My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s over-stuffed collection of links covers the return of the Super Adventure Box (which is thrilling and exasperating players in approximately equal numbers) and the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
September 6, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Construction report on HMS Queen Elizabeth
BBC News had a report on the aircraft that are supposed to be available for HMS Queen Elizabeth when she is brought into Royal Navy service later this decade. They also included an older video on the state of the ship’s construction, which happily had been posted to YouTube (most BBC videos at their site are non-embeddable):
Published on 10 May 2013
Work on the first of the Royal Navy’s two new Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers is well under way at a dockyard in Rosyth.
The structure is almost complete in what is now the largest engineering project in the UK.
A government U-turn over fighter jets for the carriers cost taxpayers £74m, according to a new report by the National Audit Office.
The BBC’s Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale saw the progress being made on the ship.
The Press Association also had a video from June:
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Bruce Schneier on taking back the internet
From his article in yesterday’s Guardian:
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can — and should — do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don’t cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I’ve just started collecting. I want 50. There’s safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems — these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
Update: Glenn Greenwald retweeted this, saying it was “not really hard for a rational person to understand why this is newsworthy”.
Latest NSA news suggests computer security industry has a pretty good racket going. Sell locks to people, then sell the key to gov't.
— Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen) September 5, 2013
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Yahoo goes out of its way to lose more long-term users
I moderate a few special interest groups on Yahoo Groups, and I’m subscribed to a couple of dozen others. There’s nothing flashy or exciting about the service: it’s been relatively stable for years, with few changes or disruptions. For most users, this has been ideal. This week Yahoo not only introduced a new logo, they also tossed a stink bomb into the placid Yahoo Groups with a new user interface called “Neo”. They apparently rolled out the changes to a few groups last month, but most users and list owner/moderators hadn’t been given any notice that the change was coming. The Register‘s Kelly Fiveash on the diabolical scheme to annoy long-term users of Yahoo Groups:
‘WTF! MORONS!’ Yahoo! Groups! redesign! traumatises! users!
‘Vile, unfriendly interface’ attacked by world+dog. But format staysYahoo! has told thousands of users who are complaining about the Purple Palace’s pisspoor redesign of its Groups service that it will not be rolled back to the old format — despite a huge outcry.
The Marissa Mayer-run company revamped Yahoo! Groups last week, but it was immediately inundated with unhappy netizens who grumbled that the overhaul was glitchy, difficult to navigate and “severely degraded”.
In response, Yahoo! told its users:
We deeply value how much you, our users, care about Yahoo! Groups … we launched our first update to the Groups experience in several years and while these changes are an important step to building a more modern Groups experience, we recognise that this is a considerable change.
We are listening to all of the community feedback and we are actively measuring user feedback so we can continuously make improvements.
But the complaints have continued to flood in since Yahoo! made the tweak by changing its “classic” (read: ancient) interface to one dubbed “neo” that appeared to have been quickly spewed on to the interwebs with little testing before going live.
And — while the company claimed it was listening closely to its users about the new look Yahoo! Groups — it has ignored pleas from thousands of people who want it to reverse the update.
For users who access Yahoo Groups through the website, the new design has completely befuddled many, hiding functions (and even group names) and making it far more difficult to search for older posts (you reportedly have to search by message number: no other searches are supported). Even for those who only receive email updates, the Neo redesign included odd and sometimes completely unreadable email formatting, broken links, and other highly irritating issues.
This is the real problem with “free” services: when things go wrong, as a user of the service, you don’t have much leverage to complain or to get things fixed.
QotD: Risk-taking
This necessity for taking risks had previously been stressed by a passage in a letter written by James Wolfe when a colonel on the staff in 1757, a passage that has become justly famous:
Experience shows me that … pushing on smartly is the road to success; that nothing is to be reckoned an obstacle to your undertaking which is not found really so upon trial; that in war something must be allowed to chance and fortune, seeing it is in its nature hazardous and on option of difficulties; that the greatness of an object should come under consideration as opposed to the impediments that lie in the way; that the honour of one’s country is to have some weight; and that in particular circumstances and times the loss of a thousand men is rather an advantage to a nation than otherwise, seeing that gallant attempts raise its reputation and make it respected; whereas the contrary appearance sink the credit of a country, ruin the troops, and create infinite uneasiness and discontent at home.
General Robert E. Lee puts it in fewer words:
There is always hazard in military movements, but we must decide between the possible loss from inaction and the risk of action.
Napoleon laconically brings out the same basic idea:
Shuffling half-measures lose everything in war.
Lt. Colonel Alfred H. Burne, “The Strands of War”, The Art of War on Land, 1966.
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