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Honestly I’d cut them some slack. It’s easy to assume that a company their size just has all the money to pay for testing and qa and expertise.
But the truth is it’s probably just a handful of engineers who are passionate about playing well in the Linux ecosystem who will probably fix this and not make the mistake again.
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I think if you didn’t know that forcibly removing whatever was at /bin/sh was bad, then no packaging rules can save you.
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Neat. I wondered how this was different from Chocolatey, and found https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/Chocolatey-Comparison
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Sad, wanted to read this but server is 500’ing.
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One year at Kiwicon, Ranty Ben got kicked out for violating the code of conduct, but they didn’t tell us what he specifically did. Was it the ASCII art goatcx demonstrating the problems with PGP signatures? Was it the lesbian fisting line? Was it the “stands out more than a trans Polynesian girl in the desert” line criticizing Tor?
Who knows. They wouldn’t say. The talk was shit honestly, but I don’t think he should have gotten kicked out of the conference for it. I said as much on Twitter and then got raked by people saying I had no right to complain since I was a cis-male. (I could have responded by saying I was a minority, but I didn’t want to get into a race to the bottom).
There was someone in a lightning talk who photoshoped one of the male organizers into a photo where he was holding pigs testicles. People laughed and the organizer even walked out on stage to stare at it and give him a thumbs up. What if it had been one of the female organizers? Would he have been banned?
Safe spaces kinda assume people are fragile and need to be protected. Brendan O’neil does a really good talk about this:
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Was it the ASCII art goatcx demonstrating the problems with PGP signatures? Was it the lesbian fisting line? Was it the “stands out more than a trans Polynesian girl in the desert” line criticizing Tor?
If you wouldn’t do it at a meeting with your boss at your office, don’t do it on stage at a con. Super simple stuff.
It’s not about “safe spaces” in every case. It’s about professionalism. I’m not offended by a picture of someone holding a pig’s testicles, but it serves no purpose in a Photoshop tutorial and is just juvenile. It makes me question your abilities in other ways: you might be amazing at Photoshop but you’re going to have to work that much harder to prove it to me now, because I think you sound like a 14 year old.
(“You” in the abstract sense, not you specifically.)
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So, a little context: Kiwicon is a hackercon .. and not a very professional one .. probably less professional than Defcon by quite a bit.
it serves no purpose in a Photoshop tutorial
It was actually a lightning talk about macos kernel debugging and how gdb was so terrible it was like .. pig testicles .. or something.
Hackercons are a different beast. People use a lot of profanity and many of the talks are more humorous than professional.
Does your opinion change at all due to the context of the type of conference that it was? Or do you think hackercons need to be more professional in general?
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[Comment removed by author]
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These are fair points.
On the other hand, if we want to remove sex and crude humor from talks and presentations, can we also please pull out all of the saccharine nonsense that people shove into their talks?
Things like:
- Cute animals and cartoon references (MLP or brony stuff pls go)
- Manga/anime references
- Tired internet memes
- Stupid music
- Talking about “making the world a better place”
- Plugging people’s employers/library of week/favorite transpiler/whatever (unless that’s the focus of the talk)
- Overly emotional language (“things we love”, “the best ever”, “”, etc.)
- Swearing and pseudo-swearing (”$!#% this”, etc.)
That other stuff is equally distracting to some of us. :(
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That other stuff is equally distracting to some of us. :(
I don’t think it’s remotely comparable, and honestly this comes across as concern-trolling. I’ve never known someone to e.g. break down crying in response to any of your list.
(I don’t necessarily think we should grant a heckler’s veto to anyone who breaks down crying, but we should acknowledge that the kind of emotional reactions some real people do have, in practice, to sex and crude humour, are in a different category to those people have to other kinds of content)
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I’ve never known of anybody to break down crying because of photoshopped pig testicles, and yet here we are.
If you want to discount the experience and preferences of folks like me, that is your choice–but understand that in doing so you have no higher morality than people who are doing the same those you are attempting to defend.
A good quite to meditate on: “You not caring about my problems kind of makes me not want to care about your problems.”
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I’ve never known of anybody to break down crying because of photoshopped pig testicles, and yet here we are.
I don’t think pig testicles specifically, but I’ve absolutely known people to break down crying because someone photoshopped a picture of them as holding animal genitals. Honestly that seems like a fairly normal reaction for a substantial class of people.
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Good time to remind everyone that sexual assault happens to men and women by men and women. Childhood (and adult) trauma leaves scars on the mind. Lets not give opportunity to remind people of darker times. Roughly a sixth of your audience both male and female have been either sexually assaulted or raped. Do not assume men have never been raped, assaulted, either as adults or children. I hope this goes without saying but the same applies for women as their rates are even higher.
Children are also victims of sexual violence, those children grow up, they will be at your con. Don’t do this to people, or at least warn them so they can get the fuck out before fight or flight kicks in.
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Aside from distracting, it uses both time and bandwidth that could be used for conveying more important information. Stuff like that would receive at least some criticism if folks were truly about ridding conferences of “unprofessional” or “unnecessary” content.
I can make an allowance, though, for extra effort directed at stuff like testicles that will cause a ton of distraction or outrage. Not all things are equal. On other side, I have no problem under those rules with occasional image, quote, or video that really drives a point home.
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While I agree with most of the list, I’d say the first two are fine if the speaker manages to bury that so it doesn’t take away from the talk itself (ie, like having it in the background of a slide). Atleast if they know the audience will enjoy it.
Though I do agree that presentations should remain serious at their core, they exist to transmit information to a broad audience.
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Does your presentation change at all due to the type of conference it was at? lorddimwit makes really good points here.
The reason I stopped going to hacker cons is all the reasons outlined with lack of professionalism, and the ‘omg so edgy’ behavior of everybody. Just because hacker conferences tend to have ‘a lot of profanity’ doesn’t mean that you have join in on that. When you do, you’re just supporting that behavior but maybe thats what you want.
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Definitely true too. Being, for example, transgender isn’t fodder for a joke.
(More accurately, it is possible to make tasteful and funny jokes about any demographic group, but you gotta tread really carefully…and if you’re going to do it respectfully, know that everyone’s on board first.)
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lorddimwit speaks truth. All these things sound super juvenile. Photoshopping testicles into your peers hands irrespective of their gender should also not be allowed on stage. In the same way jokes about $Demographic, also super unprofessional and shouldn’t be in any talk at any convention for professionals. Nothing is legally stopping anyone strictly speaking from being a bigot, but if you want people to respect you then you have to treat others with respect. Nobody is going to want to go to your sloppy con for children, and thus codes of conduct were written. Clearly Kiwicon isn’t really adhering to theirs given your description and I’d rather not have to wade through weak gross/bigoted/dumb jokes to get any information on a topic. I mean they didn’t even try to screen the talk before letting him on stage? At that point your talks are just glorified soap boxes.
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It’s reasonable for a con to be able to shape their identity and rules, but they should be done evenly.
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Sure. There’s a gap between “personal, non-corporate” and “let’s photoshop pig testicles onto things.”
I’m not saying it should be illegal or anything. I’m just saying that if you do it and the con boots you out, well…you shoulda known. Start TestiCon if you want to be able to do that without repercussions.
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I’m just saying that if you do it and the con boots you out, well…you shoulda known.
If that’s the con’s approach to dealing with disagreements then what’s the point in having a code? If the code is supposed to clearly communicate expectations and get everyone on the same page about what kind of culture the con is going to have (whether that be “professional”, “juvenile” or whatever), it has evidently failed.
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To be fair, some of the better/widely-viewed Photoshop tutorials are, well, a tad unprofessional.
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There was someone in a lightning talk who photoshoped one of the male organizers into a photo where he was holding pigs testicles. People laughed and the organizer even walked out on stage to stare at it and give him a thumbs up. What if it had been one of the female organizers? Would he have been banned?
What is the point of your rhetorical question? I’m reading it as, “Some content involving people and sex and bodies is more or less appropriate depending on, among other things, the gender of the subject or actor/speaker/presenter, and that doesn’t seem fair.” The next step on the slippery slope is to follow that with, “and it’s less fair to men than to women.”
So, obviously, what people are allowed to get away with in the court of community opinion is different depending on who you are, what your status is, what group you belong to, etc. This is unavoidable reality, and is probably not a problem that needs fixing. Here’s why: the less powerful generally get to joke harder about how fucked up the larger context is, and the more powerful must graciously accept being the butt of those jokes as the price for being more powerful.
So, yeah, it would probably have been a shit move to use a female organiser as the butt of that hilarious Photoshop joke involving testicles (it sounds like a shit move in general for a venue that broad, but that’s beside the point). Violence against women is commonplace and threats or implications/evocations of it are credible.
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For those, like me who were wondering what
diredeven is:“Dired makes an Emacs buffer containing a listing of a directory, and optionally some of its subdirectories as well. You can use the normal Emacs commands to move around in this buffer, and special Dired commands to operate on the listed files.”
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Dired.html
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GeoffWozniak
1 year ago
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link
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Man Puts Computer Through Hell By Installing Every Major Windows Upgrade
Two things come to mind when watching the video, aside from the time it must have taken to do this. There is no question the output is impressive.
First, the backwards compatibility is pretty amazing. The only thing I know that is better at this is mainframes.
Second is the use of the penis ejaculation drawings and stuff like “twatface” and “poo” that show up in the input fields. I gotta think that if I showed this to my wife, she’d be even less inclined to take part in tech stuff (I’ve been trying to get her to get involved for a while). It also makes it much less likely that I’d use it in a class or lecture (if I still did that) even though the content is historically interesting. It’s all rather childish, which is unfortunate.
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There’s nothing wrong with finding them funny, but they are clearly not appropriate for everyone. I don’t mind when it’s added to dime-a-dozen content (“go somewhere else if you don’t like it”) but it’s a pity when relatively rarely-made stuff like this excludes a ton of otherwise-interested audience.
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Right - my point is that ‘just as easily’ is ‘not very easily’ (it’s not a small job).
My point isn’t that it’s some great moral failing - but that it is an unfortunate waste. If it were a waste of something that was easy to create, I wouldn’t care at all.
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There is, of course, a thread on HN (posting it here against my better judgement). According to one Googler:
I managed to find [the questions] and I don’t work in recruiting, they are for SRE pre-screens. The guy misunderstood most of the questions which is why he failed and then worded them incorrectly on his blog, it wasn’t the fault of the questions or the interviewer.
([] edits are mine)
Make of that what you will, but the whole practise of this type of test (whatever the questions) is rather off-putting to me.
I can understand completely why Google interviews take the form they do - with the volume of applications they get, they need a system that filters the wheat from the chaff quite quickly. The problem I have is that the rigid Q&A with no room for discussion strikes me as far too inflexible.
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Make of that what you will, but the whole practise of this type of test (whatever the questions) is rather off-putting to me.
That’s because the whole premise is predicated on the power imbalance of “we’re Google, so jump through these hoops” rather than a discussion that paves the way to a deeply technical discussion. I’m not saying they’re being nefarious here, it’s more this weird institutional behavior that results from achieving any sort of notoriety, where the bar gets raised ridiculously high for potential hires because “omg one bad hire could ruin us.”
There are definitely interviewers that delight in this sort of thing, but I really believe this is a breakdown in a system where every candidate, even if they come in for an interview, is automatically ‘not-fit,’ and must perform near-perfectly in order to become ‘fit.’
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it’s more this weird institutional behavior that results from achieving any sort of notoriety, where the bar gets raised ridiculously high for potential hires because “omg one bad hire could ruin us.”
“One bad hire could ruin us” is an admission of managerial incompetence. If a company is so fragile against bad hires that an incompetent junior programmer can take the whole thing down, then maybe the VPs and the C-words earning $250,000 per year aren’t doing their jobs.
Also, “false negatives are better than false positives” is not always true. False negatives lead to false positives, because you still have to fill the role and if you shut out too many good people, you end up deeper in the barrel. Besides, people can’t be linearly ranked. The person who’s too picky to date people with/lacking Superficial Feature X at age 25 ends up dating a larger proportion those with Serious Deficit Y at 30, because that person rejected too many people for bad reasons.
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the power imbalance of “we’re Google, so jump through these hoops”
Exactly, and much like the “Techtopus” wage fixing scandal, the hoop-jumping just spreads from firm to firm. Some time back I read of someone interviewing with Amazon and (IIRC) he had seven interviews before being made an offer. Sheesh, I’m pretty certain medical doctors don’t have it so hard!
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I interviewed for a job at Mozilla and went through six interviews before being rejected. I did poorly on the sixth interview, and I understand why they passed after that, but the fact that there were that many interviews was a bit ridiculous.
I think they didn’t want to do a panel interview, so each member of the team I’d have potentially joined did their own interview. I would have preferred a panel, if only because it wouldn’t have used so much time or required so much reorganization of my schedule to accommodate.
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where the bar gets raised ridiculously high for potential hires because “omg one bad hire could ruin us.”
I don’t think this frames it the right way. I have been heavily involved with the interview process for 2 unicorns under heavy growth phases. I’ve helped develop the interview process as well as performing the most interviews of my department last year. So I’ve done a lot of interviews. From that I can say, it’s not the idea that “one bad hire could ruin us”, it’s that when you’re trying to hire hundreds of people in a short period of time you can can let tens of bad hires in in one round, and that has the potential to be pretty bad. Striking that balance is really really challenging and it’s simply much easier to be conservative about it if you can afford it.
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I do wonder how long until they start to see a large increase in declines from actually taking part in their interview process.
I obviously think that they will still get a steady stream of CV’s from fresh grads but I do think they will meet more ‘not interested’ replies from people they spear fish themselves. I know of at least a few people that don’t even want to bother with them but they would gladly go through the hoops a couple of years ago.
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Don’t know if we are on the same page. I was complaining about a Google employee writing a comment on HN based on internal information, that should be kept confidential (protecting the individual). So I am not against sharing the list of questions, I am against a Google employee sharing an assessment of the applicants performance.
I don’t have much against that guy sharing the questions he was asked in the interview.
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I interpreted the comment to say “I looked at the actual questions we ask, and the ones in this post are similar but not the same.” If someone accuses a company of asking shitty questions, I think it’s fair game for the company to respond and say that the allegedly shitty questions have been misrepresented. The googler didn’t just show up out of the blue and announce “this guy sucked”. If you don’t want people discussing your interview performance, don’t write a blog post about your interview performance.
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I had a similar experience with Google. It’s been several years, but I remember that I rated myself as competent at Linux and one of the phone screen questions they asked was “What is the order of fields in the shadow password file?” Even worse, I had a recruiter a few years ago who wanted to give me a “programming test.” Okay, sure. They asked me to choose languages, and one of the ones I listed was PHP (I was young). The test expected me to know how to write text to an image without searching the web.
Ahh, yes, imagettftext, the most frequently-used of all standard library functions.
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I love how they will prevent you from using the stdlib and write the function in Google Doc to prove you know what you’re talking about. Write tests? LOL. Use a REPL? LOL. Write it all your code in this Google Doc, you know its just like your daily coding environment. And don’t make any mistakes, or ever think your program works unless you know it works, but good luck with that.
My problem with this method is that it tests to see if you are a very specific type of person. Good luck with that failing diversity initiative Google.
And enjoy the feedback you get on your interview. Why weren’t you a fit? Oh. the interviewer didn’t leave any feedback.
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Yeah, I went through a similar first interview there a couple years ago. I was invited back for more interviews but was so put off by their process that I declined and went with a different job offer instead. Having seen a few friends burn out there I don’t regret that decision.
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I too had a similar experience as the OP, with many of the same questions, although in my case the interviewer was thoughtful, kind, had a good ‘close enough’ filter, and although I passed and they continued to show interest, I found a better fit/opportunity before they called back.
That said, in my opinion there are probably better questions to ask in a tech filter than what signal number correlates specifically to a particular signal enum name, or what the set of calls you need to make in C in order to get to a full TCP connection are. Those are handy to know off the top of your head, but they’re second- or third-order indicative of what I believe Google really wants, and may tilt towards people who have very recent CS degrees (as those are the people who have recently implemented languages or bare metal network servers in classes).
On the third hand, Google appears to be doing fine and going from strength to strength. So it’s possible that the process, as convoluted and error-prone as it may superficially appear to us on the outside, is just what they need, even if it gets there surprisingly.
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Building mods for Fallout 4. Its a nice distraction from Tech, which I still feel burnt out with.
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I think its pretty good, lacking in some ways, and thankful the modding community exists. I also feel like Bethesda released a subpar product with the hopes that the modding community would fill in the gaps. I’ve loved all the DLC for it so far, the stories and quests were great. But I do feel like it lost a lot of the ‘grit’ that made Fallout in past games.
I’ve also found scraps of a bunch of cut content while exploring through the creation kit; and I’m working on restoring some of it.
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Reasons why I work remotely.
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A. Why was Redis running as root? B. Why wasn’t AppArmor/SELinux enabled? C. Why wasn’t the firewall configured to restrict Redis / SSH connections.
I can go on and on.
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B. Why wasn’t AppArmor/SELinux enabled?
Because the first step of every Linux guide for anything ever is “Disable SELinux.”
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Is that the case for AppArmor too? My very under-informed understanding is that people usually don’t bother disabling or touching AppArmor because the profiles that Debian et downstream ship tend to be permissive enough to not be noticeable.
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av
2 years ago
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Fix inconsiderate naming - PR on Swift, to change Master/Slave to Leader/Follower
The PR has been now merged. The same guy also sent another PR - Use gender-neutral language.
However now, there is another PR which asks for change Leader/Follower to Primary/Replica - (Properly) fix potentially inconsiderate naming
On a related note, even Django had same PR and it was merged - #22667 replaced occurrences of master/slave terminology with leader/follower
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It’s sad to see people wasting engineering time on this–note the brief breakage of tests that occurred due to this.
Master/Slave is completely reasonable terminology, in certain cases. For example, it is intuitive that a slave is never given master responsibilities, and that they are probably interchangable (“I am Spartacus!”).
There are certainly word combinations more suitable for other relationships, and we should all use those where it aids comprehension, but people getting grumpy about a pairing that is well-defined and understood is frivolous.
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I agree that this is a complete waste of time. Because the reasoning is somebody being offended by widely used and understood terminology. The second link, suggests “primary” and “secondary” naming which adds an interesting new angle. There is a technical limitation on the applicability of “master” and “slave” to a system involving two layers, while “primary” and “secondary” can do two layers or more just by extending the naming to “tertiary” and such.
But while this kind of naming is good, it is not the motivation of this patch.
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Not really “everything” since its a work in progress. PR’s accepted at https://github.com/opsschool/curriculum
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Now’s a good time for a reminder that spam catch addresses work well for junk mail, too. You wouldn’t believe the number of flyers and credit card offers I get addressed to my cat. ;)
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Then you submit a change-of-address form to the post office (you’ll have to do it with the paper cards they have at the office, it won’t work online) with your cat’s name and “no forwarding address” as the new address. They’ll bounce that mail back to the sender and you won’t have to see it anymore.
I have to do this a few times whenever I move to a new apartment and I get tired of seeing junk spam for people that haven’t lived there in many years.
Of course you’ll still be subjected to the “… or Current Resident” spam.
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Your cat doesnt have to receive any of that paper waste, you can opt out.
Paper bullshit - https://www.dmachoice.org/ Credit Card offers - https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
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Done that (for family and cat), made no difference.
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The ‘Chuck Norris’ fact had me closing the page immediately.
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There’s a lot of…interesting English scattered across the page.
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I started out with EFnet in the mid 90’s and have been using Freenode for over a decade. IRC is a huge part of my social life. I’ve met most of my friends because of local IRC channels. I can also thank IRC connections for multiple real jobs.
That said, I think most of the infrastructure around IRC is definitely built for and by hackers. Most bouncers are a SPOF waiting to happen, few support external user databases, many are ‘configured’ via messages sent through the bouncer itself, or a hackjob web-inteface.
Give me a bouncer that:
- connects to a database (eg, ldap)
- can synchronize data across multiple instances (or deals well with data restored from a S3 backup)
- can be configured via a reasonable API
- can be monitored via a reasonable API
- can handle 1000+ synchronous users.
I feel like robustirc is a step in this direction, but clients are still problematic. The great thing about IRC is that the interface is simple and anybody can write a simple client. The bad thing is that the majority of IRC clients are awful. Text, and GUI based IRC clients could be improved greatly, but they are still mostly stuck in the stone age.
This is where Slack wins, the visual interface is appealing. Its easy to setup. It has message storage, and search. I can connect from multiple clients are they all get the same thing. Its great, until you use the Slack IRC Bridge. Its amazing that the IRC Bridge exists, but its a awful experience for users who have no interest in using the Slack app or web interface. Many of the integration’s render horribly in text, and many messages translated from Slack -> IRC get mucked up in the process. Code pasted via snippets is fine, but you can’t deal with those in the IRC Bridge, code pasted directly into the channel via a Slack client render broken code through the IRC Bridge.
With all that in mind, I find it strange that so many programmer communities are jumping ship to Slack. Sure its free, but so is /join'ing a channel on Freenode. People can be jerks in either IRC or Slack, and you can kick, ban, and ignore them from both.
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What’s he talking about?
‘However, the world around us is no longer suited for IRC’.. the world that was ever suited to IRC is still well suited to IRC…
A revival of IRC? freenode.net has 100,000 users online now. I don’t remember how many people were simultaneously online in the heyday of EFNet, but was it much more than this?
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Some numbers here. http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/
Fair enough on overall decline, my main reference point over the past few years was freenode only, which is still growing steadily, up 25% since this article.
‘Ideological zealots and power users’ is completely unuseful and inaccurate judgement onf the elitist control freaks who populate IRC ;)
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Yup. This is my main experience of IRC for ever. I am conscious that it’s an environment where asking questions that are not pitched at the right level is not productive though - if you ask a question that you should reasonably be able to solve yourself, you may get an offensive response. Too hard / abstract question results in questioning your approach/tools/reason for existence, etc.
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They’re not comparable: slack is for a team who have some kind of shared purpose or relationship; IRC (the IRC I’m talking about) is a public space, where people have no motivation other than to be helpful, or help support a particular project, or, y'know, score ego points.
The answer to your question though is that there is no ‘not pitched right’ on slack (all the slack’s i’m in), I would expect any and all questions to get met with a helpful response.
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In the context of this post (and others) projects are choosing between irc and slack (or at least being told to choose), so some people find them comparable. But my question is really, at the point where a project decides to use slack, why can’t they decide to not be jerks on irc?
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Most slacks still seem to have multiple channels, which can certainly be set up along eg different technical levels. Asking a beginner question in the expert channel (or vice versa) is the equivalent of asking in the wrong irc channel.
The biggest difference for me is that I am only on well moderated Slacks that have a good, thorough code of conduct which is enforced, having been deliberately set up as welcoming spaces, whereas I started using IRC before that was a thing, and so many channels either have not embraced it, or have baggage from the more, ah, ‘abrasive’ past.
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We also had a pretty good experience using it in a research group. I set up a direct webchat link via Mibbit for people who weren’t interested in finding an IRC client, and a number of people just joined via the IM clients they were already using, some of which support IRC (Adium, Pidgin, Trillian, etc.).
There wasn’t really any preexisting “IRC culture” per se, good or bad, because it was just the members of the research group, so the culture was whatever culture we had.
Now I’m in another group that uses Slack, with some personnel overlap with the people who used to use IRC, and the main thing people like better about it is that the server stores messages when you aren’t connected, so you can read them later. You can do that on IRC if you use it (as I do) in the Unix-style irssi-in-tmux way, where you’re connected 24/7, but if you use Mibbit or Adium to IRC, you miss what happens when you aren’t connected. Some way of fixing that problem would be nice.
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They exist, but they are definitely not built for the enterprise. Have you ever tried to run a ZNC for ~400 users? Its difficult to manage, doesn’t link to LDAP or any other database, most of its configuration takes place via a web-interface. SSL is also a pain, unless you use ZNC to generate the certificate. If you already have a Internal CA, its going to be pain.
Additionally, no bouncer that I’ve seen supports any type of HA, all of their state tends to be stored locally. Making them a Single Point of Failure.
I’d love to see a bouncer built for more than ‘hackers on quakenet’.
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I think an attempt at making an open Slack-like thing on top of IRC would at least be dependent on a bouncer layer and a client layer. The bouncer layer can abstract away the server’s problems such as lack of persistent logs and push notifications, if it isn’t integrated into the server. (You’ll also need a client capable of supporting this new stuff too. AFAIK, Palaver is an iOS client with ZNC integration, but it’s still IRC and ZNC, with all their warts at the end of the day.)
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Theoretically, businesses could just raise their prices and wages until they can find workers, right? The housing situation is insane, but for the right price, people might commute to work in a place they can’t afford to live.
What is it that I’m missing, and why isn’t that happening?
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So why would the crypto community recommend against checking for them? The cost is essentially zero.
And why is OpenSSL superior for fixing code nobody uses?
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…I don’t think that OpenSSL is being considered superior here.
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“The LibreSSL response? The #ifdefs and code in them have been deleted.
The OpenSSL response? The code… that in 11 years had never been used… for a deprecated cipher… was fixed on Saturday, retaining the #ifdefs
<drops mic; walks off stage>"
They are trying to sound superior because they “fixed” the code rather than just deleting it.
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Philip Guenther, author of this email, is an OpenBSD and LibreSSL developer.
I’m confused why everyone is confused - perhaps guenther@’s commit will clear that up. If not: Guenther & LibreSSL are trying to (rightly) sound superior to OpenSSL because the right decision is to yank never used code on a long dead cipher.
As to GP:
So why would the crypto community recommend against checking for them? The cost is essentially zero.
DES has been broken in < 1 day in 2008. Who knows how fast we can do it today. You shouldn’t be generating new DES keys under any situation. Adding code to support it only adds more places for bugs to live.
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This was on the openbsd-tech mailing list. I don’t think OpenSSL is trying to sound anything, as they weren’t involved in the discussion.
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As a European, I don’t quite get it: Americans seem to be concerned with net neutrality, meanwhile not protesting huge monopolistic corporations(the gatekeepers) removing some controversial users on their own judgement and with no way to appeal. Are individuals excluded from the net neutrality?
I’m not very familiar with the legal details, but I assume the distinction is general access to the internet being considered a utility, while access to platforms being considered something like a privilege. E.g. roads shouldn’t discriminate based on destination, but that doesn’t mean the destination has to let you in.
edit: As to why Americans don’t seem as concerned with it (which is realize I didn’t address): I think most people see it as a place, like a restaurant. You can be kicked out if you are violating policies or otherwise disrupting their business, which can include making other patrons uncomfortable. Of course there are limits which is why we have anti-discrimination laws.
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.
Do you have the source for these claims regarding ISPs?
Which ones?
One of them described a situation with a contracted, construction crew with guy doing the digging not speaking English well. They were supposedly digging for incumbent but dug through his line. He aaid he pointed that it was clearly marked with paint or something. The operator claimed he thought that meant there wasnt a line there.
That’s a crew that does stuff in that area for a living not knowing what a line mark means. So, he figured they did it on purpose. He folded since he couldnt afford to sue them. Another mentioned them unplugging their lines in exchanges or something that made their service appear unreliable. Like the rest, they’d have to spend money they didnt have on lawyers who’d have to prove (a) it happened snd/or (b) it was intentional.
The landmark case in the United States is throttling of Netflix by Comcast. Essentially, Comcast held Netflix customers hostage until Netflix paid (which they did).
It’s important to understand that many providers (Comcast, AT&T), also own the channels (NBC, CNN, respectively). They have an interest in charging less for their and their partners content, and more for their competitors content, while colluding to raise prices across the board (which they have done in the past with television and telephone service).
Collectively, they all have an interest in preventing new entrants to the market. The fear is that big players (Google, Amazon) will be able to negotiate deals (though they’d probably prefer not to), and new or free technologies (like PeerTube) will get choked out.
Net neutrality is somewhere where the American attitude towards corporations being able to do whatever to their customers conflicts with the American attitude that new companies and services must be able to compete in the marketplace.
You’re right to observe that individuals don’t really enter into it, except that lots of companies are pushing media campaigns to sway public opinion towards their own interests. You’re seeing those media campaigns leaking out.
Switching to the individual perspective.
I just don’t want to pay more for the same service. In living memory Americans have seen their gigantic monopolistic telecommunications company get broken up, and seen prices for services drop 100 fold; more or less as a direct consequence of that action.
As other posts have noted, the ISP situation in the US is already pretty dire unless you’re a business. Internet providers charge whatever they can get away with and have done an efficient job of ensuring customers don’t have alternatives. Telephone service got regulated, but internet service did not.
Re-reading your post after diving on this one… We’re not really concerned about the same gatekeepers. I don’t think any American would be overly upset to see players like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix go away and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of those guys implode as long as they don’t get access to too much of the infrastructure.
Right-leaning US Citizen here. I’ll attempt to answer this as best as I can.
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). But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
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. I do remember this article was moderately interesting, saying that the majority of root DNS servers are run by US companies. But, that doesn’t really faze me. As soon as people start censoring, that get backlash whether the media covers it or not
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. I bet you didn’t know that InfoWars was the #1 news app with 5 stars on the Apple app store within a couple of weeks of them getting banned from Facebook, etc. I don’t really have any opinion about Alex Jones (lots of people on the right don’t agree with him), but you can bet I downloaded his app when I found out he got banned.
P.S. I assumed that InfoWars was what you were referring to when you said “removing some controversial users” P.P.S. I just checked the app store again, and it’s down to #20 in news, but still has 5 stars.
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.
It’s interesting to contrast this to New Zealand, where I live in a town of 50,000 people and have at least 5 ISPs I can choose from. I currently pay $100 NZ a month for an unlimited gigabit fibre connection, and can hit ~600 mbit from my laptop on a speed test. The NZ government has intervened heavily in the market, effectively forcing the former monopolist (Telecom) to split into separate infrastructure (Chorus) and services (Telecom) companies, and spending a lot of taxpayer money to roll out a nationwide fibre network. The ISPs compete on the infrastructure owned by Chorus. There isn’t drastic competition on prices: most plans are within $10-15 of each other, on a per month basis, but since fibre rolled out plans seem to have come down from around $135 per month to now around $100.
I was lucky to have decent internet through a local ISP when I lived in one of Oakland’s handful of apartment buildings, but most people wouldn’t have had that option. I think the ISP picture is a lot better in NZ. Also, net neutrality is a non-issue, as far as I know. We have it, no-one seems to be trying to take it away.
I’m always irritated that there are policies decried in the United States as “impossible” when there are demonstrable implementations of it elsewhere.
I can see it being argued that the United States’s way is better or something, but there are these hyperbolic attacks on universal health care, net neutrality, workers’ rights, secure elections, etc that imply that they are simply impossible to implement when there are literally dozens of counterexamples…
At the risk of getting far too far off topic.
One of the members of the board at AT&T was the CEO of an insurance company, someone sits on the boards of both Comcast/NBC and American Beverages. The head of the FCC was high up at Verizon.
These are some obvious, verifiable, connections based in personal interest. Not implying that it’s wrong or any of those individuals are doing anything which is wrong, you’ve just gotta take these ‘hyperbolic attacks’ with a grain of salt.
Interlocking Directorates
Non-mobile link
Oh yeah it’s infuriating. It helps to hit them with examples. Tell them the media doesn’t talk about them since they’re all pushing something. We all know that broad statement is true. Then, briefly tell them the problems that we’re trying to solve with some goals we’re balancing. Make sure it’s their problems and goals. Then, mention the solution that worked else where which might work here. If it might not fit everyone, point out that we can deploy it in such a way where its specifics are tailored more to each group. Even if it can’t work totally, maybe point out that it has more cost-benefit than the current situation. Emphasize that it gets us closer to the goal until someone can figure out how to close the remaining gap. Add that it might even take totally different solutions to address other issues like solving big city vs rural Internet. If it worked and has better-cost benefit, then we should totally vote for it to do better than we’re doing. Depending on audience, you can add that we can’t have (country here) doing better than us since “This is America!” to foster some competitive, patriotic spirit.
That’s what I’ve been doing as part of my research talking to people and bouncing messages off them. I’m not any good at mass marketing, outreach or anything. I’ve just found that method works really well. You can even be honest since the other side is more full of shit than us on a lot of these issues. I mean, them saying it can’t exist vs working implementations should be an advantage for us. Should. ;)
Beautifully said.
My family’s been in this country since the Mayflower. I love it dearly.
Loving something means making it better and fixing its flaws, not ignoring them.
Thanks and yes. I did think about leaving for a place maybe more like my views. That last thing you said is why I’m still here. If we fix it, America won’t be “great again:” it would be fucking awesome. If not for us, then for the young people we’re wanting to be able to experience that. That’s why I’m still here.
Only if you can’t find Austin on a map… ;)
Native Texan/Austinite here. Texas is the South, Southwest, or just Texas. All the rest of y’all are just Yankees. ;)
But if their ISP starts doing anything shady, they’ll surely get some backlash, even if they can’t switch they can complain.
They’ve been complaining for decades. Nothing happens most of the time. The ISP’s have many lobbyists and lawyers to insulate them from that. The big ones are all doing the same abusive practices, too. So, you can’t switch to get away from it.
Busting up AT&T’s monopoly got results in lower costs, better service, better speeds, etc. Net neutrality got more results. I support more regulation of these companies and/or socialized investment to replace them like the gigabit for $350/mo in Chattanooga, TN. It’s 10Gbps now I think but I don’t know what price.
Actually, I go further due to their constant abuses and bribing politicians: Im for having a court seizetheir assets, converting them to nonprofits, and putting new management in charge. If at all possible. It would send a message to other companies that think they can do damage to consumers and mislead regulators with immunity to consequences.
The problem is that corporate fines are generally a small percentage of profits.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-radcliffe/should-companies-obey-the-law_b_1650037.html
What incentive does the ISP have to change? Unless you can complain to some higher authority (FCC, perhaps) then there is no reason for the ISP to make any changes even with backlash. I’d be more incentivized to complain if there was at least some competition.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
This was also brought up by @hwayne, @caleb and @friendlysock, and is not something that occurred to me. I appreciate all who are mentioning this.
Wow, I did not know that. I can see that as a legitimate reason to want net neutrality. But, I also think that they’ll piss off a lot of people if they can stream CNN but not InfoWars.
I understood it to also mean that you also couldn’t charge customers differently because of who they are. Also, don’t things like Tor mitigate things like that?
I completely agree. But in the US we have a free market (at least, we used to) and that means that the government is supposed to stay out of it as much as possible.
I also agree. But these corporations (the tier-1 ISPs) haven’t done anything noticeable to me to limit my enjoyment of conservative content, and I’m pretty sure that they would’ve by now if they wanted to.
The reason I oppose net neutrality is more because I don’t think that the government should control it than any more than I think AT&T and others should.
But they haven’t.
edit: how -> who
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.
I read the comments, and I read most of the freecodecamp article.
I like the ideal of the internet being a public utility, but I don’t really want the government to have that much control.
I think the real problem I have with government control of the internet, is that I don’t want the US to end up like china with large swaths of the internet completely blocked.
I don’t really know how to solve our current problems. But, like @jfb said elsewhere in this thread, I don’t think that net neutrality is the best possible solution.
I might recognize a name, but I probably wasn’t even around yet.
Thanks for the info, I’ll read it and possibly form a new opinion.
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.
I don’t personally care if the prioritize certain websites, but I sure as hell care if the block something.
As far as I’m concerned, they can slow down Youtube by 10% for conservative channels and I wouldn’t give a damn even though I watch and enjoy some. What really bothers me is when they “erase” somebody or block people from getting to them.
well you did say they have an incentive to provide “equal service” so i guess you meant something else. net neutrality supporters like me aren’t satisfied with “nobody gets blocked,” because throttling certain addresses gives big corporations more tools to control media consumption, and throttling have similar effects to blocking in the long term. i’m quite surprised that you’d be fine with your ISP slowing down content you like by 10%… that would adversely affect their popularity compared to the competitors that your ISP deems acceptable, and certain channels would go from struggling to broke and be forced to close down.
Well, I have pretty fast internet, so 10% wouldn’t be terrible for me. However, I can see how some people would take issue with such a slowdown.
I was using a bit an extreme example to illustrate my point. What I was trying to say was that they can’t really stop people from watching the content that they want to watch.
I recall, but didn’t review, a study saying half of web site users wanted the page loaded in 2 seconds. Specific numbers aside, I’ve been reading that kind of claim from many people for a long time that a new site taking too long to load, being sluggish, etc makes them miss lots of revenue. Many will even close down. So, the provider of your favorite content being throttled for even two seconds might kill half their sales since Internet users expect everything to work instantly. Can they operate with a 50% cut in revenue? Or maybe they’re bootstrapping up a business with a few hundred or a few grand but can’t afford to pay for no artificial delays. Can they even become the content provider your liked if having to pay hundreds or thousands extra on just extra profit? I say extra profit since ISP’s already paid for networks capable of carrying it out of your monthly fee.
yeah, the shaping of public media consumption would happen in cases where people don’t know what they want to watch or don’t find out about something that they would want to watch
anti-democratic institutions already shape media consumption and discourse to a large extent, but giving them more tools will hurt the situation. maybe it won’t affect you or me directly, but sadly we live in a society so it will come around to us in the form of changes in the world
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.
That’s a witty way of putting it.
But yeah, @lorddimwit mentioned the small number of tier-1 ISPs. I didn’t realize there were so few, but I still think that net neutrality is overreaching, even if its less than I originally thought.
Personally, I feel that net neutrality, such as it is, would prevent certain problems that could be better addressed in other, more fundamental ways. For instance, why does the US allow the companies that own the copper to also own the ISPs?
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.
I think you’re a bit late to the party, I’ve conceded that fact already.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
I might’ve been conflating two different political issues, but I have heard “fascist” and “nazi” used to describe the entire right wing.
A quick google search for “net neutrality fascism” turned this up https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbye4z/heres-why-net-neutrality-is-essential-in-trumps-america
You assume that net neutrality is a left-wing issue, which it’s not. It actually has bipartisan support. The politicians who oppose it have very little in common, aside from receiving a large sum of donations from telecom corporations.
As far as terms like “fascist” or “Nazi” are concerned—I think they have been introduced into this debate solely to ratchet up the passions. It’s not surprising that adding these terms to a search yields results that conflate the issues.
Ill add on your first point that conservatives who are pro-market are almost always pro-competition. They expect the market will involve competition driving whats offered up, its cost down, and so on. Both the broadband mandate and net neutrality achieved that with an explosion of businesses and FOSS offering about anything one can think of.
The situation still involves 1-3 companies available for most consumers that, like a cartel, work together to not compete on lowering prices, increasing service, and so on. Net neutrality reduced some predatory behavior the cartel market was doing. They still made about $25 billion in profit between just a few companies due to anti-competitive behavior. Repealing net neutrality for anti-competitive market will have no positives for consumer but will benefit roughly 3 or so companies by letting them charge more for same or less service.
Bad for conservative’s goals of market competition and benefiting conservative voters.
One part of it is that we already have net neutrality, and it’s easier to try to hang on to a regulation than to create a new one.