...have to VPN in to the work network to deal with switches or to check the status of an outage, I'm automatically assumed to be a pirate?

Seems like the BBC is looking to piss off every IT department in the UK.

I think it's definitely wrong when talking to or about a specific victim. They feel horrible enough already.

On the other hand, such talk probably has a useful place in rape (or violence in general) prevention education, for example. The advice can do good only when given in advance.

That's exactly the point that I, and others who feel the same as I do, are trying to make. There's nothing we can do for the current crop of victims. What we can do is to point out how bloody stupid their actions were, and how others need to not follow these same actions if they don't want to find themselves in this exact same situation.

The women featured in these leaks are already massively publicly famous. This isn't slut-shaming someone unknown, dragging them into the limelight. This is pointing out how the high and mighty have unwittingly assisted in bringing themselves down, and how conditions that they never thought of have led to this.

Nevertheless, women are raped at parties where they're blackout-drunk. To me, the solution is to not get drunk to the point that one loses all control of one's faculties.

Compare to this current debate. If naked pictures are being stolen from technology that is beyond the understanding and control of the user, don't take naked pictures with technology that's beyond the understanding and control of the user.

Then I'm happy that a meteorite struck it!

Since when are we not responsible for our own choices?

You know it would be less risky if I didn't carry cash in my wallet. But that doesn't make me even slightly responsible or to blame if I get mugged.

And to reply to this, since I forgot to in my previous reply, if you know a part of town at a particular time of day is known for muggings and you go there during that time of day and get mugged, then you bear some responsibility for not using that grey matter between your ears to evaluate and minimize risks to yourself. So yes, you are to blame if you knowingly put yourself into circumstances that lead to bad things happening to you.

There's nothing wrong with advice to people about what ways they can minimise risk. But the time for that is before the crime, and the people to do that to are people that are in danger. Raising it after the crime, amongst a group of people who are not renowned for having photogenic bodies, reveals that it is just reducing the blame allocated to the criminals, and that's wrong.

Then when is the appropriate time to raise it?

After that hacking incidents in 2012 when Blake Lively, Scarlett Johansson, and other actresses found their private naked pictures redistributed?

How about when Vanessa Hudgens' photos and Hayley Williams' photos were redistributed before that?

How about when Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian had video of them having sex released prior to that?

Be they technological faults or human failings that led to the information getting out, there's an established pattern that large portions of the public want to see this stuff, and that some who are motivated will go through significant amounts of effort to make it happen. If it exists it's at risk of being exposed. The only certain way to prevent it from being released is to not create it in the first place. The only close-to-acceptable way to create it and not have it be at risk is to not use a digital means.

It's the same argument as telling rape victims they shouldn't have worn short skirts.

Is it wrong to cite the bad choices that a rape victim may have made, in a specific circumstance, like getting blackout-drunk in a semi-private party while surrounded by people that the victim might not know very well, when the nature gathering itself has helped whip up those in attendance into a higher state of sexual interest?

In that kind of circumstance the rapist is 100% at fault for his actions, but that doesn't mean that one can't cite additional responsibility on the part of those that took away their own self-control. The expression, "boys will be boys," is misinterpreted. It's not an excuse, it's a warning. The only behavior that one can control is one's own. Regardless of how illegal, unethical, or immoral an act by another may be, their behavior is not something that you can control. If you don't want to be a victim, don't make it easy to become a victim, as the law will only serve to prosecute afterward, not to protect in advance.

In these circumstances, the very existence of the profession paparazzi combined with all of the tabloids that have significant circulation should already be a warning that like it or not, as far as the public's concerned their bodies are not off-limits. Add in previous incidents where private photos have been published and redistributed, and you already have a known threat. Throw in lessons that we're taught as children about the inherent untrustworthiness of others, the lack of knowledge and understanding of the technology that they're using, and the flaws in that technology that aren't even understood by those that developed the tech, and you've got the recipe for what happened. And while it's wrong, while it's immoral, unethical, and probably illegal, it will continue to happen as long as people want to see these stars without their clothes on. There's no excuse to make one's self vulnerable to this, and unfortunately without an understanding of the technology and vigilance with regard to it for as long as the images exist, this kind of thing will always be a risk.

In short, don't take naked pictures if you're not comfortable with them being exposed at some point. You cannot truly protect yourself from them being redistributed.

From what I can tell, he draws the line quite clearly. There is no place for traditional paid commercial software. It is okay to make money writing software, but it is never okay to keep even a single line of software secret from the general public.

I guess I don't see that view as being compatible with making a career out of writing software, as at some point one needs money for one's efforts, and being paid for one's software is how one makes money from the effort of writing it. It's similar to how authors make money through publishing and selling numerous copies of their books.

To my knowledge, basically everyone that makes a career in FOSS is being paid by a company that puts their own value-add proprietary software on to an FOSS platform, or else is employed by a university that feels it's their interests to have this individual on their faculty as it promotes either interest in their degree programs or in donations. Essentially no one makes money writing FOSS for either specific customers or for the public-at-large, they have to have a 'day job' writing commercial software and they volunteer to write FOSS in their spare time.

I look at FOSS' support as a platform for commercial software as the necessary tax to make the FOSS community possible in the first place, and I honestly don't see how it would be possible to make it happen without that.

One of the things that I've always been confused by with Stallman is where he draws the line between what in his view must be free open-source software and what can be free non-open-source, and what can be truly paid commercial software.

This confusion stems from his fairly regular changes as to what Linux distributions he's willing to endorse or criticize. At one point he was very happy with the Debian folks, but at some point decided that their making available non-GPL or other free-to-distribute-but-not-modify software was anathema, and last I looked (admittedly awhile ago) there were only a handful of very obscure Linux distributions that he actually endorsed. They're obscure because they don't have the software available that users want in order to have their computing experiences be the way they want them to be.

I get that the platform being open-source is a good thing, but I don't think that where he draws the line between platform and applications works well.

There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.

In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be. Depending on the inputs on the tuner card you can experiment with coaxial, composite, and S-video inputs to see which combination turns out the best quality (ie, if the comb filter on an S-VHS deck isn't as good as it should be, maybe composite makes the most sense, or maybe a very high quality RG-6 or RG-11 cable and RF transmission will be best) so it's worth some experimentation.

Bear in mind, that VHS resolution is about 330x480 when thought of in modern digital formats, and nothing is going to overcome that. Even S-VHS is only about 570x480, so you're still looking at poor quality even with some of the higher end S-VHS and S-VHS-C camcorders compared to anything modern. Don't expect miracles, you will be let-down.

So you never do anything in secret? I certainly don't want you or anyone else to know what I am doing. Fuck the the assholes in this world who try to tell me how to live my life. I wasn't born to be a slave or to follow your rules. My life is my own bitch.

Thing is, if you're using services or technology that communicates with third-party systems, then you're not doing things where that tech is involved that are truly secret. The argument against allowing that data to be accessed has been fought and lost.

If you want your activities to be secret, don't involve technology that communicates with anyone else.

Don't forget a lack of opportunity. It's very much easier to solicit young men for your cause that might kill them when they want a wife or girlfriend and cannot get one due to society's structure making that basically impossible for them. Suddenly the promise of women at the time of martyrdom becomes more appealing.

The United States is a bit of an aberration and we would do well to remember that. At our founding we were sparsely populated, had few neighbors who themselves were sparsely populated, and were facing large amounts of untamed wilderness. Our concept of manifest destiny effectively meant that if you wanted a say in affairs greater than your own, all you had to do was move west and set up your own place to govern, and if you look at the religious migrations that occurred, and the movement of immigrants that came through America's east-coast cities and kept traveling inland you can see how that played out.

Even still, we had our share of internal violence, with its strongest being the 1860s and the civil war. If you look at the propaganda from that war, The Battle Hymn of the Republic calls on men to fight for natural rights as a Godly cause; religion played a role in many of our decisions as a nation. Now I couldn't rightly say what Union or Confederate troops did to the civilian population beyond what we know about (ie, the burning of Atlanta) because I'm no historian, but given human nature I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of atrocities is simply a matter of documentation and no desire to show them off, versus them not occurring.

Back to my original point, Our country's creation and history is uniquely created by our geography, lack of population density, and the various mindsets of those that immigrated here and those that resettled. Our modern form of democratic republic reflects how disparate and diverse the perspectives and opinions are, and that abstraction layer in the form of elected representation is often overlooked in terms of how we feel and how we actually govern, and our most extreme citizens generally aren't represented in government. We're successful but we still have to pay attention to our fringe element, and fortunately that fringe element is fairly small.

We can't expect other countries to have the same circumstances as we do. Our kicking-over the anthill that was Iraq was a huge mistake, and while Saddam Hussein was not our friend, history has shown him to be the lesser of evils in the short term. He oppressed his people, and he killed those that sought to overthrow him, but he didn't kill those that simply believed in the same god but worshiped that god in a slightly different way. He couldn't have afforded to let religious extremism come out into the open because it was a threat to him, so he kept stomping it down. Don't get me wrong, he was a bad person, but not nearly so bad as what's spawned in his wake.

We need to remember the lessons of Iraq, and to not go around kicking over other dictators just because we don't like dictators. Take that cork out of the bottle and the whole thing explodes.

I have 2nd or 3rd edition at home, it was new-ish when I got started in earnest. I was in a bookstore looking for some Cisco books, and that PC book is now up to 21st edition.

School district I attended finally did get around to setting the BIOS to boot from primary master only, and set a password. They also installed some halfway decent security software on the box too, which cramped our style for a couple of days. Then there was a sub, we found out about earlier in the day. I was wearing a polo shirt and new black jeans with no wear that day, and I had some computer tools with me as usual. I ran into the student aide before the class and told him to not mark me absent, and I gave him my backpack. I came in five minutes late, tools in hand, introduced myself as the IT technician, and that I needed to do something on each PC and to speed it up I'd like the help of one student. The sub agreed, and my friend pulled the monitors off of the PCs (desktop LPX form factor if I remember right) so we could open the cases, pull the drive carriage out of the way, reset the CMOS, put the machine back together, then install a password of my choosing on the BIOS. Didn't change the boot order or anything like that, just asserted control.

The next day the teacher came in and was unhappy for about ten seconds until I gave him the BIOS password; they'd locked him out too.

In hindsight, that I got away with it still amazes me, as the sub should have realized that I had no district ID, no visitor's badge, no district-logo-bearing clothing, anything. Just took me at my word. No fellow students ratted me out either, which REALLY surprises me now, but then again I was their facilitator for Quake and Warcraft II and the original GTA, so perhaps they didn't want to spoil their own good thing. I can see why social engineering like Kevin Mitnick was known for is so effective, many people simply won't question even if not all ducks are in a row.

One of my grandfathers was born in the 1890s. His community had no electricity, no telephone, no running water, no automobiles, and all of the farming tools were human or animal-powered. He had to go out to manually pump water up from the well with a handpump, and the farm was watered by Mother Nature's good graces. To go anywhere required walking, taking the horse, or taking the horse and buggy, and the train, while existing, was not affordable.

He died in the 1980s. Men had split the atom for both violence and for power generation, walked on the moon, landed probes on other planets; he could watch C-band satellite TV from stations originating all over the planet, and he could pick up the phone and call to just about every country on the planet, and he could get on a plane and visit any part of the continental United States in less than four hours.