tal8d

How 'bout a little bit of both? Imagine the past year of US corporate simpering in regard to Chinese interests - but across the entire .com domain. Everyone better make sure they're using the CCP approved South China Sea maps, yes - it would get that silly.

I don't doubt it. Like I said, troll-shielding. The more interesting consequences of that don't happen in game chats though. The censorship apologists come out in force in the wake of a competitive player being banned for publicly supporting the HK protesters was a good demonstration of that. They were clearly struggling to understand the value of free-speech, and the fact that those accustomed to it are unaffected by "You wanna hurt my national pride?! Well I'm glad 9/11 happened! See, free speech is bad!"

The Chinese firewall is looking less like a method of tyrannical control, and more like a ridiculous attempt at troll-shielding an easily manipulated populace.

https://youtu.be/xN0vUlljX0I?t=120

So the text of the article doesn't factor into your diagnosis of my projection?

"Alison’s balcony offers her a small degree of distance from her partner..."

"For the estimated 1.6 million women who experienced domestic abuse..."

"...self isolation for women in coercive or violent relationships..."

"But he’s the worst..."

"...the charity WomanKind in Bristol has had a number of new callers."

"...women can leave violent households to go to a refuge during the lockdown."

"Help is still out there for women enduring domestic abuse."

"Sian Norris is a writer and feminist activist"

Such mental arithmetic, much meninist numbers.

> That wasn't the start of the hoax...

The only perpetrator that would provide an excuse for baselessly accusing the US military would have to be the US government. So when did they fabricate that hoax? Was it when the FBI started cracking down on spies in January? Are they the ones that pressured the Mounties to start clearing their level-4 labs of Chinese virologists last year?

> ...the blame for these hoaxes does not rest on the Chinese.

The lying and secrecy creates the environment in which that sort of thing thrives. At some point you can't characterize predictable consequences as victim blaming, for many the benefit of doubt was lost pretty early on, following the crackdown on doctors and journalists who accurately described events.

> When you feel we are encountering an unprecedented level of misinformation, why do you think that your information is untainted?

Let me be more clear: China lying about something is to be expected. What is unprecedented is the combination of two things: the lie being told has severe and unavoidable consequences to everyone, and the means to combat the lies are not only open to all - but are actively being employed to do so. The beauty of opensource intelligence is that any potential for manipulation can be quantified in a way that secretly sourced data cannot.

> ...reply to the "US accusation" that the virus was unleashed intentionally by the Chinese.

Oh that is an easy one. That US accusation was actually open speculation by Indian and German researchers examining the only data that China was willing to share with the rest of the world. They weren't accused of intentionally unleashing it, but negligence was speculated - the lying and secrecy is the cause for that, and they have only themselves to blame. China had allowed only one outside crisis team in, from the WHO (which lost credibility long ago) - and they only spent a single day in Wuhan. Around that time it was discovered that China had been under-reporting infections by an order of magnitude, every province coincidentally made the same calculation error for the same period of time.

> ...they're fairly common tactics worldwide.

This is all unprecedented. We have never seen such transparent lies counter-messaged in near realtime by way of opensource intelligence. Grassroots btw, the corporate response has been denial - followed by a week or two of softening messaging, then admission to the truth. The information surrounding cross species transmissibility is a good example: videos starting popping up of Chinese people hurling their pets from rooftops in response to government warnings with regard to transmissibility. The corporate media immediately swung into action, declaring any such talk as racist FakeNews™ - but they were wrong again.

> Though it does not excuse many of China's initial actions...

This qualifier, "initial", makes me think you are arguing that their subsequent actions are excusable. I'd argue they aren't excusable, even from a completely amoral utilitarian perspective - because nothing they've done even looks rational. Accusing the other party in trade negotiations of releasing a biological weapon, coincidentally right next to your own infectious disease facility, isn't going to improve negotiation prospects - no rational person would think that it could. Threatening to interrupt medical supply chains during a pandemic... I can't think of a better battlecry for those who'd advocate pulling all operations out of China. Forcing workers to return to the factories and claiming that you are back at 85% capacity, when everyone has access to near real time satellite imagery proving that your coal plants aren't running, isn't going to strengthen your negotiation position.

While also providing proof that those statements predate China's antics. When China was accusing everyone of fear-mongering, and hints of travel restrictions were met with speeches about the holocaust and hypocritical appeals to the WHO, which US official is to blame for that? I've been watching this thing since December, the USG is pretty much the last one to the party - China's state run media has been saying crazy stuff since day one.

It was happening long before the WH uttered a word, so if you really want to blame Trump for Chinese propaganda - you are going to have to argue for the concept of preemptive retaliation.

Which market will bring costs down and feed into the next cycle of development, a market that potentially includes everyone - or a market restricted to desperate legally blind people? I'm not a fan of consumerism, but it goes a lot further in improving the lives of everyone, versus conspicuous virtue projects.

I attacked it from both directions: an arguably supervised dataset of urls (hundreds of GB from various internet survey projects), and unit testing the insane markov gibberish the parser makes when you cram random data where it doesn't belong and run it in reverse. The dataset was way less helpful for a strictly conforming design, but I imagine it would be useful for a mostly correct parser.

I wrote 90% of a strict URI parser over a year ago, I know that RFC way better than I'd like to. I stopped at 90% after discovering the reason why my fuzzer was generating test failures: the ABNF is wrong. I believe it was around the query portion of URI segmentation, where two potential interpretations shared the same order of precedence and there was no rule on the order of execution. I'll finish that project one day... because I still don't know how scared I should be about that sort of ambiguity making it through more than one ABNF parser.

For an individual, yes - the barrier to entry is high. But I don't really see any way to change that, due to the very nature of mainframes: systems of complex and highly tuned special purpose submodules. This is the first thing you'll notice when digging through the literature, lots of brand new non-standardized acronyms for purpose-built subsystems. While a lot of it certainly has the taste of needless market segmentation, there is a lot of unique stuff that is genuinely scarce. Yes, you can get a second hand mainframe at a bargain price - but your really don't want to unless it is part of a much larger tax advantaged living museum project. There are emulators though, Hercules and zPDT.

My interests led me more to the Power architecture, which is weird enough to hold my interest - while still being practical at the individual scale. For example, the z15 comes with the NXU compression accelerator - the p9 has a similar (same?) NX coprocessor. You'll also find market segmentation here, and IBM would do well to knock it off with the weird PowerVM/NV/Opal/ePAR/LPAR stuff. Their performance monitoring and scheduling stuff is really awesome, and it is unfortunate that they use it to segment product offerings. It isn't as ugly as Intel's ECC games, but it still isn't a good look.

Yes, I understand that logical correctness is different from universal truth. But using the exact same formula to argue two mutually exclusive points in the same breath is a very good way of demonstrating why emotionally driven arguments yield poor results.

> ...exclusive right to violence.

I know that duty to retreat is much more common outside of the US, but I don't think any democracy demands that you just die in the face of a determined attacker - which would be required in your "exclusive right" characterization. While the classic way of describing it is a "monopoly on violence", the scenario you describe would be better characterized as an exclusive right to classify murder and manslaughter.

> ...exclusive right to private communication and private secrets.

Because that would be impossible, as they can't exclusively have a right to information that you generated - at worst it would be a shared right. The US does claim shared rights to everything that is possible though: the moment you share that information with anyone they claim that right - 3rd party doctrine.

Your two points would have better symmetry if you added that bit about the definition of democracy onto the end of both. That would make it easier to spot the fact that you've just made the exact same "threat to democracy" argument I just replied to.

> ... and make having a democracy much more difficult.

Are you unaware of the fact that this is exact argument made by those who argue for the 2nd amendment? While you could argue that they are fear-mongers, with the tree of liberty talk, you can't then go on to talk about a threat to democracy by way of the government's constant violation of citizen's other rights (the 4th in this case). Emotional appeals are much easier for the confiscation proponents, because nobody expects internal consistency from someone waving a bloody shirt.

This is one of those "It depends..." questions, where it really does - on so many variables that it would be a major chore just to list them all. So an easier way to go about just establishing an idea of where to put the first bite would be to get an idea of the lateral limits. You are already familiar with the startup side of the spectrum, so spend a little time thinking about the extreme opposite: multi-century continuity, the US military's system of knowledge transfer. To be clear - you really don't want to emulate it, even to the degree that IBM did with their manual that helpfully informed employees of the correct way to sit at a desk, but know what the extreme looks like. Maybe pick a few high level concepts out of it:

* Graduated levels of mastery: few people need the details for standing up a production database, but all department members need to know that a company process already exists for it.

* Training dependencies: the mapping doesn't have to be perfect, a little goes a long way in giving shape to a training program.

* Training records: log employee training sessions, from self declarations of 'Yes I read this brief' to consultant led seminars.

Basically 80% of the military's comprehensive training program can be implemented with a network drive of docs and a spreadsheet. A couple of places I contracted for was pretty heavily reliant on Microsoft Sharepoint. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a fairly decent open source suite of components that could give you a solid starting point for a training program what would be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

Nope, just advanced planning and VoIP. You'd be amazed how much you save in both service fees and distraction. Friends and family quickly adapt as well, knowing to call in the evening - which leads to better conversations in my experience (no more "...so whatcha doin?", they've collected their thoughts and I'm not distracted). Obviously it doesn't work for everyone... but unless you are a doctor or a volunteer firefighter, I encourage people to give it a try for a month or two - you won't want to go back to lugging that privacy invading media consumption device around after that.

I've been living without a mobile phone for about 5 years. The only time it has ever registered as slightly inconvenient for me is while travelling - specifically the airport pickup coordination. I simply don't use services that rely on thoroughly busted mobile phone 2FA - and I'm honestly dumbfounded that anyone with any understanding of 2FA and the insecurity of telecom networks would, given the fact that a lot of services use it for password reset.

For those who haven't been paying attention to the comedic effects of intellectual property taken to the extreme (or logical conclusion, I'd argue): just punch "tractor dmca" into your favorite search engine. We often take for granted that people in this sphere are aware of this sort of insanity, but unfortunately that really isn't even close to being true.

That is a distinction without a difference, even in the most charitable light. Do I think they're meeting in smoke filled back rooms to plot their dark deeds? No. They are actually very open about it, sending company officers and employees to panels on the topic, echoing the same messaging about their self appointed burden in policing the thoughts of others.

It is not unlike a mob. While it is comprised of autonomous individuals, there is a feedback loop of their own making that results in an emergent behavior. Translated into moonman talk: something something social contract, something... collective will.

sdf.org is interesting because it is one of the few services running a multi-user capable OS - and using it that way. I donated to them years ago, primarily for the complementary email address, and in setting that up I was poking around in the shell - that was the first I'd seen 'who' return a list active sessions that weren't me.

I don't think Facebook wants anything, as it is simply an abstract legal concept. Employees and shareholders of Facebook are the ones to watch. They were the first movers on the totally not coordinated Alex Jones shunning. Youtube had previously struck a video or two, but Facebook was the first to bring down the ban hammer. Days later Jones was banned from every other major platform - with Twitter being the single exception.

The AFF back to back breaches were interesting because there were faults to found at every level.

* The breach included PII from a property they had already sold, but held onto for some reason.

* SHA1. A good choice if you want to slightly inconvenience somebody with a GPU, while also increasing the odds of your hashes getting uploaded in full to one of many distributed cracking projects.

* No effective user input validation. The exploit was one step in sophistication beyond those ancient IIS ../../hue.txt attacks.

* No attempt at anything resembling principles of least privilege, exec whatever wherever.

So, everyone failed - executives to DBAs. Screw pentests, start by implementing best practices that have been around for 40 years.

After learning that there are people walking around with no inner monologue, I am no longer surprised by these debunked universalities. People share a lot less in common than what popular culture would have use think, again no surprise when considering the effects of popular culture.

Oh I blamed everyone, from USPS and the county level politicians - to the astrologists screwing around with the tz database... Also, and I hope this doesn't offend any surviving perl monks, having only perl at my disposal made it that much more unpleasant. I never touched perl after that project wound down, but I do wonder to what degree that experience influenced my subsequent shift to porting AIX software... Indiana was certainly involved. I'm sure I've got a copy of a backup of a copy that would contain those old scripts, but I'm no joke starting to get a little upset just thinking about how much time was needlessly wasted on such a stupid problem.

You just triggered a deeply repressed memory. I had to write some software that integrated a properly designed logistics database with an improperly designed USPS mail piece tracking feed. What constitutes a proper design? UTC timestamps. USPS, at the time, provided a service that allowed mailers to track their individually serialized mail pieces with an impressive level of granularity. Every sort machine reported its model number and the nature of the event, which is very useful when trying to track the cause of damage - as some models were more aggressive than others (speed, bend radius, etc). Unfortunately they only reported times in the local representation... "No problem" a much younger and happier me said, "they have helpfully included the zipcode that the scan occurred in!"

That was an absolute nightmare. Nonsensical timezone pockets, not necessarily along postal lines, arbitrarily changing at what point they switch to daylight saving time... and yes, areas around reservations were the most common offenders. Oh and you can't just cleanly ingest the data - converting it to UTC on import, because you only find out that they switched after you start seeing time travelling mail pieces in your staging datastore. I don't think I'd ever been more tortured by a problem, only a couple of years before that I had been fighting house to house in Fallujah - and that USPS system integration had me wonder if I'd made a mistake in not renewing my contract.

And snap goes the bear trap. I was a little concerned that the parallels between their political maneuvering with Mugabe and Jinping would be too obvious, but you've clearly missed it. They have a history of this sort of behavior.

> They are easily one of the most honest and forthright global organisations around, made up of competing professionals in their field from around the globe.

They are political actors. You may, most charitably, say that they are pragmatic in pursuit of a great good - but there are two problems with that: loss of trust and misaligned objectives.

> They would be the first to be ringing alarm bells if there was a problem.

Would they? You just admitted that their motives can't be examined without considering the political dimension. This is why you shouldn't lie.

Unlike the WHO, this friendly internet commentator hasn't appointed Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador. So you'd be better served appealing to my authority, not theirs.

The propensity for lying, in order to protect the power structure, results in a major constraint on future options - requiring more lies. It is a vicious cycle that completely obliterates any potential strong-arm advantage a single party system may have. If for no other reason: this is why you don't lie, you have no idea how badly you screw your future self. Also, and I'm looking at you World Health Organization, anyone trying to soften the blowback from lying suffers major damage to their credibility.

Having worked in loss prevention for more than one company, I've only seen cuts to that budget occur in one of two ways: departments working themselves out of a job by solving the root cause, or vendors absorbing enough counter-party risk to make in-house anti-fraud programs a net negative. I can't imagine any decision-maker outsourcing LP without simultaneously outsourcing risk, because it would not only be a bad idea - but would be nearly pointless in even the best potential outcome.