throw2016

There is now a whole lineup of pro corporate decisions by judges that need more scrutiny and dissent, and some way to return to defending the public interest.

In this case sealing was clearly not in the public interest, at the very least it would have alerted parents, prevented more abuse and increased public awareness of a growing toxic culture.

This would have have produced better outcomes for all parties, including Facebook and their employees by forcing a rethink of their business practices and processes.

On the contrary with surveillance there is a 'chilling effect' and people will be constantly wary and not speak their mind. These societal experiences have already happened, are heavily documented and thus we do not have to speculate, we know.

The only reason you don't live in a police state and in a democracy is because someone 'cared' about it. Its perfectly valid not to care about these things but its quite another to try to make a virtue out of personal passivity or indifference.

Since there is no reference to 'static' in the original comment that is a meaningless straw man, its like telling people fighting against surveillance, anti-democratic or fascist forces not to bother as 'change is inevitable'.

That's because you don't really care about privacy. If it were something else 'you cared about' you would be saying something completely different and wondering why others don't share your concern.

These things are generational and accumulated wisdom about privacy, surveillance and their cascading consequences into other aspects of society including sleepwalking into a police state are well known.

For those on the other side of the police state or who gain from these shifts, and there are many apart from many who 'just accept', these are merely to be hand waved away, 'normalized' as 'inevitable', 'not such a bad thing' or 'accepted' with quiet resignation but perhaps those with a greater appreciation of history, evolution of human societies and the perpetual quest for freedom and democracy and what it entails can take a wider view.

People on these discussions should stop playing these games of ignorance or shifting blame to the user and acknowledge the pervasive industry wide culture of data collection, open deception and fraudulent help messages deployed ie 'can we do x with your data to provide a better experience' conveniently forgetting to mention the full scope and what else they are doing with the data. This is fraud.

If you think users are so stupid then why even play these games? There are no regulations, no one cares about user privacy and everyone's sold out, fair enough but being 'coy' about it makes a mockery of informed discussion.

There is something extremely disturbing about the state wanting to go through your private papers.

The only way this should be possible in a democracy is rarely and only by due process with a judge's order and ample safeguards, explicit conditions built into the law with no room for abuse by 'friendly judges' or 'overzealous' state machinery.

Anything else is a police state in the making. This is fundamental to the definition of a democracy and you can't dilute this without diluting the meaning of democracy at which point you should use some other word to describe your system.

This discussion is new because AWS and others are new and growing rapidly and it's a huge mistake to conflate it with conventional discussions and strategies about open source.

The threat is not just to open source but also entire categories of software and hardware.

The situation is so dire that you may create a product that does 10Gbs or something else and AWS offers 5Gbs but with automatic snapshots, high availability, scalability and distributed out of the box, and because of ease of use, access, near free management and scale users will still prefer AWS and your market will be limited to a extremely tiny subset requiring some specific niche and willing to configure, roll it out and maintain on their own.

This completely changes the incentives to create, because to compete you now need to create a 'cloud native' product that leverages AWS and other clouds. Which means a transformation of traditional open source and entire categories of software as we understand them to something new.

Everyone reading here knows there is no 'AI' but are happy to peddle or sit back and watch as pattern matching used to identify nudity is wildly hyped up as 'AI'. This is the same kind of fraud as Theranos was guilty of.

There is nothing in the current programming paradigm to create an 'AI' as the 'world understands the term' but individuals and groups blinded by profit and greed are 'growth hacking' redefining and blurring the meaning of words to suit their commercial agendas.

The technical community at large would come out against this kind of widespread misinformation and abuse but they don't as everyone is looking for a gig, job, contract or more ominously some 'illusory power'. But that doesn't make it any less abusive of discourse.

How can we make an AI when we don't even understand human intelligence properly. What in current programming language allows you to create anything that can 'think' and make decisions. How is processing data and matching patterns 'thinking' or AI is any way or form? A culture of hubris is seeing programmers constantly engaged in hype and overestimating their tools while underestimating basic human intelligence required for even mundane tasks like driving.

But once you redefine and twist words they lose all meaning for communication and in the end you lose all credibility, but this seems to be a gold rush and as long as some have made money on the way who cares. If AI happens it will be from decades of hard research in the scientific community like how all breakthroughs happen, not in the trade.

The word 'professional' itself is a way to distance yourself from your actions and consequences and works to dehumanize the people you work with. What does 'professional' mean'?

Is it 'unprofessional' to deceive your employees and customers or users? Is abusing the privacy of your users professional? Is it unprofessional to layoff workers for short term gains? Its definition itself is contextual to power and what it defines at that time. Individual bad behavior is not unprofessional, its just bad behavior.

I love these vintage posters and artwork. In current times they are less propaganda and beautifully capture the essence of a certain time and culture. They are equally interesting posters this side of the 50s onwards that could be looked on as propaganda but also again capture an essence.

Communism was a response to the incomplete transformation from feudalism to democracy, for history buffs its easy to understand its context and its incredible that something so radical and egalitarian in its objectives was actually put into practice, that this was even possible in a time filled with feudal instincts, interests and attitudes itself is astonishing. The rest is history.

Future generations can learn from the multi dimensional failure in practice and learn to recognize how the significant gaps between ideals and reality came into being and use the same understanding to also recognize the significant gaps between our ideals and reality of current power structures and how the world works and is. That is our propaganda.

There is a pattern of designing for the most niche use cases and imposing complexity on everyone by default. Shouldn't it be the other way round? Letting those with advanced needs accept the complexity? Presumably they have the know how.

There are multiple examples of this including the binary journal for those with extreme auditing needs, optimizing for laptop wifi networks when Linux is predominantly used in servers, the ironically named 'predictable network names' that are anything but predictable. And these issues being hand-waved away because of some fringe use case with the additional overhead nonchalantly imposed on all users.

We are in the middle of a transformation and its clear open source will have to change. There is little stopping cloud providers and other well funded parties monetizing your projects leaving little room for you to.

Because they don't have to focus on development they can divert their resources to marketing, adding the syrup on top to 'ease use' and ride the hype wave while the original developers are dismissed as 'technical' folks who do not understand marketing when the fact is they do not have time left over from development, or the resources.

It's perfectly legitimate to expect to sustain yourself while building open source products and projects. Unfortunately we are flooded with one sided superficial perspectives and short term narratives that look at open source projects as if its a crime to expect to make some money while not even examining slightly the parasitic models of cloud providers and others who in effect hijack open source projects with marketing.

The end game is few can compete with the resources, reach and engineering of behemoths like AWS, Azure, GCP and others. And at the customer end the cloud is unavoidable and thus will only see increased adoption. This is not only going to affect open source but dismantle entire groups of software and hardware ecosystems.

The only way forward seems open source projects that leverage these cloud platforms to provide some additional functionality, but these projects will be intimately tied to these platforms and not 'open' as we understand the term.

Those linked articles hardly make the case for blanket assertions about 'disability being the new welfare'.

Every man made system has fraud and abuse and yet reasonable people do not use these instances to attempt to discredit the entire system, no sensible person points to evidence of bank and corporate fraud to discredit the concept of banking and corporations? Even the church has fraud.

This article goes into great depth with documented evidence of serious problems, what is the connection to fraud in other regions covered in 2 articles covered way back in 2013 and how is it useful to this discussion?

A bankruptcy is not a 'loophole' or benefit you can avail as a matter of course every year, but this misses the point. That was just an example, it could be anything, any 'financial innovation' not available to individuals.

This is simplistic. What if there was a loophole in the law that allowed one to not repay debt. Bankers will get that loophole fixed asap.

In this case saying its 'legal' misses all the processes, politics, lobbying, accounting firms drafting laws, ideology, tax havens, that are all in play to leave little 'loopholes' like this for selective enrichment.

Google and other corporate interests who benefit from these 'loopholes' saying 'this is legal' is understandable, but why should an individual say this?

How about employees allowed to sell their services to a third parties incorporated in low tax regions competing for their membership, which in turn then license it to employers, leading to reduced tax in their home countries? Why is this not a thing? If everyone did that the whole tax base would dissipate and destroy our current system, hence its now allowed, why is the exact same thing ok for corporations?

It's pretty silly for commentators here to not recognize their current thinking rules their future selves out from any respectable employment and existence in the field because of the prejudice and massive assumptions about others their current selves hold. 1 or lets say even 10 out of 100 will strike it lucky, what are the 90 going to do. Retire at 35?

This is exactly like the 'temporarily embarrassed working class' supporting policies against their interests as they expect to be in exploiter roles 'soon'.

This kind of ideology tries to reframe software engineering not as a profession like others but some kind track and field with olympic stars dependent on youth working 100hr weeks to the exclusion of everything else. What happens to the majority for whom this does not pay off? This is self importance taken to delusion. This attitude will not only undermine your experience as you age but also directly reduce the quality of people entering the field as anyone studying now with options cannot logically choose a field where you are expected to work like a dog for long odds where experience does not count.

You reap what you sow.

The recent piece by HCN on our nuclear past stands in sharp contrast. [1] Anyone reading that, environmentalists or not, will have reason for extreme concern and skepticism about a single generations ability to manage consequences that can last thousands of years.

[1] https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.21/nuclear-energy-theres-no-ea...

There is a lot of apologism for censorship on this thread in sharp contrast to the threads on china and others where they are demonized for the exact same thing.

This is troubling as it seems when we do it commentators are ready with a litany of justifications in contrast to the blanket judgements on other discussions. This kind of double standards is abusive of discourse and the values sought to be defended and cannot then be a forum for informed discussion.

The fact that border agents can search your personal effects is totalitarian, not unlike the stasi and other authoritarian regimes. The fact that this is 'normalized' in a democracy is astonishing.

This case also highlights the massive gap between civilized rule of law and what actually happens in these interactions, the dehumanization and arbitrary intimidation is not compatible with a democratic civilized society, and this culture of enforcement and lack of accountability is akin to a police state.

Hopefully the newer generation can jettison the decades of systemic libertarian propaganda and fabricated individualism that justifies self obsession and sociopathy to instead build a society that is more humane and connected like most human societies are supposed to be. And we can see very early signs on it.

No one is threatening your individualism, if you don't like other people and the concept of cooperative society you can always go and live in the forest alone. This is possible for every single human being on the planet but no one takes it.

Because this fake individualism generates its identity not on the rugged individualism of standing alone but taking advantage of all the resources, benefits and skills of millions in societal human cooperation and then stand apart merely to legitimize petty self interest and exploiting others without remorse. In essence all the benefits of cooperation but none of the responsibilities.

This is people like Vinod Khosla in a nutshell and if your society is full of such 'individuals' and legitimizes their ideology you have to consider whether you have a 'society' worth fighting for. What is the motivation? Because these kind of individuals do not believe in the larger good, only self interest.

Every single part of the economic system is organized into industry groups, lobbying groups, industry associations and everyone thinks its perfectly natural for them to group together to promote and push their collective interest. No individualism there. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others are part of multiple such industry associations and lobbying groups.

But curiously when it comes to labor suddenly collective action becomes anathema? This is not logical. Isn't it high time anti-union propaganda and demonizing unions on the flawed logic of 'bad unions make all unions bad' ie some banks are corrupt so banking as a concept is bad is jettisoned for informed discussion.

The key word in this case is 'forced'. If you prefer company managed arbitration then you should be able to 'choose' it. Similarly those who see it as fundamentally flawed should have the freedom to choose due process in a court of law as is the right of every citizen.

Here is an idea for online advertising. Use IP and text based contextual targeting. No stalking required.

Stalking everyone and building increasingly creepy online profiles to target better is an abuse of basic human privacy, if you stop to think about it, and completely unethical and takes your hurtling down the path to a surveillance society.

The only reason its even possible because of the lacuna in a new space and laws catching up, and when they do, it won't be possible. The idea that making money makes everything ok is a primitive and fundamentally antisocial ideology. And if everyone thought like that would end civilization as we know it.

If you only care about making money and see ethical behavior and basic human rights like privacy only as things one talks about, then this is the perfect time for the camel in the sand approach.

The crisis here is not just facebook but the growing realization by the wider world of the scope of betrayal by the tech community. The echo chamber covering up this betrayal is now pierced with increasingly louder external voices that challenge the self serving narratives to justify morally bankrupt behavior.

This will have ramifications that those who are already disengaged from the world have no problem with, but many others will not take this loss of reputation as well. The real crisis seems to be we have large groups of people who are not invested and engaged in their world and see no problem in behaving like mercenaries while affecting normalcy. This kind of behavior is toxic and can only promote an environment of complete distrust, decay and degeneration.

Technical communities like this have to accept their role in perpetuating false narratives and a naive perspective of the world where everyone acts in good faith.

Like the exploding complexity in browsers touched on recently that makes it now impossible for small teams to develop in effect rewarding billion dollar companies and guaranteeing centralization and vested interests. Once done these are nearly impossible to reverse making it all the more important for the scrutiny to happen while it is happening.

Similarly there is something completely disingenuous and false about those who have been pushing ssl on the pretext of 'concern' end user privacy and surveillance when the response by the tech community both in comment and action to Snowden and Assange's revelations and invasive surveillance by Google, Facebook and others remains embarrassing if not non existent and in case of the latter even supportive, again promoting centralization and a few interests.

This is a mockery of globalization, free markets and rule of law. It's sad for those of us who have supported some of these values to see them mocked like this. This is like China or Russia getting Trump's or Bill Gates daughter arrested on some made up charge in a third country. Who will support that?

Unilateral sanctions against Iran or Cuba without the consensus of the UN is questionable in law in the first place. What crimes have Iran or Cuba committed? And yet these sanctions without basis by countries who count Saudi Arabia as their closest ally are allowed to cause suffering to millions of people for decades on end and no one cares. This is the twisted state of our world.

It seems ultimately foolish to believe in ideals when they only apply to a certain group of countries in their benefit, and when not will use propaganda and their collective political and diplomatic power to harass others.

It's great to see some Googlers stand up for this. Subcontracting is an all around poor practice and encourages exploitation of labour, and whenever this is pointed out the same old false arguments on the lines 'but some slaves had it good' or the 'alternative is starvation' are trotted out, completely defocusing the companies benefiting from this labour and their dependence for it. This subtly shifts and derails discussion.

But the bigger problem having this discussion in a tech context is the tech community is also made of up many who derive near religious identity from their jobs and conflate their jobs with success and identity, and logical arguments cannot appeal to emotion and this need for hierarchy.

This is a nice idea about abstraction but without knowledge you cannot run anything professionally with any degree of reliability or confidence. What happens when things break? Google, Facebook and any company dependent on delivery have full fledged networking and ops teams.

All these wrappers still require time investment in knowledge, setup and configuration. The cost for users knowing the wrappers but not the tech is being locked in a platform, if they know the tech even if Kubernetes crashes and burns their knowledge and time investment remains valuable.

Before Wireguard it was extremely difficult to get near line speed with encryption, now accessible to all. If this is not 'value' what is? Given this post is about networking benchmarks this is a huge deal. If people stop creating these kind of networking tools and technologies then there is going to be nothing to wrap.

Things like CNI take away from the development and understanding of general networking technology to scripts and json/yaml wrappers that not only add another layer of complexity but also prevent users from understanding what they are actually using.

For instance in this post itself we learn about all these CNI wrappers but learn nothing about Vxlan, BGP and Linux networking tools that these are using underneath. And those are actually easy to use directly. This does a disservice to both developers and users.

For instance true game changers in this space is tech like Wireguard that can deliver encryption at near line speed and would kill these benchmarks. Everyone can benefit from Wireguard today. Initiatives like CNI encourage wrappers and those then wrapping tools like Wireguard end up getting the recognition and success while the underlying tools like Wireguard fade into the background. This does not seem like a healthy or sustainable development model.

There is something disingenuous and false about those who have been pushing ssl 'vehemently' on the pretext of concern end user privacy and surveillance.

It would be slightly more credible if the response by the tech community both in comment and action to Snowden and Assange's revelations and invasive surveillance by Google, Facebook and others was not so embarrassing in inaction.

One can argue of degrees and doing both, but in this case it seems all the 'concern' gets expended in ssl leaving no energy for the far more pervasive SV surveillance culture the tech community props up without protest or even leaks.

There are too many double standards here, about capitalism, free trade, technological progress. There is a legitimate reason to be concerned about backdoors and spyware, but why should this 'concern' be limited to a single country in this self serving way?

What this really says is that some companies and countries can access all markets without concerns but when others try to grow their market access will be restricted with scaremongering, bullying and political games perpetuating an artificial marketplace.

Its the ideologues who always argue on 'free markets' and 'competition' in absolute terms who should wake up to how little the real world has to do with their idealized constructs.

Nothing, and no one cares. It's like the aged grandfather wheeled out at special occasions to reassure everyone they care, and promptly wheeled back out of sight. Life goes on.

Snowden is an embarrassment for those who use human rights, freedom and democracy to further other interests. Hence the deafening silence. The entire ecosystem that supports dissenters with asylum, grand freedom narratives and wall to wall coverage about evil regimes and heroic protest closed shop for Snowden, Assange, Manning and others.

Imagine the hysteria of the 'free world' in unison against the totalitarian chinese if there was no Snowden and a chinese dissenter leaked something like this, and his or her subsequent global fame as a defender of freedom. Now look as Snowden stranded in Russia and Assange in the Ecuador embassy. That is the pathetic state of pretension.

And instead of demonizing others and filling pages upon pages scaremongering about totalitarian surveillance vs democracy, its surveillance that is being demoted to a lesser transgression, even something 'acceptable' if not 'necessary', and that's what Snowden changed.