I agree but there is a good and a bad. I don't live in a gated community but my neighbors and I do have a "private road" I suppose when the lots were originally sold and the houses originally build people desired to not have drive ways running right up to US-11.

On the one hand its great. We know we can turn out of our drive ways safely. Our pets can run and there is little risk of them being hit by a cars, because there are only 7 of us along our dead end road. Naturally we all use it cautiously and respectful because we all know each other.

On the flip side its a couple miles of road that "we" have to maintain. Our little association has to pay to have it plowed and I suppose someday probably re-graded (its dirt). Until the plowman gets there we are snowed in the winter. We could probably get more prompt service but that would cost even more. We also get to pay sky high rates for home owners insurance because of the (perceived) greater fire risk. The insurance adjusters insist that responses may be longer because of the private road. I kind of doubt it, the guys at the local fire department know exactly where everything is and our road is probably at least as good as most of the public roads off US-11 in the area.

Now out in southern CA I suppose you don't have the snow concern. Still you got heat and I suspect lost of these "city folk" wont want a dirt road. Which means you going to have some sort of pavement that will require maintaining. That might prove fairly expensive. Our association considered paving the road some years before I bought in, from what I am told it was cost prohibitive to the point nobody had any interest in reviewing the idea when I brought it up.

Except that Google and Its employees are citizens with rights too. Everyone should be equal under the law. The law in Spain is now, you have to pay to link to certain types of content. Fine, Google is complying with the law, they tried to convince the people not to support it and failed, so now they are being a good citizen and obeying.

Its not Google's fault you or the news papers miss'em now that they are gone. If Google is now to be forced to operate a news aggregator, than so should every other organization or individual that has a website! That is just fair.

Speaking as a computer security professional the entire second amendment argument is juvenile and stupid, if not harmful. On top of this we continue as a society to tolerate an obviously corrupt system of double standards. I completely agree with you.

  We have corporations that now seem to operate under an entirely different set of lows than the rest of use do. We have HS and College kids being aggressively prosecuted for acts that cause tiny amounts of harm if any. Sony deploys a root-kit that puts the security of the systems of millions of customers in danger, and impairs those systems in general and they get basically asked to apologize and replace the defective product, they are not asked to do anything about the real damage. I don't recall prosecutors asking Aaron if he would like kindly remove his machine from MIT's wiring closet, delete the copies of the journals he made, tidy up and than forget the whole thing; no he was threatened with prison and a ruinous legal process until he killed himself. Yet for some reason Sony gets off without even having to clean up the mess they made.

Meanwhile the security community continues to want play army. Weather its with red vs blue rhetoric, or bizarre and ill considered Second Amendment analogies. To anything thinking person software it self and digital communications are more closely tied to the First Amendment, in terms of speech and anything you might do with a computer or network is more relate-able to expression or assembly.

A computer is not a weapon, let me repeat that a computer is not a weapon. Now it might control a weapon, be a component in or of a weapon but a computer it self is not a weapon. We don't need to conflate these things. By the logic they are using anything that can be weaponized is an arm. Which would mean I have the right to keep and bare well anything. "Sorry mister DEA agent, that brick of cocaine isn't drugs, I use it throw at people I don't like. Its a great arm, if you get hit with the corners of the package it really hurts; yet at only one kilo its light enough to carry around throw easily!" To say nothing of the implications for cars, kitchen knives etc.

This is about impotent little pricks that want to feel powerful, without having to leave their desks. The CFAA is a terrible law that is vague and potentially criminalizes lots of very innocent activity. Still I hardly think given the number of shared resources out there we want go to a total free for all where anyone can do anything the like online with no real/physical world consequences either. I am not even necessarily against "attack back" if its allowed under a prescribe limited set of circumstances, just like castle doctrines or stand your ground laws. The important parts of that though are "limited" and "prescribed" none of which applies to what Sony is doing here.

Its distributed and it denies service (or at least the service users are expecting), just because they are not necessarily "packeting" the targets does not make it not a DDOS.

This sure sounds like it very well could fall under that definition. The question is for (me at least, IANAJ) does an HTTP get represent a page view? Who agreed to that interpretation? Perhaps the advertizing firm and the site operator agreed those are equivalent but I never did. My guess is though the "by conduct" part is going to cover it. I mean in this case an individual has downloaded software specifically designed to disrupt statistics gathering that is know to be used for paying on ad views, and then your proceed to use said software. No part of the definition requires you to gain anything directly, only the other party to be injured so this may qualify as "defrauding the ad company" by you the user, without involving the site operator as a party.

I really don't know, but would/will stay away myself.

There is a world of space between telling people what they want to hear and " telling people your view of the truth bluntly". If you are qualified to offer an opinion and one has actually been sought you should offer your actual opinion, that is how you add value. If it differs from that of others you do so diplomatically.

For instance, lets say someone says, "I think we could deliver that in six weeks" and you know they forgot about issue $X. You don't reply "Well you forgot about issue $X so I don't think that will work."

You allow them to save a little face, and you say something like: "Sounds a little tight, I think you have underestimated how long $X could take, because we know it can fragile and will need extra QA testing attention"

They can cop to having for got all about X or not, you haven't completely shot their idea down but if they are a decent thinking person they correct the course. You know "a little tight" means "way the fuck off" and they do to but others might not need to known and you have not rubbed it in the face in even if its just between the two of you.

Just being some yes man does not do anyone any good though and those people usually only rise as far as the bottom rungs of the decision makers because eventually folks realize they just agree with everyone all the time and don't really offer anything.

Which is insane, but if it looks like special treatment it usually is. Denying our own senses takes us away from reality, it prevents us from recognize something that actually is unfair when we see it. We spend all our time solving imaginary problems rather than addressing real ones.

There is this huge push to get girls into STEM, encourage them to do science and math etc; because what apparently they can't be expected form their own ambitions and desires in the presence of all the societal messaging.

Yet on flip side we don't see a big push to encourage boys not to enlist in the armed forces. Nope despite all the glorification war in movies (almost always shown be fought by men) GI Joe, video games where you play soldier clearly marketed almost exclusive to men and boys, men are still expected to think for themselves. The idea of encouraging our girls to go into this high risk line of work is given lip-service at most.

Oh sure there has been lots of news about women in the military but you don't see the recruiters chasing the girls down the side walk outside the local high school.

Lets face it if it was really about getting rid of gender stereotypes we would stop calling attention to gender stereotypes. Rather than going oh look "SHE is a successful software developer" we would start saying oh look "Jane is a successful software developer" We should put the emphasis on Jane and not her sex. We would not "find female mathematician" to speak to the girls in the class about math, we would find the best mathematician willing to talk about their work to class of students regardless of their gender to do it.

Kids are not stupid, showing Barbie "can be a computer engineer too" or having a chapter in the computer science text about "women in the field' or something does not play as "see girls can do computers" it plays as "see you won't be the only freak out there, girls can do computers but its still kinda weird"

Finally we need to stop framing thinks as women's issues that are not. Early voting for example. Pelosi tried to push the idea the women for some reason are unique in the obstacles they face getting to the polls, because I don't men apparently don't have events in their daily lives that make it hard to abandon their usual routines on a particular Tuesday, nope that's girls. Then we see how she treats a female fellow democrat that might happen to vote in away she does not agree with, the instance she seeks the right to vote by proxy. Hint she is denied.

So either women don't need special consideration for voting or the do which is it? Oh that right the answer is obvious they don't or if they do the need it no more and no less than any male. Still Nancy was perfectly willing to portray her gender as needing special accommodate when it was politically useful but she knows perfectly well the need is imagined, and discards the idea when its not politically useful.

Yea, honestly the lesson I would want a child to take away from this book is that life isn't fair. Barbie is a bimbo she hasn't got to neurons to rub together but she is pretty and charismatic, she will be able find other people like boys in this book to sponge off and carry her anywhere she wants to go.

This isn't a gender thing either. Pretty boys gave the same advantage although it might show up a little later in life. I have worked lots of places and seen one male manager who is near totally incompetent leading a vastly less successful and productive team than his counter part and their team get selected for promotion to some role like director or CIO/CTO over and over again. Why because that guy was taller and better looking and maybe if he possessed any skills at all its knowing how to tell others what they want to hear.

People need to understand that they may come up against the Barbies and Kens out there and depending on the situation it might not be a fair fight. They might need to recognize they are Barbie or Ken and learn to lever that too.

Your failure to manage resources is not the school or tax payers or tuition payers in the case of a private school's problem. All of that stuff could have been downloaded once (perhaps over night) and passed around the room on an $8 usb stick you most likely could have expensed.

Agreed,

I don't see this as much of a solution. The Grandparent is right transport encryption is a requirement but I am not sure its first step. encryption and authentication are part and parcel. One really isn't useful without the other and might be more dangerous alone than nothing.

At least with HTTP I *know* there exists the possibility what I am receiving isn't coming from who I thought it was from, may have been undetectably altered, and others know I am viewing it. Just as anything i send, might be altered or not go where i expect it to.

The big problem today is all those shitty domain validated certs, are cheap ticket to every spammer, fraudster in the world to appear legit.. Not to mention if I can find some stored-reflected-xss or even just content injection via iframe, or img tag on a legit site say "example.com, I register a name like uberCDN.com and host the sourced content at example.com.uberCDN.com and the typical victim user will have virtually no chance to detect anything is up..

Honestly we need to solve the trust problem as step 0, than we need encryption and integrity + authentication as step 1.

Funny I think a world in which you did face liability limited to your ownership would make for a lot nicer America. So you have 25 shares of XYZ corp, if XYZ if fined, has unpaid debts etc, incurs a civil liability etc, you should be proportionally responsible for that after XYZs assets have been exhausted. If the remaining debt is 5 Billion and you own .000002% of the shares out standing than you should be on the hook for 10K.

My guess is if the owners could be held accountable, we would have boards of directors and shareholder votes targeting very very different qualities where selection of top management is concerned.

There is no proof of that, not that there is proof of any of this. My point was the media acts as a gatekeeper. Had he responded with a reasoned argument citing statics about the rate at which assaults by uber drives actually compares to those at the hands of other public and private transportation operators and staff there is no guarantee at all Lacy would print it.

What is a better headline? "Some uber drivers caught assaulting passengers!" or "There is a vanishingly small risk your uber driver could assult you and its probably very comparable to the risk you face from everyone else!"

Ah but many of the folks he needs to reach don't watch Fox. Just like many of the people who do don't read left leaning media. So its not one group but the intersection of the groups getting smaller and smaller. When the groups no longer over lap its just a bunch of silo shaped echo chambers.

One of the many ways the news media has abandon the few vestiges of integrity it ever had, has been the move toward tailor the message to the audience.

I blame the media though. The "news" media has never exactly been objective but once upon a time they at least offered up most of the facts and some reasoned analysis. This gave them some appearance of objectivity which sat better with folks and also put most of the facts out there so you could reject their conclusion and form your own.

Now almost all the news media is very closely tied to the interest of their corporate masters. So much of the media now at least appears to have axe to grind, even when its not clear whose axe that is, I can understand the concern.

Put yourself in Uber's shoes, you are running a company and getting somewhat hostile media treatment, perhaps you deep down to your core believe the criticisms are inaccurate, and deeply unfair. You try to rebut them but you are simple not given the same air time the critics are. What should you do just bend over an take it, let them damage your business. I for one would much rather erode peoples faith in the source, and opposition research is how you do that!
 

Hmm lets see break every link to every site for an entire country. Sounds like a pretty stiff sanction to me. Think of the economic harm that would happen to us for instance if suddenly .com .org and .net were suddenly pointed elsewhere, that would mean for example slashdot.org would not resolve or would instead point to someones propaganda page etc.

Services and integrations that have hostnames would beak, I am sure lots of federal and state government systems we don't think of as Websites would cease to function, b2b apps everywhere would die, etc. It would be chaos!

Now countries like Iran and the DPRK would probably be able to recover much faster than we can, they have few internet choke points a handful of well placed NATs could point 53 traffic at a "root server" that responds with values pointing their tlds back at their "proper" name severs, some minor DNSEC issues aside it would probably mostly worky.