I don't agree with this logic. It implies that people who use Google, Bing and a million other products made by US-based companies are supportive of the huge amount of attrocities commited or aided by the United States. Or other countries. It feels very odd to single out Russia's invasion of Ukraine but to minimize the Israeli genocide of palestinians in Gaza, the multiple unjust wars waged by the United States all over the world etc.
It's often fairly easy to find US government-centric news and criticism with Google.
But as one counterexample: The end of the US penny was formed and announced not with public legislative discourse, nor even with an executive order, but with a brief social media post by the president.
And I don't mean that it's atrocious or anything, but I wanted to see that social media post myself. Not a report about it, or someone's interpretation of it, but -- you know -- the actual utterance from the horse's mouth.
Which should be a simple matter. After all, it's the WWW.
And I've been Googling for as long as there has been a Google to Google with. I'd like to think that I am proficient at getting results from it.
But it was like pulling teeth to get Google to eventually, kicking and screaming, produce a link to the original message on Truth Social.
If that kind of active reluctance isn't censorship on Google's part, then what might it be described as instead?
And if they're seeking to keep me away from the root of this very minor issue, then what else might they also be working to keep me from?
There certainly is a huge army of people ready to spout this sort of nonsense in response to anyone talking about doing anything.
Hard to know what percentage of these folks are trying to assuage their own guilt and what percentage are state actors. Russia and Israel are very chronically online, and it behooves us internet citizens to keep that in mind.
Never agreed with this logic. For a lot of people (anyone that does political activism of some sort for example) the threat model can be a lot more nuanced. It might not be Mossad or the CIA gunning for you, specifically, but it might police searching you and your friend's laptops or phones. It might be burglars targetting the office of the small organization you have and the small servers you have running there.
Yep. While there might be some use cases for his ultra-simplistic "Mossad/not-Mossad duality" - say, convincing Bob Jones that "b0bj0nes" is not a great password - it's 99% fairy tale.
And even if the CIA/Mossad/NSA/whoever is "interested" in you - this is the era of mass surveillance. The chances that you're worth a Stuxnet level of effort is 0.000000001%. Vs. 99.999% chance that they'll happily hoover up your data, if you make it pretty easy for their automated systems to do that.
Also worth noting that Mossad/CIA/etc. are not monoliths. Maybe you got a top agent assigned to you, but maybe your file is on the desk of the Mossad's version of Hitchcock and Scully from Brooklyn 99.
> Yep. While there might be some use cases for his ultra-simplistic "Mossad/not-Mossad duality" - say, convincing Bob Jones that "b0bj0nes" is not a great password - it's 99% fairy tale.
Honestly, the oversimplification here reads to me more like something Bob Jones could use to justify not caring about "b0bj0nes" not being a great password.
I was thinking, "Bob, stop making excuses about how it's hopeless, and you'd need a 'U0hBNTEyICgvdmFyL2xvZy9tZXNzYWdlcykgPSBjNGU2NGM1MmI5MDhiYWU3MDU5NzdlMzUzZDlk'-level password to be safe. That 'b0bj0nes' is so easy that a bored kid might get it in a few dozen guesses, and you need to change it to something better."
That password should include symbols too! Without symbols, each character is one of 62 values (sticking to ASCII letters and digits). Including symbols makes it much harder to guess passwords of a given length. Even better would be Unicode letters, digits, and symbols, even if you stick to the Basic Multilingual Plane.
Best would be non-text, binary strings. Since I already use a password manager, I don't really need to type passwords by hand. But I do understand most people prefer text passwords that could be entered by hand if necessary.
Except that's exactly what the Mossad will be expecting us to use, for our uber-secure password! By eschewing symbols and binary, we are actually meta-out-smarting their ultimate giga-quantum nuclear crypto cracker.
Or: This is Bob "Dim Bulb" Jones we're talking to. KISS, and maybe we can convince him to upgrade his password to "iwantacoldbeernow".
Sorry, your password does not meet complexity requirements because it does not contain at least one of each of the following: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numeric digits, nonalphanumeric symbols.
Yeah it's extremely immature, even within police agencies there's a huge variation on their ability to perform digital forensics. Furthermore, just because the feds don't like you for whatever reason doesn't mean they're going to deploy their top-of-the-line exploits against you, or detain and torture you, or whatever magic voodoo bullshit the author thinks the Mossad can do.
the maximalist false dillema of "all or nothing": either it's a super-poweful super-human agency and you can't do anything, else any half-measure is fine
The idea that average people can't handle incremental improvements like a password manager, MFA, full disk encryption, etc is unhealthy infantilization of people who are entirely capable of understanding the concepts, the benefits, the risks they address, and appreciating the benefits of them.
Most people just don't care enough until after they're hacked, at which point they care just enough to wish they'd done something more previously, which is just shy of enough to start doing something differently going forward.
It's not that normies are too stupid figure this out, it's that they make risk accept decisions on risks they don't thoroughly understand or care enough about to want to understand. My personal observation is that the concept of even thinking about potential future technology risks at all (let alone considering changing behavior to mitigate those risks) seems to represent an almost an almost pathological level of proactive preparation to normies, the same way that preppers building bunkers with years of food and water storage look to the rest of us.
I do understand the concepts and exactly because of that I doubt I myself would be able of airtight opsec against any determined adversary, not even state-level one. I think it's humility, you think I infantilize myself lol.
I do use password manager and disk encryption, just for case of theft. Still feels like one stupid sleepy misclick away from losing stuff and no amount of MFAs or whatever is going to save me, they actually feel like added complexity which leads to mistakes.
The third mode is enabled by scale of data and compute. If enough data from enough sources is processed by enough compute, Mossad does not need to have a prior interest in you in order for you to fit a profile that they are interested in.
Anyone else see all the drones flying over a peaceful No Kings assembly?
I agree with the idea behind the paradox of tolerance, I just find the idea of this being only applied to a chinese-owned company because of things china does somewhat hilarious. America does much worse so its clearly not about morals or anything like that. I really wish that the discussion would more outwardly become "we're banning tiktok because China is our competitor in international geopolitics" so we can all move on with our lives and stop having these dumb discussions.
I find it interesting that you mention this offhand because I've been very seriously noticing this type of prudishness in a lot of gen z and younger gen y people and its begining to manifest as old style homophobia
Gen Z is weird. Most young people are very accepting of LGBT peoples but stuff is starting to turn around back to homophobia now that transphobia is Hip And Cool again (thanks J.K. Rowling[0]), because many feminists are invalidating transgender women in the name of equal rights. Transphobia breeds homophobia. I worry sometimes what will happen if young people too become trans-exclusionary feminists but thankfully it's unlikely such a thing could occur. Young people are more open-minded now and discovering they're transgender themselves.
I should add that I'm not quite sure exactly how the trend of homophobia that you speak of is hitting younger people. I haven't noticed a shift backwards in real life or on-line. If you're referring to social media homophobia you should realize that "zoomer humor" is radically different from typical humor and many kids will sound like a deranged homophobes/racists/sexists until you realize that they themselves are gay/black/female and are making jokes at their own expense. That being said, ask before assuming they are or aren't joking.
[0] - I'm not sure about the legitimacy of Slate as a publication but a brief skim of this article makes me think it hits on everything relevant in the controversy (if you don't already know about it; it's semi-common knowledge nowadays): https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/06/jk-rowling-trans-me...
how is that a good comparison, when you're given puppies you are being made responsible for living creatures, If you're given a bunch of code you can literally just drop it.
Is this a real book someone wrote? Incredible to me how you can call yourself an economist and just write basic observations and conclude they are the root cause of everything without even taking a cursory look at the history of things.
It's kind of like how you can read a post on the internet that mentions two economists and draw any kind of conclusions about the work they've done without even taking a cursory look at it.
I would imagine the book contains a bit more justification for its arguments than what was presented by the person you are responding to.
What makes you believe that the author just "wrote basic observations and concluded they are the root cause of everything"? Most ideas are easy to dismiss when you assume that a blurb posted to HN is all there is to them.
For real, all I want is for us to go back to the time where you could pop off the back cover of your phone by at worst unscrewing some screws, and the easily replace the battery.
Then maybe Apple wouldn't need to send out a backdoor patch to underclock old devices. People that still want the long battery life the device had on purchase could go out and purchase a new battery (or attempt to force Apple to give them a new one) - those folks that are fine being tethered to a power outlet can choose to ignore the shortening battery lifespan. Either way, it'd move the decision into the hands of the consumer instead of Apple making that choice for you. And don't forget that Apple did get into trouble over their stupid underclocking "We hope no one notices that we don't allow people to repair things" patch.
>Lockdown cause massive unemployment, bankruptcy, mental health issue, kids not getting proper education, delayed treatment/care for non-covid cause, etc.
a lockdown doesn't inherently cause this. These things are caused by a badly implemented lockdown, a lockdown that doesn't have measures in place to make sure people don't go bankrupt, measures to make sure people's mental health doesn't deteriorate etc.
Sure, I will totally support such implementation that neither restrict people movement nor have occupancy restriction, at least for this specific virus.
If let say covid has severity of anthrax or ebola then restricting people movement maybe justifiable but not otherwise.
the problem is not people who are worried about their finances - that is understandable. The problem is people who want to put finances over covid, mostly because covid requires certain measures in order to be eradicated (objectively) whereas an economy can (at the very least temporarily) be switched to a mode where people do not have to worry about their finances (such as UBI or a command economy). What makes at least me angry is people who are pretending that the way our economy functions right now has to be how it functions in every situation. It comes off as dogmatic and religious thinking.
100% this. The economy isn't part of nature. In it's current form it's a relatively new social construct that honestly doesn't seem to be working very well for a lot of the global population
I would even dare to the say that post keynesian economics has been worse for a major part of the population inside a western economy.
Economic growth in and of itself might be better, but how much of the population sees the result of that? basic commodoties like housing and social wellbeing/services are worse, while most of the economic growth seems to be stuck at the top.
Also, having massive growth is simply not sustainable for our planet.
Dire change is needed, the question is what? It seems most major forces in politics are stuck in maintaining the status quo and not thinking long term. Change from that system would be hard to realise, especially in the complete gridlock of american politics.
Lockdowns only cannot eliminate this coronavirus. You'd have to also eliminate the virus from bat populations, or eliminate bats, else it will jump back into humans.
The most likely outcome for this is that it becomes endemic, another variant of the common cold, like the several others that already exist.
The 1968 flu killed 1-4 million people, in a world with half as many people. This is nothing unusual, diseases happen, part of being human, shocking news headlines to the contrary.
> The first thing to remember is that we haven't been successful at eradicating many viruses at all. Really the lone exception is smallpox, but many of these viruses exist not only in the human population but in animal populations.
> And then the expectation I have is that this virus will actually become the next common cold coronavirus. What we don't know with these common cold coronaviruses is if they went through a similar transition period.
> So, say something like OC43, which is a common cold coronavirus that was originally from cows. It's been historically reported that there was an outbreak associated with the transition of this virus from cows to humans that was very severe disease, and then after a few years, the virus became just the common cold.
