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aliakbarkhan

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Why does the amount of effort on the site matter? I don't understand how that tells you anything about the project or its likely outcome.

I would appreciate some more detail, too. I've noticed that I find TVT much less engrossing than I did a few years ago, but I thought I'd just grown out of it. If there's an explanation for the decline I would be very interested to hear it.

edit: How accurate is the Encyclopedia Dramatica article on TVT? I normally avoid ED, but I gave in this time because it seems to be pretty comprehensive. edit 2: I found this blog: http://tvtropeshistory.blogspot.com/ Obviously it's hard to verify histories like these, but it seems pretty in-depth.

This is impossible to guarantee today. Certainly if you run the zero-day magnets known as browsers, and even if not, there is always some possibility of physical intrusion.

Bingo. Even if you go all-out with security and only browse the web with a pure text web browser through Tor running on a VM that you purge after every use, use full-disk encryption with plausible deniability, fully shut down your computer and wait until the RAM is cool before leaving, inspect your computer for NSA/other implants every time before boot, tape your webcam and mic, never use your real name, and whatever else you can think of, you're just going to go nuts from all the paranoia, as well as from realizing all the myriad ways your security could still be broken (don't forget to check the keyboard for a built-in logger and look inside your case for PCI cards you don't recognize, and hope they don't have any implants that look convincingly like something you'd recognize as yours). Never mind that this isn't a very viable way to do most things most people actually use their computers for, like personal email, online banking, social networking, and so on.

Why do you think the 4chan source would be any less awful? If you're really curious you can look at the partial source that leaked a while back, but IIRC it's not exactly amazing. (I'm paranoid, so I won't link to it but it's trivial to find with Google.) Edit: Just saw that you've already seen it. Nonetheless, my other points still stand.

At any rate, I don't think we'll be seeing an open source release of the 4chan source in the near future. Obviously I don't know the specifics, but in my experience it seems like most purpose-built internal applications like the 4chan imageboard tend to be rather messy and filled with a lot of very specific code that's hard to repurpose for more general use. In order to release it publicly, the codebase has to be sanitized of private information, disentangled from any internal utilities or applications, refactored to remove ugly hacks that solve one-off problems (ex. legacy integration), and so on. Then they have to switch 4chan itself over to the new codebase if they ever hope to keep the public repo up to date. That's a lot of work for 4chan's volunteer labor force, on top of what they already have to expend to maintain the site.

There's also a good likelihood that the volunteers who contributed to the code have not done so in a way that would allow moot to release the source. I am not a lawyer so I can't speak confidently about this, but I'm pretty sure copyright is a major issue here. Unless every volunteer contributor has explicitly agreed to allow their code to be released or directly assigned copyright to moot, the first prerequisite to an FOSS release would probably be to get that permission from every contributor, both past and present. The present contributors may not be that hard to ask, but given the nature of 4chan I wouldn't be surprised if a few past volunteers have worked under personas they've since abandoned, effectively making them unreachable.

Mistakes we've made 12 years ago

What you're saying is essentially that women should be discriminated against simply because they don't use the same phrasing as you. You're arrogantly demanding that they change the way they see the world simply because you don't like it. A person who doesn't say they "love" their job can still be as dedicated and passionate about it as you are -- they just put it in different terms. If a particular group of people is more likely to use different terms, then to discriminate against their terminology is to discriminate against that group. I'm sorry you can't stand that other people don't "love" their job, but why is it any of your business? If they do the job well and are comfortable doing it, then there is no reason to discriminate against them.

AI 12 years ago

The amount of rampant bulshitting here by obviously unqualified people is amazing. If you don't even know that humans do not, in fact, have five senses, I'm not sure I can take your post seriously even as unqualified speculation.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis received seven Grammy nominations and won four (Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Album), two for "Thrift Shop", which also went septuple platinum in the US, multi-platinum in 5 other countries, and sold over 10M copies worldwide. I'd say that's pretty fucking commercial.

Fallacies are irrelevant because there's no reasoning going on here -- the person you're responding to is making a subjective opinion statement, not a formal (or even informal) argument about aesthetics. Their statement doesn't even have a warrant or grounds, so to attack it with a fallacy is nonsensical.

You forgot to mention that the NSA's S-Box tampering actually made it stronger against differential cryptanalysis, which was unknown to the public at that time. It seems like the key size reduction was a compromise for that enhancement. It's an interesting move because it shifts the power from the smartest adversary to the one with the most brute force, perhaps with the assumption that only the U.S. and its allies had access to systems capable of cracking a 56-bit key at the time. That would have made the cipher more secure against other countries that had to rely on cryptanalysis, while still giving them the access they needed if they so desired it.

Just because "Defense" was added later, that doesn't mean it was at some point not a military-oriented organization. 'D' or no 'D', (D)ARPA has always been about improving military technology.

How stupidly self-centered are you? "All academic papers should be written in a way that I can understand no matter whether they would be comprehensible to the intended audience!" What a fucking egomaniac.

I don't think large corporations like Getty and AFP should have the freedom to appropriate peoples' work for profit. When people are quoted, it's usually from an interview or press conference given with the expectation that the words spoken will be used. When someone takes a photo and posts it to Twitter, there is no such expectation. I believe in sweeping copyright reform, don't get me wrong, but I think that copyright reform should shift the balance of power away from huge corporations, not towards them. By allowing big companies to use peoples' work anywhere they want, just as long as they attribute it, you're allowing them to turn even more profit without sharing a dime of that with the people who actually did the work to make it possible (taking the photos). Instead, non-commercial use should be allowed with attribution for any reason, and a standard legal framework for licensing copyrighted works should be established so anyone can take part (sort of how song cover licenses have to be granted).

Is this not Hacker News? Seriously, what the fuck is up with all these closed-minded, anti-hacker comments today? Is HN really just a bunch of knuckle-dragging, startup-fellating retards now?

No, you don't know. As the comment you replied to and misunderstood pointed out, that metaphor was originally used in the context of a SCOTUS ruling which made it a criminal act to distribute anti-draft pamphlets -- a ruling which was overturned in 1969. By continuing to invoke it, you're misunderstanding the original intent and also perpetuating the myth that the phrase has any basis in current U.S. law.

I think you're too quick to dismiss the possibility. The point of parallel construction is that the police construct a plausible (and, more importantly, legal) means of finding the evidence that they used in an investigation that masks its true, illegal origin. More importantly, unlike false flags -- where the only "evidence" for their use is the ravings of conspiracy theorists and some internal suggestions by government officials in the 60's -- parallel construction is a technique that we know the government uses by their own admission.

From Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...):

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. [...]

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."

The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

"It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

Given how they talk about parallel construction, it certainly sounds like it's not an uncommon technique, so do you think it's so implausible? I'm not going to say they did or didn't use it, because the simple fact is that I don't know, but given that "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day" that is "decades old, a bedrock concept," it doesn't seem too implausible that they would use it in such a high profile and important case.

Well, at a minimum, it saves the processing time required to format the text, which lessens the server cost of each page hit. It's a small optimization, but when the vast majority of the users are just coming to the site to read text, I'd imagine it would save a lot of CPU time.