scotchmi_st

This is a fascinating story. It's funny though how, with compromised accounts at a highly reputable university and a 0-day exploit in one of the most-used pieces of software out there, they still managed to make basic grammatical errors in their phishing email. I mean, these people were clearly not messing around. Their attack(s) were highly targeted. And yet they still didn't check their written english!

If it hasn't already been tried, perhaps it's worth building a spam-blocker which checks for bad grammar and increases the spam score for every mistake found.

This is exactly how I felt watching the video. It seems just like the same old 'wasn't everything better in the old days' nonsense. Not to mention the fact that in those days, a computer was something that you had in one room in your house, and wasn't often connected to other computers. Nowadays, computers are everywhere. I personally would argue that the rate of increase in safety in code hasn't kept pace with the rate of code being put in things, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

> There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection.

But the point is that this assumes you're able to tell the difference between the two cases- intent is often a really hard thing to prove. And often discussions about whether Facebook acted in good faith when it did certain things neglect the fact that they made a big mess everywhere, that needs sorting out regardless of their intent.

Honestly I can't say if it's definitely the right course of action, although in the last few years there have been reports of millions of 16-35 year-old Americans leaving Facebook, only to move to Instagram. I do think the ability of these companies to buy their nearest rivals is an antitrust issue that needs addressing, for the health of this relatively new market, if nothing else.

Not to contradict your overall sentiment, but people often focus on intention with these issues. I think that's wrong.

Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet.

We need to be more dispassionate when discussing these issues because otherwise threads like this descend into analysis of whether Zuckerberg/Bezos/whoever is a moral person. Which is a)probably unknowable and b)besides the point.

There is a problem here with a very big company that has more power than it knows how to handle, which can probably only be mitigated by breaking it up. That's all there is to it, really.

[edit] Just as an addendum, that's not to say that if the company has done something illegal, the people responsible shouldn't be prosecuted- they should.

Well, there are solutions. One is to breed bacteria and other organisms that can digest plastic.

Not to say this is a solved problem, or something we shouldn't be concerned about, but the response "There is absolutely zero chance of ever cleaning it all up" here seems overly sensationalistic.

It wasn't dropped in the sense that the prosecutors dropped their charges. It was dropped in the sense that the case was put in a dormant state. It can be re-opened, until August 2020 I believe.

The second statement doesn't follow from the first. He was both wanted for questioning in a rape investigation _and_ wanted for extradition to the US.

You can both want him to face charges for rape, and also not want him to be extradited to the US.

The lack of regard for a rape case against him (mostly by male commenters, it has to be said) is very troubling.

This seems like just another proof-of-stake currency, albeit with some niceties like sharding and the 'vaulting' mechanism. It'd have all of the issues with a proof-of-stake currency, such as leading to small clique with most of the coins in the system, who get to decide who gets their transactions signed. Can anyone see anything more here or is that all there is?

I think this falls under the principle of 'good design is as little design as possible'.

That assumes someone, at some point, takes a path other than the one of least resistance and faces down the Rees-Moggs. Given the concessions to the whitepaper produced last month, and the track-record of the government since 2015 or before, that doesn't seem at all likely. If that doesn't happen then we'll be leaving the EU automatically next March.

Life will of course go on. The sun will still shine. But the idea that things will stay more or less the same in that case are mistaken.

I get the style this article is going for, but Cambridge Science Park (and surrounding areas) have quietly been a major hub for tech for at least the last 2-3 decades. Lots of biotech research, but Microsoft Research has been there since as long as I can remember (I went to school around the corner) as well as major offices for Intel, ARM and any other major player you can think of.

If I had to give an answer to the question 'why now?', I would say because of investment, and also Cambridge has really modernised as a city in the last few years. Plus it is a genuinely nice place to live- good schools, you can cycle and walk everywhere, and cars aren't really allowed in the city centre.

You're referring to anecdotes. Maybe the sort of behaviour is widespread, but even if it is, you then need to prove it's having much of an impact on the environment, and even then it's a drop in the ocean compared with the damage done via climate change and water consumption.

We need to get out of our parochial ideas about waste. Plastics are aesthetically bad, but other forces are quantitatively way worse.

This is a really great point that deserves to be it's own comment, rather than a reply to another. The two greatest challenges facing us in the next few years are climate change and water usage. Plastic is an issue, but it's not a life-or-death-for-the-species problem. We can figure plastic out later. We already are discovering bacteria and other organisms that can digest plastics.

It seems to me we have a kind of liberal guilt when it comes to plastic production. As if we're defiling this green and pleasant land with something alien to the universe. We're almost certainly not producing anything that hasn't already existed. We should stop acting like we are. (The same goes for nuclear waste.) As long as plastics are disposed responsibly in ways that don't damage plants and animals, what's the issue?

> This study does not prove that too much sitting causes thinner brain structures, but instead that more hours spent sitting are associated with thinner regions, researchers said.

This is a bit of a non-story. The article doesn't go into what measures were taken to eliminate confounding factors, and it seems from the way it's worded that not many were taken. Maybe people who have a more sedentary lifestyle also tend to come from a lower social background, thus are more prone to physical and mental diseases. Or maybe people who sit more tend to be more obese, and it's really obesity that's associated here. It doesn't take a genius to think up more possible confounding variables. Also, a cohort of 35 people is tiny.

Since we're discussing nationalisation of drug development, one more less extreme idea that I think needs more air-time: The creation of government-issued prizes for drug discovery.

Here's how it goes- Government X issues a prize of $10B to whichever company comes up with a new drug for, say, blood pressure. (10B being about as much as a company would get in revenue for a blockbuster drug.)

Companies submit their drugs, which are then tested independently (see http://www.alltrials.net/ if you want to know why that's important), and if they are found to have passed the requirements in a strictly yes/no manner, they get the money.

The IP for the drug then passes to the government, which can then manufacture and sell it at generic rates.

Like everything there are down-sides to this method, but it would sidestep a lot of the issues around companies' incentive alignment with healthcare.

This is really nicely put. It should be hammered home in response to pieces like this. Particularly the bit about people in abusive relationships, and also children of abusive parents. Vulnerable people need privacy much more than the rest of us. Even a shred.

I really appreciate the fact you call yourself out as a hypocrite. A hypocrite can still be completely correct (we are all sinners, after all) and I think society would be more well right now if people understood that fact.

I too have been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. Step 1 for those who want to but can't bring themselves to is to just be logged in on your phone or tablet. Has done wonders for me.

Unless you’re basing that on some extra information, you seem to have not read the article.

“To set the record straight, no lawsuit has been issued and Radiohead have not said they ‘will only accept 100%’ of the publishing of ‘Get Free.’ ”

The bitcoin example is an especially clear one. You could generalise that even more, and say that the reason why companies exist is because you can make more money by working together with other people than to try to do everything yourself. In other words, the fact that a company is more than the sum of its parts is why this kind of centralisation happens.

My prediction would be that we would see this centralisation overturned at the same point that companies disband as people realise they can do just as well, self-employed. (Which is happening a little bit, actually.)

China's GDP per capita is still somewhere between #70 and #80 in the world[1]. It just happens to be a big country with lots of people.

If the US or most other western countries had same number of people is China, they would be doing much better. Also to go out on a limb a bit, you could probably draw a graph which shows a correlation between China relaxing its protectionism and its GDP increasing at a faster rate as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

I think that says more about the the US-based public services than it does about public services in general.

From a european perspective, public services in the US seem really terrible. Whereas in the UK and Europe, the default mode of transport in large cities is public transit, in every US city I've been to (accepting maybe NY) your only real options are Uber or your own car.

I believe it's in the afterword of Seveneves, that space debris was mentioned as one of Neal Stephenson's inspirations for the plot of that book.

I would love for there to be a similarly thorough project with Clojure. It really bothers me there's no good native compiler. Apart from anything else, it means that Clojure lives and dies by the languages it compiles to, and while Java is used everywhere still, it probably isn't the thing the kids are learning these days. Besides, without going into any further rational arguments for why using the JVM (or another VM) isn't always great, something about it feels a bit icky to me. On an aesthetic level.

> why bother? Email is just one of dozens of messaging systems available to Internet users. Better to move sensitive conversations to things like Signal, WhatsApp, or Wire --- the double ratchet construction is designed specifically to make IM-like protocols secure even when conversations are sporadic and last months.

This makes me sad. There's something profoundly democratising about the idea of running your own email or XMPP server (or any kind of server, for that matter). It's something you're in control of, that's configured the way you want it. Using someone else's server for everything brings with it a kind of tyranny (even if the people in charge promise not to use it for anything tyrannical (like that's ever happened)). If the response to that is "yes but it's hard/impossible to build a secure, distributed messaging system" then I think that's overly cynical.

The creator of this project published a website, took on volunteers to help build it, and held meet-ups to discuss it. In other words, they went well out of their way to publicise it. So yeah, at that point anyone has the right to say anything they like about it. If the author didn't want that to happen, they could have just kept it a private project, never to see the light of day.

AS refers to the Autonomous System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_(Internet)

It's an IP routing concept. AS Numbers are used to refer to different networks (run by different ISPs and providers) on the internet.

> Another way to look at this problem is by data size. Let's assume we are training a NN using a data set of 10,000 pages text. The total number of pages of all possible knowledge in the world (ever) is an incalculable number, but let's assume it is a sextillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Then the question is, how much of the sextillion pages of data can be handled by training a NN using 10,000 pages? The answer would obviously be too small compared to the whole.

> On the other hand, grammar rules and ontological semantics mastered by the human brain can handle the entire sextillion (since those pages were written by human). If you know how to read and write, the entire sextillion will be understandable to you. This is the horrifying truth between the capabilities of the human brain versus the current state of neural networks.

This bit especially doesn't make any sense. I'm a human who has been reading all my life, does that mean I understand every grammar rule or ontological semantic ever created? Of course not! I barely understand all of them in my own language! My 'neural network' (brain) would need a bit more 'training' (studying) before that could happen. Even more, if all I had read in my life were 10,000 pages (which still may be true).

The article seems to me to hint that exploring inner space is the key here. Perhaps the internet, computer games and other ways of interacting socially without actually coming into contact with each other are a way for us to expand the amount of real estate we have to use and stave off the effects of overcrowding.

There is a partial solution to this problem- API schemas. Define a schema for your API and make it public, then have API methods auto-generated directly from that. For example, for web APIs, there's jsonschema- http://json-schema.org/ from which you can auto-gen functions in a given language. That way, the parameters around the API such as the URI of an endpoint can be changed from version to version without completely destroying the logic on top of it. It doesn't always solve the problem completely, but it can make it much more tractable.