Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found • Hacker News Board

Re: Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found

#41

Post by simonsaidit » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:54 AM UTC

azernik wrote: post #32

simonsaidit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A usecase for blockchain.

How exactly does blockchain help here? It would allow you to enter a read-only entry that you interviewed a subject and they said XXX, but how would it verify that this is a truthful entry?

That’s Not my point. You would be able to store history and news and later being unable to rewrite it. A creditable source eg if you trust waybackmachine or some journalist or organization then you have a record that it happend... that is a step up from a screenshot. I believe there is a saying that the winner of a war writes the history and I believe we have seen many wars which tried to destroy information and history of a people. Or recently people/ companies trying to erase their internet history. A example would be simple system would be to log eg url to New York Times article you request and blockchain does the logging so perhaps it’s wrong what the journalist wrote but it’s true that they did write it.. and eg trump getting control of all all media in us would still leave a trail for historians even if us were fucked today ;)

See https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims...

Besides that there is nothing that prevents us from in the future to store voice/video and digital/biometric signatures and whatever to document interviews or events. For some part it will still be based on trust of a source in others it will be based on evidence. In science based on ability to reproduce methods and data.

Re: Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found

#42

Post by matt4077 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:20 AM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #35

shaki-dora wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, a conspiracy theory. Great start for a new account! What you are misunderstanding: Companies and products are part of what's often called "the real world". As such, journalists are allowed to mention them in articles, because nothing in the real world cannot be the subject of journalism. And in the same way that they sometimes offer positive opinions on politicians, or 200 year old books, or tomorrow's weather,…

> What you are misunderstanding: Companies and products are part of what's often called "the real world". What you are misunderstanding: being patronizing does not make you convincing.

> What you are misunderstanding: being patronizing does not make you convincing.

At least they had arguments...

Being patronizing while making good arguments should be just as convincing as good arguments alone. Unless you're letting emotions cloud your judgement.

Re: Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found

#43

Post by throwaway080383 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 10:22 AM UTC

azernik wrote: post #31

throwaway080383 wrote: post #10

I'm surprised that despite being able to concisely explain why Apple is preferable to Google due to the privacy implications of their respective business models, they're perfectly content with a Google Home in their kitchen! Maybe I'm paranoid, but isn't it obvious how the whole Home Speaker story ends? "We're not spying on you, we're learning your behaviors to offer a better experience!"

If you read carefully, he didn't actually say iPhones were preferable : "Apple’s less data-focused approach has allowed it to take the high road on privacy. That strategy has potentially insulated the company from regulations and public scorn, but it also could leave Apple with dumber products than its rivals."

Fair enough. I guess I presumed the preference since he uses an iPhone.

Re: Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found

#44

Post by stinkytaco » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #26

stinkytaco wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're equating giving up personal data to harming the environment or workers, I'm afraid I don't agree. One of these actions is under your control, is a trade off we make simply to live in society, and even provides some benefits to users and society. To bank, to get mail, to shop online, to support services we like, to receive communications, etc, etc. Privacy is also something you can control, rather than somet…

The point is that these are all examples of negative choices that consumers choose to take because it’s easier to accept short-term personal gain while causing long-term, depersonalized, harm.

My point is that if you assume giving up some privacy is going to cause long-term harm, then you are correct. But a rational person can weigh the cost/benefit of giving up privacy for some convenience and decide there's a net gain to it. People who use the internet or carry cell phones or even vote or do banking have given up personal information, and likely know they've given that information. If they found the trade off beneficial, it's not necessarily apathy, but a decision. It may be a bridge to far for you, but perhaps not for everyone.

Re: Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found

#45

Post by new299 » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 4:41 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #25

new299 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve searched for web archival services before, but never found anything outside of some expensive legal services. It would be great if there was a service like the waybackmachine but which could be use to archive on demand, and make those archives publicly available. The internet archive is great for this, but they also respect robots.txt and don’t guarantee that they’ll archive pages you request.

There are at least 3 locations for on-demand web archiving: https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://archive.is/ https://webrecorder.io/ Probably some of the other sites supported by this extension have on-demand archiving too: https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive For archiving on your own computer, this LWN article is pretty interesting: https://lwn.net/Articles/766374/

Thanks, webrecorder.io looks particularly good. I’d also forgotten about archive.is I should use that more.