presumeaway
That line was so incisive when I first heard it in 2011 that it's stuck with me ever since:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...
Edit: Hey guys, it's the only primary source I could find citing Drew Houston's conversation with Steve Jobs, wherein Steve Jobs stated that Dropbox was a feature, and not a product.
I'm questioning the motives of someone who just released a data set that's going to cause very real harm to very real people, who've done nothing to deserve it.
For the record, given his credentials, it's highly unlikely that he didn't fully appreciate the ramifications of his actions. Which narrows down the other options on the table. (Did I mention he's selling books?)
Just because I'm not blowing sunshine at the guy, doesn't make it ad hominem.
There's a lot of research that could be performed if we were willing to generate data without due regard for the inherent downsides.
Saying research requires data is just insufficient justification in this case.
> I don't see why he could not release it to the public for researchers to use.
Because the collateral damage doesn't justify it. That aspect of it seems to be little more than a side note to him.
He could quietly and securely give the data to established researchers.
Or, he could very publicly release a torrent for everyone's use, with almost no concern for how it'll be used.
There's a massive difference there and the likely potential reasons behind his decision to do the latter leave very little room for one to make favorable judgements about either his motives, or his ability to responsibly mitigating risk.
I'm sorry if you believe any of that to be ad hominem, but it just isn't.
> Usernames may have a high correlation with passwords and thus are useful.
And that's precisely why the likelihood of collateral damage stemming directly from his actions is much higher than it should reasonably be in this instance.
At some point what you're giving up to further research isn't worth the tradeoff. He's selling innocent bystanders up the river to further his own cause, with little evidence that he's done everything possible to limit collateral damage.
I don't understand why this line of thinking is a hard sell here.
When a government or corporation releases lightly-redacted, personally-identifying information about people, the outcry is (rightly) massive. White knight does it and, well, to question his motives is ad hominem?
Really?
A desire for a particular type of attention his ego seems to need.
Which, combined with either a moronic lack of appreciation for the hassle and damage he's going to cause to end-users who've already been hosed once before, or an arrogance that makes him not care, makes him difficult to fit for a white hat.
FTA:
> This is completely absurd that I have to write an entire article justifying the release of this data out of fear of prosecution
What's absurd is his assumption that stripping domain names is somehow sufficient.
Edit: I'm getting downvoted like crazy here. Which is fine, but people seem to think it's ad hominem because I'm narrowing the reasons behind why someone would release a data set with a considerable price of collateral damage attached to it, while doing very little to mitigate that damage.
Just because the likely options for why someone would do such a thing don't speak favorably of the person, doesn't make it ad hominem. An ad hominem attack is seeking to undermine someone's argument by attacking their character.
I'm saying Mark Burnett made it difficult to assume good things about him after a stunt like that. If he actually made a real argument that what he did was sufficient, or that the harm he's going to cause is more than offset by the greater good it'll do (or some such argument), then we'd have something to try to undermine (whether legitimately or fallaciously), but as it stands, he hasn't even justified his actions.
Misleading. Most of what you're hearing–wind noise, aside, which is non-trivial–is the tire tread deforming as it comes into contact with the road.
Race slicks are far sticker than treaded road tires, and are also much quieter, for a number of reasons.
All of which were basically from the same small, inexpensive PR campaign.
Wikipedia runs a serious risk of becoming a commercial echo chamber (if it hasn't already).
What're you guys doing at Newslines to prevent it from turning into a vehicle for self-promotion?
Spectacle and ShiftIt are two alternatives I later heard about, but haven't yet tried, so please let me know if you try them out and find a clear advantage to either (besides price).
Except, that's not what the parent was doing. It was a partisan dig, thinly disguised: even worse.
You say it isn't all that different, but having experienced too much of both, it is.
Both are real, and sometimes both occur at once, but to say a white guy in a predominantly non-white and high-crime neighborhood would gain empathy for a non-white coder in a predominantly white tech company, would be as absurd as claiming the reciprocal.
If we can add a layer of conflict-resolution between open diplomacy and global thermonuclear war, there's something to be said for the fact that it may provide additional margin before greater escalation occurs.
That's not advocating for war/or violence, that's just responsible conflict-resolution.
It'd be just as fallacious as my saying anyone opposed to cyber warfare must prefer that we cut to the chase and nuke the globe.
You can oppose cyber warfare but also prefer it to something you oppose even more.
If you go a while, mostly digesting only tiny chunks of information, your brain optimizes around that and eventually becomes bad at dealing with longer narratives. (Aside: sometimes those narratives are worthwhile, other times they seem like they're just filler to make editors and publishers happy. But that's beside the point.)
It's also something we seem to be losing as a society.
The good news is, at least in my own experience, it's a skill we can develop (and it's closely related to attention span). When I buckle down and read complex texts for non-Internet periods of time (20-30 minutes), I quickly regain my speed and comprehension. But I find it important to deliberately exercise that part of my brain.
Yeah, it's silly. I think it's not too unlike calling everything "hacking." I "hacked" my eyesight by looking out the window for a minute at the end of every chapter, etc. I moved more and lost weight, brilliant body "hack."
We like to use language to make concepts more or less appealing, and assign them ethical value, even if it's incorrect, or impossible.
Correct, that's what I'm talking about.
E.g., show the low ceiling and then the ICAO code for that airport parenthetically, then high winds and another airport code. Quick way to inform intuition about where things are happening.
In my region, I saw several items under Worst, but after scrolling down and looking it over, I realized it was all happening on the other side of a mountain range–nothing to really be concerned about unless I'm going over there, since that stuff is usually well contained.
Unless it's all realtime.
And: showing an "as of" time somewhere, expressed in Zulu, would be helpful.
Evidently!
That's a skill I'd like to have...