zerebubuth

This looks really interesting. What do you think the license of the articles should be?

I don't think we can assume it's within 1 hour of being reported. The press release also says:

In addition to referrals, internet companies should implement proactive measures, including automated detection, to effectively and swiftly remove or disable terrorist content and stop it from reappearing once it has been removed.

To me, that sounds a lot like they're willing to mandate AI detection in order to "solve" the "team is asleep" problem. They suggest this might be yet another rent-seeking opportunity for big internet platforms:

To assist smaller platforms, companies should share and optimise appropriate technological tools and put in place working arrangements for better cooperation with the relevant authorities, including Europol.

No doubt, some "helpful" authorities will provide an "appropriate technological tool" to help. No need for the government to break Perfect Forward Secrecy if every site is giving it clear-text access to all uploaded content.

I think there's a big difference between "everyone else is awful", "there's statistically enough awful individuals" and "every driver is trying to kill me". Only the last one of those is going to lead me to incorrectly blame a whole group.

I agree that a statistically significant subset of drivers cause problems (and a statistically significant subset of cyclists, too), but the vast majority of individual drivers (and cyclists) are safe and do not deserve to be grouped in with the the problem-causers.

I wonder if part of the problem might be a natural tendency to generalise bad behaviour of a small number onto the whole group?

For example, I might see several instances of individual cyclists running red lights and generalise that to "all cyclists run red lights". Or see several instances of individual motorists "dooring" cyclists and generalise that to "all motorists are dangerously inconsiderate".

It's probably easy to go from that generalisation to an overt dislike of the other group. Therefore, I try to force myself to attribute bad behaviour to the individual rather than any groups they might be a member of.

Sounds a lot like the "on the fly parsing" (§3.1) in Alagiannis' NoDB (See https://stratos.seas.harvard.edu/files/stratos/files/nodb-ca... for details).

I think you're absolutely correct!

In each round, I reckon the optimal strategy for the "cut" will likely be the same as partisan cuts are now; densely pack the opposition's supporters into a small number of districts, while slicing the rest up to have a small but stable majority for one's own party.

This gives the opposition the chance to choose/freeze either a district they know they'll win, or a district they're pretty sure they won't win. I would choose the one I know my party would win, and redraw to pack all my opposition's voters into as few districts as possible.

If this is repeated a few times, the map ends up with many safe districts for each party and a small number of "left-overs" which will be contested. This means parties will have an incentive to concentrate on the small number of voters in the few contestable districts, at the expense of probably the majority of voters. It doesn't seem like a recipe for every vote counting and voters' voices being listened to.

If we break up monopoly businesses when the lack of choice increases the cost to consumers, should we also break up monopoly parties when the lack of choice increases the "cost" in time and effort that voters must "spend" to get their issues dealt with?

Do you think it might work to tell Facebook that in a year's time they'll be broken up into (for example) 5 separate companies, and their users will be assigned at random to one of those parts but must also be allowed to move between them at will?

That gives Facebook engineers a year to design and implement a federated API that would work seamlessly. If reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing was required on the API standards, then possibly others could interoperate with it too. Hopefully the mini-Facebooks could start to differentiate themselves through features, price, privacy, etc...

I'm glad you found them useful! The code which made all the metro extracts was embedded as a Chef recipe, although I'm sure you could just extract the bits which do stuff from the Chef wrappers: https://github.com/mapzen/chef-metroextractor

Mapzen, a now sadly defunct mapping startup, also had an awesome (if I say so myself - I used to work there, but not on that team) vector tile renderer for browser and mobile. Check it out at https://github.com/tangrams

Also, there was a great interactive style editor (https://github.com/tangrams/tangram-play), although it seems the demo site is broken now :-(

Mapzen, a now sadly defunct mapping startup, released all of its software open-source, including WebGL mobile and browser SDKs, map tile rendering, search and routing. Take a look at:

https://github.com/tangrams/

https://github.com/tilezen/

https://github.com/valhalla/

https://github.com/pelias/

(Full disclosure: used to work at Mapzen)

One method for making a copy or crawl very difficult to tamper with is to publish a hash somewhere difficult to forge (e.g: in a national newspaper or opentimestamps). That won't prove the copy wasn't manipulated before it was archived, though. For that, we would need multiple, independent archives.

This is effectively what libraries have been doing for many years with their archives of newspapers.

for me the solution was to find social circles beyond work. For me I have my church community and also meetup groups with other developers in a similar field.

I think you are exactly right. Additionally, I think having a variety of social circles beyond work can help broaden one's support network, which can reduce the disruption of changing jobs or being let go. And it's fun to have a wider variety of friends with common interests.

This is why I subscribe to an independent review and consumer advice service / magazine. Money, even in small amounts, seems to distort reviews. Before I trust a review I want to know where the money that paid for it came from.

Like many new technologies, it can be used for both good and bad. Harnessing nuclear reactions can be used to generate massive amounts of electricity, or to level cities. What's important is that it's regulated, not that it's banned.

I worry that, as we already see with NSA, GHCQ and friends, governments won't be quick to regulate a huge source of information that they can tap, and a source of technology that they can use for themselves. Recent history would seem to indicate that governments see the potential for state use of these techniques, but overlook the much wider scope for criminal uses of them. (E.g: Reliable facial recognition and pervasive tracking seems like it would make undercover police work much harder.)

Having a stockpile of nuclear weapons feels like an innately dangerous thing, whereas having a computer system tracking everyone for auguries of pre-crime is light-hearted enough that it's the central plot premise of a major TV show. Many politicians are who are rightly wary of the destructive power of nuclear technology may not see the same dangers in computer vision or pervasive surveillance.

If you asked users to mark stories they considered fake, some would mark info wars and some would mark huff post.

It's possible that's the right answer, and that there should be more scepticism of stories from both of those sources.

Fake news didn't start online, though. There have been many paper publications which lie outside of mainstream scientific and ideological orthodoxy, e.g: Fortean Times, Daily Worker, Sunday Sport, which today we might call "fake news". Some of these had quite wide circulations and were available in many shops, and yet didn't precipitate any kind of crisis.

It would seem that fake news is perhaps a symptom of something deeper. It's possible that the mainstream press has lost the authority to suppress the fringes as public figures have learned to control their image in the media more (i.e: spin), presenting at least the appearance of collusion.

EDIT: It would appear that Joseph Pulitzer, creator of the prestigious journalism prize, was deeply involved in the rise of "yellow journalism", the "fake news" of the 1890s. Perhaps in a century from now, journalists will covet the Bannon Prize?

Wow! That's really impressive. Seems like a _lot_ of work and ingenuity went into this.

It's great that large, corporate projects like Chrome OS are attracting the sustained attention necessary to find bugs such as this one. But I worry that projects without such deep pockets are crowded out, leaving bugs unreported. Are many people doing security audits of open source projects without bug bounties?

Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates

Not always. The share of wealth owned by the top 10% in the USA fell between 1932 and 1952, and again between 1962 and 1985 [1].

[1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf#page56

If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move.

A possible problem might be that a failing area is likely to be undesirable and therefore have low property prices and concomitant taxes. Moving to a more desirable area might be unaffordable. Many people have a strong emotional connection to their home, and would find it difficult to sell it (perhaps at a considerably lower price than they think it is worth) and move somewhere smaller.

Further, there may be people who are "post-economy" in the sense that they have retired. From their point of view, they've paid their dues and have no need to follow the jobs any more. They may have built up local social ties that they don't want to sever by moving.

My point isn't that failing places need to be propped up indefinitely, but that there's a middle ground between "successful, valuable" things and "failing, worthless" things. And there are infrastructure projects (e.g: rural broadband) which can help retain jobs and communities in "failing" places relatively cheaply.

I absolutely agree that Wallaroo Labs wrote the code, and they get to decide what license is on it. It is, as you say, their business.

And don't forget that programmers need to eat too. "Widely used" does not directly translate to "making tons of money".

I hadn't forgotten that; I wish every success to Wallaroo Labs, and hope that they are soon "making tons of money". I think their product could be very exciting.

Personally, I think their product would be even more exciting if it were fully open source. I think more people and companies would get involved, and that this would accelerate development and adoption. There are other business models which could support this (paid support, hosted instances, etc...) which are not incompatible with the software being fully open source.

Ultimately, the decision belongs to Wallaroo Labs. Their assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the available business models is clearly different from mine.

I think that one of the great benefits to open source platforms such as PostgreSQL, Hadoop, Kafka and others is that their open license guarantees no vendor lock-in. This means users can relax in the knowledge that the platform won't disappear if the original company disappears (or hikes prices), and means that it's possible to support the platform forever - even if that means bringing it in-house.

The Wallaroo license seems to be non-free, which I think is very unfortunate and a misses an opportunity to be more widely used: https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2017/09/open-sourcing-wallaroo...

I wasn't suggesting that anyone define or prove a "market rate" for intangibles. I agree that would be a waste of time. The reason I mentioned it was as a contrast to IP licenses, for which no market exists.

Profits are subject to tax, as are people's incomes, consumer sales, assets such as cars, TVs and homes, and goods which cross customs borders. I was suggesting that another tax (or duty) be created to discourage the offsetting of profits using IP licenses.

I thought that a necessary part of the "Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich" was that a company in a tax haven can license IP to its subsidiary at an arbitrary price. Therefore, that company can offset any profit its own subsidiary might make.

To do this requires two things:

1. That the license arrangement with the subsidiary is unique to that subsidiary.

2. That the license fee can be set to any value at any time.

For more concrete assets, for example a bag of coffee beans, it's easier to see when a parent company charges a subsidiary a different amount than the market rate. However, there is no comparable market for IP, so it's harder to see what a "fair" price for a copyright, trademark or patent might be.

One option might be to tax all IP licenses at the corporate tax rate. Another would be to adopt a "most favoured licensee" rule, requiring all licensees to pay whatever the cheapest rate was (or taxing the difference).

My hope is that technologists also get involved in the political process — in government, in think-tanks, universities, and so on.

How does one do this? What might Bruce Schneier be thinking of that the EFF, Liberty, Privacy International, etc... are currently not doing?

In some sense, it seems like this might be solved "generationally", once the majority of elected representatives are "natively" computer-literate. Based on the average age of politicians, that might take 30-40 years.

From the data on the Wikipedia page for the Boeing 747, it looks like the empty weight is around half the maximum take-off weight. Passenger and cargo aircraft seem to usually turn around quite quickly and spend only a small amount of time on the ground. In which case around half of the energy required on take off is just to lift the airframe back to the same altitude it landed from.

Perhaps if aircraft could use some sort of funicular system so that one aircraft taking off could get a "boost" from one slowing down to land?

Or planes could land on giant inflatable runways at 30,000ft, with the passengers and cargo taking a lift down to ground level?

An example from the linked blog post:

It strikes me that anti-microkernel sentiment most vocally originates as a sort of tribal affiliation mechanism by Linux users to ward off insecurity.

I think the post would be a better reference and stand a greater chance of correcting common misconceptions if it didn't include so many ad-hominem attacks against those who don't agree with the post's author. As-is, it just appears to be a continuation of a long-running flame-war.

The authors of the paper identify a trend of "growth that began in the 1970's", and say that correlates with the emergence of IT firms being able to erect barriers to competition. It might be coincidence, but the late 1970s is also when:

1. The US Copyright Act of 1976 extended copyright from a fixed term of 28 years (with opt-in 28 year extension) to the life of the author plus 70 years.

2. The Patent Cooperation Treaty became active in 1978, making it much easier to obtain patents in multiple countries.

It would seem that IP was strengthened (both as a method of avoiding tax and suppressing competition) in the late 1970s. The deregulation of the banking industry which happened in the early 1980s seems like it would have helped also.

by the time that millennials walk the halls of power, their parents will have signed away all their rights.

I don't think this is a generational thing. Governments have always been trying to spy on their citizens since governments have existed. Back in the 1700s, John Wallis and the Rossignols were routinely reading diplomatic letters. Before the invention of the internet, the "Special Investigations Unit" of the Post Office was routinely opening people's letters and copying them to MI5. Even Snowden's revelations simply show that the government continues to pry into everyone's private lives - only the scale of the abuse has been magnified.

When so-called "millennials" walk the halls of power, they'll try to spy on their citizens too. Their bogeyman might not be terrorism - that was their parents' bogeyman, and their grandparents' were Communists, their great-grandparents' were Fifth Columnists, etc...

It's not clear how to make the situation any better when both major parties in the UK are committed authoritarians whose security policies are dictated by MI5 and GCHQ. The public, "millennials" or not, in the UK seemed quite unmoved by the Snowden revelations, and seem happy for the panopticon to continue.

I think that expectations from physical-world objects could be clashing with online service "objects".

For example, if I buy a physical-world object then it's well-understood that the vendor can't break into my house and take it back or, in most circumstances, demand its return. Many physical-world objects additionally come with a warranty assuring that it will continue to work for some length of time.

Online, the digital "object" that I upload to a free service has no such ownership analogue - the service provider can generally cease to offer the service at will. This not only means there's zero warranty, but effectively that service providers can "break into my house" to "take back" the object.

I don't think there's much awareness in the general public that GMail, to pick on a well-used example, could shut down tomorrow and almost every user would irretrievably lose the last N years of their email.

I think that a big problem with the UK rail privatisation was that it split a large, badly-run monopoly up into smaller, regional monopolies. Some of which have proved to be just as badly-run. In some ways this seems similar to the breakup of the Bell telephone monopoly.

A necessary part of a free market is that consumers have choice. In the franchised UK rail system, there are very few routes on which one can choose between different suppliers. The franchise system also imposes huge barriers to new entrants to the market. Therefore, there is little incentive for companies, having won the franchise, to improve the service more than the minimum necessary.

The core infrastructure of the UK rail network is still owned and run by Network Rail, which is publicly owned, so the core inefficiencies remain.

Single-payer systems are not without problems either. Unless we're rich enough, as a society, to pay for perfect healthcare for everyone then there will be some people who get less than perfect care.

In an individual-pays system, those with expensive conditions or those who are poorer lose out. In a government-pays system those without political leverage lose out - often still those who are poorer.

The British NHS, for example, has been the target of much ire due to different (and arbitrary-seeming) spending priorities in different parts of the country, often called the "postcode lottery".