As was pretty obvious from almost the start, it looks like our data center provider whose name shall not be mentioned was the target of a ransomware attack. Ransomware attacks are all pretty similar: the attacker finds a way to log into the target, encrypts all the files on the target, and offers to provide the encryption key if the target pays a ransom. Of course, the ransom must be paid in some untraceable cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
In all the fawning wank about cryptocurrency that’s been dished out by the tech press, there’s precious little discussion of how it enables cybercrimes like the one we just experienced. The talk of regulation around cryptocurrency usually focuses on the massive waste of resources used by the computers that are “mining” currency. But, from my standpoint as someone who works with companies trying to do something useful with computers, the danger of cryptocurrency-driven ransomware is far greater and more immediate than the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining.
Creating a special currency has always been a glibertarian masturbatory fantasy. Ron Paul, for example, was a big fan of the Amero, which was for a short time the target of jokes in this here blog. With the advent of cryptocurrency, which is every bit as silly as the Amero as far as I’m concerned, having your own alternative to the dollar went mainstream. Politicians like Eric Adams, who took his paycheck in crypto (side note: hahahaha), think that they’re leaders in a new revolution in finance. In reality, they’re fools who have fallen for another con.
I don’t want to waste precious brain cells on how, exactly, cryptocurrency should be regulated, but we should be treating it like almost every other danger to civilized society (except, of course, for guns). Elon and the other tech bros flogging cryptocurrency have had their fun — playtime is over.
Baud
I felt like Crypto had jumped the shark when I saw all those crypto ads during the Super bowl.
Jesse
inb4
oops
MattF
Couple of links: Molly White’s Web3 is going just great and a lecture by a computer security expert.
debbie
As long as the FDIC doesn’t swoop in to make them all whole, this will die the death it deserves. I hope.
Jesse
Crypto-driven randomware does get coverage in the security world. It’s been the driver for several years now. I think that might explain the relative silence on the matter. There are all sorts of other nonsense going on in the crypto world, like rug pulls, NFT scans, and meme coins.
Starfish
@debbie: There are a couple of more serious things going on in this space including hospitals being attacked by ransomware, and oligarchs attempting to use crypto to get around sanctions.
Betty Cracker
@MattF: Was just going to drop a link to Web3 — fun site. ;-)
Martin
Oh, yeah. Crypto serves no legitimate societal benefit. Sure, you can get rich off of it, but that’s true for human trafficking and we don’t tolerate that. It needs to be banned, now.
I’m all in favor for experiments with currency and whatever, but it needs to provide substantially more social benefit than cost, and crypto isn’t even in the same universe as that.
Ninedragonspot
My neighbors were SWATted one day a few years back. The (very armed) police went through our house and backyard to reach them. Someone had phoned the police claiming to be the neighbor, saying that he was distraught and had just shot his mother.
Fortunately, my neighbors weren’t home at the time when this happened. And it turned out that they weren’t even the intended targets of the SWATting. They were renters, and the house was under the name of the landlord’s ex-wife. She was in financial services, I think, and had a sizable amount of cryptocurrency. Crypto thieves wanted to break into her account, so they looked up her properties and tried to create a distraction. The theory, I guess, was that she’d be so busy with the Swat team she wouldn’t notice irregularities with her account as the theft was underway.
Since she had no connections to the renters, she was not in fact distracted – though it took the FBI to figure out what was going on.
Martin
For a good, but very dense walkthrough of what’s terrible about NFTs and crypto, and ultimately Web3, Dan Olsen has a great (2 hr long) video on it. He’s very engaging as a speaker, so it’s very watchable.
3blue1brown has perhaps the best explainer of how crypto/blockchain works. It’s something of a masterclass in how to explain abstract concepts. It’s really wonderful.
Chetan Murthy
mistermix, you left out that cryptocurrency is used to facilitate espionage. The Russians who attacked the 2016 election used crypto to pay for servers and other stuff they needed in the US.
CaseyL
@Baud: it’s often said that, by the time any “hot” commodity is being advertised to the masses, it has long since peaked and early adopters are looking for marks to unload it onto.
lollipopguild
Crypto always struck me as a giant never ending Ponzi scheme as well as a tool for criminals-which includes certain governments.
Starfish
Line Goes Up was a good video about NFTs.
Someone asked Salem Ilise to do a song about crypto on TikTok. She did a song dunking on the crypto boys, and everyone including the crypto boys loved it and participated in TikTok duets with her.
mistermix
@Chetan Murthy:
True – I’m guessing that whoever attacked the data center that shall not be named was living in Russia or an ally of Russia. Whether or not it was state-sponsored espionage, it was state-tolerated or state-facilitated, enabled by cryptocurrency.
Daoud bin Daoud
dm
@Martin: I’ll see your Dan Olsen and raise you a Moxie Marlinspike: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
I think he does as good a job of destroying NFTs in a ten-minute read than Olsen does with two hours, though I don’t consider the time spent with Olsen’s excellent presentation to be wasted.
waspuppet
@debbie: That’s what I find so immensely depressing about all of this. No one wanted this. No one said “Instead of national governments, I want my money to be backed up by a 26-year-old neckbeard from Brooklyn.” No one said “I want my taxi to be driven by someone with no licensing or training.” No one said “We should start the space program all over again, but instead of government-employed scientists making the decisions, we should have a blood-diamond failson who gives no sign of having legitimately graduated high school at the controls.” (Or for mass transit, for that matter.)
And it’s all happening anyway. Because an actual successful business is not the goal. A bailout or a merger or an IPO which you cash out on and split is the goal.
Math Guy
I’ve thought about what cryptocurrency “is” and what conventional currency “is”. Cryptocurrency represents an increase in entropy – useful energy being put into a higher entropy state in the form of waste heat from “mining”, whereas governments issue currency to represent activities that decrease entropy – growing a crop, building a road, generating electricity. A bitcoin represents an increase in entropy whereas a dollar represents a decrease in entropy: how we value those changes is a different matter, but that is what they are.
debbie
@Starfish:
Tell that to the investor whining last week.
Chief Oshkosh
Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” always starts running through my head when I think about crypto.
@Baud: Yes, not only jumping the shark, but just plain creepy. Matt Damon’s going to have to say a lot of Hail Marys to atone.
James E Powell
@Baud:
Agreed. Echoes of the Dot Com Super Bowl.
lowtechcyclist
I too am all for seeing a bell put on the cat.
Suzanne
I feel like the only people I know who are into crypto are those who don’t have many social skills, foster resentment that the lack of social skills has had a negative impact on their earning potential, and yet are too lazy to work on those skills.
lee
One thing to note is that the vast majority of crypto is traceable.
Granted it is easier to shuffle it enough that tracing become difficult.
OzarkHillbilly
You just described me to a “T”, except for the crypto part. I long ago decided that social skills were a waste of my time and instead focused on the many uses of a framing hammer.
lollipopguild
@OzarkHillbilly: “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer certain people in the morning…” I have a long list of people to hammer.
debbie
@waspuppet:
Nothing’s changed. It’s always about greed..
Benw
@OzarkHillbilly: don’t be so hard on yourself! You aren’t lazy, you just made the decision that social skills are less important when you’re waving a hammer around. Like Thor!
AWOL
@Math Guy: I feel like I’m reading a Pynchon novel.
different-church-lady
I wish it were: you just know it’s going to come back again, only with even more powerful people in tow.
Bob7094
OT: I don’t know if it’s been mentioned before (I did look), but the blogroll is screwed up. Everything goes to the wayback machine, to posts from late last year.
the pollyanna from hell
When I work on my social skills some people find it very alarming. I try to avoid working on my social skills.
different-church-lady
@AWOL: I’m tellin ya, the first fifth of the 21st century is like a bunch of highly intelligent sociopaths with affluent parents found a catch of dystopian sci-fi novels from the 50s and said, “Hey, let’s do that!“
different-church-lady
@Martin:
Well, not much at any rate…
Fleeting Expletive
I am so very glad this place is back. I really missed this gathering place.
TriassicSands
I understand that perspective, but ransomware attacks, so far anyway, have been more or less localized and transient. The environmental impact is significant and lasting. But, yes, the potential for far greater damage from ransomware attacks is very real.
In a world with so much going wrong every day, ransomware attacks are intolerable. Personally, I would love to see cryptocurrencies regulated out of existence.¹ But…the blockchain!!! Blockchain, schlockchain. Criminals need crytocurrencies. Ransomware loves cryptocurrencies. But we NEED cryptocurrencies about as much as we need Donald Trump. If there are legitimate uses of blockchain technology that don’t require energy consumption on a massive scale, fine.
¹ There is probably no way to simply outlaw them.
@MattF:
I read that article earlier today. Four cheers for Molly!
different-church-lady
@waspuppet:
The neckbeard and his friends did.
jl
I think the kind of libertarians who are into cryptocurrencies admire the decentralized use brute force by individuals to get what they want and dominate those who are weaker. That use of brute force is elaborately rationalized by their Byzantine Kafkaesque arguments from first principles. As the old saying goes, freedom to them means forcing others to do what you want them to do and nothing more.
So, they are good with it. The fantasy part of it comes in when they daydream that they will be the lucky, or depraved, select few who profit from that system.
jl
@different-church-lady: The huge gaping hole in the hermetically sealed world of cryptocurrency is how it can interact with the real world. The fanatics don’t mind that at all because that problem runs through all of their worldview.
Fleeting Expletive
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly: In architecture and engineering, and probably in lots of other technical professions, most everyone is good at what they do. Maybe not all the exact same subgrouping of tasks and skills, but most are good. But the people who get promoted are those who are good at the softer parts of the job, client management, work planning, mentorship, communication, and presentation. There’s a subtype of socially stunted technical types who don’t advance very far and they can’t figure it out. Then they blame diversity policies, because it’s usually women who figure this out. Then they’re taking direction from women, many of whom they don’t respect, and it is a recipe for problems. Ask me how I know.
hells littlest angel
There is not one single good thing about cryptocurrency. It is just another symptom of the terminal madness of the human race.
BTW, Ron Paul was not a fan of the Amero. It was one of his many bogeymen.
GregMulka
There is a level of these attacks that are franchised. You can by a package for a couple hundred bucks and engage in computer related crimes for fun and profit. They provide an infrastructure for attack deployment and take a cut. Most of those are based more on spear phishing or possibly compromised credentials. Or some idiot allowing remote admin access over a server NAT’ed directly to a public IP. Ask me how I know. Or don’t, it’s boring.
Attacks like those on Data3xx get more press but probably aren’t the majority of attacks or where most of the loot is gathered. The thing they share though, is they all leverage cryptocurrency as a payment for the anonymity.
That said, blockchains are publicly readable and vulnerable to all sorts of fuckery. There have been plenty of reports about wallets getting raided but the same could certainly be employed by law enforcement. It may even be easier than traditional FinCEN methods because all the information is there in the open.
Doesn’t ease the pain of this instance and Data3xx fucked up by the numbers in either allowing an attack on one of their clients spread through their entire infrastructure or by not having hardened their backups enough to allow this. My guess is a combination of both so they deserve all that’s going to get dumped on them. Just sucks that our benevolent Balloon Juice overlords had to go through this.
Also cryptocurrency is a blight on multiple levels and I’m starting to think it might be the great filter.
raven
@Suzanne: Ha, I got hired to build online courses in a collaborative effort with faculty in a discipline. My boss hired be because of my background running kids sports programs. He said “If you can do that you can do anything, you can learn the technology but dealing with crazy parents is a skill you can’t learn’!
Martin
@different-church-lady: That happens constantly, btw. The only reason it seems like a new problem is because we’ve internalized the stuff that succeeded before. Survivors bias. Trust me, all previous industrialists were sociopaths as well. Hell, the ones from the first part of the 20th century all had boners for Hitler.
WaterGirl
@Bob7094: Good catch. I thought I had changed all the links but I didn’t think about the blogroll.
Try it now, everything should be right unless I missed one.
edit. oh ugh. the authors and artists pages are the same way. I just fixed those, too.
Suzanne
@raven: I have noticed that a resentful libertarian tip-off is when they talk about “the best person for the job” or “the most qualified”. This type cannot conceive of the fact that, for most knowledge jobs, almost everyone who is under consideration is qualified and competent, and it’s all that other stuff — the ability to explain stuff to people without technical skill, the social grace to send a thank-you note, the foresight to anticipate a problem and head it off — that makes someone successful.
I have noted before that, in my life experience, the women (and minorities) I know who are successful in their careers all expected to struggle. And so they got in the habit of looking for ways to set themselves apart from others. I contrast this with the expectation that a lot of men seem to have, which is that they’ll show up and do a good job and that would be enough.
SpaceUnit
Crypto is the Kim Kardashian of the financial world.
TriassicSands
Except, we all know that that Biden, Hillary, and the libruls are all working overtime — getting rich in cryptocurrency and NFTs, I guess — to control global human trafficking.
As I said above, I doubt cryptocurrencies will be banned, but if that isn’t feasible, then maybe regulating them out of existence is.
The smart money says that if the Democrats try to do something about cryptocurrencies, Manchin, Sinema, or both will suddenly emerge as their greatest champions.
dmsilev
@TriassicSands: Straight-up outlawing cryptocurrencies would be hard, especially since they’ve gone global, but making it far more difficult to turn bitcoins or whatever back into dollars/euros/etc. would help a lot. One thing the crypto enthusiasts prefer not to talk about is that there’s very little real-world stuff that you can directly buy with bitcoin or Ethereum or …; it’s almost always “send your very expensive electrons to a broker, who finds some sucker with dollars, mediates an exchange and takes a cut, and then your dollars go to whatever merchant you bought your stuff from.” Make that exchange process more painful (lots of disclosure and tax information, for instance), and the whole thing becomes less attractive (especially for criminals).
Another Scott
@hells littlest angel: Yup, Ron Paul was a goldbug.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
There’s no way FDIC should step in. These are not depository institutions that have been paying insurance to FDIC or accepting its regulation.
Martin
@Suzanne: There’s a reason why Apple doesn’t really give a shit what degree you have or where you got it from. They hire primarily around soft skills. It doesn’t get mentioned much, but if you look at Apple’s product offerings and how they promote them, their primary trick is to unlock the female tech market. Where most tech products are centered around the ‘if you’re 1337 you can flash a new OS on our product’, Apple’s focus is ‘this device has a button that will save your life if you are assaulted’. It’s not that the technology of the latter is harder than the former, it’s that you need to consider what people who are different than you value to find that market to understand what to build.
I used the same approach when hiring at .edu. I wanted employees that could empathize with students in everything they did. I could train them on all of the other stuff. I couldn’t train the empathy. Fought a LOT of battles with HR over that.
Bill Arnold
@Math Guy:
Curiously, a very back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that nearly all computation ever done by or on behalf of humans is a vast amount of SHA256 computations, for bitcoin mining. (For others: SHA256 is a 256 bit digest of some (usually larger) block of data, a one way cryptographic hash, which basically means that it cannot be reversed easily, or inputs found that result in the same hash). Bitcoin mining is done by ASIC hardware that is ludicrously faster at doing SHA256 than even GPUs – the ASIC SHA256 hardware is roughly 5 orders of magnitude faster than CPUs, and bitcoin mining consumes about 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about 1/200. 5 orders of magnitude/200 == 2.5 orders of magnitude, i.e. Bitcoin for the useless-computations win.
Efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware (26 Feb 2020)
dnfree
@dm: Wow, that’s an excellent explanation (that I only partially understand).
I’m struck by the comment at the end about software. I started as a programmer in the mid-1960s and retired in 2012. In the beginning, I was a member of teams that were usually 3-4 people, occasionally as big as 8, that supported a range of functions up to and including everything that went on in a large factory, from manufacturing to payroll. I could handle a smaller project myself, from design to implementation to training and support. It was enjoyable.
When I retired, the norm had become customization of large purchased software systems, that didn’t entirely fit your company’s needs, and that you had to lay out some modification specs for someone in a different company, maybe even a different country, to implement. And when the results arrived, you couldn’t “fix” them even if you could see what was wrong. The whole process was more “standardized” and much less responsive to end users. I don’t think I’d enjoy working that way.
raven
@Suzanne: I had almost all female bosses in my varied career and only one was awful and the rest were great!
OzarkHillbilly
@Suzanne: But the people who get promoted are those who aren’t smart enough to say, “No thanx.”
FTFY. I got made foreman on one job. My pay hike allowed me to buy one extra take out pizza a week. WOOP WOOP! Anyway, dealing with a recalcitrant crew every day for 2 weeks and then a lying management back in the home office who promised me extra guys for the day the crane showed up and then reneged without telling me they were reneging, so that I was forced to make do with way too few assholes for the rather dangerous job we were undertaking…
Yeah, I was totally socially stunted when at the end of that day I told them they could all just go fuck themselves with a donkey’s syphilitic dick because they were never gonna fuck me up the ass again. Imagine my surprise when they didn’t want me around any more than I wanted to be around.
Long story short, never again. I showed up in the mornings, worked my ass off making the contractor money, and as long as everybody left me the f alone, at the end of the day I got into my car and drove home with quiet satisfaction. Even better, nobody expected me to be nice.
eta: As far as working with or for women, it never happened to me. I was on job site with female electricians and once a pipefitter, but never a carpenter and the one job with a woman architect, I don’t think she ever interacted with anyone on the jobsite. Just went about her business and left us alone. Maybe she talked to the superintendent, but I never spent much time in the trailer so surely don’t know.
Roger Moore
@Starfish:
Legal Eagle had a pretty good one as well. One issue he brought up that I had not heard elsewhere is whether a lot of the NFTs (including ultra-expensive ones like the ones from Bored Ape) are even eligible for copyright. He pointed out that many of the NFTs are algorithmically generated, which makes their copyright status highly questionable. Only something that involves human creativity is supposed to be eligible for copyright, so images that are generated by a simple algorithm shouldn’t be.
Bob7094
‘@watergirl: yup, it’s working now. Also, I forgot to say thanks for the great work.
Roger Moore
@jl:
That is, at least potentially, a transient problem that only exists because cryptocurrency isn’t widely enough accepted yet. If they can push it to the point that it can be used for everything, there will no longer be a need to exchange it for real-world currency anymore.
Suzanne
@Martin: Apple also embraced the idea of beauty and high-quality aesthetics being a differentiator earlier than many of their competitors. Lots of people didn’t understand why others would pay more for equipment that might not have had the same specs but offered a more seamless user experience or that looked nicer in your apartment or more status-y in your office (or on your wrist). Apple understood that. I feel like that’s a good lesson for the nerd types to learn.
TriassicSands
I think you’re right, but I also think there is rarely one person (for consequential jobs) who is guaranteed to be the most successful once hired. Lots of people are superbly qualified on paper, but may not perform as well as others for reasons that were unforeseen at the time of hiring. I don’t want to argue about this, it’s an opinion others may not share, but I think Rochelle Walensky was undoubtedly well-qualified — on paper — to head the CDC. However, I think shes done a poor job largely because she’s a terrible communicator. I won’t say more, because she’s an example, not the point of the comment.
Lani Guinier, at one time, advocated for college admissions where the final decisions were made by lottery. Set up standards for admission. Everyone who meets those standards goes into the lottery. The resulting “winners” are all qualified, but no one had to try to decide if one person’s slightly higher GPA was more important than another person’s SAT scores. And legacies and donors weren’t part of the process.
WaterGirl
@Martin:
Yes, yes, yes. I did NOT hire the person who knew the most. I hired for a service attitude and for whether we would want to share an office with them and for communication skills – I could teach them anything else but you really can’t teach those things.
Luckily, there HR wasn’t involved in the hiring (other than the paperwork and the details) so at least I didn’t have to fight with anyone about that. I had a real knack for hiring great people, so they just let me do my thing.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
Totally agree. I thought the tweet was the most ridiculous thing I’ve read, maybe ever.
OzarkHillbilly
@Suzanne: I did have a woman in a journeyman upgrade class for rigging. Everybody in the class treated as just another carpenter. It may well have been different for her on a jobsite as a whole lot of carpenters are misogynistic assholes.
raven
@Suzanne: We were the only “academic” shop in a world of techies so they let us use Mac’s when everyone else had PC’s. Our online courses had to function cross-platform so we actually got both types of machines but I became a Mac-head then> Way back when I got the first 5 gb click wheel iPod to try to figure out a way to use them in online language classes. At one point we considered having students do a recitation in the target language and mailing them to the instructor!
dnfree
@Bob7094: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP7094.html ??
Announced January 15, 1962 and withdrawn July 14, 1969.Built for large-scale scientific computing, the IBM 7094 Data Processing System featured outstanding price/performance and expanded computing power.
Compatible with the IBM 7090, the advanced solid-state IBM 7094 offered substantial increases in internal operating speeds and functional capacities to match growing scientific workloads in the 1960s. The powerful IBM 7094 had 1.4 to 2.4 times the internal processing speed, depending upon the individual application.
The 7094, combined with major input/output improvements through IBM 729 VI and IBM 7340 Hypertape units along with programming systems such as 7090/7094 FORTRAN, reduced job time significantly for users.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly: Eh, getting promoted in the office environment usually means a significant pay increase and more visibility, which means you get better projects. If it was just doing the same job for 3% more money, I’d agree with you, but it’s usually a very desirable thing. Which is why a lot of the crypto nerds are resentful when it doesn’t happen for them.
Suzanne
@TriassicSands:
Agreed.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
Just regulating them like any other financial product would help enormously. We already have detailed financial regulations to deal with banks, commodity exchanges, and payment processors, which are the functions many of these crypto entities are fulfilling. Make them obey those same regulations. Make people who invest in cryptocurrency keep records and report it to the tax authorities the same way they would with other investments. If cryptocurrency is actually such a wonderful thing, they should have no trouble succeeding on a level playing field.
Suzanne
@WaterGirl:
100%.
I will also note that I have had to report some employee issues I’ve observed in the last 4-6 weeks to superiors, which sucks. And both times, it’s been dude team members being fucking dicks to other team members. One in a gendered way.
I often say that there are only two types of men in architecture — one is the libertarian crypto nerd type, the other is the Steve Jobs world domination “I’m an aesthete” type — and these events have involved the two members of my team that embody those typologies the most. It’s so tiresome.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: The DOE is on the case:
I think I see why graphics cards are still expensive. :-/
It would be “funny” if the DOE used this monster for a few weeks (or whatever) to mine the last Bitcoins, etc., then gave them to the Treasury.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who realizes that ASICs probably still have an advantage in some respects.”)
OzarkHillbilly
@Suzanne: It all depends on what a person wants and how they are going to get there. I worked with a carpenter who decided on the path of climbing the corporate ladder and did what it took. Good for him. I never wanted to be a superintendent no matter how much more money I might make. I was perfectly happy with my jouneyman’s wages and benefit package and I was mostly left alone, which suited my introverted self just fine.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott:
Gin & Tonic alert!
dmsilev
@Suzanne:
I guess the ones who view themselves as Harold Roark from The Fountainhead fall into both bins at the same time?
Gonna go way out on a limb and say that that particular subset is …lacking in interpersonal skills.
James E Powell
@OzarkHillbilly:
I felt exactly the same way about being a classroom teacher. I’ve had colleagues who start out with the goal of moving up as soon as possible and some of them do so. They have families and they have ambitions beyond the classroom. I don’t have either.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
This has already largely been done, for US taxpayers.
There are a lot of people under the delusion that a new currency escapes tax rules until some specific laws are passed. People used to believe something similar about barter transactions and that they could use bartering to escape taxation. Also wrong.
The IRS has authority to issue regulations concerning crypto crap and has clarified rules regarding reporting by the companies that people use for trading, etc. This past tax season, quite a number of people were shocked to find that their crypto transactions were reportable and taxable.
Crypto for crime is more complicated, but there is not much that is new here. As the Internet and related tech developed, so did schemes to use it for crime. Also, cash and avoidance of banks has always been part of the criminal underground economy. As the use of cash has declined alternatives have to be created and maintained.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly:
Absolutely. I have told my husband that I don’t know if I want to go much further, because I don’t want to deal with certain types of bullshit (any more than I already have to). But I do think that there’s a type of dude — enough that they are a subculture — who are smart enough to do technically skilled jobs but then don’t have the type of career progression that they think they deserve. They do want more, more money but also more esteem, more opportunity to lead and to be seen leading. And, in my experience, this subculture of dudes loves them some crypto. Part of that is because it’s a nerdy, technical endeavor, but part of it is also that it lets them feel smarter than everyone else. Because they don’t feel that way at work. And they would love for the world to reward their narrow vision of intelligence financially.
Gin & Tonic
@Steeplejack: As if I were the only reviled pedant around here.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
NotMax must be napping.
Bob7094
@dnfree: @dnfree:
Yup, I first learned to program on one at the local university while in high school in the late 60”s.
FelonyGovt
As someone with no interest in cryptocurrency, I’m taking bets on how long LA’s rather beloved venue formerly known as Staples Center will be stuck with the ungainly name “Crypto.com Arena”.
Baud
@Suzanne:
FWIW, there are a couple of us who get screwed over by their employer and just manage to change career paths without getting sucked into woo currency.
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: I knew someone here would note that. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@dmsilev:
Oh God. It’s terrible.
I had a dude colleague who was ten years older than me but held a more junior position. He was complaining once that project managers (my role at the time) got more respect (were “listened to” more) than the technical staff. I should note that this dude was technically excellent but had never bothered to get his license, and he had all the social skills of a slug. This dude was like a seething pit of grievance. He had an Eastern European wife who married him for the green card, believed that his ex got child support because courts are biased in favor of women, knew about the age of consent in different states, said shit like “the state has the monopoly on violence”…..
I remember him saying shit to me like, “Well, you have the personality for your job.” One time, I said, “Dude, do you think I don’t work at this? Do you think I didn’t have to learn how to explain a floor plan to people who can’t read?”
Seriously, you could play libertarian bingo with this dude. I hated him.
Steeplejack
@Gin & Tonic:
The only one brave enough to admit it today!
Suzanne
Now I want to make a Libertarian bingo board.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore: I think you missed the point there: it’s not how the currency interacts with the real world, it’s how the people in crypto culture interact with the real world.
Xavier
@Math Guy: When the government wants to hire someone or buy something, it prints some money out of thin air and offers it to the private sector (us) as payment for goods and services that we create out of thin air. The government motivates is to accept the money by requiring us to use that money to pay the tax liabilities it imposes. The underlying purpose being to transfer resources from the private sector to the public sector, in order to establish justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, etc.
JMG
I have noticed that crypto, minus the mumbo-jumbo, has become just another risk-on financial asset. Its values went way up along with stock markets in ’20-’21, and have gone way down as the markets’ appetite for risk has shrunk along with securities prices. I don’t think it will ever become a true medium of exchange. The governments that print money would squash crypto like a gnat if they ever perceived it as that kind of threat.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: I believe Jobs was a frustrated artist at heart. He didn’t know how to make art, but he thought about the world the way an artist does. That’s why the arts community embraced Apple — they could feel a fellow artist communicating with them through the technology. That’s what the specs oriented people don’t get. In fact, it’s probably why they were so hostile to the Mac — it spoke a language that was alien to them.
WhatsMyNym
@waspuppet:
That would be NASA, they are paying the bills (at least the part their contracts cover).
Jackie NC
Hi, does the Amazon link work for anyone else? I feel better if a few pennies go to this blog than all into Bezos pocket.
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly: I was once favored for a promotion to manager. Once I saw what the pay increase was, about 5%, and what and how much additional work would be required, I told my bosses that “it just wasn’t right for me at this time.”
eclare
@FelonyGovt: I’ve been wondering that too!
Steeplejack
@Xavier:
Question about your nym: do you pronounce it “Zay-vier” or “Ex-Zay-vier”?
OverTwistWillie
B E S U R E T O D R I N K Y O U R O V A L T I N E
Baud
@different-church-lady:
I tend to be hostile to Apple products because they are more expensive.
Although I just upgraded to a newer model iPad. The price difference wasn’t as bad and Apple does a good job supporting their software for longer.
debbie
@different-church-lady:
Jobs said he wanted to make computers liberal arts majors could handle.
Here.
NotMax
‘@debbie
(yawns, stretches, blinks to focus eyes)
Oh, shoot. Did I forget to close the shutter on the webcam again?
:)
debbie
@NotMax:
WaterGirl
@Jackie NC: oops, i just fixed that for you.
RSA
@Suzanne:
I used to be on Usenet, a precursor to today’s social media platforms, and I would often find myself arguing with technolibertarians. Presumably competent with computers, but a completely skewed view of the world. I began to wonder whether it was computer programming and computer environments that attracted some kinds of people. Roughly speaking, there are strict rules of logic and process for what’s possible and what’s not possible in a computing environment. (Social skills? Persuasion? User interfaces that make it easier to do simple things? Please.) If you have the right privileges, and if you know what you’re doing, you can turn your environment into whatever you like. It can be hugely rewarding. It tends to inculcate a sense of superiority over (even contempt for) people who use computers but don’t have the same specialized knowledge (stupid users, lusers).
For some people, I think it’s unhealthy.
cope
@OzarkHillbilly: I saw the same self-selection process during 28 years in public education. Some wanted to be the best teachers they could be and develop the best relational skills they could with students, myself among them. Others were obviously making strategic moves to get into admin at the school or district or state level. Being a teacher was just a step on the way.
I can’t help but make the observation that those upward moves almost always made the person more assholish.
ETA: I see that I am echoing James E Powell’s sentiments.
Xavier
@Steeplejack: I suppose “Zay-vier.” It was supposed to be Xavier Onassis but somehow didn’t get there.
Early Riser
Anyone who thinks that bitcoin in untraceable is misinformed:
https://nordvpn.com/blog/is-cryptocurrency-untraceable/
Xavier
@RSA: We had a computer tech like that. When Windows hit he hated all that “pointy-clicky, touchy-feely”crap .
Urza
@Another Scott: I don’t care how much they spent on it, if that supercomputer has HPE designed parts in it I call it a waste of taxpayer money. So many problems with their datacenter servers, try to decom them early because of that but the supply chain all messed up made it impossible. So then HPE says lets just stop servicing them entirely a year before they had said they might stop.
The Moar You Know
@different-church-lady: Jobs was a con artist, nothing less or more. He took credit for the work of others who, it must be said, didn’t have the ability to make a dime on their own. Much like Thomas Edison.
BellyCat
What’s tiresome is this kind of generalization. Architect of thirty-three years here and do not agree. there’s a few, sure, but lots of flavors of men. Same as women.
Firm owner for ten years. Lots of great folks came and went of both genders (more women, in fact). A few poor ones of each gender.
Broad skills prevail, regardless of gender.
Wondering if you recognize how discriminatory against men some of your comments on this topic seem? We all have different mountains to climb and the best among us help each other up to the summit. That’s ultimately the best skill to develop. This requires an open mind, free of bias. YMMV
BellyCat
Not to stir the pot further, but if one thinks the courts are not often biased against men, talk to a few divorced guys with kid(s) about their custody experience. Start with, “Did you seek equal custody and get it?”
One’s thoughts on the matter will likely evolve.
Steeplejack
@Xavier:
You can still get there. Spaces are allowed in nyms. Your first comment with the new nym “Xavier Onassis” will be moderated, as usual.
Another Scott
@RSA: The Linux/*BSD wars were fun for a while. Then the Gnome/KDE wars. Then the Enlightenment/Everyone Else wars.
Some people like to argue, especially when everyone who disagrees is obviously wrong.
Signed, former OS/2 user,
Scott.
(“Ah, what might have been…”)
Jackie NC
@WaterGirl: Truly appreciate all the time and attention you donate to us. You are a treasure.
Martin
@different-church-lady: This is going to be hard for some, but Jobs was the precursor tech bro in the sense that everything about Apple both then and now is identifying an opportunity in the market – a gap, a stagnation, etc. and then building products and services into that opportunity and leveraging everything the incumbents have invested in holding their market against them.
What made him succeed is what I outlined above – in doing this finding the value that the consumer wants is key to building a durable business rather than a short term money grab. That second part isn’t just hard, but it’s slow. Takes Apple years to get some products to market because that part is so hard for them to find. Marc Andreessen:
“There’s a pattern in our industry, Apple crystallizes the product” says Andreessen, “and the minute Apple crystallizes it, then everyone knows how to compete.”
That’s the 2nd part getting surfaced by Apple. What’s interesting is that almost nobody tries to replicate Apple’s process. But lots of tech bros try to short-circuit it. That’s the soft skills coming in. Jobs was really good at that in the macro even when he could be an absolute asshole in the micro.
Suzanne
@BellyCat:
And yet there’s plenty of men who have worked with me who ask me to be references for them, write them letters of recommendation, I tell recruiters about them, give them good peer reviews, etc. I am happy to oblige. Doesn’t change the observable patterns.
FWIW, I think the women in architecture are also usually a type.
Martin
@BellyCat: Having worked in a Gehry building for a decade+, while it was lovely, it was an absolute failure of utility. Some of his ideas were beyond the reach of engineers to make work, and he couldn’t ever seem to recognize that.
I would argue that no female architect could get away with that. That US architecture is so dominated by male celebrity architects probably speaks to that. I don’t think it’s an indictment on male architects as it is on a culture that allows male architects to rise to such stature on such mediocre execution.
Suzanne
@different-church-lady: I think that’s probably part of it. For the most part, I think Jobs brought a marketer’s sensibility to computing, meaning that he identified a couple of gaps/deficiencies in the market at the time and made his product fill those niches. One was ease of use for sure. Another was specifically appealing to the graphic and digital arts cohort by buying the actual digital versions of classic typefaces (like Helvetica) instead of cheap copies (which is what Ariel is); this was how Mac basically survived for about a decade. The other giant gap is that a lot of people really want to enjoy lovely objects, and hiring Jony Ive was a masterstroke. Seriously, I don’t know if there’s anyone else who has had as much of an impact on how the world looks as Ive. Crossing the aesthetics of fashion into computing was brilliant. Honestly, the specs of the computers are almost beside the point.
Martin
@The Moar You Know: I disagree. Ideas are cheap. Recall that one of his best known quotes is ‘Real artists ship’.
I can point to countless instances where I had an idea to a well recognized problem at work that would take me 5 or 10 YEARS to get implemented because of the resistance to it, failure to recognize how it would work or be received, etc.
Alternatively ‘talk is cheap’. He didn’t steal ideas from Xerox, he bought them, and then successfully commercialized them. Everyone has ideas. To quote another:
The work is what matters. Jobs did the work.
kalakal
@different-church-lady:
My antipathy to Apple products was purely price based. I’m quite happy using either them or pcs. I’d use Linux but a lot of software I use won’t run
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I’m not a huge Apple fan, but I will acknowledge that in many cases their products are more expensive because they use better, more expensive components. That isn’t the whole explanation- their very high-end stuff charges a massive premium- but for their consumer-grade products that’s the main difference. It’s one of these “pay me now or pay me later” things. Yeah, maybe iPhones are a bit more expensive than the corresponding Android, but their lifetime is usually longer.
Suzanne
@Martin: I would also submit that Jobs could recognize talent when he saw it, and that is an underrated part of much of success.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: I think part of Apple’s premium price is because they’re status symbols in a way that other devices are not. They’re designer. The people who wear Gucci or those Common Projects sneakers would never be seen with anything but a MacBook Pro.
Dopey-o
I started on Autocad under DOS. Graduated to Windows 1.0. When the Mac came out, I realized “I can teach anyone to do this!”
Whether Jobs was a genius or an artist or a con man is for others to decide, but apparently he understood that most computing would be done by non-nerds. My nerd-side plays with the computer and thinks “Fsck, this is so much fun!” But getting the non-nerds to feel the fun is a skill most don’t have.
I’ll see your OS/2, and raise you a BeOS (I’ve got the disk in a box downstairs…. Somewhere.)
Martin
@Suzanne: Your comment there at the end on fashion points to something that made me a lot of money.
Back during the iPod era, tech analysts kept lowballing Apple’s sales, because they couldn’t figure out where the tech money was flowing from. What tech products wouldn’t be bought to buy iPods instead. And then every year Apple would bust out crazy numbers and tech grew, and nobody could figure out why.
Meanwhile, some other analyst is trying to figure out why apparel sales were declining. Every year they’re falling – across the board. Well, the answer was right there – the way people were social signaling had changed from what clothes you wore, to what tech you carried. The iPod took the place of the hot fashion brand and steered a lot of dollars out of clothing and jewelry and into tech, specifically Apple tech.
See, the key wasn’t the tech of music players, but the go-to-market on them. How to make them appealing to a much broader market, not just through ease of use, but also what delivered the most joy (value) per dollar. Apple needed to make a product that could compete against things like fashion. That’s not easy to do. Ive was a big part of that, but not the only part. He was always having to be pulled back to earth a little bit. I know one of the engineers that had to battle with him over things. He’d have a strong top-level vision but the engineers had to win on a lot of details.
One thing that was a challenge for him was that Apple designs to price points. That’s set before the product even has a prototype. So it’s value engineering the whole way through. You add and remove value to hit the price point. Designers like Ive both hate that shit and find it an interesting challenge. What’s the base price for an iMac right now? $1299. What was it when the product was introduced in 1998 – 24 years ago? $1299. People really don’t understand how Apple works. If you do, you can make a lot of money and retire early. ;)
Roger Moore
@Martin:
Another way of saying this is that implementation is more important than originality. Most of the great stuff Apple gets credit for wasn’t invented by them. Xerox came up with the windowing interface before Apple. There were tons of MP3 players before the iPod, and smart phones before the iPhone. OSX is a skin over Mach + BSD. And so forth.
That’s not what matters. What matters is that Apple was able to take good ideas that hadn’t really taken off and give them the boost they needed to become popular. People tend to give Apple credit as inventors because we recognize inventors more than popularizers.
Martin
@Suzanne: It’s funny. Apple sells the best selling durable good ever made. Not even a close 2nd, and yet it’s considered ‘premium price’. How can a product that has been sold to 1/6th of the world population be ‘premium priced’?
I would argue that Apple has brought value up to the price point in such a way that a lot of consumers see that it’s properly priced. And that competing products of similar cost don’t have the same value, which is why they don’t sell as well. That value can take many forms – from retail service locations, to aesthetics, to reliability and ease of use, to network effects, and so on. Some of it is just trust. 10-20 million people buy one before even having a chance to touch it ahead of time, which is unheard of for a durable good. Hell, most people won’t buy $5 worth of broccoli without touching it first, but Apple will sell $70B worth of iPhones in the first few days of launch, sight unseen. You gotta work at that. That doesn’t come for free.
burnspbesq
If you think the SEC is willing and able to do its job, and if you don’t think that Joe Manchin and/or Neil Gorsuch will make it impossible to the SEC to do its job, then the answer to crypto is simple: Amend the 33 and 34 Acts to include all forms of crypto within the definition of “security.”
Those are two bonus-size ifs.
dnfree
@Bob7094: I started on an IBM 1620 in 1965 at my university. It didn’t even have a disk or a printer. Card input and output only.
Suzanne
@Martin:
100%.
I used to have this client, Boomer-age, who would always joke about needing to “go to Jared!” to buy something for his wife for whatever upcoming occasion. Birthday, Christmas, anniversary, whatever. One time he asked me what I wanted for Christmas or something. I said, “Steve, I don’t want to go to Jared, I want to go to the Apple store”. And much of my cohort is the same. I drive a seven-year-old Honda, I wear clothes from the mall, I don’t have any expensive collections of anything…. but I have a stupidly expensive degree and nice tech stuff. LOL.
dnfree
@Roger Moore: I bought a very expensive Samsung tablet through Verizon years ago. After two years, it turned out that the Android operating system couldn’t be upgraded to the next snack level. Verizon blamed Samsung and vice versa. I couldn’t load an app I wanted. Obsolete in two years??? Apple and Microsoft both do better than that.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@burnspbesq:
Isn’t this sort of doom talk?
kalakal
One thing I hate about Apple is their OS changes. I use a lot of music production software and everytime Apple change OS X, 3rd party vendors such as Eventide, FabFilter , U-he, Liquidsonics etc have to devote lots of resources to get their stuff to work on the new version. I use Pcs but still get hit by the opportunity cost.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
Apple’s price premium on consumer-grade hardware is much smaller than people think. It looks big because Apple doesn’t sell the lower-spec products that you might buy if you’re price-conscious. If you compare Apple’s stuff to comparably specified products from other manufacturers, there isn’t that big a price difference, at least until you get to the really fancy pro products.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
I agree. Apple predicts are well made. For phones and computers, I haven’t found the difference worthwhile (and I’m not a fan of ios). Tablets are a different matter.
ETA: iOS has improved, so I’m not sure what my next phone will be, but that’s at least a couple of years off.
Martin
@Roger Moore: And if you ever compare Xerox’s windowing interface to Apple’s, they’re nothing alike. 3 buttons down to 1. The hardware wasn’t up to the task, so that had to be improved. From the lore of the era:
It lost 2 buttons along the way, which required reconsidering *everything* in software to incorporate the functionality under those buttons. Thus was invented the double-click, which reduced the button count.
And there’s a lot going on in there. One of the Mac features which wasn’t copied for ages and it still seen as a problem in web menus is that on the Mac if you are navigating to a submenu, the system keeps the menu open if you travel out of the menu box at a certain angle because you are aiming for a submenu item. You don’t have to move right and then down, you can go directly to the submenu item and leave the menu/submenu hit box. It’s much faster/easier. But do you know how much programming is involved in that? Figuring out when to keep it open, when to not, what’s the right angle, etc. Same with the acceleration curve on the mouse. One thing I hated about Windows is that it didn’t have that – the mouse moved at a constant speed, but the Mac mouse has an acceleration curve, you could flick the cursor across the screen and also move pixel by pixel if you went slowly. Another tricky bit of programming. And the Mac cursor was implemented in hardware so it wasn’t competing with application compute, so it always had priority.
Other things Xerox hadn’t envisioned that Apple had to invent:
drag and drop, direct document editing, multiple file system views, menu bar and pull down windows, self-repairing windows (windows that redraw their contents automatically), plus all of the underlying hardware.
Xerox had some great ideas, but they weren’t mature enough for a product. Lots of really important things were completely missing. Steve Jobs didn’t steal any of Xerox’s stuff. Instead, he gave Xerox 20% of the company for permission, which Xerox gladly took and then sold before Apple went to IPO. It would have been worth $360M at IPO. Xerox sold it for $1.2M.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
My Macs survived me trying to add memory, change out CD drives, and reformat every time I thought I’d messed up the system. That alone made them worth the price. They lasted forever, too.
Martin
@kalakal: Getting software to work reliably on the Mac is not hard. But you can’t go too rogue. Apple is very good at about telling developers where to go, and developers are notoriously bad about ignoring them.
If you are trying to do this cross-platform, it’s going to be impossible to share code reliably there because your primary goal is almost certainly latency and you achieve that in completely different ways on different platforms. That’s going to be especially true with the shift to ARM.
kalakal
@Martin: I’ve written stuff for Macs, a bit of a pain at times but eminently doable.
No my gripe here is that I use Audio Workstations and a lot of plugins ( I don’t write them myself) and whenever OSX changes almost every manufacturer of them has real problems ( this doesn’t happen with Windows, that its own ‘features’). It doesn’t affect me directly, I use PCs as high end macs are very expensive, but the opportunity cost in wasted time does for those companys does. Quite a few music software vendors are dropping the apple market because as you say you can’t really share code between say VST3 and AAX, let alone the extra pain in having to rewrite the AAX whenever OSX changes
The music production software is rife with proprietary software, it’s a miracle MIDI was ever adopted.
Another Scott
@Martin: Jobs and Apple were (and are) smart fast followers. They managed to survive their mistakes, teamed up with and learned from several of the big guys (Canon, Xerox, Adobe, IBM, etc.) when appropriate, and went their own way when appropriate. Now they’re huge enough to be able to do whatever they want (for a while), but they will still be fast followers (Waymo will probably have cars/trucks for sale before Apple).
They set the path with the iPhone and that was obviously a huge deal. I don’t know of anything else, though, where they were first. Being at the right place at the right time is much more than luck, but it’s also luck.
Cheers,
Scott.
Math Guy
@Xavier: As I understand it, if the government just printed money out of thin air and put it into circulation, that would cause massive inflation. But when they need something from us – our labor, essentially – then they are asking us to do something that I see as a reduction in entropy, and they pay us for that. I am not an economist, but I broadly trained mathematician who now has the luxury of being able to think about these matters. I think many of the commenters on this thread have it right: cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, and it doesn’t even have the benefit of a foundation built on sand.
Math Guy
@OverTwistWillie: Loved that movie!
different-church-lady
@Martin:
There was absolutely something wrong with that dude. No question. But I like to think that all the asshole was on the outside, rather than the other way around.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore: I am typing this on a 14 year old MacBook Pro.
Fourteen.
That’s some kind of build quality.
Xavier
@Math Guy: The Government does just print money out of thin air and somewhat surprisingly it has the same intrinsic value as a Bitcoin – none. But the Gov promises that you can pay your taxes with its dollars, whereas nobody is promising anything wrt Bitcoin. And taxes are critical for maintaining the supply of and value of the dollar, since dollars returned to the Treasury as tax payments effectively no longer exist.
As far as cryptocurrency goes, there’s a good argument that besides being a pyramid scheme it is the cause of the whole ransomware industry. Without cryptocurrency there’s no practical way for ransoms to be paid.
Rokka
@kalakal:
@kalakal:
The main problem with Apple is they change their computer OS every year driven by marketing PR instead of anything else. This sets up a situation where everybody is forced to be a beta tester for a half baked OS all the time. What they should do is put out a new system every two years where they do their own testing and give users and developers more time to catch up.
BruceJ
Another good article about crypto https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fire/