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I think there might be something here. I've written about it and I wonder whether the current interpretation of Agile is just another manifestation of our can-do, 'get-ahead', 'achievement society'- - which is perhaps the ultimate cause of burnout. As someone who has tried to promote agile mindsets within organisations, it's deeply concerning.

https://nealdtaylor.com/burnout-trumps-agility/ https://nealdtaylor.com/agile-burn-out/


Also nice reminder about that lovely photo of Zuck with a sticker covering up his webcam. Now why would he do something like that ... ?


Because he's much more likely to be targeted than any of us for things like that?


“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL / BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”


Not sure who downvoted you. But I agree 100% with this, he is a high value target.


I feel like a high value target to me, though. If the environment is untrustworthy enough for Zuckerberg to defend himself against it, he should consider his own role in making it that way.


But the truth is you should always treat your environment as untrustworthy. I don't think you should deduct him points for blocking his webcam.

It is an ADDITIONAL privacy step. He runs a company with thousands of employees, and with any company like that you never know if someone may decide to become a bad actor, and physically compromise him.

But yeah lets continue to hate on facebook.


> But yeah lets continue to hate on facebook.

Yes, because they're voracious collectors people's personal information. We can hate on "bad actors" as well, we don't have to choose one or the other. But as long as Facebook is behaving creepily, whether deliberately or inadvertently, let's hate on them. There is no reason to tolerate their mistakes.


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Nothing is preventing you from putting a sticker over your webcam, just like Zuck does.


Or I can close my eyes and imagine that nothing happened

Result will be the same

Stickers do not work - because people around you do not put it too magically

And what even sillier - that someone have phone with installed fb app in 2k19


Why are you concerned if someone else does/doesn't do something? You can only control your own actions. Not protecting yourself by covering your webcam because the majority of others do not is not sound logic. I have a bright pink piece of tape over mine, and it is always a conversation starter. I have seen later that many people do wind up covering their webcam. It's not a 100% conversion rate, but it is definitely > 0%.


Why someone want defend corporations? Especially those which breaking law

What motivations of such people?


Who here is defending "corporations" (by which I assume you mean corporate bad behavior)? Do you think Facebook and their ilk are the only actors who might want to hijack the cameras on your devices?


There is no good corporate behavior

>Who here is defending "corporations"

dylan604 try to change focus of attention.

This is type of manipulation. And in this context, this is defence

>Do you think Facebook and their ilk are the only actors who might want to hijack the cameras on your devices?

Nope. But for some reason fb can't do QA. At all

And this do most of the work for other "actors"

Why this happens?


wait, what? i am not defending evil corp at all. IMO, my comment about covering the camera on your device is purely self-defense because evil corp can't be trusted. how you can twist my self-defense suggestion as defending evil corp's decision to nefariously use the webcam is some serious bending of logic


> dylan604 try to change focus of attention.

> This is type of manipulation. And in this context, this is defence


>Stickers do not work

They do though.


They do if everyone put it

Do everyone put it?


No one else has a computer in my bedroom


So your neighbors with hires full spectrum light camera pointed at your windows does not count

Mhhh, okay


If I were Mark Zuckerberg, the sticker is the solution to my laptop camera, and buying up all of the adjacent houses is the solution to neighbors

http://money.com/money/4346766/mark-zuckerberg-houses/


But you are not him

And you still need to control your data

And you can't do that now effectively

And if people will defend corporations and hide its fu we will newer live in better world


This is an intentional misreading of the parent comment and does not belong on this forum. Zuck being a high value target for extortion/exploitation/attack is an objective fact. Saying so doesn't imply that anyone else is "low value" - attackers will attack whoever and whatever they can to achieve their goal, which is almost always money.


If it is misleading then first priority of fb is defending privacy and user data at all costs.

Everyone, not just one person

Nice


Other than not using them themselves (which, just to be clear, they absolutely should not be doing), how is Facebook supposed to protect everyone from remote camera takeovers?


Do QA

Do a security properly

Do a code for security

Do QA properly

Do not hide thing like Cambridge Analytica


In a building he owns, on a network he owns, defended by an army of network engineers he employs?

No, he’s not protecting himself from any external threat.


This is common practice among US government employees as well. The fact that Zuck does it as well doesn't say anything about Facebook's practices WRT their users.


This is common practice among US government employees as well

Sure, but they are protecting themselves from the Russian hackers that are in all the US government networks. Zuck is protecting himself from Facebook itself.


Couldn't he just tell that army to add an exception for his account?


What about taking the laptop outside of the office? Doesn’t seem like a crazy thing to do.


Ever heard about 0days?


I do it. My wife does it. My sister does it. The cameras at Bloomberg all had shutters, and I used it there as well. It's just good (paranoid?) OPSEC to defend against remote takeover exploits.


How does tape over a camera prevent remote takeover specifically?


It doesn't, obviously, and I never said it did. It prevents the camera from being used to surreptitiously record useful information when a machine has been remotely compromised. It's the same reason nothing with a transmitter is permitted in classified areas without specific authorization. Preventing a remote takeover is effectively impossible, but these steps reduce the usefulness of such an action (which is part of the defense against them).


> > > It's just good (paranoid?) OPSEC to defend against remote takeover exploits.

> > > [Camera shutters are] just good (paranoid?) OPSEC to defend against remote takeover exploits.

> > > [Camera shutters are] ... good ... [defense] against remote takeover exploits.

Clearly I misunderstood your intent, but the comment does seem to indicate what I thought.


Nothing there says or indicates anything about preventing takeovers. Preventing is a strict subset of defending against.


Physical controls can be as effective as technical.


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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebaity comments to Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I absolutely hate this sentiment.

Technical people know about this stuff, and designed it to trick people who don't know about it into thinking it's benign. But sure blame the user. Seems to be a favored go-to for Facebook.


Turning off one's microphone is not so uniformly easy that failing to do so justifies the epithet "stupid." Sometimes you can only deny permission to use the microphone, not turn it off entirely. Sometimes permissions are reset in an update. With several devices on different platforms, it can be hard to keep track. And then, others around you may have their microphones on, and voice recognition seems to work.


Do you realize that every microphone I have is basically embedded in the devices? I can't turn off -temporarily- my laptop's microphone or my phone's.


This is arrogance and it shouldn't belong here.


Helps to purge the nonsense from the mind (which can often derail you later on, if suppressed). I journal in the mornings at 6am. I find that it'll take me a few pages to get past the noise and nonsense and then at that point, sometimes the truth will reveal itself. I also enjoy the clarity of mind that I can achieve at that time in the morning.

An outlet for the unfiltered stream of consciousness is important. You just write whatever comes up. No-one else is to read it. That's equally important.

As a result, I'm happier and more creative. But if you want to start, I wouldn't advise focussing on the benefits too much. In all likelihood, you'll start because you need to, or because the time is right. Hope that helps!


I found the book 'Work together anywhere' by Lisette Sutherland extremely helpful. You can skip past the first five chapters if you already are in this situation.

It's really helped me work with a remote team. The book has tons of good recommendations as well, so it's practical as well as helpful.


It's a somewhat misleading comparison because nobody uses Latin today. MSA however is the language of the news, media and academia so everyone can understand it.


People did use Latin even into the 1800s for a similar purpose in western countries.


Made my day reading this!


Well spotted - It must be a typo because normally I hear parts per billion in reference to these figures, never ppm.


regulations site also says ppm: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=a3b649316ccb17c312... (warning: massive HTML file)


All the more reason to select organic produce and where possible start growing your own veggies or link up with local co-operatives. It's something we've done and having a close relationship with local growers and knowing about your food is fantastic and something kids love. The [roduce tends to have more nutrients as well (yet more positives). Can it be done large scale? I remember hearing in a talk about permaculture that a hectare of land can support a hundred people throughout a year.


While you won't have to worry about glysophate on organic food, just as much, if not more, pesticides are used on organic crops.


Considering reduction of pesticide use and exposure is one of the main objectives of the organic movement, which has been developing for over 60 years now - it would be a hopeless situation if it resulted in "just as much, if not more, pesticides".

Do you have any substantial sources for such a tragic claim?

For example here[1] is an EU funded meta-review from 2014 which finds: " the frequency of occurrence of pesticide residues was found to be four times higher in conventional crops, which also contained significantly higher concentrations of the toxic metal Cd. "

I personally have some faith that professional scrutiny involved in developing organic standards, selects the permissible pesticides with some insight and success. Not without possibility of some errors - to which the national and international trading standards are also susceptible, however the organic standards are a refined subset of those protections.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...


>Considering reduction of pesticide use and exposure is one of the main objectives of the organic movement

why does that matter when the still spray as much pesticides you want and still call it "organic"? call it the "pesticide free movement" or something, but don't conflate it with "organic", which is essentially a meaningless marketing term at this point, at least when it comes to food safety.


Not to mention fungicides and herbicides, which are also permitted with "organic" farming. https://tilth.org/app/uploads/2014/12/can-i-use-this-pestici...

"Hydrogen peroxide and potassium bicarbonate, two familiar substances that are relatively new as fungicides, are also permitted."

"Various natural substances have been tried as herbicides with mixed success. Clove oil is a botanical that is effective."


Right, those are ubiquitous chemicals and compounds with a relatively low uncertainty to their ecological and biological impacts. Unlike for example - synthetically augmented glyphosate compounds, and other contentious products which organic standards takes a precautionary stance towards.


"they still spray as much pesticides you want"

Organic labelled produce cant, it is subject to greater restrictions of pesticide use than general international farming regulations. Honestly, if you dont acknowledge this very basic reality of organic certification then your arguments against it are besides reason.

Organic certification is not a "meaningless marketing term" like for example "family farm" can be. It means the farm has been advised and reviewed to follow restrictions on pesticide, fertilizer use and other practices which are applied in addition to regional and national farming regulations.


> Organic labelled produce cant, it is subject to greater restrictions of pesticide use than general international farming regulations

Kinds, yes, which often results in greater and more environmentally harmful quantities. And the kinds are not based on any scientific evaluation of safety or health, but on what amounts to religious preference.

Organic certification is like kosher or halal certification.


> which often results in greater and more environmentally harmful quantities.

Do you have any substantial references of such results happening "often" or is that idea just gathered from anecdotes and casual articles ?


Without knowing more, it seems a logical deduction. If the "organic" pesticides were more effective than the "chemical" pesticides, farmers would always choose to use them. If the alternatives aren't as effective, then you need to spray more for the same result.


So this then claim stems not from knowledge but from a "seemingly logical deduction". It is clear that there is no actual substance to this idea that "organic farms often use more pesticides" - even the notion is false that "more pesticides" is a meaningful concept as it alludes only to pesticide weight or mass and ignores all qualities of the substances involved - in the accompanying "logical deduction" - such as ecological and biological impact.

Organic standards are not so simply drawn as to focus on the weight or mass or price of pesticides - they concern the ecological impact and risk of agricultural materials and practices.


>Organic labelled produce cant, it is subject to greater restrictions of pesticide use than general international farming regulations.

is that a feature of some organic certification programs, or just some?


There is generally only one organic certification program per country, in the US it is administered by the United States Department of Agriculture [0] - which also administrates most standard regulations. Of course, no organically certified products are exempt from any standard regulations - the organic regulations exist in addition to general standards.

[0]https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/beco...


I took a quick skim of the "farmers guide" https://web.archive.org/web/20170217143321/https://www.ams.u...

and couldn't find anything saying you can't "spray as much pesticides you want", only that you can only spray certain pesticides. can you provide a link to the regulation preventing unlimited usage of allowed organic pesticides?


"they can spray as much pesticides as they want" equates substances with pesticidal properties like pepper with the likes of glyposate and chlorpyrifos products. It was a deceptively simplistic statement from the get go, which you should put aside.

Where there may be substances used for pest control which are not limited by organic certification or EPA or USDA general standards, those substances will almost certainly be ubiquitous in nature with zero conceivable impact on health and environment.

Organic standards most contentious pesticide is perhaps Copper sulphate, which has potential to taint soil biology.

Here is description of its controls and others.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/04/04/2018-06...

"Copper Sulfate—for use as an algicide in aquatic rice systems, is limited to one application per field during any 24-month period. Application rates are limited to those which do not increase baseline soil test values for copper over a timeframe agreed upon by the producer and accredited certifying agent."


Glyphosate is a an herbicide, not a pesticide.


Herbicides are a subset of pesticides by the technical definition, though “pesticide” is often used to mean something closer to (but sightly broader than) “insecticide” in popular use.


I keep forgetting this fact. In light of this, the idea that commercial produce could ever be "pesticide-free" is unlikely. Avoiding the use of pesticides altogether is going to be extremely expensive and/or extremely inefficient .


I have a few kiwi friends and it seems like most of them (and most of their friends over there) are financially very successful regardless of their profession and background. Appears to be a very good time to be in NZ!


I would recommend the 'Princes of the Yen' as an incredibly insightful documentary based on Werner's analysis of the Japanese economy.


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