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

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#481

Post by imagiko » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #468

imagiko wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, obviously not. The mental gymnastics involved here are impressive: the point of E2E encryption is to stop the service provider seeing or tampering with your messages. If they do that anyway it doesn't really matter how it's implemented. They could also just use a broken random number generator, or many other ways to implement the policies whilst still having encryption code in the product. It's the end result tha…

Phew, agreed. I mean of course the company "can" read the message. If it does, I would love to see that shown by the app upfront, so I can avoid using it.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#482

Post by thingymajig » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

kabacha wrote: post #303

thingymajig wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You somehow imply that it's impossible to get rid of crime without getting rid of privacy which is an absurd claim. Finally if you take a look at pure math - most of worlds suffering, evil and death is inflicted by world's governments. You'd put your trust in that over individuals?

I won't just imply it, I'll say it too: It's impossible to stop ALL crime while also retaining privacy.

I also said in my (very short) comment that such an extreme level of power never works out in practice. So we need to accept that as long as privacy exists, some amount of crime will. We can't eliminate privacy without giving someone too much power.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#483

Post by dionidium » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 8:25 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…

> What motivates a statement like this?

The simple explanation is that there exist people who in good faith disagree with you about encryption.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#484

Post by RabbitmqGuy » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

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.

This.

Something I've wished for; hacker news only with top level comments

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#485

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #373

eanzenberg wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates is scared people are passing bad information through encrypted platforms such as whatsapp. Next, he will require 24/7 monitoring of every private citizen to make sure we don’t call him mean names.

I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.

That doesn't mean there's no E2E encryption. WhatsApp can take the text of your conversations and also send plaintext to Facebook for ad targeting, while the actual conversation to the other person is still E2E encrypted. Or do "local" analytics on the phone to find keywords for ad targeting. Etc.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#486

Post by Minor49er » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

conro1108 wrote: post #355

Minor49er wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t think that’s the point anyone’s trying to make. $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 pl…

You're missing my point. EarthIsHome is arguing that someone with that amount of money could give it directly to people in need, which would do the most good for those people right now. bluedevil2k is arguing that it's better to fund research that might help a potentially greater number of people who would need it at some point in the future. bluedevil2k noted that even if Bill Gates helped a million people today, it would be futile because sickness would still exist. The dismissal implies that regardless of how many people's suffering could be alleviated today, it's still preferable to invest in future research. My comment is meant to underline that point. I want to see if there's a point of compromise between these standpoints.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#487

Post by olivermarks » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

sukilot wrote: post #247

BeatLeJuce wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I despise MS od the 90s and their business tactics? Sure. But wether he pays taxes on his philanthropic endeavors doesn't really matter, what matters is that they exist and do some good in the world -- and certainly, spending money on health care is good in my book. So what makes him a "dark character" in your eyes?

Instead of donating to existing public health (and education) organizations, OS programmer Gates created his own so that his personal biases wouldn't be challenged.

@BeatLeJuce You don't have to go very far online to find the answers to you question. James Corbett has amassed a formidable array of facts and history, for example.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#488

Post by philliphaydon » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 12:14 AM UTC

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #485

philliphaydon wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.

That doesn't mean there's no E2E encryption. WhatsApp can take the text of your conversations and also send plaintext to Facebook for ad targeting, while the actual conversation to the other person is still E2E encrypted. Or do "local" analytics on the phone to find keywords for ad targeting. Etc.

So literally defeating the purpose of e2e encryption where the conversations are between me and the other person. Not parsed prior for advertising. In any case people should avoid WhatsApp as it’s clearly less secure now that Facebook owns it.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#489

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 1:52 AM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #488

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean there's no E2E encryption. WhatsApp can take the text of your conversations and also send plaintext to Facebook for ad targeting, while the actual conversation to the other person is still E2E encrypted. Or do "local" analytics on the phone to find keywords for ad targeting. Etc.

So literally defeating the purpose of e2e encryption where the conversations are between me and the other person. Not parsed prior for advertising. In any case people should avoid WhatsApp as it’s clearly less secure now that Facebook owns it.

Certainly! Just that with a closed-source endpoint the use (or not) of E2EE is meaningless.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#490

Post by freddie_mercury » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:12 AM UTC

waihtis wrote: post #408

freddie_mercury wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is as much of an echo chamber as any other internet forum. 90% of the time you can predict in advance what the top-voted comment is going to be. Most of the time it will be some pointless quibbling about how the subject line technically isn't correct somehow. The rest of the time it'll be about one of the three or four hobby horses of HN. "I don't use social media", "WFH has no flaws", "whiteboard interviews are w…

Any community will have an echo chamber, that's part of the basic human fabric. It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)

> It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)

I think is generally good. I wouldn't call it "great". I can only assume that people who think it is great only ever care about tech (where HN is a good tech site) and politics (where every politics discussion on the internet is terrible). Every other interest I have has a forum that is better than HN. HN suffers somewhat from its demographic monoculture and seems to have way more opinionated arm-chair quarterbacks than other forums I'm in. I assume that many other "career-related" forums have similar issues, though. I can imagine lawyer forum probably has lots of lawyers who have never practiced Constitutional law but giving strong opinions on it on a daily basis.