Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon

Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by generalmycoup on Thursday April 19, 2018 @02:14PM (#16878466)

Exactly. These 3000 engineers that protested in Google don't seem to live in reality. In the real world, China and Russia are doing government sponsored hacking against Western government/companies all the time, stealing IPs, strategies and bankrupting companies. I wonder how these engineers would respond when Google is hacked and its business is down, and engineers fired.

Case in point:

"Brian Shields, former Nortel security adviser, alleges Huawei hacked company for 10 years..."

"It was on behalf of Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies that could have used this information to compete against us in the marketplace. It gave them a strategic advantage. How can you survive when you have a competitor basically right there knowing all your moves, what you're doing, what you see as the future products?"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-aga...

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by oh_sigh on Thursday April 19, 2018 @02:35PM (#16878711)

Americans are generally pro-military, save for ultra left-leaning types. The fact that only 3000 people signed out of a population of ~100k(which already clearly trends leftwards), tells me that most people did not actually have a problem with that project.

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by philwelch on Thursday April 19, 2018 @02:56PM (#16878916)

The majority of people on either side also probably recognize that signing your name to an open letter opposing your employer’s policies and decisions is a career-limiting move.

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by oh_sigh on Thursday April 19, 2018 @03:00PM (#16878968)

I really doubt that at google.

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by philwelch on Thursday April 19, 2018 @06:48PM (#16880844)

Google literally fired someone for that, so...

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by oh_sigh on Thursday April 19, 2018 @07:06PM (#16880938)

I'm speaking specifically about this situation, not about signing open letters in general. And James wasn't fired for signing a letter, he was fired for writing it in the first place.

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by philwelch on Thursday April 19, 2018 @10:52PM (#16881831)

But then he signed his name to it. Although, yes, you are technically correct.

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by notacoward on Thursday April 19, 2018 @10:50PM (#16881821)

> Americans are generally pro-military, save for ultra left-leaning types.

That depends a lot on what "pro-military" means. Do most Americans wish success and well-being for our military service members? Yes. Do most Americans approve of how large our military has become, affecting both government budgets and culture, or of the foreign policy that puts so many of those service members in harm's way? I doubt it. It's not "ultra-left" to oppose militarism. You know what is ultra-left? Having a decent social safety net that enables veterans to integrate back into society, instead of abandoning them like the ultra-right does.

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by throwawaymanbot on Thursday April 19, 2018 @02:34PM (#16878696)

USGOV does this also... They learned it of us.

BUT, why would they NOT work on interesting projects for the gov? Projects are projects.

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by generalmycoup on Thursday April 19, 2018 @02:56PM (#16878921)

> They learned it of us.

from us, 50 Cent Army/Chinese Government AI who is imitating an American

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Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by vkou on Thursday April 19, 2018 @02:20PM (#16878548)

How exactly will working on drone strike software protect some executive's account from being spear-phished?

This smells like FUD.

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[dead]

Re:Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon by sctb on Thursday April 19, 2018 @03:14PM (#16879099)

You're breaking a lot of guidelines, including:

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.

Could you please stop?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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