nonrandomstring

Why bother? Let Bill Hicks explain.....

  You know I've noticed a certain anti-intellectualism going around
  this country ever since around 1980, coincidentally enough. I was in
  Nashville, Tennessee last weekend and after the show I went to a
  waffle house and I'm sitting there and I'm eating and reading a
  book. I don't know anybody, I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a
  book.  This waitress comes over to me (mocks chewing gum) 'what you
  readin' for?'...wow, I've never been asked that; not 'What am I
  reading', 'What am I reading for?' Well, goddamnit, you stumped
  me...I guess I read for a lot of reasons — the main one is so I
  don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress.  - Bill Hicks

Malicious updates and vendor malware are super hot topics now. Out and out vandalism of private property obviously breaches every flavour of "computer misuse" law.

There probably hasn't been a massive class-action against companies like HP because not enough users feel they have redress, or they believe that they "agreed" to malicious acts of vandalism. I doubt HP would find any contractual safety to hide behind here.

But the harm I see being done is bigger and more nebulous. It is a massive harm against security in general, and therefore against the public and nation.

As you say yourself, it's only sensible to see "updates" as very probably hostile. I would agree. There is debate in security circles about whether one should apply updates at all.

Yet, updates are a necessary component of modern security. Forcing malicious updates on users is therefore a "crime against the fabric of society" and I'd love to see a government make an example of HP, Microsoft, or anyone else pushing malicious "updates".

I totally love this early principle [0] for RAM by literally writing in electrons on a 2D surface and then reading them back using the electron gun.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube

> only Russia would have the motive to link or frame Ukraine to the hack.

Or Musk/US Gov. What actual evidence is there that the alleged "attack" on Twitter really took place? Now the Internet Observatory and much of US intelligence has been neutered we've really only Musk's word for it.

It's amazing to be the one saying it! I'm generally reflective and reluctant to take up slogans. But once the jackboots started proudly and openly signalling it on the world stage, it got a bit difficult to keep pretending otherwise. God knows we all tried. For at least 10 years anyone who spoke of what they saw coming was attacked, banned, piled-on and ridiculed.... all those "Good People" (many of them here) did the fascists work for them. It's understandable. Nobody wants to feel uncomfortable, right? But now is the time for more self-honesty.

Great example, and I'm old enough to have also wondered why those "nc" pins on valves and ICs clearly did do something.

As you frame it, it's "What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve". Definitely apropos the making of burgers and sausages.

Now we have a different discussion, about "internal" or "external" legibility.

We used to live in a world of high trust in vendors. Those days are gone. Vendor malware is a massive and growing problem and supply-chain legibility is a hot topic.

FWIW I'm arguing the fully open position. Unless you've desperate trade secrets, there is no "internal". And if you've a 16 bit register that's 65536 entries, most of them sparsely documented as "no op". And if a researcher finds it does something,... it's suspicious by default.

This "no user serviceable parts" is an old schism in technology. Today we have almost blanket rights to repair and openness is the new security model.

FTR that's not what I'm suggesting. Good communities are worth protecting and preserving. But that means looking out for threats to a community and defending the members. Clearly moderators (of all US-based forums) are facing a hard time. And FWIW it's even worse in UK where forum hosts are simply shutting down rather than face draconian threat tactics of deliberate ambiguity (by OFCOM).

Storm in a teacup. But it raises an interesting question. Why are these HCI commands "undocumented"?

A phrase I hear around security nowadays is "Shadow API" [0, 1]

A shadow API is an undocumented one, and it tends to set-off massive alarm bells.

The researchers were clearly too keen to make a splash, and that reflects a sad state of wannabeism and hustling for crumbs these days.

What exacerbates it is proprietary software - stuff that's hidden, obscured, opaque, deceptive, distributed as mysterious "blobs".... this entire cluster of behaviour raises red flags and gets people looking for things. And when we go looking for things that aren't there ... we find them (assume the worst).

That is to say, the researchers are reacting emotionally (but with good justification) to discovering undocumented features, aka a "shadow API".

This could have been avoided if the device maker had just documented them. Why didn't they?

[0] https://www.cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=39

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/api/what-is-sha...

I agree with much of that. Corporate "identity" and "ethics" is a nonsense - mostly conjured up by types who like to hide their malfeasance in a crowd. But there is such a thing as group psychology [0]. And many fascinating ways in which groups exhibit memory and latent intent.

My objection is to vague attacks on all and any "institutions". Yes, most of them are corrupt and broken now. But that doesn't preclude the belief we can build good institutions, and should keep trying.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics

Yes, most spineless. Community is shared interests worth standing up for together all the same, so it's not always a watering-hole around money. But I get your drift.

On the other hand, institutions from science and technology, wireless communications, radio and phonograph, made all of these recordings possible. Just sayin. So nil-nil at half-time for the argument against "bare" institutions? Or are you saying all "institutions" are inherently monstrous?

> What makes you think that all of a sudden they would pivot from chasing profits to defending those users,

You're putting YC into the same box as Meta? I'm probably very naive, but I think it's necessary to defend your users if your business model depends on them. What is YC's business model? It's "innovation". HN is a forum cultivated to encourage free exchange of disruptive ideas. That is not possible under conditions of technofascism. I expect the creators of this forum understand that, are worried, but have maybe convinced themselves it's safe to play along at ideology for now. If I thought there were not a significant cohort of humanist/anti-fascist technologists here I would not stay or contribute and I expect I speak for many others.

History shows city states go to war with each other and within themselves far more readily than nation states. Presumably shining technofascist utopias will not be needing the US Army or Judiciary as they'll have their own robot militias and summary justice AIs?

> All responses are confidential

No, they'll be on Surveymonkey INC, headquartered in San Mateo US

With the greatest of respect, I cannot fathom how you're contemplating building compliance assistive software while blindsided by technical realities of data sovereignty.

They pick their sides for profitable expedience. I expect they would betray those sides just as fast for profitable expedience. US, EU, it's all one big world, and business never prospers in the long-run under the heel of a boot.

Paul Graham wrote some very fine LISP books IIRC, and that's absolutely all I know about him. We may have had some cordial exchanges here on HN. To the extent Mr Graham is influential on this forum I'm sure he understands the peril facing any nexus of open speech in the current technofascist climate.

Breakups are painful. A great battle is afoot on the "data sovereignty" ground, for sure.

It's over a year since I spoke at Cloud Native Media [0] on the urgent need to extricate sensitive processes and data from US American companies.

At the time there were a few angry reactions - mainly from people accepting the risks for the first time and acknowledging how deeply enmeshed/dependent their operations are. Most of the assembled creators, CEOs, journalists, fully understood and were enthusiastic about relocating away from US BigTech.

It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism. AFAICS, all of US BigTech (bar some tepid resistance from Apple) has fully aligned with an agenda that is unconscionable to liberal democracy.

Yet we still have problems like UK government departments that are running on Microsoft Teams or casually using Google docs in ways that seem wholly inappropriate to security and safety of data and users.

Where I'm working on sensitive projects I find myself repeatedly having to point out that we urgently need independent end-to-end encrypted video chat and collaboration tools.

For email I've started removing some @gmail recipients in CC where they are not strictly NTK.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/cloud-native-talk/

If even half of this is true, I wonder what the future of HN is? THis forum is backed by Ycombinator, a US based "investment" company. Do they have plans to relocate to friendlier climes?

TBH I lived like a total animal in first year (freshman) Have you seen "The Young Ones" [0] That show was not to far off reality. But there was scaffolding and support to grow up, separate and begin taking serious responsibility for every level of shit in life. I had excellent personal tutors who got me through some rocky patches. Exactly zero of my trouble came from the uiversity system itself. Today I see that being 100% of what harms students. The institution itself has become a toxic nightmare, the kids have to wrestle with it in addition to their studies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Ones_(TV_series)

There is actually a psychiatric disorder (from an Oliver Sacks book) where the patient wakes up one day with a terrible conviction that their own healthy limbs are not theirs, and with an overwhelming urge to amputate them. Sometimes it's so distressing that amputation is actually done.

This kind of happened to the US.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. 30+ years in academia, I've taught all around the northern hemisphere at all kinds of universities and have written dozens of articles in Times Higher documenting the regress of higher learning institutions into kindergartens.

It's not just that universities are no longer fit places for teaching, learning and research, but something bigger is at play, which I see as "the death of adulthood". HE institutions are leaders in this 'infantilisation' which is toxic to self-development and personal responsibility.

A big factor is the aggressive intrusion of US BigTech; Turnitin, Grammarly etc... violating "proctoring" software, just a pathological and pointless quest systematise and lock-down absolutely everything.

Another reason universities have been morally upended is putting vanity and appearance before substance. They care more about how they are seen, in league tables and in social media, than they care about their students. Self-deluding PR has made universities worse than some of the most cringe corporations.

As a recovered "academic" prof (they are not really academies any longer but holding-pens and "degree vendors") I absolutely would not want my own kids to waste their time or money there.

Self-similarity is a really nice property for lots of sound synthesis too, so textures like water, fire and wind can make use of Perlin control and basis signals.

Love this synthesis of safety and software thinking that seems apropos Ross Anderson's musings on software safety engineering.

Very nice read. Missing from the essay (but present in all of the philosophers mentioned) is "experience". Musk and so many other "smart" types lack it because they've used tech - smartly, and will defend to the hilt as a virtue - to cushion their experience of the real world - and in Mr Musk's case to manage awful childhood issues around control. Those sorts never develop to wisdom because they're too busy being "successful".

Kind of comes down to one of Neil Postman's questions

"Whose problem is it that it solves?"

It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API, federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network) seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.

> changeable process

Indeed. One sentence in TFA stands out

"As you adapt from cowboy to drone..."

Systemantics thinkers (Gall) would say that optionally you can move the other way too. In fact that happens when old systems are broken up into gangs of cowboys (much apropos DOGE etc). Only bad systems are ones that "cast themselves in stone". We prefer modular systems of smaller systems and if you put a process in place, it should be as easy to remove, adapt or replace that process.

SE tells us, never build highly coupled systems where changing one small bit causes problems in unrelated subsystems.

All this is to say there are such things as "flexible systems", which are designed to be more like cowboys than steel machines. A good example is an "operating system", where the essential purview is to frictionlessly run other systems. Parts can be set running, and just as easily terminated if they don't work, need bypassing, or the org grows.

Keep supporting the values of freedom, democracy, self-determination. These are not national or cultural preserves.

There are plenty of fascists and mean-minded frightened little people here in Europe, just as the body of US America remains founded on liberty.

I hope you're right. Incentives both ways and support for national infra is ideal. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia just showed [0] how flexible grids can be at the international level. However I think at the national level some countries aren't that happy to support national grids.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/brell-lithuania-latvia-and-estonia-tur...

The US is an ally in distress. We'll be happy to repay the debt from 80 years ago and reaffirm our common cause to freedom when the call comes.

I agree with the incentives for zonal pricing to encourage clean local production. The downside however is that the grid becomes defunded and a tragedy of commons ensues. We invest in common infrastructure precisely because of variance, which in the long run we hope to ameliorate.