See blog entry: https://puppet.com/blog/nsa-re...

https://github.com/NationalSec...
https://github.com/SIMP

A great and extremely useful project by the way.

1) If you're a 'tech journalist', make some minimal effort to get facts right (like you know actually looking at dates on the GitHub org page), at least in your fucking headline.

2) I hate this reductive 'anything with the word NSA in it is bad' reasoning. Open source is open source, and useful code is useful. GitHub is full of cool stuff from organizations that don't get much love here - Walmart, Facebook etc.

This. After a handful of rides with Uber in Sydney I have stopped. It should be an easy market the local taxi industry is monopolistic and overpriced e.g. customers pay a 5% charge if you pay with a card. But Uber went quickly downhill after a handful of rides.

Started with trying to catch a ride in the city. The map showed the usual bullshit - ubers swarming everywhere around me. But I got a pick up time of ten minutes. And almost ten minutes passed with the driver no closer, and looking at where he's going on the map he clearly has no clue about one way streets and turn restrictions (no GPS?). I cancel the ride and Uber slugs me $10. They cancelled when I complained but it left a bitter taste. You don't get a message saying you will be charged for this ride when you cancel, just a generic message as I remember. To check whether you got charged you have to check your purchase history.

The same happened a couple of days ago, but this time I cancelled in under five minutes after seeing the driver floundering around just up the road. Still didn't know whether I got charged until after when I checked my purchase history. Why isn't there a pop up saying if you cancel now you will be charged.

That combined with crap drivers ~20% of the time kills it. If one out of five times I arrive late despite taking a cab because the driver doesn't know how to use a GPS then it kills the point of the 10-20% saving over a normal cab.

You can know by wanting to know - this isn't China we are discussing.

There was a massive public campaign: https://www.savetheinternet.in...

The founders of hundreds of Indian startups signed a letter calling for net neutrality.

The regulatory authority TRAI received 2.4 million public submissions, mostly favouring net neutrality.

India is a corrupt country but don't get so hung up on stereotypes.

Also, unlike China, Facebook is the dominant social network in India as much as it is everywhere else. There are no local alternatives - most internet users would be comfortable enough with English to just use Facebook and multi language support takes care of the rest. What's app is huge as you would expect. So there is no question of keeping Facebook out. Just the Zuckernet - India doesn't want the Zuckernet.

I cannot believe an audience like Slashdot does not get the implications of something like this. Imagine if the internet had been considered too expensive for poorer countries and the only 'internet' that reached poorer countries was a curated government managed internet in the guise of making it cheap. Why does India need the real internet at all, they can't afford it anyway, just like they shouldn't be flying rockets and shit. Let's switch the whole country to free Zuckernet.

That is the kind of condescending attitude that people like Mark Zuckerberg have that really pisses off people know who anything about internet access in India. That whole 'let them eat stale bread for free' thing.

The choice between Zuckerberg curated internet and no internet is a made up, false dichotomy. Whatever else you may say or hate about Google, I much much prefer their philosophy of fast internet is good for Google and therefore they focus on improving access to ALL of the internet.

For anyone who has been to a train station in India for example, this is an absolute godsend: http://indianexpress.com/artic...

And a huge number of poorer Indians use trains - we are talking millions of people every day if they cover the 100 largest stations with adequate bandwidth.

The biggest barrier to internet access in India is not just the cost. And the reason for the high cost is not just the fact that people are poor - the licensing regime and restricted spectrum are far bigger factors than price.

This has been big news in India and most opinion was strongly against Facebook. You can read some of the arguments here: http://blogs.timesofindia.indi...

Being poor or poorer doesn't universally bestow some sort of nobility or sense of purpose or a special hunger for knowledge. Most people in the third world use the internet for what the developed world does - games and pointless social media and sharing garbage. That is exactly what the free 'tablets' that a misguided minister subsidized in India a few years ago were mostly used for.

Provide internet access in public spaces, and in schools and universities Mr. Zuckerberg if you really give a shit.

Business Insider didn't just become an authoritative source of news just because it is saying what Slashdot wants to hear.

- "Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy" Garbage. That's stuff of fantasies, no large commercial software company has a structure like that. Slashdot makes 'merit based hiring' sound like some kind of panacea - there is no such thing. Maybe GitHub are going the wrong way but this sort of description sounds like it came from someone with an axe to grind. No start up retains that cosy 'smart people you love to work with' feel.

- For the people saying just use a different hosting service, almost every worthwhile open source project is hosted on Github and tracks issues and releases on Github. ALL major companies use Github when they decide to go open source with a project. Guess where Apple put Swift? Microsoft when they wanted to develop an OpenSSH port publicly? Netflix? Yelp? Google's Tensor Flow?

- Alternatives - let's not even mention SourceForge. Bitbucket? Look at how terribly cluttered their UI is compared to Github: https://bitbucket.org/atlassia... And Github has massive first mover advantage here. I can't believe how awful Github's notification system is - I can't set up notifications to just keep track of new releases in a project for example.

- What some here hate is that GitHub is no longer focused on the traditional open source developer audience (if it ever was). 'Enterprise focused company' means what it says on the label. Yes they will have a massive sales force. Yes they are exploiting the brand name to sell an enterprise product that is way more expensive per user than their competitors (Bitbucket and Gitlab). But you know what - better than bundling fucking adware with downloads from their website.

- On the same point, they don't care much for the 'Git isn't server based, why do you need Github to host stuff' audience, or the 'you can take my eMacs from my cold dead hands'. They've put significant effort into their app, available on all platforms (yes an app - for 'developers' don't know how to run git clone or configure SSH keys. Snigger). You know what - they don't care. I heard from a friend recently how working in a major bank, their data science and modelling teams write code and don't use any source control. That's their target audience and that's where their sales people will make them money. I have lost count of the number of perfectly intelligent people I have dealt with who can't get their heads around Git or cannot be bothered to.

- Github doing what's best for Github, and when they do their sales pitch, a couple of slides of how Google hosts their projects on Github rather than the crappy code.google.com does not hurt. And I don't terribly care, compared to the products I have seen sales people sell successfully, Github is like vaccines - it's a good thing despite how it gets sold. A collaboration tool is a pretty damn good pitch.

- On the eMacs thing, Github released an Open Source plugin friendly editor called Atom. And I like it, I like it a lot. Github Page is pretty neat. Git LFS is awesome and works seamlessly for versioning large files and keeping them in the same repo - much better than the half baked git-annex option some projects used. It definitely does not look like they are out of ideas, despite apparently carrying a massive baggage of diversity based incompetent hires if Slashdot is to be believed.

- Look at this blog entry about a doctor who likes to code: https://github.com/blog/2103-m.... In commercial terms, you can't fault their choice of going for the much bigger market rather than sticking to trying to sell to 'pure' software / IT firms.

- Look at their blog, the huge list of integrations. They're not asleep at the wheel.

- Another one about their services team: https://github.com/blog/2093-h.... The second sentence is "But what about when the team's primary deliverable is not software?".

- I like GitLab. I use GitLab. I prefer GitLab for the fact that their core product is open source with proprietary extra bits rather than the completely closed source GitHub Enterprise and GitHub apps. But they have some way to go, and I don't think they have the same amount of money or clout. Their public hosting page is pretty embarrassing: https://gitlab.com/public

Stopped reading comments on other sites a long time ago, but the Slashdot moderation thing used to work mostly.

He's 14 years old FFS. I don't remember much of what I did or did not do at that age, but I am damn sure I wouldn't come off great from a trial by social media.

At least above average intelligence, socially awkward kid probably misuses the word 'invent'. Maybe he was a bit desperate for attention. Don't know, don't care. He got handcuffed out of his classroom, in every part of the world I have been to that is every level of messed up, and I wouldn't grudge him getting some time hanging out with people / institutions he looks up to. Maybe he wouldn't make this photo on merit: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qMS0...

So fucking what. He got handcuffed out of his classroom. If he gets to visit NASA and Google and Facebook, that's pretty commensurate compensation. What the kid needed was some off the radar time hanging out with tech / science folks, then back to (a different) school. Pre social media, that would be possible - it would make the papers, then fade away, people forget your name.

But now, we put a 14 year old's life under the type of scrutiny no one would survive unscathed. Some of the comments that I would love to annotate with 'HE'S FOURTEEN'.

Browsing at '2' now:

1) He is not a particularly bright kid and is being unduly celebrated.

  He's not particularly bright and spends his time publically denouncing unduly celebrated 14 year olds on internet forums.

2) 20,000 volts should be enough for anybody

  Joke about tasering a skinny non violent 14 year old kid. HAHA

3) Sorry, but you need to be part of a celebrated group, re-assemble your clock into something that some people say resembles an IED, and then have the school go apeshit and overreact to it.

  I made a better clock when I was 14 and no one cared, so I'll piss all over this 14 year old.

4) So, they finally got their 15min of fame, and now let's just be happy to have them out of the country and back where they want to be in the first place.

The funniest thing about the 'us vs them' theme is the denial of reality. The family are Americans, they hold American passports, they are and remain American in the only way that counts.

5) IMO, this was all part of a preconceived plan to scare people at school by bringing in a suspicious-looking device and then cry discrimination when called out on it.

  (4 Insightful) Sigh

6) Yep.... I hate to say it, but I think a LOT of us just got fooled on this one, at least initially. As techie geeks , we *wanted* to believe this was all about a young, brilliant kid getting held back by the system.

Usual predictable media cycle of build them up then tear them down. Actually I don't think any real tech geek was 'fooled' even before the clock tear downs etc. I saw a curious kid stuck in a crap system being treated abysmally by public taxpayer funded institutions. The fix was to get him into a better environment where he can make what he can of himself. Not this circus. If you got fooled, the fault is yours, don't put it on the kid.

7) If you're muslim, you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb

I had the privilege of being brought up in an environment where that wasn't much of a concern when I went to school. I want all 14 year olds to have that privilege.

And everyone goes on about 'muslim kid', when did we start stamping religion at birth? His muslim-ness didn't seem to be that big a part of his life before this whole business. Now we've given his dad an excuse to cut him off from the rest of the world, take him to Mecca, maybe enrol him in religious classes, move to a muslim country, all at a very impressionable age. If the kid turns into a bearded islamist conservative, I won't blame him. He tried being different and fitting in and look where it got him.

8) Ahmed didn't just not invent anything, he disobeyed a science teacher who saw the clock and told him not to show it to anyone else in the school. Ahmed plugged in the clock and set an alarm to go off during his English class. The mess of unsecured components and wires was dangerous when plugged into 110V AC, if not scary for what it might be. The English teacher quite understandably freaked out.
Ahmed's father had to have known the clock was not the invention of his son, yet he set up fundraisers.
Last November, Ahmed's father registered a company named Twin Towers Transportation.

(4 Insightful)
This is the only one of the nutty conspiracy things I actually looked up and feel stupid for doing so. Apparently it's housed in a building called Twin Towers. Or maybe not. Who gives a crap, I thought this was about the 14 year old and if it is who gives a damn what his uncle calls his company or his cat.

Even if that twisted summary of what he did is accurate, I can't find anything to be outraged about. Like, you know, handcuffing a kid out of the classroom. He did, knowingly, and with malicious intent set off a clock alarm

9) I'm curious if they're leaving the country to avoid a potential fraud charge. You don't insult a police department this haphazardly and get away with it. Nothing would make me happier than watching this piece of trash and his family get arrested as they try and leave the country.

Only one thing worth noting - the 14 year old is very much included in the poster's list of people who should be arrested. The rest of his family, I don't know or care if they should or shouldn't.

10) Because clearly he deserves more recognition for reassembling a clock than Olivia does for discovering a new way to detect Ebola...

(5 Insightful) Ok. If you say so. You are the only one saying that though. In this world of perfectly proportional recognition given out to everyone from the Kardashians to Fujio Masuoka, the 'recognition' for this 14 year old is what we should be outraged out.
Incidentally, I don't think I saw or read a single comment describing him as some sort of genius], all I saw was 'hey kid, drop by our lab sometime, we can show you some cool stuff'.

Not a big fan of tech support, the ones who are good at what they do tend to move on or move up wry quickly.

I have no idea what the Windows equivalent is like (sccm or something). But I have used Casper from Jamf software to manage several Macs, and it's a pretty cool tool. They also have a simpler option called Bushel, with a free option for three devices, which I haven't tried. Install either, lock down their Macs, and manage their machines with a remote management tool, which also lets you get some learning in. You could even keep your Mac synced with your parents'. They need something installed, you do it for them remotely. The same for patches, OS updates etc. Also, if you build a system from scratch using one of these tools with no manual messing around and if you have the necessary user backups, you can rebuild a machine.

The sheer amount of time spent fixing unknown environments ( where you don't know all the things done in the past to a system ) is never worth it and it's a game you can't win.

Manage system state and configs, automate, take backups, rebuild from scratch if needed.

Casper has a tool called composer, which takes before and after system snapshots for an installation and gives you a reusable package.

My feeling was a similar approach is harder in the Windows world. The UNIX 'everything is a file' advantage, no registry, saner installation paths all help.

Misleading advertising aside, that's really not a fair comparison.
Frankly, by now we know what to expect from $125 phones in terms of updates. You really do get what you pay for, and with low end Android phones it is better to temper your expectations than complain later.

I am not excusing Motorola for the false promises. But really, for that price, what did you expect? And I really can't understand why anyone would buy anything under a Moto G, especially in a mid-high income country. Especially anyone who uses their phone features enough to care about software updates. What possible reason could you have for saving a measly $50 over a Moto G?

That's ridiculous. It doesn't cost just a dollar to manufacture and sell critical drugs like this.

It costs a few cents. That's how much it retails for in India.

The summary doesn't mention the name of the active ingredient, on slashdot that's pretty inexcusable. Don't give the market name importance.

The real story isn't the egomaniac Ceo, he's doing what's on his job description. The story is the complete absence of checks and balances. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with your country? They have a nation wide exclusive on a half century old drug with the freedom to set any price they want??? Sanctioned by the Fda?

Sounds like something Obama could do something about. Import vast quantities of the drug, accelerate Fda approval, flood the market? You do have emergency provisions in the law for importing critical medical supplies I hope? You do right? Why isn't this the fucking story, not some idiotic Twitter baiting?

Seriously? I don't get the hype over self driving cars, but this is nuts. Maybe just the article rather than the study, if there is one. We have practically or completely driverless transport. It's called public transport, and it costs a hell of a lot less than it would to deploy and accommodate useless driverless cars. It's a solved problem, many times over. Rail, underground rail, trams, light rail, busways (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway), driverless trains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems) etc. The answer to fixing a problem involving hundreds of cars driving to the same place is not to take the driver out of the picture, it is to take the bloody cars out of the picture.

Decent home shipping to save you from carrying your shopping home. That's the main reason people have for driving to malls. Get rid of it. It's a terrible reason, and lugging shopping home is no fun, even with a car.

Most of the world is so far behind in what's possible with public transport, that's where research should focus on. Driverless cars matter about as much as rich tycoons taking joyrides into space.

The level of data collection and sharing enabled by default in Windows 10 is truly scary, as I mentioned in a comment yesterday (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7759605&cid=50205063). But that blog post is snarky and awful. There is a decent article about it, which belongs in the summary, ironically one she linked herself: http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

There may be a valid point or two in that blog, but the Google drool all over it makes it truly terrible.

"I have enormous faith in Google and Googlers doing the right thing with respect to protecting the data I share with them"

Umm yeah...

"Users with Home versions of Win10 will be required to accept automatic updates, including drivers.

And here's a biggy. If you don't want Microsoft installing updates automatically -- if you're a user who has chosen to take control of this process up to now -- you probably will hate Win10.
In some environments, this is unacceptable from a support and security standpoint, and reports are already coming in regarding driver related issues."

The cesspool that is the average Windows Home machine can only be improved by automatic updates. Just heard from someone a couple of days ago that they disabled Windows Update completely because it made their computer slow.

Many users -- especially on somewhat under-powered systems -- may find Win10 to be a painfully slow experience compared with Win7, irrespective of MS' claims.

Weasel worded nonsense - most factual reports suggest the opposite.

First things first. It's obvious from my email today that this icon and MS pitch alone are confusing many users. They've never seen anything like this appear before and many think it's a virus or that their system has been otherwise compromised.

Ah I wish the average user was that suspicious about actual threats. That corner on the average Windows machine is taken up by about twenty background apps.

The privacy issues in Windows 10 are quite fucking terrifying, and matter far more than one more icon hidden in a corner.

The issue for me is that I use Windows because I have to, Android / iPhone / GMail / Siri / Google Now etc. are a choice. And if I am not wrong, these are all opt in, you get notices when you first start up your phone / iDevice. Also a quick read suggest Microsoft's data collection goes far beyond anything I have seen even from Google.

"Windows 10 generates a unique advertising ID for each user on each device. "

"We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services."

tl;dr Windows 10 privacy issues are scary, but that blog post is garbage, try here: http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

The implications of which no review has mentioned or discussed in detail. With antitrust cases long behind them, and a lower market share in a more mobile world, Microsoft would be pretty sure they can get away with it. It is non trivial for a normal user to change default browsers, all Chrome can do is dump you on the correct settings screen. Then you've to scroll down, click on one of those buttons that doesn't look like a button. And there's a big friendly 'Reset to Microsoft Defaults' link at the bottom. You need a Microsoft account, or at least it is non trivial to install Windows without getting one. OneDrive pops up right away.

The most egregious is the 'express settings' option when you install. The 'custom settings' option is hidden in small text in blue on a blue background in another link that doesn't look like a link thing. The 'express settings' are scary, sending your voice, contact details, location, advertising ID, browsing history etc. to Microsoft and others.

Sure, the average slashdot user can get around it in a few minutes. The average user, not so much - they'll click Next.

What if your job, and having food on the table that day, requires being out in the mid day sun?

Take the numbers on het wave related deaths with a pinch of salt - it's some crappy statistic cooked up by a bored government official, perhaps based on dubious second hand reports (at best, could also be completely made up). Not saying the number is too high. Or too low. Could be either. But when the number of deaths you can report in India correlates with the number of clicks you get on your 'news' website, you get what you would expect.

While the urban heat island affect is well known, and Bangalore would certainly be affected, it's not anything like 10 degrees celsius (the way you write '10 centrigrade' suggests you're used to thinking in Fahrenheit).

Bangalore does not reach 45 degrees. Ever. The average summer maximums are ten degrees below that, which for India makes it pretty much like heaven. It is the ONLY major city in India that does not have an awful climate, which is one of the major reasons it became an IT hub.

Summers in India are fucked. You don't need the hyperbole. The facts are awful enough. 47 degrees is nuts, but it's not the one day extremes that are the worst thing. It's the fucking consistency of it, weeks upon weeks of 40 degrees+ maximums, averaging ~43. One fucking hot day, even if it is 46-7 degrees, is survivable for well off people, you stay home or in an air conditioned office, step out for lunch, change your mind, IM each other about how hot it is.

Seriously. There are a small number of people whose opinion is worth listening to even when it disagrees with the groups managing almost every single major distribution of Linux. Granted, some of them will be on slashdot. But definitely not anywhere near the number that pop in to these threads and whine. I use Linux to get things done. I have also used FreeBSD quite extensively, but there are a number of applications that don't quite support FreeBSD, and there is no equivalent of Red Hat. I plan to deploy Ceph soon for example for a storage cluster, and I want to be solving issues related to making Ceph work effectively, not spend time getting it up and running, compiling things myself. So I'll go with a *nix distribution that Ceph is most extensively tested against (RedHat or Ubuntu when I last checked).

If you want to build Debian without systemd and deal with all the niggly annoying issues that will come out of that and get progressively worse, go for it. Just don't pretend it's a viable option for anyone trying to get shit done, trying to keep systems running, trying to get systems up and going in short time. Sure, if you have an abiding interest in operating systems, love compiling kernels and creating custom builds of your favourite distribution, go for it. But the idea that any organization using Linux for critical systems would consider rolling their own distro to avoid systemd is ridiculous. Systemd won. Get over it. Discussions about how it is better or worse are mostly academic at this point. We are approaching almost a year since RHEL switched - if it was that catastrophically bad, we would know by now.