hackuser

I would guess you saw this, but just in case:

Step 1: Determine if you have an Intel® AMT, Intel® SBA, or Intel® ISM capable system: https://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-5693. If you determine that you do not have an Intel® AMT, Intel® SBA, or Intel® ISM capable system then no further action is required.

Step 2: Utilize the Detection Guide to assess if your system has the impacted firmware: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26755. If you do have a version in the “Resolved Firmware” column no further action is required to secure your system from this vulnerability.

That description is a misconception, IMHO.

First, it's an investment; it's not taking away money; it's not robbery. It has a return, a benefit that generally exceeds the cost (I'm not sure how much I paid to fly Cassini to Saturn, but wow was it worth it). People make investments all the time and are happy to do it, in everything from houses to the local homeless shelter to a new computer.

Second, people normally and frequently participate in group decisions, even though they rarely get exactly what they want. To suggest that anything besides an individual choosing alone is extraordinary - that isn't how people really operate.

> I can link you to tons of articles of them being political and generally left leaning

Isn't that falling into the trap of repetition = truth? People repeat falsehood and rumors as much as the truth, and they rarely check the facts. Humans are hardwired to follow social norms not verify facts - e.g., the scientific method didn't arise for thousands of years, and takes great discipline - if everyone is repeating something, that becomes the norm. Propaganda campaigns, some that lead people to far more awful things than criticizing ESPN, rely on it.

I can find a ton of articles and far more online posts saying that the science of climate change is inconclusive, but that's not true. (And a related point: For thousands of years humanity had misconceptions about nature; everyone repeated them; but they weren't true.)

That's why I'm interested in a factual basis, but not in what people repeat. If they are repeating something factual, then there will be a basis for it.

> I think there are poll numbers to support that people tend to shy away from sports broadcasts that are more political

That would be valuable. But I'd like to see it (and it depends on the definition of political).

> "We need to protect minorities and women from the white male oppressors" is basically the slogan of the identity politics wing of the left.

No, that's something white nationalists say to each other; I don't see it elsewhere (in any significant quantity). There is overwhelming evidence of discrimination against people who are in minorities and against women, and as these people are largely excluded from power due to that same discrimination, they have little ability to protect themselves. If we believe in liberty, opportunity and meritocracy, and basic morality for everyone, then everyone should do something about it.

For the most part, only white nationalists say white-skinned people are discriminated against (with any significant scale or impact). There is no evidence of it that I've seen and a look around SV and the IT industry, corporate offices, governments and legislatures of every Western nation, college campuses, and any other locale of wealth, power and privilege shows how absurd the idea is. But the argument is not about discrimination, it's propaganda that is about creating hatred, trying to get people to see everyone as friends or enemies based on skin color (which is perhaps why white nationalists think there's some sort of bizarre us vs. them team competition), and providing a (transparent) excuse for racial hatred. Few people are fooled.

I don't see ESPN's content as politicized. Politicized content would be to support a candidate or political policy (e.g., for or against national health care).

I see ESPN addressing social issues, such as abuse of women, but I don't call that political. Of course, any person can say: X is against my politics; but on that basis everything is politics.

The reality is that there's a segment of the public that's part of an ideological political movement. Consistent with such movements, everything and everyone that doesn't share the political ideology are viewed as political enemies; the goal is to wipe out all apostates and non-believers. If ESPN doesn't share their ideology, they are portrayed as political enemies. In the end, that group is a small minority (per surveys, not per online volume or representation on cable news); we can't be intimidated into silence on important social issues.

> I've seen anecdotes online

As a basis of knowledge, that has been so misleading for so long, especially regarding politicized issues like this one, that IMHO repeating it mostly magnifies misinformation.

> The amount of people who I've seen, online and in person, citing the absolutely insufferable, constant politicization of ESPN ...

How many?

How about directing funding toward creationism, or alternative views of the causes of climate change (i.e., non-human ones), or the benefits of authoritarianism? How about when the Koch brothers fund research into the benefits of their brand of libertarianism?

Anything can be used politically.

> bias against white males?

IME, the premise that such a thing exists (with any meaningful impact at any meaningful scale) almost defines the white nationalists (alt-right). The racists with some intelligence rarely will outright say something socially unpopular; they try to make themselves palatable - 'we don't hate people based on their skin color, we just want to protect people like you with white skin from the victimization we are facing'. It's an old tactic: Adolph invaded other countries to protect Germans; Russia recently invaded Ukraine to protect Russians; everyone is a victim.

> The Nation is not exactly a great source to use on this particular topic

Agreed, they have a clear bias.

> I know a lot of moderate people that stopped watching ESPN

How many? 10? A statistically significant number?

Monday Night Football has been very popular for years, and rarely does it feature your favorite team.

How do you deal with those problems when developing Octave? Do you stick to one 'dialect', for example? Or is it somehow a non-issue?

> [Professor Michael Jensen] advocated an "agency" theory of management in which management's sole duty was to maximize shareholder value. This upended the long-held "stakeholder" model, in which management was seen as having broader obligations to a corporation’s workers, customers and communities.

It's interesting how that theory has filtered into public consciousness. My sense is that the public doesn't grasp it as one theory among many possibilities, but as a law of nature (a pattern I see for many ideas - people lack perspective that the theory is one of many possibilities, and different concepts were popular before and others will be popular later). You can read people using agency theory, thought not by that name, on HN regularly.

Consider how amazing that is: An academic comes up with a theory, and eventually tens of millions (or more) are repeating it. Is it marketed? Even if it is, many or most of the people repeating it probably have no idea of the marketing. Is it part of an intentional political propaganda campaign? I know other popular ideas successfully pushed on the public this way (one I know of in particular is the "death tax", and I've observed others where the talking points frame and effectively end the discussion).

What incredible power. Is it random? Can it be directed and controlled? Who knows how and who is doing it? I know political groups do it to an extent, as I said, but I don't know their range or accuracy, so to speak.

> Secure Boot is utterly broken (for general purpose pcs at least) anyways. I can just take an old windows kernel and boot with a configuration that loads a driver with a known vulnerability (a certain gpu manufacturer might be a good place to look) and a script that use it to run kernel mode code that does whatever it wants.

If you are referring to the Golden Key exploit (a misnomer because it doesn't involve keys, FWIW), it doesn't impact desktops and laptops, possibly because you can simply disable Secure Boot on them, but does affect certain mobile devices on which Secure Boot was supposed to be impossible to disable. It also requires physical access.

What word would you use for the class of machines that are desktops and laptops? It's a real, if not very important, question that I've never found a good answer for.

> started Nautilus in 2012 with a two-year, $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation

That's very interesting and important. I know the Templeton Foundation as funders of 'research' into creationism. Richard Dawkins, for example, is apparently a critic of theirs and refused to participate in a project of theirs. The Templeton Foundation's Wikipedia page tells some other interesting stories with names you may recognize (with the caveat that it is Wikipedia).

I wonder what influence they have on Nautilus. It's a genuine question; the world isn't black and white, Templeton is not evil, and I don't know their current level of funding for Nautilus - perhaps they could use more Templeton money. OTOH, funders can have subtle influence in many ways, from story selection to self-censorship.

EDIT: Oops, should have kept reading to answer one of my questions: "[The Templeton Foundation] has dialed back funding for Nautilus, although it gave the magazine an additional $1.25 million in 2015, and a little more than $1.2 million last year"

Could you provide an example? That's not my experience, but maybe we are looking at different parts of the site.

It was the tone and listening (or lack thereof), not the content. No big deal, but life is too short ...

Is what you're describing essentially a trust anchor / root of trust, as implemented in TPMs? I realize that TPMs aren't implemented exactly as you describe, but they are designed to be vulnerable only to physical attack, not software attack.

I ignored the (negative) hype and looked into TPMs recently, and I encourage others to do the same.[0] They look like excellent solutions with the important exception that two of the three key hierarchies, the platform hierarchy and endorsement hierarchy, appear to be fundamentally in the vendor's and not in my control (the latter hierarchy can be disabled, as I understand it, but its functionality is then lost). It's surprising that enterprise IT would tolerate that - I'm not sure I will - but perhaps they can have the manufacturer deploy the corporation's keys in the roots of those hierarchies.

Also, the TPM's security as a trust anchor depends on its implementation. They look good in theory, but I have no idea if the various vendors actually implement them effectively.

[0] By far the best source I found is A Practical Guide to TPM 2.0 - Using the Trusted Platform Module in the New Age of Security by Arthur, Challener. It's also recommended by the Trusted Computing Group, the authors of TPM.

An excellent point that applies to almost any system:

The inconvenient and somehow embarrassing truth for us – the malware experts – is that there does not exist any reliable method to determine if a given system is not compromised.

FWIW Secure Boot has its own blacklist, called the Revoked Signatures or Forbidden Signatures database or dbx, though I don't know if and how it is actually used.

> old windows kernels can't be blacklisted because then people's install media that they might have paid for would stop working.

I understand the theory, but are you sure that is true in practice? There also could be a workaround (such as disabling Secure Boot for the install).

An important detail which doesn't change what you are saying: Secure Boot is from the UEFI specification, but I think SB is optional.

Unfortunately, I don't think I want to get caught up in this kind of conversation.

Thanks for sharing all that and informing the rest of us.

> Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.

It would be interesting to learn details: How often? Who is making how much? And in what circumstances does it tend to work and not work?

> the Arctic is a tremendous shortcut for shipping

The Economist article says, "the much-vaunted sea passages are likely to carry only a trickle of trade". Do you have any information on the prospective volume of trade?

> it's surrounded solely by states with a strong rule of law, making piracy unlikely.

For another reason too: Piracy usually is conducted by people.

A fundamental conflict keeps coming up:

1) Security agencies are much more effective if they collect data before they know it's important. If they wait until Jane Doe blows up a building to start collecting intelligence on her, much of the evidence and other valuable information will be long gone.

2) Spying on innocent people violates their privacy, their legal rights, and is a tool for oppression. Warrants are required for a good reason.

One somewhat obvious solution is to store the data in escrow, available only with a warrant. Nobody would trust a private company with all that data (I hope, though I some countries require ISPs and other service providers to maintain some history), so who can we trust? I wonder if the courts are an answer. On one hand, it is not their role to provide investigative tools to the prosecution and could even violate their independence and neutrality. On the other, there would be little question about whether law enforcement had a valid warrant or whether the courts would respect by their own authority to issue warrants (and on the third hand, rather than the courts cleaning up the corruption, the corruption could spread to the courts too).

Does anyone know if there's a precedent?

I don't quite understand. The scholars of Europe did not have access to Aristotle's works. Are you saying that isn't true? Was Spain isolated from the rest of Europe during the Middle Ages?

> This entire thing is a long propagated mythology that things were at their best when Europe dominated the Mediterranean

I don't understand how saying that they lost access to their greatest scholar, Aristotle, and had to rely on people from another part of the Mediterranean to preserve and return his works to them, supports a claim that "things were at their best when Europe dominated the Mediterranean".

Also, do you have some source for what you are saying? If you look at the cite in my post, you can read much of what I said, including about Aristotle.

Speaking very generally (and based on slightly faded memory), one reason they liked old things in the Renaissance was because there was a point of view that the prior ~1,000 years, since the fall of Rome, was a waste intellectually, and that the way forward was to revive the Roman and Greek knowledge. I don't think the same conditions apply today, and IMHO perhaps Humanism's goals should be accomplished by other means than focusing on preserving or reviving the past.

(Disclaimer: The following mostly is based on memory; details may be off a bit. Sorry.)

Hegel said in the 19th century (paraphrased), "he would 'put on seven-league boots' in order to skip over the thousand years between the 6th and 17th centuries and, having at last arrived at René Descartes, said that now he could 'cry land like the sailor.'"[0]

Even the name of that prior, wasted period, the "Middle Ages", was given to it by people in the Enlightenment: From their point of view it was the middle between two great periods: Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and the Enlightenment.

The Middle Ages ended, in a sense, with the reintroduction of most of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's works to Europe, where they had been lost for centuries. Aristotle was highly respected and presented a worldview that challenged Scholasticism, the philosophy of the Church. Thomas Aquinas, a name many recognize, made it a mission to reconcile Aristotle with the Church.

It's a good reminder that civilization is a fragile thing, and we are stewards of it. We don't want the next 1,000 years to be lost, too.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Scholasticism

It's amazing to me how normalized these accomplishments has become. Humanity didn't master rocketry until the mid-20th century, and now we regularly have robotic vehicles flying around other planets (and sending photos to us).

Perhaps it's an example of how humans naturally notice only change. This is just more of the same, I suppose.

And we also hear how incompetent and inefficient NASA and the whole U.S. government are. They certainly could improve but they also just flew a craft around Saturn, for 12 years. What was it that you were working on again?

> The reason: It's basically wild west and the state hasn't yet regulated ISPs to death.

How do you know that's the reason?

For those interested, I looked up the story:

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/...

the same World Bank study that applauded Romania’s well-connected cities cautioned about a digital divide. A much larger share of Romanians have ultra-fast internet connections compared to other European countries, yet one-third of the country’s population has never used the internet. Half of all households have no broadband connection—half of households don’t even have a computer, for that matter.