jwtadvice

I remember the same thing originally happened with Wile's proof of FLT. It's heartwarming to know that scholars continue to skeptically check each other's work for factual correctness.

Thank you, I will do that.

I'm reminded of Paul the Octopus in the Sea Life Centre in Germany, who at least reportedly likes watching soccer. Crowds have taken to watching his behavior like an aquatic Punxsutawney Phil - looking for signs of Paul feeling optimistic or depressed - and leading crowds through an exercise to imagine that Paul is able to predict the outcomes of games.

While not really equipt with fortune-telling capabilities, Paul and most other octopi (as aquarists will share) have very distinct personalities, have favorite caretakers they can individually recognize, and in the wild will save food, trade rocks and have learned to pull diving masks off humans who bother them.

Thank you for asking the right questions!

This should be it's own topic. Can you run an "Ask HN"?

My thought would be an information system that is jointly published in by all nation states - like a broadcast Wikipedia. The idea is that out of the chaos in the reporting the facts that every nation agrees on will get through clearly, whereas the opinions, unfounded accusations and the rest will bury themselves in a quagmire of costly effort.

Interesting bits of analysis:

1. "DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."

2. "When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency."

3. "Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency."

4. "Moscow also saw the election of Presidentelect Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). "

5. "Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity."

-- Full stop -- Do they mean Americans who are "Pro-Kremlin" like many progressives and conservatives that are anti-war? Or do they mean paid/covert bloggers? It seems to me they mean Americans? In which case how is that in the report at all?

6. "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries."

7. "RT and Sputnik—another government-funded outlet producing pro-Kremlin radio and online content in a variety of languages for international audiences—consistently cast president-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment. "

-- I actually believe this to be true. I absolutely hate Trump and think he's a despicable man and unfit for the presidency. However, I thought that the media coverage of him was absolutely brutally skewed and over-the-top clearly politically aligned. Anyway I saw this kind of reporting across international media outlets and friends and family and other news media outlets in the US said the same thing.

8. "RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties."

-- I think these speak to me because American media will not cover civil rights abuses and curtailments in a non-apologetic fashion. It seems typical to me that state-propaganda criticizes their adversaries' civil liberty abuses, as the US does to Russia and China and as Russia and China do to the US.

The whole section on RT seemed to be completely off topic and distractionary. I only got half way through it.

I did not see any assessment that Podesta's emails were hacked by Russia or shared by Russia. I was hoping to see that because people keep grouping it into the DNC hacks.

It would be interesting to hear the take from the other fourteen intelligence agencies. I thought they were going to be in the report?

Private intelligence to help journalists disclose and report on corruption and abuse around the world.

I have met a large number of people who love their jobs and have burned out. I'm not really sure that anecdotal evidence is going to satisfy people in this thread of the conversation, so I suspect my volunteering of this is of little utility.

Maybe another way to look at it is the "burn out rate". Different companies have a tendency to turn excited new tech employees into minimally-productive ones in different time frames.

For example Amazon has a burn out rate of about a year, whereas Google and Facebook are about two years and Microsoft four years.

Why should this be the case? I think people above in the thread would argue that it has to do with culture and working conditions, with moral and with levels of individual autonomy.

Not only this but when the BS is an orthodox position it takes 10x the amount of energy per person who believed the bullshit.

The number of conversations I've had to have with friends and family about, let's say, the "Russian hacking of the election" or "the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" or "the bulk collection NOT mass surveillance by US intelligence" is greater than even the amount of time I've had to spend speaking to each of them.

> If anything you say can be interpreted in a way that the hivemind can destroy you over, they will do it, even with incomplete information and little to no proof.

I've found this to be true on Reddit, increasingly true on HN (if you look at my comment history you will see people trolling me and accusing me of being a foreign shill), and writ large in American politics.

Psychologically, people are anxious, they have little time, and they have a lot of information to filter.

They have an idea that because you are anonymous you very well may be a US information agent from the Fort Bragg propaganda center or a a propaganda agent from another country. They think that you may be from a different political party or from a group of people that you think are culturally a threat to their type of existence (cis white male, LBGTQ or urban, rural).

And so when they filter, they filter out the imagined adversary and anything that increased their level of anxiety. If they don't filter, they often attack it.

In Mixed-Strategy Nash Equilibria, the amount of unpredictability to use in alpha-beta-like competition games to maximize expected gains assuming a similarly motivated adversary.

In many cases these strategies are dominated by a fully deterministic strategy, or with the mixed-strategy that is highly uneven in its distribution: favoring that one action be taken almost all of the time.

The title taken on face value is flatly wrong but as headlines go it's trying to be cute and attention grabbing. Strategic surprise is a fundamental tool to strategy, but should never be assumed to just work without explicit motivating reasons (be they heuristic or calculated).

I don't think I've ever personally clicked on a Google Ad - they appear to me to only a combination of spam ('unwanted ads') and tracking/surveillance implements.

I don't own an Android Phone (any cellular phone, since the Snowden Documents disclosed mass domestic surveillance programmes). So I can't use AdNauseum. I do, however, run similar software on my laptop and I would have used this software or something similar to it were I to own such a device.

One of the reasons - above and beyond GPS tracking databases and my information from cellular phones going into HUMINT and propaganda databases - is that the phones and tablets I've used haven't been sufficiently owned by me.

Google/Alphabet's willingness to uninstall software on user's devices is an example of this: their terms of agreement lay out conditions equivalent to their partial ownership of your device, and your limited ability to own and control the device for yourself.

This would be so much fun to jailbreak.

The solution to media content distribution looks a lot like what companies in the United States have tried again and again to do, but have failed - with perhaps the recent exception of smart phone and tablet devices.

Another trick the DPRK might consider is making much of their software a service and requiring always-on connectivity to use the application in question. This not only restricts what a user can do, but it also allows the 'stewart' body to track usage, collect metadata and a number of other useful bits for state security. Often, the use of the app can be track to a geolocation.

This guy is a cardio machine.

Kudos to Ed for finding a passion like this in his life. I hope some film maker gets a chance to interview him, and to capture some footage of his feats.

Having seen a number of 'libre' projects disappear or radically change management (sometimes under unlitigated accusations of harassment or misconduct), I hope that important projects to the freedom of computer use continue to exist.

Recently TrueCrypt has disappeared, TOR got new management (a bunch of suits), etc.

Personal spats aside, these projects are bigger than the organizations and people who sacrifice so much to contribute to them.

I might recommend to the FSF and GNU that these sorts of projects need to be given special attention with regard to their continued existence, the happiness and healthiness of the contributors, the transparency of internal activities, and the thwarting of intelligence/infiltration activity.

The continued, healthy existence of free software depends not only on the code but on the institutions and the people who provide, advertise, decide and distribute that code.

It's similar to how RT is fined and banned in the UK.

There's a ton of US propaganda in the New York Times. China doesn't appreciate that much.

Given that the same people circulate between them, and they work together on a regular basis, and they both are critical to the survival of the society that exists today: I hold them to the same high standard.

I don't give breaks to golden parachutes or to lobbied appointments.

In the US we are dealing with the problem of real news.

So is China.

This is significantly different than the Voice of America.

H.R. 5181 establishes a Global Engagement Center, funds it, creates an official in charge of it who works for the Board of Broadcasting Governors and makes them immune to civil law.

With the passage of the resolution, the Executive Branch is empowered to reinterpret prior domestic propaganda protections so that American citizens that do not believe official US narrative can be engaged/targeted by influence operations.

Please note here that the designers of the legislation intended for domestic propaganda protections to receive a new executive interpretation - that they argued current interpretation of domestic propaganda is taken "too literally".

Nah, the "fake news" filters make it hard to post the content, make it hard to reshare the content, make it less likely to show up in feeds, and mark it so that it is less likely to be read.

I remember when Apple removed the App that reported on US drone strikes and civilian casualties.

I remember that Reddit bans foreign news outlets from its news subreddits.

I remember that Facebook censored people trying to post Snowden Documents in the US.

This is a global phenomenon. We should do everything in our power to reverse this trend in the United States so that we have the credibility to criticize China for doing the same.

I am 100% with you and thank you very much for your well thought out comments. I did not reply earlier because of end-of-year vacationing.

These are the sorts of forms that fill the empty spaces in my notes for work and school.

Getting the shading and proportions exactly right is an exercise of both aesthetics and calculative reasoning, and so I find it's uniquely delightful.

I take comments like this very seriously, having been accused of "tinfoil" when pointing to evidence of global surveillance programs (e.g. Office of Strategic Influence, Total Information Awareness, etc) before journalists broke the Snowden story.

Luckily, I think most people on Hacker News are realistic people not easy to excite into witch hunts and victim-blaming like you suggest. I think most people on Hacker News believe that the governments of Russia, France, Turkey, Germany, China, and others including the United States, manage their appearance to the publics they represent, making appeals for and finding evidence to build the case for their own legitimacy. That's not an extraordinary claim, you can find media reporting that suggests a wide range of policies and rhetoric from around the world are motivated by public appearance and appeals to legitimacy. Much of the censorship that people experience in the world is similarly motivated.

The character attacks against Snowden have evolved over time: "he didn't understand the programs / he was just a low level employee", "his girlfriend was a stripper", "he's a Russian spy", "he didn't go through the proper channels", "he just wants to be in the news", "he was a disgruntled employee".

These slanderous rumors, spread by anonymous officials and PR contracts, belie the fact that there is no desire to discuss the abuse disclosed by the whistleblowing. What anonymous officials, press offices and paid PR coverage want to talk about are rumors and opinions about Snowden's intentions - topics that not only distract from the documents (which are conclusive evidence of highly illegal and unethical behavior) with inconclusive speculation but topics that have a specific effect on the public attitude and narrative understanding of the events that unfolded.

Those who think that there has to be some wide ranging conspiracy for officials to react in a self-defensive manner are unrealistic. Those who think the human nature of American officials deeply differs from Chinese officials, French officials, or Turkish officials (etc) are unrealistic and unconvincing.

So to the first question you posed: no. I have a higher opinion of Hacker News commentators than that. I don't think they are dumb or immature or unrealistic. At least, not to that extreme degree.

There's a serious misunderstanding by the American people that the NSA concerns itself with terrorism/counterterrorism. It does not. It's a technical agency who attempts to collect as much information as possible. It provides some information to some other agencies some of the time.

Other agencies are in charge of counter terrorism intelligence such as the FBI, DHS and NCTC.

Disclosures about their global surveillance program had much more to do with human intelligence (mass propaganda), industrial espionage, and diplomatic intelligence than terrorism.

The media seriously misinformed the American people about the duties and prerogatives on the NSA, mostly to link the NSA and its excesses to something equally controversial, however, untrue.

Anyway walking back from that line of reasoning: yes. Insurgencies around the world have had their operational security studied for decades and they are very sanitary wrt carrying around cellphones that have their batteries in, etc.

Unfortunately that's not how the state thinks.

Washington knows that it has a lot of levers that it can pull to influence public opinion and narrative (just look at the poor quality and compromised character of international reporting in the US).

Snowden as a concept is a threat to Washington's legitimacy. Not only because he exposed massive illegality and wrongdoing on their part, but because if he's considered a hero then:

1. they are the villian. That's bad for state power.

2. it could inspire more leaks of more illegal and ethically questionable behavior. Which could start a spiral.

From a purely game theoretical point of view, Wasthington has to insist that it's the good guy in this situation and it was Snowden who was behaving irresponsibly.

Given the collective approach that the US government is known to take (e.g. it gets to write the history books that children are educated with) and the opposition to this narrative track among informed and disillusioned Americans are not collectively organized over the long arc of history probably Washington can have its way.

His actions were perfectly consistent with his attitude toward global mass surveillance.

In particular since there wasn't an individual document that stated "we are surveilling the American homeland in addition to the remainder of the innocent world", Snowden choose - I think history vindicated him in this regard - to grab many documents and let journalists choose what to publish.

I think the journalists who disclosed the documents did a wonderful job selecting what to publish directly, what to report on, and what to black hole. They chose to report on what was in the public interest.

The public interest included revelations about mass surveillance of allied nations, espionage to help American business prospects, memoranda for allies to spy on one another's citizens, backdooring and infiltrating American products and standards so that they could be military weapons overseas and a great many other things.

Another wonderful outcome of Snowden having provided a large collection of documents to journalists is that in reading them as a wholistic collection gave journalists the context to understand the motivations and methods of mass global surveillance - indeed it allowed journalists to effectively question American official denials about its behavior. America had been guessing what was taken and so it wasn't sure about what it could get away with lying about. Journalists were able to publish documents that contradicted the official narrative coming out of the White House when it tried to downplay the massive illegal and unethical apparatus.

In any case, it's wrong to abuse Snowden in this case. Journalists made the decision about what to publish. I don't remember anyone's privacy inside the agency getting ruined, but if that did happen the blame rests with the media.

There are three times as many public relations professionals as journalists in America. Media companies are being consolidated into a few owners, many of them with tech leadership. Microsoft, for example is the MS in MSNBC (although I think they recently sold MSNBC?)

When we hire skim the list of certifications and look for indications of experience. A list of CVEs, a blog or several years in a serious role rank much higher on our hiring queue. And when we interview, we specifically check for depth on the areas the resume indicates depth on, and we look for breadth everywhere else.