There's advertisement on the Internet? You poor fool must be surfing without an ad blocker, who inflicted such cruel and unusual punishment on you?

TV is a declining medium. 15 years ago, when I removed the TV from my home, I was an exotic. Since then, more and more people I meet also don't have a TV, especially young people. And a lot of the others use it to watch movies from DVD or download/streaming, not any TV station.

It's big still and thanks to exclusive deals for events like olympics and world cups, it will stay around for many more years, but it's a medium on the way to exit, and two generations from now it will be part of media history like gramophone records or cassette tapes.

Innovation in this area will only speed up its decline. Heck, even the "Apple TV" thing doesn't really do television - it replaces television with iTunes media consumption.

Yes.

But not because you lack technical skills, those can be learnt. You're seriously working for a boss who thinks that he can turn a sysadmin into the head of a pentesting department by telling him to make it happen?

There's a lot that goes into a good pentest, and a reason that there are entire companies staffed with people who do essentially just that. It's not something you learn with a book on a few weekends. If your boss doesn't understand that, the result will be a disaster. And we already have too many people out there selling the printout of a Nessus scan as a penetration test.

What other comments said is spot on. Your boss needs to hire an experienced pentester, period. If he doesn't want to do that, there's no chance you'll be heading a pentesting department anytime soon.

I didn't mean other watches, sorry for not being clear. I meant the high price tag on the gold Apple watch makes the regular Apple watches seem affordable. It's a variation of an old marketing trick called "door in the face".

Are you aware how much free press this thing creates for Apple? Not to mention it makes the very expensive regular watches seem affordable in comparison. Meanwhile the target audience doesn't care if it's 10k or 20k or whatever. Do you think the Silicon Valley billionaires give one fuck about 10 grand? Or the movie and music stars? They don't care that they'll buy a new one in 2 years, or probably next year, either. They already buy a new iPhone every time they lost theirs in one of their ten bedrooms. Normal people like us can hardly understand how little money matters to people who don't work for it (they let other people work).

LFS, of course. Or any other non-distro approach. What do you need a distro for if all you want is the kernel and basic system functions? It's not so difficult to start with zero and get to a shell prompt. Been there, done that.

The really interesting approach would be to have a deployment distro - a way to add packages to such an image from outside, without having all the packaging crap and its dependencies on the image itself.

I think what you really want is a build system that can install to the image.

It still is. But when you have millions of people working in IT, instead of thousands, there's space for insects. Doesn't mean you have to become one.

To any new technology that people worship I say: Give me one hour on the Internet, then I'll know what I need to know about it and you can worry about the implementation details if you like it so much.

You may have noticed I don't care how it got there, only why they are acting now the way they are.

Many companies have this immune system response that if something happens that shouldn't have, they will at the same time punish someone internally, and defend themselves externally claiming everything is proper.

They are taking a calculated risk knowing that very few GPL lawsuits actually went to court. They know it takes money to fight a legal battle and hope the opposing side doesn't have it, or will run out of it before reaching a final verdict. And finally, from the fact that they've been at this since 2012 - they probably think that it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.

The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.

More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.

Yeah, I wonder if these two could be in any way related...

MS is a design and UI fiasco and always has been. The only reason few people realize how unusable the crap is, is that we are so used to it that we don't notice anymore - until the next major update, or if you don't use it daily and then suddenly sit in front of it and wonder who the fuck came up with this stupidity.

And everyone who knows anything at all about mobile devices and usability knows that nobody on the planet wants a windows desktop experience on their smartphone. People want a smartphone experience on their smartphone, what's so difficult to understand about that?

Oh, speaking of that: People also don't want a mobile experience on their desktop. They want a desktop experience on their desktop, that's not so difficult, either.

It works for bombs and tanks, but not for computer networks and communications. It might have even worked in the time of telegraphs and snail mail letters. But for encryption, it doesn't work. A cipher is either weak, or strong. You can compromise a foreign postal system without affecting the security of your own, but you can't secretly build a backdoor into an encryption algorithm that works only for you.

Now you're trying to reverse the chain of causality just to make a cute finishing sentence. :-)

Everyone knows about the evil bit. That's what prompted me to write the bracket remark. But it's not quite the same as a "we're from the NSA, nothing to see here" flag.

What's with the clickbait headlines? By itself, the headline is total BS. The actual statement made, however, is spot on. The hole in your security doesn't care who exploits it. There's no "good guy" flag in IP headers (though I'm sure some April 1st RFC will soon introduce it).

What worries me most is that we could win this fight, if it weren't for our own governments deciding to betray us. There are vastly more people interested in secure communication and other people not being able to spy on or subvert our computers and mobile devices than there are people interested in compromised communications and systems (basically only criminals and some deluded, criminal-if-the-laws-were-right elements of governments).

There is just one problem to Bruce's argument: The largest and most powerful spy agency in the world disagrees with his fundamental assumption. We often forget that the NSA has two missions, and they are exactly the two things that Bruce argues cannot co-exist: To secure the computing infrastructure of the US against foreign espionage, and to provide espionage on foreign communication.
The NSA believes, and/or is tasked with exactly these two things that Bruce says (and I agree) are mutually exclusive. No surprise they've gone rogue, their very mission statement is a recipe for a mental breakdown through cognitive dissonance.

Doesn't it depend a lot on what you refactor, when and how?

I have 3 year old code that I would like to refactor because I've since switched framework (from CodeIgniter to Symfony 2) and it would bring it in line with all my other projects, allowing me more easy code-reuse and not maintaining two frameworks both on servers and in my mind. But it's largely a convenience factor and I would agree that it will probably not improve code quality very much.

But I also have 12+ year old code written in plain PHP with my own simple database abstraction layer. I'm quite certain that refactoring that would do a world of good.