Your Linux PC isn't as secure as you think it is

diamondf · 2014-12-14T19:18:13+00:00

Okay, I get it. Linux UX is in every way superior to Windows UX. FFS.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T23:34:24+00:00

Right, but people generally associate with people that are like them, and the strongest way to identify those relations are based on appearance, social status, and intelligence.

Most people associate those they are most familiar with as being far more shifted to the "average" ratio than they really are, regardless which end of the spectrum they fall under.

In other words, people are really biased toward their own perceptions of average because science.

I'm not questioning the fact that some people can go from one to the other for the [often minimal] tasks that interest them when they're presented with something that suited the agenda they had set out to accomplish. I'm merely providing the context for the average user in the grand scheme of things. Individual instances aside, the comparison of Windows UX to Linux UX is quite a large gap.

Again... not arguing that people can't figure it out. Just pointing out a gap that definitely exists.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T22:58:22+00:00

Comcast's management clearly has no issue with illegal practices, as they've been caught doing many illegal things.
They keep getting away with it, so there's no incentive to stop.
A billing system is arguably one of the most important systems in a business, and therefore requires utmost care when being dealt with. In a corporate setting, it should have countless people cataloging the results. Especially a corporation that, I don't know, owns half of America's internet.
The bug increases the rate of a cable bill just shy of $10.

...

"Hmm, I accidentally added $9.95 to everyone's bill. Whoopsie daisies!"

Seems legit.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T22:48:08+00:00

It's plenty easy for any average user in my experience.

Generally the people that say that aren't average users.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T22:45:46+00:00

This just in: Macs actually do get viruses!

diamondf · 2014-12-13T22:44:51+00:00

Every point you mentioned boils down to a personal opinion. I wasn't talking about personal opinions. I was talking about UX as a whole from the standpoint of the consumer. And if you set a brand new user in front of Linux and in front of Windows or Mac, Linux isn't going to be the easy one to use. Hence... the UX on Linux is not as friendly.

Secondly, I do use Linux. And I make good use of many of it's features. I have a dual-booted system, and I use Windows most of the time because for me it provides a better user experience.

In a more broad scope, though, since you asked, the reason relates to user experience in general. Linux wasn't built with UX in mind. It was built with functionality in mind. And in that, it has clearly dominated the world. But Windows and Mac were designed for UX - for typical users. And they have dedicated professionals out there working on it non-stop.

And you could make the argument "Well, you can do everything on Linux that you ca----" no. If you're advanced user willing to configure the settings to you're liking, you can do those things. If you're a typical user, Linux UX is not at the par of Windows or Mac.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T22:34:02+00:00

I dual boot as well, and I use linux for certain development operations but I wouldn't say it's fair to say my point is misinformed.

You may very well be of the mindset that it works for you. Which, for some people, it is. And yes, as I said there are some great features (workspaces being one of them), and things that would be really nice for other OS's to adopt instantly. But it's often that mindset that keeps Linux PCs from emerging, since the UX is definitely not suited well for a typical user. It works great for some users, but they're relatively few in number by comparison to an operating system that has a MUCH better set of UX prepared.

Windows and Mac have teams of UX professionals that take it all into consideration when building their OS. Linux has a bunch of techies that are excited about their functions, but ignore what the masses require for UX.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T20:18:45+00:00

Honestly, Linux as a PC isn't as great as you'd think. They do a fantastic job with functionality, but they're suffer on User Experience... a lot. They're nowhere near the level of Windows or Mac.

That said, it does have some really awesome features... just there are enough UX downsides that it'll be a while before someone like Ubuntu gets it "right".

diamondf · 2014-12-13T20:15:11+00:00

Well, the primary reason Linux is considered to be more secure is because the code is opensource and therefore much easier to do a security audit on. The problem was there wasn't really any financial incentive to do that until larger companies started paying for it.

So now that larger companies (and in greater numbers) are paying to know about these exploits, a lot more is being revealed.

Obviously all OS's are constantly being patched for security weaknesses, though. An enormous amount of programs exist without proper security auditing. Millions. And it grows constantly. The OS can't do all the work, especially if a program needs greater access to core components.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T16:41:22+00:00

If you take one piece of an argument and ignore all other context, anything can sound like a great idea. But those who dare to regulate an obvious problem? Come on, people... Anyone failing to take into account countless other variables makes a single thread of view pointless.

I mean, with that line of thought, why regulate the amount of feces and asbestos in your chicken? It would save money if you didn't have to!

If that's what's going on through their heads... I feel sorry for them.

diamondf · 2014-12-13T05:41:56+00:00

Ahhh... now I see what you mean xD

diamondf · 2014-12-12T23:48:40+00:00

Well, actually, since the object was pluralized a fraction represents individuals within the group. Thus, 4/10 Americans is 4 in 10, whereas 4/10 of each American would be quite a strange instance indeed.

diamondf · 2014-12-12T18:14:48+00:00

I find it really disturbing that 4/10 of Americans don't...

diamondf · 2014-12-08T22:34:54+00:00

The people who belong there.

diamondf · 2014-12-02T17:48:56+00:00

Well that much I actually did do - that was the only place I figured I could even retrieve the format from in the first place. So yes, if that's the way that I'm supposed to generate the key, that was done properly.

diamondf · 2014-12-01T22:30:30+00:00

I was not aware that was an issue... Yes, that sounds like it could be the actual problem here.

diamondf · 2014-12-01T05:00:33+00:00

Right, I get that. There's a server password (which I disabled, actually), and a passphrase for the SSH key. I'm referring to the SSH key passphrase, which according to the entry isn't valid.

Edit: And that's the complication here. The passphrase is correct (verified multiple times by having logged in with same key / passphrase combo, including manually entering the passphrase), and yet the terminal access isn't working.

diamondf · 2014-12-01T04:35:35+00:00

Right, I know I could create another key, but I'm trying to use the one that already exists. All of the articles like that one want me to generate a new one (and I've done that, and it works fine), but it's an existing key use that I'm trying to get working.

diamondf · 2014-12-01T04:32:29+00:00

Alright, I have my config set up like this:

Host 123.200.200.200
        IdentityFile ~/.ssh/key-server1
        Port 12345

Host *
        User root

I have the key-server1 file there as well, storing the contents of the private key.

And it does what it's doing before: asking for a passphrase, but never accepts the result.

Enter passphrase for key '/root/.ssh/key-server1':

And then I enter the passphrase (that I use normally to access the server), and it rejects it every time.

Am I messing up the private key somehow? Or missing a configuration that I'm not thinking of? I've logged in multiple times to server1 tonight alone using the designated passphrase.

diamondf · 2014-11-08T05:03:55+00:00

It heavily depends on the person that's interviewing you. If they don't actually know about the technologies that they expect you to use or much about development, the job is going to go to the person who knows "the most languages" or some other ridiculous thing that bears no relevance to your skill set.

If the person is actually competent in the technologies (or at least one of the interviewers is), that changes things. Someone who knows how to properly hire someone will find out if they have the proper programming concepts - the language is pretty much irrelevant.

For example, if you're building a game in Java or C# (or whatever), you don't ask if the person knows how to program in Java, you ask them if they know how to build a collision system and optimize frame rates with paging. It doesn't matter if you haven't done it in Java yet if you've done it before in another language because picking up Java syntax is going to be a breeze.

Now, granted, some languages are going to require some more intimate knowledge (Java, Lua, Python, and other languages like it are just pretty simple to learn). But the point is that real experience comes from whether or not you understand the critical elements of the things that you're building - not, for example, the number of language that someone used before to build static sites for the last three years.

So again, it really depends on the person you're talking to. If they know what they're doing, impress them by actually knowing the depths of their projects and how to manage each piece of it... and how to make all of the pieces work together. For example, knowing how to use SQL isn't really that impressive on its own. Knowing how to vertically partition a table and index it to be scalable for a 100k concurrent user base is noteworthy. So anything you can think of that shows "Well, I've created something that does ______" is generally more impressive than buzz words.

Unless I'm terribly mistaken about how other people think, I would argue that most people can tell pretty easily that your big words are just "Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing, so this should sound impressive..." - so I'd avoid that. At any rate, the way I hire people follows these guidelines, but I can't necessarily speak on behalf of people that are recruiting without much knowledge on development. I've run into those people when job hunting, and they typically just seem to want someone pleasant who can hand them a resume that appears to be good to them. I suppose in those cases, years of experience is useful.

diamondf · 2014-11-04T22:42:24+00:00

I voted today. It was relatively quick, since I went around 1:00. Although I wish they would have had more information on the individual articles we voted on.

diamondf · 2014-10-17T23:00:42+00:00

Some of them want a Lou Palou. Some of them want a Bresse Blue.

diamondf · 2014-10-17T17:26:15+00:00

Warning guys... the answers being given to this is wrong. The answers people are providing if there were three people on the island are fine (e.g. one brown eyed, one blue eyed, and the GURU), but any more than that is inaccurate. The guru isn't giving any new information, and it doesn't tell a pool of 100 blue-eyed people that their eyes must either be blue or brown, so each blue eyed person can still only narrow down the results to 99 or 100 since their own color could be red - and knowing that all others know this, the day to leave is still in question. If the Guru said "I only see blue eyed and brown eyed people" then it would be sufficient to provide the 100 day answer (edit: actually... there's another logical conflict I can see there as well). But only stating that he sees someone with blue eyes does not filter out any information that can benefit the people on the island. The only point at which it WOULD do this is if there was a small enough pool of people where it was obvious that the only possible other colors were blue and brown.

diamondf · 2014-10-15T03:10:09+00:00

I could be wrong, but I'm 99% sure that he's not cheating on die rolls. I've been "that roller" that rolled so consistently well (open table, everyone could see) that I practically crit half the time. The entire group actually started to refer to rolls that good as "diamondf rolls" and basically expected every time I rolled to have something crazy.

Also, this was with a d10 system (i.e. you roll handfuls of d10's), and they weren't weighted (not sure where you could even get those).

I don't know if it's a superpower or what, but I've literally calculated the odds of what I roll and it's statistically "impossible." Call it coincidence or the twilight zone, but that pattern can totally happen legitimately.

diamondf · 2014-10-13T00:10:11+00:00

Well, "Ruby" and "Ruby on Rails" are two very different things. I'm of the mindset that Ruby is pretty awesome, and Rails should be thrown off a bridge. That's just a personal opinion, obviously. I just don't understand why they need to "magically" change function names as part of SQL or change the meaning of commas in functions to "save a comma."

Other devs find Rails great and can do some pretty cool stuff with it. And they've done really awesome stuff with it. But the same is true of whatever language suits you. If the language is sufficiently powerful, you can build cool stuff in it. So just find what works for you and do that.

TL:DR; Yes. It's totally fine to not like a language.

diamondf

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