wheelie_boy

Good to hear, I'm very happy to be corrected on this. Thanks!

This is not a feature available to mere mortals. Your assumption seems likely.

Link to the post: https://web.archive.org/web/20190703224616/https://news.ycom...

It's also weird that the post is still up, but the username was changed from austenallred to another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774

2021 is the year of linux on the desktop, I just know it

This is an extremely aggressive approach - the scenario is that the government considers it a threat to national security, which presumes that modifying national laws isn't a problem. You'd be able to detain developers from other countries with extradition agreements, and maybe a few others if you want to risk angering those countries. That'd probably be enough.

A lot of the discussion in the linked post is about specific ways that countries could take down bitcoin, but my main point is that if a majority of large countries wanted to take it down, they have a large variety of tools they could use to do so. Building a lot of hash capability is probably low on the list. The tech is built and run by people, and countries have a lot of ways of exerting power on people, should they consider it important.

Like, the US was arranging coups across central and south america so that bananas would be cheap, I don't think it's too far-fetched to think that violence is a tool they'd reach for to take down bitcoin if needed.

This whole thing reminds me a bit of xkcd.com/538/

The simplest way for the US to get rid of bitcoin is to secretly declare it a national security threat, then identify, apprehend, and possibly extradite a majority of the Bitcoin Core developers.

Then force them to release a new version which is easier to control, but incompatible with the old version. Maybe this is just a PoS version, with inherent flaws? If some of the miners stay with the old version that's fine - a fork helps your goal.

I've seen a lot of industries compared to programming, like construction and manufacturing. For example, people trying to apply lessons from the Toyota Production System to programming.

This doesn't make sense, because we have systematized the construction of executable programs with extremely high reliability and predictability: we call it "Copy File"

It's the design that is the hard part, and the process of coding is the process of iterating on the design. Even turning the design into an executable is extremely reliable, either running via a VM or scripting engine, or compiling. Those are all very repeatable and reliable.

There are other disciplines that focus on creating and improving designs (like writing, painting, architecture, 3D modeling), but it's not like they're reliable or predictable either, unless you're designing very similar things over and over again. That's true of coding as well, but you don't really end up doing that, because once you've done it 3 times you should make a library and then never do that part again, just the unique bits.

In short, yeah, coding is its own thing, and I doubt it'll ever be predictable unless you're wasting a lot of time and effort doing very similar things over and over.

Reminds me of https://tylervigen.com/old-version.html

Especially some of those graphs about stuff like childhood obesity.

It would be nice if all problems in a society had a single, simple cause (bad people doing stuff!) and a single, simple solution (stop 'em!), but the world is a complex place

I did notice that the people hawking bitcoin didn't include any graphs about climate change..

There are lots of ways that this can break.

- On a rooted/jailbroken device, the system libraries could be hacked to provide any image from the camera.

- The app itself could be hacked or the protocol reverse-engineered

- The company's servers could be compromised, either internally or externally. Only trust this service as much as you trust the company.

- Picture of a picture or other staged pictures

In short, there's no way they could deliver on what they promise. It would also break in more pedestrian ways, like if you want to take a photo somewhere you don't have good network access.

I think only a device manufacturer could get closer to providing this, signing the raw camera buffer and metadata with a device-specific private key. You could use lidar or other sensors to capture more of the scene, to make it harder to duplicate. And even then it would not be 100%

I guess the question for this company is whether there's enough of a business model in the improved security that they can provide over just normal exif data.

Yes, if the amount of traffic stayed the same, having all self-driving cars would be a big improvement. But what I'm saying is that a lower cost of commuting (in terms of attention, effort, and danger) would induce demand. People would hate commuting a lot less, and therefore more people would do it. To offset that you'd need to either increase the speed dramatically or do something else so that more people can fit on the roads. Maybe smaller cars. Maybe pack self-driving cars automatically into trains. Maybe build a lot more roads.

But whatever it is, you need something major to counter the increase in commuters or else the road system will get swamped.

If anything, self-driving cars would make congestion a lot worse. If I had a self-driving mini-RV, I would live further from the city, and do my morning routine during my commute. Maybe take a small nap or get some work done.

Always reading the dialog boxes is usually a very good idea, but I've also seen that strategy backfire.

Specifically, I was once trying to help a CS professor register a new domain name. This was at some low-cost registrar and there were 6 pages of upsells on the way to checkout. For whatever reason, he was definitely taking his time reading the entire pitch, and eventually I had to step in and click 'next' several times. "No, you don't need a new virus scanner as part of your domain name purchase. No you don't need a company to submit your new domain name to search engines. No you don't need SEO services. ..."

A lot of people need to have control of their lives.

One manifestation of this is when they look at people that have bad things happening to them, they come up with a list of how they can avoid that thing happening to them.

Sometimes those things are very reasonable - I'll avoid these dangerous behaviors, I'll engage in these good behaviors, I'll avoid those areas, etc. But sometimes the threats are not the kind that you can really avoid. Sometimes people respond by blaming the afflicted with having poor intrinsic attributes, as opposed to their own superior attributes. Sometimes people respond by simply disbelieving the afflicted, discounting evidence that they would have considered otherwise. Because it is simply too taxing to really consider the risk.

I don't know you from Adam, I have no idea if that's what's motivating you, but what you said reminds me of what other people say in that situation.

I doubt other companies would want to create their own device drivers

Sandboxing is important, but is only one part of the protections.

There's also:

- App store guidelines on what is and is not permissible in different cases

- Restrictions against using private APIs

- Restrictions against jailbreaking the device

There are a variety of VPN apps available on iOS. Why was Onavo blocked? Because it violated the guidelines on the use of the information, which is the kind of thing that it difficult to automate.

Restrictions against using private APIs are semi-automated, and would be difficult to completely automate.

The fact that you can't get an iOS app that jailbreaks the device in order to do whatever it wants is in part due to human review - if one existed in the store, it would get pulled, and the developer cert would get revoked. Jailbreaks exist, and human review in the app store is one way they are mitigated.

I for one remember the bad old days when playing a CD could (and did!) install a rootkit.

It's a little weird to say that the app store has a monopoly on distributing apps on iPhones.

Does Apple also have a monopoly on writing the OS that runs on iPhones?

Do they also have a monopoly on creating the iPhone hardware? And choosing what they write in press releases?

A big part of the value of iPhones and iPads is that you don't have to worry about installing an app that screws up your system and requires a wipe & reinstall. You don't have to worry about viruses. You don't have to worry about spending a lot of time being a system administrator, and just use it. You don't even have to worry about many types of malware, because the system protects you from poorly-behaved applications, through a combination of technical means and human review.

If it was possible to side-load apps, then those advantages go out the window. To see what I'm talking about, look at apps that are skirting the apple app store.

Onavo is a good example. They:

- paid teens

- to install the Facebook Enterprise Certificate

- to side-load the Onavo VPN

- to spy on their internet traffic

- to find out about new apps or websites that might be a threat to facebook (among other things)

I'd be interested to see if the tooling around moderation could also be improved. For example, could the images start heavily blurred, with a circle of clarity that opens when you click. Or something like that, which would harm throughput, but be more humane.

I'd say another difference is the percentage of your attention is being devoted to this kind of thing. Presumably reddit or phpbb mods aren't spending 40 hr/wk looking at gore.

Don't you also have to have the 'Don't ask again on this computer' option selected the first time you login to Google with 2FA?

It looks like that's the default, but that's another good way you can avoid this issue - if you do have to log in to Google on a machine with lower security, be sure to uncheck that box.

> We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook!

Well, Verizon doesn't want their ads running next to certain types of speech, correct. Not sure if that's censoring.

> But oh not all speech just some speech that we don’t like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don’t like. And we reserve the right to change at any time.

> So, please just censor speech that we don’t like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we’ll tell you what to censor next.

That does sound like a lot of work to keep up with what is considered acceptable in polite society. I know I have no interest in starting a social media company. But Facebook is making their money from advertisers against user-generated content, so they made their bed, as has every other social media company funded by ads.

This could explain why it might not have shown up in testing.

It's not just that the image had a non-sRGB colorspace, it's also that the pixel values in this specific image were out of the expected range.

Pandemic profiteer

National emergency price-gouger

Depends on the amount of traffic you're expecting. If it's very light, rolling any kind of captcha of your own will work.

For example, on a moderately popular (~100 comments a day) phpbb forum I used to run, I had a custom captcha that was a single image and a single correct answer. It completely stopped all my spam issues.

Eventually I would have needed to upgrade it, but it never got to that point. Nobody wanted to specifically spam my forum.

That's just rationing, the same thing as 'commodity is affordable'.

Or maybe you're expecting it to not be a real shortage?

It's mostly about risk/reward and effort.

Giving detailed feedback takes more time, and is inherently more risky than a timely, somewhat bland rejection letter. Candidates are much more likely to feel slighted when they are given specific criticism, which they may or may not agree with.

"Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after release of 'National Treasure 2', starring Nicholas Cage"

The fixed hardware that is long-lived and affordable is possible because the hardware manufacturer subsidizes it, especially at the beginning. If they were not able to rely on money from game sales, the hardware would be much more expensive.

An alternative way for companies to make money manufacturing gaming hardware is to keep the prices low until there are a lot of great games for the system, and then jack up the hardware prices later on.

So you might want a hardware standard that multiple companies could produce, which games could interface with and be portable between..

Eventually it just turns back into PC gaming.

> Where else can you, with just your hands and a laptop on the Internet, create something a billion people use?

At the large tech companies, with a lot less risk and higher salaries.

Yesterday was all about getting enough light during the day, today is about getting good sleep at night. Hopefully we'll also hear about eating healthy, getting some exercise, and the importance of healthy friendships.