I was active online in this era. starting with 300 baud on a C=64, then moving up to C=128, Amiga and finally PC with a 57.6k modem before moving to dual-ISDN and DSL during the shell account / early WWW era. In Silicon Valley we of course had a healthy BBS scene. The one I called the most maxed out at 32 lines and ran the MajorBBS software by GlactiComm. GalactiComm made a 'GalactiBox' ISA serial expansion unit that would allow you to stack 16 internal modems into it. (max 64 modems over four units) So the place I called had two of them. The phone company had a great time getting those lines into a residence in Monte Sereno...

The popular multiplayer games on that system were Quest for Magic (it came stock with the BBS) Legend of Kyrandia (both are multiplayer MUD/Zork-likes, the latter was made into a successful point and click game in the 90s by Westwood) and Infinity Complex, which had a mutable environment you could dig out and expand.

I also occasionally called Spies in the Wire, which was run by Andy Rubin, later the creator of the Android operating system. Andy was a student and hobbyist at the time.

This is all receding so far into the past now it feels very quaint. But it was cool to dial up and see some of this great ANSI art from time to time. I was always impressed with people who could look at that character set and make art of out it.

Moderators are a special kind of special.

I got banned from the entire site for "circumventing" subreddit bans, which was because some of my alts were fed subreddits by the algorithm that I was not supposed to be on.

Also, is there a point, when any app uploaded to one of these app stores would have to basically comply with the same terms and conditions as apps on the Google Play Store, from the looks of it?

Google is trying to claw back some of their precious per-sale revenue loss by charging that $10K, and increasing the barrier to entry to the point where only serious businesses will attempt it. It's obvious that having third party app stores provides no benefit for Google, so they are doing everything they legally can to stem their losses. With monopoly app stores, Google and Apple basically have a license to print money. The incentives are not great for consumer freedom.

"Point us to an post about a guy given a job he is clearly unqualified"

That's literally my point -- the post isn't about the person in charge of the ministry! It's about them testing Collabora and the users just having too many issues with it. I guarantee if it was the same exact story and the minister had a male name none of you would have done this deep dive and criticism.

And why do you think she is unqualified? The Minister of Digitization doesn't need to be an expert on digitization, they need to be competent at high-level management and understanding how laws and policies work. Did she do something wrong? Would someone else have somehow convinced the 37 or however many employees who tested it not to hate it?

Yeah but for some reason Slashdot commenters jump to targeting people mentioned in the stories when they have a female first name.

They primarily manage company-internal CAs for big businesses, which they seem to do well. AFAICT, they noticed that their security infrastructure was compliant for managing a global CA, and thought they might as well also have that as a product. However, there are some operational differences between an enterprise CA and a public one, including that companies want to issue client certs to employees but nobody really does global client certs. That means that they had an intermediate CA for global client certs that they never used, but it was in the standard trust store, and nobody tested that it was handled right until Wayne just went through the standard trust store making sure a new certificate weakness detector didn't give false positives.

So eMudhra correctly handled all the certs they issued, and all the certs they used to sign them, but they got some extra CA certs trusted that they didn't really need, because it would make their side business more similar to their main business, and this caused a major problem.

Chances are that they actually got a real random number out of a HSM for the bad CA certs, but accidentally made the certs with the index of the random number instead of the actual number. (That is, they got the 4th random number and made a cert for 4 instead of the number.) I wouldn't be surprised if they stored the correct private key, which would have made leaf certs that didn't validate because the intermediate was wrong, but they never used it to find this problem.

The email wasn't even too good to be true. The nasty phishing emails are the ones where the recipient is supposed to get a real email on the topic, but it's because of a publicly known event and outsiders could easily make up the content, so they just need to find a bunch of likely recipients.

I think the "you've been assigned the mandatory phishing training" emails should come from an external sender and contain a link to get into the extended training, and you should only get the short refresher by finding it through verified sources. Not only would this be a good placement test, it would test that official communications are actually hard to fake and possible to verify using the process in the training.

"In response to the embarrassing data breach that hit the news recently, we've assigned every employee at the company an online training session about phishing at this link. By sure to take it immediately, because it's a legal requirement for our settlement and delays could affect your employment." --Russian Hackers

Audiophilles will be convinced they can hear a difference. They can't, but they will be convinced of it.

"And the UK handed you the brand new computer industry on a plate by destroying all the computers it had built during the war while not requiring that you do the same with the licensed copies you had built."

The UK decided to destroy its computers on its own, don't blame us for your idiocy. "Require"? What were you going to "require" we do? And how were you going to enforce this "requirement"?

And what licensed copies are you talking about? Britain shared the Bombe (which was basically an upgraded version of the one the Polish built, but of course Brits insist they're the geniuses who broke Enigma), but ENIAC was a US production.

Business school is a 2-year cocktail party.

We live in a capitalistic society that builds wealth.

Historically, hand-loom weavers complained when automatic looms were first introduced in the late 1700's, and ultimately they all lost their jobs.

...but at the same time, the cost of clothing and cloth in general came way down, making high quality clothing affordable to many, many more people. And the relative low cost of cloth gave rise to new uses, such as tarps and tents.

That's what building wealth is about: putting something in place that can reduce the cost and/or effort for future generations.

The fact that some people were put out of a job isn't a flaw, it's a feature. Making things more affordable and available raises the standard of living for everyone.

If you want to help the poor, if you want to solve some of society's problems, then that's a fine conversation to have. And I'm on board with it, I'll happily support your efforts... so long as your proposed solution doesn't involve changing capitalism.

If you want to help society, it has to come from a different place. UBI might work, government assistance is well intentioned but inefficient, communism is a complete disaster. An indexed wealth fund of $2 million would give out a dividend of $50,000 each year in perpetuity by gaining more value than inflation plus the disbursements, so maybe we should start setting up individual wealth funds for selected people, single mothers and doctorate students, perhaps. Start small and start taking people out of the workforce, and salaries should rise.

Other ideas are also welcome.

The idea that "workers and communities become afterthoughts" was well explored and described by Karl Marx himself in the middle of the 1800s, we don't need a Harvard Professor to remind us. Marx's mistake was to blame capitalism for the problem, we know that doesn't work.

We need new ideas and new institutions, but don't change capitalism.

Capitalism didn't cause any of it.

Given how most of the rioters are masked, and many of them are clearly white, I don't think iTs AlL iMMigAnNTSS is proven.

In any event, the French riot constantly, and have for decades, well before you saw large increases in immigration.

"She" is also lying about being a French woman. It's just some right-wing propaganda bot farm content.

It can very occasionally be a pain in the butt, but I use a throwaway google account for my phone, and nothing but my phone. The only data I allow it to back up is my contacts list (even that is a stretch for me, but I got tired of re-entering all the names and numbers each time I bought a new phone or doing a manual local backup process). There are no other google accounts added to my phone. No gmail (I use a third party IMAP client for a non-google email, only two weeks of emails are kept on the server before being downloaded to my local PC and deleted.)

Depends on how much you want to sacrifice convenience for safety in terms of someone potentially having access to your entire digital history / footprint by getting a hold of your phone.

The idea is to keep a reasonable amount of stuff local-only and off the device that is easy to steal / confiscate / hack.

I dunno...

You have a point about parental control, but the reality is that most of a child's waking time is away from the parents in state-mandated schooling. And I strongly suspect that the supervision schools use on their students is much less strict than the direct supervision that parents would use on their own kids.

For example, should we keep guns, alcohol, and tobacco out of the hands of children, or should we rely on the parents to impose rules?

We teach children to swim, but we also make people put fences around their swimming pools.

It makes sense to put restrictions on some of the obvious dangers kids might find in their environment.