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“Subject: Urgent Warning”

daniel.haxx.se

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Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#141

Post by TeMPOraL »

kelvin0 wrote: post #133
TeMPOraL wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. He was totally a crank, and also an asshole (which is what got him under house arrest). He was rightfully rejected by contemporary scientific community for pushing a model that didn't even agree with empirical data about planetary motions they've accumulated so far, as opposed to the commonly accepted models. Yes, be careful in that respect, because the story of Galileo is one of the common historical misconc…

Could you please give me some citations, papers or any reference? Was he not an advocate of the Heliocentric model accepted today, that almost got him killed? Please correct my historical misconceptions.

Added a link to sources to my original comment.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#142

Post by manigandham »

napworth wrote: post #25
elthran wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, from http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/about/ >I’m Daniel Stenberg, a network hacker working for Mozilla. Sigh. Why does everyone have to be a hacking rockstar ninja? What's wrong with not using a word that has negative connotations to the rest of the world, and just calling yourself a developer/engineer?

You realise this is the man that created CURL, right? If anyone is allowed to call himself a hacker, it's Daniel.

Everyone is "allowed" to call themselves whatever they want.

I would argue there are practical rules to follow depending on your audience. In this case it seems fine but obviously can cause issues with the modern interpretation of what hacker means.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#143

Post by weinzierl »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #46
madaxe_again wrote: post #24

Ah, this sort of thing is as old as the moon. We run an eCommerce platform, have a variety of clients using it, they have a number of customers. At least once a week we get an accusation either from a client or an end-user of some outlandish nefarious behaviour, usually due to some complete lack of understanding of the nature of technology. Way back when, we responded, tried to help, tried to explain, but it tends to…

> Anyway. When you have a conversation with an idiot, nobody watching can tell which one of you is the idiot. A friend of mine who works as a college professor has a fun approach to deal with the kinds of random cranks who contact him out of the blue seeking someone to validate their wild Time-Cube-style theories and "research": he responds to each one by providing an introduction to the previous one. Apparently, he…

This reminds me of "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti":

    Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus 
    Christ and confronted them with one another's conflicting claims, 
    while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group.
    [...]
    While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and 
    reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each 
    explained away the other two as being patients with a mental 
    disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Christs_of_Ypsilanti

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#144

Post by robterrell »

My name and email address is the very last thing in the Waze about box, because they used some code I open sourced. Turns out it's the only email address anywhere in the app.

Thanks to this, I get about a dozen emails a week from people asking for Waze help. (Lots more when Waze changes something, like hardware support for a particular device!)

I've tried contacting Google (either to get these people help, or to get my email address removed...) with no luck.

I empathize with Daniel. It's an unexpected downside to open sourcing something and asking for credit.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#145

Post by mikeash »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #124
fab13n wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet helping crackpots (along with every other motivated people) find each other is unavoidably part of what the Internet does. I believe the good coming out of it outweighs the bad, but you're definitely not the only one being afraid. It seems that many of those scared are those who've learned in a time of knowledge scarcity (it was difficult to find any information at all on any subject. It took at least a trip to a…

I was only half tongue-in-cheek. I'm not really that worried about obvious crackpots having an effect directly. It is entirely plausible though that they could have an indirect effect. If banded together they could reach more of the public with crackpot ideas, and even if the public generally recognizes these ideas as crackpot, they will have succeeded in shifting the Overton window, enabling public acceptance of les…

If one were to look at my Facebook feed at any random time and imagine it representative, one would come away with the impression that vaccines are an evil plot by pharmaceutical companies to make money, that airplane contrails a.k.a. chemtrails are an unknown but surely nefarious conspiracy by the government involving mass quantities of psychoactive chemicals dumped into the air, that "natural" healing using tea and crystals and such is way more effective than doctors and hospitals and pharmaceuticals, and plenty more along those lines.

My mother is deeply into this stuff, and I have some friends through her who are lovely people aside from the part where they believe in this stuff. They don't make up a large proportion of my Facebook friends, but some of them are very loud about their beliefs.

Now imagine if you don't care a whole lot about this stuff one way or another, you get your shots on schedule because that's what people do, you never considered government conspiracies because the news never mentioned them, and you see the doctor when you get too sick because that's what everybody does. Then you become exposed to all this stuff, written very confidently and seeming to be backed up with solid facts, charismatic people, and high production values.

I think there's a good chance you'd start believing it!

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#146

Post by currysausage »

mturmon wrote: post #109
jerf wrote: post #27

About nine years ago now, I worked for a small security startup that managed to make its way up to PCI certification for scanning websites before keeling over dead. It died the "just one more feature before we can release" death, so you've never heard of it. You've probably never even heard of the company that bought it/put it out of its misery. I'm pretty sure the customer base never exceeded the low single digits.…

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA has an exhibit of letters written by interested citizens to the astronomers at Mt. Wilson observatory in the early decades of the 20th century ( http://mjt.org/exhibits/letters/letters.html ). Mt. Wilson was famous at the time because Edwin Hubble had just discovered extra-galactic light sources, and the Big Bang, while observing with the 100-inch telescope there. Most letters…

I find it relieving that people were already bad at punctuation 88 years ago.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#147

Post by cmurf »

jordigh wrote: post #135
kelvin0 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. However, at some point in time remember Galileo was also called a crank. Be careful in that respect.

I agree that some crank-looking people end up being Ramanujan, but the vast majority are not. When you look at the lunacy that most cranks put out, you start to see that there is a sea of weirdness out there, and doubtlessly a lot of mental illness. The old http://crank.net still seems to be up (hah! "powered by GNU m4"), so take a stroll to get a sample of the common thing that maths and physics profs have to wade t…

Keep in mind for the vast majority of human existence thus far, humans sometimes just flip their shit and become untrustworthy. So some percentage of humans always expecting this from everyone is probable. So which is the mental illness, expecting a fellow primate is or will become bezerk, or that fellow primates non-deterministically do in fact go bezerk?

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#149

Post by CrowFly »

elorant wrote: post #93
cookiecaper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you bellow at a stranger because you don't understand something, you're an idiot, sorry. To be fair, the email included in the OP is not really bellowing. She's politely explaining that she found his contact information inside the documentation distributed with the app, and providing screenshots as proof. I think a simple explanation that the name is included only due to technicalities of copyright law and that t…

Please keep in mind that Facebook owns Instagram and these are big companies that you likely don’t want to have a trail of evidence that you are a part of an Instagram and Spotify hacking ring. This sounds like bellowing. It's borderline blackmail. Help me with my request or else I make sure Facebook knows what a scumbag you are. The funny thing about this whole story is that she's not contacting him because she thin…

See http://acme.com/software/thttpd/repo.html
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