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HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

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Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#161

Post by mjn »

tptacek wrote: post #114
deveac wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. The opposite is true. For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The…

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

> And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.

This has been disappointing, not because I expect everyone to be lawyer, but because I expect HN commenters to be able to use an internet search engine. It'd be one thing to miss details that you need years of training to understand correctly, but a huge proportion of the comments in these threads strongly suggest that the person posting them has not spent even five minutes researching the subject they're posting on, and yet has somehow arrived at strong opinions on the subject anyway.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#162

Post by tptacek »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #154
dylangs1030 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you that all of those things are ridiculous (and I was vocal in arguing against them), is it fair to characterize the entire forum as being so easily swayed by ant-state sentiments? During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For eve…

> For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, ... If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns. Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 p…

Politics on HN, Exhibit A for the prosecution.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#163

Post by psuter »

How much of this would be solved by personalizing the ranking of stories?

This is certainly a departure from the current model, and the mere notion of front page could be fatally affected, but, after all and just to name two, Amazon and Spotify are pretty good at anticipating my taste. Simply correlating voting patterns with other users and weighting their upvotes more, for instance, could go a long way towards a site where everyone sees more of what they like.

There are also certainly arguments to be made against such an approach ("filter bubble" etc.). If a strong case has been made before, I'd be curious to read it.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#164

Post by tptacek »

mjn wrote: post #161
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

> And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole. This has been disappointing, not because I expect everyone to be lawyer, but because I expect HN commenters to be able to use an internet search engine. It'd be one thing to miss details that you need years of training to understand correctly, but a huge proportion of the comments in these threads strongly suggest that the person posting them…

Yes! It's like reading and tracking down sources is a kind of superpower here; sometimes, it feels like threads treat that as a kind of unfair advantage. In fact, if pressed, I could cite examples of commenters on threads asserting that.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#165

Post by Terretta »

tptacek wrote: post #114
deveac wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. The opposite is true. For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The…

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

The site has been equally embarrassingly bad about taking certain claims at face value, like, "no direct access to the servers", when it is painfully clear to anyone running a colo how NSA PowerPoints could talk about data direct from BigCom servers at the same time as BigCom denies giving direct access to its servers, with both 100% "technically true."

What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief based discussion, and a bit more analysis: we have these two claims, assuming both parties are self interested, could both be true, and if so, how.

I see "of course Google is/isn't giving server logins" but I don't see as much "here are ways a third party could get data directly from servers, for these various definitions and implementations of 'directly'."

That stuff does get said here more than other places I'm reading, but still clearly not enough as I haven't yet seen that kind of analysis get noticed and picked up by the reporters increasingly sourcing their tech digests from here.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#166

Post by [deleted] »

deveac wrote: post #121
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

>In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Poor analysis by some of the users (there are a lot of non-technical commenters on here) doesn't negate the higher degree of technical discussion that has indeed been present here. Just because opinion and fallacious arguments are present doesn't mean that good technical…

[deleted]

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#167

Post by tptacek »

Terretta wrote: post #165
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

The site has been equally embarrassingly bad about taking certain claims at face value, like, "no direct access to the servers", when it is painfully clear to anyone running a colo how NSA PowerPoints could talk about data direct from BigCom servers at the same time as BigCom denies giving direct access to its servers, with both 100% "technically true." What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief base…

This comment neatly characterizes the kinds of discussions we have on this issue; it starts with innuendo about how the NSA could have what any reasonable person would refer to as direct access to servers, then retreats to a broad, abstract position crafted to make the innuendo harder to rebut.

Thank you.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#168

Post by mpyne »

tptacek wrote: post #158
dylangs1030 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you that all of those things are ridiculous (and I was vocal in arguing against them), is it fair to characterize the entire forum as being so easily swayed by ant-state sentiments? During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For eve…

I understand what you're saying. You're suggesting that I might (perhaps unintentionally) be cherry-picking. I disagree. I think the kinds of commentary I referred to aren't outliers, but rather characterize the site.

They characterize the site now, that's for sure.

But it didn't before, as best I can tell. The switchover seemed to happen in 2013, but it wasn't Snowden's leaks that caused me to notice the change.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#169

Post by dylangs1030 »

tptacek wrote: post #158
dylangs1030 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you that all of those things are ridiculous (and I was vocal in arguing against them), is it fair to characterize the entire forum as being so easily swayed by ant-state sentiments? During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For eve…

I understand what you're saying. You're suggesting that I might (perhaps unintentionally) be cherry-picking. I disagree. I think the kinds of commentary I referred to aren't outliers, but rather characterize the site.

Fair enough. I did mean unintentionally.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#170

Post by xyzzy123 »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #154
dylangs1030 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you that all of those things are ridiculous (and I was vocal in arguing against them), is it fair to characterize the entire forum as being so easily swayed by ant-state sentiments? During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For eve…

> For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, ... If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns. Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 p…

> that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news

I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion).

I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality.

To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mechanism in the world (apart from those that employ 2FA) is broken in this scenario.

Sensible people cannot expect Tor to provide the fig-leaf of safety it seemed like it offered.

GPA was not a default assumption in threat models before.

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