Gokenstein

Bad faith moderation is why this site is a ghost town.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/146144481666247...

How's that for upping the level of discourse?

we had that. It was called livejournal. And everyone stopped using it.

Funny, I thought the lesson here is that if you take away the barriers to the entry, all regulation, most of the financial burden, and provide nearly complete anonymity for disseminating news and information then foreign state actors will abuse it.

I can point my finger at the problems above. I can clearly articulate the problems above. I can even propose some clear and limited solutions to those problems.

But there are monied and powerful interests who do not want to solve those problems. So we will end up blaming "stupid people" or give a "blank check" of regulatory authority that ends up being abused to line the pockets of bureaucrats who will craft laws that damage free speech and the rights of common people.

Before we go start a class war about educating the unwashed masses, or create a new "TSA for the internet" let's just stop and think about how this problem has been solved reasonably for "old media" without hampering free speech or redesigning school curriculum across the globe.

In Chicago I saw first hand how it turned the Mayor into everyone's favorite punching bag:

Housing prices go up. Developers move in and scoop up desirable properties, remodel the kitchen, paint it grey, and sell to a young tech worker for 3-4x what they bought the property for or demo a 100 year old beautiful greystone and put up a modern shipping container on stilts with 8 apartments and no parking.

Property values go up, long time residents are getting older. The ones who CAN move sell first and you get a runaway housing bubble. The ones who CAN'T move? They're on a fixed income. They need public services but they can't afford more taxes. Property taxes go up. Sometimes older people on fixed income can get a freeze, but taxes go up anyway. More people, more services.

People don't like taxes going up so either you put it off as long as you can while services atrophy and you make it the next guy's problem, or eventually schools start going bankrupt. Teachers go on strike, not enough police, not enough money to keep up transit and infrastructure, and you've got a lot of upper middle class people living in a very expensive post-apocalyptic hell hole.

That's Chicago.

If you're the best engineer for a company who's bottom line is not direct sales of engineered products you are a middle tier or bottom tier engineer on the open market.

You're the best engineer willing to work in a black box, a niche, in isolation from your peers with constant pushback.

And... now you understand how China feels about American tariffs?

Oh, we've had very different experiences relating to project management! I've never had a PM that was a former developer, and in my world senior developers usually act as solution architects without the title, mostly removed from the day to day development tasks unless they're briefing developers on documentation and implementation details.

I thought I emphasized the point pretty well: Get involved in the process if you're managing a team of developers and don't just look at metrics. They can be misleading if there is no way for developers to communicate UP to managers or if there are self interested parties between you and your devs.

"Don't be afraid to filter people out, it happens that some beginners take a toll on the time of the team, because they develop errors / don't test code."

I would put a huge caveat here: Make sure you're deeply involved the process and understand what's going before taking any steps to sideline a programmer that's underperforming.

I worked for 3 years on a project that was underperforming by every metric. Major features were constantly riddled with bugs, rewritten, over budget. We had no way to push our issues above the PM who was throwing the developers under the bus.

The functional requirements would change daily, deadlines would not move, we were getting less and less QA time and 0 time to write or update tests and we were trying to write an integration with a service that was still in development (trying to hit a moving target).

They brought in a BA and kid you not, she quit 3 weeks in. That got the notice of management, finally, and our semi-technical schizophrenic partner on the client side was let go. Before we were able to escalate these issues there was a very different impression of the work we were doing. Afterward it was like black and white. Perfect releases, on time, on budget, and we were delivering real value to the client.

When US intelligence goals directly oppose US business goals then the enemy has already won.

Perhaps US police have shoved too many of these cases under the rug and now they need a scape goat because it is becoming too obvious that US companies cannot bribe, influence, or demand justice from their own government when the opposition is "businesses" with the backing and protection of China.

If a spy leaves his disguise in my trash can and I take it to the police the spy exposed themselves.

Taking steps to intimidate a citizen because your spy screwed up is an act of war, but not by the citizen.

There is one hitch and it’s a doozy. This invasive targeting may be neutralized by market forces when it comes to buying dish soap but it’s proven frighteningly effective in swaying voters even before the internet. Politicians conduct expensive in depth polling and it’s because it works. The move to using data collected online isn’t going anywhere and the normalization of this in advertising helps them.

Bonesaw is, indeed, reeeaaaaaddyyyy

Title is misleading: Article is about how Facebook facilitates authoritarian governments in silencing dissidents: even poor or ill equipped ones.

The title leads you to believe Facebook has or had any interest what-so-ever in stopping the spread of their best customers...

If it’s legal to drink alcohol and poison yourself it’s no different than pouring arsenic in the water supply and poisoning everyone right?

Speaking of platforms: In the Bernstein timeline someone went to Stockholm and convinced Notch that a cross between Steam and Kiva kicks off the next cultural revolution and all we need is a little “mancala money”

Probably buying it above market price and therein lies the problem

It’s shorthand for a whole range of economic factors, housing costs, school quality, local politics, etc. Most big US cities have had waves of immigration that concentrate themselves in various neighborhoods ands it takes too long to list out all the features I listed above characteristic to these neighborhoods so people tend to refer to them as “Ukrainian” or “Hispanic” or “Asian” when they mean, “Working class catholic with some gang problems, a very influential Alderman, dealing with school closures due to budget cuts and rising property values without corresponding rising property taxes because many elderly folks on fixed incomes would be fucked... etc etc etc”

It is oddly silent on what government institutions MUST do within 48 hours...

In the US the general public, engineers who discover and are tasked with preventing these attacks, and to a large extent the companies that are attacked are faced with a perverse set of incentives at the moment. Notifying federal authorities is often the best/only recourse. This results in a long waiting period where they determine the geo political or national interest in these attacks and they may make recommendations on how to best navigate and mitigate the impact but there is 0 incentive to make the fact that an attack occurred public knowledge.

How would you propose we shine a light on what bad actors, companies and individuals who are attacked, and even our own federal law enforcement would rather keep secret? How do we give law enforcement the ability to trace these attacks to their proper source during an ongoing investigation, but keep them accountable?

Ugh, this is all stressing me out. I have an interview with a tech company in NY that interfaces with the fashion industry and I've worked from home for the past 3 years. My wardrobe consists of 3 pairs of jeans, 2 dad sweaters, 15 tshirts from various coffee shops and festivals, and 1 pair of target knock off slip on boat shoes.

Incentive for a company to say "No" when the FBI offers to "fix" the problem quietly either by going up the chain of command internally to get answers and stop a blown attack on a US owned and operated business or use contacts within the US security infrastructure to stop the foreign criminal or state adversary.

Most of these attacks never leave the room at corporate HQ where they are discovered unless an engineer wants to permanently screw themselves out of a career.

I once tried to leave a linkedin recommendation for a friend I'd worked with on a high profile project where he discovered Chinese state actors performing corporate espionage and we stopped it. The FBI came in and carted off the servers, we switched data centers, re-deployed, and that was that. We would never have been the wiser if he weren't closely monitoring network characteristics. 3 years and 2 job changes later he messaged me back to say, "Thank you for the rec. but don't mention that shit!"

Seems like all US conflicts are now an excuse to race to the bottom with whoever our "enemy" is. We imported torture from the middle east and now state run news and corporations from China.

Just like gravity, its not the influx of cash that causes fear, its the sudden stop at the end.

Plausible deniability. Wouldn't surprise me if China is getting the blame for a LOT of US hacking.

Apparently my brother's college roommate is a UX designer who worked on Google+ and he told my brother that he was directly inspired by the way I used AIM at the time. I had different screen names for different groups of friends and I would sign into AIM at different times of night with different screen names to chat with all these different groups.

Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)

What's more likely is someone on the inside of one of these companies was privy to the discovery, but not the follow up.

I've been in such a situation myself where I was in the room during what LOOKED like a DDOS by Akamai 10 minutes after we got off the phone with them to turn down their CDN services.

In much the same way as Apple is refuting this claim, after a few weeks of internal debate above our pay grade we decided we didn't see it and it didn't exist and therefore it didn't.

It takes 980 MBAs to reach the level of schmoozing required to secure the contract.