intransigent · HackerTrans

intransigent

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vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Political quagmires like this only get untangled by terrifying psychos, unfortunately.

People only shut their mouths when they get threatened into a fearful silence, and/or sometimes if they get bribed enough.

Otherwise, you'll always have a substantially sized group of complainers dragging down a project this big, and the complainers leech into operations and mysterious expensive mistakes erode the budget of an already expensive operation.

There's just enough shrug factor here for people to not care about how much gas they burn driving to places that might not be very exciting to begin with.

Many would just as soon not have to travel at all, and even more would prefer to not be taxed so as to pay for trips they personally don't want to take to begin with. Most people just want their actual lives to be generally easier.

Without confrontational intimidation, bribery is probably the only other political lever to press in the United States.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Yeah, in a way, this sort of thing is indicative of a turing tarpit.

It's not obvious which, among all the moving parts, is responsible for any of the outcomes, just by looking at the commands themselves in isolation.

If someone did a similar thing in Brainfuck it wouldn't be entirely surprising that such a thing is possible, but the practicality of being able to getting it right every time, extemporaneously, is low.

It's interesting to know that this is possible, in case of emergency, but just because it's possible doesn't make it desirable.

If someone wrote an article about how to do the same in MS DOS batch files, circa 1996, it'd be an interesting proof of robustness, but an undesirable standard operating procedure.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Because many developers don't honestly believe that SQL represents a code execution boundary. Much of the time, the tendency is to think of SQL as simple I/O with a disk. And one rarely needs to worry about escaping interpretted expressions when streaming into and out of an I/O pipe.

They don't think of it as "executable code" because of the limited and monotonous nature of CRUD operations typically associated with data persistence.

They just think of it as yet another inconvenient form of declaritive data already at rest. Perhaps akin to mark-up. Raw data, like XML.

With JSON, some developers innately clue themselves in, because JavaScript, but they don't honestly understand the root of the hazard. They're just thinking FIRE BAD! Then they hack some JSONP into place because it's fun to do that sort of thing.

Most novice developers (my younger self included, tisk tisk) strongly resist protections against even HTML injection, until they see a massacre play itself out in the real world, when someone drops the ball.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Well, the idea of global doomsday for all, beyond mere tactical retaliation, is probably drawn from the media, with movies like Dr. Stangelove playing the part of the primary narrative.

As to how much any world power has actually strategized and mobilized resources toward such an end (deliberate global suicide that destroys both sides by design) is likely to never be fully revealed, since it's a slightly alarming idea.

Even so, some of the plans that have been revealed really are quite terrible. Bad enough, that the difference between deliberate and accidental nuclear winters could be considered an argument that splits hairs.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Since when is Social Media participation a compulsory activity?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Old people aren't quite as tuned-in to the technical realities of the internet and its in-groups and out-groups.

The premise that "there is no anonymous" escapes 4 out of 5 people I talk to. It takes very careful explaining, to bring people to the understanding that their are hacking teams with names, that get away with things, and the things that those named sub-groups manage pull off are perpetrated by "some unknown, anonymous group of people" until evidence demonstrates who done it.

Because of this, The Proles (people who aren't paying close attention) often confuse the premise being a simple anonymous tipster with being affiliated with the fictious premise of an organized, regimented imaginary hacking group that possesses a rightful claim to the mantle of "Anonymous" as if it were Batman.

Then media outlets exploit this cluelessness, to sell advertising, by drumming up exciting click-bait that perpetuates the false narrative that there is a movement called Anonymous, rather than the prank call it really is.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Be nice and play ball, or you'll be subjected to a set-top-box appliance again.

  (it puts the lotion on its skin
   or it gets the hose again.)

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Consider the possibility that lead poisoning inflicts just the type of mental disabilities that would lead a person to vote in such a fashion to begin with. With that in mind, is this really how you feel?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

They are supposed to be captured from a twitter feed.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Because it kind of smells like bullshit seizing moral high ground, and not actually changing anything.

Religion promises everything and delivers nothing.

My arguments are not irrelevant. You seem to be hinting that I'm a forum sliding paid mercenary shill on a mission to gaslight political opponents blah blah blah...

I am not some political interloper out to dilute conversation or discourage the action of others. I only outline my own rationale for why I think this is a pointless feel-good activity. Take this comment as my pledge. I am not being sarcastic.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Pledges don't require signatures. I've taken the pledge of allegiance to the United States of America...

Specifically, though I was pointing out flaws with respect to the part about "having teeth":

  with actual teeth (violating it means you 
  can't commercially build software any more).

Taking a "pledge" sure ...but then also recording names, and then beyond even THAT enforcing violations, violations which carry penalties. But not just any single penalty for some transgression, a PERPETUAL penalty that blacklists a person.

There's an escalation in the magnitude of authority hidden in this idea, which starts with an ideal, and can quickly spin into ideology. And maybe delves into impossibilities, at best. At worst suspends disbelief, and convinces people things are fixed when nothing has actually changed.

Crimes are crimes. Incidents involving civil damages are recognized by state authorities. Meanwhile the by-laws of a subculture, fraternal guild or trade association are something else entirely. Without passing the bar exam maybe this becomes cult-like.

Okay, industry self governance is a thing too. Agreeing to ground rules, when regulatory iversight is dubious. Is the intent to provide protections against situations which legal state appointed authorities cannot legislate or perhaps fail to grasp? That sounds like a tall order which carries realities beyond a simple pledge or civic association's intentions.

If the intent is to somehow apply dogma to adversaries whom already flout rules and willfully undermine codes of conduct, those people will assuredly happily lie, sign the pledge, infiltrate and destroy whatever beautiful thing that had yet to hatch anyway. With falsified identities, no less. So, then what?

Making promises is nice. Communication of expectations is good. Codified guidelines are even better. Maybe the idea is for something like standards and practices departments within television networks, or the PMRC which tried to take stand against foul language in music, according to opinions regarding morality.

Software, isn't simple artistic expression, but still there would need to be enforcement, and a registry of good children who get presents from Santa, and bad children who get coal.

Who has the teeth? Who gets to bite? (hint: the words "everyone/anyone" does not belong in the response, because the buck stops somewhere real)

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

  - Taking the hippocratic oath
  - Passing the bar
  - Obtaining a pilot's license
  - Completing series 7,(63,66) exams

Yes, these are things people do. But these things are each different from each other, and different from a petition.

Some of them are not centralized lists, and others are not calls to political action.

Meanwhile others are discriminatory, in that they distinguish those who have proven proficiencies, as capable practicioners of valuable skills.

Simply affirming a willingness to act in a certain way only means so much. Refusing to act means less. Indicating an intent to prevent others from acting is yet another behavior.

Advertising any political intentions, regardless of actual skills or rationale, may carry sentimental value, and that's nice, I guess.

Meanwhile the possession of technical skills, which rest on the firmament of electrified silicon substrates, with open-ended usage patterns, which may eventually lead to these objects ...behaving with some semblance of ...sentient free will? Deciding thier own ethics? In ways not obvious to the inventor?

Are their parenting licenses?

Just kidding. That last part's a can of worms all its own.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Isn't the petition itself a kind of database, naming and identifying specific individuals?

What if the petition itself is abused as a source of information?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Wouldn't that require the building of a database that is used to discriminate against individuals listed therein?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

VGER.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

If it helps, there are probably wi-fi, mobile broadband, and cellular telephone providers that probably won't ask for your name or address, although you'll probably get gouged for bandwidth.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

It doesn't matter what I think, because the inexorable tide has washed over this question long ago.

Anybody willing to outspend their rivals with enough money to bury the world in obfuscated asynchronous callback hell, just to lock people out of any hope of understanding what their machines are actually doing, did exactly that over the past decade.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I definitely get the sense that this was a situation where a guy made too much money way too fast. Like almost overnight.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like he had been pent up, and when an effectively unlimited budget reared its head, it open the floodgates for so many bottled up urges.

By the time he had graduated to drunk driving convictions, other habits had been so firmly established that he was never going back to his old life.

It reads like a medical study of addiction models in animals. When granted unlimited push-button access to an addictive stimulus they push the button compulsively, without stopping and kill themselves from sheer lack of self control.

And about that writing of the tell-all cringe blog. I'd reconsider if I were you. Definitely do some writing. Write on paper. Not on a computer. Not on the internet. Lock it away, and then proof read it when you're in the best possible mood, and try to imagine how it would change your mood to realize others had read it, and cringed over it.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

So, magnetic fields can be used to confine fusion plasma with "five nines" reliability?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Reddit is 4chan for pussies.