Sorry, but an executive is not just "an employee" and any alarms are rightfully justified. Took a little bit of cajoling in my company but we've successfully moved to self-hosted tools for the most part (Jitsi and Rocket.chat) with just a couple of projects with outside contractors using Slack.
It's weird that you describe the headline as "overwrought" and call the person an "employee" when the headline is more accurate than you.
This was an executive, not just an employee. That's a huge distinction and I can't help but think you intentionally downgraded his position to cover-up his behavior. "Just an employee" "Not a big deal"
But when you read the allegations, they seem like a very big deal that an executive was spying on users, giving their information to the Chinese government explicitly for oppressive purposes, including folks who are not in China, and went out of his way to personally censor non-Chinese groups meeting to discuss the Massacre-Which-Cannot-Be-Mentioned.
I would say the headline understates the gravity (it's very much a 'by-the-books' headline that you KNOW went through ten levels of Legal), and that your hand waving here feels much more dishonest than the headline.
Regardless of intent, it's undeniable that at some point there were insufficient controls to prevent this executive, or any executive in the future, from gaining this level of surveillance access.
And it's also undeniable that the consequences for Zoom (really, just needing to fire a few people, and not even the people who designed those controls if there were any) are so minimal that they have no incentive to strengthen those controls.
For some organizations (mine included) the benefits of Zoom outweigh the risks of Zoom having proven itself to not have those controls, namely the possibility of both political and corporate espionage. As with all things, YMMV.
It was an executive purposefully brought in for legal compliance with that country's requirements. That he was fired is a huge signal in how seriously aggressive zoom is about protecting data that they would even be willing to go up against national governments. I feel like the firing is a huge part of the story.
There are remarkably few organisations I somewhat trust (even then on a sliding scale) but on that spectrum Zoom sits at the "wouldn't touch them with someone elses bargepole" end.
And? This implying Alexa is spying on your conversations crap is getting out of hand on HN.
The dude is ceo of a cybersecurity company and has very unique and deep insights into global security threats. He’s definitely someone you would want to have around to advise on security especially as foreign threats are ramping up on the digital front.
Alexa, Google assistant, Siri are demonstrably not listening to your conversations, us in the tech industry should know better than to spread this sort of FUD.
If you actually read the article we already outspend them on R&D. We spent 2.8% of GDP vs their 2.2% of GDP. They failed to meet their target of 2.5% of GDP despite steadily increasing.
Novel R&D is more expensive than incremental catch-up R&D; you can catch up by spending less money since by definition you at least know where you're going.
When you take into account that China's GDP is 70% of the US but has a PPP factor of about 1.6 (i.e. the same amount of US dollars goes 60% further in China than it would notionally in America) they're actually spending what amounts 2.6% of the US GDP in PPP dollars.
(a) that changes nothing about what I said, and...
(b) do you really, truly, honestly, believe that if America were behind in tech the first thing they'd do wouldn't be to send in the spies? Of course they would. I know because that's what I would do. As a leader my obligation is to my people at the end of the day -- and this is true -- who's going to stop me?
In what world would you sit back and say, well, I think it'd be better if we just figured it out on our own, fair and square lol.
No. The U.S. intell community does not do that, empirically. There isn’t even the apparatus for doing that. The US IC’s ties to industry, apart from defense contractors and communications, are very tenuous, hamstrung by clearance and classification problem and a very insular culture.
So, in addition to being factually incorrect, is very damaging to the national discourse to normalize CPC’s strategy of wholesale IP theft.
The US intel community (a) doesn't need to do that because in general US tech is world-class and (b) wouldn't be very good at their jobs if they admitted to it publicly. I suggest you review your Cold War history for examples of when both sides were absolutely stealing each others' technology.
When you're top dog, your job is largely counter-intelligence.
> So, in addition to being factually incorrect, is very damaging to the national discourse to normalize CPC’s strategy of wholesale IP theft.
Hold on, at what point did I suggest it shouldn't be combatted - or that it was okay? I'm saying we should expect them to try and do so. I absolutely think the US should fight back. That's the game.
It’s normal in that every country would do it given half the chance. That doesn’t make it okay, and it doesn’t mean that countries on the other end should roll over and take it. I’m just saying we shouldn’t sit here gobsmacked that it’s happening. We should assume it’s happening at all times and beef up defenses precisely because it is so normal.
The US absolutely does it, has done it and will do it again. That doesn’t mean chinas not defending themselves against it.
> is very damaging to the national discourse to normalize CPC’s strategy of wholesale IP theft.
Can you clarify why? China is a state actor. State actors generally can be expected to act in self serving ways. What would be the basis for preventing espionage? Is this a moral argument that spying is evil?
Of course countries should protect themselves from foreign espionage if they can, but I don’t see what blame accomplishes, unless you are willing to have a hot war to stop spying.
That article foes not substantiate your claim. That article says Snowden-leaked data shows the NSA collected information on Petrobras. There is no indication why. There is no information suggesting the NSA provided that information to US businesses or gathered the information for anything other than national security purposes.
If you have something other than speculation that backs up your claim, I am happy to consider it. But this is not it.
If you read the article, it says the numerator grew faster than the denominator, and analysts think progress is good and not meeting the target this year is not a problem.
I wonder how it would look if there was some magical way to view it on an ROI basis.
Rather than focusing on R&D (science & technology presumably), I'd like to see Western countries start approaching ~"the humanities" (culture, society, happiness, etc) the same way we treat technology and industry. To me it seems fairly clear that there are distinct differences at the human satisfaction level between different countries/cultures. I have the sense that Western countries are starting to fall behind in some categories, the consequences of which first began showing up in our political discourse/mood, which has now progressed to literally spilling out onto the streets. Rather than our current laissez faire approach to this aspect of life, could treating it as a serious first class intellectual problem yield positive results?
It would be interesting to know how accurate that estimation is. It would also be interesting to know how many people deeply and unambiguously realize that such studies are speculative estimates (as opposed to facts), and why that is the case.
It is metaphysical-type questions like this that seem to get very little formal attention and funding. I would like to see humanity devote more effort to this type of initiative, and less towards optimizing advertising, making phones thinner, games more addicting, developing technology to send the ultra-wealthy into space, etc.
China once had a large emphasis on humanities, the Imperial Exams used to be primarily tests and essays on classical books, philosophy, and poetry. Science, engineering, and math were not important. It did not turn out well for them.
From a logical perspective, should one conclude from this that effort invested into the humanities is a waste of time? If not, what meaning should one take from it (and, how might we confirm whether that meaning is reasonably optimal from a "social engineering" perspective)?
The explicit mechanics of how society makes optimized decisions on public policy and spending seems like an area that needs improvement. Specific areas of what I refer to are global climate change, rules on wearing masks during pandemics, taxation, etc - the manner in which we currently approach such questions seems extremely sub-optimal to me, to the degree that I sometimes wonder if some approaches may be in part designed to be confusing and dysfunctional.
Like any aristocracy, the ruling class is born and raised to care not the humanity, but their humanity's value to them.
Imperial exams amplify those value and ideology by enforcing a strict caste systems in the classic reading, etc. That's not emphasis on humanity, that's emphasis on human caste.
You said the "humanities", but the examples of research you'd like were from the "social sciences". The humanities deals with fields like comparative literature, poetry, history, Russian language studies, etc. I am personally quite happy my tax dollars do not fund a lot of that, though I know not everyone feels this way.
Psychology and sociology are the fields that study the human happiness or social dynamics issues you referenced, and both funded by the NSF[0], so is it just that you wish they had more funding?
It appears I've made an error in terminology, but I would have anticipated the additional words I included would have rectified my error. Apparently my heuristics failed in this case.
> Psychology and sociology are the fields that study the human happiness or social dynamics issues you referenced, and both funded by the NSF[0], so is it just that you wish they had more funding?
Generally, I would like us to fund anyone who has novel ideas that may offer useful insight into the state of affairs on the planet, which largely derives from human actions and interactions. The quirkiness of specific forum conversations (this one, for example) is one class of interactions where I believe we could learn something useful that may shed light on broader trends we see in society, if we put some serious effort into it.
I'd have to review the specifics of what the NSF is studying and the results, but from an armchair commentator perspective (observing the general state of the world and the quality of public discourse) I wouldn't expect they are producing useful insights - although, it's completely possible they produce excellent results, and are completely being ignored (which should be noticed in a proper review).
I apologize if my comment came across as pedantic, I certainly wasn't trying to be.
The way research in the humanities and social sciences are conducted are fundamentally different, which is why I think the lexical distinction is important in this case. Most social science research applies the scientific method (hypothesis testing etc.), most humanities research does not.
>The quirkiness of specific forum conversations (this one, for example) is one class of interactions where I believe we could learn something useful that may shed light on broader trends we see in society, if we put some serious effort into it.
I agree.
>although, it's completely possible they produce excellent results, and are completely being ignored (which should be noticed in a proper review)
If I had to bet on it I'd say this is the answer, though I'd add that in addition to being ignored the research is being used in ways you and I wouldn't like. I know for example that app/social media development 2005-today relied/rely heavily on psychological research pertaining to addiction, human computer interaction, etc. I'm positive some of that was NSF funded.
What I'm getting at, in not a very effective way, is that I see low hanging fruit everywhere I look, and I don't think I'm the only one. Where I do think I may differ, is that I also sense a strong aversion to discussing this low hanging fruit in extreme detail and unconventional ways.
For example, plenty of people think climate change is a legitimate threat, and that prudent societal responses are hampered by imperfections in democracy, and that beliefs such as racism play a role in voting choices. Nothing very controversial (from an HN perspective) so far I don't think. But an invisible line that I sense cannot be crossed here is the underlying reasons why people "are" "racist", or the degree to which mass heuristic-based theory of mind estimations (~mind reading) like this are even true, or even happening. Introduce this style of thinking and one will surely be rewarded with downvotes, if not stern "culture war guidelines violations" warnings. But one thing you'll never get is any substantial justification or reasoning behind why there are peer-enforced guard rails on things like:
- what can be discussed
- how (from what perspectives) certain things can be discussed
- at what level of detail things can be discussed
I think there is something very interesting going on here, and that there seems to be this strong, almost universal/multi-dimensional aversion to discussing it (the phenomenon) makes me even more curious.
Yeah, I agree with you - those are important questions I wish we had better answers to.
I'm early into a research career though not in these fields and I'm starting to observe that knowing the problems that need solving/questions that need answering is often trivial when compared to actually solving the problems or answering the obvious question. That might be part of the issue here too, just my 2c.
Unfortunately the humanities succumbed to postmodernism long ago. Since then it has been impossible to impose strict tests on veracity as you find in hard sciences.
Postmodernism teaches (among many things) that truth is not objective. Rather, the epistemological center in postmodernism IS the self. Each self has its own version of truth, rather than truth being perspective-independent.
In literature, for example, this means that authorial intent is supplanted by perspectivalism. That is, each reader interprets a text based on his or her own perspective, and each interpretation is equally valid. This plays out in the political realm most prominently in the supreme court's interpretation of laws (does it matter what the author meant to say or just what we now interpret them to have said?).
So when I say it's impossible for the humanities to impose strict tests on veracity, what I mean is that a strict test would yield true results that are perspective-independent. This is what the scientific method attempts to accomplish, and the hard sciences use this methodology. The humanities, however, have long ceded that it is impossible to arrive at a perspective-independent conclusion and IMO would therefore reject a similarly rigorous approach.
I can only guess but art is now considered to be inherently subjective. So you there's no way to make statements like "picasso is better than jackson pollock", or "cubism is not real art".
Going further there are a number of works meant to probe the exact limit of what we're willing to consider art. I recall a couple interesting ones:
I don't understand why this is downvoted. Money goes further in China than in the US, and the Chinese GDP PPP is indeed higher than the US, although barely.
A lot of what's spent in the US goes towards private rents. Money that goes towards rents is a waste. Most don't see it because it's everywhere. Either directly or indirectly. You pay more per sqft for an office, but you also pay more per hour for labor, because the guy you hires also pays rent[1]. Things cost more because the supply chain has to pay rents.
[1] Consider a lot of workers half their income goes to rent.
Holy shit. Not even a year ago it was 23.4 to 21.4, not only did the coronavirus do a number on the US economy, but Chinese growth has been simply explosive.
correct, it's also why the Chinese and Russian military are quite large and potent despite the fact that obviously they spend several times less in absolute terms than the US. In particular salary costs, which tend to be large factors in research or the military, are way lower in China or Russia.
No they didn't, both Facebook and Google decided to quit themselves. Remember Dragonfly? Google just tried to get back into China THIS YEAR and was blocked by the US government. It's the US that's closing access to China not the other way around.
Wrong, Facebook was blocked in China following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots because Facebook refused to release information about Xinjiang independence activists.
In March 2009, China blocked access to Google's YouTube due to footage showing Chinese security forces beating Tibetans. Access to other Google online services was denied to users arbitrarily.
The search engine remained operational under the condition that the government could filter the search results. In January 2010, Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely.
Also, the government didn't "block" Dragonfly. Google terminated the project after its own employees protested it and politicians criticized it.
(All the above from Wikipedia either as direct quotes or paraphrased for brevity.)
The companies may have been unblocked if they'd handed over information potentially leading to death of the protestors AND allowed the Chinese state to continue hacking their systems.
If we're not being disingenuous, that's like telling your coworker: "If you come into work today, I'll kill this bystander and rob your house," and then saying: "Hmm, I guess they decided by themselves to not to come into work today."
Luckily we don't live in a cyberpunk world where corporations are above the state. TikTok is obedient to the state and is still getting banned, the US has no excuses.
As said in some other comments, TikTok does not use a "follow" model, new content is algorithmically recommended to you. Therefore there is no problem with the content creators you're following burning out or your follow list getting stale. For example my highschool friends are no longer that active on facebook, and in 2020 I'm no longer asking random people to add me to FB, therefore facebook is now kind of dead to me. My youtube follows like Ryan Higa etc are burned out, hence youtube is less useful for me. That'll never happen with TikTok because my follows list is irrelevant. I see pretty much only fresh faces with content I'm interested in.
I feel like YT used to be better at recommending stuff to me. Now it just sends me more what I've already seen. It seems like it's falling into the "you just bought a lawnmower. do you want to buy 500 more lawnmowers???" recommendation engine trap.
I haven't installed TikTok, so I'll ask you instead.
If there's no follow model, how do I see stuff that I want to see? Say there's a particular guy I like, I want to see a bunch of his content. Do I have to like it and hope the algo gives me more?
The follow mode is secondary as others said. But aside from that it figures out what stuff you like by tracking things like time spent on videos and dozens of other micro creative analytics that I'm sure would piss off privacy advocates. The end result is a very fine tuned recommendations algorithm that's really adept on its task.
there's a follow model, it's just secondary. when you log into tiktok, the first page you see is called the For You Page, where content is pushed to you algorithmically. to see the content you actually subscribed to, you'd need to swipe left.
Your graph does not tell anything about absolute values. My shitty app has grown 400% in that timeframe, by your metric it should be values at least 200$ billion?
Then there should be a setting that has to be manually approved to allow the clipboard interactivity feature.
I use a password manager on my iPhone and I am copying and pasting my passwords all the time. If some random app is scraping my clipboard silently and sending the data to a third party, that means my passwords are compromised. I am very much NOT OK WITH THIS.
Keep in mind, this permission should be fundamentally different than the permissions for just manually copying and pasting. I don't want to have to deal with permissions to "allow clipboard use" that I have to approve every time I want to paste something. That would be obnoxious. I am only worried about restricting permissions for invisible passive snooping.
The developer can fix it by either (1) querying "is there clipboard content?" instead of copying it every few keystrokes or (2) stop altogether if there is no legit purpose.
It sounds like this feature is working as intended - closing was was a silent security risk.
Wait, but China is also doing the same. Have you watched any of the press conferences in China? They were frank and forthcoming with information, there were many reddit threads applauding it until everything got politicized around March.
TSMC develops the tech often times in partnerships. AMD definitely paid for a lot of the tech and manufacturing research that went into the current state.
