woevdbz

The self-styled "free speech absolutist" writes column in a magazine published by the Chinese government administration in charge of online censorship.

If it was a poc they just lost the ability to build the real attack by being way too noticeable. This issue has likely already been mitigated and will be patched up within days if not hours. Much more likely to be an honest mistake.

Maybe. But given the culture at most of these places I'd expect the junior to be explained that it's ok, everybody makes mistakes. Some engineering manager is probably sweating bigger buckets over their failure to properly secure casual human access to prod stuff, which is definitely not ok. Meanwhile the both of them are really really relieved that the notification contents were completely innocuous and not some sick inside joke that would have been massively offensive out of context.

Also until that time, their competitors (foreign like Toyota, Hyundai, etc and specialized eg Tesla, Rivian, etc) will get more subsidies and continue to undercut them.

IMO what will really light a fire under their ass at this point, even if you forget about saving the planet, is that an EV is a lot more fun to drive than an equivalently price ICE (post rebates). Whenever I go back to an ICE vehicle for a rental situation, I tend to curse often at how sluggish it feels. Feels like an iPhone/Android vs Nokia situation, manufacturers will get with the program or they will get pounced out of the game by competitors.

Having worked in both US and Europe I think this is very much less about average engineer and much more about engineering management and product management. There are many excellent software engineers in Europe already, and they are generally OK being paid much less than in the US. But the strategy, ambition, and execution discipline imparted by management are not there, so folks end up being underutilized there. The average engineer - even at a FAANG - often gets lionized but really isn't that amazing IMO.

1900 is an impressively small upper bound of affected users, implying that Signal and Twilio got onto this very, very quickly. Seems like the response was swift. I would be interested in learning more about the process that led to such readiness at either company.

Physical security and insider threat management for one thing. All big companies tend to hire for these positions from the ranks of law enforcement. Look up literally any company in the fortune 500 and look at the experience of the chief of security - they don't tend to come with PhDs from Stanford. Moreover Twitter is a target of many government agencies around the world, extremists groups of various shades, and disgruntled randos who believe the Californian elite is stifling their favorite brand of hate. It takes organization and expertise to operate safely within that kind of threat.

This looks like a right wing disinformation site. The implication is that Twitter (in readers' minds the incarnation of oppressive liberal media) is somehow colluding with FBI deep state chimera to stifle freedom of speech. This is what conservatives in America resort to: allying themselves with white supremacists doesn't help them win elections, so when they lose, it's always supposedly the fault of fraud, federal government rigging the scales, and coastal elites. Aside from the fact that FBI does not regulate media (nor anyone in the US either TBH) I'm quite sure that on balance, there are more FBI agents going to traditionally right wing businesses with lots of political influence as well (energy, military contractors, etc.). In insurgency terms, this is textbook sapping of institutions, and honestly I say f these f'ers.

I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with autism. Eg the "should we use React" situation - I have quite a few colleagues too (presumably not all of them autistic) who tend not to answer directly the questions that they're being asked until they can reframe them in a clean way going back to first principles. I think it serves them well in some instances like systems design where this kind of behavior is particularly useful, and it's very counterproductive in other settings such as dealing with higher level execs, who tend not to ask the "right" questions because they don't have all the context, but feel like they're being stonewalled when asking what (to them) sounds like a simple question. Balancing this is a communication challenge for everyone.

There is never a shortage of desperate people living under corrupt regimes. That's the wrong problem to focus on

Feels like a great application for adversarial generative networks

I think back at my days in college, when a bunch of the computer science lab professors and postdocs had basically unaudited root access by design to all of the college's email and Unix logs... Or later, when I worked at an ISP and saw nominative clickstream data being casually handed over on USB sticks... I don't miss local control.

Science, not engineering

The underlying principle I've been using to understand this is, no engineer worth their salt will be spending a material amount of time working at an organization that they don't believe utilizes their talents well. The opportunity cost of talented software engineers is much too high in general.

This applies regardless of actual talent and does not guarantee results. I've seen mediocre SWEs with inflated egos jump around because they felt their "world class" talents weren't being put to good use, some unsuccessfully, but some rather successfully fooling their way through the ranks of management. But I've also (more frequently) seen disillusioned, extremely talented engineers leave an org that was paying them obscenely well already, but was making them feel like they were wasting their time, for a shot at a startup dice roll which does not pay off as well (on average).

?? Where is there any reference to amusement or self-actualization in TFA?

After a couple really bad experiences with product quality (think clothing items that don't last after a couple washes) I no longer buy Amazon branded items. It's going to play against them over time if they keep messing up on quality.

When people say "software is eating the world," this is what they are talking about. When mastering the software development cycle becomes a strong differentiator in an industry, inept companies (like Hertz in this case) get fleeced by rent-a-coder firms that get paid the same no matter the usefulness or reusability of their code. They end up, hopefully, spiralling into irrelevance while competitors who are able to harness software to their advantage win out over time.

Hertz is even suing Accenture to recoup the development cost, but it seems they are missing the bigger problem, which is that their aging digital presence has probably harmed their ability to acquire or retain customers to a bigger extent than the lost cost of development...

This fails to note an important factor in both suicides and car crashes, which is (in the US especially) strong popular preference for personal freedom over personal safety. People would rather be able to freely own guns (even if they are routinely used for suicide) or drive their own cars at fast speeds (even if it causes deadly accidents).

Trains and planes get such strong safety assurances because they are typically commercially operated, so they are subject to another popular feature, which is commercial operators' permanent fear of liability lawsuits.

It's much harder for people to accept to trade off personal freedom for safety than it is for people to demand safety guarantees in commercial transportation services.

And it's a good thing with the incoming recession. Good regulation should be countercyclical — it's in times of plenty that society can bear the cost of reform and restructure. Besides, tech won't need government's help to become less dominant in the next 5-10 years. I think once we see a few of the big names in tech suffer the same fates as Yahoo or AOL before us, the push for regulation will soften even more.

Wrt "people standing around", software is the same. You look at what it takes to ship a one-line change in any nontrivial, well-engineered website or app, compare the textual code change with all the work that goes in waiting for the compiler, code review, writing and running unit tests, integration tests, running release QA tests, testing in prod, and final release, and you got a lot of apparent overhead "waiting around". One difference is perhaps that the work is more amenable to automation and adding machines to replace humans, but even that (as in construction) has its limits.

I'm not sure we know about the side effects very well yet though?

Any statistic calculated over a large enough number of places will yield some outliers, even if nothing actually distinguishes these places other than luck. It is unclear that the characteristics described have any predictive value.

> this is a class of attacks which are only relevant to a specific, small class of users

Yes.

> It's irrelevant to users who have intentionally enabled any kind of network communications on their computer

No, there are lots of use-cases at least for LAN communications.

> it's also irrelevant to users who have robust controls on what code is executing on their system, or who run untrusted code in an environment which isolates it from hardware (like a virtual machine).

No, it's relevant in those cases too, as part of a defense in depth strategy.

Well but that is exactly the point of air-gapping. It's meant to give the institution a guarantee that, no matter how badly the box might be owned, no matter if the user themselves is compromised, stuff won't get out. If a user with admin rights on the machine can get it to communicate with the external world, that's an air gap failure.

This is an excellent metaphor, and I would note that the annealing strategy of always taking the good choices, and randomly accepting some bad choices too, also applies in career choices or life choices. Sometimes when you find yourself tangled up in a knot / stuck in a rut careerwise or lifewise, occasionally making a jump to something different — not necessarily something better — can give your life the kinetic energy it needs to find a better maximum. And as with annealing, the payoff of doing so early in life is higher than doing so late, so one should do more of it while young than as one gets older (if one chooses to optimize their life, that is).

Gee imagine being fired or ostracized for voicing casually x-ist comments even though they were true...

Imagine being fired or ostracized because of your sex/skin/passport though... stop whining, start asking questions. What does the experience of being x feel like at your company? Just ask and listen.

It's striking how much more flamelike the structures appear to be, with the added resolution

Thank COVID for teaching more people how to use the dang camera on their phones as a barcode scanner (by way of many restaurants moving to QR menus)

You can also generate the QR code from an Android phone by going to WiFi settings, and tapping the "Share" from the details view of the network in question (assuming the phone is already connected to that network)

Agreed, but it's a balance, and in many parts of the world, transportation user needs had been disregarded for so long that there was wide popular support for breaking with the status quo and rebalancing power in favor of the user. Everyone who was an adult city dweller pre-Uber has taxi horror stories at the ready, of not getting picked up, of being overcharged, of unsafe driving, of dirty cars, of feeling threatened or disrespected by the driver — and not feeling like they had any effective recourse. This is what caused the market to be ripe for disruption, the users' sense of powerlessness in the face of a bunch of local players set in their ways and gripped by local worker politics, in the way that most industries are thankfully not.

In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to.

Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty.

Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.