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When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

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Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#301

Post by aidenn0 »

eru wrote: post #240
Freak_NL wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is hard to get wrong, is it still dumb? Being able to verify with your own eyes that the redacted parts are indeed redacted is a pretty strong benefit to that process. You'll need to train staff to properly black out stuff (no idea what they do, heavy cardboard cut-outs or cutting out the censored content and using a black background for the scan?), but once that process is in place, it works. With software you…

Incidentally, you just wrote a pretty good argument for (political) voting on paper instead of via machines.

I think the correct solution is a machine that prints out both a human- and machine-readable representation of the vote. The voter can confirm that the human-readable representation is correct, and you can randomly hand-count a few boxes of ballots to check that the hand-count matches the machine-count.

An election doesn't need to be tamper-proof we just need to be able to detect tampering well enough to make tampering a loser's game.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#302

Post by mmerlin »

chris_wot wrote: post #27
aahortwwy wrote: post #6

> “You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!” I mean not to call him out but this did happen and he didn't navigate his way out (although that says nothing about his confidence). https://www.smh.com.au/national/tony-abbott-lost-in-the-outb... EDIT: To be fair, it's been a decade. Maybe h…

Sure, this is the guy who knighted a prince and ate a raw onion. What did you expect? Abbott was Australia's Trump. Thankfully he lasted in office an even shorter time than the people he replaced.

Abbott's worst two decisions while PM were, IMHO:

Killing our nascent Fibre-to-the-Home rollout which had just begun after years of planning by the previous government. We now use problematic mish mash of slow copper instead of fibre (Murdoch wanted this so Tony gave it up for him).

Killing the mining tax for his donors. This would would have returned billions for our country. We could have begun a sovereign wealth fund like Norway who have over $1 Trillion in theirs. Australia also makes minimal profit from gas exports. Qatar exports less than us but their country profits 2600% more per year than Australia.

Domestic buyers on the east coast of Australia now pay one of the highest prices in the world for gas. Double the price our exporters are buying it for (and they have liquefaction and transport costs included).

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#303

Post by mmerlin »

prawn wrote: post #113
rswail wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say he was our Trump. Our Trump is Clive Palmer, down to the grifting and ripping off subcontractors and employees and suing people. Abbott was more our McConnell, happy to tear down political norms and standard parliamentary practice while claiming to defend it. He was a "good" opposition leader in that he basically was in opposition to everything proposed by the government, not for good reason, just beca…

I think your Trump-Palmer comparison is decent, but not sure about McConnell. Something that seemed key to Abbott was his focus on very repetitive and simple statements - the three word slogans (stop the boats, axe the tax; hardly discouraged "ditch the witch"). Not saying there hasn't been similar before, but he was particularly effective with it. Trump has used similar tactics (build the wall, lock her up, etc), wh…

He triumphantly claimed several times that a particular issue or legislation was now "Dead, buried, cremated"

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#305

Post by dorkwood »

toyg wrote: post #278
dorkwood wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically how I taught my father to use a computer. It came down to two things: 1. He was terrified of breaking it, so I told him that there was nothing he could possibly do to it that I couldn't fix. I made sure to sound overly confident -- almost like I was challenging him to break it. That gave him the confidence to do whatever. 2. Every time there was a problem with it, I would Google the answer in front o…

Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man how to google, and he'll never go a day in his life without being obsessed with conspiracy theories.

You're not far off, to be honest. Just replace 'conspiracy theories' with 'extreme political YouTube channels'.

It's not all bad, though. He invites his friends over and shows them how you can find all sorts of cool stuff online. One of them the other day was apparently trying to stump YouTube with increasingly obscure woodworking joints.

I think most people would be surprised how many people are still out there who have no idea what the internet is or what it does. Imagine discovering that there's a machine that can show you how to do anything, or play any song you've ever listened to, and you had no idea something like that even existed.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#306

Post by eee_honda »

toyg wrote: post #277
function_seven wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I knew what that comment was before I clicked. (“Is it that rsync/ftp comment? Yup.”) ((EDIT: but it was curlftpfs, not rsync))

The HN equivalent of "I put on my robe and wizard hat".

god, YES! i needed this reference in my life today :)

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#308

Post by j_walter »

kccqzy wrote: post #26

Nice. Here's a similar personal story with a PSA that sometimes blurring is NOT sufficient. A friend of mine posted on Instagram a picture of a U.S. visa (or something similar; it was probably five years ago) to announce her trip to the U.S., and she took care to blur out sensitive information such as her passport number. But a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse and I successfully unblurred it and told her my discovery…

I found many years ago that my pay statements suffered from the last item you mentioned. My personal info had a black box over things like the SSN...but if I just moved the window around the black box followed slower than the document so everything was visible. ADP never acknowledged the problem when I brought it to their attention, but they did eventually fix it.
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