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Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

blog.wikimedia.org

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Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#61

Post by jimnotgym »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #45
dom0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stasi was able to read all mail of targets (and they had many) fifty years ago. Practically all mail crossing the border was read, which again was a lot. I'd assume addresses are scraped anyway, since they are digitized for routing already, and targeted mail being opened without leaving marks (an art existing for hundreds of years).

I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to read mail while still sealed in an envelope. Wouldn't a sufficiently bright light and OCR be sufficient to read the average single page folded in thirds?

In 'Spycatcher' IIRC MI5 actually steamed letters open with a kettle, or rolled them out of the gap at the top of the flap with a split cane! They had no way (at that time) to deal with cellotape, however. I suspect the metadata is a pretty valuable resource in itself. Suggests that people wishing to protect their privacy would do well to shield the inside of their envelopes with junk text, tape them shut, post them from random locations and use mail forwarding services and a mailbox service

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#62

Post by quickben »

Markoff wrote: post #19
justicezyx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, FB makes way more money on an user by building social echo chamber and ads... Wiki give user knowledge, probably one of the highest quality sources...

FB is not asking me for donations and FB pay to people working for them unlike Wikipedia parasiting on work of volunteers pretending to be non profit organization so 300 people can enjoy doing nothing for good salary

No, FB forever locks one into a tiny little echo chamber, so one never learn anything else besides what one clicked on and what they can sell.

But am I to judge. There are encyclopedias and yellow press, and happiness is very subjective.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#63

Post by dkruger »

orf wrote: post #52
Markoff wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the issue is, the site itself they could run with 10% of current employees and they would have funds to run it for years without threatening donation banners each year

You've postured a lot in this thread about the number if employees Wikimedia has. So, put your money where your mouth is and defend your position. Which 90% would you cut, and why? Here is a list of their employees: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors Perhaps they could tighten their belt a little bit, but to think that you can run a foundation with the size and scope of Wikimedia with ~30 empl…

> Which 90% would you cut, and why?

(Senior) Software Engineers : The site already exists. What could they possibly be engineering? Clearly all these positions can be axed and replaced by a few volunteers or an intern for the occasional maintenance patch. Even that is probably unnecessary - the site generally works fine for me.

QA : See above

Product : This isn't a product, it's a website. Obviously this entire section is superfluous.

Discovery : An entire division for legal discovery? What kind of pork barrel waste is this. Easy cut.

Mobile : I built an Ionic app this weekend, and these jokers need a whole team for this stuff? Now with flux.io, they have no excuse to employ more than 1 dev. Cut!

Research : What do they need to research? The website runs fine and all the content gets created for them. These guys are obviously playing ping pong all day. Cut.

Security : Nobody cares about hacking an encyclopedia. They're paying an entire team to play around with splunk all day. Cut!

Search Platform : I can spin up an Elasticsearch instance in an afternoon, and they need a whole team for this? Cut!

Traffic : The site already gets traffic. What are these guys doing? Cut!

Cloud Services : There's no such thing as the cloud - it's all on someone's PC. Obviously a fake division. Cut!

Fundraising : Now that we've eliminated the whole company, we don't need to fundraise anymore. Easy peasy.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#64

Post by jimnotgym »

asher wrote: post #11

Seems like it's trendy to hate the NSA. It gets conflated with an anti-authoritarian mindset. I wish smart people would gain some perspective - I got some by reading Bamford's books and a new one by Fred Kaplan - Dark Territories, about NSAs painful move to cyber. Some key points: * All the great powers have NSA equivalents. Meaning they play offence and defense in crypto, RF, and cyber. We (USA) can impose restricti…

I recommend a very health disrespect of organisations like the NSA. This article was shared recently on here apologies for stealing it

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...

It really made me laugh, and think about the pointlessness of the whole organisation of British Intelligence.

Are we really clear that MI5/6, NSA, GCHQ etc have any benefit at all. Isn't it just a matter of of an arms race, where each country keeps raising the stakes? It is already clear that the NSA have produced dangerous cyber weapons which have escaped into the wild.

The secrecy is the perfect excuse for empire building. You can imagine they are filled with paranoid idiots who want every bit of information going, but never analyse it into anything useful.

RE WW2 it is not clear at all that the USA was at a disadvantage due to lack of intelligence. In the UK we love to celebrate our great code breaking efforts, whilst simultaneously the Germans were breaking ours...

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#65

Post by visarga »

type0 wrote: post #41
a3_nm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a Wikipedia "volunteer" (or rather "editor"), I think it is in fact a very good idea that the Foundation takes no editorial responsibilities (except reacting to legal challenges via so-called "office actions"). It means that editors don't have to worry about legal, sysadmin, PR, etc.; and conversely WMF is not directly responsible for Wikipedia content. Believe me, it would be silly for WMF to be involved…

You forgot to mention that a lot of editing work on wikipedia is done by bots (there is no clear way to decide how to pay for that). What is your opinion on Wikia and the deletionist culture that is rampant on wikipedia?

By the way, I don't know if you're aware that Wikipedia with its parallel corpus in hundreds of languages covering almost any subject is very important in NLP (natural language processing) and the development of AI with common sense. Wikipedia is also routinely used to build word embeddings for many languages. The Wikidata project is essentially a huge ontology - a database of entities and relations - very important for advanced NLP tasks.

So it's a valuable resource both for humans and AI. We'll benefit from Wikipedia indirectly by using AI trained on its database.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#66

Post by walshemj »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #53
walshemj wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not the "cyber" is now the term that is used

People don't just make fun of "cyber" because it sounds stupid, they also make fun of it because it is stupid. The media literally portrays the threat as Tron, when it's actually that critical systems have remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. The only real solution is to find the vulnerabilities before the bad guys do so we can close them before they're exploited. Hoarding vulnerabilities in secret is the exact oppo…

as is the way "hacker"'s meaning has changed from its original usage some times you have to accept that meanings change

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#67

Post by majewsky »

walshemj wrote: post #66
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't just make fun of "cyber" because it sounds stupid, they also make fun of it because it is stupid. The media literally portrays the threat as Tron, when it's actually that critical systems have remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. The only real solution is to find the vulnerabilities before the bad guys do so we can close them before they're exploited. Hoarding vulnerabilities in secret is the exact oppo…

as is the way "hacker"'s meaning has changed from its original usage some times you have to accept that meanings change

Not at all, actually. Usage of words like "hacker" or "cyber", in the meaning ascribed by mass-media et.al., can be very useful to identify someone as "not an actual hacker". Jargon has been used this way for about as long as humanity exists.

I recall a story in which, a few years ago, a few emissaries from police agencies roamed the Chaos Communication Congress to recruit IT personnel. But they came in suits and thus immediately stood out of the crowd which was wearing nerdy T-shirts and hoodies, so no one liked to be seen with them.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#68

Post by pwdisswordfish »

strathmeyer wrote: post #20
Markoff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they don't provide anything, they use outdated software provided by volunteer, their content is managed by volunteers for free and pretty much only expenses they have to run Wikipedia are servers but they still have 300 people in payroll

It must be real tough to run a smear job here.

With HN being such an echo chamber, indeed it is.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#69

Post by nickpsecurity »

jacquesm wrote: post #39
Markoff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you mean making huge profits from donations? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

I have a hard time choosing what's the best thing to come out of the internet: WikiPedia or the Khan Academy. If you're so intent on smearing WikiPedia it would probably help you if you studied it for a bit before spouting off a bunch of nonsense in this thread. I get it: you don't like WikiPedia because they ask you for a donation. Note that you're under no obligation whatsoever to donate and that the content is you…

I agree on their impact but disagree on best ons: it's Google. They let people reliably get the content they needed. Later made great email system, cheap alternatives to Microsoft, a browser, and so on. If I need Wikipedia article, Google will put the right one on top plus other sources right below it.

Google is awesome.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

#70

Post by nickpsecurity »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #45
dom0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stasi was able to read all mail of targets (and they had many) fifty years ago. Practically all mail crossing the border was read, which again was a lot. I'd assume addresses are scraped anyway, since they are digitized for routing already, and targeted mail being opened without leaving marks (an art existing for hundreds of years).

I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to read mail while still sealed in an envelope. Wouldn't a sufficiently bright light and OCR be sufficient to read the average single page folded in thirds?

There was a spray that made them temporarily transparent a long time ago.
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