160 karma · joined June 17, 2014
So it's entirely within reason to think the NSA has the potential to be a decade ahead of the public on matters of cryptography.
Terrorism is a low risk in the US, these programs seem to add little to just having investigators follow leads and intentionally infiltrate groups or paying informants or similar, and the US government has a long record of targeting groups that the powerful don't like.
This doesn't follow from the symptoms being cited, which is that a small subset of people say incredibly offensive and inappropriate things online.
If a million people see a video, and 1% of the people respond, and 3% of the people responding are crazy, that's 300 crazy people responding. If each crazy person sends 15 emails before finding a new thing to obsess about, that's 4,500 threatening or otherwise crazy emails in response - which certainly seems like a flood to the person being responded to - but doesn't actually tell us anything about the population watching the video, at large, except that it has a similar percentage of crazy people to society at large.
Continuing the hypothetical: if you assume a normal person only sends 2 emails, then you only have 19000 normal emails to 4500 crazy ones, because crazy people are more talkative. At 1.2 emails for a normal person, It's 11000 to 4500, which makes crazy emails over a quarter of all messages received in response - a vastly disproportionate number considering they were 3% of respondents.
One thing that automated filters can provide is sentiment analysis and looking at related messages, to pull out the underlying distribution of people responding (and hence seeing it's just people being people), rather than just seeing the surface level "We have 25% crazy emails!"
I would have to see a much more detailed analysis of the emails, responses, and distribution of them to conclude that it's a widespread problem, rather than a small crazy contingent being amplified above their importance by just posting a lot.
I'd argue it's making use of technology to make a people oriented solution: people do less of things that are harder to do, and seeing less garbage even if you still see some makes the place seem more pleasant.
> I'd like to think we can do better than "sorry about the rape/murder threats, we'll try to hide most of them from you"
The best we can ever do, without swerving way out in to super repressive regimes, is impact the rate at which it happens, the response of other people, etc and not that it happens at all.
If I looked at my email unfiltered, I'd think one in three of the people sending me messages in the past day were unusually concerned about the state of my penis.
From a not-adding-anything-to-the-discussion perspective, dead baby pictures and random threats of rape or acts of violence are even less useful than those adds telling me how to work at home. From a cost-benefit perspective for the people involved, it's very easy for someone relatively unimportant to get an outsized influence on social interactions if they can easily reach people who actually matter with harassing comments, at virtually no cost to themselves.
So why don't we use tools to shape the online discussion and feedback mechanisms, the same way we do with our email inboxes?
Perhaps I'm just too out of the loop to see it being done.
My first thought about Robert Downey Jr is usually something about his hair or attire.
We're primed to study the physical appearance of others when we see them. I don't see any reason that it's bad to notice that someone is attractive, has a funny haircut, etc.
The key point is that it's just a thing, and to move on to more important things (such as they're accomplished, intelligent, etc) rather than dwelling on physical ones.
Insisting you not see that she's attractive seems as weird to me as just focusing on her being attractive.
(You could even make mod versions with "failed" on them after the fact, and use the coupons to buy those.)
Naturally, you should have giant, red, all caps letters explaining you're funding development, and might never accomplish the project successfully. Coupons only cover items posted for sale in the store, etc etc.
I'm mostly just curious about it as a legal method to give the reward at a tier without promising the exact reward.
(Side note: is this also an end-run around the multipack rule?)
Example: $100 Dollar Level, tshirt + coupon for discount on items that we sell, available for use on target completion date (which just happens to be projected cost of baseline project item)?
Edit:
Found the answer...
> Discounts, coupons and gift certificates - Offering a reward at a lower price than what it may cost post Kickstarter is fine, but a future discount or coupon as reward is prohibited. Additionally, vouchers in exchange for a particular item (a meal, a book, etc.) are fine, but monetary gift certificates are prohibited.
A little disappointing, but I can understand why they'd take this stance. (Likely because of money transmitter laws.)
(It's possible you could still phrase it as equivalencies, eg, "one X, OR two Y, subject to availability")
Not for the privilege to have traffic delivered to me if the sender pays enough money to the government mandated monopoly that owns my area.
The value that Verizon gets for accepting that traffic is that I continue to pay them money; no need for the person fulfilling my request to pay Verizon for Verizon to accept things on my behalf (which is what they agreed to do). Verizon (and other ISPs) bill their service as accepting any package on my behalf, and tell me that I can have a certain rate of packages accepted and routed to me.
They're simply not upgrading their package receiving centers to reasonably reflect what their customers are ordering because they know that their customers can't do anything about it, and they don't have to provide the service they promised.
Is this just a random feeling or is there something to back this up?
How are you even assessing things like the value of the difference in precision caused by doing something like creating (mostly) distribution equivalent (but fake) data and the cost of leaked person details to hundreds of thousands or millions of people?
We can, it just requires that end users manage the keys if they don't want them turned over to the government by a third party (eg, the telephone company).
Not finding something when you should find something is suspicious.
It's clear that they intend for it to be an otherwise clean drive, since the mention they're going to wipe the drive before returning it.
Again, they're not asking for any specific drive, just that you turn over a copy of all the data collected on a medium that's easy for them to use.
From the letter, it's clear that they don't expect anything else to be there, since they comment that they're going to wipe the drive when they're done looking at it, before returning the drive.
The drive is just meant as a convenient way to transfer a large amount of data.
Why not grow large tanks of GMO algae with fusion power?
In fact, the weeds have some benefits: they average over a small patch, have good volume coverage, likely have a water loss correlated with the factors that cause grape water loss, etc.
If you view plants as evolved machines, then it makes sense that weed with certain properties (such as not strangling the vines (too much)) would make really good sensors.
Trying to replicate that, as you point out, is a really hard challenge, and only matters if you're doing something complicated with the data (such as integrating many sensors in to an automated system that locally adjusts the levels).
Looking through examples, it still appears very much that domain specific calls were added to the very flexible language typically used in Mathematica to essentially extend computation to these new domains using domain specific widgets. (Also, some exchange data types.)
I'm still having trouble seeing how this is a radical departure from say, embedding a bunch of domain specific tie ins in a Lisp using macros (or similar constructs) to get a similar syntax across them.
I get that the constructs are likely tightly integrated, but I guess I'm still not seeing where it's more than a framework for dealing with particular classes of data running on top of a programming language that targets a hosted run time with a database of facts.
I'm not saying that this isn't a useful thing, and entirely worth it for well curated data. As I mentioned, I pay for essentially that service targeting a database about social media. I'm just trying to see if there's something key to understanding the features that I'm missing.
If you'll excuse one quasi-dig: it can sometimes be hard to see what something really is and what its use cases are through the hype and marketing.
You didn't build it in to the language, you connected the language to a standard database via the hosted, proprietary runtime.
I'm not against this in principle - it's clearly a useful thing - but it's hardly revolutionary.
I already pay a company for essentially the same thing (where I use a DSL embedded in a programming language to interact with their database of social media).
Again, I'm not against the idea as I understand it, but the misuse of terminology and generally the way that various people associated with the project talk about it is a huge turn off.
> When Federal agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open source software – a so-called “Zero day” vulnerability because the developers of the vulnerable software have had zero days to fix it – it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than to hold it for an investigative or intelligence purpose.
> This process is called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process. Unless there is a clear national security or law enforcement need, this process is biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities.
Nothing about this statement makes me believe that they were unaware of Heartbleed, specifically because it seems to imply that they don't stockpile vulns that they find, which we know that they do.
> The Federal government relies on OpenSSL to protect the privacy of users of government websites and other online services.
The only damage that seems to be claimed specifically in their report is that not fixing Heartbleed would compromise public interface security, and not necessarily any government internal security.
> I pointed out here on HN even before the ODNI released the statement I linked above that Heartbleed is far more damaging to the USG itself than any intel value NSA could have hoped to achieve from it.
I suspect that this isn't true, especially if the US government isn't using OpenSSL for their internal security.
> would have hurt a lot of USG (and just as importantly, private US) infrastructure, so even going by crazy USG logic the right thing to do would have been to disclose it
This didn't seem to be a paramount concern with their other spying activities, which have hurt the security of the US infrastructure and compromised us tech companies (both hardware and internet services) trying to compete internationally.
> But also, straight from the mouth of a USCYBERCOM strategist speaking to our class the other week.
If we're going with anecdotes, I've met a couple of military contractors who claimed to have known of Heartbleed ahead of the public disclosure by non-trivial periods of time.
Source?
When the laws governing this were written, it was generally impossible to do what they're doing now, so it wasn't specifically addressed.
Claiming that impossible to predict growths were not specifically covered does not mean that they shouldn't be covered, merely that the people who write our laws aren't oracles.
It may not be illegal, but it's clearly against the intent with which the law was written, and should be addressed by a new law which reflects the growing power of technology in society.
And in the case of Catapult, they'll be refactoring the algorithm to represent changes to their search feature matching, which is the majority of what they offloaded to FPGAs.
I'd guess it's more like 5-10%.
There's probably another 5-10% that are problems dealing with trying to uniformly iterate over different kinds of structures, but I'm willing to admit I might just not know the correct way to do it (ie, map or fold or something).
They're questioning if you have any relevant experience with the topic which informs your opinion, or you think that the solution to a complex environmental problem is the first thing that "felt right" or "made sense" to you.
Why do you think YouTube isn't allowed to arbitrarily take down videos?