If there is a threat to the freedom of the internet it is by regulations from the FCC and other governments more than from companies who have an interest in the continuing innovation and growth of the market.

When Google and the rest stop funding academics to argue that "neutrality" is sensible for carriers but not for them, and agree that "neutrality" is good for everyone including search providers and internet services, I will consider their position, but I still don't think FCC regulation of the internet is the fix we are looking for, its just adding another problem, likely a more serious one when considering the freedom and innovation made possible by the internet.

The U.S. Constitution spends a much larger portion of its content seeking to protect the citizens from their government than any external threats. The fact that in general 'mericans tend to distrust their government is a heritage that goes all the way back to the start.

If i'm not mistaken the oath of office taken by government officials might actually mention defending the document in question and not just generally defending the United States as a nebulous patriotic idea? You wouldn't try to convince me that they don't actually intend to do that, would you? I mean those speeches in front of the flag are so sincere.

Eliminating secure comms will only open a second front on the regular folks who will have to worry about being criminalized by the voluminous and out of control regulations of every area of life and the economy as well as the fact that at that point just using encryption could label you as a terrorist threat instead of only being at risk from terror/criminal elements. I hope at some point the nerds get through to their bosses that most of these ideas would actually hurt the ability of the government to keep their own secrets secret, but won't hold my breath. It will be private sector devs in both corporate and open source projects that make these kinds of political stupidities irrelevant.

Meaning that the NSA developed a way to collect that data that hasn't been publicly disclosed...

"Commercial Linux"

If we didn't have "cloud" to deal with that would be one of the biggest marketing jokes in the IT world.

Hey Ministry of Silly Walks!

-You can only charge me for petty larceny on that bank robbery you accused me of because I only incidentally collected all that cash and actually went sorting through looking for targeted selector serial numbers to get enough cash to buy a Black and Tan

I wonder if there is a way to leverage these suspicious legal theories to the advantage of the people?

Yeah, probably not.

This whole "memories are not really private" thing is hilarious, until it's not.

How long until they will be able to remember it for you wholesale? With Total Recall?

In a few years these mutated humanoid fish bathed in their tanks of orange Melange spice gas will gain a monopoly on intestellar travel by using their precience to guide guild highliner ships through foldspace.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

In the Tucker Carlson interview with Adam Schiff who is the one who pushes this agenda the hardest in congress, Schiff refused to answer several specific questions and basically just said "it's settled, you refuse to look at the evidence" which he also refused to provide.

It seemed to me that he was indicating the hacking of election orgs in several states were the hacks he was claiming were Russia, when even before the election the consensus was that those hacks were interesting, but really had no impact on the outcome of an election, they were more important for the protection of voter records. He refused to answer whether "The Russians" hacked John Podesta's emails, the DNC, or any of the other exposures that were actually relevant to the election and its outcome. The refusal to specifically attribute and the insistence that Carlson was "ignoring evidence" which has not been made public indicates to me clearly that he is spinning a yarn.