fixermark

It's always interesting to me the number of people who come out on HN to advocate vociferously for ownership of their private data, given that HN doesn't even let you delete your account ;)

https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq/#deleteacc...

If that headline accurately describes the situation, in what sense of the words is it "my data" instead of "data about me?"

+1. When I was a Boy Scout, I had confirmation direct from an FBI agent that once somebody is wanted, the Agency has a long memory and a long reach.

The anecdote he shared was a fugitive fled to Saudi Arabia. Over a decade and a half, the fugitive grew a small business empire and was well-connected. In tandem with allies in Saudi Arabia, the FBI arranged a lavish party on a yacht to which their target was invited. The yacht sailed out to international waters and FBI agents apprehended him and put him on a Navy cruiser out at sea.

It's interesting that it may have been avoidable if he'd accepted rendition to Sweden to stand trial for the sexual assault accusation, given that the previous administration was apparently uninterested in extraditing him for this charge.

He likely made the situation worse by hiding out in the embassy---he became a symbol of something untouchable by American power, and this administration cares more about that sort of perception than the previous one.

If Assange gets extradited on a charge that the previous administration wouldn't push but the administration his organization assisted in getting elected is willing to (because they don't care about such a paltry thing as "endangering the protections provided to freedom of the press by the US Constitution"), it will be the highest of ironies.

First Amendment protections are not extended to non-US citizens.

Why? Every organization has whistleblowers. By the same token that Chelsea Manning leaked the state department cables, one can imagine a middle-tier operative with differing political ideology dropping a hint.

Correct. And would have been entirely unnecessary, because they could just wait him out.

If the goal is deterrence, he works just as well as a symbol rotting in the Ecuadorian embassy as either dead or rotting in jail.

Wikileaks has leaked 10 some-odd documents on Australia, so I don't expect them to go to bat for him.

The problem with being a uniform thorn in everybody's side is you run out of friends.

Or the release of the Vatican letters.

Problem is, Trump says a lot of things that he doesn't mean. Or he forgets, it's a little unclear.

But the American intelligence community appears very interested in the guy and is known to have been working on extradition process in 2018.

If the American intelligence community wants to extradite Assange, I don't doubt somebody high-ranking in the CIA will sit down with the president and by the end of the meeting, have him thoroughly convinced that he's wanted Assange's extradition all along. They have agents trained in psychological operations and negotiation, and Trump is demonstrably an easy mark.

I honestly don't know what assange or wikileaks thought was going to happen when they leaked information that was politically embarrassing to an Ecuadorian ally.

On the plus side, I'm now far more convinced of WikiLeaks' non-partisanship (or naivete), since they threw their own founder under the bus.

If it was, WikiLeaks would have leaked the details by now.

Ah, see, I'm American. ;)

The lane assist can be disabled and a cyclist who hard-brakes in front of me is taking their life in their hands because my Ford only stops if I touch the brake (it just stops as hard as it needs to to minimize risk of impact, regardless of how soft I push the pedal).

(Sidebar: I almost feel like that cyclist game is something that should be solved with more sensors. If it's a common issue, you really want a dash cam to capture their image and report them to police, as inentionally hard-braking to trigger a car safety system is clearly endangering their lives and the lives of the car occupants, since the auto-brake is designed with a bias towards injuring occupants over killing anyone).

I'll be honest, I still prefer it to the world where lack of software kills people.

... I avoided running over that child I couldn't see in my rear-view because the infrared sensors picked him up as a mobile object intersecting my path and the backup warning screamed at me. I like not killing people, so I call that a win.

Not a pilot yet myself, but I know exactly enough about flight physics and control to suspect that while you are likely correct about the MCAS jack-screw positioning being undesired, the solution is probably not to auto-return it to neutral.

If we assume MCAS is only disabled in an emergency, we don't want the result of cutting out an automated system to be further automatic manipulation of the control surfaces, right? That's one more weird behavior for the pilots to have to keep in their situational awareness while doing the most important step (i.e. flying the plane).

This is referred to in the industry as a "Dr. McNinja scenario."

(... nobody refers to it as that ;) ).

While this is true, the point that it's worth thinking through the nature and consequences of "obviously erroneous" sensor data is still a valuable exercise holds.

If the temperature is past 280, generally speaking the same steps to diminish temperature can be taken (... I'm speaking broadly; this may not actually be true of nuclear reactors and if it's not, additional sensors with larger ranges were definitely warranted if there's discontinuity in the safety and disaster mitigation strategies at temps higher than 280).

There is no amount of automatic airplane wing trim that can arrest a 70-degree AOA. When the sensor's getting 70 degrees, the failsafe operation would have been to back out of the control calculation and defer to pilots.

He doesn't seem to be an experienced owner of a home outdoor thermometer though.

Or if he is, I need to know where he found one that goes to 452 degrees and why he even needs that much range. ;)

Google's entire privacy policy is laid out in (by the standards of other documents I've seen) very digestible language. https://policies.google.com/privacy#intro

Beyond that, it's a trust and a penalties-for-violating-policy exercise.

And I agree with you: you can probably tell volumes about how much a company cares about the risk factors based on who they trust. But I don't generally think companies are being ignorant placing their chips on Google---it's a big org with a lot to lose if something goes wrong. That gives it advantages over either smaller competitors or rolling one's own (factoring in that to match the security of a dedicated service's cloud offering while approaching the convenience of such an offering, you basically have to hire your own full-attack-surface-spectrum infosec team, and that's one more line item in a small company's budget).

That's the thing though---given the interface of the law to the question, there are right and wrong things to say and do if one wishes to keep one's job. Paul Graham wrote an essay about "What you can't say" related to this topic (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html); he doesn't say anywhere in the essay that people who say the things you can't say don't suffer consequences. And the NLRB has made pretty clear that in Damore's case, he crossed a line.

We have an entire world of academia to debate issues that the private sector can't touch.

A world built on completely unrestrained speech, surprisingly, is also a world built on fear. Counter-intuitive, but hypothetically: if a workplace has the freedom to openly declare that while they must act to comply with the law, they never voluntarily hire women because they believe women can't do the job as well as men? We have enough research to know the kind of hostile work environment that creates.

Absolutism in either direction is unacceptable; the particulars are debatable.

(... also: are you really equating the notion "homosexuals or transgendered people don't have fundamental differences that make them worse employees" with "women do have fundamental differences that make them worse employees?" I'm calling foul on your false equivalence.)

What information would these IT security staff have that we don't?

The cost-benefit analysis of their individual industries and the risk tolerance of their companies.

At what point does it become Google's responsibility

The last time we tried to push the responsibility onto individual organizations to inform the public of the basics of how the Internet works, we ended up with "This site uses cookies" dialogs popping up redundantly and annoyingly everywhere.

I think I'd rather see the money spent on a public education campaign, not unlike the US Health and Human Services videos of the 1950s. While hokey and hilarious by modern standards, they provided a real service in helping Americans reconcile with rapid advances in technology and hygiene (including now "common sense" ideas such as "Don't play in construction sites" and "Drinking and driving are dangerous").

Perhaps the security staff are convinced that either Google doesn't actually have access to it in any practically-concerning sense (https://www.quora.com/Can-Google-open-and-see-files-in-my-Go...), or the risks associated with that access are negligible?

I think you've hit on a very interesting point. The fact that IT security staff (with careers and reputations on the line) do sign off on companies using Google's platform for business applications that include passing sensitive data around might indicate that our assessment of the risk model is flawed?

Privacy isn't a morality question for most users. If it were, we would expect to see more people up in arms about demographic surveys instead of willfully participating in them.

I'm looking for numbers on tickets sold but I don't know how to get them easily.

Honestly, part of the problem may be that audiences for movies self-select for what they want to see, and there may be an upper bound on how many people you can pull in for a psychological thriller. That seems to echo the issue with online privacy in general---the hard first step is getting people to care, at all.

Does Libre Office allow for simultaneous collaborative editing by multiple users and seamless passing of current version by passing a URL around? Does it require correct set up and maintenance of a Linux installation (which has gotten a lot simpler in the past 20-odd-years, but still requires more than its fair share of technical expertise), or can it be used by anyone with a web browser, regardless of operating system or installed software configuration (save, of course, the web browser)?

If not, it's definitely an option but I'd generally anticipate it'll lose out in userbase to the alternative that has those features.

It was called "The Circle," it came out in 2017, and it did $40.7 million at the box office on a budget of $18 million.

Not only did we do it to ourselves, we're mostly enjoying and benefitting from it. The alternative (where all software is pay-to-play) actually shuts out the vast bulk of the world's population that doesn't have chips to play yet.