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Comment Re:Lack Of Faith (Score 1) 90

Are you aware that BMW and Mercedes reliability has gone into the toilet since the 1980s?

The M3 I drove last year begs to differ. As did the SLK the year before. :-)

Maybe they have problems, I don't know, I don't own a car, I just rent them pretty often, and I'll take one of those every day over almost any brand. At least until my car rental company gets Teslas.

Comment Re:what about liability? and maybe even criminal l (Score 2) 90

Just think of a auto drive loosing control and plowing through a school crossing killing a dozen children. Who or what is responsible? The passenger? Or the computer?

The school that put its children on the fucking Autobahn, a high-speed road that is by law off-limits to pedestrians, bicycles and anything else that can't reach and maintain the minimum speed of 60 km/h.

Comment targets (Score 1) 392

Intelligence agencies are not going to give up trying to get the bad guys.

I'm glad to hear that as I'm sure everyone else is.

Now if you could give up trying to spy on all the other guys, we could become friends. You see, the problem is your "kill 'em all, let god sort 'em out" approach of just vacuuming everything in and leaving the decision about who the bad guys actually are until later.

Comment Re:Who are you? I'm bat- er, ANON! (Score 1) 413

This and more. There's also a massive difference between actually abusing a child and trading pictures of nude kids on the beach. And many more details.

That's the main problem with the public court of opinion - our own and the medias tendency to simplify. To replace details with labels.

Every witch hunt in history has this problem. They all start with something arguably reasonable. You want to get rid of the witch because she poisoned your cows. You want to kick out jews because they steal money from the people. You want to drive the heathen out of the community because he erodes moral values. You want to put the paedophile behind bars because he abuses children. More or less reasonable arguments, maybe not true but there's a causality in the thinking that we can relate to. But a few steps further the cause is lost or abstracted and the individual becomes a group, and the causality is not even assumed anymore, just implicit in the group attribution. Now you want to burn all witches, kill all jews, slaughter all heathen or castrate all paedophiles. Not because they've one anything, only because they belong to a group that you've given the "evil" label.

Comment Re:Think of the children! (Score 2) 413

Not the purposefully coordinated kind where everyone meets in a dark room somewhere to plot their actions, but the kind where everyone sharing fundamentally rotten values leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour.

Which is not a conspiracy. The first rule of searching for the truth is to call things by their proper names. A conspiracy, by both legal and colloquial definition, requires agreement between the parties. Agreement requires communication (not necessarily verbal, but explicit).
If everyone on the highway drives too fast, you can argue about "everyone sharing [fundamental values] leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour", but that still only makes it a lot of speeding tickets and not a conspiracy.

It's important to make the distinction because it changes how to approach the problem. A conspiracy you would try to shatter in a different way than you would tackle a culture problem.

Comment validation (Score 1) 413

the ongoing work, which has been divided into three steps.

None of which is validation of the information.

It'll be interesting to watch how much of this is going to end up being disclosure, how much a witch hunt and how much targeted disinformation. It's already far too popular to destroy peoples' lives by accusing them of kiddie porn, now you can make an anonymous account on Github and add your enemies.

We seem to forget too often that the more vile the crime, the more sure you need to be that you actually have the guilty party. Falsely accusing someone of a petty theft is bad, but it will be forgotten. Falsely accusing someone of murder, rape or kiddie porn, not so much.

Comment Re:Not trying to excuse what he did (Score 1) 376

but had the first degree women friends of the Professor on Facebook not replied to that first woman saying that they were also in an online sexual relationship with the Professor, then the first woman wouldn't have considered his behavior sexual harassment, and she would have never retroactively taken back her consent to the online relationship.

Sadly, this seems to be the case for many recent sexual harassment cases, which is bad firstly because it turns innocent (not necessarily morally good, but criminally innocent) people into victims of the system and secondly because it muddies the water when it comes to real cases. Too many of these "angry ex-lover" cases, and people will tend to believe that actual cases are of the same kind.

She also said she felt trap near the end, but really how trapped could she have been?

You can feel very trapped in relationships, ask any of your married friends. ;-)

Seriously, over the Internet, when it's not really an actual relationship - yes, she does have attachment issues.

Comment Re:Protocols (Score 1) 252

You're right, it's not that the OS doesn't matter at all. If you run your home on any kind of windows, I believe you are incredibly smart because you just made sure that if you're ever accused of a crime, you'll be among the 1% that can make the insanity defense work.

But for the question of connectedness and building a smart home infrastructure, the focus should not be on choosing the right OS, but on defining the right protocols. Once that is done, the right OS will win by merit. But if you go about it the wrong way and look for picking the right OS first, then you'll create lock-in effects and very soon the right OS will become the wrong OS.

Comment Re:How about educating your dumbfuck mother? (Score 1) 463

security is frequently hampered by management that

...did not receive useful information about information security.

Fixed that for you. I know the frustration, I've been there many times. I do agree that management decisions can affect information security dramatically. However, I don't think it's management stupidity. Or rather: A different kind.

I believe there are two kinds of companies. Those that understand information security and those that don't. You can spot them by one simple thing: Those that do have a position - the CISO or similar - whose job it is to translate between management and information security. Those that don't have nobody and suffer from a management and an information security that speak different languages.

As it turns out, that manager was a criminal:

You're right, there are three kinds of companies. There are also the criminally incompetent.

Comment Re:Not so sure about this... (Score 1) 252

This one million times.

I'm so amazed at this mantra of "corporations good, government bad" that gets repeated ad nauseam in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that I'm about one inch short of deciding that the entire USA is some kind of religious nutjob cult to the god of imaginative economy.

I don't want government nor private corporations into my house to watch me 24/7. But when I think about the potential consequences, I'm more afraid of corporations and what they would do with it than of the government.

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