I read Morganstein's letter. I will repeat what I wrote above: what the bill calls for to be publicly available is the science (i.e. the methodology) and the data. Personal details are not part of the data!!! Those are administrative details.

Just as Morganstein says, simply stripping names is not always enough to de-personalize data. But other methods are easily available.

This is a non-issue.

Please show us exactly where it says this.

In a medical study, your SSN, DOB, and (non-anonymized) medical information are not data. In fact they are mostly irrelevant to the actual DATA of the study. Your approximate DOB may be important, and your medical history (and I very highly doubt they would require a complete medical history) might be relevant, but your name or SSN? Fucking hardly.

This is really reaching, by anybody's standards. I read the article, and Morganstein's letter.

The language of the bill calls for "publicly available science". It does not say that the subjects of any studies cannot be kept confidential. That's just malarkey.

As I wrote above: such studies or surveys, by their very nature, are presumed to be repeatable. The idea is that anyone else who conducted such a study, with a similar but separate sample of individuals, would come up with the same results. After all: that's what the studies are for.

To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't anywhere say that study subjects cannot be anonymous. The only thing that can't be anonymous or secret are the authors and their methodologies.

I don't mind honest debate about the issue, but the idea that the statement "publicly available" could reasonably apply to study subjects is a pretty long and thin stretch of the imagination.

What's also not common sense is that this would keep EPA from using health studies from confidential sources. By their very nature, such studies are presumed to be repeatable; if not, then the researcher(s) are using questionable statistical methods at best. Like biased sampling methods, for example.

There is nothing in there that would preclude using decent studies which used non-controversial methodology. Whether the subjects of the studies remain confidential, or not.

The language of the bill is very clear. It is intended to do what it says: make sure our regulatory bodies (employees of The People) are making their decisions based on publicly available, sound science.

Why should they be able to keep their "science" secret, as they have? That's obviously a non-starter. Especially when they're attempting to shove the most expensive regulations in history off on the public.

Verhoeven completely misunderstood the book, was the thing, and made a parody of it. What he missed, what Heinlein's reader's often miss, is that Heinlein doesn't write utopias. None of his books are some imagining of an ideal society. The point of Starship Troopers was to explore in depth what life would be like in a militaristic/fascist society from the point of view of someone who knew nothing else. It was subtle and powerful as a result: the point-of-view characters are fully adapted to their society, and don't point out all the ways it's batshit crazy. Heinlein trusts the reader to make that call, to see how easily people get used to even such a harsh society and accept it as normal, if that's all you know.

Verhoeven missed all of that, saw it as an endorsement of the society in the book, and parodied it, turning the really interesting point the book was making into trite anvilicious crap.

Moon is the same - exploring an ultra-libertarian society in the same detail, in the same way from the point of view of people adapted to it. I expect the same Hollywood treatment: making a satire of it since they see the society as unwanted, not realizing it wasn't an endorsement in the first place but a critique.

Wow, auto-correct had a blast with that code. "Monuments" indeed!

Tech debt is like credit card debt: the interest is a bitch. I worded for a while at one company that nearly folded because the time required for emergency bug fixes grew to, then past 100% of development time for the team. Horrible code doesn't just require more bug fixes in the first place, each change grows progressively more expensive and unsafe.

10k lines of shipped, production code is only of value if it's working bug free and without complaint. 10k lines of buggy code, that you have to add a week to any project that modifies in any way, that has negative value.

That being said, if the code is "cleaned up" by the same team that wrote it in the first place, you likely don't come out ahead. The only reason that company "nearly" folded was monuments willingness to hire about 10 senior guys like me to rescue what we could - 6 of them quite within a few weeks, but the 4 of us who stayed managed a few core fixes that kept it limping along for enough time to find a buyer for the company before it went under.

And when did I imply any such thing? I'm think you read more into my comment than I actually wrote.

What I did write, was that there are obviously fewer comments on YouTube as a result of that action.

My point was that IF they were being used to dazzle IR cameras, they're pointless because IR cameras wouldn't see your face behind the glasses anyway. They might recognize A face, but not YOUR face.

Also, not mentioned earlier but just as cogent: IR blasters wouldn't work on most halfway decent cameras anyway, because they have IR filters on them... precisely because IR messes up the exposure.

10,000 line functions are shockingly common in industry. Shit grows over time, and is so poorly written that you can't safely refactor it, and management lacks the balls to let you clean it up, so it just festers and festers.

I hear PayPal had 90% of their processing business logic in a single, multi-million-line class! Thankfully, I don't know that one first hand.

Government will fuck you sideways for a laugh, then shoot your dog and seize your house. I'll take Google's arbitrary of government's malice any day.

Whatever your perspective on that, someone, somewhere has to rank search results. If Google becomes capricious, people will stop using them (I haven't used them to search in 5+ years). If some government controls search results, it will get worse every year, and never ever get fixed.

Contrary to what was reported from many sources, he DID go to them first, before publishing the exploit. The fault for not fixing it immediately rests on them, not him.

What he did was normal curiosity. Hell, I've done it. In fact I don't know of any web or security professionals who haven't. Got an ID in the URL? Increment it by one, see what happens. We all do it.

Granted, we don't normally explore it to the degree he did. But what he did was ridiculously simple, and hardly even deserves the term "hacking" at all. What THEY did was akin to leaving the back gate open and putting out a sign that says "Come on in!", then complaining about it when someone did.

Anyway, I'll repeat what I said about my own experience: I didn't need to go "fishing" for information in that case. It was being sent TO ME, just in a non-obvious way. I stumbled across it, I didn't go looking for it or trying to exploit it. I sure could have, though.

It wasn't like that. THEY were spilling information. I wasn't going looking for it.