throw101010

> Not to be rude, but did you read it?

Have you?

> You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.

> [...] the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense

> We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest"

And there's more of this all over this letter. Just because he mentioned a tit-for-tat rationalization first and addresses American's actions (does it really surprises you in a "Letter to America"?), it doesn't remove the ideology behind it. It's also very ironic to see this letter brought up by leftist/progressive people as a justification for "resisting" the way Hamas does (because that is what is happening on TikTok, maybe you haven't watched the videos and read the comments). Almost none of the values they claim to care about would be left if Bin Laden or the Hamas had it their way.

> There were lots of liberal western countries that didn't get 9/11ed, so "he hated our freedoms" lacks explanatory power if nothing else.

Are you trying to rewrite history that's not even 25 years old? London, Madrid, Paris (to mention only the largest) all had sizable attacks from Al-Qaeda or their sprouts after 9/11, they don't count unless it caused above 1000 deaths or something? With their limited means (relative to the undertaking), they have managed to struck the biggest target they could on 9/11 and cause the most death and destruction in any Western democracy in a terrorist act.

> there was some stated reason at all, that terrorism is political (and usually not driven by like a supra political cosmological hate).

Bin Laden clearly displays homophobia and antisemitism as main justifications for his terrorism in this letter. He clearly hated the freedoms allowed to individuals in liberal democracies and claimed they were the causes of their alleged degeneracy. It was rooted in ignorance and religious fundamentalism.

So I don't really know what other justifications you have found in this letter that would make you think Bin Laden had "reasons" to do what he did beyond this, he wasn't fighting for his people first, he was a religious fundamentalist, if that's not "supra political cosmological hate", what is it?

Also, if people were learning this from this viral campaign it would be good... unfortunately it seems that they are more focused on the antisemitism part in it as it relates to the current Israelo-palestinian conflict. That is why it became viral right now, context matters, and it's really not looking like a "learning" opportunity if you check the comment sections where this is shared.

Bold of you to assume there was a CTO back in the days of ISDN... even in a bank.

> And yet this is the #1 post on HN right now.

Doesn't it make sense to give some visibility to such claims so they can be verified? I would think a lot of people on HN are equipped to take part in this informally.

But I agree with you that the title is too categorical and should be updated.

And the potential use of this data by governments around the world for less innocuous purposes than "showing relevant ads".

It is not too surprising that companies who can profit from it push the data collection as far as they can. It is more surprising/troubling how the people in general seem to either have completely capitulated due to the generalization of the data collection... or fail to understand the implications it can have.

Thankfully some people in EU courts still think that privacy is a right.

Especially considering the mount of electronic waste that 400M of PCs represents. I think this should be one argument authorities should use against Microsoft when it makes all this hardware obsolete with a software update.

If there are software workarounds that can prolong the use of that hardware, even at the cost of performance, they should be liable (and maybe subsidized) to implement them.

Would prohibition really work? It's not like there isn't already a large network of illegal betting in place for all the bets that can't happen legally... it would simply make them thrive even more.

Making things illegal/banned might feel good at first, but if it's barely enforceable and/or the demand for that thing remains very high all you are doing, as a state, is foregoing on a lot of taxes while not even diminishing harm often (sometimes even causing your own harm... I'm looking at you "war on drugs"... and before that the alcohol prohibition).

> please use the FaceID/TouchID protected platform authenticators for passwordless authentication.

No, thank you, I don't wear my passwords on my face or my fingers because they need to be secret to serve their purpose. I don't really feel like wearing a balaclava and gloves all the time.

Also sometimes I need to change them (if they get compromised, if computing progress made them easier to bruteforce, etc.), and I don't really want to have to use cosmetic surgery when that happens.

Biometrics are closer to a username than a password in this regard.

> Don't do passwords by memory.

We can agree on this (and the disaster that SMS OTP is due to lousy carrier security mostly), you will still need a password for that password manager usually though. You can have a key based setup but you still need a way to store/remeber that key. So passwords will not die just based on this, they might become less ubiquitous.

It sounds like you want to trivialize a problem that has existed for way longer than computer science and systematically relies at some point on human memory if you want a certain level of security and secrecy.

Obviously if you decrease these requirements, you can get away with weaker authentication mechanisms... but you will not secure whatever that password was securing as well then.

What does it change from normal/cheaper keyboards? I've never made the jump because I'm always scared that the additional noise will bother people around me who might sleep at times when I am working.

In the same vein two of my favorite compact tools:

- Victorinox Cybertool (mostly to work on PC buils when I'm on the go and can't take lots of tools with me)

And for everyday use a keyring pocket knife:

- Victorinox Midnite Manager@work (somehow makes me feel safer to have a backup of my encrypted passwords on me on that USB stick, and I often use the small LED light at night or in dark corners of PC builds too)

USDC definitely got hit as it depegged from the USDC for few days and traded for $0.87 at some point, it didn't "explode" (and it restored its peg) only because the US government promised to bail out customers of the Silicon Valley Bank fully and not just upto $250,000 as it would be the case if in an usual FDIC coverage situation. Circle, the company behind this stablecoin had about $3.3 billions in SVB.

I hate this thing so much, and all the times Microsoft just ditches long standing features/options for seemingly no reason. They likely collect usage stats for them too and know many people use them...

For task grouping they had left a way in the registry to disable it but for some reason they also temoved it in an update... and now I think they have added an option in an Insider version and it "should" come in a release in Fall.

Nothing in the article explains why this is the measure the government apparently "has" to use?

In most other countries as far as I know exams can be carried with relatively low cheating and no Internet outages, certainly not country wide outages.

Anyone has more insights on why Algeria isn't applying common anti-cheating measures or why they are ineffective there?

> Nature will not be publishing any content in which photography, videos or illustrations have been created wholly or partly using generative AI, at least for the foreseeable future.

Allow me a bit of a rhetorical question, what are the chances they already publish photos taken on devices that apply by default some form of AI-based generative/corrective algorithms like the "AI detail enhancement engine" by Samsung (the one they use to enhance photos of the moon)?

I don't think they can win, and I don't mean just the moderators here, SO in general can't win a fight against AI with bans of all kinds.

I see one possibility for them, embrace AI and generate a quick/automated first reply by AI marked as such (with a disclaimer) for every post. It should be subject to the same voting system.

The error of moderators and SO here is to discard AI generated answers because some wrong (but sounding right) answers it can generate... when often AI answers are also correct and even at times out do what a single human would have found/answered.

If you can harness the existing human knowledge and correct the "bad" ones (badly rated AI answer given less weight) to feed the models of the future it seems like a win for everyone in the long run. A ban misses this opportunity and generates even more work for moderators which will inevitably also ban some innocent users and valuable content.

Isn't it a bit unusual to release the details of an exploit before a fix is released?

The author of the software seems to be cooperating to release a fix, I would think making it public would help people who would exploit this maliciously.

Seems a bit dissimilar, demonstrating something is possible right now, out of the realm of fiction, seems like a decent way to incite people do discuss the issue. Especially to a crowd that most likely has no idea of the recent AI advancements and the ease of access to this technology by almost anyone.

For Fukushima the evac zone was 20km around the plant. A similar scenario in the US would see a 50 miles (80km) radius evac zone recommended by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (at least the the time of it happening in Japan: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-evacuations-... ).

I don't think I have ever heard of such large zones for other industrial disasters, the estimatated maps I've seen for Bhopal, one of the if not the worst industrial chemical disaster ever, had a radius for the gas spread of about 7km (and it killed a lot more people really quickly). It is of course annecdotal, but each disaster has its own circumstances: wind, water/soil contamination, etc. that impose different measures to take... but in general nuclear disasters have a much wider radius for the fallout, that's why the security/processes for it are way more demanding and generally successfully applied.

But the main point was that we can't discount these risks and their results (deaths) when a disaster happened, as rare as they are (thankfully). They are part of it, and counting these deaths is just honest, as I said other sources of energy in the course of their "normal" operation kill way more people and destroy our environment in the process. It's a no-brainer to choose nuclear power over them.

Again the evacuation zone was larger due to the nature of the plant, so yes it caused more stress, to more people than a similar incident in a coal plan would have.

It still is an exceptional incident and it is a ridiculously small death toll compared to the "normal" operation of coal plants yearly death toll... but it isn't a reason to minimize the numbers. As for the 1 direct death, I was referring to this part of my source:

> In 2018, the Japanese government reported that one worker has since died from lung cancer as a result of radiation exposure from the event.

Going by the official statement, I let them do the judging, they don't really have an interest in over-reporting as far as I know.

1 direct death from the nuclear incident, 2313 deaths due to the mental and physical stress of evacuation required partially due to the incident (there was an earthquake and tsunami ofc, but the evacuation zone was broader because of the nuclear incident), per official Japanese numbers.

> The year after the 2011 disaster, the Japanese government estimated that 573 people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation.17 Since then, more rigorous assessments of increased mortality have been done, and this figure was revised to 2,313 deaths in September 2020.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

Don't get me wrong, I love nuclear power, but reporting numbers inaccurately/partially serves nobody.

EDIT: I am not sure what justifies the 3 instant downvotes, I am literally reporting accurate numbers in the face of someone minimizing them.

Most medical schools apply modern versions, most of which do not forbid abortion and are more secular than the original Greek oath.

> As of 1993, only 14% of medical oaths prohibited euthanasia, and only 8% prohibited abortion Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath#Modern_vers...

It is not rare to have people colloquially call these other forms of "the" oath many M.D. swear to the hippocratic oaths in my experience.

> we are increasingly in need of a countering force. We are currently suffering under the tyranny of the anonymous!

Are you? What happens if this "need" isn't filled? Just because you can't probe popular opinion with an open comment system, it doesn't mean it is a requirement for society to work. We have systems to vote that work and don't have these issues. Simple paper ballots work really well.

> It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies

Private companies and governments have never collected as much data as they do now, mostly without real consent, and they are getting the means to exploit this data very efficiently now with AI. The cypherpunk ideology (cyberpunk is a fictional sci-fi genre, although it's kinda related with its themes) applies more than ever in this context, it actually predicted the situation we are living, so I can't agree with you when you claim it is "outdated". Individuals should value their ability to be anonymous if they intend to remain somewhat free, this is the "counter" to mass surveillance.

Maybe this will come off as cynical, but aren't the customers of these 3 companies doing what you suggest here? "Putting their money where their mouth is", and since they have a lot of money their voice gets heard over the ones of individuals with no money. I don't think it's your goal.

So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims. You also make it harder and harder to remain anonymous and preserve your privacy, two things that might seem useless in a functional democracy, but unfortunately democracies are not perfect and they can turn into totalitarian systems where the wet dream of dictators is exactly this: having total control over every individual, especially the ones who would dare signing petitions against them.

This is by far not something humans have solved systemically, we have the technical solutions to build such systems, and governments tend to push to implement them, but as someone who cares about privacy/censorship resistance I do my best to build alternative, opt-in, systems to go around them.

Thank you, very interesting I hadn't seen this concept of Dummy Blocks before!

> better consensus protocols (my expertise!)

As it is your domain of expertise, can you give more details on the new/improved ones please?

If I didn't have to tie my identity to my browsing/watching history (through credit card) then I would pay... but I guess that would imply them supporting alternative payment methods and also them not being able to sell this data (i.e. the subscription would be more expensive).

Unlikely to happen, so I will keep ad-blocking or eventually stop watching if they make ad-blocking too difficult (happened with Twitch for me)

Did the NASA, Google, Intel, etc. really give their approval to have their logo used as promotional material for a gun seller in the "Where we come from" section? It really surprises me.

Has it ever been demonstrated that these bans actually hinder terrorists or criminals?

It does feel like they would just move to the next app/protocol or even roll their own or use VPNs... so why are governments still penalizing 99.9% of the population which use these only to communicate normally (and use privacy protocols because they don't like the idea of being surveilled)?

Are governments trying to funnel non-criminal people towards apps they can surveil completely to be able to control them even more? To what end?

I am not advocating for total transparency, but exactions committed by the state cannot be classified as secrets.

So if a leak leads to revealing such crimes, the whistle-blower should not be prosecuted, unless you can prove they deliberately leaked information to harm innocent civilians.

I specifically say civilians because I consider that the military and officials who are part of the state know the responsibilities involved in their position... and if they do not generate any content worthy of leaking (crimes), they will not be exposed to this risk.

You know the saying beggars can't be choosers? We are currently begging for transparency.

The filtering process by independent journalists is the only actual recourse I can think of to solve this. Exfiltrating confidential documents is usually not a process that gives you a lot of time to sort out what is worth it or not, furthermore the volume of data might very well also be a problem to handle on your own.

Consider the time it took a lot of journalists to find the pertinent documents in this specific case among about 200,000 leaked documents (of various lengths), when Snowden is thought to have exfiltrated 1.7 millions documents.