Just because no one managed to create WannaCry for Flash doesn't mean the security problems are overstated. They've published over 50 vulnerabilities in Flash this year, when the installed base is in the toilet.
Java may be worse (or it may not be, but I would avoid installing either on most client machines), but blowing a bigger hole in the system's defenses doesn't really make the slightly smaller hole any less of a problem, it just changes your priorities in patching.
The only thing impressive about Adobe's security record is the number of times their source code was compromised.
To be clear I was talking about the era when a lot of people were working on Flash - on attack or defense. These days (since, say, 2013-ish?) I doubt there are many working in either direction.
The point being, in its heyday Flash was a bigger target than any web browser, and I don't think its attack surface was much smaller. If Flash had 10x more vulnerabilities than browsers did that'd be bad, but I don't think that was the case.
Kids make stupid and dangerous decisions because their brains aren't fully developed, they don't have the same sense of perspective that they will (hopefully) have as adults. Once upon a time, this was part of why we had a separate judicial system for them, too.
Religion comes into play because the lobby against making birth control available to teenagers is also the lobby against abortion clinics (and any clinics that offer health services and birth control to teenagers) is also the lobby to teach abstinence in schools (or not teach sex ed. at all), and that lobby gets most of its funding from religious organizations.
So, the slightly awkward week in sixth grade where my teacher gave us anatomy lessons and a birth video is something my daughter didn't get to experience, even though I brought my family back to my hometown. Instead, she gets the even more wonderfully awkward talk from her parents, which my wife likes to paraphrase as "your mouth won't get pregnant" (thanks Bill Clinton).
Teen pregnancy is not currently a common issue (it has been declining since 1990), but that doesn't mean it won't start going back up if we continue making it more difficult for young women (and men) to have access to birth control and education about safe sex.
We even had some discussion in school about how to reduce the risks of experimenting with drugs, though I don't think many people followed those directions.
In the old days they used to say "First babies can arrive whenever they want, the second baby better take nine months". Which is to say they knew unmarried people would have sex, but any girl that got herself pregnant was expected to marry the father before the baby was born and stay married.
Religion never worked great, but it was all they had.
While on the surface this is true, the amount of work required as a developer to learn how to do this is insignificant compared to the total time required to really understand your craft. While you may have to spend more time testing accessibility if you want to use the latest features in the bleeding-edge versions of JavaScript and CSS (or whatever language you're using which compiles down to them) or WebAssembly, you'll probably spend more time on browser compatibility testing, too, with those technologies (or you'll take the IDGAF approach).
When you really dig into it, though, most of the accessibility issues for the UI of a web application are still among the things you have to know to present accessible content on a website. In either case, the important point is to know when you're pushing the boundaries so you can make an informed decision about your testing requirements. It's just another metric to consider, like browser compatibility or mobile presentation.
I think people underestimate the difficulty of getting this done in a University environment, but I also think people are too quick to side with Berkeley in this particular case. One of the points made by the DoJ was that Berkeley makes resources available to faculty and staff to do the captioning, so, in theory, the captioning could have been done as the videos were made (at least those which were made in the last couple of years), and it should have been done as they were posted (again, at least those posted in the last couple of years).
So, the problem is getting the faculty and staff at Berkeley (and nearly everywhere else) to take the requirement seriously. Many of the people working to make content accessible are not in a position of authority over the people creating the content. In some cases it's a battle to educate the people who are in authority regarding the legal requirements and the consequences of ignoring those requirements.
As much as I wish that content didn't have to be pulled because of accessibility issues, sometimes there is no other way forward.
It is worth noting that the Berkeley case was federal law. California law does make the requirement for state Universities to comply with the ADA more explicit, but the US DoJ isn't in the habit of investigating violations of state law. The DoJ's letter to the University cites the ADA and various portions of the US Code: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
This was not something they where required to do?The implication here is if you add requirements to free content, institutions just won't bother - the material was only released due to the low bar to do so in the first place.
> sometimes there is no other way forward
There is if you change the law, which is what I think parent was implying
This is where it can be difficult for people to understand the culture in which people are operating. From the outside, a public University is the ivory tower, but from the inside, it's just short of chaos. Sometimes faculty have direct access to post this stuff and either don't understand the requirements or don't care. Other times the staff who post this stuff don't have the support to stand up to faculty when they're told to post it.
The University is not removing all of their content, and they plan to continue to add new public content. It would definitely be a significant undertaking to make 20,000 audio and video files accessible. I'm sure the people responsible for the content will consider prioritizing that undertaking and possibly seek funding to get some of that content back out there.
Something else that is missing in their discussion of requiring University credentials to access the content is the fact that the same requirements apply to content they distribute to students, faculty, and staff. The difference is primarily in the likelihood they would be sued, and the fact that they would have a much easier time finding the funding to make something accessible if a student needed it.
Yes, you could change the law, which would theoretically benefit the people who could access this content, but would completely set back the few gains we've seen in web accessibility (assuming we're not also talking about everything else the ADA does).
Or you could set priorities for the content and fund the effort to make it accessible if it's really worth making it available. Fund research into improving automatic captioning/transcription, put your students on the path to better jobs, and improve the content for everyone.
I feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh" if you weren't sure about der/die/das).
They are generally going to sound good together because the word and the pronoun co-evolved. If they didn't sound good together, either the pronoun or the word would have changed. That isn't about the gender being right so much as just the sound, though.
If a system gives you two options for storing a date (using 2-digit or 4-digit years), how many dates do you need to store and use in calculations before you end up saving space by creating a new data type and all of the supporting operations to make the storage of the date itself more efficient? In recent years, it's more common to make this type of decision because something else is causing an issue, otherwise we rarely consider the space required for a date (and many languages no longer have a separate type for dates).
Another solution was to set the prefix for 2-digit years on a sliding scale, so they are interpreted as a date within a specific 100-year period (date windowing). For example, see the 2029 rule: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/214391/how-excel-wo...
This turned out to be one of the most cost-effective methods of fixing the problem, and was probably one of the most likely to be implemented. This was especially the case in situations involving software which ran closer to the hardware (for example, BIOS or firmware) or on systems where RAM or storage couldn't be increased and/or the change might increase the software's requirements beyond the system's capabilities.
Most countries apply intellectual property law to anything published on the internet. In other words, when it comes to something you pull down via http, you should assume that, if you attempt to republish it in any form, someone out there might decide that it's worth their time to use the court system to destroy you, so you should take the time to read the ToS.
Yes - Like I said I think it's perfectly find that the material I download from the internet has terms and laws associated with it. That is, what I do with what I download is subject to laws as soon as I e.g. try to publish it.
But my point is this: what service have I used, and what terms can I be assumed to have agreed to if I do this
> wget $random_url > /dev/null
That's what web scraping is. What I do with the scraped material is something completely different.
So why did the U.S. sign the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement in 1942? The Migrant Labor Agreement of 1951? Why did the UFW hold protests at the U.S. border in 1969-1973? Why did the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 specifically address agricultural workers?
Importing large numbers of foreign workers, migrant or otherwise, has been the backbone of the agricultural labor market in the U.S. since the country was founded. It's not necessarily a good thing, just not a recent thing by any means.
Mexican agricultural workers have always been a thing. But the concentration of farm output to a few regions of California is a recent phenomenon, and the resulting industrialization of agriculture was a thing.
When I was a teen in the early 90s, I worked on a 500 acre farm in upstate ny. At that time it was possible to support a family and a few workers on land like that with a diversified crop of dairy, hay, something like oats and a few other things. The neighboring farm grew vegetables.
That is no longer possible. 90% of farms within 75 miles <250 acres are hobby farms, growing subsidized corn, or are legacy dairy farms that will be subdivisions when the farmer is too old to work or his equipment wears out.
There's a significant gap between the bottom end of people with other sources of income and those who will "accumulate it with no intent to spend it". Further, even if you give it to everyone across the board, most of the people who don't need it for basic expenditures and have no intention of saving for a big purchase at some point in the future (e.g. a down-payment on a car or house) would likely be making enough money that the UBI is less than their taxes.
Java may be worse (or it may not be, but I would avoid installing either on most client machines), but blowing a bigger hole in the system's defenses doesn't really make the slightly smaller hole any less of a problem, it just changes your priorities in patching.
The only thing impressive about Adobe's security record is the number of times their source code was compromised.