freakonom

You have it backwards.

The state and its avatars recognize that they can and must have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if they wish to fester in society.

The point isn't that working at a startup is heroic.

The point is that if you don't believe in your core that the startup's mission is worth spending the last year of your life on, you're not the kind of person who'll do what's necessary to make it happen.

Maybe you can't think of a cause you'd make that sacrifice for, but many founders and startup employees can. I don't think that's disgusting.

An answer that usually works:

Absolutely, because there have been no large scale terrorist attacks.

> The internet poses one of the greatest threats to our existence

This is true, where "our" refers to domestic spy agencies and the governments that consume their output.

Hence these laws.

You know what would be super clever?

Discovering a case where wget shells out to bash while setting some env vars based on received headers. And then anonymously posting a supposed shellshock payload just begging to be downloaded with wget.

You should be paranoid about both because they're the same thing.

One tech company's backdoor is another NSA's vulnerability to exploit (and silence with an NSL).

The ecosystem of linux software that shells out to bash is ridiculous, and coercing an env var is a very light requirement.

Virtually any software that takes input from the internet can be a target, and enumerating the combination of versions and configurations is futile. We all need a working bash patch.

Not running a webserver protects against GET spray-n-pray, but you shouldn't feel safe.

s/Secret Service Special Agents/American hijackers/

s/U.S. government employees/Americans/

We therefore conclude that "Some Americans are American hijackers." The logic's airtight; it comes from a secret service test designed to evaluate logic ability.

Suddenly the TSA makes sense.

Companies will gradually start selling services piecemeal at what will be promoted as a "discount", where you buy a tiered package of sites. "Obviously, you only need Facebook, Google, and Buzzfeed. Why are you paying for that shitty internet you don't need?"

Public praises the lower bills, talk shows argue incessantly, and nobody grasps either the tech or the economics: the price of the discount is that large tech/infra companies no longer have to worry about competition, and can levy arbitrary entry fees.

Gradually the big companies open up walled app stores that let you run your internet applications within their parameters, rules, and fees. Since this is the only way to reach anyone, smaller upstarts/devlopers grudgingly accept the new way of things, until the whole shenanigan is disrupted by a little guy meeting an unmet, undervalued need out of left field.

And the cycle repeats.

You could actually argue that handling of these petitions is very transparent: petition text goes in, petition text comes out, and there's a null transform in the middle.

Between the lines: Google has calculated that

ExpectedLockinValue(given(ventureFunded)) + SillyPRBoost.value > ExpectedUsage($100k/yr)

Or, in other words, Google believes for the venture-funded cohort, giving you a $100k option now will set them up to take significantly more later. They also don't want to spend any effort administrating (vetting) this program.

I don't think this is confusing or insulting. Google's cards are plainly on the table, and as always they're here to make a profit.

npm as your package manager:

    npm install -g

node as your shell:

    node

An actual minimalist kernel booting to node might be interesting. But this isn't that. This just looks like plain node and npm, except locked down and made complicated for no reason.

This is a Free Speech Cage [1] with suits.

Straight from the history books, it's one of the last phases of the plan that goes like this:

1) leverage an extraordinary event to scare everyone into supporting emergency measures

2) perpetuate fear and argument on all sides to distract, divide, and conquer public opinion, raising the possibility that these emergency powers might be (necessary|good|here to stay)

3) put on the suits and officially vent dissent to devnull (you are here)

4) everyone gives up and you can peel off the emergency sticker, pointing to your new law as precedent and tradition to uphold

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

I wonder who's manning this submarine [1].

[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> constantly employed as an argument-ending sledgehammer

Or, it could be being employed as a reminder that in our systemically biased reality many people aren't judged on their merits. If people saw this we wouldn't have to have this discussion.

I'm not going to try to untangle the nest of motives on all sides, but I find it warmly ironic that this comment tries to shut up a discussion about "privilege" by accusing it of being used to shut people up.

The courts would have to decide.

Reasonable IANAL answer: the person who owns the copyright to (the strings in) the code.

Without TLS, absolutely anyone along the link (not just curl.io) can inject some BS into your command line if you choose to copy-paste.

If you don't trust curl.io, fine. But without TLS the list of people you need to trust is not only curl.io, but everyone else in the tubes too.