441–450 of 539 posts
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There was a person in Beijing that was arrested for a post on Twitter. Government surveillance was able to track him down in real life, which I think is deeply troubling
That's a post not a visit
Using styled components for the Reddit redesign and littering the DOM with nodes.
You monster. \s Why did reddit use such a shitty design, anyway? To maximize clicks / number of pages visited? old.reddit.com is the only sensible reddit interface, the mobile app sucks. Even the old m.reddit.com was pretty great..
Many of the people hired for the redesign didn’t seem to fully understand the magic that made Reddit successful in the first place, so there was a big disconnect that made itself manifest in what you now view as the new site.
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Yes, and in the case of technology, it is REALLY EASY to simply sell no technology to any authoritarian regime, for any purpose. There are dozens of academic and GNOs that track democracy, e.g., [0]. Just select a reasonable cutoff of some level of democracy, and don't sell to anyplace below that. That does require management and sales to have ethics. Some do. [0] https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking
You're assuming only authoritarian regimes are capable of doing bad things. You can have a perfectly democratic country without a sense of ethics when it comes to homeland security and/or espionage. So that line of thinking provides a false sense of virtue really.
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Yes, and in the case of technology, it is REALLY EASY to simply sell no technology to any authoritarian regime, for any purpose. There are dozens of academic and GNOs that track democracy, e.g., [0]. Just select a reasonable cutoff of some level of democracy, and don't sell to anyplace below that. That does require management and sales to have ethics. Some do. [0] https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking
You're assuming only authoritarian regimes are capable of doing bad things. You can have a perfectly democratic country without a sense of ethics when it comes to homeland security and/or espionage. So that line of thinking provides a false sense of virtue really.
But if you cannot tell the difference between how democratic countries vs autocratic regimes deploy security & espionage technology, you are deeply ignorant. I'd suggest you go live in Russia or Myanmar for a while and report back.
Of course there are instances of overreach in democracies. They typically get reported and corrected. In autocracies, they are systematically rewarded and encouraged.
Of course everyone would rather have no security & espionage technology, but that is entirely unrealistic. If you want to live a self-determined life in a democratically controlled state, you MUST always be better armed and prepared than every bully and authoritarian out there, or you will soon be ruled by them. Security & espionage is simply a part of being better armed & prepared than the authoritarians (and in a democratic state, you REALLY aren't of the slightest bit of interest to the agencies).
Those of you implementing DPI, assisting CCP with logging, cryptocurrency daredevils, tracking enablers and even a slave helmet guy. Do know that you have changed the world. For worse. And you'll never git amend or git revert what you've done. Most likely you will never find rest for what you've done as the confessions are very indicative.
Funny, how Hollywood different the notion of an evil computer guy in movies (asian/western european/nerd) to an average american family guy Mikey Mike doing all this real damage.
But, I bet all those mortgages ain't gonna pay themselves, right?
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The same thing that would be bad about using your phone GPS location sensors to automatically send you speeding tickets every time you wander >1mph over the limit. Even without intending to, everyone would go from a ticket or two per decade to dozens of tickets on every commute. "But the law is still the same!?!" Of course it is, but changing from poorly scalable human-required surveillance to always-on, fully-scaled…
One argument in favor of this is that it would pretty much force governments to set reasonable speed limits, rather than optimizing them to ensure that the police have an excuse to pull over almost anyone at any time.
It would always be entirely unworkable at anything resembling the current fine structure, with fines in the $100s for a single infraction. These are based on the assumption that people are rarely caught.
I could see a surveillance-based system working, something on the lines of a congestion toll. Maybe $0.02/mi/mph over the limit, so going 10mph over the limit for 20 miles would be a $4.00 charge. We'd also have to eliminate the bogus insurance surcharges which falsely equate speeding with unsafe driving (barring neighborhoods & construction zones, they can signify either an unsafe driver or a highly skilled driver).
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I was powerless to stop it. I was just a junior engineer, and it was decided by the CEO to do the project. So, actually, I feel I made the right choice -- I participated in the project but worked hard on making sure it was as limited as possible. I successfully advocated for several categories of logs to not be sent because they were not required by law. So, yes, I regret I couldn't do more, but I don't regret the ch…
> I was powerless to stop it. You could have found a new job, driving up their costs or delaying them slightly.
I worked in an Ad-tech start-up in Berlin run by two of the most evil f*kers I've ever encountered. I built out their principal ad auction algorithm and a lot of the back-end to support it, and all they did with it was target vulnerable groups of people at particular times of the week when they thought they were at their lowest ebb. One meeting in particular really stands out still, a social media giant that everyone…
This fintech didn't exploit them, but it was very obvious how this data could have been used to exploit them and other addicts.
When I was at Akamai about 5 years ago, I was involved in building the system for making their CDN compliant in China. There were two main features, and they were activated on all servers running inside mainland china (not HK, macau or Taiwan) 1. Logs of the CDN were sent in real time to the ministry of technology -- there was about a 15 minute delay if I remember correctly, and they could impose fines if they were d…
(It would make me more sorry. Sorry.)
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> Also, systems knowledge and critical thinking skills have brought me mostly anguish; it has made me cynical. […] I should have been a lawyer If software made you cynical and miserable I don’t think you’d have survived law.
At least I would probably have made a ton of money and would be made to feel important. Every minute of software development makes you feel like you're never good enough (the compiler keeps reminding you). Also, on the company side, you're always made to feel like a replaceable cog in a big machine, not to mention that salaries are generally limited and under constant threat of outsourcing... To rub salt into the wou…