> Any solution Apple develops that enables "disable E2E for this account" makes it harder for them to claim that implementing that would be compelling work (or speech, if you prefer)
I think it’s really speech [0], which is why it’s important to user privacy and security that Apple widely advertises their entire product line and business as valuing privacy. That way, it’s a higher bar for a court to cross, on balance, when weighing whether to compel speech/code (& signing) to break E2EE.
After all, if the CEO says privacy is unimportant [1], maybe compelling a code update to break E2EE is no big deal? (“The court is just asking you, Google, to say/code what you already believe”).
Whereas if the company says they value privacy, then does the opposite without so much as a fight and then the stock price drops, maybe that’d be securities fraud? [2]. And so maybe that’d be harder to compel.
>> Apple's defense against backdooring E2E is the (US) doctrine that [government can’t] be compelling work (or speech, if you prefer)
It’s really not "work” but speech. That’s why telecoms can be compelled to wiretap. But code is speech [2], signing that code is also speech, and speech is constitutionally protected (US).
The tension is between the All Writs Act (requiring “third parties’ assistance to execute a prior order of the court”) and the First Amendment. [1]
So Apple may be compelled to produce the iCloud drives the data is stored on. But they can’t be made to write and sign code to run locally in your iPhone to decrypt that E2EE data (even though obviously they technologically could).
It's weird bending of law. Code, especially closed-source code, is not a speech; it's a mechanism and the government may mandate what features a mechanism must have (for example, a safety belt in a car).
> to even have a rheumatologist referral to begin with, some previous combination of [doctors] would have had to have suspected an autoimmune possibility and created some documentation to that effect
This is a good point. Even when a diagnosis is obvious, a doctor may not say it outright and instead make a referral to a specialist because it’s not their specialty to diagnose that condition. This is a good thing because they’re not that specialist so they could be wrong about it, and if they are right, then they should make that referral anyway - and end result is the same i.e. a referral.
This is referring to timescape cosmology and the recent paper (Supernovae Evidence for Foundational Change to Cosmological Models) that was discussed 11 days ago on HN:
Standard cosmology is a consensus based on interpretations of spotty data and imperfect methods, therefore standard cosmology itself is a bit "fringe". It natural given the context. Alternatives to standard cosmology will also be "fringy" for the same reasons, and possibly more reasons too.
Dismissing all alternatives to standard cosmology as "fringe" is not helpful when standard cosmonlogy itself is "fringe".
Granted, there will be really far out there alt theories. The uncertainty of the context will bring out wild hypotheses. Figuring out who's a charlatan and who is in the ballpark can be difficult under these circumstances, but we have to.
The vast majority of “fringe” stuff comes from people who don’t really understand the standard model or modern consensus. It consists of half-baked ideas that don’t hold up to passing scrutiny by those who understand the field. Not because of any bias… but because the ideas have glaring flaws, don’t explain existing observations well, or are mostly incoherent.
Science is hard, and it takes a lot of work.
I’m guessing this is what the parent comment was referencing.
The problem is all the easy problems have been solved, and even all the hard problems have been solved in science. We're down to the really hard problems, and since our otherwise astoundingly accurate observations of how the universe acts are thrown off by them, everything looks weird and fringe at the very hard edges.
Sure, we have to think outside the box to solve some of those problems. Or we need more data (and tech to gather it with). Or both. Thinking outside the box means differing from the standard consensus. Differing from the standard consensus causes controversy. Some wildly outside the box thinking will be not even wrong.
I think they trained on one too many closet bifold doors [1].
If you look at the edge of the doors as they swing open, it seems their movement resembles bifold door movement (there's a wiggle to it common to bifold doors that normal doors never have). Plus they seem to magically reveal an inner fold that wasn't there before.
It’s Hebbian and solves all stability problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oja's_rule
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