> This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
That is, he's saying explicitly that women find leadership roles more difficult. Generally if somebody finds something more difficult they're not as good at it as people who find it easier. As a result I'm not sure how this could be taken any other way than stating that men are better managers simply because they're men.
While I agree that what the UK government is trying to do is dangerous, wrong and ultimately won't help all that much anyway, this article is so full of hyperbole, bluster and FUD that, even though I know and understand most of the issues, it's honestly hard to take much of it seriously.
I expect exaggeration from Rudd and I expect her to misunderstand how certain things (i.e. encryption and the internet) really work because a) she's a politician b) she's not an encryption expert (that's what advisors are for). I don't really expect the same thing from people should be trying to counter her arguments with facts, explanation and alternative ideas though.
Well, I can't say that there's anything obviously wrong with the article.
You should be fearful, uncertain and full of doubt about privacy and democracy if you live in the UK.
And those companies really are farming people's data and doing whatever the heck they want with it.
And removing the people's access to private communication in the digital age is both stupid and evil.
There's no bluster and hyperbole, just the sad reality.
This doesn't seem to get suggested very often, or ever, but maybe we need to keep protesting these developments, and boycott these companies/services who collude with the government to erode our civil liberties. Nobody has to login to facebook, at least not yet...It's only going to get more difficult.
" You should not believe a single word any of those companies tells you about end-to-end encryption or privacy on their platforms ever again. "
Well, that's going to make it hard to have any discussion about privacy on the internet.
"If you’re still not convinced and feel that the UK government should have the right to spy on everyone, you can stop worrying. Because they already do."
Well in that case, what are we talking about?
The main reason there is nothing obviously wrong is because it doesn't really say anything, just keeps repeating "Amber says X, other online news source says not X. Amber is evil".
> Given the gravity of what’s at stake – which is nothing less than the integrity of personhood in the digital age and the future of democracy in Europe
So banning encryption in online chat programs (she obviously can't and won't be banning _all_ forms of encryption) is the same as destroying democracy and will effectively stop people from existing as people on the internet?
> Translation: We want to ban encryption and if we do we will be better equipped to catch terrorists.
in response to a direct quote saying "we don't want to ban encryption" is a bold and unsubstantiated opinion at best.
> Does it matter that you’re more at risk dying from falling out of bed than you are from terrorism
All analogies are bad, but this one is especially so. Nobody worries about dying falling out of bed. And if it really did happen, then it would be "merely" a tragic accident. Should the government only act to prevent types of murder if it happens more than people falling out of bed? A lot of people die of heart disease every year. Does that mean the government shouldn't do anything to try and prevent traffic accidents?
> Translation: We want to scapegoat the Internet as the root of the problem with terrorism.
This again is clearly not what's being said. They're aiming their guns at the internet, but nowhere is it implied that the root cause of terrorism is internet encryption.
> It is not the role of multinational corporations to police the world’s citizenry.
This is true, but those corporations cannot also place themselves above the law so they do have at least some duty, moral or otherwise to do something if the government wants them to (setting aside the specifics of the laws involved).
> Rudd pivots from the government’s successful battle against the spread of public propaganda by terrorist organisations to their belief that they need to eavesdrop on the private communications of every citizen in order to keep us safe.
I assume I missed something somewhere because afaict Rudd wants to be able to listen in on and extract evidence from private communications of suspects, much like they already do with telephone systems. I can't see anywhere she claims to want to actively listen to the entire population (though I fully get that it may end up that way on the basis that they've up to this point proven that they don't understand the technology well enough).
> You should take note of the companies that are part of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and never trust another word they say to you about the encryption and privacy features of their products.
Feel free to stop using everything that most tech companies produce but if if this is intended to be actual advice I don't think it's realistic.
> What it will do is make all of less safe and lead to chilling effects that will destroy what little democracy we have left. It will result in a surveillance state and a global panopticon the likes of which humanity has never seen.
Having just gone through a general election that resulted in a rare minority government and, potentially as a result, a fundamental change to brexit ambitions, I don't buy this at all. We have just as much democracy as we had before. It's a very very long way from where we are now to the UK government locking up leaders of the opposition for example.
"I don't really expect the same thing from people should be trying to counter her arguments with facts"
No one cares about facts. "Encryption keeps you safe" is a fact but its a boring one, it won't get shared around on facebook, which means it wont get out to the people who don't know its a fact. When you don't have facts to back you up you can just make up whatever story you want "Encryption kills your kids" will get shared on facebook no worries.
imho the government isn't wilfully malevolent and pretending that it is is a surefire way of getting people to write you off as a crazy person.
> When you don't have facts to back you up you can just make up whatever story you want "Encryption kills your kids" will get shared on facebook no worries.
If the brexit debate taught us anything it's that people can see BS in arguments from a mile away and, when it happens on both sides they dismiss all the facts and go with their instincts. There are some really good arguments against what the UK government is trying to do. I think dressing them up with falsehoods does nothing to advance them.
The bit where nobody bothered to listen to what experts were saying on the basis that both sides spent much of their time lying. If arguments that are counter to people's preconceived opinions are full of holes and exaggeration then they're really easy to dismiss imho.
Well, don't forget this is written by a man know for drumming up sensationalist products like the Indie Phone (crowd funded but never delivered, try google it), pissing off people, and even becoming a meme - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/29521388/Indie-Phone-Aral-...
So the fact there is hyperbole is par for the course.
It's hard to know what's actually going on behind closed doors, but it sounds like the tech companies want to do something about it and are quite prepared to work with the government on a solution.
Of course, what that solution turns out to be is a separate issue. I trust Google et al to know what they're talking about wrt encryption far more than the UK government though, so actively working with tech companies is a huge step up from the previous position (though obviously a long way still to go).
If you store settings related to password system requirements on a per site basis then you're leaking the existence of your account on that site, which often needs to be private itself.
You're right. If you're worried about that, then you will need to treat that data as not entirely public. The point is just that the secrecy requirements can be much less than you'd have for keeping a password.
Ultimately though, we can only speak for our own moral choices. If you're happy with doing something unethical or illegal, then go ahead. If you're not prepared to, then don't. If you refuse though, then what happens afterwards isn't up to you and doesn't impact on your morals and/or character. The best you can hope for is to know that you played no part in the wrongdoing.
This isn't about deployment of broadband (though it's certainly related), it's about rollout of fibre, which can be used for other services (such as TV) as well.
Right and as it says in the title, use of JIRA is often a symptom that there is a problem with management. Nowhere is it stated that JIRA itself is the problem.
I disagree. JIRA goes further out of its way to accomodate Agile/Scrum stuff than many other issue trackers. I was on a team once where we used FogBugz (without any of the metric tracking nonsense -- our managers didn't even log in to it, they just talked to us when they needed to know about progress) for a long time without any issue, and only after some big middle management restructuring did we switch to JIRA, specifically because managers wanted a tool that spit out useless junk about velocity and burndown. We even had to go and do really dumb training about "story points" and how to enter the progress data they wanted (which added so much overhead to entering things into the system that most of us just stopped, or at least cut every possible corner so as to not waste our time doing manual data entry for the sake of middle management).
Not every such tool focuses on these kind of pointless metrics so much. Using the GitHub issue tracker is joyful, especially when you don't have someone trying to micromanage you with it. Some tools focus instead on what the actual developers need to get their work done, instead of what managers want in order to be more micromanagerial.
Another tool that is starting to go down the dark path of JIRA is Asana, which is a shame because the original design of Asana was great. But now it's all about Scrum metric bullshit, catered to middle managers who have the power to choose it over other things, and usually don't make the choice based on developer preferences or rational arguments.
I'd say the title could be "Agile/Scrum metric trackers are a symptom of a management problem" and that JIRA is absolutely the poster child for such a tool, so it's not bad faith to tie it directly to JIRA. Though your point does bear repeating: JIRA is not the only tool that suffers from this problem.
It is "failure to use issue tracker effectively" and it happens all the time.
The problem is confounded by many little cuts. For instance, they think that the issue tracking system is only used by devs, so it goes on a dust-filled desktop machine from '03 that is stuffed in a corner somewhere, so it is underpowered and takes 25 seconds to load a page over my DSL connection and about 22 seconds at the office.
The people at the office don't care, however, because the boss thinks the issue tracking system is a waste of time. He bitches me out for taking 10 minutes to write up an estimate and then giving an estimate which is always "too long." I am carefully watching the star programmer to understand what he does right, and finally realize the reason he doesn't have this problem is that he doesn't estimate anything. Sometimes the testers put in tickets, and sometimes the star programmer puts one in, but the "product owner" never puts one in or bothers to show up at the scrum meetings down the hall.
Top management assigned a project manager to our team and she was putting in the scrum thing because my team had been going in circles for two years and they had to get a product in front of the customer. My boss pushed her out and she left to work for some kind of Christian charity.
At some point our boss got the religion of checklists, gave up on the idea of estimating or scheduling, and somehow we got it across the finish line.
But you can't say the same about every issue tracker. For example, GitHub Issues is so constrained that it's difficult for management to bend it, for good or ill.
> It is not the one-size-fits-all solution you are using it as. If your site has a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.
The main benefit of virtual DOM afaict is that it makes rendering on the server trivial without needing to jump through all the hoops that, e.g. Angular has to. Contrary to the post, this makes it ideal for such sites.
That is, he's saying explicitly that women find leadership roles more difficult. Generally if somebody finds something more difficult they're not as good at it as people who find it easier. As a result I'm not sure how this could be taken any other way than stating that men are better managers simply because they're men.