mbgaxyz

Serious question, is there a blacklist of people deemed undesirable, being shared amongst Silicon Valley firms?

"Introduction

1. Twitter is an information content provider. Twitter creates and develops content, in whole or in part, through a combination of means: (a) by explicit censorship of viewpoints with which it disagrees, (b) by shadow-banning conservatives, such as Plaintiff, (c) by knowingly hosting and monetizing content that is clearly abusive, hateful and defamatory – providing both a voice and financial incentive to the defamers – thereby facilitating defamation on its platform, (d) by completely ignoring lawful complaints about offensive content and by allowing that content to remain accessible to the public, and (e) by intentionally abandoning and refusing to enforce its so-called Terms of Service and Twitter Rules – essentially refusing to self-regulate – thereby selectively amplifying the message of defamers such as Mair, Devin Nunes’ Mom and Devin Nunes’ cow, and materially contributing to the libelousness of the hundreds of posts at issue in this action.

2. Twitter created and developed the content at issue in this case by transforming false accusations of criminal conduct, imputed wrongdoing, dishonesty and lack of integrity into a publicly available commodity used by unscrupulous political operatives and their donor/clients as a weapon. Twitter knew the defamation was (and is) happening. Twitter let it happen because Twitter had (and has) a political agenda and motive: Twitter allowed (and allows) its platform to serve as a portal of defamation in order to undermine public confidence in Plaintiff and to benefit his opponents and opponents of the Republican Party. In this case, Twitter contributed materially to the illegal conduct of defamers Mair, Devin Nunes’ Mom and Devin Nunes’ cow. Twitter, by its actions, intended to generate and proliferate the false and defamatory statements about Plaintiff in order to influence the outcome of the 2018 Congressional election and to intimidate Plaintiff and interfere with his important investigation of corruption by the Clinton campaign and alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential Election. Twitter knowingly acted as a vessel of opposition research."

Patrick Moore writes:

"@Google has removed my photo and name from the "Founders of @Greenpeace". It was still there 2 days ago but now I am erased. Tech Tyranny!!..." https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1106924843189055488

"I was listed as a founder of @Greenpeace on their own websites for 20 years after I left. They only disowned me when I came out in favour of nuclear energy." https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1106654161788198918

Meanwhile Greenpeace USA writes:

"Patrick Moore was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. He does not represent Greenpeace. He is a paid lobbyist, not an independent source..." https://twitter.com/greenpeaceusa/status/1105445951039303680

Wayback machine shows Patrick Moore listed as being a founder:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060514012451/http://www.greenp...

Perhaps the issue hinges on how one defines "co-founder" and what was or what became Greenpeace. It could be that both parties are correct in their interpretation.

"...Greenpeace was incorporated in May, 1972, more than a year after I joined the Don't Make a Wave Committee. I was a founding director of the new organization..." https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1106023923597172736

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-10/ethiop...

A software update intended to fix the problem identified in the Lion Air crash still hasn’t been rolled out. The fact that the crew on Flight 610 are likely to have been aware of the known issues with the aircraft, too, raises the more worrying possibility that there’s an unknown complication.

https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the-boeing...

The relocated engines and their refined nacelle shape caused an upward pitching moment -- in essence, the Max's nose was getting nudged skyward... putting the aircraft at risk of stalling, according to a series of questions and answers provided to pilots at Southwest Airlines. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System(MCAS) was designed to address this.

"Unfortunately, Apple's butterfly-switch keyboards have a troubled history of failure — littered with users shooting compressed air at stuck, unresponsive keys. There have even been a couple of class-action lawsuits. ... Apple's been decidedly mum on the reliability of its 2018 MacBook keyboards. From what we've seen, though, Apple is trying to fix the situation: leaked documents explain how the 3rd-gen keys have a membrane layer (the existence of which was confirmed in an iFixit teardown) under the keys would protect the switches from debris. But flaws, apparently, still linger."

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/2018-macbook-air-keyboard...

Users reporting problems here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/9x700s/new_macbook_air...

Tangential point... is it accurate for the project to describe itself as a "pure-Rust implementation of the QUIC protocol" when it uses platform dependent unsafe code? https://github.com/djc/quinn/blob/ce514af89a73f530e1366e79e5...

From article:

Our team created email addresses with different email providers and signed up for the email lists of around fifty different candidates, committees, and political nonprofits. In the month leading up to the election, we tracked how many emails were sent from each entity, and what percentage of those emails made it into our inbox.

In Nevada, Democrat Jacky Rosen averaged over 90% placement in inboxes, compared to Dean Heller’s over 90% placement in spam.

In Florida, 100% of Republican Rick Scott’s emails went to spam in Yahoo, while 100% of Bill Nelson’s emails went to our Yahoo inbox.

While these were the most dramatic examples, this pattern emerged in every toss-up Senate race we tracked.

The 9 percent tax will hit PlayStation services on November 14 ... PlayStation isn't the only digital service affected by Chicago's Amusement Tax. Spotify, Netflix, and Xbox are all subjected to the same taxes enacted under mayor Rahm Emanuel and has seen Netflix raise subscription prices in Chicago. ... The tax isn't popular in the city of Chicago, but Emanuel says the taxes are necessary to shore up the city's pensions. Several companies like Apple and Netflix are taking action against the city for the taxes, but until any changes are made PlayStation gamers are now subject to the same tax as other amusement activities.

From Ian Grigg's latest blog post:

Such a chama was Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s apparent from what is now publicly known that the famous team worked in both excessive secrecy but very high trust. This handful of professionals from the Internet security field contributed jointly and separately to code, keys, design, vision, business, documentation, communications and opsec. As a common enterprise with a shared goal, enveloped in a dangerous environment, the Satoshi Nakamotii, various, faced more or less the same challenges that the members of any chama would face in Kibera: work in secret, protect the assets or be robbed and destroyed. Stay close to the vision, stay the long path, and in perhaps the ultimate irony, don’t allow personalities to be swayed by success.

You don’t have to believe me that Satoshi Nakamoto was a chama — and the surviving members may also be bemused and disagreeable. I care little for their bemusement or your disbelief, as being bemused and disagreeable is just evidence of a twitter handle or a reddit post and most people out there are incapable of dealing with that simple scientific logic: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

For reference, the same author posted in May 2016:

"SATOSHI IS DEAD - LONG LIVE SATOSHI - TEAM LEADER COMES OUT"

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001593.html

Replace "people" with "politicians" and I'll give you an upvote.

Maybe office workers prefer not to have to run the gauntlet of feces and hypodermic needles, just to buy a sandwich.

"San Francisco Man Steps on Hydodermic Needle, Demands Action"

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/on-air/as-seen-on/SF-Businesses-W...

"Junkies Take Over Corridors Of San Francisco Civic Center BART Station"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk

"SF Crime, Squalor Scares Away $40 Million Medical Convention"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLcoOIDJBsc

SF Mayor: 'There's More Feces ... Than I've Ever Seen'

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/SF-Mayor-Theres-more-f...

Coinbase has suspended service.

https://twitter.com/WikiLeaksShop/status/987510235349663744?...

Hmm, also this:

https://www.coindesk.com/cryptos-biggest-icos-stay-silent-se...

Source?

It references @iotatoken which is the official twitter feed for IOTA.

Where is the code which exploits the supposed vulnerability in IOTA?

After all, there are code samples available today which demonstrate the SPECTRE and MELTDOWN attacks.

What is a "real thing"?

Like Bosch using IOTA to build smart cities in China?

https://twitter.com/BoschPresse/status/968479596868980737

IOTA co-founder, Sergey Ivancheglo aka Come-from-Beyond, has an open invitation for cryptographers to discuss this issue on his blog:

"Intermediate summary of Heilman et al. claims about the security of a previous version of IOTA signature scheme"

https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/intermediate-summary-of-h...

Also from IOTA foundation statement:

"Whether intentional or not, DCI’s report and subsequent refusal to follow proper disclosure procedure have caused misinformation about IOTA to continue circulating on social media. The latest round of attacks on Twitter attempts to undermine our recently announced corporate relationships — we find these attacks equally reprehensible. There is a reason why following proper disclosure protocols is so important, and we can only speculate as to why DCI refuses to comply.

We have spent much more time than we intended to on discussing this issue ad nauseum, and we would like to put it to bed. However, we can’t do that without help from the DCI team. To that end, we propose the following:

We hereby formally request DCI to complete the proper disclosure protocols: we call on Ethan, Neha and their team to release any and all code, documentation, research, etc., they have developed in conjunction with their findings.

If DCI are unable or unwilling to release all of the aforementioned documents, we call on them to retract their report fully and issue a brief apology, after which we will drop the subject entirely with no harm done.

If DCI do clarify and disclose their results fully, and a substantial and legitimate vulnerability is found, we will happily eat a slice of humble pie. We will own up to our mistake and apologize for it, thank them for helping us to improve the IOTA protocol, and reiterate our offer of a bounty reward as a token of our gratitude."

https://blog.iota.org/official-statement-regarding-the-mit-d...

In a later response, IOTA also appeal to authority...

Did you receive the invite? We can also setup a chat with our ex-NSA post-Quantum hash function experts after we get the initial confusion out of the way.

Interesting to see the range of opinions about IOTA.

The conclusions on HN are (so far) completely at odds from those on the cryptocurrency subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full...

Meanwhile the commercial world seems happy to engage with IOTA:

"Volkswagen CDO will join the supervisory board of the IOTA foundation. And now, Volkswagen is going to utilise this technology in their automobiles." -- https://coingape.com/iota-volkswagen-partnership-raises-hope...

"Bosch makes first investment in distributed ledger technology, purchase of IOTA tokens to support creation of new business models for the Internet of Things" -- http://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/robert-bosch-ve...

"Taiwan's capital city of Taipei is working with the IOTA Foundation to bring Tangle - IOTA's answer to blockchain - to its citizen identification plans." -- https://www.coindesk.com/city-of-taipei-confirms-its-testing...

So what to make of all this?

Did you read the emails? Your conclusion is the opposite of nearly all the comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full...

PAYWALL:

New Oxford exam times help women

An extension to the time allowed for all maths undergraduates to sit papers has boosted the grades of female students

Oxford University students were given longer to complete exams for the first time last summer in an effort to help women achieve higher grades.

Extended durations for exams have been introduced by the mathematical and computer sciences departments in response to a growing gender gap, especially in final year exams.

Undergraduates were given 105 minutes to complete papers rather than 90 minutes “with no change in length or difficulty of questions”. The university said women did better as a result.

It is hoped the change will reduce “the undue effects of time pressure”, which is thought to have more of an impact on female students than male ones.

Helen Zha, a member of Oxford’s Mirzakhani Society for women studying maths, said female undergraduates were more likely to experience problem-solving difficulties when male students were in the same room.

She said: “One thing I’ve heard and felt is that where there are more males in the room, women will . . . perform worse than they would otherwise.”

The change to maths exams follows a decision by the history department to replace a traditional exam with a “take-home” paper, also done in an effort to try to boost results for female students. The move was criticised as “sexist” by some academics for implying that women were the “weaker sex”.

Of all subjects at Oxford, maths has one of the biggest gender variations in results. Just seven female maths finalists achieved firsts last year compared with 45 men. This means that 21.2% of women on the course graduated with first-class degrees against 45.5% of men.

Maths dons at Oxford looked at whether “shorter exams may particularly disadvantage women” and pointed out that exams were not supposed to be “a time trial”.

Internal documents obtained under freedom of information laws show the decision to extend the time of examination papers “with no change in length or difficulty of questions” had the intention of reducing the disadvantage to “students most sensitive to time pressure and stress”.

The document said: “It is thought that this might mitigate the gender gap that has arisen in recent years, and in any case the exam should be a demonstration of mathematical understanding and not a time trial.”

It is widely accepted that there are no inherent gender differences in mathematical ability or intelligence. However, Sarah Hart, a maths professor at Birkbeck, University of London and an Oxford graduate, said she had noticed a tendency for female students to double-check their answers in their heads before suggesting them to class.

Male students were quicker to answer questions, she said, but were more likely to get the answer wrong.

She added: “I am a big fan of giving people as much time as they want to do exams. After all, you never have to prove theorems against the clock in real life so mere speed is not what we want to assess.”

Oxford University said: “The departments are not drawing any firm conclusions from the first year’s data. However, third-year female students did show an improvement on their second-year marks. While there is clearly more progress to be made, the departments will continue with the longer papers for the foreseeable future, monitoring the exam data carefully.”

Archived here: http://archive.is/jDXeY

From article:

The row with the hotel chain started on Tuesday when a Chinese-language questionnaire it emailed to its customers referred to Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan as independent countries. News of the error travelled rapidly online and triggered a backlash from Chinese internet users, who called for a boycott of the company.

Marriott’s troubles deepened after social media users spotted that the Twitter account for its loyalty programme had “liked” and shared the Friends of Tibet post after the company had apologised for its initial gaffe.

The hotel chain was not the only company to be accused of disrespecting China’s sovereignty, however. Shanghai-based news portal Thepaper.cn reported on Saturday that on the websites of 24 airlines, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan were all listed as countries.

ACM fellow leading research and development, stock exchange running pilots, access to a platform of 1 billion people... there's serious work going on in these projects. It's a bit unfair to label them as "Beanie Babies".

From article:

Joseph Grundfest, who was a commissioner at the S.E.C. in the 1980s and is now a law and business professor at Stanford, said he had been contacting current commission officials and staff to urge them to bring cases, and fast.

“I.C.O.s represent the most pervasive, open and notorious violation of federal securities laws since the Code of Hammurabi,” Mr. Grundfest said in an interview.

“It’s more than the extent of the violation,” he said. “It’s the almost comedic quality of the violation.”

...

“We’re waiting to see a whole bunch of enforcement actions in this space, and we wonder why they haven’t happened yet,” he said. “I hope what they are doing is planning on a sweep of 50 I.C.O.s.”

From website:

"Served as co-lead counsel for the largest settlement in world history against Big Tobacco, and at the time the largest automotive, antitrust, ERISA and securities settlements in U.S. history."

https://www.hbsslaw.com/attorneys/managing-partner/steve-w-b...

State of Washington, et al. v. Philip Morris, et al. $206 billion / Hagens Berman represented 13 states in the largest recovery in litigation history.

Visa-Mastercard Antitrust Litigation $27 billion / The firm served as co-lead counsel in what was then the largest antitrust settlement in history.

Volkswagen Emissions Litigation $14.7 billion / Member of the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee in the VW consumer litigation and part of the Settlement Negotiating team

E-books Antitrust $560 million / The firm took on Apple and five of the nation's largest publishing companies in an antitrust class action regarding e-book price-fixing.

Charles Schwab Securities Litigation $235 million / The firm was lead counsel in this action alleging fraud in the management of the Schwab YieldPlus mutual fund; a class settlement was approved by the court.

https://www.hbsslaw.com/success-record/victories-and-settlem...

Bitcoin Futures start trading on the CME in the next few weeks:

http://www.cmegroup.com/bitcoin

However the largest electronic brokerage in the US considers it unwise:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/cme-clearing-member-to-regula...

TLDR (from article)

But now that we are seeing these slightly bigger blocks, claims are being made that segwit’s method of increasing capacity is actually very inefficient.

In comparing some numbers the 1.6MB block had:

  Block size: 1602023
  Number of transactions: 833
  Input count + Output count: 11073
  Bytes per IO address: 144

  Block size: 999931
  Number of transactions: 2110
  Input count + Output count: 10574
  Bytes per IO address: 95