mrex

>The real flaw in the argument of the parent is, that in a direct comparison between Singapure and Norway Norway still wins: If roughly the same recidivism rates are achieved in a very punitive and a very supportive system, the supportive system is superior according to utilitarian principles.

Wouldn't that depend on subjectively balancing costs and benefits of the other involved factors? For example, Singapore's system may (or may not, frankly I don't know and it's not important to the logical point I'm making) cost less than Norway's system. In that case, the question would be what value the society places on finding solutions that are supportive rather than punitive.

Right?

>You argue against cherry-picking, and then you think you can prove something with one single example?

Well... he can! He can prove, with one example, that the other person's thesis doesn't fit the facts.

And he did that.

So, yeah.

>Yes, and, expressing emotions helps us move beyond them.

Yes and sometimes in expressing those emotions we realize that they're underlayed by a logical basis that our instinct was informing us about, as when we fear the rise of a genocidal communist dictatorship as a global power monger.

>To blindly assume that all characters in LotR must have a Biblical corollary is lazy.

Why do you deem my post "blind assumption", when it contained quite a bit beyond that?

>Architecture is just a matter of organization.

Have to say, I think that's somewhat oversimplifying. Architecture is a lot more than organization. It's also a broad and deep understanding of external and internal resources, the creative design process, corporate vision, industry insight, risk analysis, project management, stakeholder politics, marketing, and technology.

It's very possible to be super organized but still end up with a discombobulated frankenstein of a project, or one that's under water on time or budget, or a design that's too niche and misses the market.

>The truth is it’s just a pretext for having a gateway from the South China Sea to the rest of the world- which I don’t think is particularly unreasonable as an aim.

But you're shifting around from principles to consequentialism. Suddenly, whatever rules China breaks, even if they are extremely serious ones to do with territorial control that underlie the peaceful international order we've enjoyed since WW2 ended, it's fine with you as long as it's in pursuit of an aim that you consider reasonable?

That's a fairly blank check, innit?

>You can choose to both not be afraid and still walk through fire, so to speak.

Fear is a healthy emotion, properly tempered. And it's an entirely rational response to a threat to my freedom and way of life. China is no less than that.

Reality is made of results, not intentions, so ultimately it's those that we're accountable for. This is one of the most considerable challenges for a species with such creativity, emotional drive, and long vision.

I fear the results of a world where China's deliberate moves towards dominance are unopposed, or ineffectively opposed. Even if everyone has the right intentions as we face down that risk, it's the results that matter.

>All these disputes are quite clearly about China being pissed off that the US is projecting power right on their doorstep.

The South China Seas dispute is, in fact, primarily between China and a series of smaller nations like the Philippines and Japan. International governing bodies including an UNCLOS tribunal have consistently ruled against China's claims of sovereignty to open sea, but China keeps on doing it anyway.

That's not imperial behavior?

>this part I'm not too sure about.

Modern China exhibits genuine imperialism. They've even developed and published plans for dominating world standards bodies by 2035[1]. They're crafting a gigantic blue water navy[2]. They maintain a standing army with larger numbers of soldiers than the US, to put on those ships[3]. And they have no qualms about exerting their power globally, challenging freedom of navigation at sea[4] and territorial integrity on land[5]. In their meticulous and naive way, they are most certainly pursuing a world domination strategy.

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/27/china-standards-2035-explain...

[2] - https://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-has-modernized-the...

[3] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/29/just-how-strong-is...

[4] - https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/16/asia/us-navy-freedom-of-navig...

[5] - https://news.yahoo.com/china-threatens-forceful-measures-pel...

DevOps is a sysadmin who doesn't own his infrastructure, mixed with a developer who doesn't own his code.

> America (and by extension the West) is guilty of all that

Let me stop you, right there. No, we're not.

This is what happens when you're Chinese and you try to run for local elections as an independent not endorsed by the Communist party:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1HdCIW2Xtk

In America and by extension the West, there is nothing comparable to this going on.

There is absolutely no moral equivalency between the brutal dictatorship of China and Western plural democracy, even at its ugliest.

>In someways China is ultra-capitalistic. They will sell what people want.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Pornography, anything deemed prurient by the government, anything deemed corrosive to social values, even trivial things like the depiction of zombies and ghosts in media, is strictly controlled by the communist government of China without respect for corporate profits.

To be fair, OWASP does publish some excellent frameworks focused on enhancing broad-based organizational security posture, like their SAMM (Software Assurance Maturity Model) project:

https://owaspsamm.org/

It's typically some affiliate-relationship that's conveniently structured to permit plausible deniability on the part of the ultimate recipient of the funds.

I think there is some "fortuitous things just keep happening to these people" in much fiction, and certainly the LOTR series, right? If you or I was given a knife that glowed when trolls were around, that would probably be the most amazing thing that ever happened to us. To Frodo it's a footnote, right along with "met and was rended minor aid by the oldest corporeal creature in the universe".

Ultimately, I can only offer conjecture, but given what we know of Tolkein's deeply religious personal perspective, it's not difficult to imagine that his fantastic universe is pervaded by an overwhelming force of goodness that seeks to bring events to their right conclusion through divine providence.

Tom Bombadil is quite clearly what Tolkein referred to as a "subcreation echo" of biblical Adam. Oldest, fatherless, unaffected by original sin and thus not tempted or influenced in the least by the ring, literally living his life as uncontested master of a lush garden. He is Adam, if Adam had contented himself with a Gold Berry instead of that apple...

>He contributed exactly nothing to the story.

Or, did you just not understand what he contributed?

Why was Tom Bombadil invulnerable to the ring's power? Why was he not tempted by it? If you can't cogently answer that, I feel like you've probably just not yet understood what Tolkein was trying to represent.

>I don't see any correlation between spies as agents and spying on your own people.

Well now that doesn't make any sense. If you spy on the other side, and they spy on you, but you don't spy on you, then how do you know what they know? Or what they want to know but don't yet?

Information is the currency of warfare. If the other side is in our OODA loop, they're going to shape our decisions at a tempo we can't respond to.

>Browser already operates in “untrusted” mode.

My guy, there's a difference between legitimate confusion and this sort of aggressively refusing to get the point.

Clearly I'm not referring to sandboxing or app privileges, I'm referring to how your browser assumes any site that's able to send it some Javascript should automatically expect that Javascript to run, or WebGL, or WebAssembly, or whatever monstrosity.

Fundamentally the web was built with the assumption that any resource loaded was an intentional act by a user, or by a process directly authorized by a user.

Over time, the internet has drifted to a one-protocol town, and that assumption by the designers of the protocol is breaking down as the protocol becomes everything to everyone. Trust boundaries and user controls are NOT evolving in time with the protocol capabilities, and worse, protocol development has largely become a fox guarding the henhouse as the main browser developers ultimately responsible for defining the de facto protocol suite, Google and Microsoft, each vie for advertiser dollars and market ubiquity by transforming web browsers into operating systems.

>When you talk about spying on people to know everything about them in order to learn how to manipulate them, you're talking about brainwashing.

That's a semantic debate that's neither here nor there. If that's what you consider brainwashing, fine, but that's here today and it's happening every day. Do you have any idea what credit reporting agencies know about you, your purchasing habits, your media consumption preferences, your politics, your medical history, your sex life?

>I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage.

You don't? Well let me give you an example. Let's say there is a movement of individuals within a nation who are discontent about some specific policy or behavior of their government. First, intelligence would allow you to discover this fact. Then it would allow you to research and profile the individuals who you've identified in this group, and refine your search parameters to identify likely candidates to recruit. It would also help you to refine messaging, giving you instant feedback about the virality of trial balloons you floated.

Using these tools, you don't see how domestic unrest could be created?

We aren't talking about some far-out concept like brainwashing, though. We are talking about information warfare, where information asymmetry is a battlefield advantage. That's not a theoretical or far-out concept at all, it's here and now and we are seeing this information war playing out on the world stage every day!

>What if you just solve the problem by making society a better place?

Because I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows, how to better society in a way that wipes out all the dictatorships and malign powers of the world that mean to do us harm merely for their own gain. Ultimately the world is not always a friendly place, and sometimes if you aren't the shark at the table, you're the fish.

>Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineering to the extent we should be worried?

Yes, they undoubtedly do. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and many other nations run active cyber campaigns against the US with varying degrees of success, but often absolutely stunning scope and scale. Their purposes in doing this are to advantage themselves and disadvantage us.

This sort of social engineering can be very subtle, and very effective:

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...

>It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value.

I realize you don't know me, and that as you say this you have no way to know that I'm someone who values freedom far more than most people do, to the extent that I've spent much of my life studying civics and law and their intersection with technology. Freedom is what makes life worth living.

But maximizing freedom sometimes means taking non-intuitive actions. For instance, imagine a world where China's government instantly knew everything that was said on Twitter, who said it, where they were, etc... but the US government did not. Imagine what an advantage that would constitute. Is that likely to lead to a world, or a personal experience for me and my loved ones, of greater freedom? No way.

Is there a way that we can better balance the needs to surveil against the legitimate fears of the populace about chilling effects that broad law enforcement domination of electronic media could create?

Can we somehow effectively, assuredly, in a way that citizens can trust, limit the surveillance activities to legitimate national security and lifesaving actions?

Because the only alternative, to me, seems worse: a world in which our adversaries maintain the advantage in information asymmetry against us, knowing more about our own society than we do, and thereby maintaining an ability to act against our society in ways we cannot detect or attribute.

>Just makes no sense to have such a complex system

It's not that complex, it really can be reduced to what the browser already does: attempts to render web pages best for the display, without full hinting from the server-side.

In the end, what I'm getting at is that browsers should start viewing any page in an untrusted mode, and this mode should dramatically limit available fingerprint features to the most minimal subset that provides an acceptable user experience.

Wow. I had no idea. This bullshit is why I browse with javascript off, and enable it only on a per subdomain basis with uMatrix, and disable all the tracking technologies I can. I probably already stick out like a sore thumb to anyone doing browser fingerprinting.

Not only did the kids fail to get off our lawn, look at this giant hunk of poop they left all over it. Eternal September never ends.

I wasn't suggesting proxying anything, just that the browser should attempt to correct errors that it introduces into page rendering when it spoofs feedback to the server.

And again, is it a realistic threat model to imagine that a high volume website, trusted enough to be browsed regularly by Lockdown-paranoid users, will be hacked in such a way as to deliver a fingerprinting attack to browsers, and only that?

I appreciate the sense of superiority that you have, but try to follow along.