311–320 of 327 posts
Someone (Eric Schmidt? not sure) once said, "If you really want something to be private, don't put it on a computer." Still the best advice. Rather than storing it and then worrying about where it goes, just don't store it.
Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream. Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data coll…
Anyone who tries to do effective privacy regulation at the political level will be condemned as enabling crime, by the very same people that say they're very angry about their liberties being eroded and willing to shoot people over it.
I remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care. R…
On some days I believe the molten veins of liberty in the US have cooled and solidified—structurally succumb to the great machine—bound by economic needs and principles. It’s not about we the people anymore. We won’t see any real change; corruption has seeped in and taken hold. Right now, if there’s money to be made, it’s legal. (Except if it involves giving women power, so sex work remains taboo and OnlyFans is unde…
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These newfangled beamforming systems can alter the direction of transmission to optimize signal quality for your phone. How can they do that if the system cannot locate a handset with great accuracy?
I have no idea about what information the (5G?) beamforming protocols use; perhaps they have figured out a way for some "angle discovery" as part of the protocol handshake or perhaps they just require the device send GPS data for that adjustment (and in the absence of that data would just skip beamforming, getting worse rates); but the distance information for the 4G/LTE timing system would be an inherent part of the…
”To correctly form a beam, the transmitter needs to understand the characteristics of the channel. This process is called channel sounding or channel estimation. A known signal is sent to the mobile device that enables it to build a picture of the channel environment. The mobile device sends back the channel characteristics to the transmitter. The transmitter can then apply the correct phase and amplitude adjustments to form a beam directed at the mobile device. This is called a closed-loop MIMO system.”
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You couldn’t use CBP’s travel history page? https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search
I've used this in the past but currently it's showing no records for all my 3 passports.
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That's really interesting, I feel like I've experienced the opposite, most people I know have had some kind of interaction with the "hand of government" in some way, if not themselves then second hand. At least in the US with our incarceration rates, statistically it's still more likely that any given person knows someone who is in prison than knowing someone who has died from COVID-19. And COVID-19 has killed a lot…
>the will of the people There is no unified 'will of the people.' I would agree that, in many cases, governments were criminalizing behavior which communities had already curtailed, so to that extent they were following wills of many people. In this case, why not let those same people who chose the actions take the blame or appreciation for their actions, rather than saying it was government? I've moved about a decen…
I don't think this is a useful thing to say, it seems to suggest that a given group of people can't reach consensus, when this is not really the case.
>Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so [...] and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans
In my opinion that illustrates why I think any kind of reactions to this are a bit odd. It's very hard to enforce a mask mandate in every possible area in a jurisdiction. So the strategy has to be done by tackling big targets (enforcing the mandates only in densely populated areas, empowering private businesses/organizations to kick people out who endanger other people's safety, stopping people from mass spreading misinformation on social media, etc).
What I've seen is that people who were discreetly throwing parties and were being cautious about the virus didn't have any problems. But it's still risky and they still face penalties if they get get caught, because of course once someone causes a super-spreader event and people end up in the hospital, then it can easily be traced back there, and that's where I'd expect those people to be held liable. So in that sense, yeah you could say they could take blame for their actions after the fact, but that doesn't really help much either if it caused a large number of other people to get sick. We could very directly trace that back to deliberate actions taken by someone knowing full well that it could harm others.
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HN is pretty out of touch I think. When I talk to non HN crowd. * Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded * Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). It would be interesting to look at other count…
> * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). This is because those laws rarely have teeth at all. I don't want "ACCEPT BUTTON FOR MARKETING PERMISSION", I want all remarketing and persistent cross site tracking to be illegal. Period.
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No, I get your point. Your point is a red herring. You're arguing that "Because law is arbitrary, police powers should be restricted." That's not a valid argument. You don't get to pick and choose law. You either get the whole package, or nothing. Police powers are completely orthogonal to this question. The reason they are restricted by law is not so that law is more difficult to enforce. The barristers that have dr…
>You're arguing that "Because law is arbitrary, police powers should be restricted." No. I'm arguing that because laws can be arbitrary, we should err on the side of protecting criminals when difficult decisions around privacy are at play. I don't know why you insist on strawmanning absurd forms of what I am saying.
I'm probably 'strawmanning' it because your argument is utterly incomprehensible, given that it is entirely inconsistent with the purpose of the law.
The purpose of the law is not to protect the guilty from the legal consequences of things that they have done. You seem to think that it should be. This is utterly baffling. If you don't want people held accountable for crime, then strike those crimes from the criminal codex.
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That doesn't make any sense. There are so many government laws and regulations that affect our day-to-day lives, it would be impossible to list them all. You have to get a driver's license to drive a car and wear a seat belt while you're driving it, you can't drive if you've been drinking alcohol, you can't buy alcohol unless you're 21 and you can't do it between the hours of 12am and 8am or on Sundays, you must vacc…
Yes, but these are all regulations already established. Most people were born into the world where they were already in place, and over their lifes to date, there were only altered in a minor way - a speed limit change here, a new mandatory vaccine there. Some classes of people, like business owners, may have experienced more pronounced regulatory churn - but it still feels mostly like tweaking stuff here and there.…
* Seat belt laws
* Can't smoke in bars and restaurants
* Can't smoke within 50 feet of a door
* Unaccompanied children at a park being considered neglect
* Illegal to use a mobile phone while driving
* Mandatory emissions checks to register a car
* Legal mandates for chicken pox vaccine
* Taking your shoes off and going through a body scanner to get on an airplane
* Time of day/time of week restrictions on alcohol sale (existed when I was born, but not where I lived, so new to me when I moved to Texas)
* Restrictions on how much sudafed you can buy
* Restrictions on filling out of state prescriptions forcing me to pick up and mail medication to my wife when she was traveling
* Real ID laws forcing me to make an appointment 9 months in advance and show up with what felt like 18 different types of proof I lived where I said I did in order to be able to vote
* The State of Texas apparently just passed a law saying my block of 6 townhomes now needs to keep minutes and retain paper records and send all communications to each other via registered mail even though we live 20 feet from each other
* I guess it's now illegal to get an abortion here?
Granted, none of these ever happened all at once in response to an emergency. I guess your friends are just lucky to have never lived in a place that experienced an emergency before this? Living through the LA riots wasn't all that pleasant, either. Anyone who has ever lived through a hurricane has not only been told they have to close their business, but they have to abandon their homes completely and leave the city without any guarantee they'll ever be able to return.
Sure, a national level emergency hasn't happened since the 1940s, and almost nobody alive today experienced that, but it is weird to see the divergence in response. As far as I know, shared sacrifice and repurposing of private goods to public purposes in the 1940s had the exact opposite effect. Especially since the measures were far more drastic. We didn't confiscate property and force Chinese Americans into internment camps this time around.
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That $17k would've either been rejected as ad fraud in the best case, and just ended up funding the companies you hate at worst.
That's assuming they can dis-aggregate my traffic at the F5 gateway well enough[0], otherwise they're just saying all traffic out of that rack in Dallas, TX is invalid. A personal web browser clicking ads on pages i visit doesn't feel very fraudulent. [0] google routinely can't, and i stopped using search because it made me do photo captchas every time . If google can't, i'm guessing other people are going to have le…