There are many good female scientists/engineers/mathematicians. Back in Cambridge University, to start off with, there are many female mathematics students. Considering achievement by people such as Grace Hopper, I don't think we can blame the domination of men down to sex differences. I would rather girls stand up and bravely join the science community regardless whether these communities are male dominated or not.
I studied mathematics at Cambridge University. While there were some very good female students on the course, it's worth recording that the better colleges had smaller proportions of women; New Hall (all-female) had possibly the worst academic reputation, while Trinity (probably best academically) had two girls among my year of 42.
FWIW, lorettahe, this is exactly the kind of ad-hominem idiocy/misogyny that women encounter[0] and men never do[1]. There's no one big issue keeping women out of programming, it's just the drip-drip-drip of "you're different from us and we don't want you here" that 50% (then 65%, then 80%, then 95%...) of the candidate pool simply never hear or see unless they make an effort to.
[0] This moron got downvoted because downvoting is not socially awkward; how many times do you see a social smack-on-the-wrist in a face-to-face conversation?
[1] I'll donate £5 to a charity of your choice for every time someone comes up with an attributed accusation of using "man logic" in a discussion related to programming.
The idea of encouraging the term of "man logic" is man logic. Misogyny is clearly a problem, but saying, "oh but men are dumb too" is not the right way to go about fixing it.
I definitely wasn't encouraging the invention of the term "man logic"--I was pointing out that no-one even thinks about calling things "man logic". That's the dichotomy at play here.
The scientific consensus is that while men and women might have different distributions of personality traits, their mental abilities are more or less identical. Seriously, the difference in math test scores between male and female students in different countries tracks sexual discrimination so well you could almost use it as a diagnostic.
Seriously, the difference in math test scores between male and female students in different countries tracks sexual discrimination...
Yes - the more gender equity you have, the better boys do relative to girls. (The scores of both genders improve with gender equity, but boy's scores improve more.)
Don't be delusional, there were/are obviously beaches which are not red herrings. And all that "classified nato secret", "not allowed on networks connected to the internet", "breach in protocols" and "strict rules" are BS.
But to say for sure, we would need a thorough analysis of the incriminated data.
I'm not saying this isn't bad enough. I'm just saying there are rules in place to prevent these kinds of things. Like physical network separation and machines with disabled interfaces (like network, usb, firewire). You would require physical access to steal data from those machines and it would be either guarded or locked away.
Data security is taken very seriously within the military & NATO but I can't speak for how other countries do things. Accidents happen, things are poorly secured.
I'm just speaking from my own experience, even if it is limited.
No I am saying that if they are doing their jobs properly any data accessible from the internet is data that would not pose (much) of a security threat if released. I agree that most likely a lot of them do poor jobs but you should not underestimate their rules, regulations and strictness when it comes to data security.
Anyone with access to classified information is given extensive security training, with regular refreshers. This means that if classified documents to make their way onto an unclassified system, it was done by someone who was specifically trained not to do so.
You are correct that, despite this training, classified information do sometimes accidentally make it onto unclassified computers. It is usually discovered almost immediately (most often by the person who did it), and almost always involves very small amounts of information (it's hard to "accidentally" copy large numbers of files). The bigger the collection of documents, the more likely it is to be discovered quickly. These events are a huge deal because the cleanup process is so extensive and thorough.
I've read a lot of conflicting reports in various articles, probably because most journalists don't understand that words like "secret," "classified," "confidential," "restricted," and "sensitive" all have very specific meanings in a military context and are not interchangeable. As far as I can piece together, the documents in question were merely "restricted," not secret (not classified at all, for that matter).
While I am sure there are protocols that are followed and motions gone through, I don't believe even a little bit that everyone with access to NATO SECRET documents follows these protocols very closely.
We all know how this thing goes. We know we should be using GPG all the time, we know we should be using exclusively unique, long, random passwords for each web site we visit, we know we shouldn't enable JavaScript or Flash unless we have a good reason to trust the site, etc., but out of convenience we ignore almost all of these things that we know are potential security problems.
That same impulse functions in government, and I would assume it would function to an even greater extent because most people just have no comprehension at all that almost every computer network out there, even so-called "high security" networks from whitehats, intel agencies, etc., is just sitting wide open and waiting for someone to come along and ask for its contents.
The one sensible (and probably the least likely outcome) to all of this LulzSec nonsense would be a serious inventory of the state of our computer security as a whole, and new industry standards that actually required, encouraged, and generally deployed competently secured networks. That of course is almost impossible to fathom and I expect we will get a bunch of draconian and incomprehensible legislation making it a crime to type too fast while hacktivists continue to steal everyone's files forever.
I see no end to this kind of activity (because, as before, I don't believe most people, even big companies or governments, will be able to secure their digital resources) and it is a serious potential destabilizing force in our society, which is now so dependent and accustomed to electronic communication. If the government can't secure its networks and is constantly subject to this class of attack, what will it do? And how will the citizenry react? This could have scary, real ramifications before anyone knows it.
>While I am sure there are protocols that are followed and motions gone through, I don't believe even a little bit that everyone with access to NATO SECRET documents follows these protocols very closely.
We all know how this thing goes. We know we should be using GPG all the time, we know we should be using exclusively unique, long, random passwords for each web site we visit, we know we shouldn't enable JavaScript or Flash unless we have a good reason to trust the site, etc., but out of convenience we ignore almost all of these things that we know are potential security problems.
There's a key difference between the security measures you describe, which people tend to neglect, and the protocols that keep classified information off of unclassified systems: the measures you describe are tedious and time-consuming, so people tend to cut corners on them. When it comes to moving information between classified and unclassified networks, the opposite is true: they are completely segregated, so you have to go out of your way to move information back and forth. The simplest way to do it is by sneaker-net, and even that is made difficult because these days the computers on military networks are set up to not mount flash drives, so you would have to burn the files to a CD, then get that CD past various layers of physical security. It can be done, but you have to deliberately go out of your way to do it. It's not something that would happen because someone was being lazy or trying to cut corners.
>...almost every computer network out there, even so-called "high security" networks from whitehats, intel agencies, etc., is just sitting wide open and waiting for someone to come along and ask for its contents.
This is simply not true. All classified information is stored on networks that are not connected to the regular internet. It's not just a VPN: they are completely segregated.
>This is simply not true. All classified information is stored on networks that are not connected to the regular internet. It's not just a VPN: they are completely segregated.
I understand that it's true that there is no physical internet connection to the computers that access that data in many cases. I tend to believe it's not so air-tight as supposed but whatever. The Manning case demonstrates that even keeping your computers on a completely independent network doesn't prevent a low-level employee (or someone using his credentials...) from just waltzing in and taking everything. Manning had access far beyond his needs and he was able to download virtually any data that appetized him. Even on a non-internet system, if you have multiple millions of people with that kind of access, you're going to wind up in trouble and you definitely shouldn't assume that data hasn't gone anywhere.
I also understand that it requires some initial effort to physically move the data from the private network to a computer attached to a public network, but I don't think this is really sufficient to stop the transfer from occurring. The same thing occurs with paper documents -- technically these are never supposed to leave government property (or corporate property, etc), but it is still really common for someone to take copies home. While it takes some effort to take the copies with you, the effort is obviously worthwhile to ensure easy on-demand access.
The same will be in true in cases involving digital documents, and people will take out CDs and email the contents to themselves just out of convenience, so they can pull up the relevant information when they aren't physically at work. I believe that this happens.
If your network has a comparative handful of users this is probably something you can manage, but big corporations and governments have a lot of users and I don't believe that they can keep this stuff from leaking out to the real internet in violation of protocol eventually anyway, and I also don't believe that that'd be sufficient to stop leakage even if it were possible.
Again, we see from the Manning case that even if the network was not connected to the internet, the security on the system was horrible and allowed far, far too much access. Hackability from the internet isn't the only relevant consideration here.
>Hackability from the internet isn't the only relevant consideration here.
True, but it is the central issue in this thread: the documents in question were hacked from a non-classified network.
The scenarios you describe for people circumventing barriers between classified and unclassified systems for the sake of convenience sound quite plausible, until you consider the severe penalties for doing so. With that in mind, only incredibly foolhardy individuals would do so for the sake of mere convenience--a much more serious motivation would be required for most people. In a large enough organization, someone would most likely do it anyway, but it wouldn't be nearly common enough to leave "high security networks...sitting wide open."
Really, the only plausible scenario for significant leakage of classified information is deliberate espionage. I'm not sure why people keep citing Manning as setting some sort of precedent or revealing a previously unknown vulnerability, because this type of espionage has been going on since the beginning of recorded history, and probably even before that. It's the reason why access to classified information requires both a clearance and "need to know." When "need to know" rules are relaxed or ignored, it becomes relatively easy for people to take information that they have no business accessing and simply walk out of the building with it, whether it be hard-copies or soft-copies. This tends to go in cycles, with "need to know" rules gradually loosening until a major incident occurs, after which they are rapidly tightened, and then the whole process repeats. There was a rash of such incidents all at once in the mid-'80s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985:_The_Year_of_the_Spy
Nokia is very good in the design of usable mobiles. Since they acquired Qt, they are also very good in software design.
Apple is not a good example. This article makes no sense.
"Are intrinsic differences between the sexes responsible for the underrepresentation of women in mathematical and scientific disciplines ?"
I think so.