
Saving Lives with Tech Amid Syria’s Endless Civil War - halasystems
https://www.wired.com/story/syria-civil-war-hala-sentry
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forkLding
Sad to see the media no longer reporting Syrian news or seeing it as a
headline, whats happening there is very tragic.

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godzillabrennus
Yemen is also conveniently absent from main stream media coverage despite the
horrible bus full of school children incident this week.

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philipkglass
I think this is very dependent on how you find your news stories. In Apple
News today I see 6 Syria stories. These are from very mainstream news outlets
too: CNN, the Guardian, Reuters, Wired.

In Google News (different device) I see stories about Yemen in the past day
from USA Today, Reuters, the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Washington Post,
and the New York Times. Most appear to mention the school bus bombing.

I admittedly don't know what makes the front page of printed news or goes into
heavy rotation on TV news. I've been using news aggregators instead of any one
publisher for a decade+.

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megous
I maintain a database of news articles from local news sources and sometimes
query it if I feel something is underreported re Syria. Sometimes it is and
sometimes it's just a wrong feeling. Developments in Daraa/Quneitra were much
less reported than developments in E. Ghouta earlier this year.

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halasystems
This x 100. The news is being reported, but so many of us just digest what the
aggregators and algorithms decide is most relevant - it saves a ton of time.
Today's readers need to be curious to be well-informed.

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christianklotz
The article explains it's a mix of human observers and sensor data plus a lot
of trial and error that has been done in order to get accurate prediction and
to build trust.

What are the strategies to avoid or reduce false positives. I suppose the
human observers are vetted? And the article suggests that there must be
sufficient amount of sensor data for the likelihood to be big enough. However
it fails to mention how many sensors and therefor data-points are collected.

Are there good resources on crowdsourcing data, ensuring certain quality of
data, especially when it comes to limited data inputs?

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aussieguy1234
This should be expanded to Palestine, listening for Isreali jet bombers that
blow up entire apartment complexes

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rospaya
Great use of tech.

Also, not sure if I'm not seeing well or if my adblocker is being too zealous,
but I don't see any share buttons on the article. Not something I'd expect
from Wired, or any media outlet these days.

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Bucephalus355
This article is shameful. The “tech” involved predicting bombing raids, to
evacuate people beforehand. Obviously the tech will be used in the future to
maximize casualties via predicting bombing raids.

Not saying what they are doing is bad, just the unabashed optimism / tech will
save us all view of Wired magazine.

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bmiller2
From the article, it seemed like the “tech” is just text messages triggered
based on flight paths of aircraft. How does that translate to killing more
people?

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Kalium
If you know how people are going to respond, you can take advantage of it. You
get a related practice in double-tap bombing attacks, where there's a second
bomb set to hit the predictable batch first responders.

In this case, you can predict where people will evac to, and time your follow-
up bombing flights to hit those areas before there's time to evacuate from
them.

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halasystems
CEO of Hala here. What I think needs reiterating is that the tools to do what
you fear are already available and employed by the highly advantaged attacker
(regardless of who it is). One of our primary missions is to actually give
defensive tools to people who currently lack adequate means to defend
themselves.

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extralego
Wow I never thought of it like that!

If you have any pride in what you’re doing, I see that as a problem. Maybe
you’re helping, but we will never be sure if you’re making things worse.

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King-Aaron
Please.

