Disqus - Latest Comments for wogan

Re: SiO2020 Demo - Silica

Wogan — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 09:34:22 -0000

Test

Re: Microaggressions: understanding subtle racism

Wogan — Mon, 21 May 2018 14:54:08 -0000

The entire theory of "microaggressions" can be charitably described as garbage.

http://journals.sagepub.com...

If you want the more digestible version:

https://www.economist.com/u...

Re: Programming on the Ethereum Blockchain

Wogan — Wed, 09 May 2018 11:27:53 -0000

Thanks! I hope it was useful :)

Re: It’s time to block all piracy sites in South Africa – SAFACT

Wogan — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 05:03:02 -0000

This is garbage. The EU determined that piracy was not a major problem for sales: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-...

Every example of how blocking pirate sites boosted sales here, are confusing correlation and causation. Every single one can be contested, because there's no limit to the amount of hypothetical damages you can dream up as an anti-piracy crusader.

If SAFACT wants to remain relevant, they should be doing more to defend property rights for South African content, and work with existing vendors to get more stuff into cheaper legal channels (iTunes, Spotify, whatever). That'll be a more productive use of time than going after piracy sites, when there's absolutely no way to block them all.

Re: Interview: DStoq co-founder Craig Mc Gregor

Wogan — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 06:25:26 -0000

So I have a few questions.

For context, I started researching and writing about ICOs late last year (during the massive hype cycle) and I continue to follow developments in the blockchain space in general. I've been especially interested in the alternative fundraising model provided by digital assets, and DStoq is not the first exchange of this type that I have seen.

My first question is legal jurisdiction. A lot of projects handwave that way with "we're global", but that causes more problems than it solves. Any investor - institutional or retail - should ultimately be able to hold a platform accountable if they mess up.

The next question is dividends. This was skirted over on the podcast with the Ethiopia example. The government there is not keen on capital outflows, and stocks are generally purchased in anticipation of future earnings. From the sounds of it, there would be no way for an investor to recover money from the actual Ethiopian company they invested in - they'd have to sell those tokens to someone outside Ethiopia for a profit.

The next question is asset freezing. If your platform can lock a wallet, or freeze a transaction, then it's not a blockchain. The entire point of decentralized blockchain tech is to *prevent* the censorship of digital assets. The moment you have the power to disrupt that, you also have the legal requirement to do so if governments ask you to.

The next question is the trading itself. Digital asset trading is currently unregulated, and market manipulation runs rampant. Will the tokens issued on DStoq be portable to other exchanges? Will there be policies against wash trading, etc?

The final question is whether or not you need a blockchain for this at all. If you're starting a global stock exchange which:

> includes a KYC process, onboarding, vetting, audits, and remedial action capability, and
> all tokens are issued manually as part of the onboarding process, and
> holding a token doesn't yield dividends, and
> trading can be frozen, transactions reversed, and
> the addition of blockchain tech does nothing to mitigate the financial/legal requirements in each jurisdiction, meaning
> creating the ability to trade any given security is almost entirely legal wrangling, then

What value does a blockchain add to this? Blockchains were designed for open participation with immutable transactions. What DStoq needs to do, stands basically in direct opposition to all of that.

To be clear, I'm not "bashing" the idea of a global stock exchange. I think that sort of venture would be immensely valuable for all the reasons Craig outlined. I just don't know that a blockchain project will solve it, and if there are reasons why I'm wrong, I'd love to hear them.

Re: DA to overhaul economic policies

Wogan — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 03:23:27 -0000

That's nice in theory, but in practice it would be chaos. For one thing, if it's tribal land, then it's under traditional rule. If the government handed out title deeds directly to the land occupants, they'd be undermining the authority of the traditional leaders, and there'd be some proper pushback there.

100% agree on the change-of-attitude point. If you have no property, then property rights aren't important to you at all - which might be why political parties skew so far left in general!

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 03:26:26 -0000

My point is that Atul up there seemed surprised that clicking on a link to download an executable file, downloaded that file. I have no idea why it's interesting, noteworthy or otherwise unexpected to get the exact download you requested.

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 01:29:29 -0000

On the plus side, this is the best way to learn about how to not manage passwords :)

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 01:25:05 -0000

My god, is Joomla still a thing?

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 01:17:28 -0000

Relax, Jim, it's just an internet comment.

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 05:18:00 -0000

Well, yes, it's a free Windows program. That's kinda the point?

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 05:17:14 -0000

Haha!

To be honest though, if you can deliver what a customer wants, and use nothing but a static HTML site to do it - 100% go for it. You cut out so many attack vectors, maintenance overheads, and training costs. It's perfect for the sort of customers Chris there is working with.

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 02:15:14 -0000

He's not kidding though. I found his portfolio, and it seems like every site was built with https://www.coffeecup.com/d...

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 02:11:50 -0000

Must be nice getting paid to troll comment threads online! Where do I apply?

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 02:10:19 -0000

Yeah, my customers are reacting immediately - by moving off Hetzner. It's not like we can go re-registering businesses and applying for new ID numbers :P

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 02:00:15 -0000

The heck is HTHL5

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 01:59:07 -0000

So first I should respond to your original comment: https://lh3.googleuserconte...

Companies have had internal breaches before. They're rare, because the employees that do them are phenomenally stupid. If it was an employee, vendor, partner or auditor that caused the breach, we'd be hearing about how someone got fired, and how Hetzner would commit to fixing their internal security processes.

Except that's not what happened here - there was "unauthorized access" to a public-facing system (konsoleH). If it was unauthorized access to a back-office/line-of-business system, that's a different story.

And then to your edited comment: That's a whole lot of sarcastic anger over an internet comment pointing out the same thing that 90% of all the comments on this have pointed out. Web app frameworks (all major languages) have had input sanitization for years now, and databases (all major vendors) have had query parameterization.

The only way for a SQL injection vulnerability to exist in a web app this far down the road, is if it's based on home-grown code that was never routinely audited. Even a basic OWASP scan would probably have found something that needed fixing.

And that's the real issue here: A major local business that gathers and stores PII on a routine basis apparently had no mechanism in place for auditing the system that handled it. Which is unfortunately par for the course in South Africa :(

Re: Hetzner hacked – Sensitive information exposed

Wogan — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 14:58:18 -0000

Next thing you're going to tell us the sysadmins caught scurvy while trying to cross the Atlantic on homemade rafts.

How the hell do you have a public-facing SQL injection vector this far down the road?

Re: Install cockpit on CentOS 7.3 with valid certificates from letsencrypt

Wogan — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 13:54:34 -0000

Super useful, thanks!

Re: Zille and the DA’s Fall

Wogan — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 09:01:06 -0000

Solid read! Good work :)

On the one hand I do share the concern that the DA is going to fall victim to classic populist politics. On the other hand, that seems to be necessary to engage and activate a voting base - South Africa's education on things like history and civics is dogshit (to say the least). Is this not maybe a case where the ends justify the means?

I'm not honestly convinced that's a good argument myself, I'm just trying to find an alternative interpretation of events that isn't doom-and-gloom.

Re: What does Peter Bruce have against the whites? - OPINION | Politicsweb

Wogan — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 08:55:29 -0000

Solid work, Jeremy! My family has been in South Africa for generations, initially coming over essentially as indentured servants to the British. Very few (if any) of us have ever gone to university - myself included, and everything we have, we worked for.

Articles like Bruce's are very disappointing. We all (white and black) need to pull together if we want South Africa to succeed, and all the virtue signaling from guilty white liberals just adds fuel to the fire. It legitimizes the position that every white person is guilty of some sort of mortal sin, for which eternal reparations must be paid.

Which is rubbish. If you were born here, work here, and pay your taxes here, you're a citizen of South Africa. Not a "settler", "colonist", "immigrant" or "foreigner". It's okay to take pride in being a productive, law-abiding human being, of whatever race.

Re: Gareth Cliff: I’ll defend your right to speak out, especially if I disagree

Wogan — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:01:46 -0000

Exactly! Offense is the result of what you let through your filters, into your mental garden, and what you allow to grow there.

Re: Ancient Greek Discourse and the American Left

Wogan — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:00:40 -0000

This approach does work, by the way, even if you don't see results immediately. When people are nudged into re-evaluating their beliefs, one of two things generally happens:

1. Either the person's ego is too fragile to accept any compromise, and they double down anyway - these are the people you can't help, or:
2. The person, concerned with being on the right side of the issue (as most leftists are) will pause and think for a while.

What a lot of keyboard warriors miss is that facts are not feelings, and you cannot kill feelings with facts. You can only kill feelings with other feelings. Your aim is not to educate a rational person, but to inject self-doubt into their armor of moral certitude. You need to make them *feel* like they're on the wrong side of the argument.

Re: ‘Statistically Insignificant’ – The Immoral Minimum Wage Intelligentsia

Wogan — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 10:15:56 -0000

Solid argument here, nicely done!

I haven't seen much written about the intersection of minimum wage and welfare. If minimum wage is going to force people that _want_ to work out of employment, is that not further dehumanizing? Will welfare costs not rise even further, as it becomes the only option for people without the skills or opportunities to find meaningful work?

I'd rather see this time and energy put into job creation, and connecting a willing workforce with meaningful opportunities.

Re: Gareth Cliff: I’ll defend your right to speak out, especially if I disagree

Wogan — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 16:37:01 -0000

Well said! I think it's worth reminding everyone that feeling offense is an essentially good thing - it means you're being challenged to grow. Telling people only what they want to hear is how you pull the wool over their eyes, and I'd rather not go through this world blind.