jdp23

The main focus of the story is actually on the "No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man" art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/burning-man

From the TokTok site (which is linked to from Tox):

"Neither the Tox protocol nor the implementation have undergone peer review, and its exact security properties and network behaviour are not well-understood, yet. We are actively working on improving that situation. Until said peer review, Tox is not recommended for use cases that require proven, high-assurance security."

https://toktok.ltd/

Agreed - with better and lower-cost tooling the tradeoffs get steadily more appealing.

Back in 2005ish I put together a panel with Kent Beck of extreme programming fame and Martyn Thomas of Praxis, which was doing commercial development using formal methods and Spark/Ada. We were hoping for fireworks but it turns out they were in agreement on a lot of stuff: formal methods need to be used in the context of a pragmatic development process, sometimes iteratively exploring is the right approach, for high reliability you need to complement testing with other techniques like formal methods. Concurrency was one of the examples where there was general agreement that testing and code inspection just isn't enough.

But no, based on the responses here it turns out that not all HN commenters know it yet - some are still playing semantic games and excusing Facebook's lies and exploitation.

Great answer. It sounds like this was very much the right call for Matrix.

Great point about electing politicians who understand technology. Shahid Buttar (who's running for Congress in SF) talked about this in a short video last week - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94IC5JVA_MU

It appears that many people on Hacker News don't like the idea of politicians knowledgeable enough to counter bad behavior by tech companies. It's pretty entertaining when Senators ask stupid questions during the Facebook hearings ... and it also decreases the chances of Congress doing anything useful.

Good summary!

An even better way to avoid it: don't use Uber.

Well said. Social networks don't have to have an exploitative business model; Facebook and Twitter aren't the only possible models.

Yeah really! cperciva had a great tweet on this a few days ago: "Probably the most important thing to keep in mind when reading the FreeBSD Code of Conduct is that we weren't trying to change any rules. Rather, we were trying to elaborate on the rule under which the FreeBSD project has operated for years: Don't Be An Asshole."

Mike Godwin, who worked with Barlow at EFF back in the day, talked briefly about the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in a recent essay:

"Barlow, best known prior to his co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, was writing to inspire activism, not to prescribe a new world order, and his goal was to be lyrical and aspirational, not legislative. Barlow wrote and published his “Declaration” in the short days and weeks after Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, a telecommunications bill that aimed, in part, to censor the internet. No serious person – and certainly not the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations that successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act provisions of that bill – believed that cyberspace would be “automagically” independent of the terrestrial world and its governments. Barlow’s “Declaration” is best understood, as Wired described it two decades later, as a “rallying cry.” Similarly, nobody thinks “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” or “This Land Is Your Land” is a constitution. (And of course the original Declaration of Independence isn’t one either.)"

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2018/01/04/mike-godwin/free-spe...

Exactly right! I was about to say something similar but you phrased it much better than I would have :)

Thanks for getting involved! And you're completely right: Republicans have been treating North Carolina (and Wisconsin) as a lab and prototype for testing out attacks on democracy.

Can they successfully raise money at a huge valuation with that case unsettled, news that they (almost-certainly-illegally) hid a data breach, a potential class-action lawsuit about sexual assault by their drivers, a business model that shows no signs of breaking even, etc. etc. etc.?

If so, they then probably think they can go public with all of that baggage.

It's not power user friendly, AND it isn't very good for non-power users. There certainly are opportunities for significant improvement!

Just wanted to say, thanks for the excellent article and the answers to questions here!

> I want to make one point clear: I believe that EtherDelta, in concept, is safer and more “trustworthy” than a traditional exchange. Everything about how EtherDelta functions is transparent and verifiable by users.... The attack detailed in this piece could have been identified by anyone before it was exploited, and if there had been a security review protocol in place, it would have been easily prevented.

Even "in concept", releasing fintech software without doing the security basics verges on professional misconduct.

Here's the background:

https://thenewstack.io/node-js-forked-complaints-repeated-ha...

It seems like it might be internet-savvy anti-DailyStormer types. https://twitter.com/OpStandUpToCFAA/status/90077016627919667...

(I updated the main post with this and another link.)

They dropped the request for the IP addresses, but actually broadened what they were looking for. National Law Journal had one of the better articles on this at

http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202796292903/DreamHost...

Thanks for the update. That's probably worthy of a top-level thread of its own!

They're saying it's a DDOS attack. Looks like it started right around the same time as their DOJ hearing this morning.

Update: There are reports that the DDOS is in reaction to DreamHost hosting PunishedStormer, the rebranded DailyStormer site.

https://twitter.com/OpStandUpToCFAA/status/90077016627919667...

And the tail end of https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/daily-stormer-punished-storm...

I follow an Oblique Strategies bot on Twitter, so they pop up every few hours in my feed.

https://twitter.com/obliquebot

17 books by guys. 2 books by women. Both recommended by women.

And if an election were flipped in such a way, it would turn out to be impossible to verify the results in a recount.

http://time.com/4599886/detroit-voting-machine-failures-were...

Exactly right. People like different interface styles; a big chunk of the current audience likes the current style. OK, they want to expand to people like me who prefer different styles, good call; but they shouldn't hang people who like what they have out to dry! Yeah, it's more work to come up wiht an interface that's flexible enough to support the different styles ... but they just raised $200M so can presumably afford it.

There's a great quote from Kite founder 'alexflint in one of those earlier threads:

"our plan is to earn trust the hard (i.e. only) way: transparency, published policies, and a track record of good decision making."

Easier said than done, apparently.

Yeah, I came here to say exactly this.

'dang, this has been the top comment on the post for the last 20 minutes. You and others at YC who want to make the enviroment on HN less hostile to women (and people with PTSD and other invisible disabilities, and to people of all varieties who have been sexually harassed) need to understand the impact things like this have.

[edited to clarify that this doesn't just make it a hostile environment to women]