This is the hunk of shit that the NSA told Hillary Clinton to use instead of a Blackberry when she asked them to set her up with a smartphone. It ran Windows CE, first introduced in 1996. A recent document dump shows that Clinton started using a private email server after the NSA tried to foist this turd on her.
Can you imagine getting any real work done on this thing? The user experience would have been like the feeling of warm diarrhea creeping down your leg, interspersed with painful cramps. No wonder she used her own server.
By the way, in case you’ve forgotten, Obama refused to use this and forced the NSA to harden up a Blackberry for him.
dr. bloor
Pic too small. Can’t see which keys are designated “Meat,” “Produce,” and “Dairy” on that thing.
Adam L Silverman
At least it didn’t come with a dongle that had to be plugged into it before it would work.
chopper
jesus, it looks like if you pressed a key it would go “the cow says, MOOOOOO”
Hunter Gathers
Windows CE? I wouldn’t wish that POS OS on my worst enemy. Windows Embedded is bad enough, CE makes me want to slit my wrists.
goblue72
Before everyone starts going “hur-hur stoopid gubmints” – Apple’s genre-busting, paradigm shifting smartphone – the iPhone – didn’t premiere until mid-2007, with the 3G iPhone being release in mid-2008. So yeah, today in our touchscreen world that Apple built, that thing looks like a dinosaur. But those dinosaurs were still kinda wandering around “back then” (a mere 7 years ago). And a mere 7 years before 2009, Nokia & Ericsson style candy-bar cellphones were the cutting edge of cellphone design. The first consumer camera-phone sold in the U.S. didn’t premiere unit 2002 from Sanyo in a clamshell flip phone design.
Smartphones have developed so blazingly fast over the last 10 years. To point where the once-ubiquitous Blackberry amongst the power elite is now a company that has needed to downsize itself to a niche company primarily serving a vendor to government agencies.
Mai.naem.mobile
More importantly did it have a Siri type character to tell her to smile?
John Cole
Can I ask why have an unclassified port and pda key if you already have a classified one? I don’t understand the technology, but that seems like owning a really good, safe car but driving around your unsafe crappy version of the same thing for shits and giggles.
Cacti
Government IT: yesterday’s solutions tomorrow
opiejeanne
@goblue72: Then what smart phone was she asking them for? She wasn’t SOS until 2009, so smart phones were available.
Ecks
@John Cole: presumably because you also sometimes need to send non-classified files to people who don’t have government decryption.
eric
@chopper: *golf clap*
Adam L Silverman
Remember, this is for Secure/Secret level communications. The unclassified issued smartphones are the newest iteration Blackberry devices. Yes, the US government, including the military, is single handedly keeping Blackberry in business.
As I’ve written here repeatedly: The US government’s ability to utilize cutting edge technology is exceedingly limited. Some of this is due to the logistics and acquisitions cycle – its slow. Some of it is due to the classification requirements. And some of it, especially in regard to voice and data, is due to limits on bandwidth. Finally, some of it is due to limits in creativity and imagination. It is important to remember that the DOJ set up a process for a new computer system in the late 1980s. When it was finally delivered in the early aughts, years late and dollars over budget, it was obsolete. As late as the late 1990s the folks at Kennedy Space Center would routinely put adds in papers in Florida for anyone that might still have in their garages, attics, and/or closets working original IBM PCs with the 5 and 1/4 floppy drives. Why? Because that’s what their shuttle launch and control systems were originally built on and they were basically triaging them to keep them alive.
And these are just two horror stories. I have numerous involving my team’s tech in Iraq – as in what worked, what didn’t, what we were sent with that was actually broken – our Immersat – not that it really mattered because one of the other teams had used their entire satellite Internet connection so much they’d gone through the entire programs budget for its use in just a couple of months. So even if ours worked, we couldn’t use it. And don’t get me started on my unclassified email account from 2010-2014. At one point someone at the central office for mail.mil accounts decided to reclassify everyone who was a term appointment’s email address. Of course they didn’t tell anyone. I was on temporary duty at Ft. Sill and my blackberry was useless for email as was my ability to use my CAC card to log into a workstation to access email. Why? Because my email no longer existed. For over two weeks every unclassified work email, even if it was for official use only, had to be sent to my gmail account. And then for two more weeks once I got back to the office as it took the tech folks at Carlisle Barracks that long to get a ticket put in and the process to get me a new email address started. And then, of course, when it came through, it was set up wrong and the multiple and redundant certs would crash my office workstation. So for about five or six weeks all of my unclassified work email correspondence had to be done to and from my gmail.
Baud
Does it have Tetris?
schrodinger's cat
@Adam L Silverman: Totally OT question? Do you watch The Americans?
Adam L Silverman
@John Cole: This was designed to be a handheld PDA version of the combo NIPR/SIPR systems you’ll find at workstations in a lot of SCIFs. Basically you flick a switch on an external box and it switches your workstation from NIPR to SIPR so you don’t have to leave your desk and go to a SIPR room to work on SIPR or leave a SCIF and go find a separate NIPR/unclassified workstation.
As a result everything has to be duplicated: one set for NIPR and one set for SIPR.
redshirt
Having seen how even very small companies can fuck everything up in regards their technology, it no longer surprises me that the Government is 8 years behind and in a constant state of triage.
Hell, try implementing a CRM system for a company of 100 people. Like pulling teeth. Can you imagine doing it at the level of State Department or the Army?
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Don’t be ridiculous. I see TONS of ads in the dead-tree WaPo for CP/M programmers wanted at Langley. Keypunchers, too.
Technocrat
@Adam L Silverman:
It’s starting to bite them in the ass in a big way. At my site, we’re not allowed anything with recording capability (duh). I can’t even use a late-gen iPod Touch to play music – for some reason they have a camera.
Imagine that you’re trying to hire young developers, for a government salary, and they have to leave their Nexus or iPhone at home. That’s a tough pitch, and many of them turn down the job for that reason alone.
Ella in New Mexico
The government is still in the frigging dark ages when it comes to technology. The crap my husband has to use to conduct “state of the art testing and development” is essentially Window 98 Computers.
Welcome to the world of tech and cyber security purchased from Defense Industry Corporate Welfare Queen companies who have essentially faced NO competition and thus have provided NO innovation.
He was actually excited to hear Google is going to start advising the Government on how to get it’s technological ass in gear.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodinger’s cat: No. If its not based on a comic book, its not a cartoon, it doesn’t have NCIS in the title, its not about Bigfoot, Cryptids, or Josh Gates trying to get killed running down a legend, or the Big Bang Theory, I don’t watch it.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: LOL. Same. Except the crime shows and Big Bang.
Baud
@Adam L Silverman: Someone said DiNozzo was leaving the show!
guachi
Mr. Cole, the reason you need a classified and unclassified port is that something plugged into an unclassified port can’t ever be plugged into a classified port and vice-versa, if that “something” has any kind of programming/electronics/whatever type stuff and isn’t just a “dumb” device.
For example, I can plug a non-powered set of headphones into my classified and unclassified computer all day, every day. But if I used powered noise cancelling headphones, I can only use them with one system.
Adam L Silverman
@Technocrat: The worst was my assignment last summer. I’m in a schoolhouse, yet the building has been designated a SCIF. The NIPR workstations are so larded up with security on it that even though I’m a senior research fellow, and my day to day work is unclassified, if I open more than two browser windows when doing research the system crashes. I can’t bring my iPad in to read pdfs on, my cell is locked in a cubby hole, and my office phone only works if I hold a button down at all times, so having a conference call is a nightmare… And the students can’t bring any tech into the classrooms that we would expect them to use.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: End of this season. Word is he’s going to be replaced by two female agents.
boatboy_srq
@John Cole: Not being totally familiar with the device, but knowing how some encapsulation technologies work, the “classified” connectors probably talked to secured/encrypted apps/data-storage and the “unclassified” ones don’t. So, if you want to replace the wallpaper with Steve pics, for example, those would be uploaded using the unclassified connector, and if you wanted to download the PDF of the last intel briefing from DHS, you could do that from the “classified” port (to a similarly secured PC) but not from the “unclassified” one.
BYOD technologies use similar data segregation techniques.
goblue72
@opiejeanne: I didn’t say smartphones weren’t available. I was saying that the Star Trek Next Generation glossy iPhones and Androids we all walk around with today that make that thing above look like a Speak N’ Spell had just premiered a year or two before Clinton was SOS. The whole before-iPhone and after-iPhone divide had literally just happened. And when iPhone premiered it was aimed at the consumer market, and was initially scoffed at a device deployable at the enterprise-level (i.e. business- / corporate-use). Let alone deployable by the Federal government for users with high security needs.
I distinctly remember buying a 3G iPhone in 2008 when it premiered and most people at the company I worked at had two reactions (1) that thing looks like a toy, that’s no substitute for a Blackberry and (2) um…can I try it?
Now layer on the usual government procurement crap and the security needs crap and the Etch-A-Sketch above doesn’t seem all that crazy.
There are the 10 Most Popular Cellphones in 2009.
As you can see, the iPhone 3G and iPhone styled Androids were starting to take over, but you still had Blackberry-style PDA phones and the like. The Borg-Phone has not yet completed its full takeover yet.
schrodinger's cat
@Adam L Silverman: You should watch it, it is the best show on television, it is about two Soviet spies, posing as a suburban couple. It is set in the 1980s.
Baud
@Adam L Silverman: Whoa. Will they kill him off? There won’t be a dry eye in the house.
boatboy_srq
That thing reminds me of the Treo 650 I was using (in 2004)…
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
OT, but I waded into a facebook thicket about my irritation with “have a blessed day” and “our business is owned and operated by committed Christians, and we operate according to the highest Christian ethics”.
I indicated my disdain for the approach, and stated that my inclination is to run screaming from any such purveyor of services. You’d think I’d stabbed a puppy in front of a Kindergarten class.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: No he lives. They aren’t killing him off, but at mid season they were still working out the departure. There was some speculation they’d bring back Ziva for his last episode, but that seems to be just that – speculation.
mistermix
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, it sounds like Clinton came to them with a simple requirement — I need a smartphone so I can read my unclassified email. They realized that some classified email could possibly be inadvertently mixed with her classified email, or maybe they imagined that she would start using her device for classified email because she didn’t know the difference, so they went full-on CYA and offered her this monstrosity. Since she actually wanted to do real work on her unclassified account, she ended up setting up her own server.
It would have been much better to just set up a blackberry server under the control of State’s IT department – Blackberry and a server they control and monitor is far less of a security risk than a 3rd party email system with questionable security monitoring.
opiejeanne
@goblue72: I am talking about Hillary requesting a smart phone.
The 4s was a substantial improvement over the 3, and was available by March of 2010. That still fits nicely within the timeline you have described.
opiejeanne
@goblue72: I had the 3g. I also had the 4s, which was available in early 2010 and was a huge step up from the 3g.
LAO
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Your criticism infringes on their first amendment right to loudly and proudly practice Christianity.
redshirt
I don’t see what’s so bad about the phone.
RSA
This story was making the rounds late last year, about a French airport being shut down because one of its systems responsible for managing weather information went down–due to a Windows 3.1 problem.
We’ve known about the loss of functionality and data due to hardware and software obsolescence for decades now. I remember reading about it in a Scientific American article from 1980, before I even started college. But in a lot of cases the replacement costs are so high that organizations will put it off until a disaster happens.
Ruckus
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
You’d think I’d stabbed a puppy in front of a Kindergarten class.
Of course many of the rabid christianists would think that’s normal for some bizarre reason that defies normal comprehension. But not agreeing with them deflates their entire belief system.
Ruckus
I worked for a relatively small company that still used an IBM mini for it’s corporate work with IBM PCs running 3.1 as terminals. In the ten yrs I worked there they up graded the minis, I think twice and replaced our desktops. Those of us who traveled got laptops, instead of having to borrow the 2 IBM laptops from support. We couldn’t have smartphones because the office manager didn’t like them and kept the 2 Motorola phones, you know the first cell phones, analog, limited range and the service to support them cost $400/month. You had to make an appointment to borrow one and then had to be a VP level to do so. My boss had me go out and buy 5 phones and service and the service for that was much less than $400/month. That’s what happens when the controlling voice in the chain has ZERO technical chops. BTW I left in 2005 and bought a BlackBerry 9330 international for my phone. Just replaced it a couple of months ago with an Android based phone.
Adam L Silverman
@mistermix: Actually classified email can’t really be easily sent on the unclassified network. You would have to print a copy out, leave the secure room/SCIF with it (which would be picked up by the ceiling mounted surveillance, then take it to an unsecured printer/fax/scanner and scan it in and send it to your email. Then forward that using the unclassified email. Or just take the doc to your workstation and retype it into the unclassified email and then send that. This is cumbersome and easy to detect.
Mnemosyne
@opiejeanne:
I am reading your comment on a 4s right now! The main issue I have is that it doesn’t have enough memory (a mere 16GB) but the iPhone 6 is too big for my dainty hands. Rumor has it that a somewhat smaller phone will be announced in a couple of weeks.
Adam L Silverman
@opiejeanne: @opiejeanne: Apple products are not approved for US government uses. Yes the President put his foot down and got them to secure an iPad, but everything is set up for windows or blackberry. And they are required.
Technocrat
@Adam L Silverman:
Ugh. It’s like Kabuki sometimes.
@mistermix:
Security on an unclassified system is pretty much “we try to keep up with software patches”. It’s not terrible, but not spectacular – I’m getting free identity theft protection because of the OPM breach.
At home, I use gmail with two-factor authentication. I trust it more than a gov’t run system, and in fact lots of research labs are moving to gmail for their unclassified stuff.
Burnspbesq
The only piece of tech I miss from my Gubmint days is WordPerfect 5.1. Still better and more user-friendly than any version of Word ever released.
Mnemosyne
@Technocrat:
Ah, Gmail 2-Factor. We have custom Google at work. It was SO MUCH fun to have the 30 days expire while I was in Florida for my brother’s funeral and have the temp sitting at my desk trying to reach me because the reset code went to my cell phone. (Not on the actual day of the funeral, thank god.) Good times, good times.
Baud
You really can’t talk about the “government” with respect to tech. Each component and sub-component of the federal government has its own tech issues, and exponentially so when you add in all the state and localities.
Adam L Silverman
@Technocrat: It is. And I’m with you on free OPM security monitoring for life!
Unfortunately since they also got everything on the security investigations for everyone’s clearances, everyone who knows me and was interviewed and/or contacted is now compromised as well.
LAO
@Adam L Silverman: DOJ uses iPhones, my brother’s work phone is an iPhone (ATF). He was pissed when they switched.
FlyingToaster
@boatboy_srq: Only about half as many buttons on the Treo, though.
I had a Treo 350, then the Palm 1 (which I reluctantly replaced with an iPhone4s, still running). I seriously considered an Android, but realized from HerrDoktor Toaster’s experiment with one that I had no patience left for shit failing on me when I needed it to just fucking work.
Now I’d accept an Android (the stuff I’ve gotta do is now totally stable). I wouldn’t take a Windoze anything because of the two dozen-or-so Windows-installed products I’ve bricked since Windows 286.
lamh36
Um…its not considered quitting when you’ve already been fired…Marco…smh
Marco Rubio reportedly quitting politics
C’mon son…
MomSense
@schrodinger’s cat:
Just about to watch the season premiere. It’s my favorite show.
Technocrat
@Mnemosyne:
Heh! I feel your pain. The only reason I can log in at work is because I call my wife to get the code.
@Adam L Silverman:
Damn, I tend to forget that. At least the people they interviewed didn’t have to give up their SS#. I hope.
Mary
@Baud: The entire FCC did an overhaul this past summer that was a nightmare. My friend started a new job there around the same time and they couldn’t even issue her a security badge for a week, which meant not only that she had to call someone to let her into the building whenever she showed up for work, but also that she had to be escorted to the bathroom.
rikyrah
Governor Blocks $2.85 Minimum Wage Increase After Giving Staffers $73,405 Raises
BY AARON RUPAR
MAR 17, 2016 4:38 PM
When the city Birmingham, Alabama voted last month to give its lowest-paid workers a $2.85 raise, Republican Gov. Robert Bentley signed a bill banning Alabama cities from raising their minimum wages at all. Now, news has emerged that Bentley recently gave four of his cabinet members $73,405 raises — an 80 percent increase from the $91,000 salaries they were making previously.
One of the beneficiaries of the raises, Alcoholic Beverage Control Board Administrator Mac Gipson, argues his previous $91,000 salary wasn’t sufficient to attract the best talent from the private sector. But an author of the bill that gave Bentley the authority to raise cabinet members’ salaries in the first place says the 80 percent boosts are “outrageous.”
“I’m troubled by the amount of raises that I’ve read about,” Sen. Arthur Orr (R) told al.com.
The raises reportedly went into effect late last year, though news of them just broke this week. While the $73,405 salary increases were the largest, more than a dozen members of Bentley’s cabinet and a number of his staff members reportedly received raises as well.
scav
@Mary: On the upside, I guess it’s a fast way to get really close to your co-workers. Granted, depends entirely on the coworkers.
Baud
@Mary: At least she learned to get to work on time.
daves910
Over at Kos the bernies are foaming at the mouth claiming that this proves that at the very least Hilz was a Russian agent.
Baud
@daves910: Ha! I almost made a joke about that. I’m glad to know my humor would have been taken seriously at kos.
Bill E Pilgrim
See I didn’t even know that USB came in “classified USB” and “unclassified USB”, only 2.0 or 3.0.
No wonder some of my ports never work, I never checked if I was buying classified or unclassified cables.
I’m not even going to ask what a “5-way communication” is.
Roger Moore
@John Cole:
I think the idea is that it has compartmentalized security so it can deal with both classified and non-classified information on the same device. So you push the “classified” button to access your classified emails and the “unclassified” button to access the non-classified emails, and the system won’t let you leak by copying from the classified side to the unclassified side. Similarly, it has classified and unclassified USB ports so you can connect to either classified or unclassified computers, and it will likewise prevent you from downloading classified information where you aren’t allowed to.
LAO
O/T: to the surprise of no one, Cliven Bundy was denied bail today. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/17/cliven-bundy-denied-bail-nevada-government-standoff?CMP=share_btn_tw
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
So what you’re saying is, you’re a Gravity Falls fan.
scav
@LAO: How do you think the detail that he seems to be playing ingenue “it wasn’t little old me that brandished weapons!” is going to play with those that clearly and photogenically rallied with brandished weapons to his call to arms? Or, is this Cowboy SOP on the neighbor-relying plains?
different-church-lady
@Technocrat:
Holy god: how would they ever be able to post a photo of lunch to their Facebook feed under those conditions?!?
JudyinSD
Completely and totally OT but I just made my first donation to HRC and the emails I have received back are done in a font which is almost totally unreadable. Do you think I may have gotten snagged by a phony site and am being scammed? Or is this a legitimate response and just poor font management?
encephalopath
This is about what I figured. Between 2005 and 2010, trying to login to work networks remotely got significantly worse to the point that you needed an RSA token with a prefix PIN that was sure to have expired since the last time you used it, and you were at least 3 nested virtual desktops deep (all passworded) before you got to the point that you could actually do anything, while being tied exclusively to high bandwidth environments because if you didn’t have bandwidth you would get 3-5 second keystroke and click lag. And this was a corporate “technology” company. I can’t imagine the government was any better.
Baud
@different-church-lady: If they work for the government, they probably can’t afford lunch.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Then they don’t need the iPhone at all!
[nods]
LAO
@scav: I expect, he shall, remain in federal custody till the end of his days. He certainly conspired to commit those crimes and he may have (not sure of the specific evidence) aided and abetted those crimes. I know that he is charged under both theories (as a principal and as an aider and abettor). So, that dog will, probably, not bark..
Baud
@different-church-lady: You monster!
scav
@LAO: I didn’t think it would fly with the courts certainly, but I was wondering about the Sagebrush posse’s reaction to his playing the it wasn’t me card. Although, I guess they do all claim it was some sort of amore’s based camping expedition.
chopper
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
usually when someone says that to me at a store and i figure out they’re christians i tell them “thank you, have a nice day” in yiddish and walk out.
Villago Delenda Est
The guys at the NSA invented “user surly” human interfaces.
Frankensteinbeck
@scav:
It’s not inspiring, but it’s SOP. They see the court system as a corrupt tool of tyranny, without hyperbole. Many think it’s not even legally legitimate, and represents a fake government we’ve been tricked into obeying. One way or the other, nothing Bundy says or does will be taken as cowardly, because all is fair playing a broken game. The only exception I can think of would be publicly ratting out his comrades for immunity.
His refusal to plead guilty or not-guilty sounds like he’s going Sovereign Citizen, and believes, essentially, that the legal system is a broken game he will try to win with cheat codes. I hope so, because A) that will get hilariously weird, and B) the judge will get singularly pissed and Bundy is in for the harshest punishments available.
Tenar Darell
@Adam L Silverman: This makes me wonder even more how the FBI or the NSA can even rationally or logically argue that putting back doors in encryption is a good idea. (It makes no sense to me, because they’re terrible at unstable technology).
Robert Sneddon
@Roger Moore: The Pwn2Own competition is running at the moment. For those who don’t know, it’s a competition where the makers of computers and software put up large cash prizes and laptops etc. for “white hat” crackers who can break their security. Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers were compromised yesterday as was Adobe Flash. The second day will provide attacks on MS Edge browser and other common software. At the same time it has been announced that a security hole in a common code library (StageFright) used in Android phones has put about 30% of modern handsets at risk of being remotely hacked even with all the security mitigations now in place.
Back when the abomination shown in the picture up above was state-of-the-art in security all commercial mobile devices were vulnerable to a passing breeze in terms of being hacked, and that included Blackberry even in its “hardened” form. Only by separating secure and insecure systems and building the secure systems on separate silicon is there any hope of providing some kind of defensible and secure data communications devices, and that’s what the abomination (theoretically) does if its makers did their job right.
chopper
@Ruckus:
well, if you shoot a puppy in front of a kindergarten class (and then shoot up the class, natch) the krazy kristianists will make every rationalization they can for why it’s totes just a thing.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: That’s new. Or at least new to me.
different-church-lady
@Robert Sneddon:
Adobe Flash is compromised the moment you install it.
scav
FYWP autocorrect has a fondness for turning smores to amore (or smokes, which was its last trick — psychoanalyze that)
The Dangerman
I’m sorry, but boo fucking hoo for Hillary if that’s the phone she should have been using; cry me a fucking river. Seriously, is that some sort of defense for her setting up the home server … really? If so, you’re shitting me, right?….
….though I can see Hillary throwing a shit fit if Obama got a Blackberry and she didn’t…
ETA: Beware the Ideas of the 12-5 matchup.
LAO
@scav: ah sorry. I’d be pissed if I picked up a weapon, pointed it at a fed and then got locked up and now face federal charges and the shitheel I did it for, says but judge it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. But I’m a New Yorker and we’re not nice people. These guys seem like morons, so who knows.
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: No, let me amend that: cartoons based on comic books.
Baud
@The Dangerman: She doesn’t need a defense.
LAO
@Frankensteinbeck: It appears he is going sovereign citizen. I feel sorry for the judge.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
He is apparently claiming that the federal government has no authority in Nevada. Something tells me that a judge in the District of Nevada is not going to buy that argument.
LAO
@Adam L Silverman: it’s true. I swear.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore: “Mr. Bundy, at first I found your theories of federal authority to be quite farcical. But I have researched the subject over the past 24 hours and… holy shit, you’re right!“
LAO
@Roger Moore: the magistrate entered the plea on his behalf. His attorney should be disbarred. To stand in federal court and make that argument is head shaking.
Frankensteinbeck
@LAO:
Yeah, I’m not in the legal profession, but I’m told Sovereign Citizens are annoying as Hell to deal with. Much of their belief system involves trying to be as obstructionist as possible until you find a loophole where the court admits they have no power over you.
@Roger Moore:
Yep.
redshirt
All electricity is hacked. That’s why I dictate all my responses from a darkened hobbit hole.
Baud
@different-church-lady: The case of Bull v. Shit clearly supports your argument.
Frankensteinbeck
@different-church-lady:
Actually, the Sovereign Citizen theory involved is that the court knows they don’t have authority, but they’re depending on you not knowing. They’re essentially trying to trick the defendant, so the defendant just has to reveal that they know the truth and not let themselves be manipulated into conceding points like this. Yes, it’s completely fucking insane.
LAO
@different-church-lady: @Baud: I admitted it, I laughed.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Hey, just out of curiosity, who are you releasing your delegates to?
bago
@Robert Sneddon: What this guy says. I’ve worked deeply in the software world for most of my life. My friend works in the state department, I did a job for the D.O.J. And wound up dating an FBI agent after DefCon. The biggest hacks these days are rowhammer variants, which exploits the fact that our manufacturing tolerances at a <10nm scale are vulnerable to quantum leakage. If you hammer a row of memory on a chip long and hard enough you can leak into the next row with your charge. All you need to know is the exact details of the chip and where the OS stores its secrets. And then you can hammer the hell out of it. Van Eck style phreaking is a bit 90's but techniques listening to the LCD screens exist, as well as listening to your poorly shielded Usb cables.
That's why State uses old, clunky machines that can't run flash, or plug into normal cables.
LAO
@Frankensteinbeck: thankfully, I have never dealt with this but it was crazy popular in the local, pre trial federal locks up in NYC @ 10 years ago. the papers were crazy!
different-church-lady
@Frankensteinbeck: “The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner’s door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, was an utter surprise to him.”
goblue72
@The Dangerman: Pretty much. But some folks seriously refuse to see the forest for the trees.
Pogonip
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: “Have a blessed day” is a standard black sign-off in parts of the Midwest. (Oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard it from a white no matter how devout the white is.). Anybody of any ethnic group who makes a big issue out of being a “Christian,” as opposed to a Catholic or Methodist or whatever, advertises in the Blue Pages, or both, should be avoided; such a person will steal you blind. In fact, an obnoxiously self-professed Christian who also advertises in the Blue Pages should probably be chased off with a crucifix and holy water. You are hearing this from someone who’s been a Church member for 45 years.
bago
If you allow an app onto your phone, mathematically, the general purpose instruction set can do anything. Sometimes it’s not what you want.
Mnemosyne
Annoying day. I broke a new bottle of perfume at my desk at work (opened a Sephora package), cut my finger on aluminum foil, and discovered we don’t have enough decorations for tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day party thanks to Yours Truly. Plus my shoes hurt. Good thing we don’t have plans for tonight.
scav
@LAO: Well, then, he should read it the way Feste reads Malvolio’s letter in Twelfth Night
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: I believe you. It doesn’t surprise me that DOJ moves faster than DOD on this stuff.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne:
Uh… hate to make things even worse for you, but…
Roger Moore
@Robert Sneddon:
I’m assuming this is something like an Orange Book Division B system, where there are mandatory access controls to prevent data from crossing security boundaries in ways it isn’t supposed to. In theory, and even in practice with the right hardware, it’s possible to have multiple security domains on the same machine without needing completely different hardware, though today it may be simpler just to have two sets of chips interacting with the same screen and keyboard.
LT
“A recent document dump shows that Clinton started using a private email server after the NSA tried to foist this turd on her.”
That sentence couldn’t be dumber.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
No, that part we did on purpose. We had another event in the office today (which is how I cut myself on aluminum foil) so we moved the official celebration to tomorrow.
Frankensteinbeck
@LAO:
Oh, cripes. I just realized. If he isn’t just being a twit and is actually going full-on Sovereign Citizen, he’s just begun the ‘If I don’t plead guilty or not guilty, it’s not a trial’ gambit. Please, please, let this be so. It promises the deepest levels of nuttiness. The trial will be a farce worthy of Monty Python.
LAO
Too bad, no cameras in the courtroom!!!
Frankensteinbeck
@LAO:
Is it wrong of me that I’m hoping one of these bozos will pull the ‘fake legal documents that unilaterally declare themselves innocent and order the court to give them a lot of money’ trick?
LT
@LT: See this thread. Not sure ArstTechnica or you even understand what’s going on here:
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/710588930500919296
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
The trial will be a farce worthy of Monty Python
The trial may be a farce but I’d bet the outcome won’t be.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
I fully support the return of peine forte et dure for that kind of behavior.
Technocrat
@different-church-lady:
Hey, you try going 8 hours without any “likes”. [shudder]
redshirt
I had one of the original Blackberries, which was more like a pager. It had no phone but you could send/receive emails on the very, very tiny screen.
I’m getting old. I miss the days when people only had phones in their homes or at pay phones. It made us more enterprising and engaged.
LAO
@Frankensteinbeck: No, no, it’s not. But I hate that they’re crappying all over the justice system. By no means is the CJS perfect, but I’m finding myself less amused and more pissed. Which surprises the hell out of me. Thankfully, I expect my righteous indignation will wear off by tomorrow.
LT
This was ONLY about a device inside the SD office – where she could have just used a computer.
pseudonymous in nc
I had a Sony Ericsson P800 in 2003, and friends had Treos in 2004. But none of us had to deal with classified information.
But it’s true that the device and platform restrictions probably put off young programmers and developers from working in government. That’s why you end up carving out special entities like 18F or USDS where the standard rules don’t apply so much.
redshirt
@redshirt: But seriously, the Buddha’s mission was to bring Enlightenment to all sentient beings, and I feel that for the first time in history we are taking massive steps backwards towards this goal because of mobile phones. The human race has never been less aware then it is right now.
Has anyone ever seen the video of the dude texting on his phone unintentionally walking right up to a bear, captured on a news helicopter? For example.
Mnemosyne
@LT:
I just read that thread. I don’t think you understood it. Marcy thinks this is a political prosecution by the FBI — read the comments and her replies therein. She compares Hillary to Snowden.
Robert Sneddon
@Roger Moore: I’m thinking more of the approach Apple have started to implement where authorisation and encryption is in silicon rather than in programs running on a general-purpose processor that shares data and code space with Angry Birds and a Twitter client. Blackberry started doing that a few years back (the Blackberry Blackphone) but ten years ago this wasn’t an option unless you were a major government who could afford expensive custom silicon like the chips I suspect lurk inside the abomination at the head of this article. Nowadays custom silicon is a lot more affordable and capable.
In reality it should have been a single secure phone, not a general-purpose schizo device and SoS Clinton would have had another phone for the non-governmental side of things (and Angry Birds). I expect there were Reasons for it though.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Adam L Silverman: The Navy’s had iPhones and Android devices available since 2014.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Shana
@chopper: I think I’d say Da Kaken Afen Yan, which if I recall correctly, means “go jump in the lake.” I’m happy to be corrected.
different-church-lady
@Technocrat: Sometimes I feel like I’ve gone 50 years without any likes.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne:
Except that one of them actually had permission to possess classified documents…
Adam L Silverman
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I’ll update my files. Never worked for the Navy.
LT
@Mnemosyne: I’m just talking about this being about inside the SD. People are actling like it’s about her use of BB generally, and, dopily, about her decision to use her own private email server. Completely different issue.
Technocrat
@LT:
Signed! Except you misspelled “This”.
@different-church-lady:
Technocrat likes this
gene108
My experience with government IT is if the latest and greatest technology has a security vulnerability, you just avoid using it.
Sharepoint is useful, some of its file sharing capabilities cause documents to potentially be exposed over networks or the Internet to people, who do not need to know.
Solution: shut down those functions and do not let anyone use them.
Productivity takes a hit, but sacrifices must be made.
redshirt
I have a theory when you talk on the phone you actually “transport” your consciousness to the recipient of the call, and that’s why people completely forget about their bodies when talking. We all know these behaviors – the random walking/pacing, hand gestures to no one, repetitious actions like hair twirling, etc. This was not a big deal when phones were static – tied to a set location. But mobile phones mean we have a sizable percentage of the population out and about with limited to no control over their own bodies. It seems to me these days to be a bigger threat then drunken driving.
Baud
@different-church-lady: Most likely, their parole officers.
PurpleGirl
@Burnspbesq: You know why that is, don’t you. WordPerfect was set up to look like and feel like a typewriter — straightforward to seeing what you were typing as you types. Word was set up like a type-setting program.
In the late 1980s – early 1990s I worked in a law firm as a paralegal. We used WordPerfect. I taught myself how to run the automatic macros for a List of Authorities and a Table of Contents. Not all the secretaries knew how to do them and most of the staff did them the old-fashioned way using index cards. I love WordPerfect. While I still at my non-profit job, they still had WordPerfect in the system for me to use because I could use it do things no one could. I found it to be very versatile.
different-church-lady
@Technocrat: I don’t need your pity.
Okay, maybe I need your pity…
different-church-lady
@Baud: That’s our show, goodnight everybody!
Technocrat
@redshirt:
Texting is more dangerous than drugs, alcohol while driving: Study
different-church-lady
@redshirt: That is EXACTLY why cell phone use while driving should be illegal: it’s not where your hands are, it’s where your head is.
Technocrat
@different-church-lady:
No! it was support =)
different-church-lady
@Technocrat: OK, screw daylight savings time, I’m voting for any candidate that makes texting illegal.
Not just texting while driving — I mean ALL texting.
different-church-lady
@Technocrat: You say “to-MAY-to…”
Mike G
Boeing and Blackberry make the Black Phone for defense/security applications. Looks pretty slick.
http://www.boeing.com/defense/boeing-black/
redshirt
@different-church-lady: I’d ban all phone use in cars if I could, but that’s unrealistic, so enforcing hands free devices only is the necessary compromise. I know there are a few states already doing this, but I think every every state should.
I’d love to read a paper on it, because it’s fascinating. For example, there’s a qualitative difference between talking to someone over a hands free device and talking to someone in the passenger seat.
I suspect it’s because without the person being there, the mind creates the person and the context around the person and thus devotes precious focus to that endeavor rather then the road or the sidewalk.
different-church-lady
@redshirt: Great minds think alike. And so do ours.
Technocrat
@different-church-lady:
Uhhhh…how do you know my first girlfriend’s father??
redshirt
@different-church-lady: Maybe it’s obvious? If so I assume there’s actual studies out there. Someone throw me a link?
different-church-lady
@Technocrat: The man was trying to tell you something about the right way to approach romance. Were you smart enough to listen?
different-church-lady
@redshirt: It’s so damn obvious that nobody else in the world except you and me is willing to believe it.
But that might have more to do with the fact that if they acknowledged it, they might have to consider, just for a moment, that they should stop being selfish and put the damn phone down.
PurpleGirl
@LAO: Too bad they aren’t being tried before Judge Jack Weinstein. Can you just see his reaction to the Bundy crap? (Manical laughter)
redshirt
@different-church-lady: Maybe true, but I’m talking about the larger notion of consciousness in general. Meditation is a great tool for understanding the differences in consciousness.
Mobile phone use and the behaviors during are just a small example of this overall larger subject.
LAO
@PurpleGirl: it would be amusing.
PaulWartenberg2016
One of the horror stories my older brother – the libertarian one who worked with companies that did business with the feds for all that corporate welfare – told me was how the technology for the federal offices were – and apparently still are – ten years behind the times. One of the costs of all the damn budget wars with the tax-cutter crowd of Republicans has been the inability to keep up with more modern, more secure tech. For what he told me, it sounded like they were still operating with Windows XP (or worse, upgraded to Vista)
No wonder Clinton and others set up their own sh-t to get any work done.
? Martin
@goblue72:
That’s all swell but the NSA was still handing those Windows CE devices out as of early last year. The NSA would have been better off building a secure government communication platform as an iOS app that relied on Touch ID and end-to-end encryption than continuing with that program for 6 more years. I mean, for fucks sake, 15 Whatsapp employees were able to build such a platform that has also successfully thwarted all of our intelligence agencies.
Technocrat
@different-church-lady:
Smart enough, no.. Intimidated enough, definitely!
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
It’s not only the U.S. Government. A friend of mine who works for the Government of Canada in Ottawa posted this today on FB:
Roger Moore
@redshirt:
The explanation I’ve heard is that when the person is there with you, they can see the environment and pick up on non-verbal cues, which lets them know to shut up at critical moments. When they’re on the other end of the phone, they don’t so they keep distracting you when you need to be focusing completely on driving.
redshirt
@Roger Moore: That’s no doubt part of it, but a bigger part I’d bet is you can see them, and thus your brain has less to do, rather then when talking on the phone, your brain is constructing everything about the person you’re talking to. That mental effort takes away from the ability to focus on your actual environment.
SiubhanDuinne
@Burnspbesq:
I miss the entire Corel suite. Loved loved loved WordPerfect.
PhoenixRising
@different-church-lady: you’re not going to get support for your texting ban from deaf people, old people who are losing their hearing or anyone who communicates with either…but ok! Keep swinging for the fences!
RSA
@redshirt: To my knowledge, consciousness isn’t well enough understood to test whether someone thinks of him- or herself as being “here” or somewhere else, but attention and multi-tasking can be studied in detail, specific to driving and phone use. David Strayer, or rather his Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah, is a good starting point.
A different take on your general idea can be found in research on telepresence, the use of virtual reality techniques to give someone the impression of being present somewhere other than their physical location.
SiubhanDuinne
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’ve always said “user hostile,” but “user surly” is better and I shall begin using it forthwith.
PhoenixRising
Report from Jan ’09: I was selling security solutions for IT processes to the federal court system, literally while Obama was taking the oath. This is obvious bullshit and deserves to be mocked. There were options that met everyone’s demands.
The NSA was hazing their new co-worker, and she apparently took it well. To the point of failing to throw them under the bus during the hearings on Benghazi. She was sending the national security apparatus a message that they can trust her. Hope they appreciated it.
PhoenixRising
@efgoldman: yes, every time I fly I reflect on this. The FAA uses the monitors that cast a green light on the operators.
RSA
@SiubhanDuinne: I like “user surly” too. I just happened across an early use of “user hostile” in a paper from 1984, just a few years after the introduction of “user friendly” in 1977 (according to Merriam Webster).
redshirt
@RSA: I’ve never formally studied telepresence but I did set up some rooms and noted that the designers made sure each room was identical no matter the location, in terms of dimension, color scheme and furniture. Makes sense in terms of the experience you’re trying to convey. And I bet telepresence is a far more natural form of communication for those few people who do it then even basic telephone calls.
There’s no metric I can give you, so YMMV, but I meditate a lot and I can feel the difference between talking on the phone and talking to someone in person. I note that I no longer have awareness of my surroundings and my body while talking on the phone, but even this awareness is brief. Whereas when talking directly to someone it’s much easier to maintain that self awareness.
SiubhanDuinne
@PurpleGirl:
Versatile, and also very intuitive. Because Corel was a Canadian company, we all figured we’d have WP forever, but several years ago the Harper government decided to dump it in favour of MS software. I don’t know of anyone, either at the Consulates or Embassies or the Mother Ship in Ottawa who was happy with the change.
SiubhanDuinne
@RSA:
Huh, and all this time I thought “user hostile” was original with me :-(
Well, I guess it’s one of those things that is, indeed, original but not unique. The GMTA effect.
different-church-lady
@PhoenixRising: Okay, okay, we’ll grant exemptions, special placards, all that. Nobody said the revolution wouldn’t be messy…
different-church-lady
@efgoldman: I miss the days when idiots didn’t expect you to instantaneously respond to their every thought every second of day no matter where you are.
Matt McIrvin
Yes, I remember the days when, in the United States, “smartphone” meant “a cell phone that runs Windows CE and can open your Excel spreadsheets.” I worked for two different companies that tried to bust that paradigm. In hindsight both of them were really trying to create Android before Android. But it took Apple to take the idea mainstream first, as is often the case.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore: There’s also a social component: that odd split second where you have to figure out that no, you don’t actually need to explain to the person on the other end of the phone that, hold on a second, I’m about to rear-end a stopped car on the parkway. But by the time you realize that you’ve lost the split-second you needed.
The Other Chuck
Wow. It’s the Homermobile of phones.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Cool, bro.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: The funny thing about it is that Jobs only decided to get in the phone business because he could see that MP3 capable phones were going to destroy Apple’s iPod market. And then he wound up saying, in essence, “If we’re going to build a phone, let’s just go ahead and build the fuck out of the thing.”
Aleta
@Adam L Silverman:
Would this be because the old PCs had integrated circuits with thicker “wires” — not as suseptible to damage by cosmic rays as the more modern ICs ? Even nowadays, I’m thinking that the latest greatest chips with nanometer-thick wires cannot be used on PCs that go into space. ?
The Other Chuck
@Adam L Silverman:
So basically the difference between SCI and not is a KVM switch? Hell, that’s the same as the anti-spam techs had in their last hob. I thought for SCIFs that all the hardware had to be hardened end-to-end, down to anti-TEMPEST shielding in the monitors.
Edit: doh, SIPR, not SCIF. Neeeeeeeeevermind. :)
different-church-lady
@efgoldman: No, I actually get to ignore blog comments if I want to.
In fact, nobody here gives a shit if I respond to their blog comments. But I have to respond to EVERY FUCKING TEXT, no matter how trivial, useless, or distracting, or I’m the one being rude.
Smart phones are like little ADHD machines. I have now gotten used to the idea that if I pick up my phone to do something, I am going to be obligated to give my attention to at least three other things (text, missed call, demand to update software, choose new WiFi connection, etc.) before I get to do the thing I was going to do in the first place.
retiredeng
I had to maintain a Windows CE device 10 years ago. The OS was commonly referred to as Windows Cement.
mclaren
Simpler to use than most smartphones.
I swear, everything in America gets designed by brain-damaged three year olds.
Remember that stupid kid in kindergarten who said “I’m gonna design a train that looks like a giant dog!”? Well, that kid is now in charge of designing all consumer electronics.
Case in point: on my smartphone, to find my goddamn phone number, I have to dive down into 7 levels of fucking menus. SEVEN FUCKING LEVELS. Press a button to turn the phone on, press an icon to unlock it, then press another button on the phone itself to get into the system menu, then press the messaging app icon, then scroll up and press the system messaging icon, then scroll all the way down and get into the system details menu, then press on that icon to open it up and FINALLY you get the goddamn phone number.
Talk about shitty design–!
Another case in point: the genius who designed my smartphone put 3 tiny little icons right above another on the welcome screen. The first icon turns the phone on, then the next long thin icon (about 1/4 the width of the human thumb, just to make the fucking design even WORSE!) right below that powers the phone down (as opposed to just just turning off the screen), and the next icon right below that switches to airplane mode.
STUPID!
Half the goddamn time I wind up accidentally press the AIRPLANE MODE icon and then the phone no longer does anything. It’s idiotic. That’s like designing a house by placing the SELF-DESTRUCT button right next to the light switch. Even a mongoloid idiot wouldn’t make that mistake.
Consumer electronics are designed by pithecanthrepoids on LSD in America. So no surprise Clinton’s “secure” messenging widget is unusable, evey fucking piece of consumer electronics in America is unfuckingusable.
different-church-lady
@Adam L Silverman:
Idiots: paper tape is forever!
redshirt
Phones are too large these days! They’re like mini-tablets.
I want a phone small enough to fit in my tight acid washed jeans pocket.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
Stop.
Take a breath.
You need to tell these assholes: “I AM NOT YOUR MONKEY” and then walk away. Tell ’em if they want your opinion on it, they can google your past comments.
different-church-lady
@redshirt: 2005: “Look how small my phone is!”
2015: “Look how big my phone is!”
catclub
@Adam L Silverman: If it has a CAC reader, it might refuse until the CAC is plugged in and pin entered
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
My 8088 IBM PC running DOS 3.2 laughs at your modernity.
I will not speak of my hallowed Kaypro 2, since it runs CP/M 2.2G.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
2045: “Look how big my brain implant is!”
2065: “Look how small your brain is.”
2085: 10101110101101101101010101000011101011101000101010100011111
mclaren
@Aleta:
Sounds highly unlikely. You can harden anything sent into space by shielding the hell out of it. Even the most energetic galactic cosmic rays won’t make it through an inch of steel.
The Other Chuck
@different-church-lady:
Strictly about the expectations you set. I’m hardly ever without some communication device, but everyone who knows me at all knows that I don’t return messages promptly. You need me right away, you gotta call. Usually twice, because I usually let the first go to voicemail.
You don’t have to be a hermit or a Luddite. Just stop letting people expect that you’re at their beck and call and they stop treating you that way.
redshirt
@different-church-lady: I’ve just accepted that all we know today will be lost since it’s stored on digital media. When the asteroid hits it wont mean shit. All electronics will be wiped out. Digital media will be meaningless. Paper media will burn. Rock might last.
Our lasting human legacy will be the stone tablets and monuments of 3000BCE.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
Obligatory cartoon about smartphones.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@efgoldman: The NexGen system is slowly being rolled out. There’s a huge amount of infrastructure that has to be changed over decades:
Just because we don’t hear about it very much doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening to bring our infrastructure into the modern age. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
RSA
@redshirt:
Oh, I believe you. I might even feel it myself, if I had the sensitivity. These sorts of qualitative, experiential things are hard to observe directly and objectively, as you know.
@SiubhanDuinne: For what it’s worth, “user hostile” was new to me when I first read it yesterday. :-)
different-church-lady
@mclaren: I have a problem: roughly half these monkeys are people who give me money on a case-by-case basis. (Otherwise know as “freelance clients”.)
The other half I tell time and time again to please stop with the barrage of texts. “Please, please, I’m begging you people, when I am on a job site and I’ve got four seconds to accomplish something and my phone buzzes and I don’t know if it’s my client trying to tell me I’ve got three seconds to accomplish something else or you lunatics sending photos of restaurant menus to each other on a nine person group text and I don’t have the option to ignore it because of aforementioned client, could you please, please, PLEASE muster up a scrap of empathy for my situation here, you’re supposed to be my friends…”
I wound up blocking the worst offender, and she is a very very very good friend. Took her about a month to figure out she was blocked, after which she finally got the hint. But no amount of merely asking her was sufficient — I had to digitally “shun” her to get it into her head.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Fortunately, no, just the opposite. Once anything is in digital form it becomes immortal and you can keep translating it into new storage formats forever.
And if a Tertiary-Cretaceous-level asteroid does hit, that’s the end of human civilization and probably the human species, so I’d say everyone will have much bigger issues to worry about than preserving that precious issue of HOWARD THE DUCK No. 1.
The Other Chuck
@mclaren: Inch of steel weighs a hell of a lot and retains a lot of heat. That heat is hard to get rid of — space is cold, but a vacuum makes for piss-poor radiative cooling. Now it’s true they do put fairly modern CPUs in satellites which can have all that shielding, but where you’ve got computer systems sprinkled all around the spacecraft, they’re probably running on first-generation Pentium chips (and this is an upgrade, since it used to be 386’s for the longest time). The old tech has a lot more predictable behavior when getting hit by a lot of energy from, say, a solar flare.
There’s some better hardened chips out there that aren’t quite so retrograde, but when it comes to CPUs, there’s a lot of advantages to a part that’s more or less off-the-shelf that everyone and their grandma knows.
different-church-lady
@redshirt: I’ve just accepted that all we know today isn’t worth keeping.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
The other solution is to let everyone know “I will be on a job from X to Y so if you call me, don’t expect an answer.”
You could actually switch to a recorded message that says this. I routinely give out my google phone number which dumps spoken messages to gmail texts and merely send me email notifications.
If you have more sophistication with things digital you can automate responses with bots that will do a lot more.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: I thank you for that. I shall hereby suppress my next five sarcastic replies to you.
redshirt
@mclaren: At the end of the world maybe all that matters is Howard the Duck #1. An asteroid event would be pretty quick for everyone. No need to wallow in the mire. Choose what makes you happy and kiss your ass goodbye.
benw
You guys have weird phones. My smartphone lets me text easily with my wife and friends, make calls from wherever (duh), play music, take photos, email, check my calendars, track my exercise, deposit checks, keep grocery lists… and it fits in my pocket! It probably even sends all my personal data to Facebook, Google and the US and Chinese governments. It’s really convenient!
mclaren
@The Other Chuck:
Solar flares are mostly slow hydrogen nuclei AKA proton storms. Those are much much easier to shield from than galactic cosmic rays, which are thought to be accelerated by the accretion discs of black holes. To shield against solar flare radiation it is well established that a modest width of paraffin will do the trick.
In fact, paraffin is really overkill even for the most energetic coronal mass ejection. A 1/16 inch thick width of typical aircraft-grade aluminum or a 1/8-inch thick piece of pyroceramic or plastic will stop 99% of the protons from coronal mass ejections. If you want lighter weight, go with beryllium — more expensive but much more effective with lots less mass.
Source: “Who’s afraid of cosmic rays?” NASA website.
different-church-lady
@The Other Chuck:
It just hasn’t worked out that way for me: I set those expectations explicitly and they just ignore it, nag me when I don’t respond, and act like I’m the weird one when I push back.
? Martin
@mclaren:
Jesus, fucking buy a decent phone. iPhone: fingerprint on the home button turns it on and unlocks it, swipe right and your top 8 contacts are at the top of the screen. Or “Siri, call mclaren”. Don’t even need to touch the phone for that. If you’re too cheap to buy a decent phone, then shut up about the state of the US tech sector and the state of Democrats if you’re part of the problem of refusing to pay for labor. Good design doesn’t fucking fall from the clouds – you have to pay decent wages to hard working people to get it.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@mclaren:
Nobody is going to send any electronics into space that requires an inch of steel shielding around it. The lift costs would be prohibitive.
Also, lots of radiation can pass through an inch of steel with no problems. Cosmic rays (with energies on the order of GeV) wouldn’t even see that…
There’s a lot more to radiation hardening than shielding. You have to consider the details of how radiation interacts with the materials and how energy is lost in the interactions. You can change the materials, you can change the design, you can do lots of clever things other than putting shielding around the electronics.
Maybe do some Googling? ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
The Other Chuck
@different-church-lady: Persistence is key. That or you can always give up on them. Ok, at least that works for me, I guess some people have folks they’re obligated to daily. In which case, uh, First World Problems, amirite? :)
The Other Chuck
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Most cosmic rays are going to be stopped by decent shielding (but not all, and that’s what ECC RAM is for). It’s neutrinos that ignore things the size of, oh, planets.
different-church-lady
@efgoldman:
And Dick Cheney.
redshirt
@efgoldman: A smaller asteroid could still kill most everyone yet not be that cataclysmic. It would just take longer. And if you had a proper shelter you would survive.
mclaren
@? Martin:
Spoken like a typical idiot manager.
Option #1: Pay $750 for a fucking goddamn iPhone.
Option #2: Print my phone number out on a piece of paper, cut the paper, then glue it TO THE BACK OF THE FUCKING PHONE.
Guess which solution I chose?
Christ on a minibike, digital technology makes people stupid.
? Martin
@efgoldman:
Had a really nice dinner talking to a Boeing VP overseeing their ATC efforts a few years back.
There are three problems with ATC migration:
1) The federal government doesn’t pay for it – but they do regulate the result. The airports and airlines pay for it, and you need consensus to get them to fork over that kind of money.
2) There are few systems as mission critical as ATC, so the switchover is unbelievably complex and therefore very expensive.
3) The aforementioned cost/value considerations and mission criticalness means that the rapid advance of technology undermines a system that is inherently slow to develop. No sooner do they start to form consensus then a new set of technologies arrives that offers to dramatically improve the safety of the system or reduce the cost, etc. and they get asked to go back and start over.
And you can see some of that in the NASA anecdotes. NASA maintains hardware for their probes through the duration of the mission. The Voyager team was/is keeping 1970s hardware in operating condition because there is just no real benefit of migrating to something new and the risk of having some new system lose contact with their multi-million dollar probe that took them a decade or more to launch.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Guy, that’s like carrying waffles and a fork with you everywhere you go just in case there’s another Great Boston Molasses Disaster like the giant waves of molasses that reached 35 mph in Boston on 15 January 1919.
redshirt
@mclaren: Mmmm, waffles….
different-church-lady
@mclaren: [suppression #1]
different-church-lady
@mclaren: Now that you mention it, an exploding molasses tank would be a much more entertaining fate for “The Village” than the asteroid everyone keeps wishing upon them.
mclaren
@efgoldman:
The U.S. air traffic control system is a classic example of a large interconnected nonlinear system with extreme path dependency and radically nonlinear failure modes.
True story: the entire Dublin ATC system crashed hard because of 1 (one) flaky network card on a single legacy computer. These are the kinds of radically nonlinear failure modes you get in a such a highly interconnected system. So even making some minor change to the system could potentially shut it down hard. Worse, once you’ve upgraded, doing something trivial may take down the entire system.
The advantage of legacy systems is that their failure modes are well known and documented.
Surely you know the classic MIT story about the homebrew switch labeled `magic’ and `more magic’…
? Martin
@mclaren:
You know what, then you need to quit fucking whining about anything related to labor in the US because its clear that you have the same attitude about getting value without paying labor for it as the very corporate masters that you bitch about. You want a decent product, then fucking pay people to make it for you. If you want labor to make decent wages, then be willing to pay for a good product.
We bitch about supply siders, but its attitudes like yours which is why companies settle for lower skilled workers – they’re just delivering the price point that you demand. Economies are demand driven, which means you are representative of the problem.
And if you insist on a shitty cheap product, then don’t complain about your shitty cheap product.
The Other Chuck
@? Martin: Amen. It’s not like computation itself has changed since the 70’s, and we can always upgrade the ground systems to process more data. Mind you, NASA engineers probably do prefer 21st century technology they can patch if they have to. Bugs in 70’s tech are something you just have to live with forever.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@The Other Chuck: It depends on what one means by “most cosmic rays”. :-) A “single event” error can cause problems unless it is considered in the design and fabrication.
The Wikipedia article on Radiation Hardening gives a good summary of the various issues and approaches to combat the problem.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Other Chuck
@? Martin: Yunno there is a difference between paying a reasonable price for reasonable tech and paying a big premium for a brand name. Of course it’s not like one has to buy an iDevice either.
? Martin
@The Other Chuck: It kind of depends. You will find the graybeards that started their career working on Voyager or whatever that are still around and know every system inside and out. I think these guys love the fact that the thing they built right out of college is still banging around out there against all expectations.
But yeah, it’s an interesting challenge for them in their career – move forward and walk away from this amazing thing they built and sent to another planet, or see the mission out – and there’s a lot of pressure to see the mission out because nobody will know how to support it as well as the team that built it. I think they got that part of The Martian pretty on, the team of graybeards to bodge a solution together. In my experience they are extraordinarily committed people, and very proud they are doing this work on behalf of the US people.
mclaren
@? Martin:
You know what? You need to shut up and go back through the waiting line and get some IQ points, because design is not a labor- or materials-intensive commodity.
No, shit-for-brains, competent design costs nothing and should represent the baseline standard. What you’re saying is equivalent to the idiotic claim: “Low-priced cars should use joysticks for steering, so that if people want a decent competently-designed usable steering wheel they’ll have to pay $90,000 for a luxury car.”
That’s the single stupidest piece of reasoning anyone has ever offered on this blog, hands down.
Utterly totally wrong and a perfect illustration of the toxic attitude of shit-for-brains managers like you: the baseline standard for all consumer products should be “unusable shite” and if people want a competent usable deign they should have to pay through the nose for a luxury product.
That pay-through-the-nose-or-get-fucked attiude is not my fault, it’s the direct result of greedy corrupt monopolies like Apple’s iOS walled-garden goddamn monopoly. The only reason Apple’s shitty products cost so much is because Apple has built up a huge monopoly supported by a proprietary ecosystem of hard and software. Absent that ridiculous monopoly, Apple’s products would cost the same as any other smartphone manufacturer’s products.
Oh, and make no mistake — Apple’s products are shite. The latest iOS upgrades have been bricking iPhones and crashing iOS apps right and left. Apple can only get away with this because they’ve locked their helpless users into a vast sadistic greedy monopoly enforced by predatory patent laws and savagely anti-competitive trademarks and software copyrights for horseshit like “swipe to unlock” (which should never have been copyrighted and patented and represents a gross abuse of the copyright and patent system).
As an antidote to the foolishly false claims of ignorant incompetent shit-for-brains managers like Martin, take a gander at news stories like ‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6, The Guardian, 5 February 2016.
This is the “genius design” that supposedly compels us to pay $750 for Apple’s piece-of-shit iPhone.
Shorter idiotic Martin argument: “If you don’t pay through the nose, you should expect to get this moronic unusable design instead of a usable competently-designed baseline standard like the regular typewriter.”
different-church-lady
I got an iPhone 5c for $50. Just sayin’.
randy khan
@mclaren:
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t understand why you need to find your own phone number on your phone. I’m pretty sure most people know their own phone numbers by heart.
And, as an aside, you’re essentially saying you’re not willing to pay for good interface design. That’s your choice, but if you make that choice I don’t really think you’re entitled to complain that good interface design doesn’t exist.
redshirt
I’m definitely getting a Samsung now. Free Tibet!
mclaren
@The Other Chuck:
Useless to try to reason with that monoloid idiot Martin. He’s a manager, and to a manager, the business approach “Pay a fortune for a luxury product or get fucked” is the only sensible way to do business.
Which of course is exactly why the rest of the world is now abandoning American-built shite consumer electronics products for Chinese- and Korean-built products. From VCRs to DVRs, from smartphones to tablets, the world has taken a look at the shite products churned out by greedy monopolistic U.S. managers like Martin and said, “No, instead of paying a fortune for the super-high-end usable version of your product, we’re going to pay a modest amount of money for a competently-designed open system that doesn’t lock us into a proprietary walled garden of custom hardware and software.”
So people buy Android smartphones and run linux on their laptops, instead of paying a fortune for the American-made shite.
Martin, in other words, is the poster boy for why manufacturing and design has moved offshore away from America. Once upon a time, people designed open products with open specs and a reasonable price point, products that were designed well and that other people could modify as they wished. Products like Apple Computer’s Apple ][+.
Then American companies got greedy and dumb and big and corrupt, and they rewrote the copyright and patent laws, and now American companies like Apple and shit-for-brains American managers like Martin have the sneering swaggeringly arrogant attitude “Pay us until you’re bled white, or get fucked.” So the consumer has fled American consumer electronic companies for companies like Samsung and Lenovo.
Yes, Martin, you clueless hack, there’s a reason why Lenovo and Samsung are the biggest consumer electronics companies on the planet.
randy khan
@mclaren:
This is where you lose me, and I mean you totally lose me. Competent *anything* does not cost nothing. Competent bricklaying costs something. Competent electrical work costs something. Competent blog commenting costs something (just someone’s time, but a cost nevertheless).
And competent design of something like the human interface on a smartphone costs a lot because it’s very complicated. The constraints are significant and there are a million tradeoffs that have to be managed. The reason for incompetent smartphone interface design is that companies don’t want to devote the resources necessary for competence (or don’t care enough to do it, but that comes to the same thing).
? Martin
@The Other Chuck:
That ‘reasonable tech’ is $1 a day, delivering what was considered science fiction a decade ago. Less than what almost anyone in this country pays for coffee. So spare me the value judgement. Almost everyone with a smartphone uses it more each day than they spend drinking their coffee and derive vastly more benefit and are far more reliant on the device, and yet they complain mightily about the price of that big premium brand name while sipping their $3 Starbucks coffee (or $2190 over 2 years – which is more than your iPhone *and* contract will cost you.)
And of course you don’t have to buy an iDevice, but if you’re going to buy a cheap poorly designed phone then don’t rail against the entire tech industry when the reason that cheap poorly design phone even exists is because you’re too fucking cheap to buy a decent phone.
different-church-lady
@randy khan: I think where we’re all getting lost here is that nowadays incompetence costs just as much as competence.
The Other Chuck
@mclaren:
After 17 years anyway. Til then, you better hire someone to come up with the ideas, and if you’re anyone noticeable, someone to defend your patents and defend against someone else’s.
Plus, you gotta pay people to execute on the design.
randy khan
@mclaren:
And all of those companies you talk about make essentially no money from those businesses, because they’re competing on price in what turn out to be the commodity parts of the market. There’s a reason why Apple takes more than 90% of the profits in the smartphone market, and has for years (Samsung, despite selling so many phones, has around 11% of the profits, which means that all of the other makers combined lose money) and a hugely disproportionate share of the profits in the computer market. It’s not arrogance.
randy khan
@different-church-lady:
Heck, in some contexts, incompetence costs a lot more than competence, so you have a point.
The Other Chuck
@mclaren:
Ima assume you either misspelled “mongoloid” in which case I got nothing further to say to you, or you came up with a funny new neologism. At any rate, since I just pulled you out of my troll filter an hour ago, telling me who to reason with is pretty damn funny.
I really hope you’re not actually as angry in real life as you are here, because that would be sad for you and everyone around you.
Technocrat
@mclaren:
Apple has enough cash on hand to buy Lenovo outright, man.
The Other Chuck
@mclaren: Ah yunno what, after reading the rest of your spittle-flecked ranting, I decided to just put you back in the filter. It’s not that you’re terribly inflammatory, it’s that your over-the-top acting is just sad. So do everyone else a favor by just not replying to me. Like, ever. That’ll mean less of your tired shtick, which I’m surprised hasn’t gotten the banhammer treatment just because it isn’t entertaining anymore.
RSA
Sure, there are inefficiencies in hardware and software markets, and patents go too far. But good design costs money, in innovation and testing. Desktop GUIs are a good case in point. You might imagine that open source software could lead to enormous improvements in usability and productivity, taking contributions from hundreds or thousands of developers and unconstrained by corporate concerns. But guess what? Almost all of them are carbon copies of proprietary systems from Apple and Microsoft (developed at great cost), with small tweaks.
mclaren
@randy khan:
Here’s why competent design costs nothing: because it’s already a baseline universal standard.
Designing a toilet costs next to nothing because you know all the designs that have been tried and failed and you avoid ’em. You don’t put the flush handle at the base of the toilet, you don’t use a spring-loaded seat that flies open the instant the person approaches, you don’t make the toilet bowl 3 inches wide, you don’t seal the lid of the toilet tank so it takes special tools to open it. These are obvious design features. They’ve been figured out over a course of 100+ years. Anyone who tells you it takes lots of money to design a toilet is lying to you and trying to scam you.
Smartphone features have mostly been figured out. Lots of designs were tried and failed. We now know better. Simple rules of thumb: most smartphone users want to send text messages, surf the net, make phone calls, and find out the specs of their unit — ESN, their own phone number, etc.
So these are the most basic features. You put icons for direct access to each of these features right up front, on the smartphone screen when it starts up. This is not rocket science. It’s simple. It’s obvious.
It’s like the design of the rolling suitcase. For years and years, people tried different designs. Then finally it became clear that one design worked: wheels on two corners + a collapsible handle that pulls out. That’s the design. That’s it. The design was finalized. No further changes are needed. And anyone who tells you “We need to pay this guy a lot of money to design this rolling suitcase” is lying to you. The design has reached its end stage. Everyone agrees on what the optimal design is. No further work or effort. Just hire someone who realizes that and uses the agreed-upon optimal design.
Look, the reality is that smartphones are no longer boutique bespoke items. They are now commodity items. And THE big feature of commodity items is that their design has finalized. The design has gotten optimized by Darwinian competition with many other designs, and now the only difference the commodity items is trivial details like the color or the case.
dww44
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: That “have a blessed/blest day” thing has been a major irritant in my life for at least a decade. The use of it presumes that one shares the religious beliefs of the user and I resent that presumption, just as I resent that most of the folks who share my skin color and live in my world presume that I am a Republican. How could I not be? Been a Democrat for a very very long time.
randy khan
@mclaren:
This from someone who just complained about how lousy the interface was on his smartphone.
Honestly, this reads like something somebody wrote about PCs in the 1990s as an explanation for why Apple was never going to make any money in the computer market. It’s certainly consistent with what people thought in those days, but it turns out that it’s wrong, or at least wrong enough that there is continuing competition to come up with better designs (not to mention to protect the intellectual property in those designs). There may be a platonic ideal smartphone interface, but apparently we haven’t gotten there yet.
frosty
@Burnspbesq:
Hear hear! That was the peak of word processing. Once we were all required to deal with fonts, embedded graphics, and aesthetics, we started wasting time on publication design instead of just writing the damn report.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
I was once driving a truck on the way to the office, during one of our weekly conference calls. A driver cut me off and I thought I was going to obliterate the car. I called out loud a few obscenities of a somewhat personal nature and managed to not hit the car. The call mediator very dryly reminded me I was on the phone. I reminded him I was also not trying to kill someone at the same time. The call proceeded for the next couple of minutes it took for me to arrive at the office and walk into the conference room. About half the people had to get up and run out of the room, laughing their asses off. I was a hit! Haven’t talked on/answered a cell phone while driving since.
? Martin
@mclaren:
And yet they aren’t. Apple is larger than both of them combined – in terms of either market cap or revenue – profits completely aside. In fact, 1/4 of Samsung’s revenue is contract components to Apple with nothing flowing back the other way.
When I was a kid there was an ad campaign in the country called ‘Look for the union label’. The goal was to convince consumers to spend a little bit more money for a higher quality US labor product than for something made in Indonesia or Bangladesh. And the public responded by running to Walmart to pay $.70 less for that clothing.
You’re a supply-sider at heart but can’t recognize it. Economic change happens on the demand side – and Apple’s attitude is that they will set a reasonable fixed price ($1 day for the life of the device – that’s what a MacBook Pro will cost you as well) and deliver increasing value year after year for successive versions. Inflation actually slowly lowers the price of the product over time while Apple’s engineers add features, reliability, durability, etc. They succeed not by chasing cheaper labor, but by convincing consumers that they are getting real value for that price – and that’s why they are the only smartphone company still designing in the US (and in the most expensive labor market in the US) and why they have also been able to rise to be the 14th largest retailer in the US against the headwinds of Amazon, and pay better than any of the other top retailers and provide benefits and all that.
And your attitude is ‘Fuck the benefits to US workers, I want my cheap-ass shitty phone’ while coming in here berating people like me for spelling out why the market is moving in the direction it is simply by describing you.
And you know why the Apple II could be that way? Because it had 3500 transistors compared to 3.5 billion in the iPhone. That’s 1,000,000 times more complex of a device not just of the SoC but of the software, sensors, interfaces, and so on. That costs billions of dollars to develop – you don’t do it in your garage. You want the hobbyist hardware – go get a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or one of the dozens or hundreds of ARM based and relatively open hardware. My son has dozens of these and hacks them into a ton of different projects.
frosty
@redshirt:
Me too! That’s why I’m hanging on to my Motorola Droid 2 to the bitter end.
PS Although I’d never go acid-washed. /shudder/
? Martin
@mclaren:
And every modern smartphone including Android allows you to put these things right up front. But it’s also not so simple or obvious. My son has made exactly one phone call on his phone in 2 years. Why should that be up front for him? What if you don’t use SMS but use WhatsApp? Can you put that up front? Should deaf people have the phone app up front? Should blind people have apps which aren’t set up for visually impaired up front? They’re obvious to you, for you, but not to other people for other people.
I don’t know how you wound up with a phone that doesn’t do these things, but that’s not the fault of US engineers, it’s your fault for buying that device.
And on an iPhone you can ask ‘Siri, what is my phone number’. And it’ll tell you. Works for blind people and works in 35 different languages and dialects. Better interface than anything you would have dreamt up and a fuckton harder to implement properly – employing hundreds of people to get right. Yours for only $1 a day.
Ruckus
@? Martin:
mclaren is the epitome of a wally world shopper. Lowest price is the defining issue. But when purchased he finds out that a low price means crap and can not figure out the concept of getting what you pay for. Probably thinks those people working at wally world are over paid, because if they weren’t he could get lower prices on the crap he’s willing to buy. That the company makes billions a yr selling crap and underpaying their employees never enters the equation. How can it there is no thought of an equation in the first place?
? Martin
@frosty: Looks like there will be a 4″ iPhone SE coming out next week. Should be slightly longer, but narrower and a lot thinner than the Droid 2.
I’m personally glad that Apple is keeping with a reasonable sized phone. My daughter has zero pockets small enough for most phones. I think the men who design these devices don’t get just how small women’s pockets are.
? Martin
@Ruckus: Two things bother me tremendously about these arguments:
1) That we grade different consumer products on wildly different scales. That iPhones are unacceptably expensive, that only a mentally ill person could justify buying one, yet the same person will spend a thousand dollars a year on coffee or whatever with no recognition of that fact. Or that consumer electronics are supposed to be measured on nothing more than pure functionality per dollar spent, yet nobody buys much more expensive automobiles on that basis. The average US car costs $20 per operated hour to acquire and operate and that’s perfectly reasonable compared to 5% or less of that amount for a phone or laptop.
2) That the loudest so-called champions of US workers here are too often the ones with the kinds of consumer attitudes that are the most harmful to labor. Wages don’t come from thin air – they come from us, and we need to be willing to look at a product or service and be able to objectively measure its value to us and not chase the cheapest possible option while berating others for not chasing the cheapest possible option. It’s become cultural in the US on the consumer side to demand less and less value-add per dollar and it should be no shock that industry is responding to that demand by paying less and less in wages per dollar, or by automating away everything that doesn’t add value.
Last year I changed barbershops. The new place is new and closer to my house but was quite a bit cheaper than my old place. I was used to paying $20 for a cut with a $5 tip, and the new place only charged $14. Rather than pocket the $6, I now give an $11 tip. The haircut is worth $25, and I’m more than happy to pass what the owner is willing to forgo to the guy who cuts my hair (cool guy – 23, moved to the US from Vietnam when he was 18 and is now putting himself through school.)
When my kids hit the age that they could start doing chores for allowance my wife asked what we should pay them. I asked her what she thought minimum wage ought to be. We disagreed slightly, compromised, and started paying our kids that amount. If they’re going to do the kind of labor that any employee ought to be paid, I don’t see why our 10 year old shouldn’t earn the same amount and we’ve increased that as we think minimum wage should be. This is an upscale expensive neighborhood and they’re up to $15 an hour. But I bet most of our labor advocates who are too eager to call me a neoliberal or whatever don’t actually put their money where their mouth is on these issues.
If you care about labor you need to take money out of your pocket and put it in workers hands. There’s a wide range of way to do that but you have to do it, and if you are unwilling to do it, then you need to STFU and just accept that you are doing no more to address the problem than any Republican out there.
mclaren
@? Martin:
Tyipcal shit-for-brains manager thinking.
Dollars are all that matter. Who cares how many products we sell? Who cares whether they’re any good?
All that counts is the pile of cash we make from selling our shite products.
Out here in the real world, shit-for-brains, “biggest” means “number of units shipped,” not “total amount of dollars we can extort from the public by erecting copyright and patent barriers to protect our monopoly.”
By Martin’s demented criteria, American broadband is the best in the world since American ISPs like Comcast and Time-Warner charge more dollars per megabit than almost any other advanced nation. So by Martin’s deluded yardstick, America’s shitty 4 megabit broadband service for $100 a month is “better” and “bigger” than, say, Sky’s 10-pound-per-month 100 megabit internet.
Yep, Martin is a typical manager. Finding ways to twist the numbers to make a lie into the truth. Guys like Martin and Richard Mayhew are the people you call when you want someone who will make the Iraq war of 2003 look like a success. Guys like Martin and Richard Mayhew are the businessmen you phone when you want someone who will explain why everything Enron did was not just legal, but good business.
The delusion that “economic change happens on the demand side” completely leaves out of the question the vast number of monopolies in America, like Apple computer. America is now the land of the monopoly — the attitude companies is “take what we deign to give you, or fuck off.” That’s not the “demand side,” that’s a monopoly. It’s not even capitalism, it’s what Harvard economics Umair Haque calls a ponzieconomy — an economy run off of unsustainable Ponzi schemes.
Apple’s exclusionary walled garden of proprietary patent-protected hardware and software is a classic example of the ponziconomy. It’s unsustainable.
Now we know Martin is a real manager, because at this point he’s lying his ass off.
All the workers getting money from iPhones are in China. Essentially none are in America. Zero.
Martin has changed from lying to you by implication and lying to you by omission to lying to you outright. Let’s have Steve Jobs come onstage to explain why Martin is lying to you:
Source: “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” The New York Times, 21 January 2012.
We now see the true nature of Martin’s so-called support for “American workers” — the only workers Martin supports are CEOs and other parasites who offshore all the actual labor to China. They’re the labor we’re supposed to `support,’ and fuck the rest of the labor force.
Now Martin is not just lying to you, he’s lying to you stupidly and incompetently. Linux didn’t cost billions of dollars to develop, yet it blows away shite OSs like Micro$haft Windoze.
Meanwhile, we’re now seeing the leading edge of devices which will eventually crush Apple and render shite walled-garden proprietary patent-protected overpriced crap hardware like the iPhone obsolete — open-source hardware like the Fairphone 2.
Of course, according to Martin, the Fairphone 2 doesn’t exist. It can’t exist. It would cost billions of dollars. It could be developed by a gigantic vertically integrated monopoly protected by patent and copyright walls.
Martin is lying of course. He’s proferring the old old old outdated lie of economic paternalism. Yes, corporate monopolies must rule the world, and yes, they must extort vast sums from the impoverished public. Yes, they must offshore all labor. But in return, those vast sadistic monopolies will give you magical products so wonderful you won’t be able to imagine how insanely great they are!
Right?
Wrong. All the evidence shows that just the opposite happens when monopolies gain control of an economy. Their design turns to shit, their service turns to crap, their products become junk and they must resort to keeping customers by bribing lawmakers to force consumers to buy their shite products — either indirectly, by using a thicket of bogus copyrights and patents to sue competitors out of existence, or directly, as in the ACA shitshow, where the government directly mandates that everyone buy unaffordable private for-profit insurance.
Let’s take a quick look at the supposedly “great design” of Apple’s iPhones:
“What happened to Apple design? Unapologetically bad,” The Verge, 8 December 2015.
What happened was that Apple became a huge greedy dumb monopoly and its products turned to shit. Same as with Microsoft and its fecal Windows 8, same as with Detroit in the 1970s when its cars turned to crap. It’s always the same story. Whenever a company turns into a giant monopoly its product turns to garbage. Because why do they need to make good products? They’re a monopoly. Fuck the public. As Martin has shown us with startling clarity, all that counts is cash. As long as you can jack up the prices and force the public to pay, who gives a fuck about anything else?
“How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name,” fastdesign.com, October 11 2015.
“What happened to Apple’s faultless design?” cult of mac.com.
And on and on.
Meanwhile, our resident corrupt halfwit manager Martin flails and thrashes like an insect in yogurt, desperately trying to convince us that his frantically failed arguments in favor of corporate monopolies and offshoring all the jobs except the CEO and CFO and the board of directors results in fabulous products.
What a shitshow fail parade Martin is. He’s a walking talking advertisement for everything that’s gone horribly wrong with American-style capitalism.
Ruckus
mclaren is clueless. On so many issues. I owned a business that employed highly skilled craftsmen and apprentices. Having to be competitive for labor I paid high wages and benefits, of course this was at a time when this was not abnormal. But I also had to be competitive for the customers dollar. It’s a balancing act. Other than one job in HS, working at a gas station, the navy and a ten yr stretch in professional sports, I’ve worked in the same field and am now. I understand the relationship between wages and product. I understand the relationship between wages and the overall health and strength of the economy. I understand that low prices and low wages get crap products because that is all that people can afford, if that. I understand that our capitalistic “betters” are screwing us, for the most part because we let them. When I purchase something I value quality over price because I know that quality costs. But most people have had their wages stagnate while the costs of things goes up. And of course Apple has their detractors but the product is sound. I’m typing this on one now. And not the cheapest one either. My last computer was also an Apple. When I purchased it I priced actual competing computers and saw that the price difference was for all intents nil. Of course my overriding consideration was never paying microcrap another dime in my lifetime. But I’ve been happy with the Apple products that I’ve purchased, including a IIe 128 decades ago. But I also understand that some don’t know that wages are meant to go up over time so that the ability to purchase (and make) better products exists. Apple is obviously successful at this, first because they didn’t seem to think that they could conquer the entire market with the cheapest product but that selling a decent product at a reasonable price would make them money.
mclaren
@? Martin:
Yes, my honesty, and my concern for “labor” other than the CEO and CFO of a corporation.
Now Martin is trying to be clever is his lying and it’s falling flat. iPhones are insanely and absurdly expensive, and all the evidence shows it. The typical Android phone costs $70 whereas the typical iPhone costs 10 times as much. There’s just no excuse for that. It’s greed, plain and simple.
Apple is infamous for this kind of greed. Their shitty computers have a 70% failure rate after 3 years and get built by the crappiest most infamous low-quality Chinese mfr out there, Foxconn…yet Apple charges an arm and a leg for their shitty computers. It’s indefensible.
Ah, so Martin admits he’s a manager! No, assho!e, wages don’t come “from you,” they come from the people who buy the products.
Christ, what an assho!e. Martin is the very embodiment of the “without jerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrb creaaaaaaaaaaaators the economy would faaaaaaaaaaaaaail” bullshit we hear every day from Republican thieves like Mitt Romney.
What a classic con job. Cutting hair is NOT A FUCKING PATENT-PROTECTED MONOPOLY LIKE THE iPHONE INTERFACE, SH!T-FOR-BRAINS.
But spending money on wildly overpriced patent-protected walled-garden monopoly products like iPhones which cost 10x more than the going price for open-source-software phones like Android phones does not put the money in workers’ hands. It does the opposite. 90% of the money from iPhones goes to the greedy corrupt monopolist Apple executives and their parasite billionaire major shareholders.
The Nation 10 September 2014.
Of course Martin closes his unhinged rant with an exhortation that I “STFU.” When I hammer greedy corrupt corporate thieves like Martin with these kinds of facts, what other response can he come up with other than “SHUT THE FVCK UP!”?
? Martin
So Samsung is by some handwaving measure bigger than Apple yet Apple is the monopoly. That’s curious reasoning. And I fail to understand how Apple is the poster child for offshoring when they’re petty much the only tech company that hasn’t, with nearly 100,000 US employees.
Apparently the Fairphone, which will crush the iPhone, requires 7 levels of menus to find out what your own phone number is. Since it’s open source, maybe mclaren could fix that shitty design rather than whine about it and then the world will be a better place. I mean, baseline universal design is free, so it should take precisely zero minutes to code.
And in our new open-source labor utopia as mclaren is driving us toward, we’re dispensing with the whole notion of $15/hr minimum wage and setting our expectations at $0/hr. Looking forward to that. BTW, how many git commits will earn a loaf of bread? Asking for a friend.
? Martin
@mclaren:
So is it a baseline universal standard, or a fucking patent-protected monopoly? I’m confused. Those seem to be mutually exclusive.
? Martin
Oh, and for the uninitiated, mclaren dropping ‘shite OSs like Micro$haft Windoze.’ is effectively the same as your neighbor who usually goes on about states rights dropping the facade and starting to rant about niggers.
This is mclaren’s religious id overruling any efforts at reason.
different-church-lady
You folks do understand mclaren is going to argue with you just for the sake of arguing with you, yes?
[not suppressed, because it’s not at all sarcastic]
randy khan
@mclaren:
First, the only real world measure that matters in business is, in fact, profit. When you’re losing money on each unit shipped, like nearly all smartphone makes, you’re never going to make it up on volume.
Second, your comparison is apples (sorry) to crowbars. Apple makes the most money in a worldwide market where it competes with companies from Britain, China, India, etc. (And, by the way, while it’s true that U.S. broadband is not cheap, I’m sure you know that $100/4 mbps is not remotely the going rate unless you’re a really, really bad shopper.)
? Martin
@randy khan:
Agreed. Since I just looked a this number, we pay $50/mo for 50/8Mbps unlimited cap. I just looked up Sky’s plan and it’s £10/mo ($15) for 38Mb with 25GB cap, but that’s a bundle with a $25/mo phone plan. My phone plan is $6/mo. So it’s a bit cheaper ($40 vs $56 or $.95 per Mbps vs $1.12 for me) provided you stay under that cap (I personally would break that cap every month with my family of 4). They don’t seem to have a plan that I can find for more than 38Mb (not a deal breaker in my book as 38Mbps is pretty reasonable, but when you are touting 100Mbps, I assume that is a dealbreaker).
So it would appear that the US is about 20% more expensive in mclaren’s supposed best case vs my personal case (which could be best case for all I know).