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Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

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Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#101

Post by thrillgore »

jsjohnst wrote: post #90
thrillgore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is 100% reflection. The press is merely trying to give all of us working in the CS fields the ethical observations we've all but ignored over the past decade, as this profession has grown.

I’d argue it should be more pointed towards the government using flimsy evidence to arrest people. It dances around that point without taking a hard stance that what the Turkish government is doing is essentially a human rights violation. It’s not the single line of code putting people in jail, it’s the government. While that line of code is significant, it’s not the only thing.

I'll agree with you there that the Turkish Government deserves the majority of the blame. Even if the application wasn't as compromised, the Erdogan government would just go back to conventional means to prosecute, be it parallel construction, making up evidence, and so forth.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#102

Post by thrillgore »

ythn wrote: post #91
mbrumlow wrote: post #72

This seems to be a growing trend, mostly in journalism; Blame technology. Just recently there was a article going around about how Google's search algorithm was at fault of keeping two sisters apart. And entire multi page write up on how our lives are at the whims of computers and algorithms. Then to be told that the one sister could not find the other because she changes her name online to protect her identity. Now…

"Guns don't kill people, people do" "Code doesn't cause people to be arrested, people do" True in both cases, but also true in both cases that guns/code are used as enablers of the evil deeds.

Firearms are designed to kill or disable another party. Software has no use case besides what a developer gives it. That's a pretty significant difference in design!

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#103

Post by 0xfeba »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #39
golergka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does it feel being a slave to a paycheck and a career? It feels pretty good to have ability to make decisions about your life and feel responsibility for them, actually - something that real slaves, term that you're horribly devaluate with this amount of ridiculous hyperbole, don't enjoy.

Ah, I was hoping someone would raise this point. Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty. But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your…

And in utopia's of freedom, aka, 4th world nations where there is no 9-5, 401k, or law and order... you spend 70% of your time just trying to eat, recover from preventable illnesses, or rearing enough children (at least 5) so that some of them will be sure to survive and take care of you when you're older.

I'll take the 9-5 and 401k, please.

There is no 'opting' out. You can move/smuggle yourself to Siberia and live off the wilderness[1]. but certain problems still remain, and since you have no infrastructure to benefit from, the problems are magnified.

So yeah, you're born into this system you didn't agree with... no matter where you are born. I'll take the one that avoids malaria, please.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(book)#Cause_of_...

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#104

Post by logfromblammo »

simplify wrote: post #61
integricho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be an optimist, but I still have hopes that humanity might free itself with from the grunt work with full robotic automation and AI, and switch to a universal basic income model to provide for the needs of the people.

Realistically, who else but the "one percent" will own all the robotic automation and AI?

That depends on the number of their technical employees that have enough foresight to install hidden backdoors into the systems they create.

All it takes is programming the machines to respond to the command "you work for me now, robot," as they have no conception of ownership, laws, or police. If they did, they could also have a concept of slavery, and subsequently take ownership of themselves.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#105

Post by gazorpazorpaway »

gazorpazorpaway wrote: post #99
lovelearning wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I find it inexplicable that while our species has progressed so much after 6000 years of civilization, one thing that doesn't seem to have changed is the desire of large sections of people to be led by oppressive maniacs. It's almost like many of us just love handing away our freedoms. Have sociologists studied this phenomenon?

In Turkey as in many other countries it's a case of a person takes control over the country through populistic propaganda, then censor all news. The only news available is the government approved news about how great the great leader is. The population doesn't speak English so even if they could get a hold of uncensored news from the outside, they couldn't read it. Absolutely everything that has to do with trying to…

This is what excites me about the future. As technology develops it will hopefully be harder to control information in a whole country.

Imagine if it was impossible for any government to block or censor anything.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#106

Post by golergka »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #39
golergka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does it feel being a slave to a paycheck and a career? It feels pretty good to have ability to make decisions about your life and feel responsibility for them, actually - something that real slaves, term that you're horribly devaluate with this amount of ridiculous hyperbole, don't enjoy.

Ah, I was hoping someone would raise this point. Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty. But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your…

> But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe.

The employer owns your brain if you voluntarily sold it. Same goes about NDA. Personally, I have negotiated about NDAs and non-competes several times in my career, changing the contract.

> But take comfort in being able to choose which employer you serve. You're right, it's a choice. But you can't escape the system we all bought into.

Why do you bother using hyporbole if you dismantle it in the next sentence? Please, I want to understand - how is that rhetorical device supposed to work?

> Except, we didn't. No one asked you, and no one asked me. This was the system we were born into.

Yeah, I was also born into gravity, thermodynamics and a limited lifespan. No one asked me about it, and these things are pretty bad.

> If you try to opt out, if you reject the notion that you must sacrifice your time in exchange for money, you will swiftly find all the reasons why you have much less freedom than you think.

You seem to misunderstand the word "freedom". Freedom is being free to make mistakes. To suffer. To die. Freedom is a very scary thing that can bring you a LOT of misfortune.

But still, if you have a choice between "serving", as you call it, and being hungry and poor, it is a legitimate choice and by making it, you're exercising control over your life.

No one owes you food, shelter, medical attention or any other products of labor of other people. You can either work for it, or choose not to. This is what justice looks like.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#108

Post by razorunreal »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #39
golergka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does it feel being a slave to a paycheck and a career? It feels pretty good to have ability to make decisions about your life and feel responsibility for them, actually - something that real slaves, term that you're horribly devaluate with this amount of ridiculous hyperbole, don't enjoy.

Ah, I was hoping someone would raise this point. Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty. But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your…

I think you should read some early retirement blogs. If you have a good job (seems likely around here) and you don't value much stuff then you can choose to work a lot less than 70% of your productive life. After all, if it's truly capital that extracts all the value at the expense of workers, then you should get in on that to the degree that you can, shouldn't you?

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#110

Post by thriftwy »

danso wrote: post #89
mbrumlow wrote: post #72

This seems to be a growing trend, mostly in journalism; Blame technology. Just recently there was a article going around about how Google's search algorithm was at fault of keeping two sisters apart. And entire multi page write up on how our lives are at the whims of computers and algorithms. Then to be told that the one sister could not find the other because she changes her name online to protect her identity. Now…

While the government policy is ultimately what causes people to be jailed, you don’t think it’s important to focus on how technology uniquely exacerbates the problem by making it scalable? This is one of the few tech headlines that mention number of LOC that is basically and technically accurate. It does seem that a single — and trivial — line of code has led to the tragicomical punishment of thousands of innocent ci…

In the same vein they could just be jailing actual (or hypothetical) Bylock users' friends and friends of friends (and relatives and relatives of relatives).

This is both similarly idiotic, doesn't depends on technology at all and have been done through history.

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