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Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

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Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#311

Post by therealdrag0 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #306
therealdrag0 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? I hadn’t until I listened to this podcast with NYT investigative journalist. Worth considering how serious the trade offs are https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/

>Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? What does that have to do with encryption? Also, sidebar: Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet". Together they're responsible…

Sidebar: I don’t understand your flippancy. There literally are children to think about. Is your privacy really more important that children being raped? So yes “for the children”.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#312

Post by whynotminot »

sukilot wrote: post #228
mdoms wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates is a public health expert. He has been working on these problems with some of the smartest minds in the field for decades now. How long does someone need to be working on a problem before they're worthy of being a "go to source", in your opinion?

Why do we want to hear from Fauci instead of Trump? Why get information thirdhand from the money guy?

I mean but you can take this even further using your logic: Why even listen to Dr. Fauci, then? Is Fauci at Moderna right now actually making the vaccine? Get me the lab tech running the tests and I'll settle for nothing less!

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#313

Post by api »

imagiko wrote: post #251
jlokier wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an interesting idea! Several commenters point out end-to-end encryption would prevent filtering or tagging messages. But that's not true. The message analysis could be done at either endpoint without violating privacy. Tagging (or removing) a message before you send/forward it, or after you receive it, with "the central message of this comment has been tagged as "probably a hoax" by hoaxtracker.com; check out th…

Whoa wait what..is it really E2E if they can analyse the content before putting it through their network?

Analysis happens on either end, not the network or servers. Of course if both ends are "cracked" this doesn't work, but the goal is to stop mass spread of disinformation. Most people won't modify their client.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#314

Post by justsee »

dpweb wrote: post #279
tptacek wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's frustrating about this question is that it (inevitably!) commands the top of the HN thread with a discussion of the least interesting thing in the article. It's an article about COVID and Facebook, and here we're recapitulating the end-to-end encryption debate for the 8-zillionth time.

Was puzzled by Gates' statement there. I didn't catch how the 'demon sperm doctors' video was related to encryption. Rather the very difficult and important issue, how do you stop someone with 80 million followers from spreading lies and large numbers of people believing them, and who determines what are facts and what are lies. By Facebook, Twitter, etc.. removing Trump's posts for instance, aren't they taking upon…

It was disappointing to see that segue from Gates.

Consider that the pile-on of that doctor - an African from Cameroon where Christianity is blended with traditional tribal superstition - happened around the same time as the Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health published a Newsweek piece on how HCL is a valid early-stage treatment [1].

I understand this is how the media works: an advocate of HCL who has fringe cultural beliefs was retweeted by Trump, so the story was irresistible and endlessly amplified (including here by Gates).

But the quality of debate would be so much better if the media engaged with the (superficially) strongest proponents of a position (such as Harvey Risch) and aimed withering criticism and analysis at them instead. Shouldn't the focus be on dismantling the claims of the most, not the least, credentialed proponents?

Instead the media from all quarters deliberately amplifies the most fringe proponents, so now HCL is shorthand for expressing disdain for particular cultural beliefs, and those 10 million views were significantly driven by most media outlets covering her.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exis...

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#315

Post by taberiand »

thingymajig wrote: post #274
ani-ani wrote: post #93

He is easily one of the least bullshit-y sources when it comes to handling of COVID. But then there's this right in the middle of the interview: " And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger] ". Quite literally, encrypted comm…

If you want to completely eradicate crime one way to do it would be to completely eradicate privacy. Would you sacrifice your privacy if it could eliminate child pornography? The theory is hard to say no to, but in practice that kind of power has never worked out. If we want to retain privacy we have to accept some amount of crime going unnoticed.

Such a premise begs the question that those given the power would sincerely use it to shutdown child exploitation and other crime.

It seems to me that there are many instances where child exploitation is ignored when it is politically convenient such that giving up our privacy wouldn't be of benefit to society, and would be largely to our detriment.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#316

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #308
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? What does that have to do with encryption? Also, sidebar: Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet". Together they're responsible…

> what does that have to do with Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.

> Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.

No more a trade off than the existence of the internet or computers - which are wholly implicated in encouraging a far worse behavior than the transport of illegal porn. They facilitate it's creation. In this, we have an even more serious trade off.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#317

Post by claudeganon »

sukilot wrote: post #250
MrDresden wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess for the general U.S audience having a well known figure, who has been active in the public health space for some years now through his foundations, speaking as an authority on the ongoing crisis makes sense, giving the lack of ongoing leadership in that country. However for someone living in a western European country it would not be received very well if a business person, even one with such a big philanthro…

EU has their unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. US has their unelected oligarchs in Seattle Palo Alto, and New York.

I’m not fond of either, but in comparing responses to the pandemic, the European bureaucrats seem to be outcompeting the American oligarchs.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#318

Post by bryan_w »

popnroll wrote: post #139

I think Gates is right. What is the problem with the government controlling communication? There are clear advantages, like handling illegal things. What are the disadvantages, the nude photo of your ex-girlfriend being analyzed by a machine?

Consider Russia (or the middle east) where it's still Not ok to be gay. Encryption helps you text your significant other without being thrown in jail or sent to a reeducation camp.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#319

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #311
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? What does that have to do with encryption? Also, sidebar: Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet". Together they're responsible…

Sidebar: I don’t understand your flippancy. There literally are children to think about. Is your privacy really more important that children being raped? So yes “for the children”.

Usernames and passwords are just one "privacy" related item that are transported over networks. Without encryption they are trivially easy to retrieve from any number of points along the network.

I've retrieved plaintext usernames/passwords out of network traffic, both intentionally and accidentally as part of larger captures. Encryption ends the ability of countless bad actors to do that.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#320

Post by boomboomsubban »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #309
throwawaythekey wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally enjoy Sam but found that episode was voiced more by his inner parent than his usual hyper-rational self. Child porn is a scourge that should be destroyed but there was minimal discussion of the following that I would normally expect from Sam: - Relative merits of the alternatives to the banning/reduction of e2e encryption, e.g stronger police resources, education and community programs - Is there a strong…

Curious what does “reducing of e2e” refer to? What does reduction without elimination look like?

Presumably like historical encryption, available to the government and the super wealthy. That was what they were attpting when they tried to classify PGP as munitions.
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