jack6e

Interesting that the story references this malware's similarities to Project Sauron, and that the two main modules here are named GollumApp and Cahnadr, which looks not entirely dissimilar from how one might play with the Russian version of "Gandalf" if one were to convert the Cyrillic letters into approximate English look-a-likes.

Not to mention they only banned words whose predominant circulation is among uninformed media and those whose only association with firearms is that same media. Google decided "gun" was dangerous, but not "firearm", "AR", "556", "Saint", or "Ruger".

Consider this: Google blocked the search of Burgundy wine, but not the simple search for "556" that returns a result for 2,000 rounds of ammunition in the caliber most AR-15s take [1]. They almost absolutely could not demonstrate greater ignorance or incompetence, or a greater desire to make a toothless and ineffective political statement.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=556&o...

How do I submit a pull request on Github asking that "hunter2" be removed from his list?

But the reason they are considered qualified to serve as credentialing authorities is, in part, due to their perceived reliability. Of course the significance of published work and its influence on the field is perhaps the primary driver of a journal's reputation for readers, but significant work can only be influential if it is also reliable. Were a journal's readership to realize that its publications could not be trusted, it would lose influence and thus the perception that having work published in it is a meaningful professional achievement.

> I'm not allowed to not pay my taxes

But you ARE allowed and entirely free to move to cities with lower tax rates, or states with no income tax at all, or any other location that provides you a better balance of income to tax costs. Amazon is an entity with the same rights to make decisions about re-locating to the locality with the most advantageous income/cost ratio.

Whenever people suggest that 21st-century content (namely that distributed through TV, but also in books) is somehow uniquely lascivious, I know they have not read any popular late-medieval or Renaissance literature. Anyone who has read Boccaccio's Decameron or even parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, such as the Miller's Tale, is purged of any imagined celibate medieval period.

Sex is not new, which means humans have been doing it (!), thinking about it, and talking/writing about it for a long time.

Agreed, this is incredible - especially to have something that can be perused in physical format.

Looking through some of the examples for the languages I know well enough to judge, these seem to be good quality. As a simple case in point, for how to open a file in Python they only show using a context manager. Even though you can easily read files without that, it is the better, safer, perhaps slightly-more-intermediate-level option and also makes a person more familiar with context managers in general. So it is nice to see best practices presented as the defaults.

I tried on a larger color picture that was taken with a low quality phone camera and received entirely unimpressive results. It was hard to tell if anything had even been done.

Great point. I wonder what Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran think about our reaction, and what ways they see to manipulate it. Most Americans now consider war as "something our all-powerful military does in other places and protects us from worrying about at home." The lack of preparedness you are describing is the result of a mindset that believes any and all attacks will be stopped before reaching the homeland.

In some ways I think the poor design decisions start with making a system of this nature, with this purpose, digital in the first place. With the current state of weapons systems, multi-domain tactics, and the technical capabilities of near-peer rivals, or the types of state actors capable of launching a ballistic missile, a massive cyber/electronic attack will almost certainly precede the kinetic weapons wave. Really, I would want a ballistic missile warning system to be as simple, physical, and reliable as, literally, a big button that sets off the warning broadcast over loudspeakers. It is impossible to prepare for every contingency that may arise from an unexpected all-out attack, but the obvious ones with clear solutions should be mitigated.

Your point reminds me of an anecdote from a talk [1] shared on HN a few days ago [2] where the speaker quoted Saul Bellow on FDR's fireside chats as saying people were "not considering but affirming" their content. The point of that article was expressing similarities between the adoption of radio and that of the internet, and in that particular anecdote showing that one of the dangers of radio was its ability to communicate with, and persuade people by emotion and sentiment more than facts. Poignant, then, to see an example like this where the internet likewise is interested in swaying by sentiment rather than, even in place of, facts.

Although, in some ways, what FiveThirtyEight is saying is worse than the Bellow quotation. They have not just "not considered," but have re-considered and decided to disregard the facts, while affirming what they originally wanted those facts to demonstrate. Just take their example of D.C., where they used a number that said there was 28.8% coverage, when in reality the coverage is 70%+. How can they then justify the sentiment that even metropolitan places like D.C. lack coverage?

The discrepancy, in their words, comes from totally different definitions: "We looked into it and found that the data set we used had a fundamentally different understanding of broadband access than other sources did." That FiveThirtyEight would stand by a sentiment derived from one definition of broadband coverage, and apply it to a definition that yields entirely different, indeed contradictory, data, seems irresponsible.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16106331

The fabled RESF home base.

> What Would You Pay to Keep Your Digital Footprint 100% Private?

The form of the question belies the real problem with our current laws around digital data and privacy: the assumption that digital privacy is not a right and thus requires extra payment to maintain.

The question should be: what would you charge a company to access X% of your digital footprint?

Great article a few years ago from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-...

> The one and only remedy to Net Neutrality is robust competition

Are you saying NN is a bad thing that needs to be healed by competition? Because that is exactly what the article is arguing. More regulation generally burdens potential start-ups, creates barriers to market entry, and disproportionately favors large incumbents? That is even when the regulation is supposed to limit harm caused by large incumbents, such as post-Great Recession banking regulation that only had the effect of destroying nearly all small/regional banks and causing a massive consolidation into what were supposedly already "too-big-to-fail" banks - making them only much bigger.

If we really believe that competition is good, then we should oppose arbitrary regulatory limitations and allow market competition to create alternatives to the theoretical harms we fear from undoing the re-classification of ISPs to Title II companies. That is only if we actually think competition provides better products and services for consumers than heavy-handed regulation.

Thank you for offering this rebuttal and clarification. Reading through the comments I was starting to wonder if I had read a different article than everyone else, or if the regulatory, misnamed "net neutrality", propaganda machine was really just that strong. But you caught the nuances and explained the consequences of this regulation exactly right.

So will Bob, if Apple is any indication.

> The most impressive thing to me is how similar the iPhone X is to the original iPhone (shown side by side in the second picture).

And really, how similar every non-notebook/desktop Apple product has been to each other one. Design-wise, the iPhone was just an iPod with a bigger screen; iPod touch/nano/other variations are obviously just an iPhone in different sizes; the watch is just the iPod nano on a wristband; iPad is a bigger iPhone. Apple hasn't released a fundamentally new design idea in over a decade.

On the one hand, the consistency of physical design is its own type of branding and creates solid brand recognition. On the other hand, the UI/UX that transformed interacting in the digital world from using keyboards and mice to using our fingers on touch screens is already old. Apple really has no need to be creative since they are still profiting from their slight modifications. But the next big, real revolution in personal computing design and usage will need to be more than a glass rectangle with slightly better curved edges.

This is a decent introduction into this fascinating cultural history, but there is much more to the myth of the yew tree and sadly we seem to have lost almost all understanding of it. Medieval stories in both England and France relate certain trees with the fairy world, the yew tree being one of them. One lovely story that combines these myths is Sir Orfeo [1], which is a delightful poem in Middle English and also has a translation into modern English by a young Tolkien [2]. It is a re-telling of the classical Orpheus myth, with Eurydice being taken by faeries instead of bitten by a snake. Relevant to this article, she is taken while sleeping under the shade of a tree at noon, and the fairy world to which she is taken is actually a Hades-like place where the dead live. The name/description of the tree in Middle English, though not exactly "yew" in the available manuscripts, has raised speculation that the tree is meant to be a yew tree in the source story or earlier translations.

The fact that multiple cultures across such a breadth of time have continued and created mythical connections between the yew tree and death is intriguing. Maybe it speaks to some natural or innate quality of the tree, or just the amazing staying power and transferability of certain myths. Regardless, I think the mythologizing of the physical world in these ways renders some beautiful and engaging stories that we lose through our modern disdain for myth and our retreat from prolonged physical interaction with the natural world.

[1] https://auchinleck.nls.uk/mss/orfeo.html [2] https://allpoetry.com/Sir-Orfeo

I am not saying the phone is revolutionary, I am saying that Apple and some supporters/reviewers call it revolutionary. See Apple's own page for the X[1]. The use the slogan, "Say hello to the future", and for the FaceID section, literally call it "A revolution in recognition" (emphasis mine). The point that I was drawing out from the review was that all the hoped-for fulfillment of Apple's marketing seems to rely on 3rd-party developers making this new hardware useful, but Apple itself has not really delivered to the hype. It is as if the English colonists in America had written the Declaration and then the Constitution and said, "Hopefully in the future some nations out there will know what to do with democracy and can make it successful, but we'll stick with being slightly more-autonomous subjects of King George for now." Some "revolution" that would have been.

[1] https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/

Even though the overall tone of this review was upbeat and positive, it seemed that the baseline conclusion was: "hopefully we find a use for the minor iterative improvements that will make this more than just the next release in a series of underwhelming releases." For one of the first, selectively-chosen reviews of what is supposed to be a ground-breaking product, the article essentially told us 1) the pictures look better; 2) Apple finally imitated Samsung's Infinity Display; 3) my fingers learned new motions that were useless with other Apple products; 4) FaceID became familiar and even worked sometimes; 5) I could put my face on a pile of poo, which required some cool technology.

Not that those features or the article suggest the iPhone X is a bad product, or bug-ridden, non-usable, or anything else. But how in the world are people--is Apple--still not embarrassed pretending that this is a revolutionary device? Even if FaceID is intensely innovative and unparalleled new technology - that is just the feature that people use to get to the features they actually want to use. No one is going to buy a phone to play around with the unlocking mechanism, they buy it for what that phone can do for them once it's unlocked. Hyping on FaceID is like saying, "We are revolutionizing mobile computing by entirely overhauling the millisecond process by which you gain access to a slightly improved version of the product you already have."

> unconsciously people will look at an X to unlock it even though it only needs to see you, not the reverse.

That does not seem to be the case as the reviewer puts it. Even when he was looking at his iPhone X he could not always get it unlocked: "There have been times when, despite a clear view of my face, the iPhone X has ghosted me. (Apple tells me that perhaps I wasn’t making what the iPhone X considers eye contact.)"

I am not saying they would take his phone or remove his account, but that they would restrict Twitter from using/selling his data.

I wonder if FBI/Secret Service swoop in to prevent the President's data from being sold in these cases. Or if they restrict its use/sale by other platforms as well.

> Twitter said its data-retention policies made it unable to reconcile the figures for periods before last year’s fourth quarter.

Is Twitter really claiming that they do not store even aggregated data on number of users for more than a year? Or does the data prior to that not have any distinction between Twitter and third-party users that could be used to correct their error? I would be amazed if a social media platform of that size had such weak retention policies, even for their own sake. Maybe I am too used to the paradigm of Google/FB where data is gold stored in Fort Knox.

This is absolutely correct and I think the same thing whenever I read suggestions that Roman defeats are/were significant to its decline. Rome's major strength from the beginning was an indefatigable political will. Hannibal did not just cross the Alps, he decimated multiple Roman armies in Italy and then rampaged around the peninsula for over a decade. There is an anecdote that when Hannibal's armies approached Rome, inside the city Roman traders sold land rights to the spot on which his army camped. Much like the Russians and Americans have found in Afghanistan, it is hard to defeat an enemy that shares a common fundamental belief in its own persistence and refusal to acquiesce.

Even in this story, as the article notes, after having lost three legions in an utterly decisive battle in the wilds of Germania, Emperor Tiberius' son Germanicus decided he would go back and wage more war to recover the standards. That is not the sort of political will we are used to.

This was also a period of time when the USSR was attempting strange, non-traditional methods of espionage and intelligence gathering, which, like the space race, arms race, and everything else during the Cold War, prompted imitations and a race-to-better from CIA and the military. Who knows how many arcane, incredible projects were initiated on either side just for the benefit of having scattered, incomplete information filter through spooks back to the opponent's intelligence agency. There it would cause confusion, fear of being severely outpaced, and an urgency to throw resources into their best-that-we-can-piece-together version of the project in an attempt to catch-up and surpass. In existential warfare any and all bets are always on the table, and particularly in one that was already defined by massive resources spent in the pursuit of previously unbelievable scientific discovery.

I was thinking this myself. For all of Musk's braggadocio about not needing, and even being hurt by, subsidies, Tesla, whose profits only become more negative every quarter, has had its sales decimated in the countries that ended tax breaks for electric vehicles.

With the specter of a major tax overhaul and massive spending cuts, a major recall, and still not enough strength to stand on its own, Musk has to be at least a little worried about Tesla's future and the futures of his other pet projects.

It will be interesting to see what effect Xi's increasing consolidation and even amplification of power has on China's, particularly the Party's, stability in coming years. To apply an old maxim from Nathan Rothschild, "It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it." Xi has clearly been successful in following an ambitious plan to promote himself, but in doing so he has created a position that will become even more attractive to other ambitious and talented members of the Party. When the reward increases, the amount of acceptable risk to earn that reward and the demand for that risk do as well. Some dictators are brilliant and paranoid enough, and command enough loyalty (and/or fear), to maintain their newfound power, but not all, and it indeed requires much more effort than acquiring it.

Once the exercise of these new powers becomes somewhat expected, and the holding of them by one man becomes familiar, then those on the next rungs of the ladder will start imagining what China could become if another, better man held them. We will really see who Xi is in how he responds to those ambitions.

I remember reading somewhere about some organization (not Google) hoping to map the entire ocean floor by sometime in the 2020s, but it is truly a gargantuan undertaking. As you say, we have far better mappings of the moon than we do of the ocean, and for good reason.

The data report [0] from the MH370 search offers good insight for how little we know of the ocean, and why it is so difficult to map in its entirety. Two points really stood out to me from their findings: 1) the current quality of our topographical maps and other images are low quality and mostly unhelpful for any sort of real research or analysis; 2) it took 3 years of dedicated masses of search teams from multiple countries just to produce quality maps of a tiny stretch of one part of one ocean.

To put numbers behind it, the MH370 report referenced above calculated their entire mapping efforts this way: "The search for MH370 collected 278,000 square kilometres of bathymetry data within the search area and 710,000 square kilometres of data in total, which includes the data acquired in transit between port and the search area. It is one of the largest marine surveys ever conducted." That's a lot of time (3 years), money ($160M, granted not all spent on mapping), and people, for a good chunk of sea floor. But the oceans comprise 360,000,000 square kilometers. Three years of dedicated, coordinated searching in the "largest marine survey" ever only mapped 0.2% of the ocean floor. So who knows what sort of motivation, incentives, time, and organizations it will take to get 100%.

[0] https://geoscience-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.htm...