The state and its avatars recognize that they can and must have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if they wish to fester in society.
The point isn't that working at a startup is heroic.
The point is that if you don't believe in your core that the startup's mission is worth spending the last year of your life on, you're not the kind of person who'll do what's necessary to make it happen.
Maybe you can't think of a cause you'd make that sacrifice for, but many founders and startup employees can. I don't think that's disgusting.
how cynical is it to demand this of your employees when you are the founder with 10-100% of the equity? and how easily impressed (or young / stupid) do you have to be to buy into this as an employee?
Your point now is that employees should be rewarded more. That's a fair point [1]. But it's still separate to being dedicated to what you do.
There are several occupations people enter knowing there is little monetary reward. Schoolteachers don't make much but they are dedicated to building children's lives and can't imagine themselves doing anything else. So are artists and generally anyone who has found their calling.
If I had a only a year to live I probably would still be working on the things I'm working on now.
[1] - It's a fair hypothesis that the most valuable company would be the one where everyone involved is rewarded in proportion to the value they generate. You can't build some kinds of companies if you keep 100% of the equity as a founder btw. Look at Alibaba's $210b IPO and Alibaba's founder who has only 8.4%.
The thing is that they have been doing just fine with their current powers - there is no need to expand them. I have no doubt that actual terrorist plotting has been countered by ASIO, but I also have no doubt that ASIO clearly already have enough powers to do their job appropriately.
Not to be too ad hominem, but the man who said this is a former rugby league player known as "the brick with eyes" and not generally well-known for his national security expertise.
What if most people support these laws? What happens when a democracy decides to vote away its own freedom? Should it be somehow prevented from doing so?
This is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority, and why government of any kind, democratic or not, is illegitimate. Any institution that wields power over you will eventually deprive you of your freedom against your will.
And without a government, i.e. without some entity with a monopoly on force, what happens then? Do I have to do battle on the streets every time I buy groceries or go to work?
I guess in the end, democracy or not, you get the government you deserve. Australians voted these guys in, they tolerate their actions, and many Australians will applaud them. If it all goes well, great. If not, I won't have much sympathy for them.
This is not an attitude I like to have, mind you, because I find that wherever I see tyranny in the world, I believe that to some degree - sometimes a lot, sometimes only a little - the victims of that oppression had it coming.
Discovering a case where wget shells out to bash while setting some env vars based on received headers. And then anonymously posting a supposed shellshock payload just begging to be downloaded with wget.
If you run a web server that generates its own CAPTCHA using something like ImageMagick, or call system() to gzip something, you could possibly be vulnerable.
Never underestimate vulnerabilities and the way people can use them, or even combine them, to exploit systems.
Consider how many people touch an enterprise system, or even a system at a smaller shop. Consider how many people touch shared hosting servers or even dedicated boxes.
Do /you/ trust all of them, along with all the authors of all the software exposed to the web (or touched by something exposed to the web) on that system?
On shared hosting systems, you have to design the system with the assumption that someone is always compromised. So, additional accounts getting compromised should just be business as usual.
Seriously, if you're on shared hosting, it's almost certain that at least one person on the server is compromised/malicious
Why would it be messed up if it's true? The Unix philosophy is to compose complex functionality using lots of small tools. Shelling out to existing tools instead of reinventing your own makes total sense.
I have seen implementations that shell out to bash scripts throughout my career in web and back-end development. It's a serious antipattern in the wild.
The ecosystem of linux software that shells out to bash is ridiculous, and coercing an env var is a very light requirement.
Virtually any software that takes input from the internet can be a target, and enumerating the combination of versions and configurations is futile. We all need a working bash patch.
Not running a webserver protects against GET spray-n-pray, but you shouldn't feel safe.
s/Secret Service Special Agents/American hijackers/
s/U.S. government employees/Americans/
We therefore conclude that "Some Americans are American hijackers." The logic's airtight; it comes from a secret service test designed to evaluate logic ability.
Companies will gradually start selling services piecemeal at what will be promoted as a "discount", where you buy a tiered package of sites. "Obviously, you only need Facebook, Google, and Buzzfeed. Why are you paying for that shitty internet you don't need?"
Public praises the lower bills, talk shows argue incessantly, and nobody grasps either the tech or the economics: the price of the discount is that large tech/infra companies no longer have to worry about competition, and can levy arbitrary entry fees.
Gradually the big companies open up walled app stores that let you run your internet applications within their parameters, rules, and fees. Since this is the only way to reach anyone, smaller upstarts/devlopers grudgingly accept the new way of things, until the whole shenanigan is disrupted by a little guy meeting an unmet, undervalued need out of left field.
> Since this is the only way to reach anyone, smaller upstarts/devlopers grudgingly accept the new way of things, until the whole shenanigan is disrupted by alittle guy meeting an unmet, undervalued need.
If, as a startup, I can't reach any customers anymore, why even take that risk and start a company? Why, as a VC / angel, would I want to invest in companies that are more or less destined to lose out (Internet based businesses). I think it'll have a huge negative impact on businesses, especially new Internet based businesses and this will lead to less innovation and less startups. It all depends how severe things get, but since there's really nothing to stop ISPs from charging businesses and customers whatever they want, I wouldn't be surprised if the current tech/Internet boom slowly fades away as company after company finds that it's just not worth trying to compete.
> "Obviously, you only need Facebook, Google, and Buzzfeed. Why are you paying for that shitty internet you don't need?"
For me, the value in Google, and partly in Facebook, is primarily in other sites they link to. Am I an exception? Or is the point, you might need those others occasionally, but you only need the main few to be fast?
You could actually argue that handling of these petitions is very transparent: petition text goes in, petition text comes out, and there's a null transform in the middle.
The state and its avatars recognize that they can and must have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if they wish to fester in society.