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Comment Grades are indicative not definitive (Score 1) 231

A former employer tried grading developers based on their pass rate. So you may have one dev who has 95% of their items pass testing first time around and another with one 80% but that doesn't mean the one with the higher rate is better, it may just be they had easier items assigned to them. But if the figures were similar month on month it would give a good indication of effort but not a definitive answer as to who was better. Most grading methods seem to fall into the same situation.

Comment Re:Don't worry, it'll always go up (Score 1) 431

The 2.7 million number assumes that nobody ever recovers from the disease .

Please try to get some basic understanding before posting. The 2.7m active cases in US is based on 8m known infections, less 5 million recovered , less 0.2 million dead. (BTW, "recovered" means the virus no longer detected, but does not mean there will not be lifelong after-effects.)

That a third of cases are still active means a lot of the infections are recent. Compare to Australia with 1300 active cases from 27,000 total - only 5% still active means it is under control. sort of.

Not sure where you got the numbers from but there's only 218 active of the 27K - https://covidlive.com.au/

Comment Re:Prepare? (Score 1) 253

We're supposed to prepare? How, exactly? I kind of think this is out of our hands...

Stock up on toilet paper, ammo, canned food, and generator fuel. And get a flamethrower. I'm not sure what you'll need a flamethrower for, but they are great for zombies, aliens, sterilization of an area, wasp nests, heating canned food, getting nosey neighbors to leave you alone. Actually I'm not sure why you wouldn't have a flamethrower.

Elon?

Submission + - Experts Find Serious Problems With Switzerland's Online Voting System (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Switzerland made headlines this month for the transparency of its internet voting system when it launched a public penetration test and bug bounty program to test the resiliency of the system to attack. But after source code for the software and technical documentation describing its architecture were leaked online last week, critics are already expressing concern about the system’s design and about the transparency around the public test. Cryptography experts who spent just a few hours examining the leaked code say the system is a poorly constructed and convoluted maze that makes it difficult to follow what’s going on and effectively evaluate whether the cryptography and other security measures deployed in the system are done properly.

“Most of the system is split across hundreds of different files, each configured at various levels,” Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon as well as a former computer scientist for England’s GCHQ intelligence agency, told Motherboard. “I’m used to dealing with Java code that runs across different packages and different teams, and this code somewhat defeats even my understanding.” She said the system uses cryptographic solutions that are fairly new to the field and that have to be implemented in very specific ways to make the system auditable, but the design the programmers chose thwarts this. “It is simply not the standard we would expect,” she told Motherboard. [...] It isn’t just outside attackers that are a concern; the system raises the possibility for an insider to intentionally misconfigure the system to make it easier to manipulate, while maintaining plausible deniability that the misconfiguration was unintentional.

Submission + - Popular password managers have severe vulnerabilities (zdnet.com)

chiefcrash writes: Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) published an assessment on Tuesday with the results of testing with several popular password managers, including LastPass and KeePass. The team said that each password management solution "failed to provide the security to safeguard a user's passwords as advertised" and "fundamental flaws" were found that "exposed the data they are designed to protect."

Submission + - YouTube wants 'dislike mobs' to stop weaponizing the dislike button (theverge.com) 2

Suren Enfiajyan writes: YouTube is no stranger to viewers weaponizing the dislike button, as seen by the company’s recent Rewind video, but the product development team is working on a way to tackle the issue. Tom Leung, director of project management at YouTube, addressed the issue of “dislike mobs” in a recent issue of Creator Insider, YouTube’s corporate series for creators.

“Dislike mobs” are the YouTube equivalent to review bombings on Steam — a group of people who are upset with a certain creator or game decide to execute an organized attack and downvote or negatively review a game or video into oblivion. It’s an issue on YouTube as well, and one that creators have spoken out against many times in the past. Reports have suggested that a video with a high number of dislikes — that outweighs the number of positive likes — is less likely to be recommended, and could therefore hurt the creator’s channel.

Now, the company is planning to experiment with new ways to make it more difficult for organized attacks to be executed. Leung states in the video above that these are just “lightly being discussed” right now, and if none of the options are the correct approach, they may hold off until a better idea comes along. Right now, the current option is for creators to go into their preferences and indicate they don’t want ratings (likes and dislike numbers) to be visible; the issue is that videos with an overwhelmingly positive response also won’t be seen. Leung and his team are aware of how important those public stats are to creators, too.

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