ericgearhart's comments

As someone who has worked on the "other side of the aisle" (I worked at a healthcare startup as a production support and network engineer) I'd say absolutely, you should try to learn as much as you can about secure coding practices.

Trying to "duct tape" Apache's mod_security in front of an insecure webapp is no picnic... it would've been much cleaner to clean up the code base, but because the code was 10+ years old, the level of risk in changing that much code was deemed too high, and we needed fixes NOW (a customer was scanning us and finding SQL injections) we ended up standing up mod_security on the DMZ web servers we had.

Please learn secure coding practices! Worst case it will make you a more valuable dev.

I believe you mean "White Hat Hacker"... I think everyone gets the gist of what you mean but just wanted to clarify in case someone's thinking you're a racist hating on "Whitie" or something :)

SOPA is but a battle in a war. The "war" is the corruption in the US Congress. Go check out what Larry Lessig is doing nowadays... he's trying to fight the war, not the battle.

His comments on why he's "MIA" in the SOPA battle (despite being an open source software and copyleft activist) shed light on this. I'm with Larry... SOPA, the USA PATRIOT Act, DMCA, all that BS are just symptoms of a disease. I'm not saying we "netizens" shouldn't fight SOPA tooth and nail, but some effort should be put into the 'war' as well, to avoid only seeing one or two trees and not the forest.

https://paidcontent.org/article/419-why-is-lawrence-lessig-m...

What's the information security posture on these things like?

What I mean is, what was considered "secure" in 1977 (DES based encryption was state of the art back then, right?) would be considered laughable today... I wonder what precautions are taken by NASA to prevent someone from intercepting and decoding NASA's commands to the probe and then beaming their own commands to Voyager 2.

Your grandfather was absolutely right... this post reminded me of something too in fact.

Every single time I go into a doctor's office or a waiting room I look for a Smithsonian Magazine, because of how well it's written and the random cross section of articles.

I literally just went and subscribed... personally I think I need to "get out of my comfort zone" more and stop reading just tech news and scifi.

I think the "creepy" factor of the images is probably due to the "uncanny valley"... Pixar fought this effect when they were first rendering humans

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

Well put sir. I "grew up" on Slashdot as well (started reading circa 1998 as I recall) and although it's definitely declined, there was a "golden age" of Slashdot when the comments were far more interesting than the articles, which made the site worthwhile. Doesn't diminish what Slashdot was though.