Context. Context.

The article is responding ad absurdum to the invocation of "natural rights" as a foundational precept, by supposed "serious" political economists.

As I replied above, it's much simpler than that. Proxy logs are used to determine who clicked a bad link.

Proxy logs are not magical things, they are actually very effective in determining users that followed a phishing link. Even if the user did not report the breach themselves, the security incident would have been found (though it may have taken an hour or two as opposed to minutes.

Sadly many people think a proxy is a bad thing and believe direct access is better.

I agree, but those are not people you want working for you if you are concerned about security.

I think that you and I have different definitions of intelligence (mine matches the dictionary). If a person does not care, or is lazy in terms of security, that has nothing to do with intelligence. An intelligent person that cares can easily learn. An intelligent person that does not care will perform questionable acts, and not just in terms of phishing campaigns. A lazy person will filter security messages to junk and never read them.

Making people care about security takes work, and making sure they review security bulletins takes work. Reward vs. punishment systems are a juggling act, but this is true in any behavioral science.

If the dangers of social media are not part of your security awareness campaigns in the office, you need to have your security team add this to their normal message campaigns. It does not take paranoia by end users to catch phishing attacks, it takes awareness. I.E. "Our company will never ask you for personal information on a social media site. We will never ask for your login name or password on the phone. If you receive such a request contact security at [some extension] immediately, preferably while the person making this request is on the phone." or how about "Want a free lunch? Report questionable content to security and if it's a campaign to cause damage we'll buy you lunch." and finally "Send suspect phishing emails to security, be entered for a raffle to win dinner with the CEO/attend a game in our suite at the Shark Tank, etc...." There are many ways to mold behavior.

Further if you are are a company that does take login names and passwords over the phone or asks for people's personal social media information, change your friggin policies immediately! That is not a problem with uneducated users, that is a problem with horrible company policies and practices.

I have seen too many examples where this is simply not true. Companies that skimp on acquiring and maintaining a good security team and enforcing internal training are the biggest victims. Where I work currently we have regular training, and even though we experience regular phishing attacks people are not giving out data. It's only 600 employees, but we still see 0 successful phishing attacks.

I'd be willing to bet that any company you claim is "good" yet gets regularly victimized by phishing attacks receives little to no regular security training. And "NO", an email from security that requires no follow up is not "training". Annual face to face meetings with security are similarly not training. Even in a place where users have been well trained quarterly is a minimum, and while working to train users this should be monthly at a minimum. Make the training mandatory, but buy your people lunch for attending. If you let people skip training you are teaching them that it does not matter, so your company needs to ensure a zero tolerance policy for this training. This is all pretty basic psychology for behavior training.

IN SECTOR FIVE!

I think this is the most missed part by the general public. There's too little focus on what is probably the biggest issue, politicians' ability to control intelligence bureaus.

Consider for a moment one of the best aspects of having functional dragnet surveillance in democratic society with need to get re-elected and at least partially functioning anti-corruption legislation. Dragnet surveillance means that you have the ability to unseat and discredit any politician at any time when you need to. You can't overuse this ability for obvious reasons, but you most certainly can influence all of them to support you to a significant extent. Even if they are actually against you.

As noted, you are indeed naive in your assumption that acceptability of ripping people off is universal in all cultures.

QED.

There are techniques that allow searching within encrypted files, but they rely on the client creating the index. You can then search the index for an encrypted search term and, if you know the keys, interpret the answer. Getting this right is quite tricky (there are several research papers about it), so he's right, but it's not impossible.

The main reason that I suspect DropBox discourages encryption is that they rely a lot on deduplication to reduce their costs. If everyone encrypted their files, then even two identical files would have different representations server-side if owned by different users, so their costs would go up a lot.

I, for one, am in favour of removing bread from the human gene pool.

Yes, almost certainly. The market for compiler engineers is very much a sellers' market at the moment. Universities neglected it for so long that most people graduate from undergraduate degrees with basically no knowledge of how a compiler works (if they're lucky, the know how compilers worked in the '80s), so there are 10 jobs for every person.

In The Humane Interface, written in 2000, Jef Raskin made the same complaint. The time between turning a computer on and having written a program to add two numbers together on, say, a C64 or a BBC Model B, was about 30 seconds. On a modern computer of the time, you wouldn't even have finished booting - starting the IDE would take even longer. The problem is, this misses the point. There are lots of scripting languages with REPL environments, including a POSIX shell and PowerShell on Windows, that can do this as a single command once the computer is running (on OS X, you can add numbers in Spotlight, so it's even quicker - just hit command-space and type the sum). If you want to write a more complex application, it's vastly easier today. Extend that simple calculator to show an editable history and show equations, and you'll find it a bit easier today. Now extend it to be able to print - if you've ever written applications to print in the era before operating systems provided a printer abstraction then you'll know how painful that was.

I don't understand why you think 'yum install gcc' is somehow different from 'download and run the installer for the VS command-line tools'. Especially on a modern Linux distro, where libraries come with -devel variants to save you the 10KB taken up by the headers in the normal install, so you end up having to install a load of headers as well to get the system useable.

I was a consultant for a few years and didn't find that it did. Most of my customers found me, as a result of my open source work (usually to work on the same projects, sometimes to work on projects in similar fields). Contract negotiation didn't take very long (they list some requirements, you mutually agree on a date, you pick a number, if they haggle then you politely decline).

Just increase the energy on the surrounding laser beams to evaporate any water in it's path. That way it can also double as a security measure.

This is not so insightful.

1- Foreigners who do come to America and then leave after a short period (a few years) do not take long-term jobs away from Americans. Clearly the jobs these undertake are like internships, post docs and other temp positions, these jobs are not meant as career jobs who would be of interest to an American.
2- Foreigners who come to America, get some training and then leave are *good* for America. These people will know and like America, will speak english, will have a network of friends and people they know back in America. If they start companies, maybe these companies will be friendly to America as well: import stuff from there, rely on American technology, and whatnot. The importance of creating goodwill cannot be overestimated.

How people who come on a H1B for a non-training job, and then stay by being sponsored for a green card, this is a different story. But notice that these people eventually become American. This has been a recognised way to extend the power and importance of the USA for a long time, because the best and brightest come to America to the detriment of the country they leave.

In reality the job situation in the USA is not nearly as dire as some people make it, compared with most other countries around the world. What is not so nice is that unemployed people have it very tough, very quickly. Better not fall sick.