Prove you are not an evil corporate person | Hacker News Reader

Prove you are not an evil corporate person

joeyh.name

165 pointsedward92 comments

People in the comments here are obliviously missing the point of the article. Yes, the captcha image is fake. Yes, that's on purpose, only a silly person would think it is real.

The point of the article is that Google's previously "inoffensive" spam prevention technology is being coaxed into a military tool. And this is evil for several reasons.

One: A lot of people disagree with the current US military missions, and would absolutely not collaborate with them if they were asked to.

Two: Google is a massive corporation with few or no competitors. They already have overreaching powers over several aspects of society (they're not the only one), and giving them reach over the military can only spell danger, doesn't matter how you look at it.

Three: Google is already exploiting their users in several other ways, at no benefit to them. No, convenience is not a benefit, whoever convinced people that this is the case is a genius marketer. I stopped using gmail five years ago and here I am.

The general point is: Do we really want to give ourselves always to Google, Amazon, Facebook… like that? Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet instead of 1 minute?

Is there any evidence that recaptcha has anything to do with training drones? They seem like unrelated areas of machine learning.

I have no confidence that whoever wrote the article cares about getting facts right.

Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet instead of 1 minute?

There are people who won't be able to find it at all without the 5 second option. There are people who use free services, like gmail, in part because they can't afford a paid service.

Your moral outrage won't get you anywhere if you don't address practical realities of that sort.

I'm quite poor. There are many factors that contribute to that. One is my gender. Another is my current profession as I am a writer. I often find myself on HN listening to well paid men dismiss my choices out of hand like only an idiot would make such choices.

I am no idiot. I wish I had the kind of life where I could afford to act like paying for email service is some minor detail not worth fretting over.

But I don't and trying to remedy that is proving to be a huge uphill battle. I have six years of college. I worked at a Fortune 200 company at one time. I was one of the top students of my state.

It turns out none of that is insulation against poverty. And before this turns into yet another pile on of people acting like I am just lazy or something, I will note that we currently have worse income inequality than in the Gilded Age. So let's just skip that BS means to avoid the issue today. This is a quite widespread systemic problem. It isn't just a handful of idiots making bad choices.

If you feel strongly about privacy, you could switch to something like Proton Mail. There is a free tier but you would have to dance around the space limitations (500 MB). I personally still use gmail but have been considering moving away from their services.

I am not providing firsthand testimony so that people can toss out half baked ideas as to how I can comply with their priorities if I am willing to jump through a few hoops as if I have the time, energy and mental space to jump through more hoops.

All future replies: pretty please address the issue raised concerning systemic problems and stop talking about me and my life.

The expectation that I need to dance around storage limits, migrate to a new service after years and years with gmail as if that is not a burden and generally care more about the upper class values and priorities of internet strangers than about my own actual needs is monstrously classist and dismissive. And it completely ignores the issues I raised.

Well, you don't seem to feel very strongly about privacy, so you could have safely ignored the rest of the parent comment's advice.

> All future replies: pretty please address the issue raised concerning systemic problems and stop talking about me and my life.

Stop adding irrelevant personal details to your comments.

Why is privacy an upper class value?

It may not be one of your values, as evidenced by your choice of email provider, but it has nothing to do with class, or dismissing your own needs. You can be poor and refuse to hand over your data to big corporations, or rich and have a Gmail account and keep using Google search because of the convenience.

You are the owe that chose to bring up personal details out-of-the-blue in this discussion. There were comments showing that there are ways to ensure your online privacy without necessarily spending money. The fact you do not wish to do so, is irrelevant to your economic situation.

Poor people often cannot afford privacy on quite a lot of levels.

When I was homeless, one of the places I could get a free shower had an open bay of 8 showerheads where I could shower with up to 7 strangers. I could get showered or I could protect my privacy and dignity. I could not do both. I needed a shower more than I needed to make sure total strangers never saw me naked.

Maybe you have heard the expression Beggars can't be choosers?

I did everything in my power to make judicious choices under extremely difficult circumstances. But the most charitable read I can give of your question is that you are so privileged, you honestly don't get it. There are people who are doing everything in their power to fight the good fight in spite of poverty and myriad other burdens. And at some point, you have to make compromises. Maybe you get the free option. Or maybe you become a criminal because it pays better than the legal gigs you can find. Or you make some other compromise because there simply aren't the above board good options available to you that you wish there were. Period.

The comparison between showering as a homeless individual and choosing an email provider does not work. The choice is not Gmail or no email, the choice is Gmail and slightly less convenient alternatives that do not spy on you, which you choose depending on your personal beliefs, not economic situation.

If you have the time to post on HN, you clearly have the time to change your email provider if it aligns with your personal beliefs.

Why do you feel the need to bring up personal details about your hardships in life? Being no longer homeless, you are, globally speaking, on the upper scale of social classes yourself, being from the United States, having 6 years of university, having worked at a Fortune 200 company, and currently having enough time to post on HN.

> If you have the time to post on HN, you clearly have the time to change your email provider if it aligns with your personal beliefs.

Meh, changing email addresses is a major pain in the ass. So much so that I've hosted my own mail server for decades, including configuring sendmail, to avoid it.

Changing bank addresses (aka accounts) is comparatively easier and there is real money directly on the line, and yet banks still clearly make loads off of account stickiness.

Posting on HN is procrastination.

Why do you feel the need to bring up personal details about your hardships in life?

I speak from firsthand experience. Many people do that on a regular basis here, but their firsthand experience is as a comfortably well off male so no one has any objections to them mentioning their gender, the kind of work they do, their general social class, etc.

Suggesting I should not ever mention any of the details of my life amounts to trying to make sure no comfortably well off people need to be disturbed by the awareness that people like me exist and it de facto takes the position that my life experiences and points of view are less valid than that of people with cushier lives and fundamentally not welcome here.

And I don't only talk about my hardships, of course that fact also gets used against me. Never mind that my life is still far from comfortable, if I have time to post to HN, my life is too cushy to complain about. Wow. The denial here runs deep.

Somewhat unsurprisingly the usual Google Cars/Buses/Streetsigns recaptcha is used by Proton Mail once you go past a certain amount of signups per IP.

There is simply no escaping this reCaptcha. Once in a while you hit some bad ones and have to waste 5 minutes or just give up on a particular service.

It is always easiest to blame 'the people' for making bad decisions and enabling systems we disagree with, but you are right that this is a mistake. More important is addressing the predatory nature of the systems that makes them successful.

When there is only one option being sold to you (the 'free' one), what choice do you have? And when you don't really know the cost you are paying (because who knows the true value of any piece of data you provide), then how could you know if you are paying a fair price?

There is no 'true' value of anything. The entire fundamentals of trade depend on the fact that everyone values things differently.

If I'm a rice farmer, maybe I want fish more because I have none, and likewise the fisher would want rice.

In this case, my 'data' has absolutely zero value to me. What am I going to do with it? It's anonymised, so it's not really a security concern. And for the most part it's innocuous stuff like "I like video games". But maybe Google can use it to tweak for better ads, so they see value in it.

On the otherhand, having a robust, availible, free magic box that answers any question I can possibly have (Google Search) has so much value to me.

If you don't agree with the exchange, for the most part there are alternatives like duckduckgo (search) with the trade off of slightly worse results (arguably), or ProtonMail (email) where it will cost $12 per month.

But for me, I consider it a fair trade.

It's important to point out that thinking of free versus paid in financial terms alone does not reveal the true scope of the issue. As you are probably aware, you are 'paying' with personal data, which can be viewed as a more durable asset than cash. When you can afford to pay for something, you can buy it and it's a done deal. When you pay with data, the other party knows something about you forever. They can sell it an unlimited number of times to an unlimited number of buyers. It is quite different from a one-time monetary purchase.

I'm not going to preach that one way is right and the other is wrong - I just want to point out that they are two quite different schemes. Also, you sound well educated and underemployed - I wish you good luck and hope you get paid closer to what you are worth soon.

Personal information is not something with which I can buy my groceries or pay my pediatrician, so it's pretty understandable why people would not consider it on the same level as money or other assets.

There is some truth to the idea that you need a middle class income to afford middle class morality. Pretending that the poor are equally free to make the exact same choices as others ...well, that pretty well fits my definition of evil. It's simply not true and it conveniently blames people who are usually a victim of the system to some degree or another.

On the other hand, since this data about you can be sold over and over its value is likely to decrease over time. Perhaps those who "spent" their data on a decade of free email got in on the ground floor and others will eventually be forced to trade their data for much less, or perhaps nothing at all.

Your comments generally tend to be insightful, but this one is downright terrible.

If there's a correlation between using surveillance-based email and income, it's likely positive - the well paid people are the most wed to the overarching power structure that surveillance supports, and the technically inclined ones are most likely to be directly working for the surveillance companies!

Yes, the surveillance industry takes advantage of disadvantaged people in the same manner that Bank of America does. That's not the topic of discussion or the focus of the OP.

"Privilege" pity parties accomplish nothing more than derailing whataboutism. Yes, not everybody is able to pay/host their own email. For the sake of everyone, especially those who cannot choose, you'd better hope those who can will spend the effort to stop supporting the surveillance companies.

I think the comment I replied is pretty terrible. The article is actually really excellent and gives practical advice as to how small time operators can effectively avoid being part of the problem by just using an AGPL license on their open source code. But that aspect is being ignored to moralize about what a terrible person you are if you use any Google services.

The original comment is directed at a community where the sheer majority have the aptitude and attention to be deliberate about technology choices. In that context, yes, we should all be trying to distance ourselves from Google. And we're all failing at it, and we can all be trying harder.

I have personally regressed a bit due to life circumstances, using a lot more bareback Chromium these days. But a lack of ability to chose a better alternative doesn't invalidate the judgment that there are indeed better options.

It would be incredibly easy to frame the comment as "For those of us with the privilege such that not making such choices amounts to laziness." It isn't framed that way because the 99 percent are implicitly assumed to not exist or not read HN or something. That's inherently problematic.

If you can't even acknowledge that a large portion of the population exists, there is going to be hell to pay when your proposed solutions de facto step all over them.

How is it "inherently problematic" to write a comment on a forum for technologists in the context that its readers will be technologists?

I mean, you might as well choose any arbitrary thread about a programming language and complain that the only implementation(s) require a computer, which requires non-universally-possessed resources to obtain/upkeep, and furthermore not everybody has time to program!

Also, asserting that "99 percent" are straight up unable to choose a new email provider is preposterous.

How is it "inherently problematic"

It promotes an echo chamber and is de facto exclusionary.

Minorities frequently complain that most people "bet" you will be one of the majority. If 90 percent of the time, X is true, they assume X is true in all cases rather than hedging their bet that maybe this is that 10 percent case where a woman is the boss or a person of color is the boss or the person you are speaking to is gay or whatever. It helps create an atmosphere hostile to minorities and other disempowered people.

Fighting the tyranny of probability distributions makes sense for orthogonal properties, but it's utterly nonsensical when the straightforward purpose of this forum is to facilitate discussion between technologists.

Anyone can join. There is no requirement that you be a particular demographic.

Free email based outside the US: ProtonMail[1]. I recommend it as a non-paying user.

[1]: https://protonmail.com

>But I don't and trying to remedy that is proving to be a huge uphill battle. I have six years of college. I worked at a Fortune 200 company at one time. I was one of the top students of my state.

You're right, none of this insulates you against poverty. The only thing that does that is creating value. You can be the most educated person on the planet, but if you don't actually make anything with all that education, you won't gain money. You're whining that no one has given you any money, even though you have all these credentials. Being educated or a good student != producing value. Sorry if someone misled you during your education.

>convenience is not a benefit

Where's that quote about Dropbox just being a fancy FTP account backed by VCS? This one[1] I mean. Convenience is perhaps the most important benefit of software. Not any particular piece of software, but all of it, the industry is one that at its core provides convenience.

Search and indexing is convenience. Document editing is convenience. Computers are tools that make things that used to be a pain more convenient. Math and finance, music, visual art, software makes working in those fields more convenient.

If not convenience, what does software provide?

(Am googler)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

No, the single most important benefit of software is to expand human potential.

How is that not just a rebranding of "convenience" though? Making difficult things easy is providing convenience, but when that's done, you can then do more complex things. Abstraction provides convenience, which leads to, as you put it, an expansion of human potential.

Convenience: "We noticed you have the word 'attachment' in your email body, but no attached files". It's nice to have, but not something I couldn't live without, either. Example: This exact feature in Gmail.

Expanded capabilities: A vector editing program that exports to SVG. I couldn't realistically complete the task of creating complex vector images by writing raw SVG. Example: Sketch, Adobe Illustrator.

The marketing catch: Convincing people that #1 is exactly as valuable as #2.

I have been pulling back from Google services every time I see them do something I disagree with. Doing it one service at a time helps with the transition. I switched to DuckDuckGo and from Chrome to Firefox. I also transitioned from Hangouts to Signal, but that was because Hangouts is garbage. Eventually I will put Google in the same group as Microsoft and Oracle. Those companies must atone for sins in their past before I can trust them again.

No, convenience is not a benefit, whoever convinced people that this is the case is a genius marketer.

Anything that can save people time and effort is a benefit.

Do we really want to give ourselves always to Google, Amazon, Facebook… like that? Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet instead of 1 minute?

The market has spoken, in at least 2 ways.

> Two: Google is a massive corporation with few or no competitors.

Sorry, you're saying Amazon isn't competition in ecommerce?

It warms my heart to hear Google despises the AGPL. I switched to licensing everything I make under the AGPLv3 a few years back, let me tell you: every passing day further enshrines my conviction that this is the only fair license for Freedom Software in the new age. MIT and BSD were fun when e-mail was a good protocol. When there were no bad actors and everything was jolly fair and cooperations and bulltetin board rainbows and unicorns (it's before my time but I imagine that's what it must have been like). GPL was fun when computers were computers, not dumb terminals calling APIs on private clouds. But today, the only weapon we have to protect our liberty in a digitising age, is the AGPL. It is a breath of fresh air, and my second favourite four-letter acronym of the decade, just after GDPR.

I would like to take a moment to urge anyone starting new software projects: please use the AGPLv3. The proof is in the pudding: this very article. Corporations will suddenly have to do the unthinkable: pay you for your software if they want to limit their users' freedom! Remember, you can always license AGPLv3 by default, and offer less freedom licenses for payment. The Qt model. Win win.

Richard Stallman was right. A prophet. Like Snowden, much maligned. Unlike Snowden, oft maligned by the very people who should know better :( but that's the life of a radical.

Less flippantly: with every wave of freedom erosion, through cloud computing, DRM, etc, I am surprised at how, yet again, RMS turned out to be less and less ridiculous. I remember thinking him so obscene and extreme, but no: on bloody point. Much respect, and I thank him dearly for the weapons he gave us, for a fight we didn't even know we were about to have.

I never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it! Not only that but training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing seems like they just made almost everyone into accessories of mass killings. I have to come to terms with this and I don't know how I will do it but something will have to be done because this is unconscionable.

> we won't see a dime of it!

We users click through recaptchas because they're better at spam prevention and they're free. Why would we expect to get paid for two seconds of thought?

> training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing

The recaptcha in the article is fake. Do either of the citations mention recaptchas for drones?

> Why would we expect to get paid for two seconds of thought?

Because the results of those two seconds of thought have value.

Further, we don't know the value. Thought seems cheap to us, but it is clearly valuable to the companies that use it. How do we know it is a fair deal without knowing our thoughts' worth?

It seems unfair to ask us to trade for glass beads.

Is it even ethical to be or remain an American anymore? We can't claim we don't know better anymore.

>we won't see a dime of it!

I mean, if you're in the US you do live in the safest place in terms of foreign invasion in the world.

Sure, if you myopically only look at a narrow definition foreign invasion. But we're not the safest place in the world from attack by any stretch of the imagination. Our aggression in other countries has made us a target for revenge.

I thought we all agreed we would never forget 9/11.

How many attacks in the List of Islamic Terrorist Attacks[1] page occur in the US? How many occur in Switzerland?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...

I think it is very unfair to compare any country on earth with a heavy outlier like Switzerland (has been neutral for +200 years and did/does business with everyone, sold heavy weaponry to both the US and Japan during WWII etc.)

I live there, this country is smart and unique.

I agree. The original analogy would have been better served with Canada as a reference.

Edit: Or even better Italy.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/why-has-italy-...

The person I'm responding to said, "I mean, if you're in the US you do live in the safest place in terms of foreign invasion in the world." (emphasis mine). Their wording indicates that they think the US is also a heavy outlier in terms of safety. So I think the comparison is fair.

I picked Switzerland because it's a fairly unambiguously disproof of their statement, but I agree that there are a great many other examples of places which are safer from attack by an outsider than the US. Depending the criteria you use to measure this, the US probably doesn't even rank in the top 10.

>We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it!

I have to disagree. We Americans will reap the benefit of a growing stock market and top level military as we passively support the industrial scale automated vaporization of anyone deemed foe with fleets of intelligent killer robots. It's a wonderful future we've created for ourselves.

So... Project Insight? Hail Hydra!

I feel like this stuff is scary enough to stand on its own without invoking whatever blockbuster comic book movie you saw most recently

> won't see a dime of it

It's a business relationship. They provide you with search, entertainment, mail, maps, docs. You provide them with samples of human behavior and with supervised training data.

Is it worth 5 seconds of your time to help them train their neural net, in exchange for access to their services?

Should our answers change if instead of Google or FB, it was Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics?

Depends on if that nueral net is being used to digitize old books to make them searchable, or to help a government’s military automate killing other humans.

If you don’t pay for a service, you are the product.

Never for a second believe that what you have with Google is a business relationship. As far as analogies go, you are the cow, and they provide you with a feeder and a shed.

> I never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it!

Umm, you are "paying" them with a tiny amount of labour in exchange for getting a web page (or some other access). It's a microtransaction.

Having been inside Google I can say I did not see any reasonable justification of the crazy hysterical anti-GPL and anti-AGPL position of the lawyers.

You don’t see why forcing the open sourcing of the entire Google codebase would be a problem? That’s essentially what GPL does, if you use even a tiny portion of it for your code and they prove it, you have to GPL ALL the source code from the same for base.

Nobody is going to seriously argue that google3/ is a single piece of software.

When it is worth billions of dollars and judges often barely understand tech somebody will.

Despite it being legal nonsense, it's all about finding the right Judge.

Perhaps there is more bandwidth in Marshall, TX now that they don't have all those pesky patent cases.

All other questions aside, does this count as evidence that the AGPL closes a real loophole in the GPL?

It looks like at least in this case, Google is hysterically anti-AGPL, but would actually welcome a switch to the GPL. Which, from a certain viewpoint, looks like an argument that the GPL is insufficient.

I don't remember any hysteria. I do remember that they are strict about following the terms of software licenses, sometimes going beyond what most open source tools do. And being strict about this is a good thing, no?

You can see a bit of that in Bazel:

https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/be/functions.html#l...

See this[1] article from 2011 that explains Google's "allergy" to the AGPL. (I work at Google)

[1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sour...

Disclaimer: what I am going to say might be offensive to some, but it has to be said. Apologies in advance to any offended hippie.

So google uses the technology it developed to help the military. So what? How is this different from what has happened throughout history?

If you hipsters will take the trouble to pull you heads out of the sand, you will find that everything you use is either used by the military or reuses of military technologies.

Linux is used by the military in machines that help in killing people. Will you stop using Linux? The Internet protocols?

Microwaves began their lives as military radar components. Will you throw yours out of the window? The satellites that power all you TV, GPS, Uber, etc. Delivered to space based on the work of actual Nazi scientists. The food you eat? The main reason you have it because of Fritz Haber.

https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber-th....

The man who incidentally used the same technology to start the era of chemical warfare. And this is just the last century. This same pattern has been present throughout history.

The only way to live a morally pure life untainted by things used to kill people is to live like a neanderthal. Not in a silicon valley house typing away on the internet on a MacBook. An impossible task, right?

And am I missing the sarcasm in this or people actually believe that putting everything under AGPL will solve the problem? You think google will decline a lucrative military contract just because a piece of code is unavailable. No, they will write their own implementation, while you sulk in a corner in the bubble of your victory.

We cannot stop technological progress. If you won't do it, someone else will. Not everyone in the world is high enough on Maslow's Need Hierarchy to think about self actualization. Basic Needs will always come first. A hungry man won't think about the world. He will think about food.

Our job as responsible people is to ensure that the people in power do not point this technology at us. Not living in some sort of a matrix of out own creation while ignoring the reality.

Hey, no need to make this about "self-actualization" or "a matrix" (?). The point here (and the moral imperative IMO) is to exert any influence you have over bad actors. Open source contributors have demonstrated that licensing and negative PR can be used to influence tech companies. That's all this article is calling for.

Google and Re-Captcha reminds me of the TechnoCore and farcast technology in the Hyperion series. An AI conglomerate gives humanity a free gift, farcasters, instantaneous teleportation to pretty much anywhere in the galaxy. But, SPOILER, it is discovered that the TechnoCore has been using the human minds traveling through these farcaster portals as processing power.

> Google is known to be deathly allergic to the AGPL license. Not only on servers; they don't even allow employees to use AGPL software on workstations. If you write free software, and you'd prefer that Google not use it, a good way to ensure that is to license it under the AGPL.

Man, the open source/free software community should have taken AGPL seriously

Licensing software to make it antagonistic to business is a good way to ensure no one is ever paid to improve it, which is a good way to see it stagnate. Do you really think Linux would have gone anywhere had it been licensed under those terms? There’s a reason it never moved to GPLv3.

Looks like it's possible to have a "Lesser" AGPL. libbitcoin[1] uses such a license.

Also licensing things under a dual AGPL/commercial license seems perfect for things like databases. Mongo uses it IIRC.

[1] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blob/master/COPYING

That's a picture worth a thousand words right there.

It's a fake picture designed to generate outrage.

Excuse me, I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought it was a real CAPTCHA. Of course it's fake. Still pretty thought-provoking, though.

read: it is not an image generated by google's recaptcha service, but an art piece designed to convey and draw attention to the possibilities, and probabilities, of the recaptcha service.

It's not fake so much as satirical. You would have to be pretty gullible to believe that it is a real reCaptcha.

Recaptcha is shit regardless of whether they use it to train military drones. It serves no purpose other than to infuriate legitimate web users who might or might not be using a VPN or browsing with JS off. It's a test of patience and sanity that doesn't need to exist. There's no fucking way in hell I need to pick out dozens and dozens of buildings or cars or street signs just so google can verify I'm a human. I've given up using multiple sites because sometimes, it never stops even after ten or fifteen minutes. If anything, it goes to show how shitty google's tech is. If this is what they have to resort to, a test a significant portion of humanity cannot pass, to detect humans, they are clearly not at the forefront of anything technologically. Of course, if this technology is used to train military drones, it explains the torture google has been inflicting on humanity with this garbage. While wasting millions, probably billions of human viewing hours is not as big an atrocity as helping military organizations commit war crimes with drones, it's still an ugly, disgusting activity that google forces upon so many, often through thoughtless intermediaries like cloudflare. At least now, I have an even better reason for refusing to fill in these stupid captchas.

Funny we just saw Eric a few weeks ago rambling on about China overtaking us in AI (https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-ai-...)

Seems like he might be trying to prime the US into accepting Google's participation in warfare.

This reminds me of Enders Game, especially the ending. Don’t want to spoil it for anyone but distributed military intelligence is scary

I only ever see the same car-related CAPTCHA: https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tv/image/1505/57/1505576983483... (random link via google image search)

I wonder if it's actually subtly altered each time, possibly with some adversarial image manipulation that people can't spot...

Regardless of what you think about the current state of Google's evilness, becoming a military defense contractor is not going to do anything good for their corporate morality. Both in the broad, "killing people is bad mmkay" sense and in the narrower sense of occasionally standing up to the US government for its users, becoming a defense contractor is bad.

Christ, this is silly (disclosure - I work at Google)

This sounds hilarious and awesome. Disclosure: I once worked at Google.

Cool that Google understands that AGPL is evil and has policies against its use! :)

So, either: 1) that's a real CAPTCHA which Google is serving up, in which case that's outrageous, or 2) that's not a real CAPTCHA which Google served up, in which case using it as the visual for this article is itself pretty outrageous. I have plenty of reservations about Google's power, but putting that visual on your blog article if it's not a real CAPTCHA Google used, is different from lying to your audience in only a technical sense. It's clearly intended to stoke outrage, and outrage is not a state which results in careful reading of the article. The author must have (or at least should have) known that putting that visual on their blog post would result in many people thinking that Google served up such a visual.

I'm pretty sure the author thinks more highly of his audience than that.

It gets your attention, then you think "oh, that can't be real", and then, hopefully, "but it's the same sort of thing that they really use, and training to spot cars and signs is probably useful in a military context."

Lots of things are useful in a military context. Detecting irregular heartbeats is useful in a military context.

Or perhaps it’s not outrageous at all.

It's an exaggeration of the core truth, it is art. Disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed, as someone said.

The news about Google working on this project made me reconsider giving them as much data without at least trying to rein it in (though the chances of success are low). NASA has always been clever about dual use and has an almost immaculate standing in the public view. Google is evil now, this is kind of a turning point. They weren't legally obliged to.

I'd be much happier if I was a googler knowing that my efforts didn't make targeting systems more effective and less likely to result in collateral damage.

some people have the power to redefine what collateral means, weirdly enough its the same people that google services

In unexpected collateral damage, at any rate. US drone programs target the occasional wedding, yes, but the bulk of the civilian casualties seem to be either invented targets ("they're moving tactically") or civilians in the blast area of actual targets.

I, for one, would spend a lot of time wondering whether raising confidence about targets would help justify firing with civilians present.

It's statistics, if the probability of zero bystanders killed gets higher, it's easier to justify a strike to oneself and to others without being held responsible. It gets easier to justify to the public and the world. "It was an unpredictable accident, our weapons are precise"

But even if one could identify time frames when a target is far enough from bystanders to be hit with a hellfire.. the trivial counter is to always be among bystanders.

That’s already been optimized; anyone killed by a drone is classified as an enemy combatant by definition —— it’s on their corpse to prove innocence after they’re dead.

Now that’s a productivity hack!

I wish there was something like a kharma linkedin- every company who develops such technology, drags the kharma of all employes who spend time at the company during this project down- and it does not go up until a equal kharma positiv project is completed.

Darkdeving discouraged at self-interest rate.

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