rhyzomatic

Not an SRE but I admit to saying that I expected Twitter to have some serious outages in the coming months after firing all those people. Honestly, how did the remaining engineers at Twitter pull it off? I can't really imagine losing more than half of my coworkers and not having the wheels fall off pretty quickly.

The commenter you originally replied to was wrong. Pfizer (and other vaccine researchers) never did research on transmission.

But again, can you cite any sources saying that at one point they [Pfizer and other vaccine researchers] did claim that?

The answer of course is that no, you can't, because they didn't. They didn't lie and neither did governments and health organizations. But because we were asked to vaccinate to protect ourselves and others (which worked, and was quickly backed by independent scientific research after vaccines were offered to the public), it sounds like a big gotcha lie if Pfizer says they specifically didn't research that.

Note there are ways you protect others by vaccinating other than reducing transmission. By significantly lowering your chance of hospitalization, you ensure there are more free hospital beds for those that need it (due to COVID or not).

Your first paragraph is condescending and unnecessary.

Can you cite any sources that confirm that "governments, researchers and medical professionals worldwide claimed they did test effectiveness against transmission"? I haven't seen any, and a cursory Google search reveals articles like this [0] which confirm my memory that this was never claimed by the vaccine researchers. Independent research after the vaccines were released did find they reduced transmission significantly (for the early variants).

This reference to the Pfizer "admission" seems way more like a gotcha tactic. Pfizer never made the claim, nor was it necessary to show the vaccine was safe and served its primary objective.

Edit: Oops, forgot to cite my source :P

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...

Do you mind sharing some links to back up these claims?

Just watched a video [0] where he clearly comes across as being pro workers rights, and against passing prop 22 in California. He seems to be generally pro-union while still trying to point out some general issues with them. He also says he would be "offended" if his employees unionized at LMG, which while maybe is a bit stupid to say, I don't think counts as anti-union.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpyiNOD-MOk

What is the vagueness present in a basic credit card transaction? (Not saying there isn't any, just curious what you mean)

Not every transaction needs that level of customer protection, but it's very nice to have. Currently, banks that provide consumer protections are motivated to hunt down fraud, which helps everyone, not just credit card users. It keeps the level of fraud overall low.

And while I do agree some transparency would be gained through smart escrow contracts as opposed to credit card transactions, I disagree it's any more "sovereign". For the system you're describing to function, you need established third parties that both you and sellers trust. These third parties may choose to revoke your access, restrict your purchases, etc in the same way banks do now. In short, crypto still has not solved the trust problem.

(Also, while smart contracts do work for cancelable contracts, being able to "issue" a new credit card for each company as a consumer and then cancel it whenever solves it better and without any blockchain this or that)

Thank you dang, I originally read the first link on my phone and didn't notice that it was quoting another blog.

As Ar-Curunir mentioned, you can use a technique called non-interactive zero knowledge proofs (NIZKs). Usually in ZKPs the prover will go through a part of the proof, send it to the verifier, the verifier will then send back a challenge, and the prover will reply with the final part of the proof based on the challenge. The basic flavor of NIZK I've seen is that instead of getting a challenge from the verifier, the prover simply does hash(prover id | first part of proof) and uses the result as the challenge. The `prover id` part is there such that they don't have complete control over the input to the hash. Doing it this way allows the prover to do the entire proof on their own and then send the whole thing to the verifier who can check the proof without any further interaction, saving network costs in exchange for a single hash.

Super fun paper.

It seems like their modification to Aaronson's algorithm would also work for Yao's garbled circuits, i.e.

1. Alice generates a long random bitstring s, and publishes hash(s)

2. Alice crafts a garbled circuit with just one AND gate, where the false output is 0+s, and the true output is 1. Alice sends the circuit and her input to Bob.

3. Bob gets his input from Alice using oblivious transfer. He evaluates the circuit, publishing the result.

4. If the result starts with 0, Bob verifies that hash of the rest of the string matches the hash published by Alice. Alice also checks to make sure the rest of the string matches her original s.

I must be missing something here, but why not just go with a challenge-proof type scheme? Something like

1. You want to prove to $PotentialEmployer that you own address A which has necessary credentials.

2. $PotentialEmployer sends you a random string.

3. You sign it with the private key of address A and send them the proof.

4. $PotentialEmployer verifies the signed string.

If the employer has this proof and can see in the metadata that it's your name and date of birth (or whatever), wouldn't that be enough?

No problems from Hong Kong.

I agree. It's very hard for me to believe that he can both have been so clearly well-versed in crypto and with its beauty, enough to create a masterpiece like bitcoin, and at the same time hesitate to just sign a message. Not only is signing something convincing and easy, it's taking advantage of that same beauty of crypto that he should appreciate so much.

It seems backwards to me that someone like Satoshi who obviously does value privacy and anonymity would get on BBC and declare "I am Satoshi, and I want to be left alone" and yet at the same time not take the cleanest, least extravagant option of just signing something.

For Android: Password Store! https://github.com/zeapo/Android-Password-Store It's on F-Droid (not sure about Google Play) and it works really well. You need another app to manage your keys, but there is OpenKeyChain for that (also on F-Droid).

For points 1) and 4), just so you are aware, "they" as a singular pronoun has been in popular use since the 14th century. The idea that the "correct" gender neutral singular pronoun is "he" came about in the 19th century. I find it much harder to support the idea that "'they' is supposed to be plural" with this in mind.

Is there a good way for this person to contact the owners of the Facebook accounts to alert them of this, maybe recommending that they change their passwords?

I would also love to be a part of this.

Please add me! william [at] williambernoudy [dot] com