thg

I believe OP is referring to these:

Amazon: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-...

Google: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-helping-the-p...

Heise Shariff is one. I've been happily using the typo3 plugin of it for years.

https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff

> Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

Money transfers can be rolled back rather easily and unless that maniac has an offshore account, wants to be on the run for quite some time and get close enough to someone with enough money to actually make it worthwhile, it's hardly going to work out or be worth the trouble.

Being coerced into voting for a certain party is a whole different problem, with different actors. You're not going to run the election again when the spouse of someone pressured them into voting against their will. How would you even want to prove it had happened in the first place? There's not going to be a paper trail without giving up voter secrecy, which is yet another problem.

I don't think the blockchain is going to protect you from a maniac with a wrench "convincing" you to vote the way he likes.

> One thing I never saw in Germany: cops hiding behind trees, hoping to catch people who were speeding. Traffic cops are very common in the USA, but basically unknown in Germany, since the major highways don't have speed limits.

You won't see them much on the motorway, since for most of it there isn't a speed limit, but radar controls in towns and rural areas are somewhat common.

> Another thing I noticed in Germany, where there is a speed limit, people drive that limit, and not 5 kilometers above the speed limit. The drivers make the assumption that the government must have had some good reason for imposing a speed limit.

You'll literally only ever see that when A) the driver is some old person driving carefully, or B) the area is common for radar controls, or has radar traps installed. The unwritten rule is to drive 10km/hour faster, according to the speedometer, than the speed limit allows, which works out to ~5km/hour over the limit, due to the way speedometers are calibrated.

Smalltalk

Just in case you, like me, missed the memo where Microsoft said they'd stop supplying security updates if you have no AV / AV incompatible with the patches installed. The fix to the former is creating the registry entry manually.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072699/january-3-2...

Your search results are personalized, based on all the data Google has about you. For me (not using Google; going out of my way to block trackers) the first results are all Wikipedia entries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%83

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%91

I didn't have Netflix show up in the first 15 pages and stopped looking after that.

Can't downvote replies to ones own comment. Your comment was downvoted by others due to the "A lot of them get a big hit then disappear or become complacent in “news journalism”" remark and your accusing comment above is just inviting further downvoting.

> Are there any networks around yet?

Estonia has one. https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2017/9/5g-goes-live-in-the-...

And Verizon announced that they want to build 5G networks in up to 5 US cities this year. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-launch-5g-residen...

Then where are the riots about Facebook, who are arguably even worse than Google? With 1/3rd of the global population on Facebook, I don't think people care as much as you think they do.

> seems more like Microsoft stops proving security updates to PCs with Anti virus that breaks Windows after the update

Their "fix" also affects those that don't run any AV software at all, because the registry key won't be added automatically. Unless you are aware of the issue and add the key manually, you won't receive any future security updates until such time as Microsoft stops checking for it. Currently incompatible AV software can be automatically patched in the future, non-existent AV software can not. Hence the title.

The sensible move on their part would have been to add the key if no AV software is registered with the OS, instead of just leaving all those that don't run AV out to fry until they become aware of the issue and fix it themselves.

> The data you present does not explain anything.

Not when you look at it subjectively and only focus on the specific subset that supports your argument. I believe that's called 'selection bias'.

> without any understanding of why women are not interested in technology jobs, there is no way to understand the gender disparity in technology.

The scientific understanding is there. It's just not the answer you want it to be and hence you ignore it.

> This is very unpleasant. First you assume I'm "ignoring the data" when I actually discussed what the data means. Then you assign a motive to me, that I'm "trying to drag you into an argument". Please don't do that.

>> that is a very intellectually dishonest passage.

>> You can't just stop the ball rolling wherever you like.

Of course it's okay if you do it. To a quoted article, no less, not even my own words. But when I point out what you did then I'm the bad person. This is why I had no desire to get dragged into this kind of discussion.

For the sake of the argument, I presume you are a woman (personally I don't care if you are male, female, a tree, or whatever else). You think that, just because you are interested in tech, every other woman must also be. That is false. The fact alone that you are a woman in tech means you are part of a minority. It doesn't matter how vocal that minority is, it still is just a minority that does not represent the interests of the majority. Just because you chose a career in tech, while most other females did not, does not inherently mean that there is a problem and that that problem needs fixing. Vegans aren't "sick" just because they chose to eat no meat. Salafists aren't bad people just because of their choice of religion. Cat owners don't hate birds just because they have cats. Most women just have no interest in a technical career. Be that (software) engineers, mechanics or truck drivers. It is a choice they made based on their interests (you can prove that yourself by just asking random women on the street) and it is on you to accept that you are part of a minority and that isn't going to change.

I myself am part of a minority too, being autistic. Unlike you, I have to deal with it no matter what I do and where I go. Would it be nice not to have to live in a world tailored to neuro-typicals and not having to face (extreme) prejudice everywhere I go? Hell yeah. But that is wishful thinking and not reality. Just like gender equality in tech is wishful thinking, but not more. The sooner you accept reality instead of chasing a dream based on wishful thinking, the sooner you can start making a difference for the women that made the same choice you did.

Now have a nice day. I have nothing further to add and won't answer you again.

There are real genetic differences in how the brains of men and women work. Men and women do not have the same interests, the same goals, nor the same desires. To claim otherwise is ignoring established scientific facts. Studies on this subject always lead to the same conclusion: That women are just less interested in tech jobs, just as men are less interested in social jobs.[0]

I presented the OP with a objective, data-based argument and limited myself to quoting only the article (of which there are many, many, many more I could have chosen from) exactly to avoid a subjective response like yours. I am not interested in ideological discussions about purely subjective arguments (Read: flamewars). You can ignore the data all you like, but please don't try to drag me into an argument with that.

[0]: https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occu...

Netflix is a entertainment service, not a inter-human communication service. Streaming movies isn't communicating with other fellow humans.

"The real reason why there are so fewer women in tech isn’t because of discrimination, harassment or unequal pay (although like I said these factors do exist and need to be fixed). The real reason is that most women clearly aren’t as interested in technology-related work as men are. It’s a choice. And for whatever reasons, more women seem to choose other fields."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2015/03/16/th...

> Who wants to guess requested this backdoor be added?

It could actually have been added by malicious hackers.. Wikipedia entry[0] reads like Nortel didn't really care about having had their systems completely breached for a decade, nor did they disclose that to any (prospective) buyers of the company.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel#Hackers_had_free_access...

Previous discussion (2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16083337

Knowing does not imply caring.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075911

I haven't seen any articles about AMD PSP security vulnerabilities yet, but there's a new one about IME every other month. If Intel truly is the most secure in the world, why are their CPUs riddled with security bugs big enough to drive trains through (IME has de facto become a integral part of Intel CPUs) and where are the news about non-Intel CPUs with similar bugs?

> Intel believes its products are the most secure in the world

https://security-center.intel.com/advisory.aspx?intelid=INTE...

I would argue that the existence of the HAP bit, along with the ridiculous amount of found security bugs (that on almost every ME currently in the wild will not ever be patched, mind you) can be seen as the ME being used as a planted NSA backdoor, disguised as being a (useful) utility.

They get to exploit all the bugs to do their nefarious things and can neuter the ME of their own machines to not provide the same attack surface. I find it highly unlikely that the NSA did not know about how insecure the current ME generation is and I also find it very hard to believe that Intel would not have put any effort into pentesting it.

Or maybe it was just pure corporate greed on Intel's part after all. I fear we'll never know, unless another NSA leak happens that contains information about this.

For uBlock it depends on whether the script is hosted on a blacklisted site. If it is, the script won't get loaded, but if it isn't, uBlock isn't going to do anything about it.

uMatrix does prevent this as long as you keep the script blocked. But of course you're going to be out of luck if you have to allow scripts from the host that also hosts the script that exfiltrates the data. Sadly, there aren't really many sites left that function without at least partial JavaScript execution. Thus, as was mentioned in other comments already, disable auto pasting for your browser or possibly use a plug-in that disables it for you, as you can't really rely on uBlock, nor uMatrix, to reliably protect you against this.

Having the microphone always-on drains a lot of power. You would notice it very quickly were your cell phone to transform into an always-on surveillance bug.

You're technically correct that cell phones leak all sorts of meta data that can be used for surveillance, but they aren't always listening. Voice assistants, however, are designed to be always-on and that is the key difference.

> SoC exist with builtin LTE/CDMA/etc.

But inside the Echo? It's not my area of expertise, but I'm almost certain that there are people with the expertise that are looking for exactly that and if Google or Amazon had those built in, we'd know about it. I think we can at least rule that one out.

As for the compression, that is very interesting indeed. I had no idea you could compress voice that much. If / When they're going for 24/7 recording, this would be most likely the way to go and it would be extremely hard, if not impossible, to detect.

> Not really practical with a pinned internal CA and batched uploading.

It's not so much about looking at the payload than it is about whether it's sending anything at all and if it is, what amount. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from everything I've read and heard these devices don't really have much in the way of internal storage capacity (yet). It either has to be uploaded or discarded.

You could sniff the network connection and see whether it is sending anything home. Of course you'd have to do that again after every update and you wouldn't know if it doesn't activate silent recording for specific key words.

If you want a voice assistant you can trust, you have to build your own out of open hardware and software and run your own hosted service for it, but the thing being hacked would still be a possibility. In the end, the only way to be sure is not to have one in the first place.

It's more a mix of both than an either-or. In the western world we can see Huxley's vision much more dominantly, while in China / NK it's not far a stretch to full Orwellian.

However, Orwell's envisioned surveillance apparatus is ubiquitous all over the planet, no matter what nation you live in.