Daniel Miessler

It doesn't matter how much other people care. It is that you want to have an informed opinion - for yourself.

If I make an opinion prematurely I see myself defend it while familiarizing myself with the topic. I go blind to what contradicts it and remember only what fits my preconceived ideas. This is why I try to avoid it.

Perhaps other people (you) are able to suspend their uninformed opinion but I highly doubt it.

But okay, I will at least try (and no doubt fail) to describe the taste of the soup before you try it:

The issue is that it gets so much better if you have a lot of subscriptions (sorted by pubDate) The experience is much like a search result but with everything you enjoy mixed together.

There are no notifications of course since new articles happen much to frequently. In stead you gaze over the headlines periodically and open a few articles (in the browser)

Because there are few people as interested in (the proverbial) antique silver thimbles as you those articles need to float to the top or live in a different folder.

I for example one time crawled a bunch of fortune 500 websites looking for feeds. The flood of press releases really gave me a sense what is going on. Lots of boring corporate speak but at least every page described a serious effort to accomplish something.

You really need to subscribe to every remotely interesting small weblog you can still find so that you can at least bother to read the headlines. The small blog really needs you. This…

If the article is, as you say, only about math education, then it cannot conclude "any parent who opposes adoption of the CCSS is, in effect, saying, “I do not want my child prepared for life in the Twenty-First Century.”" At best it can say that a parent who opposes adoption of the CCSS for mathematics, etc.

Since it makes a broad statement regarding CCSS, it cannot be, as you say, restricted to math education standards. (There's also the technical observation that CCSS is not the only way to achieve those underlying aspirational goals. I see that Minnesota has decided to not use CCSS, and assume a Minnesota parent may oppose CCSS for the honest belief that the Minnesota standards are better for a 21st century life than CCSS.)

I brought up "classical educated citizen" precisely because it is a different mythos. The essay only concerns itself with one specific goal - train the workers of the top 500 companies of the 21st century. There are dozens of often opposing goals for the education system[1], and to focus on only one is a disservice. You suggest I should read some education theory, but omit that the essay author is equally lacking; which was my point.

But since you bring up education theory, and elites, I feel it's useful to point out your own strawmen. We've long had multiple education methods in American schools. See http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~cac/nlu/fnd504/anyon.htm from the 1980s, on "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work". It points out that:

- "In…

The original idea was that you had URLs that told you where to find a thing, and URNs that identified a particular thing regardless of where it appeared. These used a unified schema (called URIs) because when you’re telling somebody else about a thing, you want to be able to refer to it by location (“the red building in the next block”) or by identity (“the main post office”). Presumably, there would be services that could take a name and tell you where to find it; not a bad assumption as every library in the world has such a system for its own collection.

While this looks good on paper, in practice URLs were relatively stable in the early days of the internet and so they turned into de facto names before lots of effort was put into making URNs work. Now, we’re struggling with the issues they originally foresaw, but weren’t able to follow through with a working implementation.

(For more details, see https://danielmiessler.com/study/url-uri/ where I got much of this information)

Changing SSH port is far more efficacious at reducing nonsense than the Twitter poll in the article suggests:

> "I ran an experiment with a virtual machine exposed to the internet which had sshd listening on port 22. The server stayed online for one week and then I changed the ssh port to 222. The number of attacks dropped by 98%. Even though this is solely empirical evidence, it’s clear that moving off the standard ssh port reduces your server’s profile."[0]

> "In the time that I gathered 7,025 connection attempts to my SSH daemon on port 22 I received 3 on port 24."[1]

Also, great top comment by 16s[2] in this HN thread, "Why putting SSH on another port than 22 is bad idea".[3]

[0] https://major.io/2013/05/14/changing-your-ssh-servers-port-from-the-default-is-it-worth-it/

[1] https://danielmiessler.com/blog/security-and-obscurity-does-changing-your-ssh-port-lower-your-risk/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615994

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615734

> Is any of this overhead really needed?

Moderation is needed, but often abused and used as a tool to create echo chambers.

> What does it accomplish?

As mentioned above, It accomplishes one thing: creating an echo chamber.

Echo cambers are useful, because it shows "wide support" from the community while ignoring the fact that the "community" has been reduced to just the "right people".

For example, in a room there are 100 people, three that have been elected / selected to lead the 97. The three, censor / kick / eliminate 90 people because of their dissenting opinions. Now, the majority (3+7=10) can rule in peace. Quite simple actually.

It's basically authoritarianism that breeds fascism. This is usually a product of the death of objective truth.

Oh! and this is not a LEFT vs. RIGHT problem. Here is a good read: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/bad-governments-on-the-left-and-right-meet-in-the-middle

I'd argue that privacy and security are unavoidably related. Is keeping your password secret about privacy, security, or "security through obscurity"? Depends which term you want to use :-)

IMO the concept of "security by obscurity" is overused. Ultimately what matters is the cost for an attacker. If you're trying to design a secure system, your system will be stronger if you put it out there for people to criticize instead of keeping the details secret. This argument doesn't really apply to encrypting the packages you use. Security solely through obscurity isn't ideal, but what really matters is the cost/benefit ratio. It's way easier to encrypt your package downloads than it is to read all the source code changes on every package update. (Does anyone even do that?)

I agree with this article: https://danielmiessler.com/p/security-by-obscurity/