It is kind of a garbage source. friendlysock is doing people a favor by pointing that out, and I wish I’d read his comment before I read the thread.

I agree with you in general, but this specific “article” is just garbage. (As far as I’m concerned, Twitter in general should be blacklisted from lobste.rs. Anything there is either content-free or so inconvenient to read as to be inaccessible.)

This one is somewhat notable for being the first (?) RCE in Rust, a very safety-focused language. However, the CVE entry itself is almost useless, and the previously-linked blog post (mentioned by @Freaky) is a much better article to link and discuss.

That’d be a good meta tag proposal thread.

There are a lot of potentially-RCE bugs (type confusion, use after free, buffer overflow write), if there was a lobsters thread for each of them, there’d be no room for anything else.

Here’s a list a short from the past year or two, from one source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/list?can=1&q=Type%3DBug-Security+label%3AStability-Memory-AddressSanitizer&sort=-modified&colspec=ID+Type+Component+Status+Library+Reported+Owner+Summary+Modified&cells=ids

Server-side rendering is a thing.

Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.

They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal

Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.

We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.

More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.

(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.

Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.

And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.

There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.

Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship.

There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.

There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.

Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.

An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.

So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.

In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:

ISPs do not operate in a free market.

In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.

All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.

Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.

@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit).

Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.

Fair points! I read this bit and it seemed enough to be validate the question:

A company we have been working with has a big debt with us and with other freelancers from all around the globe. They have not answered for months and I have helped them hire other devs that won’t probably be paid. My biggest issue is that they don’t answer and I think that is a really bad attitude to have during this type of situations.

I’m more charitable in assuming the company is at fault than the contractors, though Lord knows I’ve seen contractors drop the ball (and hard).

That said, part of the reason we have problems in this industry is that the people doing the work are hesitant to mention issues that could impact others–it’s basically an issue of informed consent.

Naming and shaming is not as big a problem for big companies as it is for people or small contractors…there was a time where everybody knew for example that Arthur Anderson consulting were bozos on projects and ending up on projects with Androids was a recipe for a headache, and yet they kept getting contracts.

If we want things to get better, we have to look out for each other.

Oh come on. There are plenty of women who own and operate their own businesses. And women are having kids later and marrying later, meaning more free time to start a company.

And you don’t have to start with a giant production. In fact, men don’t start that way either. You start small and grow.

And the wage gap has been debunked so many times that it’s absurd to even bring it up.

Presumably the women in question care more about looking good than carrying things.

The women I know who have different priorities wear different clothes–as do the men I know.

I don’t really know enough about the MUMPS ecosystem to answer, but maybe? It seems to fit the COBOL criteria:

1. “Outdated”[0] language people don’t really want to work in,
2. Relied upon in core parts of large, “boring”, slow-moving companies who have a lot of code and,
3. Who are very unlikely to be disrupted out of their space any time soon

I got the impression that this particular company was one of the few/only software games in town, wherever they were, and that they kinda hoovered-up a lot of the engineering talent from the surrounding region. That said, the person I spoke to was very aware that MUMPS is incredibly niche and was looking to build transferable skills in a more mainstream software environment, and was looking in the Bay Area. So, I could guess they might have a retention problem, at least amongst people who are also willing to relocate for work. That’s speculation, though.

Caveat: This is all from memory of an interview a few years ago

[0] I used air-quotes because not everyone has these perceptions

That’s been on my steam wish list for a very long time. I’ll have to check it out when I “finish” EXAPUNKS.My brief interaction with Verilog was mind-opening. I’d really enjoy a game with a similar medium but the right constraints.

Funny, I’m just teaching myself verilog right now! I’m still in the random walk stage but hopefully soon I’ll have a clue.

Chat link is broken? Are you referring to IRC? For people that don’t inhabit that space is there any mechanism for decisions / important discussions that happen there to get filtered back to the website?

Is there a link to where we (who?) did?

This talk is only tangentially about climate change, as one globally significant effect that technology has and a great example of how to think about the result of technological work.

‘politics’ is about how groups of people take action together, (in anything other than the most rudimentary ways). So climate change science is different from, but will inform climate change politics, which will be the process of figuring out as a group of people how to collectively respond to the information we understand from climate change science.

to bring this back to my original point, I’m suggesting that the lobste.rs community can have a positive benefit on politics (therefore directly influencing e.g. climate change) through technology by discussion, and therefore should consider carefully the choice to not do that.

Ooooh, that makes more sense… Not sure if that doesn’t show up on mobile or if maybe I thought it was links to comments?

Well, that’s a strawman if I’ve ever seen one.

As someone writing an article, I guess it’s difficult to know where to stop the details or not as well. Like, that’s probably a difficult line to draw? Either way, though, I think there’s probably an easy way to tell that I just don’t 100% know how to explain objectively.