This is true—I tend not to think of Apple as "an entity working to keep our data safe," since I primarily think of them as a hardware/OS vendor. But yes, any data Apple does happen to hold of yours is as safe as they can make it from those who want to monetize it—and they don't care to do so themselves.

Dan Aris

That's not what he said at all. I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you substantially, but that's completely separate from the actual point of the piece.

It's all about the fact that, in order to do many or most of the things we want to do today, we have no choice but to give someone access to our data—but that almost everyone we could give that access to wants to (ab)use it to make money.

More importantly, that's even true of those who actually want to help keep our data secure from others—even our governments.

The fact that there is really no major entity working to keep our data safe for ourselves and ourselves alone—and that there are so many, even those that theoretically should be trying to do so, working directly against that end—is definitely something we need to be concerned about, far beyond simply bemoaning the stupidity of all the "lusers" who will happily give away their data for free because they just don't know any better.

Dan Aris

Broadly, I agree with this, but there is an important exception I think should be mentioned: Learning how to think like the computer. This isn't something that gets taught directly, but something that you can learn through exposure to multiple languages.

I think the best courses I took in my college CS degree were the couple that were essentially a survey of different types of programming languages. In a single semester, we learned the basics of Pascal, ML, Smalltalk, and Lisp (and probably 2-3 others I've forgotten about).

The important thing wasn't to retain the actual skill in each of the languages, though, and the professor knew that—it was to get a feel for several different types of programming. Before I took those courses, I knew how to write code in C and Javascript. After I took those courses, I had the fundamental modes of thought necessary to pick up nearly any programming language.

Dan Aris

When I'm standing at the GeekDesk, I move around a lot. Sometimes it's just shifting positions, but other times I'll be practically dancing as I'm reading something, or contemplating the next chunk of code, or even watching a video or playing some Hearthstone over lunchbreak.

Not being stuck in a chair really frees you to move around as much as you feel like you want to.

Dan Aris

Can't comfortably type standing up (for some specific reason), or just have never tried to type standing up with the keyboard at a proper ergonomic height?

Dan Aris

This is why I got my department to buy me a GeekDesk a couple of years ago. I don't stand all day every day, but it lets me stand quite a lot of the time.

Since then, my chronic low-grade upper-back stiffness has decreased a lot—but I find that on weekends, when I tend to sit on the couch with my laptop a lot, it frequently comes back. My legs still sometimes get tired from standing for a few hours at a time, but overall, I think it was a really, really good decision.

If you can't afford a GeekDesk, and think you can handle losing the chair cold turkey, there are much cheaper standing desks that can get you off your butt and on your feet—for your health! :-)

Dan Aris

No...you may have inferred that, but that's not what I was implying. What I was implying was that, since the app is designed to help people help the EFF achieve some of its goals, if the app were in the app store of one of the most breakout popular devices in the history of the entire world, it would thus make it possible for a significant number of additional people to help the EFF achieve the goals aimed at with this particular app.

But because they have decided that some of the principles behind what they want to achieve are utterly inviolable, and the Apple dev agreement conflicts with some of those inviolable principles, they clearly feel that they are therefore obligated to prevent anyone who owns an Apple device from using their app.

This is the kind of cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face behaviour that really hamstrings a lot of efforts to improve the world. I'm not saying the ends justify the means—far from it. Just that when you're living in a badly imperfect world, insisting that you, yourself be perfect at all times while trying to make the rest of the world better is very, very often going to prevent you from doing more good than it actually does in itself.

Dan Aris

Well, I'm sorry for the EFF, then, but everyone knows what the terms are to get an app in the iOS App Store.

This sounds, to me, like the EFF allowing slavish adherence to their principles to prevent them from doing something that might actually help real people in the real world advance those principles in meaningful ways.

Either that, or they just realized they could use it as a publicity stunt.

Dan Aris

Unfortunately, in order to get a deal that is even within 2 orders of magnitude of that, you can't live in the US. Anywhere.

Dan Aris

When I was in college, one of my CS professors had a weekly quiz that he called "Iron Code." It required you to write a (relatively simple) program, and submit it, using a custom utility (I forget the details; this was 15+ years ago now)...but you only got one shot. Your grade was based upon the degree to which your program's output in response to various inputs met the specifications. If it didn't even compile, you got a zero.

I was so-so at this activity, but there were a fair number of students in the class who consistently got high marks.

Humans can be taught not to make errors. It just requires more time and more careful attention to detail. It's not sexy, and it's usually not fun, but it's totally possible, and if it's your job, then you can damn well do it.

I'm just glad it's not mine, because patience and attention to detail are not my strong suits. :-)

Dan Aris

Any rational interpretation would suggest that when rich people and large corporations buy or pay off the loan on a congressperson, they own it, and should be free to get whatever legislation out of it they see fit. Least of all should they have to deal with interference from busybody economists trying to tell them what's "rational."

Dan Aris

The biggest problem with what Stross is saying is that people, in general, want to read about situations that are familiar to them. It's damn hard to come up with a truly believable far-future culture in the first place, but it's much harder to do so in a way that makes it both alien to us and something that people can identify with enough to actually enjoy reading.

If you really follow Stross's advice when writing far-future sci-fi, you're likely to lock yourself into a very small niche of potential readers. And if you're writing that way because that's the story you want to write, or because you truly believe it's important to the integrity of the story that the culture be very different than our own, and you're OK with selling a few thousand copies or less, then that's fine. But I dare say most sci-fi authors who actually publish do so because, at least in part, they actually want to have people read their books, and to make a little money off them.

Dan Aris

Well, in that case, I guess I must be a fanboy.

Dan Aris

OK, that's not an unreasonable option. Apple could have chosen to do that, and that might have avoided this issue. But it seems likely to me that when Apple wrote the iPod OS (not to be confused with iOS) and the iTunes synchronization mechanism, they didn't even consider the possibility that someone would manage to put songs on there that tricked the iPod into thinking they were FairPlay DRMed files, and thus it would have been a considerable extra effort for them to put such a notification in place. But even without it, it's not like any actual data would have been lost—files synchronized to an iPod would still exist in the music library. Unless they were using unsupported third-party software in the first place, in which you should be blaming the third-party software for doing things that are explicitly not supported. So once the files are deleted off the iPod...they're still on your computer where you downloaded them to originally.

Dan Aris

If you can find some actual "tricky, monopolist behaviour" somewhere, I'll give you an answer. Until then, though, all we're talking about is FUD regarding Apple not wanting to go to a lot of effort to implement various random competitors' DRM algorithms...which said competitors would have had to license to them, and provide proper information for third-party implementation of, etc, etc.

Dan Aris