gress

Punishment and reward are very limited mechanisms for learning behavior. Mimicry is one of the others and is much more powerful.

The headline 'Obama administration quietly rejected ways to bypass smartphone encryption' would be more true and less sensational.

I said nothing about not reporting. It's the distorted headlines laced with innuendo that are damaging.

Actually we know enough to know that assuming that discrimination and perverse socialization is at least part of the cause is totally rational.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test

If Google thought there was a problem with intrusive ads, they would penalize them.

That was true when the incentive was for vulnerabilities to be disclosed and fixed for the good of all, but sadly today, vulnerabilities are extremely valuable and so the incentive is for them to be sold to the powerful.

The police use violence to protect the regular market. One could just as easily say that violence is market related.

Obscurity is not security. True.

Transparency is not security. Also true.

Personalization is not a problem. Systematic bias is a severe problem, even if it is not intentional.

The 'one true web' idea is a red herring. We absolutely need to know how google biases the results.

Clickbait and sensationalism is a thing in journalism. It is morally wrong because it spreads disinformation and is harmful to both individuals and democracy, but it is legal and profitable, and we haven't done enough to shun it, so it happens.

Yes it would. Cybercriminals are even more of a threat than spy agencies to most individuals.

[edit: in case it is unclear, I am saying that cybercrime is as strong reason for individuals to use ubiquitous encryption as government snooping not that it is a justification for government snooping]

Sure, but the stock market is not valuable as a prediction market.

The responses on this thread seem to prove that Apple knows what it is doing with its security strategy. The fact that people blindly disable protections and end up causing massive malware outbreaks is exactly the reason they are introducing things like Gatekeeper and Rootless. Arguably, this incident is evidence in favor of them locking down Gatekeeper further.

Why would you do that?

Why would you do that? It it exposes you to risk, and as has now been proven, if adopted as a general practice it exposes everyone else to risk too.

So Apple is putting user freedom ahead of advertiser freedom in this case, whereas Google is siding with the advertisers for obvious reasons.

Perhaps because that's more costly? Sometimes the disallowed frequencies exist within a range of allowed frequencies. A hardware limitation would involve filter stages that would add cost.

Did you read the article or are you just deciding it's bullshit because of the title?

Do you have any information at all about what they are doing?

How do you suggest dealing with drunk drivers or getaway cars?

Separating out 'Desktop Chrome' from Android makes this a deliberate Apple's to Oranges comparison. They are both Google products.

You're free to run 'Desktop Chrome' or Firefox on Apple's 'Deskrop' computers. Nothing anticompetitive there.

What has malware got to do with anything?

This is not accurate. Using an ad blocker makes no demand whatsoever of people producing content, who are completely free to stop displaying it in public.

Imagine the following:

In a busy shopping mall, a busker starts to play music. A crowd starts to form enjoying the music.

Then, a strange thing happens - people with clipboards and cameras start to walk through the crowd taking photos of the shoppers and their children, making notes of their genders, heights and weights, clothing, and the shopping bags they are carrying, plus whether or not the women are pregnant.

A minute or two into the performance, more people walk through the crowd, holding placards with brand and product names on them. They walk up to each person, holding the placard in front of them and blocking their view, using a stopwatch to make sure they do so for at least 30 seconds.

One of the women says - 'hey, that's not cool - stop being so creepy'.

The clipboard and placard people remain silent, but the busker shouts - "hey - that's how I get paid! If you don't like it you are a criminal, stealing my performance".

We do know for certain that the ad is at fault. We can see that the ad is what is flickering into blocking the text. We also know that the NYT doesn't have a flickering block on every page.

Can you give us any details of what you mean by 'horrible' or 'worst'?

This scheme isn't needed with Android since most devices are vulnerable to well known exploits.

How is 'not visiting sites with obtrusive ads' meaningfully different from just blocking the ads?

We're in agreement on that - which is why I made the comment about Android. We had a chance for that to be open, but Google wanted to retain control.

Over what time frame?

The recursive problem is the problem. If the utility function is arbitrary, then utilitarianism is just a tautology.

He said it, therefore it is his character.