subjoriented
Fundamentally, being a gateway to information in a legal environment where the hosting the content as a curator puts you under risk creates deep incentives to whitewash content. Those forces are already present for companies which might accidentally sustain 9gag/4chan type cultures/commentary which contradicts however its productizing its platform.
Reddit is another example a company that has recently scrubbed itself of most controversial content, including content critical of or dangerous to its host's countries political and national security naratives. Twitter has started down that journey as well.
It feels like we're experiencing the growing pains of social network and hosted content boom reinvented on web technology over the past couple decades.
It's kind of amazing in retrospect how controversial some of the "mundane" applications of technology to society have been, whereas a couple decades ago most of the moral panic centered around concepts like "online dating", which to date have actually been relatively controversy scarce.
The West invented technologically enabled surveillance. The Stasi in Germany - for example - developed a records and accounting system and would use home telephony equipment to spy on dissidents. As of the 70s and 80s the United States NSA has backdoored much of the modern global communications systems - and has build these systems to scale intelligence into actionable intelligence for partner enforcement organizations (CIA/FBI/etc). At a municipal scale, the United States is networked with threat scoring systems, camera networks with facial recognition, ISMI interceptors (with continuous passive collections events over all major cities), data fusion centers between policing and data networks, requirements to data holding companies to compel data access, and much more - these systems were build several decades ago but are constantly being updated.
China was struggling through these decades to reestablish itself, and has only recently copied modern Western systems of surveillance.
I don't really have teeth in that game though. I realize this is a political topic ("blame"). The fact that the West employs a sophisticated and pervasive surveillance state should not restrict us from criticizing Eastern implementations of the same gross mal-application of technology. And the fact is that who "invented" it is a bit of a non-starter, as state surveillance existed thousands of years ago in rudimentary forms that have evolved independently between states - and the application of modern technology is just one aspect of historical picture.
Of course the surveillance situation in the United States goes much further, with state intelligence agencies actively "engaged" with the public so that public perception can be shaped. The NSA calls this combination of surveillance and engagement "active listening". I don't know whether China has learned from this yet (such topics are hard to research) but it wouldn't surprise me.
I'd still call this a huge win for both open source and free software. But obviously its a much bigger win for open source than for free software.
This isn't a uniquely American thing. Russia and China are doing the same things (heard of the Great Firewall?)
Opening doors to journalists is a good and appropriate step. It won't fix the underlying issues, though, as they stem from National Security competition - not wrote press misunderstanding.
Still, who else is collecting this kind and fidelity of data? I found the trends very informative. First that we're still a long long way from having hardened base operating systems, but also that the trend is positive and slowly moving in the right direction.
Even just getting a breakdown of CVEs is interesting (though I would have liked better granularity than "bypass something") for both trends and to understand just how many DoS issues come up per year versus say code injections or overflows.
I have a background in error codes - hamming, and luby and raptor and, and, and. Reed-Solomon is particularly "beautiful" from a mathematics perspective (more so than Raptor) - something I can usually explain to anyone and get them interested.
The basic concept is that if I give you five points all on the same line, you only need any two of them to reconstruct the line.
Reed Solomon doesn't use lines (it isn't optimal) and the geometry they use isn't the Cartesian plane (this requires infinite precision) - but this is what the codes do!
Just like it requires two points to reconstruct a line, three points are required to reconstruct a simple polynomial (degree 2). Reed Solomon uses "high degree polynomials" which require n+1 points to reconstruct the degree-n polynomial.
The codes take data, make a polynomial out of it, and then send points from the polynomial to the other side, which can interpolate it as soon as enough points are gathered!
All of this looks like impenetrable discretization and matrix operations if you just get a description of the algorithms, which makes it seem a lot less approachable than it is.
Charle's Law states that Pressure * Volume = Temperature.
That's true and you can do a million experiments with a million balloons and liquids/gases to validate it - until you find a non-newtonian substance, try to apply it to a solid, introduce moving fluids, etc.
Charle's Law isn't a fundamental law of physics, but a consequence of the material properties and statistical outcomes of a large number of interacting molecules. Before atoms and molecules are characterized, it _does_ look like a fundamental law to an experimenter.
It doesn't seem to me that looking for "lower layers" of theoretical physics (holographics, quantum foam, strings, whathaveyou) is an infinite regress and doomed to never be a completed project. I do think that the project may reach some point where the theories fail to be scientific (read: falsifiable) because it could be possible that reaching deep enough through layers of physical abstraction can not be achieved / no physical instrument can provably be built to look deeper (as an analogy, no instrument can be built to probe the full amplitude space of a quantum state).
Can you explain how you consider this suspicious (to the point you needed to create a throwaway account to say that)?
I'm confused why HN is being so aggressive and unwelcoming right now...
This kind of meta-conversation isn't really what I'm on HN for.
It's much more about the region (Xinjiang) and particular fundamentalists groups present there. This happens to demographically correlate with the Turkic people in China's Northwest.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/01/the-islamic-state-pledg...
In China (based on its Marxist roots) cults and religion are deemed to be damaging to a person and to mass popular culture ("Religion is the opium of the people" - Marx). China considers religion to be within the freedom of an individual to observe, but not to impose on another person: in China you can not be indoctrinated into a religion until you are 18 years of age.
Combine this with the wave of Islamic reevaluation on the Asian supercontinent - ISIS is and has been a huge problem in China, with mailbombing campaigns and other acts of widespread terrorism.
Repression is an opinion expressed in the op-ed that hasn't considered factors that are alien to the Western author's perspective.
Both backdoor requests I became privy to while there (2.5 years, circa 2011-2014) came from a certain US TLA, were law enforcement would have been an awkward step, though it seems reasonable to me that there were more requests, including from other organizations, but I was never made aware of those.
There were some foreign spies caught in MSRC in the same timeframe. More of an extradite than a prosecute type situation, though.
I'm looking to understand what role someone is going to play in the organization, and to help understand which team a person we're likely going to hire will be a best match for.
We organize our interview loops around this, and a critical part of the conversation in the debrief is role and team matching - not just a hire/no-hire decision. Plus, we use this time to provide feedback to whoever the hiring manager is about the candidate and potential future team member, which streamlines more than just headcount.
Finally, the interview loop is an opportunity to manage cronyism. While we've got a lot of people I trust to refer exclusively strong candidates, I don't trust a single one to make fiat decisions. There's a human element to giving someone that level of decision making authority, and without sharing gory details - I've benefitted from having committee decisions in this situation.
Managing the feelings of referrer's getting their candidates rejected in a hard problem. I've dealt with that in the past a number of ways but don't have a working theory, other than "it's a job, people make mistakes, and hiring is fit and timing as much as it is about technical prowess".
> These facts should prompt some reflection about the exercise of power in a technological society: Amid concerns about the excesses of market power and government regulation, nobody seems to worry much about the private groups of experts who created 80 percent of the laptop’s standards.
While I think this is overlooked, sure, I don't think this holds very true. I and other engineers I know do worry about which private companies and interests are controlling standards, and what perverse incentives are associated with them.
Recently, there was a big scandal and worry around the NSA creating subvertible weaknesses in technologies deployed worldwide by working on standards committees (a reason academics and the open source community has worked hard to produce alternatives).
Another example that comes to mind are the stardards around Javascript/ECMAScript. During the first few "rounds", there was an anticompetitive effort being waged against browser giants like Microsoft, who were thought to have been pursuing standards choices that favored their market positions.
I'd say there's lower public visibility into these processes, but it isn't like these conversations aren't happening.
What I learned during that prank was that keyboards are very complicated. A keyboard is essentially a giant switching system where pressing keys closes circuits, and a microprocessor looks to see what lines are high/low and infers which keys have been pressed. There's whole systems designed around avoiding "ghost keys", which arise because the number of combinations of possible simultaneous button presses of the switching system far outnumber the possible combinations of signals.