Hacker News Reader

ickwabeon The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws

This will be lost now in the conversation, but this video by woodworker Stumpy Nubs is worth watching for key context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk

Yes SawStop sued Bosch for patent infringement and won. But they also then immediately offered to allow Bosch to have a license for free to continue distributing in the US. In the safety commission meeting,they also annouced they would not puruse any lawsuits for the key technology still under patent if the rule was passed.

Does this fully address the potential cost issues for beginning woodworkers? No but I very much think the video is worth a watch to make a more nuanced judgement.

ickwabeon LocalSend: Open-source, cross-platform file sharing to nearby devices

I highly suggest people give Techno Tims walkthrough of this software. It explains use case and demonstrates it across all major platforms. https://youtu.be/2ITezMkbAqE?si=-YVJq8iqwFYQ9gMr

ickwabeon Facebook owner Meta sued for inciting hatred in Ethiopia

Facebook engineers don't need to explicitly change their algorithm to promote violence. They do it by negligence; by letting the algo maximize for engagememt regardless of the outcomes. Facebook spends most of it's moderation efforts in just a few countries and does relatively little for the rest.

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ranks-the-world-int...

It is not reasonable to moderate to a certain level in a few locations, thereby implicitly acknowledging such moderation is important, while then letting other "gardens" in other parts of the world run wild and untended.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Once the moderation has begun and leaders in the company have acknowledged that it is necessary for the good of the platform and the communities in which it operates, it ceases to become reasonable to say "oh well, what we meant was, moderation is needed where the profile is highest or will cause the most political/societal blow-back if we don't".

ickwabeon Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

That's semantic sleight of hand. The US is clearly a representative democracy.

One related opinion on this topic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/yes-consti...

ickwabeon I am a model and I know that artificial intelligence will take my job

I think many of these comnments are missing the broader implications for the fashion modeling world in general.

Right now there are a lot of folks that are not models tied into this as well: photographers, lighting and set people, makeup, dressers, travel arrangers, fixers, etcs.

I can easily see a near future with the equivalent of Unreal Engine for modling. All sets, lighting, makeup, AND people in picture will be life-like. There will be easily configurable random but realistic auto-posing, etc.

The jobs will all become highly comodified down to low paying jobs for long hours much like the video game industry is today.

And none of the afore mentioned jobs or attendent costs will be required.

As for consumers wanting to "know" the real models and their lives and advantures? Ok well, I'll get off your lawn grandpa. If current trends contue, none of that will matter. Folks already form para-relationships with digital/fantasy people (re: go to any cosplay convention). So the models not being "real" will pose no barrier in the long run.

ickwabeon New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data

It may be able blocking ads or not. But I dont think it's about tracking. NYTimes already ran a successful test in Europe where they eliminated all third party behavioral based ads and saw no revenue drop.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy/

I think they have just concluded that the story being told that sites must engage in creepy third party ad behavior is false and that they can just handle in house.

Overall I think this is probably better.

ickwabeon Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

There's a gazillion videos all over youtube criticizing, mocking, and calling out the Chinese government for all sorts of repressive activities.

I'm confused as to why people would think youtube is bothering to sensor those two characters in oparticular as opposed to something much more likely like spam/bot filtering or channel word filtering. I'd think the Chinese Gov would be much more animated about videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9AvUuEPgvA

or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=S3RzKKfNkTk

or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4TReo_G74A

or any of millions of other videos.

i can find plenty of negative comments directed at the chinese communist party in comments all over youtube.

ickwabeon We can’t leave it to billionaires to solve the world’s problems

One of the major problems with the concentration of wealth in such few hands is that the societies/countries where these folks live don't get to make collective decisions about how the money is spent.

Most have made their money using the many advantages of their countries. Roads, infrastructure, eductaion, stability, government, etc.

That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But when we allow such concentration of wealth we have given away the decision power to this handfull of people about how all that wealth gets used. The very top wealthy may in some cases believe their motivations and decisions are altruistic. That they may be. But that doesn't give them the authority to think "I know better than every one else in my country/world how this wealth should be spent."

So while the fault for how we get in these situations of terrible wealth inequality may be shared by the peoples and governments that allow it, the wealthy themselves cannot escape their share either.

And in terms of who has more individual power to help restore balance by influencing the system, it sure isn't the single parent working a minimum wage job. Or a family barely getting by after an economic downturn destroys their jobs. Or the student struggling to pay their loans because they chose to get a degree in social work or eductaion instead of compsci or finance quant.

So it would be nice to see a lot more effort by more these lucky billionaires to actually correct wealth inequality and the systemtic issues that leads to this type of inequality.

ickwabeon Schneier on Australia's encryption laws and CyberCon speaker bans

Indeed! I enjoy many of the episodes. But the first time I had these thought was after reading Charles Stross' Accelerando. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

There's a character in there that has his "brain drive" stolen and he's disabled by not being able to access all that memory.

That part of the story got me thinking about how that data would be securely stored.

And then more recently in "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" there is a brief discussion about the uploaded peeoples data being encrypted in such a way that only they would know their own "thoughts", while those on the outside could observer via metadata, the goings on in the digital rhelm.

ickwabeon Schneier on Australia's encryption laws and CyberCon speaker bans

Well put. To wander a bit off topic, but I feel this is a specific example of a general problem in free societies. There is no perfect safety without perfect surveillance. In my opinion, it is necessary to be at peace with the fact that there will be a certain level of bad outcomes in exchange for the protection of general freedoms. There will be crime, murder, kidnappings, embezzlement, death by neglect, etc. It is unavoidable absent a perfect surveillance state. I, for one, am willing to accept risks. Others will disagree. But I think that in a perfect surveillance society you are also pefectly stagnant.

ickwabeon Schneier on Australia's encryption laws and CyberCon speaker bans

Whenever this conversation appears in the news and I listen to various law enforcement and political folks defend some sort of need for breakable encryption, I always jump to the logical end. Or at least one possible one.

In the future there WILL be brain computer interfaces. Memory offloading, recording of visual and auditory cortex data, and other more mundane uses. This may seem like fantasy/scifi. But barring some societal/technological collapse, this will eventually happen. If the precident is set for breakable encryption/back doors, this will absolutely be used to "supoena" people's "brain information" in that context. The invasive-ness will have no end.

ickwabeon How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance

You should reach out to the folks at https://teamhuman.fm/. Might be some connections you could make there along these lines.

ickwabeon Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does has bad effects

"On the Media" podcast this week addresses this as well. Worth a listen. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-myth-of-merit...

ickwabeon DNS servers that offer privacy and filtering

I use this as well. Found it very helpful.

ickwabeon Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin

The Federal Trade Commision has that legal standing even if they chose not to exercise it.

ickwabeon Tracking Users Across the Web via TLS Session Resumption

I dont think this is correct. I added the boolean security.ssl.disable_session_identifiers set to true in Firefox 62.0.3 and ran the SSL Labs browser test here: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/viewMyClient.html. With the boolean set to true, Session Tickts under the Protocol Details section says false. Toggling the setting back to false and rerunning the set showed Session Tickets Yes. So perhaps you had a typo in the seeting name?

ickwabeon Magic Leap One now available for $2295

I think it's in there in the "waveguide" tech. iFixit has a pretty good write on on their tear down and they mention this.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...

Also...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/teardown-of-magic-leap-one...

ickwabeon Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online

Re: "list prices are often incredibly far removed from the actual dollars paid, and the actual amount paid is all dependent on insurer contracts"

Would be great if they were required to provide list, min insurer price, max, and median.

ickwabeon Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

Agreed. As should Norway and Iceland.

ickwabeon Three quarters of Android apps track users with third party tools

My suspicion is that this is a false-positive. If you go to about:config and search for doubleclick there is an entry called: browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll

Use is self-explanitory in the name.

This twitter thread indicates same:

https://twitter.com/rnewman/status/934861503630643204

Also, LeanPlum is explained here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-usage-data-firefox...

Quote:

Firefox for Android, Firefox for iOS, Firefox Rocket and Firefox Focus collect data about installations and retention using a third-party tracking framework called Adjust and Leanplum. This helps Mozilla determine the origin of the installation by answering the question, "Did this user on this device install the application in response to a specific advertising campaign performed by Mozilla?"

ickwabeon Three quarters of Android apps track users with third party tools

https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/

https://github.com/exodus-privacy/exodus

https://github.com/YalePrivacyLab/tracker-profiles

ickwabeon Hidden Cameras in AirBnBs

Additionally it is in fact expressly illegal in 13 US states (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Utah) to use video or audio equipment in a private areas without express permission of the observed.

And other restrictions apply in other states: https://www.rcfp.org/first-amendment-handbook/introduction-r...

ickwabeon Skype Vanishes from App Stores in China, Including Apple’s

Perhaps but at that point the US (or whoever) can counter with their own rules/laws. Might lead to manufacturing balkanization but I'd prefer the US not the one to step over the line first in the same way I'd prefer the US not be the first to use nukes (although I guess that's a bit hyperbolic).

ickwabeon Skype Vanishes from App Stores in China, Including Apple’s

Right. But there is an apparent balance at the moment where because no government has demanded and received back doors, no country mandates it. It's a precarious spot to be sure. But it would be bad for the US to step off the line first.

ickwabeon Skype Vanishes from App Stores in China, Including Apple’s

I agree. Yes. Perhaps I should have said I have zero expectation that most corporations would say yes. They will decide they just cannot ignore a chunk of the world population that big.

ickwabeon Skype Vanishes from App Stores in China, Including Apple’s

My take away from this is quite different. Or at least tangential.

I expect Apple and any other company to have to comply with local laws in various countries. It's unavoidable. What else could they do? Refuse and loose access to that population?

But right now, as regards device encryption and back doors, there is a sort of mutually assured destruction. A MAD that the US law enforcement (e.g. FBI et al) are constantly trying to undermine. Right now Apple claims the iPhone is designed such that they cannot unencrypt it. The FBI wants to force them to create a method.

Regardless of the technique used that then will make every similar device world wide subject to the whims of local law as regards allow that country access.

What would stop any country from then demanding blanket access to devices? But at the moment this doesn't seem happen because there's an unspoken detente among adversarial countries to not demand such back-doors.

This situation reminds me of that. Since it is possible for Apple and others to block things on their app stores, countries demand it.

It's a cautionary tale of why it's important for companies to design certain things from the bottom up to prevent bad behavior.

ickwabeon More Than 100 Universities and Colleges Included in Offshore Leaks Database

This article provides little context or analysis. This article from the NYTimes provides a better jumping off point on this same topic (colleges and universities mentioned in the paradise papers) and is better at making clear what the potential ethical problems are.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/world/universities-offsho...

ickwabeon US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

Scientists need to try more "radical sharing"[1] as the member journalists of the ICIJ[2] did in order to report on the Panama and Paradise Papers.

Setting aside ego,etc. I would think result in faster real-world discoveries and applicitions for the good of all.

[1]https://www.icij.org/blog/2016/12/radical-sharing-breaking-p...

[2]International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

ickwabeon How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

David Foster Wallace

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

ickwabeon Android Encryption Demystified

I think this session from I/O 2017 provides a better overview in some regards. Admittedly it's brief on details but the overview is helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9_ytg6MUP0