rockskon

I primarily alluded to AI because of obvious reasons, but yes - Cloud computing and related service products are also good examples.

But there's a great deal of department needs that don't revolve around information processing infrastructure where there aren't many success stories to refer to. Especially relating to startups.

I question what specifically you're referring to.

Yes, Hack for Defense is a decade old now. But the DoD famously had not done much business with area startups for many decades outside of very specific success stories like the CIA's In-Q-Tel.

Turns out that start-ups can't wait several years for a contract award. They tend to die in that time if they have no funding.

Additionally - talk of electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology has been a oft-repeated tagline by members of military leadership as well as Palantir representatives when talking amongst themselves about Silicon Valley or in their appeals to SV itself.

"We have so much in common! Here, why don't you open your history book and I'll show you!" - that's what the appeal comes off like.

I maintain that primarily relying on those examples is a poor choice in trying to establish cultural similarities.

A tiny number of enormous companies capturing the department revolving around one specific technology doesn't sound like it's bridged the acquisitions gap between Silicon Valley and the military.

That's about as culturally relevant to Stanford as talking of people who lived through the great depression.

The DoD doesn't get to neglect relationships with a community for decades and then talk of how much in common they have with each other. It's nonsense and transparently manipulative.

Well - it's not exactly a surprise that all these non-American countries engage in un-American practices.

It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.

Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.

Does the average person think this? Perception of what other people think doesn't always line up with what they actually think.

HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently with regards to AI.

Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.

Don't underestimate the capacity for the problem to get significantly worse.

I do question at what point AI could be useful as a teaching aid.

The quality of LLMs depends heavily on, among other things, how you word your questions.

Knowing the correct questions to ask is not something most students know how to do given that it tends to require a fair bit of pre-existing domain knowledge.

Of course - it's SEO's fault that Google search frequently ignores words in your queries.

It's SEO's fault that Google frequently prioritizes giving you results that are semantically or thematically related but ultimately irrelevant to what you searched for.

It's SEO's fault that Google refuses to place ads on websites not full of meandering irrelevant "content".

It's SEO's fault Google search all-but-ignores most single-purpose tool websites.

It's not the result of decisions made by Google's programmers and project managers - it's allllll the fault of SEO!

The SEO industry definitely isn't an all-purpose scapegoat for horribly unpopular decisions made by human beings at Google.

*2024, not 2014

I did Google this. It seems to be a small number of banks doing this right now. A far cry from "all banks".

Maybe we'll get there eventually? But you should be more wary about making such absolute claims.

I've found that framing topics like this as primarily a pretext for different motives is a sure-fire way to be ignored by people you may want to convince.

As always, the goal in convincing others is to take someone from their current understanding and bring them closer to yours. You can't get there if you don't start the topic at their current understanding of it.

Trusting untrustworthy companies aside, that doesn't resolve the issue of hacked facial recognition data.

Even back in 2014, malware was coming out that steals facial recognition data directly from smart phones themselves.

https://www.theregister.com/security/2024/02/15/stolen-ios-u...

The GDPR isn't a silver bullet.

Additionally - furtherance of facial recognition technology would impact travelling to foreign jurisdictions.

One of the most common ways foreign travellers get flagged when travelling internationally is for social media posts made under their own name that their destination country's government may not like. Traditionally if you've kept yourself pseudo-anonymous, you've largely been safe. But if we get to a point where pseudo-anonymous accounts are associated with pictures of people's faces, it will become significantly less pleasant to travel internationally for a lot more people.

Do you have proof of this? This comes off as conjecture.

A bank's security camera feed isn't likely to be sold to dozens of companies.

It is all but guaranteed for Internet-based facial recognition services.

Hacked facial recognition data already is reportedly being used by scammers to not only bypass bank security but also to impersonate people to target their loved ones.

There is no lasting security gain by providing a selfie. There is a lasting security and privacy loss, however.

Asinine requirement by whatever risk management firm they use. A selfie provides nothing in terms of lasting security while simultaneously adding permanent risk.

Isn't AI routinely making significant mistakes in analyzing medical imaging?

"Their lawyers will win" is plainly wrong assumption if something is clearly illegal.

That's their problem that they're trying to make my problem.

I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.

In the 2010's, there was an instance of a late-teens/early-20's girl targeted by a group of too-online people for a racist chat log made when she was around 12 or 13 years old. The people went after her dad's business too because of his association with her.

Aside from getting her fired from her job, they also tried to destroy her dad's business.

I get that less-than-10 years isn't a ton of time, but it also represented nearly half her life. People tend to grow up a lot in their teens even if it's still common for there to be some immaturity leftover in their early 20's

In response to someone in another thread who argued against personal privacy, who said "Why do people feel they can behave in a way that can be blackmailed", I responded with the following:

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Yeah, how dare someone do or say anything that some random crazy asshole could use to threaten that person's personal or professional life or even put them in danger of physical harm. To hell with gay kids growing up in very traditional religious areas in much of the world.

That person who made a racist joke on Discord when they were 13 years old? That should be able to ruin them when they're 30!

Someone confiding to a friend over social media DMs that they're in an abusive relationship with someone violent? Well - she shouldn't be surprised when her partner beats her within an inch of her life when he finds out. If only she did what she was told, right?

And let's not forget the cringiest or most sexual thing you've ever said online - make sure that your every utterance in private would pass scrutiny by your employer's HR department!

Seriously...I don't understand people like you. What a small, listless, and unusually safe world you must live in.

You may as well have asked why can't everyone think and act like you as well as live in your particular region of the world with the same friends, family, romantic, and professional opportunities that you've been provided throughout your life.

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I recall at an old place of work, the security office having a poster on the wall that said something to the effect of "if your facial biometrics get compromised, you must change your face".

Silly as they were trying to be, the concept still holds -

Facial biometrics can and do get compromised too. Your example of IDs taken from the homeless - what the heck prevents organized criminals from taking pictures or recordings of their faces too?

Already there's malware out there stealing facial recognition data from infected devices (ESET reported on this nearly two years ago). Unlike changeable passwords, once your facial recognition data is compromised then that's it. Scammers can now impersonate you on top of having defeated this additional layer of fraud prevention.

While I agree with your claim that it is likely the number of third parties info is being routed to is likely related to per-query economics, I want to note that ZKP are not magic. They tend to either be worthless at preventing fraud or require so much additional context as to question how much privacy is really being preserved.

While ZKP is more useful in limiting how much info is provided and, depending on implementation letting you make sure of the full scope of information acquired....if it literally only validates age then there's nothing other than logistics preventing a single adult from authenticating the entire world.

They will be disruptive to your life if you, as a U.S. citizen, refuse to unlock your phone on the U.S. border. But it is my understanding they cannot constitutionally mandate you provide a passcode to unlock your phone. But they may confiscate your phone from you.

Expanding the scope of it is new.

Perhaps you should ask your super secret source how he reconciles statements from several generations of NSA leadership, the IC Attorney General, PCLOB, and FISA Court that the NSA regularly acquires U.S. person communications "incidentally" and why, if they don't have U.S. person communications, they have publicly published procedures on querying their stores of data with U.S. Person "selectors".

Presumably there'd be no point in having procedures in querying for U.S. persons communications if they didn't have the information to begin with.

The sad thing is....talking with LEOs that cause panics like this when they're apologizing after the fact....they have zero consideration for doing anything relating to schools taking action on their public statements and statements made to news outlets. Schools aren't their remit (and yet talking with news outlets is?). So as far as I can tell, school children being punished for the crime of having or using a toy that looks scary are unfortunate externalities from well-meaning LEOs.

My sources are the prior leadership of the NSA's public statements, the specifics of the legal opinions released by the FISA court, PCLOB reports, and me actually paying attention to what intelligence officials have stated in public testimonies. They are not sourced from fear-mongering from paranoid schizophrenics or activist lawmakers who are making assumptions of what the NSA is doing.

You are doing the equivalent of telling me to ignore all of those sources - to include the FISA court - and to trust you - random-person-on-Hacker-News-alluding-to-working-for-the-NSA.

If you are correct and everything else - to include the FISA court - are wrong - then that begs the question of why they would all publicly make material misrepresentations about the NSA's acquisition of U.S. persons' information.

Shall I assume that the NSA no longer collects information if one-end of a communication is foreign and the other American?

Or what of Americans that use VPNs even if the exit node is within the U.S.?

What of "incidentally" collected information (collected without a probable-cause warrant) on U.S. citizens' communication contained evidence of a crime?

What about Americans living on the coasts whose information may end up crossing a fiber line going overseas and then back again even if the source and destination are U.S. citizens? Are their communications acquired?

Don't you all still share unminimized data (to include what U.S. person data was not filtered out at the time of initial acquisition) with the CIA, FBI, and NCTC - agencies with their own rules on how long they get to retain U.S. persons' information they acquired from NSA-sourced data.

The 2023 PCLOB report on FISA Section 702 (see page 78) maintains that agents and analysts at the NSA and the three agencies they share raw data with typically do not affirmatively purge U.S. persons' information that has been incidentally collected that is not immediately recognized as having foreign intelligence or criminality information. Out of the possibility that the information might later-on be interpreted as being relevant to their agency mission, instead the information is generally kept until it ages out. Depending on an agency's individual procedures they may be retained for 5 years. Or 15 years. Or indefinitely.

I'm to understand it used to be a real significant problem for analysts to spy on U.S. citizens indirectly by looking up a foreign national the U.S. citizen was known to be communicating with.

I could keep going on, but I'd like to think I made my point.

Your agency's mission statement is not a shield to hide behind. Your actions are what matter. And a legal Rube Goldberg machine that results in an enormous amount of U.S. persons information being acquired by the NSA (and, by association, the FBI and CIA and NCTC) does not engender confidence that the agency actually gives a damn about the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Never say never.

Germany seems to have recovered quite a lot of trust following World War 2, to provide an extreme example of bad foreign policy.