351–360 of 495 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's a billionaire. The government defends his billions from being redistributed by angry dying people. He doesn't want potential revolutionaries to be able to communicate easily.
Isn't he very vocal about the fact that rich should be taxed heavily?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
Encryption was the enemy because it enabled lies.
The difference between Gates and LEO/Politicians? Gates lacks their dishonesty.
LEO & pols have a terribly long history of leveraging extreme behavior as justification for increasing LEO/Gov power+budgets, along with a corresponding loss of our civil liberties (which translates to increased Gov/LEO power).
re:9/11
All of us remember how tech + new gov powers + gobs of cash were necessary to stop the terrorists (practically in our borders and ready any second to unleash more devastating attacks).
Less remembered is how anti-terror Tech/Power/Cash is being used against low-level offenders (eg: Fusion Centers)
And sickeningly predictable, anti-terror tech is today being deployed against people who criticize cops (eg: protests)
Which is exactly what the history of LEO (Gov,etc) suggested was going to happen (eg: War On Drugs). That same history is now poking at us to realize that we can expect the same from War On Illegal Porn.
At least that's something we could learn, if learning from history is something we wanted to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he doesn't have to know that. There is a deep divide on that question; it only seems like there isn't because this particular bubble we're in is essentially unified on it. That's not true of the wider world.
I find it impossible to argue against encryption. People should have the tools to do things secretly. If you want to prevent all the bad things Bill talked about, attack those things, not the tools.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nick-bostrom-mass-surveillan...
IIRC the argument is basically that as tech progresses it will get easier and easier for any one person to destroy the planet. According to Bostrom the only way to prevent that is no secrets and ubiquitous surveillance.
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?
I use reduced to mean non universal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
$15mm probably isn’t enough to make big systemic changes to humanity and Oliver’s donation surely alleviated a lot of suffering and should be applauded. However, Gates has resources on a very different scale than $15mm.
Especially with billions to deploy to try to do some good in the world, it seems reasonable to me that someone would attempt a more ambitious plan that essentially tries to address the root cause of something rather than addressing symptoms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Here's the greater point no one is talking about. Reread Gates statements. Illegal porn was practically an aside tossed in at the last minute. His point was lies. Encryption was the enemy because it enabled lies. The difference between Gates and LEO/Politicians? Gates lacks their dishonesty. LEO & pols have a terribly long history of leveraging extreme behavior as justification for increasing LEO/Gov power+budgets, a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes, objectively the evidence I've seen supports that HCL and zinc, if given early enough, improve the outcome for the patient. The media, which is mostly left leaning, ignores this and instead prefers to take cheap shots at Trump whenever possible on the subject. It seems very biased, very childish, and entirely divorced from reality - actually that more or less sums up the state of US politics lately.
That debate has of course not been particularly honest: amplifying the weakest proponents, fabrication of negative data with the Surgisphere scandal [1] and fixating on studies which don't replicate the claimed beneficial outpatient (pre-hospitalization) treatment processes (low-dose HCL, zinc, azithromycin).
However none of that means HCL is actually effective, just that the public debate being prosecuted is quite weak when looked at carefully.
It could just be that once a mainstream position is established (which might be correct!) it becomes easier to engage in influencing to enforce or signal tribal commitment to the established consensus in place of continued honest debate.
I really don't want to hear about the cultural beliefs of the weakest advocates, or of studies which don't replicate the claimed treatment.
I want to see engagement with the strongest advocates, and studies which irrefutably rule out the specific treatment, and if they rule this out as just another alluring low-cost, ineffective treatment, then at least we've reached that point honestly.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/covid-19-studi...
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…
Perhaps you should take pause and reflect on the broader issue Gates is talking about. Social media is destroying our society in front of our eyes. Identifying how and why that is happening is something that matters too. The hardline techie position that all communications must be completely encrypted with obfuscated origins is a position whose consequences are not fully understood.
A quick, cheap, non-invasive test that is less accurate (in the direction of more false positives) would be far more effective than a more accurate but slow, expensive, and intrusive test.
But somehow every other developed country in the world has tests that are quick, cheap and accurate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is that sarcasm? Logging into sites w/ usernames/passwords is literally a thing people do many times a day. That's the opposite of off-beat.
>We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.
End to end encryption is primarily about transport encryption. Scanning for content on media servers strongly suggests you're talking about encryption at rest - a very different application than transport encryption.
Source: Day job.