busterarm

Well, in the jurisdictions that I care about the courts and lawmakers have already decided this and the legal requirement is to report.

If its your license to practice on the line you know what choice you're going to make.

I think you're demonstrating incredibly poor judgment here. CSAM is a crime with real victims. Even if your patient came across it innocently, someone is out there intentionally distributing it and that needs to be investigated.

No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate.

Honestly shocked that anyone would even say this, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt here -- the one case where I could imagine this might not happen would be if you're a police officer investigating such cases. But they also have their own therapists dedicated/trained in police-specific issues.

No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.

And therapists are legally mandated to report you if you told them you viewed or possessed CSAM.

I wasn't even complaining about either. I use both. I just think it's pointless to bitch about other people gambling with their own lives.

If someone wants to win a Darwin award, let them. Because you can just as easily do all the right things and get taken out regardless.

Also the whole thing is just weird to me. The woman's parents, the kid just out of the college and the two young children aren't going to be paying the mortgage, upkeep and property taxes.

Once those stop getting paid, none of those people are housed. This is tracking things that don't matter.

I'll never forget this one video. A cyclist riding with a helmet on was doing everything proper -- helmeted, obeying traffic laws, riding in the proper part of the road...

Then a city bus passes them far too close. The passenger side mirror of the bus catches the rider's helmet and speeds off...carrying the cyclist off of their bike and dangling by their helmet at speed...

I'm advocating for people having enough experience and foresight to understand which 20% of the code flow is Architecture from which is just feature factory work and making sure that 20% gets 80% of the design thinking and timely preventative maintenance.

This is true until you're at a company that is a feature factory and nearly exclusively hires out of universities and struggles to work industry hires into their culture. And these tend to make up a glut of the companies a rung or two below the FAANGs/MANGO.

Bike shedding means no decision is made. That is the worst possible outcome as it provides absolutely zero value.

And "bike shedding" is now a term that people hyperbolically apply to any discussion of something the labelling-participant doesn't really care about. A lot of times doing nothing is actually the best business outcome. Waiting until you have more, better information is great.

Lots of stakeholders ask for things that they think matter and then realize two weeks later doesn't and a ton of man hours have already been spent trying to build those skateboards as fast as possible.

Even the timezone example isn’t really that material IMO. Sure, it’s an extra annoyance to normalize timestamps to locale in every app/debugging query. But in the end it’s just not that big of a deal.

Oh god are you underestimating the long term impact of data not being stored in UTC. For one, it will be a perfectly reasonable thing that your engineers forget this fact and build new systems in UTC, because that's the reasonable thing to do. Also as the years go on your company will make acquisitions of other companies and whatever timezones their data is stored in (hopefully UTC but obviously not always). To properly integrate this data you have to determine for every timestamp whether there was Daylight Savings Time happening at the time on every single object. You also have to figure out all kinds of edge cases around leap seconds.

Otherwise you have a ton of data that's out of chronology. Pity you if that's a thing that matters to you (it almost certainly does).

Also maybe you're lucky enough to be in a position to modify timestamps of all of your objects in all your datastores without significant engineering effort and coordination...but probably not. Obviously the reason the company I mentioned hasn't done it is because they're in that position...

But say you don't want to "fix it" and just want to do this "on every query"...now this process above is something you have to do across maybe thousands of services for potentially every request...

No big deal, he says...

People often say the same thing about environmental regulation too...

I hope you realize what a poor argument (to lawmakers) that is, especially if your goal is to advocate for privacy.

He’s not exactly wrong either. The founders/executives of a tech startup I worked for spun off a completely unrelated E2EE chat app as a separate startup and didn’t market it to anyone.

It’s only used by them and their buddies and basically only for OTR conversations related to their publicly traded company that would have put them in prison. Totally the “let’s defraud these investors and do industrial espionage” type shit. I also know about a good half dozen other VC-funded E2EE chat apps that are also exactly this.

They do it just to get something they control in app stores that’s also a separate entity. Then they don’t have to answer uncomfortable questions about why such and such is on their phone.

This is some of what regulators are seeing and finding a problem with.

He already previously qualified tech bros as people who literally built technology and a whole industry in the US that the EU did not build.

The advocating for privacy is the cherry on top. And I never said their work was insignificant. It’s just not foundational — not something I’ve built my own career on the back of — and the primary association that you would have with any of them is going to be advocacy.

Radia is also absolutely a privacy advocate and literally wrote the book (as usual) on the intersection between Network Security and Privacy…

Maybe she would been better served spending all her time building a Twitter following and working on press releases.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the idea. I pretty much follow a lot of what you're saying without giving it names. I'm just used to people giving lip service to certain ideas as an excuse to move with less friction in their org and end up doing long-term organizational damage.

Thank you for the added detail.

The product roadmap is now and has ever been complete bullshit. Refactoring teaches that you amortize rework across all new stories. That's just how it goes.

Also agree, but teams use sprints and "the roadmap" as a way to say no to fixing bottlenecks they've created for other teams and don't want to take the time and effort to resolve.

Like half this list + Meredith are lawyers/policy people. Add in computer security specialists/operators. They use software as a tool to achieve political ends.

"tech bros" in context of the article is pretty much referring to builders of software. The tech sisters who have built significant projects are indeed mythically rare.

Names like Radia Perlman might be a better choice.

Really? I'm overwhelmingly seeing people just complain and call him a crank without really making any arguments. There are some arguments but it isn't the majority of the comments, or even what I was responding to.

This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them.

I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone.

They are still using EST today even when they have global sharding of their customers/databases between US, EU, LATAM, SEA...

--- you're also assuming that the product roadmap will afford your engineers any time to build it the second, third, fourth, etc. time.

It's extraordinary to me how highly intelligent people can't tell the difference between saying "don't this because people don't have the right to do it" and "don't do this because even if you're correct you'll go to prison for it".

That's the difference he's pointing out in your linked article. There's nothing "anti-E2E" about that piece that he wrote. He says explicitly that people can have whatever standard of encryption they're comfortable with in the post. His piece is entirely about letting all parties to communication decide their limits on privacy. It's a solution that lets people maintain their rights, lets businesses stay compliant with the law and also meets with political reality.

The staunch privacy advocates acting like privacy has to be all or none are right but not in the way they believe. If you continue to build privacy technology where the only option is total privacy then don't be surprised when nation states take all of your privacy away. There's no privacy in prison.

Also you can be totally justified in working on such tools, but western liberal governments will still imprison you for it. Hell, a guy sat in jail for four years just for ignoring a court order to unlock his phone (United States v. Rawls). He won the appeal but still sat in prison and judges can do that. That's kinda the point of the article.

phk is doing nothing more than telling people the temperature of the room outside of their bubble.

I guess tech has grown too large and fractured and maybe most working software engineers are too young to be familiar with phk and his points of view.

He's been a strong privacy and FOSS advocate for decades and has more credibility on both of these topics than nearly anyone on this board.

He also has an account and comments frequently. phkamp. I suggest reading some of his comments before making judgment.

So many kneejerk and nuance-less opinions. Absolutely hilarious that people are thinking the guy who wrote MD5crypt and BSD Jails is anti-privacy.

Also eye opening watching how many people are getting frothing-at-the-mouth mad seeing somebody with that pedigree coming to different conclusions than they do.

None of the ones you're thinking of. PHK is Danish. Danish politics and society at large leans pretty left. Even what you might call the rightwing party there consider themselves as bourgeois-liberal, or "not-socialist". The farthest they'd generally position themselves is center-right.

Except for shit like Stram Kurs, which nobody really supports or tolerates.

I think people also underestimate what a serious obligation this can be.

I'm taking care of an elderly parent with dementia who cannot afford the care that they need. It costs me significant time and money. It has completely stalled my career. I'm not actually getting anything from them and it's worse than taking care of a newborn baby.

It's interesting because I'm around the age where most of my peers are dealing with something like this and it's something I'd never heard talked about seriously even once my whole life. I was totally unprepared for it and it seems to be a thing that large numbers of people are quietly suffering with. It has given me a lot of empathy for people who I may have judged as underperformers, etc.

The laws not stopping the criminals isn't the point. People are calling on their governments to do something and thus governments are going to do what they are going to do.

It's a mix of what they can do and what they're likely to do. They just have to be able to go back to voters and say they're doing something.

If you think that the fact that they did the wrong thing is an argument for not doing anything, you clearly are blind to politics & history.

And age verification being the wrong solution to the "privacy problem" doesn't remove privacy from lawmakers' crosshairs.

It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large.

Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals.

Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can't just bury your head in the sand. The whole point was saying that there could have been a middle ground that protected more of your rights than where you're at now if it weren't for the absolutism.

Turns out that being an absolutist isn't helpful.

Boomers can be trust fund babies too.

Yeah I don't even judge them poorly for making that decision, I just come to different conclusions.

Now I think there are plenty of other reasons not to work for Google or Facebook so I guess I end up in the same place for different motivations.

Fair comment and thank you.

"Freedom of movement" is a fairly loaded term, but is defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is: - "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state." - "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Freedom of movement isn't the right to go live anywhere you want across any national jurisdiction (although some people/organizations would disagree, but that just doesn't survive any legal test). Every nation on the planet has very explicit rules around this. Even the unrecognized ones.

I guess I don't necessarily agree with elected officials systematically not enforcing laws that they don't agree with. It's hard to be rigid about this when there's things like Executive Orders, but I'm very pro "Change the law". And admittedly that's very difficult and it should be so -- new law should be hard to get to.

This process happens all the way from the local to national level, but we have terrible governance. Every structure seems to be abdicating its responsibility and overreaching in one way or another. It's precisely in these conditions that I think leaning into rule of law is more important than ever.

Otherwise we're just playing Whose Country Is It Anyway? Where the rules are made up and your rights don't matter. I also feel that this should be a compelling enough argument regardless of your political persuasion, but we've gone just about completely tribalist.

some comment you edited out where you said I'm heartless and spineless.

And I know what it's like to live in a place without adequate law enforcement and/or military.

Personal insults and calling me mentally ill. Are you projecting?

Apparently willingness to work at Palantir or Anduril or other defense contractors makes me irredeemably evil. I'm sure you're real fun at parties.

Tbh, I'm glad though. I'm really great at what I do and have had a long and successful career. We need more hiring filters and I don't want coworkers with deeply skewed perspectives, inadequate objectivity and who cannot coexist with those of different world-views. Self-filtering is the cheapest and best kind.

Same to you I guess? The world is not a black and white place. Rigorous self-defense is not evil.

I chose to be vulnerable and honest knowing what kind of responses I would get and the guidelines of this board call for assuming good faith. It's discourse like yours that is inflaming and ruining our society.

I didn't even endorse any specific actions here, I'm just not meeting your moral threshold based on your interpretation of some pretty thinly-detailed comments that I made.

You also can't influence the game if you're not a player so opting out of working in the entire defense industry is probably against your interests.

No, they would just walked all over by the 2% who have no principles whatsoever. Kind of like what's happening already.

Principles are only good up until they enable you to be systematically victimized.

On the upside, I guess maybe DeepMind is hiring.

... I'm sure I'll get flamed into oblivion for this but it's weird to me how the zeitgeist is anti-colonialism but also against enforcing borders and national sovereignty. I guess maybe they are okay with it unless you're a western nation. Whatever, there's no room for nuanced opinions anymore in modern online discourse.

I'll admit to being a weird outlier on this. I may not like what certain parts of the government are doing but I'd go work for the Voldemort companies in a heartbeat -- they just require in-office and aren't anywhere near me. I'd rather my nation develop the best technologies than let other nations do it.

Just look at how far behind the eurozone is by not making the right investments.

Seek help.