I switched already 2 months ago on mobile because I got tired by non blockable ads in Chrome and absence of any reading mode. To be in sync with the desktop I switched on the desktop too. Never looked back. And now with the new UI it even looks nicer than Safari imo. Looking forward to 57 on mobile.
> The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their
> position as a leader of software quality before it’s too
> late: consumers know that Apple’s hardware is the very
> best, but more and more they’re using apps made by Google
> and Microsoft and Facebook.
I'm not sure whether it's not too late already. I switched last fall to an Android phone using only iPhones before that. (I just didn't see the point anymore in paying 2x for an iPhone, which can't do anything better). I started using Google apps like Inbox, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Now, Google Fit and now, even I would go back to an iPhone today, there is no way, I'll use Apple Apps again (not as they are today).
There are very few topics where I just cannot get the point of the discussion among smart people, but this is one of them.
Look at the real world NOW, 15 years after all the surveillance. You still can explode bombs and kill people middle in a european capital without any encryption at all. Is this the kind of surveillance you are afraid of?
If you want to hide something, there are infinitely many ways to do this. No surveillance can (or ever will) read the one time pad encrypted communication. So you have (and always will have) your freedom and capabilities to hide — what's your problem?
Arguments like "well then show me your bank account" are just plain stupid: I have no interest in sharing this information with my work colleagues, my neighbours or my friends just because it would have implications in some social aspects (it's not about security!). But his information is only sensitive in context of a personality. I'd neither have problem to show anything to a random stranger nor would I be interested myself in this information coming from a random stranger.
If somebody uses my information in an unethical way, it is not the problem of a surveillance, but that it's possible at all.
Exposing my personal data to a government during an investigation could also protect me by verifying my alibi. We have nothing to hide, right?
The comparison with free speech is ridiculous. Free speech is the opposite of hiding and doesn't imply breaking the law. Hiding implies playing by other rules, than commonly established. Free speech is important because eventually I might have something to say. But no one would ever agree that he or she will have something to hide eventually (without getting criminal).
Yes because you assume the people who are collecting your data are ethical, secure and will always share your opinions and beliefs.
Say your bank account information was stolen and someone used it to blackmail you because as you said it would have, "implications in some social aspects".
Say the country you live in converted to a religion you are not part of or want to be any part of. Imagine if they had a record of your beliefs and used it as a handy tool in mass genocide.
Say someone working for the government or a start up was jealous of something you had, and used their access to take your information in order to discredit you.
Say you medical information was sold by a fitness start up that went bust and sold to insurance companies to bump your premium.
If we assume, that — by default — people are unethical, governments are corrupt and most people in power are criminal, then you're f*cked anyway. With or without mass surveillance.
We don't assume anything by default, we just make an empirical observation of how people behave, and then act accordingly. The empirical observation is that there are people who are unethical, corrupt, what have you. And also, the empirical observation is that there exist certain group dynamics that make certain societal developments very hard to reverse. That is why it seems like a very good idea to avoid putting too much power into a single person's hands (in case it turns out to be one of the bad apples, or in case the power is delegated to a role rather than a specific person, in case one of the bad apples ever gets into that role), and to try and avoid the kinds of developments that tend to end badly.
Nobody says that _all_ people are unethical, or _all_ governments are corrupt, or that _all_ people in power are criminal. But rather, that being part of a government or having power does not prevent people from being unethical or corrupt. Bad people are generally a minority, but they do exist. That is one reason why we have government and police and military in the first place. But there is nothing that necessarily prevents bad people from becoming part of government, police, and military. That is why it is important to limit the power of those institutions. To limit the damage that bad people inside them can do. And also to limit the appeal to bad people wanting to become part of them. That's essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers, BTW. It's a security mechanism that protects you from bad people in power - not because all people in power are bad, but because occasionally bad people manage to get into powerful positions, and that tends to end badly.
The most concise description of what you're missing is "chilling effects".
In a hardcore surveillance society, almost any innocent act can be harmful to one. If government, for anti-terrorism reasons, has a rather complete picture of our lives, then we need strong safeguards against how they can act based on that picture.
And the same goes for the private sector, which might form that picture for business reasons.
What frustrates me most in the recent time is the wall of bugs I face in Mac OS X and Safari particularly. It is getting so ridiculous that even some Apple-pages do not work in Safari for me, s.t. I have to switch to Chrome to get the content. For example, opening this URL:
> Using MD5 alone exposes you to length extension attacks.
Since NoteHub is anonymous, my concern is not the security, but spam protection only. The Publisher Secret Key + signatures is just a mean to allow 3rd party tools post to NoteHub without captha. That's all.
> The fact that you're able to validate that MD5(password) is correct implies that you're storing passwords insecurely.
Absolutely, the only reason I hash the passwords in the web client and advise in the API to send hashes and not plain passwords is only to kind of protect users' passwords in the context of insecure transport layer.
> Consider switching your API endpoints to use HTTPS
HTTPS costs money. NoteHub is a free toy tool, a pastebin for one-off notes. I feel like, a fancy security would be an overkill for 99% of all use cases.
Nice project, and tastefully executed! Plus I can definitely see the usefulness of anonymous one-off publishing, with all the benefits of Markdown formatting…
Apparently, the author doesn't really has an overview, how the programmers are paid outside of Google and Facebook. Lets take a look on Germany. Lots of lots of IT companies here. I was looking for a development position one year ago and got about 7 offers. Basically, I wasn't rejected even once. But the problem was, that the offered salaries were not even close to those in Silicon Valley. The salaries are not significantly different from other (non-IT) engineering positions here. And it's not a matter of being A or B player. All interviews were so ridiculously easy and non technical, that the companies aren't even able to distinct between bad and good programmers. There is no notion of A or B players here. A software developer here is basically the lowest level of the hierarchy of the R&D department and are merely considered as code generators.
A new tendency here -- to hire remote "code generators" in India or East Europe and to manage them having only managers or architects on site. So, this transition of development jobs to East the author doesn't see, has already started here in Germany. And as a programmer you never get rich in Germany, you have to move to management.
this is why I'm going to the US, in a nutshell. Sadly, there are not a lot of options at that level here.. (aside from working in a local Google office)
