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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

#321

Post by tfehring »

eloff wrote: post #33
ethbro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the result have been if, in late February, the US government had said "Everyone should use a mask"?

How about just tell the truth. Masks work, but we have shortage of PPE for our frontline medical workers, so please do not buy PPE. I think people can handle the truth. When you lie, you might temporarily achieve your objective, but you're sacrificing your ability to achieve any of your objectives in the future. Now I don't trust the WHO because of this, and I'll be less inclined to take them seriously.

> I think people can handle the truth.

I disagree. Look what happened when to toilet paper, which was less scarce and less important than PPE.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#322

Post by Minor49er »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #220
EarthIsHome wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not call it "giving away money." This is what giving away money is and what really makes a difference in people's lives: John Oliver buys and forgives $15m worth of medical debt [0]. Now, just imagine what a billionaire like Bill Gates could do. Actual material change in people's lives. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/06/john-oliver-...

Nonsense, it’s almost like you’ve never heard the “give a man a fish, teach a man to fish” parable. Yes, he can pay off debt of we’ll say 1M Americans. Then he’s out of money and people are still getting sick. Now what?

So John Oliver's $15 million donation was worthless because people still get sick?

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#323

Post by therealdrag0 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #316
therealdrag0 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean it was created before internet/computers but sure. I don’t see your point though as we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet... Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped. If currently reported counts from automation in the US are in the order of magnitude of 100 million (I forget exact numbers, but it was near this) from a small number of companies, there’s just no way to combat that manually with “good old fashioned police work” and I don’t know of other options besides those two..

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#324

Post by therealdrag0 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #319
therealdrag0 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such an off beat example, I don’t really understand what you’re getting at. We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#325

Post by sxxahsuxh »

tptacek wrote: post #207
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…

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.

Bill Gates said something stupid and people are talking about it. His phrasing is what I expect an old person who doesn't have decades of industry pioneering experience in technology to say. So weird.

Point is, who cares what else he has to say if he says stuff like this? He's as much an expert on technology as he is on pathology, so if his opinions on technology are bad... well you get the point.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#326

Post by yeswecatan »

dr_ wrote: post #5

He points out that a standard nasal swab test is as accurate as a nasopharyngeal (deep) swab. This is readily available from labcorp, can be done at home, and the results are reasonably quick, within 48 hrs. It’s covered by insurance and includes overnight fedex shipping.

In this article? I didn't see that mentioned. Do _all_ insurances cover this?

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#327

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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?

E2E refers to end to end. I imagine he means encryption in transport as opposed to encryption at rest.

HTTPS is transport encryption. It's what keeps your bank account info from being intercepted in a usable state.

Reduction w/o elimination means weakening encryption. The advantage is that it can be easily broken by those who want to see what's inside.

His proposal would allow me (or countless bad actors) to decrypt data captures containing secure traffic, like your bank login. Strong encryption is the minimal method for preventing that.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#328

Post by codebolt »

asalahli wrote: post #90
codebolt wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not, he's become a highly controversial figure for a large fraction of the population, particularly within the societies that his foundation works. In my opinion, they'd do good to pick a figure whose name is less tarnished if they want the message to be more broadly accepted.

That's an interesting claim. Pretty much every piece of negative opinion of Gates I've seen have either been 1. About his work at Microsoft 2. Or some conspiracy theory about world domination, population control etc I'd be interested to read more on how societies he's directly worked with think of him, if you have any links

I think his biggest mistake is that he's focused so much on two issues that make it easy to paint him in a negative light. If I was a native Nigerian and some rich white guy started building abortion centres and injecting people with needles all over my country it would be easy to become skeptical.

If I were in his shoes I'd focus more on issues like education, improving basic utilities in urban areas, fighting corruption and enabling economies to expand.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#329

Post by frosted-flakes »

refurb wrote: post #239
paxys wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why interview the CEO of a company and not engineers building the product?

Depends on the questions I guess? I’ve heard my own CEO try explain something technical and it’s clear they don’t really understand it (and why should they? That’s why they hired experts). In this article Bill says “most of the Covid tests are garbage”. That seems like a technical statement that should come from someone who is an expert in testing. If the question was “what do you think the most promising Covid treat…

He's saying most of the American tests are garbage because the results are so delayed. It doesn't take a genius to explain that.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#330

Post by [deleted] »

kebman wrote: post #280
sukilot wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 how?

Well, for starters (given two-way communication) you can ask them for the sources of their claims, or at least demand that they defend the logic behind it. Then you can take it from there, and unravel the fallacies for them. Or if you want to be more polite, then carefully point the fallacies out for them and ask what they think about it themselves, when looking more closely at it. This would be the pedagogic approac…

[deleted]
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