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krspykrm

Re:Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:41AM (#25956637)
> We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption.

I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's something baked into the laws of math that says your society is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption, where the laws of math do say this is always possible).

It is absolutely within the realm of technological possibility to build a society with largely decentralized infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."

Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations on Thursday January 28, 2021 @11:59AM (#25944864)
Corporate sponsorship of open source is entirely dependent on top talent caring about open source and thus being more willing to tolerate working for EvilMegacorp if major pieces of the infrastructure they work on are open.

When top talent just accepts the big money contract regardless, corporations see little incentive to sponsor open source. Software development is the only industry that has large portions of infrastructure free and open for anyone to use, and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago.

It's up to us to carry that torch, or we will become like every other industry.

Moderation is when pornography is banned from r/programming. Censorship is when pornography is banned from r/pornography.

Most pro-censorship voices motte-and-bailey the latter by conflating it with the former.

Re:IPFS Support in Brave on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @06:39PM (#25840511)
Yeah I just tried downloading the latest version and it looks much better now. I remember I tried ~3 years ago or so and it was horribly inefficient, so I deleted it, then gave it another shot around a year ago and came to the same conclusion.

But yes, from running it ~10 minutes just now, it looks quite reasonable.

Re:IPFS Support in Brave on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @06:02PM (#25840146)
Seconding this. Unless something's changed, my experience with the default Go daemon they provide was shock at how much resources it consumed in the background. It was something like 12% CPU usage while doing nothing at all for hours on end - I wasn't even accessing any ipfs content.
Re:We are sending more foster kids to prison than to college on Monday January 18, 2021 @01:11PM (#25824669)
Did you bother actually looking up the data? Because intentional homicide in the US is indeed more than 6x greater than it is in places like Austria and Switzerland.

There is no country in western Europe with anywhere near the violent crime rate as the US.

Re:We are sending more foster kids to prison than to college on Monday January 18, 2021 @01:06PM (#25824622)
Do you want the actual answer or are you trying to make a point with a rhetorical question you assume you know the answer to?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @06:25PM (#25755497)
> I mean Greenwald has also asserted that no Parler user was involved in the insurrection, which is a straight-up lie.

Actually, what is written is, and I quote, "a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler." But I'm sure that was an innocent mistake on your part, not a straight-up lie like you accuse Greenwald of.

Re:Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @04:22PM (#25753907)
"Prison industrial complex" is verbal sleight of hand to blame a system rather than people, but in reality these market forces are merely the revealed preference of what people want. If people wanted these inmates free - and by wanted I mean wanted in the revealed preference sense, not the virtue signal on the internet sense - capitalism would have them free tomorrow.
Re:Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @12:45PM (#25750412)
Industry has nothing to do with it. Every country has industry. The reason the US has so many in prison is because its people are the more hair-on-fire moralistic crusaders in the civilized world and they want people in prison.
Re:The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen on Monday January 11, 2021 @12:55PM (#25732824)
So maybe they just made the same mistake I did?
Re:Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago on Monday January 11, 2021 @12:53PM (#25732785)
The overwhelming majority don't have any epistemic basis for what they believe and are just saying what they think is socially-acceptable to say.
Re:The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen on Monday January 11, 2021 @09:17AM (#25729084)
If it was indeed a backdoor, sure, but that's a judgment call, not something anyone knows. As others have noted, e2e was a novelty at the time, not a norm, and the platform itself was extremely new (less than a year old), and their stated reason for this was to protect against weak client RNG, which in retrospect sounds like a weak reason, but looking back at the news of 2013, this was right around the time the Snowden leaks caused everyone to believe RDRAND could indeed be compromised, so "client having state-compromised RNG" was indeed something on everyone's mind.

Further, the fact that this was caught so quickly is in some sense a vindication of Telegram's model - even in its infancy when it had orders of magnitude fewer users, the fact that the client was open source allowed someone to quickly spot a vulnerability.

The verdict? IMO Telegram secret chats are probably secure (90% certain), but if I were plotting a murder or something, I wouldn't do it over a smartphone app anyway. There's just too many leaky, complex layers in the stack, some of which aren't even open, and quite dubiously so. If security is a life-or-death situation for you, you'd be a fool to use any smartphone app.

Re:Google suspending Parler from the Google Play store on Saturday January 09, 2021 @05:43AM (#25699282)
Agree with this. Everyone who was never dependent on FAANG in the first place because of tinfoil Stallmanism is now sitting back roasting their marshmellows as the rest of society burns.

Either you control your device, or your device will be used to control you.

Re:Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo on Saturday December 19, 2020 @07:59AM (#25477138)
That's kinda the point - the healthcare bureaucracy is up to its ears in precisely this kind of bullshit. The "studies" demonstrating the beneficial properties of circumcision are often backed by groups with obvious biases (eg, Jewish or Islamic religious groups) and almost never mention the possibility (and likely correct explanation) that the causality behind the improved health correlation goes the other way: healthy people are simply more likely to be circumcised (more likely to be from or join a religion that values cleanliness, restricted sexual behavior, etc.), rather than circumcision itself causing improved health.
Re:Swiss report reveals new details on CIA spying operation on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @01:42PM (#25061384)
> Presumably the governments who purchased systems from Crypto AG had people educated in security do some due diligence on Crypto AG's products before purchasing them.

Presumably they didn't. The article states "employees in the engineering and research departments repeatedly identified vulnerabilities in the products’ designs that they were mysteriously prevented from fixing", which implies that all it takes is for competent people to view the source code to expose the sort of fraud that was happening here.

Re:Haskell Foundation on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @12:50PM (#24991293)
FPC is not that crazy of an organization. Yes, I know in the past there's been drama between its members and other haskellers over stack/cabal etc., but I'd feel more comfortable if the Foundation were able to muster the diplomatic finesse to overcome that.
Re:Haskell Foundation on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @12:11PM (#24990895)
Not blaming anyone or pretending to be familiar with what transpired, but that is not encouraging to hear.
Re:Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access on Sunday October 25, 2020 @10:09AM (#24886386)
We have learned this and we are better. Engineers are not responsible for this nonsense. It's the other half of the Randian universe that does this stuff.
Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises on Friday October 23, 2020 @06:29AM (#24867947)
I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech.

Would I trade a European-controlled alternative to Android and iOS for yet another particle collider in Geneva? Yes, absolutely.

IMO one of the most prominent reasons - and one that I never see mentioned - that learning a language as an adult is more difficult is that the older you are, the more socially-unacceptable it becomes to point out grammatical and vocabulary errors. When you're a child, elders correcting you is so natural it scarcely even breaks the flow of conversation:

child: "Me and Tim went -"

adult: "Tim and I went."

child: "{pause} Tim and I went..."

As an adult, you simply do not get this kind of feedback. There's no chance in hell I would interrupt another adult to make the above correction. It's simply too disrespectful. And yet it is precisely this disrespectful interruption and correction that enables children to have tight feedback loops which result in fast, effective learning.

Re:Leaving Mozilla on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @01:09PM (#24710334)
> The main revenue source (in this case licensing money from Google) isn't cutting it/drying up

If Firefox weren't bleeding market share this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

Re:App Review process updates on Monday August 31, 2020 @01:03PM (#24333457)
Internal metrics, yes. If another reviewer finds an issue in an app that you reviewed, then you get your score docked, so reviewers have an incentive to whine about everything, since there's no penalty for bringing up issues that aren't actually issues and wasting everyone's time.
Re:Trump gives nod to Oracle buyout of TikTok in US on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @12:00PM (#24211848)
It's cognitive dissonance. America is supposed to be the good guys, but on American social media everyone is toxic and hates each other and it's all full of political and corporate AstroTurfing; China is supposed to be the bad guys, but on TikTok everyone's happy and enjoying themselves and the content is organic and largely apolitical.

The easiest way to get rid of the cognitive dissonance is not to fix US social media, but to get rid of TikTok.

Re:Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf] on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @04:27PM (#24065196)
> Secondly, the 8k dose doesn't seem realistic historically. Is there any diet that does not include the products of modern tech, that gets anywhere near those levels consistently? Doesn't seem likely.

Because historically most vitamin D intake didn't come from diet, but from sunlight exposure. Varying widely depending on how much skin you're exposing, the color of your skin, latitude, season, etc., estimates of vitamin D hourly vitamin D synthesis can be on the order of tens of thousands.

Good stuff! I made a sudoku in CSS (https://identicalsnowflake.github.io/sudoku.html) a while back, but it looks like the variable trick mentioned in the readme is a more straightforward way to embed logic, so if I were to make something similar today, I'd probably pursue that route.
Good topic. Have you seen this high-performance Reed-Solomon implementation (1) or Wirehair (2)? Thoughts?

1) https://github.com/klauspost/reedsolomon

2) https://github.com/catid/wirehair