if your viewpoint is doing a "good job"then what would you prefer?
Bad job by a bunch of idiots. Some of them get paid by the system, most are high calibre and can milk the teat of corporate inquisitions. They absolutely know their subject material, so it comes down to opinion....
or
Bad specs from a bunch of profiteering idiots?
Why would anyone who was ahead of the curve ever give this stuff away? The path for Bitcoin and all other cryptos actually lies far away from the 'internet money" crossover dilemnas we have today. Big blocks of silicon heating snowdrifts is already out of date
> the deluge of anti-FB, anti-Goog, anti-Twitter, etc articles. Maybe I'm viewing this too broadly, but I get an icky feeling of intentional furor construction.
Those companies are enabling the criminals. German law defines the users as criminals and it is this pre-internet law that is being upgraded and enforced, because profiting from enabling illegal activity is clearly wrong.
FB employs 1200 people to deal with this... why is that? It isn't their fault that the world has so many fucktards in it, but is their problem when they give a platform to their illegality
furor over the failings of the "city state" that FB are trying to establish. Good
"Slack groups work really well for me and a few of my groups of friends. Because we know they are exclusive, and won't spam us, we actually value them. When someone has a message for the entire group... "I got engaged / married / had a kid / new job / moving to Singapore..." whatever... it's just information, not someone trying to milk fake internet points from strangers."
Your use case for Slack is not what Slack exists for... their MO is to get business information
I used slack once then realised that it was just as bad, if not worse than facebook. It is worse because it lulls you into a false sense of security. Everything on Slack belongs to Slack. It is fundamentally more evil than FB because it pretends to be a 'confidential and secure' environment but the truth is they own every single byte you give them. Slack users are morons if they think that Slack has any agenda other than to parse data and exploit the connections. FB at least is "only social" whereas Slack gets company business data via the morons that use it.
Businesses use Slack because they are too lazy to deliver an in house alternative. I pity anyone who thinks Slack is any better than FB . Stand by for Slack being acquired by FB in the very near future so that FB can fill in another slice of the control pie they are trying to bake
Health insurance companies are going to love this. Expect to see a spinoff for-profit organization that monetizes the tests (charging the end user of course - probably via their insurance premium).
The fancy 'public healthcare' rhetoric coming from a UK research project is all well and good for now, but we all know that this will end up being a mandatory part of any health check for insurance purposes.
On a lighter note, the idea of all that leak data being (inevitably) leaked is amusing
Average users have a VCR? How would it work if they don't set the time on it?
You bought (whatever) it (is) - so that becomes your problem. The average user falls for the marketing of "your app controls your fried chicken" bullshit and buys the IoT chicken frier. So you won't buy that frier. Good for you
"For ordinary users, the situation is truly hopeless. They are pwned by default if they buy into IoT."
when was it ever different? This is just a repeat of the "buy anti-virus" phase of Windows, which wasn't sufficiently hammered home that it basically failed. No doubt there will be some responsible IoT manufacturers that address the vulnerabilities, but IMO, not many, and the market isn't exactly demanding of 'secure amazon buttons' - in fact there will be devastation because the manufacturers won't give a flying fuck about security as they stamp out thousands of pieces a day with default passwords in their factories.
If ever there was a use case for ipv6 then I suggest this is it. Sadly we aren't going to get there in time to stop a new wave of botnets. Who do I blame for the failure to properly roll out ipv6?
Having used all the encrypted call possibilities there are , you are, in my opinion, absolutely spot on. SC has exceptional clarity. WA isn't bad.
Can you talk more about "our guys" in respect to the fact that the CIA and NSA use the Blackphone? Should I, as a casual business person, be wondering that the handsets you supply to them are in some way compromised? I know that both the NSA and the CIA are interested in my phone conversations, which is why I ironically bought a Blackphone (for when I assume they are listening) and others which make their life harder (but I do accept that I do this more for the kicks of making them work for their intel)
tl:dr - is SC actually secure given that the company has been short on cash for a while and that the CIA and NSA equip their agents with the same phones. I don't mind talking because I have nothing to hide, but backdoor code is usually the case if you are selling 10k phone units to US LE.
If they seem to be doing something that is "more or less" the same then my radar is triggered for them not actually declaring they are delivering totally encrypted (ie no backdoor tomfoolery) voice calls.
Did FB/WA clarify that they use the OW audio encryption algos, or did they just put the OW 'trophy' on the wall without the actual implementation?
WhatsApp is, I agree, very good quality for what it is, but I would never trust it or FB with anything but social/personal calls. Social Media platforms are for other people to hand over their lives to. Let them subsidize my detachment from their usage, and I thank them for it. I'm sure there will come a day where you can't use WA without a FB account, at which point it is dead to me and my social contacts will be the first to know about it via WA.
that's interesting. I'm running a 2 year old Xperia Z3 and it never occurred to me that my CPU might be the issue, but SC seems to handle audio quality just fine
I love using Signal and will continue to make modest donations, but I would really appreciate an improvement in audio call quality. I still use Silent Circle for calls because it is so tiring to talk when the bitrate is low.
Your statement is lacking in a few ways, so to correct you in simple terms...
a database contains data that can be deleted and/or overwritten. Other than examining changelogs and reverting changes according to 'external requirements', a database is a non-auditable pot of changeable information. A blockchain cannot be re-written without a "hard fork" of the network that makes it exist. It is that simple. Consequently,you can also easily audit a blockchain or any part (wallet) of it. To audit a database is not impossible, but auditing a ledger is entirely simpler.
Banking people throw "blockchain" around as a buzzword without necessarily understanding the total difference in the way they operate compared to databases. The fact that the blockchain is a ledger is best demonstrated to them by the notion that a printed bank statement is a 'de facto' ledger of the transactions on a single account. Banks have always told customers that keeping printed (usually monthly) statements is how a permanent record is kept of your transactions. This is because they routinely wipe system transactions to avoid the storage and security costs of keeping a copy of the data. I have bank statements on paper going back to my very first bank account and transaction. They take up a great deal of physical space, but they do represent a permanent and uncontestable history of my finances. They are my personal paperblockchain. If only banks had been willing to keep everyone's transaction data in perpetuity then I wouldn't have boxes of paper in my attic. But that would be hugely impractical and costly. Blockchains for every account are feasible, but not on the horizon given the state of current cryptography and the huge data costs.
Banks trying to get into blockchain tech are only looking at high level intra-bank functionality, which would be well served by a new system, especially given that they don't trust each other but have historically agreed that they should, and pragmatism has cemented the system. A new system is absolutely needed.
rebranding is hardly the point. Blockchains exist as something entirely novel and challenging to legacy database structures. The folders you refer to - do you mean cryptocurrency wallets? The wallets where people can be their own bank? They are just blockchain 1.0 btw.
I'm hesitant to afford any particular value to educational practices in this case. Let's take the specific musical skill of composition, which I believe is at the root of musical traditions in any country...
The French have a much richer and deeper musical tradition. For example the 'blood lines' of Renaissance Troubadours and Trouveres, or the French Operatic Style, to name a couple. English 'classical' music tradition had a golden age which had Tallis, Byrd and Dowland but kinda stopped with Purcell and didn't really flourish again until Elgar. Elgar himself was writing in an identifiably English way, but his language was very much based on the Germanic tradition (which been imprinted on the English style by the likes of Handel,Haydn,Schumann and Mendelssohn).
All that time, let's say broadly 1700-1900 the French were much closer to their own 'cutting edge' of musical development, although the Germanic style was still very much dominant throughout Europe. What the French had, was a progressive heritage that had somehow been preserved - Ravel and Debussy (the impressionist style) could only have come from France, which I think would relate to your reference to a broader musical culture.
Of course by the mid 20th Century, in Classical music at least, the French started leaping ahead of the UK again, with Stravinsky, Les Six, Satie and numerous others building a significant new tradition that still exists today through the legacies of Messiaen and Boulez. England had Britten, Vaughn Williams and few others of note.
I think the reason you see a broader base in French 'national' music (for example at la fete) is as much down to the fact that England produced and still does produce exemplary pop/rock with a worldwide market. The French pop culture is insular and that's a good thing IMHO because it maintains integrity and does not to attempt to compete in a global market that is pretty much a cultural vacuum these days.
As for the standard of professional performers, I think there isn't too much difference in numbers produced or quality. Being a pro musician is very hard and the attrition rates are not down to which country you make your career in.
Without trying to cite what currently happens in the UK, I think it is fair to say that kids are handed instruments like the recorder at a fairly early age, and those that do well are encouraged to progress. That's a sieving process for sure.
When they get to secondary school, music as a subject is most often just a minor inconvenience in the curriculum to most pupils, and those who have ability are pushed into learning flute/violin etc (at additional cost to themselves and outside of the timetable). In the course of going through the grades of music (performance exams), kids are taught aural skills and theory (grade 5 theory is required to take higher performance grades). This results in a select group of instrumentalists that have learned intervals, harmony and scales practically. Whether any of those skills are useful to a non musician is debatable, so one could say that it is the most efficient way of getting a rounded skill set into the brain of a musical 15-16 yr old.
The French system would, I agree, produce a broader spectrum of musically able people, but in practice it results in a lower level of specific and important knowledge. The UK system produces more complete performers whereas I would say the French system has large gaps which then get filled in at degree level.
Perhaps things are greatly different these days. I know for example that studio production is an option for A level music, and there is absolutely no musical theory knowledge required to produce a studio track. I wonder if A level students are even taught basic 4 part harmony any more.
Music, to an individual, has always been a matter of ability, discipline and perseverance to practice. In education, the solution to nourishing those qualities is never going to be perfect. I do recall the French students I was with were quite annoyed that my education was years ahead of theirs, but with perspective, I'm sure it didn't really matter then, and it surely doesn't now.
iTunes is actually SoundJamMP under the hood. That app was (if memory serves) released 16 years ago and subsequently bought by Apple. AFAIK the core of iTunes is still unchanged from then and all Apple have done is simply bloat the UI and bolt on additional functionality (eg AAC playback, videos and iCloud etc) without ever re-examining the underlying engine.
SoundJam was great for me in 2001 playing mp3s and as most of the tone of this thread seems to confirm, everything else since then has simply given users extra grief to cope with when wishing to play a simple music file in a simple manner.
I've stuck at OSX 10.6.8 and iTunes 10.6.1 (which is still 239MB of bloat) rather than upgrade. That's where I'm staying as Apple only ever seem to make stuff worse these days.
That's interesting from a personal perspective. I was taught music in the UK where that is specifically not used (or at least wasn't when I learnt).
I took a year out of my Music degree to attend the Sorbonne. French music education places a heavy emphasis on solfege. When I started going to their undergraduate classes it was immediately apparent that the level was several years behind that of the UK (in classes for composition and orchestration most noticeably). To attend classes dealing with similar material to what I was used to as a UK undergraduate, I was attending Post-grad courses. Having just completed my first year on a UK BMus course it was quite an eye opener to see 19yr olds learning material I had been taught at 16.
Just as it can be said that music requires at least 3 consecutive notes or beats to have a tempo and a rhythm, it can also be said that it requires a "cadence" which at bare minimum is two consecutive pitched notes but usually at least three.
C-G-C is a simple 'harmonic' cadence. It is, for example, the basis of oom-pah music (think military marches which repeat C-G in the bass with a melody on top, and end on C when the melody is done).
There is a form of musical analysis (Schenkerian) that can be used to show that nearly all music has the basic form C-G-C, which is usually expressed as I-V-I (chord I is C major and chord V is the 5th chord of C major, which is G major). It is of course nowhere near as simple as I've expressed here!
So resolution is basically the cadence of the piece's harmony, much like a story has beginning, middle and end, so does harmony.
The reason chord V and chord I are so powerfully related is that the 3rd note of V is the leading note of chord I and the 7th note of V is the 4th of chord I. This is actually significant to understand because it is how one can see the purest relationship between harmony and melody. In early music (eg medieval plainsong) the fundamentals of more complex harmony were first developed from melody.
In the case of C major with two voices, the notes would provide resolution from notes F and B to notes E and C. The FB is a tritone, which is dissonant and wants to be resolved in the human ear. The EC is the major triad of C major, which is harmonious and consonant and resolves the dissonance of FB.
Bad job by a bunch of idiots. Some of them get paid by the system, most are high calibre and can milk the teat of corporate inquisitions. They absolutely know their subject material, so it comes down to opinion....
or
Bad specs from a bunch of profiteering idiots?
Why would anyone who was ahead of the curve ever give this stuff away? The path for Bitcoin and all other cryptos actually lies far away from the 'internet money" crossover dilemnas we have today. Big blocks of silicon heating snowdrifts is already out of date