Hacker News Reader

barbacoaon The FBI as advanced persistent threat

Alexander Acosta the US attorney who let off Jeff Epstein reportedly did so because he was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence". Turns out Epstein was an FBI informant.

https://technofog.substack.com/p/confirmed-jeffrey-epsteins-...

Or there was that time the FBI found links between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi government. Which they promptly covered up.

https://archive.is/20230115173049/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

barbacoaon Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI’s dangers and big tech’s biases

It is a little ironic to think that people being patronaged by giant monopolistic mega corporations are fighting "against the system".

barbacoaon SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

Having a whole bunch of engines means loosing a few at launch won't end in disaster. That means you can pursue more high-risk, high-performance engine designs.

barbacoaon Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

It's worth mentioning that the former senator John Edwards was prosecuted for a similar hush money case. It ended in a acquittal on some and mistrial on other charges. The issue was that it is not obvious what he was alleged to have done was even a crime. And Trump's case is even weaker than that of John Edwards.

barbacoaon NPR cancels 4 podcasts amid major layoffs

The USA government absolutely had a hand in the Maidan revolution. There was even a leaked phone call where state department officials discuss who to pick for the new government.

barbacoaon NPR cancels 4 podcasts amid major layoffs

I think Ukraine is an excellent example. Contrast the media coverage of the USA/EU vs Russia proxywar in Ukraine vs the USA/Saudi vs Iran proxywar in Yemen. Both are horrible wars with untold civilian suffering. For obvious reasons one has daily coverage the other literally zero mentions.

Another part of the Ukraine conflict that is strangely absent is that Ukraine has been in a civil war since 2014 when a CIA backed coup toppled their government. It is always presented as if one day for no reason Putin invaded a peaceful Ukraine.

barbacoaon Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

To be fair to WikiLeaks there is very little evidence that Russia had anything to do with the DNC hacks. The FBI never had access to the servers and the the whole Russia hacking narrative relies on the DNC's claim of "trust us when we said this is what happened".

Similarly the recent Twitter revelations on Hamilton68 showed that the Russian bots on manipulating social media was more or less BS.

Who know what really happened, but what may have happened was that the hacking was blamed on Russia instead of say China, or [insert foreign adversary] because the FBI panicked when trump was elected after using the Steele dossier to spy on his campaign and needed a narrative to justify their actions.

barbacoaon The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

Endless war, domestic surveillance, expanding government power.

The modern left has become the neo-conservatives.

barbacoaon The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

The FBI were sending Twitter lists of pro-Venezuela, pro-Russian, etc "bot" accounts. Were they really doing forensic analysis to determine they were run by foreign governments or were they just flagging account with opinions that ran against US foreign policy?

All the while the government was running their own fake bot propaganda accounts and having Twitter white-list them against their bot filters.

barbacoaon What happens to a smartphone when it gets stolen?

I'm sure ebay has their fair share of stolen goods. A lot of what you see sold as refurbished are returns and trade-ins. When you return an item for example, to Amazon, they don't restock it. Instead they throw it in a bin and auction it off by the pallet to second hand resellers.

barbacoaon TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

As you can tell from the last few decades, winning wars is a secondary concern.

barbacoaon What is the war in Ukraine teaching Western armies?

The interesting thing is that Russia has been preparing their military doctrine for war with NATO since the beginning of NATO. Russia has operational hypersonic missiles capable of penetrating NATO air defenses. They also have the S-400 anti-aircraft system that can track and shoot down even F22/F35s at long distance. These weapons are useless against Ukraine.

barbacoaon Twitter Limits Content-Enforcement Work as US Election Looms

Without corporations coordinating with the government to restrict information, I fear for the health of our democracy.

barbacoaon Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

>How do you turn solar panels on (or off)?

They probably mean there is an issue with getting approval from city/utility company to connect them to the grid.

barbacoaon PayPal’s updated acceptable use policy [pdf]

I believe GP was referring to china's social credit score.

barbacoaon Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B6wsujROvXg

Missile videos like the one above are common. 1996 was soon after the gulf war, tons of missiles were broadcast in the news during that time.

barbacoaon Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?

"10% to the big guy"

If the vice president was really taking money in exchange for influence peddling to foreign oligarchs, then that is a truly staggering level of corruption.

barbacoaon Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?

>COVID vaccination resistance has a direct correlation with a lack of empathy.

That's some unintentional honesty. The vaccine did little to stop the spread and wore off in a matter of months, but it became a sign of virtue status.

barbacoaon Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors

You can use Roth IRA contribution principal to pay for college. Then if you aren't limited to using it for education if you need a plan B.

barbacoaon Empty offices are becoming apartments in Texas’s big cities

Houston doesn't even HAVE zoning laws.

Companies in Houston can and do build industries like petrochemical processing plants in or near residential neighborhoods.

For example: https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/arkema-explosion-r...

You can do almost anything you'd like since it is your land.

Very different culture to California.

barbacoaon Secret talks that could have prevented the Apple vs. Facebook war

I someday hope to see pihole like dns filtering built into residential routers.

barbacoaon High-speed rail board completes environmental clearance in northern California

West coast is no where near dense enough to support mass transit rail system. You would have to get in your car, drive to a central rail station, park in a massive parking garage, ride the train to your destination, then rent a car when you get there. At that point you basically have slower and far more expensive version of an airport.

Many east coast cities have the advantage of being planned out before cars so they are structured for high urban density. It is different in cities like LA or SF where it's all about urban sprawl.

barbacoaon More Privacy and Transparency for DuckDuckGo Web Tracking Protections

Just now I went to RT.com and searched various article titles verbatim on DDG, they came up near the bottom half of results. I repeated this test with WSJ and found the link as the #1 result. From this it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that either you or the sources you pull from are engaging in arbitrary website throttling/downranking.

I hear you when you say you don't remove content, but do you, or to what extent do you throttle/downrank websites?

barbacoaon There could be 1.2B climate refugees by 2050

Well technically if you take the vigorousness of life in Earth's biomes as your metric, climate change has been a net positive.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

barbacoaon There could be 1.2B climate refugees by 2050

Downvotes don't make this statement any less of a possibility. As CO2 increases plants use less water in respiration, making deserts greener. This is part of the reason the Earth is becoming greener despite human activity. For some reason climate change activists always ignore mitigating forces.

barbacoaon TSMC Reveals 2nm Node: 30% More Performance by 2025

This nomenclature is gonna get awkward soon.

0.2 nm is the diameter is a Si atom.

Somewhere around 10^-35 they're going to hit the plank constant which is the smallest discrete measure of length.

barbacoaon Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

Being down the street from oil refinery is a small price to pay for a $300k median priced housing.

barbacoaon Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

It has also been criticized for its strings-attached funding with clear partisan aims of influence.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/06/07/...

barbacoaon Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

Mark Zuckerberg spend $400MM to get influence over state election offices in key swing states.

Makes you wonder.

barbacoaon Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

If the main use case is torrents,

I think the reason why the method you mention isn't commonly used is that it is complicated to understand/set up and hard to verify.

I've seen more advanced users encapsulate everything in a VM so that non-VPN traffic can be blocked globally by the OS.