dannyobrien

Oh absolutely based on those reviews! I was surprised that John Gruber of all people was so harsh on it. As an Apple Vision Pro owner, I'm fairly tolerant of first-gen devices :)

One thing to note is that Aaron was, at the time, increasingly working in traditional politics, through his activist group Demand Progress[1] and his work with up-and-coming progressive politicians. I think he had come to the conclusion -- rather presciently -- that working in mainstream politics was the most effective thing he could do. Any criminal sentence would have severely hampered that work. I heard that played on his mind a lot.

There's a what-if story here: one of the people Aaron worked most closely with in this part of his life was a young Ben Wikler[2]. They shared a lot of views about how things should change, and how to change them. Watching Ben's career since then, I can't help but feel that Aaron would have followed a similar path. By 2025, Ben was senior enough in the Democratic Party to be a competitive candidate for Chair of the DNC.

I often wonder whether Carmen Ortiz[3], the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the case, or any of the rest of that generation, realise what they did to the Democratic Party's future chances by unjustly targeting one of its most promising figures.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Wikler

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz

Given the criticism the Duo has had for not being a very good iPhone[1], I was hoping for a foldable iPad mini, which would seem to dodge those problems. Maybe in a year or two (does anyone remember the iPod Touch, which was an iPhone without the phone bit? I loved that thing.)

[1] - See "far the worst iPhone experience ever" Daring Fireball review: https://daringfireball.net/#:~:text=one.%20The%20outer%20dev...

I'm presuming this is all preserved in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Term_Web_Archive (though making that more easily available would be great -- another project for https://wayback-labs.sf.archive.org/ )

I wondered the same thing, and it looks like it uses this CMOS-compatible high level TFT driver: https://www.raio.com.tw/en/RA8889.html with a character generator, geometry primitives, etc.

Interesting! How would you describe the difference between Problee and https://manifold.markets ?

No, I was agreeing with you.

I mean, in those rooms I was arguing over the best policies to prevent access and surveillance and unlawful processing, and what the potential cost-benefit analysis was. And what I was arguing against was an assumption that physically compelling all companies -- or worse, all citizens -- to keep their data within the borders of the host country, would protect you from these problems.

We'd have to explain that if the data was physically in Brazil, but hosted by a U.S. company, that would not stop that company from accessing that data remotely -- unless you specified that. We'd have to also explain that if you were intended to defend against US mass surveillance of non-US persons by the US intelligence services, intelligence services and SIGINT are univerally almost defined by their broad remit to target foreign nations on their own territory in violation of local law. And, finally, if you intended to use the prohibiting the movement of of data as a sanction against companies to punish them for violating data protection standards, as pre-GDPR law in the EU had as an ultimate last resort, and the GDPR often ends up relying on as a last resort, you would find that multinationals are more capable of putting up servers in your home territory and continuing to serve your citizens than they are of substantially changing their practices regarding data processing.

I don't want to sound nihilistic about this -- regulations can exist in these areas. But it's those politics and policies of the institutions with control over the data that are the most important part of this: not where the bits are kept. Especially when those bits are encrypted, and the keys and access controls are elsewhere.

Oh man, I was so close.

No, I'm making no "unconditionality" claim here: there are just risks and benefits. Sometimes you're the person in the room highlighting the potential problems. The risk with doing that is that when those problems don't happen, you look like a fool. But someone should raise the problems anyway, because that's part of the risk assessment!

Of course, if the problems do happen, then you get to indulge in "I told you so". But only if you failed to convince anyone at the time.

Noooooooooooo not XHTML

Yep, exactly. There's a peculiarly unsatisfying kind of vindication that comes from making "slippery slope" arguments, and then watch them play, and now you are now both a) technically correct, and b) fucked. You'll excuse me if I have a brief "I told you so" moment about a scenario about Amazon's UAE datacenters being bombed without bakcups because of a US-instigated Iranian conflict, where -- if I'd ever dared to describe it -- would definitely have got me laughed out of those rooms in 2010.

See my other answers, but briefly: no, they were not thinking about this, which is why we were raising it. I guess the counterintuitive point we were trying to get across is that with most things, the best way to keep it safe from being lost is to put it in a known place, and lock it away. But for data, the strategy -- for that scenario -- is to keep it in a lot of places, with heterogenous defense strategies. This is for data loss, of course, not access or surveillance or unlawful processing. But there is a cost as well as a benefit to deliberately limiting your options.

(I can feel someone saying "but surely having redundancy in one country is good enough, so I'll just say that I know relatively sane people who try to have hemispheric redundancy in their data, and also you never know when two different-in-every-quality-but one locations will suffer from the same disaster. Floods; heat-waves; national protests and strikes. It's surprising how often rare things happen!)

On your second point, it really is crazy. And also amazing that this is a capability that is -- or should be -- available to anyone in the world, not just in the US, and not just devs. Hopefully without also having to think about their data suddenly finding itself in a warzone.

(I like the accidental pun of "Clout Provider" btw, which sadly conveys some of what they try to imply).

We may not be disagreeing that much. My argument was, and is, it's not about where the data is, it's about who has control over it. The counter-argument was "well if it's in another country, then we don't have jurisdiction, so it's going to be much harder". But what you need jurisdiction over is the people. Otherwise, you end up with multi-national corporate end-runs where you have shonky companies offering to store data locally, but who knows what department has control and access.

To be fair, the context I was having these conversations was countries arguing for data residency to combat the threat of mass surveillance (corporate and governmental) in the US, and the limited protections their users had relative to US nationals. But again, the problem is that it assumes that jurisdiction remains territorial: which is not how this was ever going to play out. The next wave after data residency requirements, beyond the usual extraterritorial intelligence community actions, was laws like the US CLOUD Act, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act, and Australia's TIA law, which effectively attempts to provide regular government departments and law enforcement with the legal ability to access data that would technically be on foreign soil.

My point was not that corporations should not self-police, but the concept of "it's stored here so we can oversee it" is not as clearcut as it seemed, and it risks introducing a new level of complexity to resiliently storing data. Which may be worth the price, but was never considered at the level this was discussed.

I think both of these things are (very) often true, but it is also true that if I'm going to have backups, it is (all other things being equal) better to minimize correlated risk. The assumption in a lot of these conversations is that having the data "in one place" (ie inside a country) was "safer" than having it in "somewhere else". The tougher counterintuitive argument was that it can be safer to have data stored in multiple places, for some risk assessments -- and that for others, having data close by was less important, in the case of seizure or surveillance or illegal use, than who had legal or effective access to that data.

I'm not sure you were disagreeing with (past) me; but if you were, could you expand on your point?

Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop insisting on where the data resided for jurisdictional purposes and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived.

[1] OK, "we" here is probably just me -- it was one of those things where the chances of successfully convincing anyone was so small, and the commercial advantages of just nodding along, and then changing your product offering was so great, that really very few people raised it or had reason to. But somebody had to!

(I think EDR here means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endpoint_detection_and_respons... )

I want to know and understand how/when we switched from all-caps tags -- <HTML><HEAD></HEAD> to lowercase. It was early on, but what prompted it?

I just wanted to add how much in awe I am at you creating this game in '93 in assembly. Around the same time I was trying to write a game on the Atari ST, and the dedication to the project -- especially when documentation was so thin on the ground, pre-Internet -- is extraordinary. Do you have any stories from debugging the game? I always found that the most dispiriting part, after the endless hope of handcrafting the code that I was sure would work first time...

Duelling opinions! (Not really -- downtown SF has had a lot of trouble in the last few years, though as Noah notes, it's been feeling a bit better lately).

However, the trajectory isn't quite that clear, at least over a longer timeline and across the whole city. Back in the 1990s, a lot of downtown was very dodgy feeling, though mostly a block or so away from Market. Market itself varied across its length -- by the time you got to Van Ness it was becoming sketchier. Its status dipped and weaved as the city's fortunes shifted -- not necessarily corresponding exactly to economic success, but by 2011 downtown I think it was fairly "back'.

Other neighborhoods did not do so well during that time, to my memory. The strange thing about 2011 was that San Francisco survived the 2008 crash fairly well economically, so on the surface it was doing well, especially by comparison, but underlying it was a big upswell in the problems that would overtake it in 2015-2022. I'm not sure they were visible everywhere in the city.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that San Francisco is a heavily boom and bust city, with lots of neighborhood variation in fortunes -- I think plenty of people would argue that Market's upturn has come at the expense of pushing problems out to the periphery. But I wouldn't disagree that it's still digging itself out of the COVID hole, five years on, and despite a lot of potential tax income from the current boom.

I like Brave, and I know and respect many of the technical team there. I looked into the various stories about the browser that led to it being unpopular in some key communities, and I really couldn't find anything some misunderstandings, common business practices (which you can legitimately disapprove of), and a wish to register opposition to their connection to cryptocurrency/web3.

I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.

So none of these are mandated backdoors, or weakening end-to-end encryption. They're examples of the intelligence services pursuing signals collection. Mandated backdoors would be something like the the United States' (as far as we know) failed attempts to compel companies to insert code to allow third parties to enter and read their communications, or the UK's (as far as we know) long-postponed attempts to add ghost devices to Apple and Meta's e2e communication systems.

I'm not so much asking as a gotcha, as modern examples of this kind of backdoor (or published encryption weaknesses) would be a big deal. I realise that there are many other tactics that states, especially the US, pursue that undermine privacy online. These just seemed weirdly specific to projects that the US has, in fact, failed to pull off for years: compelled insertion of code, and deliberately weakened encryption.

(ObContext: I worked at EFF during the Snowden revelations, and worked on understanding the impact of PRISM, and Bullrun specifically.)

Could you give examples of the US adding backdoors and weakening end-to-end encryption? I'll give you the almost-certain weakening of proposed crypto standards, and Clinton-era export controls, but I don't think I've seen any movement in that direction recently. The most successful attempts statutorily seem to be in the UK and the US.

Also: the European Court of Human Rights, as a non-EU institution, doesn't have an enforcement mechanism, so I'm not sure it's a good example to give in defending against such proposals. For instance, Russia declined to respect that decision, and I don't think it's had much effect on the UK's backdoor regime.

A somewhat similar pattern has been suggested with the Open Knowledge Format: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blo...

well that and the claustrophobia and the sugars

The best state of affairs is that neither Aaron nor Meta nor anyone else should be targeted for scraping. It shouldn't be a crime. I understand the ire about the injustice, but I don't think the right situation is that because Aaron's case was wrongly pursued, we should somehow enforce that error in the name of consistency.

There's also Spritely's[0] work on Ocapn[1], and Hoot[2], their Guile Scheme implementation in Wasm.

[0] - https://spritely.institute/

[1] - https://github.com/ocapn/ocapn

[2] - https://spritely.institute/hoot/