Hacker News Reader

eivarvon Ask HN: Are there recorded instances of people being framed through hacking?

Yes – and not only for government and organizations:

> In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBus

eivarvon Germany's blanket data retention law is illegal, EU top court says

Whether people are convinced or not – your claim was that it provided "justification".

My point is that it does no such thing – it doesn't hold up as a valid argument (which really is the bare minimum for something to even be considered as potentially true).

eivarvon Germany's blanket data retention law is illegal, EU top court says

It has been illegal at least since the Grand Chamber judgments on the cases of "Big Brother Watch" and "Centrum för Rättvisa" last year [0]. Though, really, the outcome was fairly predictable for anyone following the field.

TLDR; Continuous "General and indiscriminate retention" is not compatible with EU fundamental rights.

[0]: https://europeanlawblog.eu/2021/06/08/big-brother-watch-and-...

eivarvon Germany's blanket data retention law is illegal, EU top court says

No, it does not – for two reasons:

  - Two wrongs don't make a right: Someone behaving unethical does not excuse unethical behavior from someone else.
  - There is a difference in the power dynamics of the relationships: Consumer and service provider VS citizen and state.

If anything, laws and right should be strengthened to explicitly ban this behavior.

eivarvon Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

Yet bulk data collection (in effect "mass surveillance") happens, and poses a risk in and of itself to data subjects.

eivarvon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://cleave.app

Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading all open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level; Alternatively as "tab-groups", but encompassing multiple apps.

I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.

I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...

In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.

I find it interesting (particularly from an HCI-perspective) that there hasn't been more research into the concept on an OS-level, as I can think of many times maintaining a set of application states for continued or re-use makes sense.

eivarvon Web3 doesn’t care about privacy

Yes, if you mean true anonymization – i.e. not pseudonymization (e.g. replacing names with a pseudonym) or in any other way retaining personal data (internal identifiers, usage patterns or attributes that combined result in a unique enough fingerprint to identify a specific person, etc.)

eivarvon Cannabis use produces persistent cognitive impairments: meta review

Out of curiosity: How does any argument become more or less logical depending on its context?

Your comment reads to me as if the concept of logical fallacies is only useful or valid within the framework of rhetorical competitions – or alternatively that logically invalid reasoning is useful if you're only interested in making a decision, rather than making a correct or well-informed one.

eivarvon About the Urgency of Building Web3

Exactly – this is currently a regulatory problem, and blockchains, decentralized identity, etc. won't solve anything in this space. On the contrary, it will by definition enable identification in some types of data.

This makes me conclude that these types of solutions are really more about portability and making some sort of political point (the only thing users realistically control is first party authorization – nothing else); They certainly don't have any security or privacy-related guarantees.

eivarvon About the Urgency of Building Web3

    could protect against all sorts of abuse...

Could it, though? What's to stop someone that gains access to user data (by legitimate means) to make a copy?

eivarvon Brain implant provided immediate relief to a severely depressed patient

> I wish the field of psychiatry was mature and used different words for depression caused by [...]

Isn't this covered by "situational depression" (adjustment disorder with depressed mood) VS "clinical depression" (major depressive disorder), and the fact that diagnosis entails excluding physical conditions that cause similar symptoms?

None of the various depressive disorders (nor other psychiatric disorders) deal with defining a cause, but with describing a set of symptoms.

eivarvon Show HN: Neural-hash-collider – Find target hash collisions for NeuralHash

There is a lower limit to privacy (as a human right) – which after passing, societies would seize to be "free" (liberal democracies?). But that's not a discussion people seem to want to have, when talking about their good intentions of fighting against horrible things.

eivarvon Security Threat Model Review of the Apple Child Safety Features [pdf]

    Could someone tell me how that inspection works? Are there researchers who are given the source code?

It doesn't (with the exception of an exclusive program[0]). Not only do they generally make security work on their devices difficult – they have a history of suing companies that facilitate it [1].

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/programs/security-research-devic...

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/11/22620014/apple-corellium-...

eivarvon Guide to cognitive biases

That's not an argument that deals with whether climate change is real or not – but whether it's reasonable to believe it is, based on one's own lack of understanding in combination with making (reasonable) assumptions.

eivarvon Guide to cognitive biases

I too would trust a climate scientist as a legitimate authority on climate change over a religious leader or a PR person – but that's not what I'm discussing.

I'm saying global warming isn't true because scientists believe it to be true (this would be a fallacious argument).

eivarvon Guide to cognitive biases

Does it actually matter?

An argument doesn't get any more or less fallacious based on who believes in it (the authority, in this case) – that's not an argument in itself.

It might be reasonable (a useful heuristic) to lean to the side of the expert, but the fact that an expert believes something doesn't in itself make the conclusion correct.

eivarvon Guide to cognitive biases

My own speculation basically boils down to: Human minds are primarily meaning-seeking machines, to such a large extent that we even create meaning where there is none (apophenia).

Take pareidolia, for instance – it's likely been more evolutionary advantageous to see faces where there are none (and thus flee tot often), as opposed to not seeing faces where there are faces (and thus be eaten).

And in evolutionary terms, not everything that exists has some benefit. Some features just haven't been subject to evolutionary pressures; Not selected for, just not selected against. Vestigial features are prime examples of this.

eivarvon Guide to cognitive biases

And by extension, fallacious reasoning means that you have no good reason to take what the reasoner is arguing as true (unless they can a non-fallacious argument) – right?

The fact that an argument is fallacious doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is wrong, but there does (logically, by necessity) exist (at least) a non-fallacious argument for a correct conclusion.

eivarvon I closed a lot of browser tabs

Compared to virtual desktops, this allows you to close down apps (consume less resources) as well as maintain multiple working context-specific application states.

eivarvon I closed a lot of browser tabs

I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application called Cleave.

https://cleave.app

Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.

I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...

In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.

eivarvon One Bad Apple

... but the link between user and photo obviously exists somewhere in Apple's system.

eivarvon One Bad Apple

Legality aside – how is this not a privacy risk? Privileged users of the infrastructure can gain information about users (whether they possess CSAM that's in the hash-database... for now).

eivarvon Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

NRKbeta, the tech vertical of the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, actually did the manual version of this a few years back [0-1], but found it hard to conclude with success or failure based on the evidence they gathered.

[0]: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...

[1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/this-site-is-taking-the-ed...

eivarvon Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

Maybe not, but you could show it to people whose context reveal that they might be interested – e.g. searching for "IDE" or "Elixir", reading about developer tools, etc.

This is known as contextual advertising.

Surveillance is not essential to internet advertising – in fact neither ROI, effectiveness or perceived relevance (when compared to all alternatives, including contextual advertising) has never been proven.

eivarvon Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

More context: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/side/new-report-details-threat...

eivarvon Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

It does require an active choice/opt-in on the part of the data subject where your legal basis is consent.

It defines consent as “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous” given by a “clear affirmative action.”

Pre-ticked boxes, for instance, are explicitly not allowed.

eivarvon Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

In the cases you list, you have other legal basis for processing than consent – i.e. legitimate interest – but that doesn't mean it's not personal data.

Indeed, IP-addresses are considered [0] personal data in some cases – which only really means that you need to follow the GDPR: have a legal basis for processing, do not process the data for reasons other than that for which you have a legal basis, delete it as soon as you no longer need it, implement protective measures, etc.

[0]: https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-...

eivarvon What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code?

I think at least partial offline-support was a requirement.

eivarvon China increases spending 500% to influence America

It's a satirical movement ;)

https://birdsarentreal.com

eivarvon Overcoming Tab Overload

I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application called Cleave.

https://cleave.app

I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...