5,187 karma · joined December 28, 2008
Encrypted comms gives a huge asymmetric scale benefit to those who have these crimes committed. What it hasn't scaled is the ability of law enforcement to respond. And that's a choice, one which is open to criticism.
With guns, the state will always outgun you. So the gun-riddled society sees children in its schools murdered staggeringly often, while its (supposedly free) citizens are tear-gassed with impunity by a state for nothing more than a photo opportunity.
That was not a winning bet for that society.
It's similar with E2E. It can't protect you from the government, because the protection is illusory – it protects just you so long as the state wants it to. When it no longer wants it to, it makes it illegal. Administrations are already heading in this direction.
Meanwhile E2E enables a number of proven harms, from lynchings to child abuse. Is that a worthwhile trade-off just for the protections it gives from corporate or illegal privacy invasion? Would it lose all of those benefits if legitimate law enforcement were allowed access? There is at least a debate to be had, there.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and...
It's a weirdly blinkered concept to say "America's agencies already do illegal things and their politics is broken but what will save us is American corporations deploying technology".
(The "we need universal E2E to protect our freedoms even if there are downsides" is not, in logical form, a million miles different from 'we need guns everywhere to protect us from the government and damn the negative consequences of having guns everywhere', frankly)
The controls on surveillance are not technical, they are political. The technology was the same, yet the Stasi listened to every call they could; other governments did not.
Fix the politics, because it /will/ win in the end. Learn the lessons of Germany and China.
That isn’t a real deadline, it’s a management ambition. And a badly set ambition, based on some demos and the belief they could scream good code into existence.
Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
To make parents work weekends without their children for an entire 6-month period just to try and hit a management fantasy is a symptom of a toxic culture.
(And is also counter-productive. The slow and buggy v1 that resulted wasn’t good enough to capture the market — but it was enough to finally wake up Adobe, who dramatically accelerated efforts on Lightroom, which launched first on Mac and went on to dominate the market)
Voat is discussed elsewhere here, too. In short, the point was precisely to get the speech off Reddit because it was poisoning Reddit. People said it wasn’t worth them trying because it would move to other subreddits. It didn’t, it moved offsite entirely.
De-platforming worked for Reddit. OP asked for tech contributions to reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces. There is one.
Sure, something like Voat pops up. But Reddit improves. And Reddit is where all the people are.
There will always be dive bars, there will always be rough online neighbourhoods. But start by cleaning up the civic square.
It’s important to remember too there are incentives for people to argue and behave otherwise: FB, Twitter, hate-speech mongers who want easy access to large audiences — All have commercial cause to act in favour of more and more extreme speech.
People like that benefit from more and more extreme speech. They permit or encourage it on their platforms. This in turn causes the white blood cell count of the body politic to spike as it tries to counteract the bile and hate. This angry counter-speech then gets presented as “polarisation”.
The solution to ignorance _can often be_ silencing the ignorant, yes, in order that the educators can be heard.
Would we still have an anti-vax problem if FB banned it across its properties? Really?
Banning disruptive speakers works. Every pub landlord knows it.
In this case, it's installing Edge and the universal Microsoft AutoUpdater app. Given the range of stuff that thing has to support (including all the Office apps) and the privs it will need to run at to do so, I think the admin requirement is not entirely unreasonable.
Why is 8 years self-evidently "long enough"? Banks have code from the 1960s still running, and plenty of people have industrial hardware much older than that. Many of my household appliances are older.
It's only "obsolete" code because Apple has decided it is, it didn't rot.
One can also have desires which are more complex than mere impulse. The behaviour of soldiers willingly putting themselves in extreme harm’s way is one such.
And saying “don’t fly, knuckleheads” isn’t the same as saying “don’t ski”.
The snow trains are arguably a better way to do it: you don’t have to get a stupidly early flight and you don’t face a 2+ hr coach ride to the resort. In some resorts the train leaves you ten minutes from the slopes.
That’s how we help in small ways with this, not short-sighted stubbornness but with better solutions.
Fewer skiers flying might change the economics of Nightstar too: a proper luxury sleeper train from London to the slopes. I’d genuinely prefer that to ever getting a coach again.
The results we’ve seen when such workers realise this (see Googlers more-or-less ept attempts to change management policy) is the test for this. A strong union would stand them in much better stead.
(It's also very easy to criticise Chandler's approach with hindsight, but the book does a good job of making you appreciate just how much was up in the air at that point with approaches to building networked applications: see for example the amount of effort they poured into making it work locally because the idea of constantly having to chat back to a central server was anathema to them)
The "I'm not in denial, I'm just denying the science" is just cream on the top.
It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully".
But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user.
The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances.
On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste.
On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.
You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way, and if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
Why does Spotify still not have 2FA? I get that legacy connected devices will be a problem for them, but there are ways around that.
The market you're really talking about them capturing with a small premium phone is "rich people who have multiple devices and want a small phone and when they can't get one they buy an Android phone or make do with an SE". I'd wager that's small in most terms, certainly in Apple terms -- whether you're talking dollars or heads.
But what do the top-end Chinese consumers do when Apple doesn't have a phone that appeals to them? They buy one of the other flagships that run WeChat, and Apple loses them. That's big in Apple terms, missed-expectations-warning big.