sedev

We might be talking past each other. I'm saying - yes, the burden should be on current and former NSA employees to explain why they're trustworthy. People can set their standard of "acceptable explanation" however they like - however, I feel strongly that someone who worked for a deeply compromised institution, should bear the burden of explaining.

When Bob just wants to introduce himself and people say "You worked for the NSA? Go away, spy" -- that is a sign that effective social punishment of the NSA - the institution - is taking place. I see you worrying about the scenario where no amount of explanation Bob can give is enough to get him in the door. That's fine. But I'm arguing that Bob should have to do some explaining, and I'm arguing that if you do want the NSA - the institution - to suffer effective consequences, then you must accept that individual members will also face some gnarly consequence, because that's how institutions in a social context work. You cannot meaningfully punish the institution without also punishing its members. It does raise moral issues, yes - but if you have already decided, "we must punish the institution," then you fatally compromise that goal by adding a lily-livered "but let's not make things too hard for the members."

That is how social reproach works! I feel like you're strongly missing the point. The institution of The National Security Agency is made up of people. The institution and its members are embedded in a social context. Institutions, among other things, are responsibility-diffusing machines. You can't reproach the institution without also reproaching its members, because otherwise the members don't feel any responsibility for whatever you disapprove of about the institution and carry on with business as usual. You can't make the disapproval stick without affecting the individual members. Or, to flip it around a little, when you scold the institution and let members off the hook because they're just following orders and trying to pay the rent, you are saying "those orders were okay to follow."

I agree that it's not fully accurate to say "The NSA is untrustworthy, Bob worked for the NSA, therefore Bob is untrustworthy" - but because of how institutions work, if you want the institution to pay attention, then yes, there must be impact on its members. There is no way around this.

What I get from this article is "hey, what if we use HTML instead of LaTeX?" Unfortunately the answer to this is, "HTML is insufficient to specify all the things you need to make a paper publishable." LaTeX is a full-strength gnarly language because it had to be. If you were targeting digital distribution only, HTML (and the author really means "HTML plus CSS plus probably a small subset of JavaScript") would be maybe-kinda-sorta-plausible, but you can already go from LaTeX to HTML --- so why not write your original in the more powerful language and simplify it down to HTML when you need that? HTML+CSS+JS is actually not an improvement on PDFs, because you've got executable code in there and you'll go right down the same security-problems rabbit hole that PDF did.

To oversimplify: LaTeX is not perfect but is much smarter than the author is giving it credit for. This is that stereotypical Unix learning experience ("feature X is enormously frustrating, why can't we do something simpler" -> time passes -> "oh, feature X is actually spectacularly useful when viewed through the right lens") going on.

If you'd never heard of parallel construction before today, that seems to powerfully undermine your credibility. Why should we take you more seriously than someone who says "I was a secretary at the NSA for years and I never heard of anything bad happening, therefore nothing bad happened"?

This reads like it was penned by someone who's never heard of the Stanford Prison experiment or Milgram's research. When I read "I have a very high opinion of my former coworkers ... NSA employees are the law-abiding type ... You take a long automated psych test that flags troubling personality traits," I take away "the NSA is full of the kind of person who won't look at the big picture, who will follow orders without exercising critical thinking, and who can be counted upon to be a Good German."

The problems that the HN crowd (speaking broadly) has with the NSA and related entities, are systemic problems. They are not about, "is act X legal or not," they are not about "was this particular incident harmful or not." They are about root of the thing: about the high-level agenda, about the strategies, about the ideas. It does not in the least address these concerns to say "oh, my coworkers are fine folks, we work hard to obey the law, there are scary people out there!" This says nothing to the counterarguments of "we shouldn't have to trust you" (really, you could say that the field of cryptography is about replacing situations where you have to trust a human with situations where you only have to trust math), "the law itself is a problem," and "you haven't proven that you are doing more or better compared to other ways we could push back against scary people."

As with any government agency, the more they insist that they must not be held accountable, the more accountability we should jam down their collective throats. The first sign of someone who can't be trusted with power is that they ask for more of it.

I was also getting a strong Dave Barry vibe. It's not bad - but it's easy to let the schtick get old, and Dave Barry is still alive. Maybe the guy is testing the theory that if you understand it well, computers are as crazy as Florida and thus capable of generating as many bizarre anecdotes suitable for column grist as Florida. Plausible.

For the same reason that sending me a postcard doesn't entitle you to enter my house and take an inventory of my fridge. To get that information about a user, you should need informed consent, not just a marketer's wistful greed. That same "why not?" attitude is exactly the same bullshit user-contemptuous line of thinking that the NSA and the FBI use with their "intercept it all and let God sort it out" eavesdropping schemes.

Yes, and as a consumer, I couldn't be happier. All that shit is customer-hostile privacy-invading bullshit and I'm ecstatic that Google is making a move that kills it. I vigorously object to things like tracking bugs that leak information about me without my consent, so I'm in favor of measures like Google's that get us further towards people being unable to go on data fishing expeditions such as were possible with inserting arbitrary tracking bugs in emails. HTML email is a giant attack surface not just for Outlook Express-style remote code execution, but for invasions of privacy. If a marketer can't do their job without invading my privacy, I have no sympathy for them and I hope that this technical change stabs their business model in the belly.

There's a follow-up post[1] where he talks more about the reactions:

"A vision of a future in which civilizations, species and worlds follow life cycles like those of all other natural things didn’t leave them furious or depressed. Their comments instead featured such words as “comforted,” “delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of humanity’s overinflated ambitions, but there’s something rather more significant going on here. Not one of the readers who made these comments made gloating remarks about the fate of humanity or the Earth. Rather, what comforted, delighted, and awed them was the imagery of Nature’s enduring order and continuity that I wove throughout the narrative, and brought to the tightest focus I could manage in the last two paragraphs. "

[1]: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-ho...

A toy project I did not too long ago was "keep an eye on my Twitter account and when I favorite a tweet that contains a YouTube URL, add that video to my Watch Later playlist in YouTube." Nearly every time I mention this to someone who uses both services, they want it (yes, I know Instapaper can de facto do this).

There are some places lately with online ticket sales - I'm thinking particularly of http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2013/04/26.html - who have begun to demand not ID, but the credit card with which the ticket was purchased. It's an interesting anti-scalping measure.

As recently as last year there were still niches where spelling errors led to arbitrage opportunities: I knew someone who was into CCGs (e.g. Pokémon, Magic: the Gathering) and would search for variations on card names, score cards cheaply, and keep them around to trade at full value later. Same rationale (which I agree with!): eBay gives you a way to say "I will not accept a price less than $N" and a way to say "I will accept the highest bid regardless of magnitude." Trying to second-guess a seller's choice between those is just totally not viable.

Hey Airbrite folks, it's a blog post, it shouldn't be a blank page with NoScript in effect. That is a failure on your part.

Regarding the substance of the article: I'd argue that you're introducing a bias towards the outlier projects and ignoring projects (like Egypt Urnash's upthread) that don't need huge budgets. Tabletop gaming and comics have both set up thriving Kickstarter communities. Videogames make a big splash on Kickstarter because their fixed costs are so high (which is its own separate problem - they need to invest heavily in art assets which, as patio11 put it, depreciate straight off a cliff).

Even if there's an innocuous explanation for this, the government has totally blown through the trust of communities like this one, the critical journalism community, and more.

> If this is upheld it could have some interesting repercussions on water rights in the Central Valley > if I remember, some of those were parts of Mexican land grants as well.

That's both news to me and a wincing moment of "wow, California politics really do come down to water issues 90% of the time".

Well for that matter so does Clojure, and both have had a while to pick up traction. Do you think it'll be easier to solve the primarily-social problem of getting traction for languages like that (and I say this as someone who adores Clojure and has some affection for Haskell) or to solve the primarily-technical problem of figuring out chip technologies where one can metaphorically jack up current software and slide the new chip technology in underneath?

It might also be that browsers have started displaying it as a space - my Firefox does, for example (until you select it - copy-pasting it preserves the %20).

"Too many twentysomething founders look for employees just like themselves. “So you discriminate against anyone who is in their 30s or 40s or has a family,” says Mickiewicz. “But the most talented and experienced people will be in their 30s and 40s."

It's always a relief to see an article like this not just calling out age bias, but putting it at the top. There are other good points in the article too, but it's important to note that Bay Area tech culture skews heavily towards white dudes in their 20s. There are plenty of people pushing back against the "white dudes" part, but we could use a little more pushing back against the "in their 20s." Especially since someone who's 35 today was born in 1978 and was turning 12 in 1990, right around the elbow of the explosive growth curve of home-available computing. You could have maybe made an argument that someone who was 35 in 1995, born in 1960, was a bit late to the game to profoundly grok the web then (I think that argument's wrong, but you could make it without being laughed out of the room). But in 2013, a 35-year-old engineer is someone you want to look for because that's probably going to be someone with perspective and a mature skill set. There are plenty of smart 20-year-olds out there, yet there is no substitute good for experience.

Unfortunately that behavior pattern is exactly one that abusive users exhibit as well: innocuous review, long delay, glowing review of "target" business.

For the record: if you go and flag a review, in addition to the usual "abusive/TOS violation" type of stuff, you can also report that it "doesn't describe a personal consumer experience." It's not super obvious, but that's the easiest way to dispute someone who's not actually reviewing your restaurant.

I tend to use that to flag those jerkface reviews that are basically "I would never go there" rants.

"You would expect it to be in Yelp's interest to demonstrate its reviews are credible, though I haven't seen that. Competition and articles like this should motivate them in that direction. In the meantime, they benefit from charging businesses to allow positive reviews to appear and to suppress negative reviews (if they're doing that, it would explain why they don't focus on credibility)."

I think that you haven't been looking for it, then: that exact thing is hugely important to Yelp and is why they filter out so many reviews in the first place!

Wow, that is dramatically different than what the headline suggests. The "20% are fake" headline implies "20% of visible reviews", but instead I'm hearing you say, "20% of reviews are killfiled before visibility."

Wait, why on earth should people be prevented from leaving a negative review when they have a negative experience? A review site that doesn't let people leave negative reviews is an untrustworthy review site.

Sure, people are unreasonable - but that has nothing to do with Yelp! Think of it this way: you can make it look like the world experienced vastly more earthquakes in the 20th century than in the 17th, but what actually happened was that detection got much better. Similarly, Yelp doesn't at all change people's propensity to think unreasonable things about restaurants they go to: it just improves detection. Improved detection, I argue, is an inherent good. Knowing what people really want makes it easier to deliver that, even if the process of finding out what people actually want is painful (and it usually is, since most of us are not very good at knowing what we actually want).

While I'd love for those things to come to pass, it's alarming that you elide methods and obstacles entirely. The democratic process has been purchased by the entities you're proposing to regulate, and the entities that you propose enforce these new rules, are beneficiaries of the current arrangement and would be greatly inconvenienced by the changes you propose. The beneficiaries of the current arrangement will resist changes to that arrangement with utmost vigor, so it doesn't speak well of your proposal that it supposes that they will cooperate with changes that are against their interests by handwaved methods and tactics.

How are you going to get from here to there?

Predicted TSA response: ban iPhones.

I have a very, very low opinion of the TSA.

User data sovereignty is, in my opinion, the next big thing that folks like the Free Software Foundation should be harping on. There's already some noise about it, but unfortunately the FSF, the EFF, and similar organizations are still to a considerable extent fighting yesterday's battles.

Another question to consider: when you frame the issues around "user data sovereignty," do you pick up the support of people who don't want to be associated with the FSF but who are on the right side of the issues?

You're not wrong to feel that way. It is not strictly required to contribute back to the community when using F/OSS products - but doing so is the best thing to do by a wide margin. It's okay to feel uncomfortable when the company you work for is being a free rider.

If you count laptop plus tablet sales and measure by profit share, it's not remotely close: Apple obliterates its competitors by that measure.

For the last three elections in a row (at the very least), the will of the US' citizens has been very, very clear: "give us good health care, stop the war, keep the rich from killing us all."

No one has offered more than small parts of that, and the small parts that have been promised, have not been delivered in good faith. So yes, the US is a one-party system; Taiwan, your example, is not the only way to do it.

Oh good, I'm glad that I'm not the only one who got about a third of the way through the article and said "well, yes, this is pretty obviously the way things work if you've read Manufacturing Consent or similar critiques."

The differences of opinion between different critters inside the Washington DC alternate-reality bubble are greatly magnified by how hard they pretend to fight over them.