Whilst I agree that following security best practices is important, I think you miss the point of my post. WE are implementing the rules they drew up. From what I can see they did not.
Your melodramatic announcement of no longer participating in HN discussions directly contradicts your desire for reason to prevail over sensationalism.
No civil libertarian is delighted to save criminals from prosecution just to frustrate law enforcement. It often happens that the frontiers of acceptable state conduct are tested in such cases, though. Here, EFF isn't interested in making sure Vargas can shoot cans in his yard without interference. Rather, they are concerned that the government not be able to put people's homes under 24/7 video surveillance without even probable cause (which is all that is needed for a warrant).
Then, maybe the correct course of action for the EFF would be to work on improving the warrant system, rather than working on keeping alleged drug-dealing, unlicensed gun owners, illegal immigrants out of legal trouble?
> Then, maybe the correct course of action for the EFF would be to work on improving the warrant system, rather than working on keeping alleged drug-dealing, unlicensed gun owners, illegal immigrants out of legal trouble?
That's what they are doing, this is how jurisprudence works.
Hadn't they challenged the warantless spying, it would have made a precedent in court. The police could have relied on the acceptance of the evidence in this case to do it again, anywhere in the US.
How would they "improve" the warrant system? The police went around the warrant to illegally spy on someone. The point of a warrant is to stop illegal spying, and make sure only people who deserve being spied upon are spied upon.
If the police was sure he deserved it and had the evidence to prove it, they should've just gotten the warrant. If they weren't, then they were just fishing and waiting for someone co commit a crime. And that's not just immoral, but against the Constitution.
Is anything wrong with the warrant system? The fact that police are often trying to avoid/circumvent it is not evidence that it isn't working as designed, just that it isn't working as they would like (which is to be expected).
Then, maybe the correct course of action for the EFF would be to work on improving the warrant system
What good does a warrant system do if the government doesn't follow the law? Trials like this are how courts get the executive arms of the government to follow the law. You'll notice that the presiding judge actively solicited a brief from the EFF.
Actually getting a wiretapping warrant is really hard and you have to execute it meticulously unless you want the evidence to get thrown out. At least, if you are law enforcement.
Of course, if you are the NSA and aren't charging anyone with any crimes, you don't have to worry about suppression hearings and the judge who issued it can never have that decision appealed like they could in a civilian court...
> As much as I support the rule of law, there's no way I can interpret that as benefiting mankind in any way.
A co-worker who was on law school explained these rules are to make sure an innocent person is never found guilty, even if that means letting criminals walk.
> That's why I claim that online revocation checking is useless - because it doesn't stop attacks.
Doesn't mean there are "no" cases where it works. It just means any attacker dedicated enough can work around the CRLs.
I don't see any reason why one should throw the baby with the water. In this case, I just see Chrome guilty of FUD and hiding behind an intractable problem to justify their incorrect position.
Been there 20 years ago. Almost dropped out of CS on my last year, average dropped from 3.8 to 1.5 at the time.
Your mentor has my vote. Drop out, rebuild yourself first and foremost. You have successfully learned to work, but you haven't learned to live. Your work has become an obstacle, so no'w the time to relearn to live, love and laugh. Then you can think of working and building on what you know.
I'd bet on 3) Levine isn't interested in just "more of the same", and his mission (Irrational's) is to create. I'm sure someone else can license the names and characters if what they want is "more of the same".
Best of luck to the new team, looking forward to awesome stuff...
If that's true, then it'd make Ken Levine just an asshole. If he wants to leave and do something different, fine, but why set the building on fire on your way out? It doesn't require firing a successful team for you to go do something different, plenty of people leave successful companies to start something new.
My guess, though, is that he didn't actually make that choice and was told by Take-Two to downsize, and this is him pretending it was a voluntary "creative" decision, like politicians who want to spend more time with their family.
The other possibility is that the 15 people he's taking with him are part of the company's top-tier leadership/talent; creative directors, art directors, etc. Maybe taking those 15 people is cutting off the head of the snake, and there's no one left to steer the ship after they're gone.
A lot of studios seem to grow to a size where their product looks like this:
A game that would be considered incomplete ~5 years ago is launched. You then ship up to a dozen DLC packages that add incremental content so that the complete purchase price of the game and all DLC is 2 to 3x the original retail price.
That's how they justify the huge teams. I know it's very different market, but just look at how Turbine went from 500-600 employees to under 200. Look at how Zynga had 2,000 employees. Now wonder what, exactly, all those people were doing?
It's compelling, especially to veterans like Levine, to return a team that's no more than 3 or 4 dozen people and create / ship a complete product that they have a high amount of creative control over. Reminiscent of Double Fine / Psychonauts.
It wouldn't surprise me. BioShock Infinite was hailed as literally the best game ever by the gaming press, but the storyline contains strong indicators that Levine has squeezed all the juice out of the BioShock concept.
> What if the movie came with the full set of trailers (preview, theatrical, etc.) [...] could even throw in an entirely different ending for the movie [...]
Awesome idea! Throw this in a locked device with some kind of DRM to make sure our viewer has a fully immersive uniform experience, and I'm ready to throw my life savings at it.
(Apologies for that, I couldn't resist pointing out to you where that train of thought has taken the market. ;) )
...which is precisely what is meant when one says "there's no market for this". At this point, content owners have the choice of either being permissive, or clamping down on the community using IP laws.
Beyond that simple statement, I'd agree with Jason. My first impression upon reading their webpage was "why?" Scrolling through I didn't find an answer. No differentiator in apps, function, power, memory or price.
I've often been wrong when I wondered that about a product, for this once I genuinely would like to know if there's an answer to the question. Why a new phone called Jolla?
> interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review
Oh please give me a break. This is the worse they could come up with, a typographical error that produced large swaths of unusable data for analysts? Seems like a normal part of any computer systems: a typo will cause unintended consequences.
Sensationalist reporting and blatant exploitation of minor plot twist shouldn't make it to any serious news outlet, let alone HN. Let's keep it serious guys.
The issue wasn't the fact that an innocent mistake happened; the issue is that a major breech of privacy for some large number of US citizens wasn't reported to the groups tasked with judicial and congressional oversight of the NSA.
The reason it occurred is meaningless. The _fact_ that it occurred should have been reported.
Think you are making an assumption saying that it's unusable. I'd say it was highly usable.
202 is the North American telephone area code for Washington, D.C.
Do you think you could get usable data with a 'large number' of calls placed from DC? I can't think of anywhere better really.
But of course, conspiracy theories and big companies being unfair against the nineteny-nine-percent, are all much more newsworthy than reality.
Hence goes my last post on HN. I'll come back when - if - reason someday prevails over sensationalism.