tmotwu
I said that in the context of breaking up G/FB. Why isolate that sentence for no apparent reason? It was a very short comment.
> It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies."
There is no additional flavor. Ask yourself why we bother about antitrust. It is to raise the level of competition. Do you believe innovation is best nurtured in a competitive environment? Literally, the title of the bill consists the words a "stronger online economy", for "innovation".
Pooling all your resources into ads targeting because you are comfortably sitting in a dominant position is exactly the problem. YouTube and Instagram with independent leadership would have the flexibility to focus on their market -- image/video media. That is why TikTok and Snapchat were able to catch Instagram with their pants down -- Facebook had no idea alternative forms media (and did not care) was possible and were simply focused on milking their existing platform. Better ads targeting does not bring in users, and market share is driven by users, not ads. Why does it matter if it increases their cost of operation and slows down their rate of development if the majority of their development is focused on ads targeting - an ineffective user growth strategy? The blame lies on nobody but Facebook or Google if their products have been losing marketshare in 2021.
Maybe Paul's kids have that privilege to go down that riskier alternative. For many others, its non existent and frankly, it is tone deaf.
Universities have been moving away from evaluating candidates from raw academic or scholastic perspectives. For instance, removing standardized testing from the process. [1,2,3] This has raised concerns and considerable pushback from parents. It raises the uncertainty of admission, even if they raise a child to do everything right and mold them into the standard high achieving student.
Of course, not unwarranted concerns: how do we fairly evaluate a student's external achievements without picking favorites. There is no objective measure to solve that problem.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/SAT-scores-uc-universi...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-require...
[3] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/a-special-announcement...
Unfortunately, they must now face the court of public opinion, which has not had the best track record lately.
Obviously, knowledge learned from mistakes or design discussions from one's time at another company is no issue. The intern seemed to have worked on a project very limited in scope to the overall product (package management). It is quite possible the bells and whistles that Replit's CEO is claiming that is copied are taken from design documents made by someone else - which is not at all learnings from working around a particular domain. In my opinion, this might actually be problematic. I don't think Radon was being malicious here, but you might also want to consider that Radon is a fresh graduate and might not have fully considered the implications of where it is acceptable for him to draw designs from.
It is a misleading conflation, a complete dishonest lie, by opponents of right to repair. They always say "I support right to repair" then add "concerns" that absolutely do not apply. Right to repair folks aren't trying to replicate the microchip here. They are trying to replace a blown capacitor or a damaged resistor. They want to understand which parts are needed so they can execute the job properly. How power cycles through a board is not a magical trade secret.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/developers-highlight-more-ano...
And fyi, not all white hat stories are clean in their approaches, that in itself remains a controversial topic for another discussion. Furthermore, employees in an organization are under a different set of contractual obligations, full of caveats, to their employers. In some ways, they've already "consented" to specific bare minimums(white-hat can be framed as security awareness training required in your job role).
Open source contributors and reviewers are individual third party actors. No one has established any tolerance limits. So "enough" people doesn't really apply here because no one was made the arbiter source to decide that.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CSD-Men...
No, informed consent must be with all participants and maintainers reviewing the patches. Why does Linus/Greg get to decide that for others?
And to be more precise, ethics IS a core part of research. There's an entire subfield dedicated to it in academic labs. Graduate research is very specialized, and researchers do not have the intuition for a difficult topic outside of their expertise. Then there are IRBs, who are most qualified, and yet we see it remains a problem for computing ethics because it's a completely different environment.
We can continue to blame this lab, fine. I agree, huge ethical blunder. But don't forget that this passed IRB, a responsibility of the university, and several phases of anonymous peer review for a major security conference. The security conference that most definitely has reviewers from industry. Was there a lapse of judgement on ALL the scientists and engineers, all with immense experience in their respective fields, who touched this paper and participated through the entire process? Do you seriously believe that? Should they all be fired? Is it really hard to believe that computing ethics is actually not as clear, communicated, and well understood to MANY? There are so many caveats, and not much policies of conduct exist for the breadth of situations.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
Yes, only if it's unrelated to their jobs. People get hired, not fired, to do unethical research in industry labs. Ethics is breached all the time in industry - rarely even considered. Google tried to make amends, but decided caring too much about ethics was a roadblock to their goals. Tesla markets their "FSD" at the risk of other drivers in the road. The only difference here is that companies have a bigger, better legal and PR team. Comparing the moral compass between academia and industry is absolutely ridiculous.
Ethics in computing research remains an active research area. This incident will be used as a case study in the future, but it's not that well established. Many people have been using anecdotals, which honestly don't fit the scenario because so many variables and parameters distinguish other types of pentesting from this. And disappointingly, not a single post has actually produced the documents that establish this.
Arguably the first set of guidelines for ethics in computer security research [1] was published in 2012 and not yet widely taught in Ethics lectures (I only know about it because I learned Computer Security from one of the authors).
On identifying harms:
> "Challenges identifying harms in ICTR environments stem from the scale and rapidity at which risk can manifest, the difficulty of attributing research risks to specific individuals and/or organizations, and our limited understanding of the causal dynamics between the physical and virtual worlds. As with all exploratory research, it can be challenging to articulate benefits such that subjects can make informed decisions. In ICTR our ability to qualitatively and quantitatively foresee the probable benefits is particularly immature."
On this type of research:
> "Research of criminal activity often involves deception or clandestine research activity, so requests for waivers of both informed consent and post hoc notification and debriefing may be relatively common as compared with research studies of non-criminal activity."
This isn't a huge change from 30 years ago since Moor [2] wrote his thesis on Computer Ethics, see:
> "A typical problem in computer ethics arises because there is a policy vacuum about how computer technology should be used. Computers provide us with new capabilities and these in turn give us new choices for action. Often, either no policies for conduct in these situations exist or existing policies seem inadequate. A central task of computer ethics is to determine what we should do in such cases, i.e., to formulate policies to guide our actions."
Researchers themselves are far from educated on this topic; you won't ever explore this in depth unless you're in this particular sub-field. IRB/REB boards are considered the most qualified but are possibly too outdated to navigate around this. It's a whole mess, there is currently a lot of questionable research in many areas of computing, but the clock moves forward.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CSD-Men...
[2] https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring06/pap...
I completely agree their experiment is unethical. However, it's not actually clear cut to most researchers the ethical bounds of their work, especially for study papers that's never really been explored before. Ethics in of itself is largely a active subtopic for many areas in CS, not only security research. AI is one area where qualifying potential harm to human beings remains largely controversial. Ask any ML scientist, and they'll tell you that determining the ethics of a project is not their responsibility.
As far as giving benefit of the doubt, it's likely not done out of malice in the first place. Just a combination of poor reasoning and doesn't exactly clear up if they even considered alternatives to control their variables. Unfortunately, it seems like they were already given the benefit of the doubt from their first offense, but did not take any lessons away from that, so it would be understandable if the maintainers kept their ban.
Minorities are by and large generally more culturally conservative than the majority of the West. The only difference is the approach to communalism versus individualism, but the American conservative affinity towards individualism is largely a classical liberal idea. Minority communities are not blind to that, several aspects of progressive politics are incompatible and the media hasn't changed their mind. For instance, the gay and black community is very splintered, and progressives have been able to manage that. Left-wing literature and academia acknowledge this as well. Add influences of the Vietnam War, and you will get a vastly conservative community.
However, party politics in America do not subscribe to a consistent frame of ideologies. As cultures began compounding over the past 60 years, identity is the mainstream approach for appealing to bases. The parties have chosen a side.
A majority of minority voters have weighed the cost-benefits of choosing between their conservative principles or a stronger representation of their people, and found one side more accommodating. Quite literally, the biggest downfall to the advancement of conservative ideals in America is probably one specific party's refusal to appeal towards minority communities. It was true before Trump, Trump only exposed this reality of the Republican base. There could have been a conservative revolution.
One final point. Asians has had to deal with issues of systemic and structural discrimination from both sides of the aisle. The issues go far broader than higher standards of university admission. Very little to do with their affinity towards specific ideologies.
Imagine Amazon telling employees to stick it to books because thats the business they started off with. Like why should AWS even exist, it’s not what they do! That narrow mindedness wouldn’t have gotten them to where they are today.
No need to cherry pick my previous reply, I'll restate since some parts must have flew by :). Higher ups are very accessible to each individual employee because you really can just go up to them. Back then, the CVP always swung by our office to say hi pretty frequently. The message boards exist. And people group up for QnA because it's effective. Employees pranked their bosses without retaliation.
I don't even have a reason to justify leadership anymore. Just stating the clear facts, that the majority trust them to the right thing. Beats me why C-level is popular internally. They respond to employee concerns when it mattered, and stood their ground when it didn't. No need to make assumptions here about people being meek, lets use facts.