This.

They are so far away from the professional world that anything they learn that is specific to any kind of software or technology will be completely obsolete once they've left school.

They should be doing something fun. The best thing that can be done is to point kids in directions that make them want to do it on their own - self-directed study and show them resources where they can find out how to do things. And let them form groups to create projects and don't limit them to just glowing phosphors on a screen. Lego Mindstorms (and its descendants) comes to mind.

They need to learn that computers are tools for creation and creativity.

Absolutely do /not/ take out all the fun by teaching only fundamentals or just teaching them how to use Word and Excel, aka "marketable skills."

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BMO

Alex, your multiple repostings of identical content is spam.

I have used your software. It works as advertised. However, it doesn't justify multiple copies of the same message in the same thread. That doesn't do anything except make people tune you out as "mere noise" even if what you have to contribute might not be.

Honestly.

And you don't have to talk about yourself in the third person. OK?

Peace.

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BMO/Dan

>clarityray

Is dead.

Acquired by Yahoo.

Just so you can update your spam. HTH.

--
BMO

They feel entitled to make a profit by any means necessary, while you feel entitled to their content or service by any means necessary.

The former is true

The latter isn't. If the "content providers" suddenly put all their stuff behind paywalls, I'd ignore them. I wouldn't even bother trying to "subvert" such paywalls. You know that "you've used up your free views for this month" BS that you run into with the NYT and such? My panties don't get in a twist, I just close the window and go elsewhere. I don't use bugmenot even today. I'm one of very many people who feel this way.

Let me reiterate: I block ads. They post their content and they take their chances. If they put up the paywalls, they "disappear" for me and I'm fine with it.

So let's ask the "what if everyone did that" evaluation of human behavior to examine what damage might be done if all that revenue disappeared from the Internet: Many "content providers" that depend purely on ad revenue would close (like Gawker Media, Dice, etc.,) and it would wind up like it was back in the mid 1990s shortly before the explosion of commercial "content."

Please, please let this happen.

--
BMO

That's the problem isn't it?

Collect everything means that all your intelligence is hidden by piles and piles of cat memes.

Because the Internet isn't a series of tubes, it's a single cat with infinite meowing heads and infinite tails to pull.

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -- Attributed to Albert Einstein.

--
BMO

But the reality is, most sites with ads are infested with literally dozens of third party crapware, places which sideload junk into your system (specifically through crap like Flash), and which want to collect collate and sell your private information.

This.

And you know what I've found out? The "serve ads" and "collate demographics to sell" industries have merged completely. There is probably nobody left that merely serves ads and doesn't track across websites. Go ahead and delete Adblock Plus and run /only/ Ghostery and Privacy Badger. You get nearly the exact same results as if you ran an adblocker that uses a popular list.

Why Privacy Badger on top of Ghostery? Because it gets the things whitelisted by Ghostery. You didn't think that Ghostery was pure as the driven snow, did you?

--
BMO

All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Robert Morris, December 25, 1783

I don't see stupid passwords as a problem if they're used in situations where it doesn't matter.

That's because the people who pick 123456 as passwords never consider if it matters or not. Most people consider their mail account something that matters, yet trying out various uname/pw combinations with gmail that come from a porn site invariably works.

I don't know what to tell you, man, people are stupid with passwords and it's a documented problem.

>complain about article summarizing the problem in general
>demanding hand-holding.
>your computer is connected to the largest information retrieval system ever invented.
>can't be bothered to do your own research or bother to even google

PEBKAC. Yours.

--
BMO

Now all I need is a 10 button mouse and an interface reference!

This just in: Specialty software requires (or is more useful) with specialty hardware. Film at 11.

It's like the SpaceNavigator and SpacePilot never existed for CAD/modeling. It's as if all those 16 button tablet pucks never existed.

Also complex software requires documentation/references. Blender != MSPAINT.EXE

--
BMO

ok, so it was leaked passwords....but from where?

From everywhere. From pron.com, for example. Plaintext usernames, emails, and passwords. With .mil addresses and admin addresses to boot. They are there if you bother to look.

From a csv file I have of the pronz.com list:

Hi! We like porn (sometimes) so these are email/password
combinations from pron.com which we plundered for the lulz

Check out these government and military email
addresses that signed up to the porn site...

They are too busy fapping to defend their country:

for what reasons?

For money and for the lulz, as above.

on what devices?

Everything.

Also if PWs are from web pages? what are the pages?

Pron, government, banking, shopping, etc...

because if they are not secure pages (work, banks, personal info) most people simply dont care.

This is the problem, in a nutshell. People just don't care about even their banking passwords.

I mean to leave comments on damn near any page, you need to register. I know on some pages ive created accts to leave a post and never plan on going back, im sure ive used some weak passwords for those sites.

The thing is that people use the same "throw away passwords" everywhere. The same ones, across multiple sites including banking. Many of the above uname/password pairs worked in gmail and facebook.

"But it's too much trouble to have different passwords everywhere"

No it isn't. It's actually easier. Use a password manager. It's like a keyring, but not only do the keys fit only individual locks, the "keyring" (password manager) does the typing for you for password generation and logins. For example, through some of my own dumbassery (which I realized within 10 minutes of the dumbassery), I had to reset all my passwords one day. It took me only an hour with Lastpass including generating secure passwords. It would have taken me the better part of half-a workday to reset them manually.

Yahoo lost control of my login credentials twice. Apparently I have been to Sweden and Bulgaria. After that, I got a password manager and never looked back.

You will have to take my password manager from my cold dead hands.

"But what if the password manager goes tits-up?"

You export your credentials to a .csv file and print it out and save in a safe place offsite.

All my passwords look like this: GvY0H025195BfN2MleZWx5Sra

Try finding that in a rainbow table.

its a little hard to claim anything based on this data that is worth anything.

Only because you lack imagination.

--
BMO

"Not now, Mudhead, I have to go to the last meeting of the philatelists club!"
"I didn't know you masturbated."

Firesign in my Slashdot? It's more likely than you think.

--
BMO

Replying to you mostly for myself, to write down what I try to explain to people when it comes to what PGP actually is and if anyone gets edumacated by what I wrote, that's fine.

The problem is sending keys - and most users would just blindly well, email them around.

This is why we have public key encryption, e.g., PGP, in the first place.

You're supposed to post/email/etc the public key to your various contacts to encrypt. It doesn't matter what the channel is that you use to transport the public key - email, web page, broadcasting as a numbers station, shouting, etc. The public key can be intercepted all the time by TLAs and other nefarious mob-related organizations. It doesn't matter.

Alice: "Hey Bob, I'm trying to figure out this encrypted mail thing. Send me some encrypted mail. Here's my public key."

public key gets sent through normal email

Bob: "OK, got it." Bob then encrypts his message professing his undying love with the public key and sends it to Alice. He also sends his public key to Alice with it.

Alice decrypts with her private half (which she never gives out) of the public/private key pair and reads the email.

Alice says "I didn't know you loved me." to Bob.

Then there's key management because you have to import those keys into your contacts.

Modern MUAs handle these easily. It's up to the user to save the keys. There is just so much hand-holding that can be done.

>Other than PGP, such as anything using AES is problematic

>GPG

Both PGP and GPG are compatible with each other.

It's not just that MUAs aren't all configurable to use other encryption algorithms, it's that anything that uses symmetric keys, like AES, requires a key exchange out-of-band for it to be any practical use. And that is problematic in itself.

--
BMO

>So if they are not using to investigate crimes, what is the end game of this mass surveillance?

To pillage. To find who's got the money, boats, cars, etc., and are morally questionable/socially insignificant enough that the general public doesn't get up-in-arms about it when the DEA takes their stuff.

--
BMO

Increasing the wages of an auto-worker from 115k (average $55/hr) to 230k/yr doesn't mean that the price of the automobile goes from 30k to 60k. Wages are currently appx 10 percent of the cost of an automobile.

If you really believe that doubling wages doubles the price of goods, you don't know much at all about manufacturing.

--
BMO