> If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms.
If you don't, you're the bad actor. If specific actions lead to a ban, the way to sidestep that is to not do those actions. If you don't even look at the actions but some BS meta stuff, or have wishy-washy rules you enforce randomly, you're the bad actor.
I use FreeFileSync to synchronize my Thunderbird and Firefox Profiles, KeepassXC files, web server stuff etc. I also prefer portable applications that keep their preferences in their own folders. So I also don't mind if a machine randomly dies, but I still have all my stuff locally, plus backups, and what I upload is always a copy. Other than stuff that lives on chat servers or social media, of course, Soundcloud and YouTube playlists -- but that stuff, but that stuff will go away sooner than the files I have locally. Stuff that lives elsewhere is just a way to interact with others and show them things, not the keeper of anything that matters to me.
The downside is that I can't just change machines nilly-willy, I need to sync first, at least if things overlap. For example, I can use one Firefox profile on one machine, another on a second machine, and use Thunderbird on a third, but I can't use the same profile on several machines without getting a merge conflict, so to speak. That was confusing and annoying for like a week, since then it's not been a problem, and by now I'm so pampered by it, I simply avoid stuff that doesn't play nicely with my workflow. Smartphone apps, for example, or programs that doesn't allow me to configure the paths it uses, and so on.
Since I use applications and work on data, the OS doesn't that matter much. I mind changing Windows from the ass-backwards defaults much less than sticking with the defaults, and I do that as I go along, i.e. when I use a feature or get annoyed by the default, I just change it. That doesn't require any thought and very little time, so the configuration I would have to repeat on a new system isn't something I consider valuable, I'm pretty sure it takes much less time in total than working with the default config, in the long run. If I had to do it more often than every once in a blue moon, I'd find ways to automate it.
I am just not interested in something that could go away based on the decision of some pointy-haired boss, which is tends to be inferior software in the first place, anyway. Like, compare Directory Opus with Windows Explorer, one is a serious application, the other is a toy that constantly gets in your way.
You haven't addressed a single point. Being an expert should help a person to make arguments, and sometimes does, but it's not an argument in and of itself.
The author being a non-expert in the field is useful to know. It doesn't have to be proof of something to be useful information in creating a more whole image. Even if that weren't the case, another point the parent made was that, in their opinion, the quality and tone of the article degrades conversation rather than contributing to it, which is another form of non-proof that is perfectly reasonable to express as an opinion. The parent may have spoken with a disrespectful tone, but "You haven't addressed a single point", is equally flippant and antagonistic. In fact, it's worse, since you're addressing it directly to a participant in the conversation.
> Critics of 5G agree6–8—but its supporters do not9 10—that the overall population levels of exposure to RF-EMFs will be greatly increased by the 5G roll-out. One compelling argument for that view is the ‘inverse square law’ of EMF exposure: intensity varies as the inverse of the square of the distance from the emitting source.11 With plans afoot internationally to put a 5G booster antenna on ‘every second or third lamp-post’, it is difficult to believe that overall population exposures will not increase substantially
Yes, there will be more antennas. Does not address the question of power levels: part of the point of more antennas is that each individual station can have lower power output. No mention of "watts", antenna ERP, or indeed power anywhere in the article.
> International health protection agencies and their scientific advisory bodies have published several reviews over the last decade, of varying scientific quality, of the research evidence regarding potential adverse biological and health effects of RF-EMFs.5 12–15 These reviews—by Health Protection England,12 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC),13 an Expert European Union (EU) Committee14 and the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP)15—have, with one exception, not converged around a strong warning about such effects
In other words, current investigations do not support evidence of harm.
> Moreover, a growing number of engineers, scientists, and doctors internationally have been calling on governments to raise their safety standards for RF-EMFs, commission more and better research, and hold off on further increases in public exposure, pending clearer evidence of safety.18–21 Some politicians have listened: France, Israel, Cyprus and Russia have banned WiFi in preschool and restricted its use in primary schools. Belgium has banned the sale of mobile phones to children under seven. In response to such concerns, several jurisdictions have recently blocked the installation of 5G antennae systems in their communities: Brussels, Florence, Rome, as well as Glastonbury, Frome and Totnes in the UK; and widespread anti-5G campaigns are now emerging in Australia, North America and elsewhere.
This is true but is a kind of self-referential policy; places that have banned 5G have often done so for unscientific reasons! Saying that there are anti-5G campaigns is like saying there are anti-mask campaigns; it is not actually evidence of harm.
> more conservative jurisdictions’ guidelines, which are based on a wider variety of biological and health effects documented in recent decades
[citation needed] - no really, there are citations for other bits, where's the health effects citation?
> A striking feature of this public controversy is that various commentators—even those with advanced training in telecommunications physics and engineering—inconsistently refer to quite different specific technologies when they discuss the pros and cons of 5G
Well, yes, it's a marketing term.
Discussion of local councils and lampposts. Hard to see relevance. No details of harm.
> One’s overall assessment of the likelihood that an exposure causes a health condition should take into account a wide variety of evidence, including ‘biological plausibility
And "biological plausibility" is where it falls down, because I've not yet seen (and it's not expressed here either) a mechanism other than the raw heating effect of absorption used by the EU SAR metrics which has any plausible biological effect. See para on "non-thermogenic adverse effects" (what effects? How do they work? At what levels?)
> Finally, Carpenter has recently published a well-researched analysis of how source of funding correlates with study findings, across many peer-reviewed publications over the last few decades, of the relationship between various kinds of EMF exposure and several cancers.39 He shows convincingly that studies funded by private sector entities, with strong vested interests in maintaining their current use of the sources of EMFs under study, tend to find no association
OK, this is a genuine question that does need to be asked, because we know there's been problems with this before.
> innovations in radio frequency ‘pulsing,’ ‘polarisation’ and ‘modulation’
Non-physicist discovers QAM, is confused. Again, no explanation given of why this might make a difference.
> In other words, current investigations do not support evidence of harm.
You missed the exception he mentions. "IARC is the outlier in this respect, having determined in 2011 that EMFs are ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK304630/)
They concluded that "With 'limited evidence' for carcinogenicity in humans based on an increased risk of glioma – a malignant brain tumour – among heavy users of mobile telephones, radiofrequency electromagnetic fields were classified as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans'"
This suggests more studies are required from a biological perspective in order to form an conclusions either way, which is his point in the opinion piece.
> Non-physicist discovers QAM, is confused. Again, no explanation given of why this might make a difference.
The full quote is;
"Furthermore, a comprehensive Canadian review of the same evidence states that some of the new RF-EMF technologies—such as innovations in radio frequency ‘pulsing,’ ‘polarisation’ and ‘modulation’—are so new that biological scientists have not been able to keep up—that is, no studies yet exist of these new technologies’ biological effects." (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...)
The point he's making here, once again, is that this is a multi-disciplinary problem and we need further study from a biological perspective as there is not enough evidence to conclude either way.
You seem to think that, because he's not a physicist, that he has no idea what he's talking about.
You seem to think that, because he's not a physicist, that he has no idea what he's talking about.
Yes, appeals to authority aren't much use in the present climate. So, that's why he needs to offer convincing evidence. It sounds like he offers none (I haven't read it, just relying on the summary above). "Pulsing" is not exactly a new idea in radio technology, is it? There's only like a century or more of radio systems that do that. As for modulation, does he know what the M in FM radio stands for? The claim that these are new innovations that "biological scientists can't keep up" is just obviously false on its face so what is he talking about?
If you plot rates of cancer on a chart you'll find it's actually stable or declining for decades:
Even as ever newer mobile protocols were rolled out (and really they're more like protocol upgrades than changes to the basic physics), cancer rates were stable for women and declining for men. If mobile tech caused cancers then we'd see it in the statistics by now, there's been plenty of time. We don't.
BTW this guy is an epidemiologist, and I've been ranting for the past 8 months on HN that these guys definitely have no idea what they're talking about. The standards in this field are just ludicrously low, so I'm not surprised at all to discover one of them thinks 5G causes cancer :(
> Yes, appeals to authority aren't much use in the present climate. So, that's why he needs to offer convincing evidence. It sounds like he offers none (I haven't read it, just relying on the summary above).
My point was more that a physicist may be an authority on the technology itself, but would not necessarily be an authority on the affects it has on a biological system. That's why it has to be a multi-discipliniary approach rather than people being immediately dismissed for not being physicists.
Why would you think that a physicist would be more of an authority on causes of human disease than an epidemiologist?
> The claim that these are new innovations that "biological scientists can't keep up" is just obviously false on its face so what is he talking about?
Ok his wording is pretty over the top here, but he literally points to a study which suggests as much.
> I'm not surprised at all to discover one of them thinks 5G causes cancer
It was actually the IARC working group for evaluating carcinogenic risks to humans. He was merely referencing their study and findings.
And actually, once again, they're not saying that 5G causes cancer. They're saying that the evidence from their specific study suggests it might, but it's not conclusive, and that further studies are required to get better evidence either way.
Look I'm not saying that the evidence suggests 5G is harmful, I'm just taking issue with some of the specific dismissals presented above as I think they selectively cut out parts of the quotes that actually change their meaning somewhat.
I think they're likely more of an authority because physicists have been studying radio, EM energy and its effects on the atomic level for more than a century. Meanwhile, epidemiologists are not biologists. Look at Neil Ferguson, one of the world's most famous. His actual background isn't biology, it's ... physics!
If you want to get the views of biologists on the effects of EM on the body, then great! You'd want to talk to microbiologists about that. Physicists can probably also be informative, but epidemiologists can only look at graphs like the one I linked to previously. They're more or less data scientists, posing as disease experts, but what they're doing when you drill in is what anyone who knows R and a bit of stats could do.
The IARC finding seems to be phrased very ambiguously. I would read it as saying "we have no evidence, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Which is true but not really helpful for moving the debate forward, as at some point absence of evidence does need to be taken as evidence of absence or else you'd be stuck in the precautionary principle of not doing anything forever.
> calls them assholes that don’t care about what happens outside of western society
That's hardly her main point:
> For Chinese who are used to a specific IME- like Sogou, trying to type on something else is a tiny bit like a QWERTY user suddenly faced with Dvorak- we can make it work, but it's slow enough day to day that 50/50 they just install Sogou because what's the big deal right?
> The Signal "fix" is "Incognito Mode" aka for the app to say "Pretty please don't read everything I type" to the virtual keyboard and count on Google/random app makers to listen to the flag, and not be under court order to do otherwise.
> Needless to say, Sogou/Baidu dos not respect the IME_FLAG_NO_PERSONALIZED_LEARNING flag. So basically all hardware here is self-compromised 5 minutes out of the box.
> so unless journalists tell them otherwise, which they have not been doing- users will install Sogou.
If it's an issue in any app that can lead to privacy leaks, it's a showstopper issue for something like Signal. It being an issue with any app is even more reason to tell people about it, not less.
But if a person has something important to say, calling people that don't know about the issue assholes is not a great way to go about it. I know there is a western, and especially US/English, bias in tech. But it's not like everyone tries to annoy others, it's more an issue of ignorance.
Btw I agree that when Signal says your messages are secure, it should probably do something to warn about ways things still may leak.
She has been ignored for over a year (she tried to get them to discuss the issue in 2019), and all the while people have been getting kidnapped by the Chinese government due to this misunderstanding. I can understand why she would feel upset. I think what set this off was signal responding to questions to some tiny Twitter account after ignoring her for so long.
It is an extreme exageration to say that the Chinese state artitrarily detaining people is due to Signal not working around the IME issue.
Let's be clear: the Chinese state detains people all the time, based on many sources of information, probably the least important being interception of keystrokes to Signal in an input method app. They own all the app makers and the app stores. They can push a specific version of an app to a specific person. Frankly it is meaningless to rely on Signal on a device like that.
The OWS team is small. They don't have a social media team like big corps do, tracking social issue engagement, what big accounts have tweeted etc, and it is ridiculous and counter-productive to be going off about it.
Of course signal is not the only way people get compromised in China but if the claim in TFA that 70% of Chinese users use a third party IME is correct, it seems reasonable that some of them, thinking their chat is secure, would say something that gets them in trouble. Naomi Wu has claimed this has happened and I have no reason to doubt her.
Yes OWS is small, but a major security vulnerability for a country with over a billion people seems worth addressing, no? Naomi Wu is certainly a big account on Twitter and we can see from TFA that Moxie and OWS are aware of this complaint. The question is what to do about it. If you read TFA you will see that the best suggestion seems to be a warning to users using any third party IME. Seems quite reasonable to me.
Since MSS are unlikely to tell us their decision making process it is quite opaque. It could have been CCTV, an informant, an unfounded denunciation, something they said on WeChat, one of the main compromised Chinese apps. It really isn't open to her claim this level of confidence.
If the keyboard is leaking keystrokes or word searches on a wide basis it would be difficult to hide technically. DFIR techniques for this are pretty straightforward, I'm sure plenty of people in HK could do it. Why no details?
But ultimately this is a much bigger Android problem, and won't be solved by fixing the keyboard (which OWS is obviously unqualified and ill-equipped to do). A broad ranging device lockdown guide, and OPSEC training (like [1] but for protest groups), is necessary to have anything except illusory protection. I don't think OWS should get into the business of issuing security advisories for all the platforms that they port to.
The pro-democracy groups seem to have this stuff figured out as well as you can and still have a visible protest movement. Very much following Chairman Mao: "The revolutionary must swim with the fishes."
Where we disagree is that I believe OWS should consider security advisories. This comes up multiple times if you read the whole thread linked in the top of this HN post (TFA). OWS wants to assume that users are normal people without much knowledge of opsec. They want the users to trust the engineers to guide them. Well, if everyone is saying “Signal is end to end encrypted and no one can read your chat” OWS might be able to help a lot of people by clarifying that while messages sent over the wire are encrypted, a compromised phone could still mean compromised conversations. This is painfully obvious to you or I, but regular people I speak to have no idea about things like this. Non technical folks I speak to still don’t understand the most basic opsec.
Telegram/WhatsApp/iMessage/FB Messenger all go pretty far down the 'this is secure messaging' path, with far less justification. (And for a Chinese iPhone iMessage is completely broken.) Far more people use the big platforms. Getting a significant user base for Signal is a big comparative win, even if the handset security it weak.
Should they be less minimalistic on their website? Probably yes. Would anyone read it? Geeks, yes. Maybe people who are worried. But I think it is a small win at a high cost.
Maybe it's possible to write a basic phone opsec guide and just stick it on medium or something. Rely on the magic of Google to help people find it. (Would Baidu index it? I wonder.)
This was Naomi Wu’s claim. She herself has been “taken away for questioning” by the Chinese government (and she shared photos of it) so I have no reason to distrust her claims.
I'm not sure I'd know about this if the statement wasn't notable for its coarse language. Moreover it's not just a case of criticizing someone who didn't know about the issue, it's criticizing people who are telling people to do something without understanding the risks.
> But if a person has something important to say, calling people that don't know about the issue assholes is not a great way to go about it.
I don't mind it at all. If someone uses "being called asshole" as a reason to not even inform anyone, they would have found another excuse. Some people simply register it as strong language and otherwise focus on the content. At any rate, it's very easy to judge what someone says in frustration when you yourself don't even suffer from the situation and/or don't care about those who do.
> But it's not like everyone tries to annoy other, it's more an issue of ignorance.
So she shed light on that, and instead of talking about the important bit, people think it's super important to teach a random person to not be rude, ever? That's what we're focusing on?
That's my point. By presenting the issue the way she did, people moved the conversation away from the issue and instead ended up in a meta-discussion about the discourse. If her points were laid out in a nicer manner, she would be closer to actually achieving her goal.
She did that over one year ago and was ignored. Policing her tone instead of addressing the issue that has people getting kidnapped in China is really missing the point.
Open source devs are horribly mistreated for a service they provide for free/very low income. I will gladly focus the conversation on someone being rude to someone that has dedicated their life to making the world a better place. Signal is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the betterment of mankind. They want to a good job and they’re not assholes.
"Making the world a better place" is terribly generic, and not impressive in context of stubbornly refusing to even acknowledge, much less warn users about, an issue that puts actual lives in danger. If they ignored her for so long, what was the excuse before she dared to say "asshole" to adults who dabble with something as serious as this?
Godwin's law just says that as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of a nazi comparison approaches 1. It says nothing about that even being a problem, much less losing the argument. Even better: as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of any comparison, any string of words, any combination of letters, "approaches 1". Something you can say about anything you might as well say about nothing.
People heard the meme a lot, so they think it has weight without actually having thought about it. Encouraging people to reveal this about themselves, with pride no less, is the singular useful property GL has.
> I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.
Then I fail to have any sympathy and solidarity with you. You're just another violent extremist in my eyes, and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend by a long shot.
I responded to someone who didn't even attempt to make the case how all users of Parler are "violent extremists", they just pulled out that broad brush to justify a transgression. That's intellectually so dishonest I see no functional difference between that and what one would criticize extremists for, and I don't see a meaningful difference between "not minding" a breach of someone's rights and committing it, so that's the violent bit.
> He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
But if you don't mind their use of "violent extremists" apropos nothing, no, I don't particularly "care to" explain myself to you for using the same phrase in response to them -- I just do it because I can. You could simply remove or ignore my re-using that phrase and my point would stand unchanged. Address the core of an argument, don't just play "gotcha" while ignoring the context and the woods for the trees.
I think one man's flaw might be another man's feature in this case:
> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.
<label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
No, they are being downvoted because "don't storm the Capital chanting about hanging the vice president", and "don't use allegations of voter fraud as an excuse to violently oppose the installation of a duly elected government" are probably not Extremist Left Wing Propaganda.
Of course it's concerning, but it's also concerning how quick people are to dehumanize and call for censorship, putting a lot of energy into discussing endlessly just how evil or stupid or unreachable those other people are, rather than root causes [0]. The mainstream is whipping itself into hysteria just as much as QAnon does, and it really does seem like circus all around. Just for some perspective:
> The capitol has been the site of multiple bombings, shootings, assassination attempts, and stormings for centuries. Pretending its an unbespoiled sacred Church which has never been penetrated so vulgarly is just ahistorical.
This is also because learning to live with each other is harder than just denouncing the other side. We need to help people understand that the root cause needs to be examined as you said.
This looking for the root cause usually works well in big companies - for example on the Toyota production line but in politics people tend to look for easy answers. Examples like the war on drugs, getting overly tough on crime or defunding the police altogether do nothing but exacerbate the underlying issues.
Apart from calling this out and trying to vote in people who can think deeper I'm not sure what else to do. Living in close nit community/larger families you need to learn accept people for who they are and that seems to be going out the window with the increased focus on the individual in modern western culture. There's no one size fix all unfortunately...
> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
> If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
Still, it's a nice way to shift blame to scientists and engineers, away from people who actually use these tools for evil, or commission development of technologies to use in their evil business models.
All links in the chain are responsible for what they do, there is no single packet of "blame" that gets to reside with any single party, and denying one's responsibility will not make it go away.
Responsibility is not a chain, and it absolutely does fade away with enough degrees of separation - otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold that caused him to scream at his wife later that day, and made his wife scream at their kid the next day, for whom it became a formative moment, pushing the kid into a life of crime, and 10 years later someone died because of it.
You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers. And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.
No, but events are. The question of how to use a tool arises from the existence of the tool.
> otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold
You're still just responsible for your own acts, and they for theirs. If you were being a dick to them needlessly, that's your fault, and if it tipped them over the edge, it's natural to feel bad. Not fully responsible, but also not as if you had zero to do with it.
Just like when someone gets bullied and commits suicide, you don't just look at that act of suicide and talk about who had the most agency and what one should focus on.
> You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers.
There is no need to "focus attention", and holding one party responsible for their actions is orthogonal to holding other parties responsible for theirs. This is a tech forum, Weizenbaum was one of the greats when it comes to writing about technology and morality, and I dare say it is the responsibility of technologists to be familiar with his body of work.
> And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.
That's why I don't, and never hinted at doing so, and even clearly stated the opposite when I said "All links in the chain are responsible for what they do".
They're a little unclear about exactly what morality they are advocating for. The nature of weapon technology transforms the way society works.
In the era of sword and shield, for example, combat effectiveness is hugely dependent on raw upper body strength. That means that strong healthy men rule all domains, while women, children, any men not in top physical shape are helpless before them.
In the modern era of mechanized weapons, personal size and physical ability are much less relevant. There's a much greater ability for small groups to make their opinions felt. Victory in large battles tends to go to whoever has the best tech and greatest quantity of it. It's probably a better world overall.
The real question is, exactly how will any "killbots" work, and what effect will they have on society? Maybe they'll be super-expensive and centrally controlled, and nobody better dare to move against whoever ends up in charge of them. Maybe they'll be cheap and plentiful, so anyone with a grudge will be even more able to cause chaos. Maybe something else we can't imagine yet. I have a feeling we'll find out eventually, one way or another.
Your second paragraph seems rather simplistic to me.
Less-able men with more ability to marshall resources/rewards can convince more-able men to be their proxies by paying them . How would they have the ability to do that? Technology, knowledge, cunning, guile.
How long has it been since the king was the best fighter in the realm? I mean, seriously?
Well yeah it's simplistic, since it's 2 sentences. I'm not really prepared or qualified to write a 30 page paper on the nature of medieval combat. Yet there seems to be an obvious truth to it.
There are of course exceptions, such as persuading or paying someone else to fight for you, or concealing a weapon, getting someone to trust you, and stabbing them in the back, etc. It still seems to shape much about reality to know that the majority of people will have no chance of ever winning a remotely fair fight against the enforcers of whoever is in charge.
I don't find the "truth" you mention obvious at all. I think it's just a fairy story simplification based largely on fiction (written and visual).
Over the last couple of thousand years (or more, but history gets a bit fuzzy beyond that), lots of nations have had leaders at many different times who were not the best fighters.
Your claim wasn't that a majority of people had no chance of winning a fair fight against enforcers, which is obviously true. You made a much more broad claim about how historically certain physical attributes would put particular kinds of people in positions of power, and about how that has changed.
I think this is likely misleading and inaccurate. Yes, those with power have always used force to enforce their wishes, but that's very different from saying that those in power are themselves of a certain physical type.
If you don't, you're the bad actor. If specific actions lead to a ban, the way to sidestep that is to not do those actions. If you don't even look at the actions but some BS meta stuff, or have wishy-washy rules you enforce randomly, you're the bad actor.