"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States..."

Whoopsie, wrong questionnaire.

Instead of talking about "malicious actors", the article should be talking about malicious developers.

Or, and I think this is more likely ... malicious management who is more interested in getting something out the door than giving a damn about how much it sucks.

Find me a developer who has never been told to "just do it" and put some garbage out, and I'll show you a lucky (wo)man.

From what I've seen, this is caused by the people who make the decisions deciding they don't want to wait, or spend the time implementing security.

There's an easy answer: companies are more interested in "ZOMG, we have to have teh app" then they are in spending time and resources in making the app not suck.

Any app which goes out the door which is sending passwords in plaintext was either written by someone who was incompetent, or who was told by management to just ship the damned thing and get on with it.

In my experience, it's usually the latter.

And, since companies don't really bear any liability for implementing terrible security, I don't see this changing.

My bet, there were a few people who knew this, pointed it out, and got told to STFU. If nobody knew about this, well, then we'll revert back to incompetence and people who have no idea of how to write for security.

"Ay yo, Jamal blast on dat foo"

*BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*

"I's staight busted dis GAT in dat nigga ass. I ain't even seen da body drop"

Holy Eubonics Batman!!

Uh, it's spelled "solder" in the US, too.

Yes, but how do US people pronounce it?

Sodder

OK, smartass.

How do you say "walking"? Do you pronounce it wallking?

How do you say "talking"? Do you pronounce it tallking?

How about these? calm half salmon talk balk would should

"We should cut the salmon in half and talk calmy" is pronounced by most English speakers without a single audible L in it.

Let's face it. English is a screwed up language, and inherently affected by accent and upbringing. And it's full of exceptions and things which make no sense.

Now, tell me how many Brits say "idear"? Do the words "tire" "tower" and "tar" sound any different?

How many Brits essentially can't say "th" and turn it into a V or an F? Because I've certainly heard people say what sounds like "wevver" instead of weather.

So, when we hear a uniform dialect of English in the UK, we might take you seriously. But the reality is, we don't.

The only lies exposed by that fiasco is that of the mortgage applicants lying on their loan-applications. Most of those folks have never been to Wall Street.

Not so. Back in about 2005 or so, I remember reading articles about NINJA mortgages -- No Income, No Job, No Accepted (or No Income, No Job or Assets). At the time I remember thinking it was a stupid idea, and made no sense at all.

The lenders were going on a drunken rampage giving loans to anybody with a pulse. But they knew they were doing this.

But, make no mistake, this wasn't borrowers lying on their applications. This was lenders approving any application which came across their desk, and was known to be a risky investment at the time.

What subsequently happened was that junk debt, (which they knew was junk debt, and was junk debt because they were just giving anybody with a pulse) was then bundled up into derivatives, treated as if it was AAA rated debt, and then sold off onto the market. And then everybody else bought bad US debt, and it trickled throughout the world.

Essentially the US lenders got themselves in deep shit, packaged up that shit as if it was caviar, and then let everybody else deal with the problem.

That, my friend, was Wall Street. And it was more or less theft writ large. They lied about the risk of their securities in order to get other people to buy them.

Basically they sold magic beans to the rest of the world, so that the debt was no longer their problem. When that debt collapsed, it undermined the house of cards which had been built on it.

"High Frequency Theft."

No lies there. In other words, fail.

You don't think the act of skimming money out of the market by making a large number of trades to allow yourself to do arbitrage and exploit the fact that you have direct access to the system is theft?

I think when they do this they more or less inject themselves as a middle man who creates no value, and distorts the market to their own ends. I see HFT as nothing more than institutionalized theft.

They don't 'earn' it, they don't generate value, they just sit in the middle and take the vigorish and act like they're entitled to it. It's just siphoning money out of the economy for their gain.

My person may be anecdotal evidence, but the Economist's article puts more solid statistics behind it.

My problem with the conclusion of the article is that it places the issue at the feet of Socialism. Since they only studied East Germany, they can't really say it was Socialism which caused it, only that in this particular case.

I'm not defending Socialism -- at least, not the form the Soviets were following. But, as you say, the attitude of "it's OK to screw the government" can spill over into a more generalized "it's OK to screw anybody".

I don't dispute that the people who grew up in East Germany were more prone to cheating a little. I do disagree with the conclusion that this was the result of Socialism -- I don't think they had enough to make that claim.

If it was true, I would assume you, and everybody who grew up in such a country would also be prone to cheating.

So, either you're a cheating bastard, or their conclusions are overly broad. ;-)

Pick any place with a failed economy, or where the penalties of cheating are outweighed by the rewards, and people will simply cheat. No matter your system of government.

Be that Wall Street, or East Germany.

Then you've been working for the wrong people.

The aforementioned situation actually came up a few months ago with a board meeting. And yes, the board member did want my security person fired.

Asking whether I should write that he wants him to be fired for following security protocol (one should maybe know that security is paramount in our company) while said board member in turn wanted him to bypass security and allow him in unidentified closed the case pretty quickly.

Aside of a rather tasteless joke that comes to my mind...

Do you really want them to rip?

Wait 'til the big networks pick up the story.

Disability? Hardly. The webpages are just bloated, fat, loaded with useless information and pretending they know better what you want than you do.

That's not disabled, that's the current standard of the western world.

That's not fair. I really don't feel like defending Verizon, but I am absolutely certain they don't discriminate against the deaf and blind. They rob everyone without prejudice.

Argumentum ad populum.

/* so is there no shame for a guy to report being sodomized against his will by a man? */

Speaking as a man, I would much prefer admit I'd been sodomized against my will by a man than raped by a woman. Either scenario sucks, but most men can understand some gigantic physical specimen of a psycho raping another man, or being gang raped in prison. Almost no man wants to admit that some "girl" fucked him against his will, or used her position of power to gain "sexual favors" as a metric of job performance. Sorry.

When her body, her right, her choice is no longer his responsibility, then we'll've actually made progress.

Then they aren't 'real companies', just 'companies'. bwahaha!