Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#471

Post by blaser-waffle » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #406

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.

@tptacek This is one of the reasons for which I proposed that HN, by default, display discussions collapsed down to first branches. Just show the text for the first branches and collapse their corresponding conversations. Readers would only expand branches they find relevant or interesting and comment within them. You could take this one step further and only show the first two lines (or n characters) of first branch…

I've set up a similar approach with 3rd party apps on reddit.

Give me top threads and a level below them to see a rebuttal -- if I want to see more I'll break them down.

I do wish there was a way to see if there are high value or low value posts below, like someone got gilded or got 400 upvotes or something. Not sure how this would be implemented though; I could see terrible pun threads getting too many upvotes and throwing that off.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#472

Post by blaser-waffle » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #370

pcmaffey wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cancel culture is #2.

Cancel culture probably should be #2, it's debatable if it even scratches the surface of achieving #2. It seems cancel culture is not interested in people being dishonest, or spreading misinformation intentionally and maliciously, it's more concerned with enforcing new social mores against dredged up old statements/actions. That could be a good thing, in and of itself, but it doesn't help solve the spread of misinfor…

> That could be a good thing, in and of itself, but it doesn't help solve the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

At this point it's been weaponized, and has about as much in common with actual justice as it does with a 1984-style "2 minutes of hate".

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#473

Post by jkestner » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

evan_ wrote: post #379

jkestner wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vocal, as in he did the usual billionaire dissembling about how Warren's wealth tax would take 90% of his fortune and kill innovation. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elizabeth-warren-would-love-to-...

and of course 10% of his fortune is still more than all the money made in the lifetime of every person Who will read this combined

And Warren's actual proposed rate, 3% for everything over $1 billion, is outpaced by the 11% annual rate of return for the S&P 500 over the last 30 years. A wealth tax would just slow down how fast the rich get richer.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#474

Post by versteegen » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

tasogare wrote: post #407

jillesvangurp wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he's not just randomly throwing money around and has a well earned reputation for getting a decent return on his investments: he tends to spend money on things that work. So given that he's actively spending money and getting results, his perspective on what things need to be invested in and why is very interesting. There are plenty of rich philanthropists but very few with Gates's level of understanding and…

> he tends to spend money on things that work Like on WHO? The organization that lied for months about the potentiality of the covid to become a pandemic and that is excluding on political ground the country that handle best the virus (Taiwan). By still sponsoring this China’s lying organization, Bill Gates lost credibility in my eyes.

You seem to be misremembering WHO's reluctance to declare that the pandemic had reached the criteria to be called a "pandemic" (due to having been accused of being too hasty last time) as something... entirely else.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#475

Post by user9909 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #208

reillyse wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he is saying that encrypted communication should be illegal. He's saying that spreading lies through encrypted channels should be stopped. It would not be hard for WhatsApp to prevent people from spreading bogus videos, because they have access to the unencrypted information before and after sending. So either preventing people from sharing misinformation or preventing people from reading the misinforma…

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…

This is a major privacy violation. Who would willingly install malware that censored their posts? I've never seen a generation beg for LESS rights.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#476

Post by user9909 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

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.

We need to ban encryption and the internet. The founders had no idea of the threats to the world that these would cause, the Internet must be nullified to protect the kids.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#477

Post by jlokier » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #439

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…

> But that's not true. The message analysis could be done at either endpoint without violating privacy. This is stupid. Lots of naked baby photos get sent in my culture (Eastern-European country) in a most non-harmful way, i.e. from parents to the kids' grand-parents or even to the parents' close friends (especially from the mother to her friends). Your supposed filter will most probably block that social-sharing pro…

> This is stupid.

Truth is truth. Saying something is possible isn't the same as advocating that it be done, and it's useful to point out something is possible when people at first seem to think it is not.

Also, I was talking about messages, not baby photos, and with regard to misleading or false information, hoaxes etc that cause people to behave more dangerously to others during a pandemic. Saving lives, that sort of thing.

If it's giving the user advice that others have judged what they are retweeting to be a hoax or bad medical advice, that's not blocking, it's providing context. If they don't like it, they should be able to dial it down.

With regard to baby photos, if a network starts blocking those due to poor filtering, I would hope people switch over to another network that lets them share the photos.

> Your supposed filter will most probably block

I wasn't talking about filtering particularly, the emphasis was on providing a note to the user. Much like when Twitter attached a note to Trump's tweets.

In any case, the analysis I had in mind is not "skin tone filters" and that sort of nonsense. It's not meant to be thought police, working for someone else. It's meant to advise the users themselves to think again about some content. At least at the currently level of sophistication, that would be "we recognise this particular message or photo".

There are better and worse ways to implement it of course.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#478

Post by akshaybhalotia » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

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…

Just to make it clear, this seems very much like Gates to me as an Indian. He has bank rolled several very problematic studies in India in collusion with the fascist (at least super right wing) government, including the very controversial biometric national ID (AADHAAR) project. They were quite literally holding newborns hostages[1].

[1]: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhopal/mps-largest-...

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#479

Post by jlokier » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

user9909 wrote: post #475

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…

This is a major privacy violation. Who would willingly install malware that censored their posts? I've never seen a generation beg for LESS rights.

Something that reveals no information to others is not a privacy violation by definition.

(Although, something that blocks communication (which I don't think I agree with anyway) based on local analysis is an autonomy violation. But not a privacy violation.)

Something that tells you when you've just received a well documented hoax is not malware, it's probably useful, and most people will probably keep it switched on if the quality is consistently good.

By your logic, spam filtering (outgoing and incoming) is also malware, and a privacy violation. (Even though it protects people against malware, and indirectly protects privacy.)

Do you believe spam filtering is bad? I doubt it.

Yes, people ask for certain kinds of anlysis based message blocking all the time. We begged and pleaded for better spam filtering 20 years ago because the vast majority of messages were pure spam and it had made email difficult to use. It's a major reason people switched to Gmail, because other providers' spam filters weren't good enough.

I think the key feature most people would want in any kind of alerting, tagging or filtering is that it does what they want, rather than what the enemy wants, as it were. As people's preferences differ, that can only happen if it's configurable by them rather than blanket imposed. Things like ad blockers work this way - you can change the defaults if you want - and people seem to like those.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#480

Post by benlivengood » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #208

reillyse wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he is saying that encrypted communication should be illegal. He's saying that spreading lies through encrypted channels should be stopped. It would not be hard for WhatsApp to prevent people from spreading bogus videos, because they have access to the unencrypted information before and after sending. So either preventing people from sharing misinformation or preventing people from reading the misinforma…

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…

The problem is that spammers/shills would have full access to local filters and could tweak their messages to trivially bypass them.