One of the reason people need to make new accounts when they post anti-censorship thoughts, is that censorship has reached into our industry and a sort of neo-McCarthy blacklisting can occur if you don't espouse neo-liberal talking points. If your pseudonym can be traced to your identity, you risk your career when you fight for individual liberty.
I suspect that this person doesn't understand what neo-liberalism is, who is a neoliberal, or what their talking points are.
Neoliberals are the centrist or right leaning part of the democratic party and the moderate republicans. It is the political position of laissez-faire capitalism, reform, and reduced state influence over the economy.
Reagan and Pelosi are both neoliberal. Maybe this person meant Leftist, Socialist, Anticapitalist, or Progressive talking points?
Yes, Nancy Pelosi. She's part and parcel a corporate democrat, interested in incremental changes that fundamentally support the capital class.
She's against universal healthcare, she's committed to austerity, she supports the surveillance state, she fights against progressive reforms.
It's easy to see the grandstanding that people like Pelosi do as somehow leftist or progressive, but fundamentally she's playing a much more conservative game. She's a democrat who will put on Kente cloth and say black lives matter, while doing nothing to actually improve black lives.
For instance, she mandates pay-go, meaning any new programs must come with new taxes. Seems reasonable, but she's not proposing new programs. She's letting the progressive wing propose them, then letting the right wing attack the progressive wing, and then saying "there was nothing that could be done, maybe we should be taking my compromise, which is predominantly a market driven compromise."
Pelosi is not someone who is out there calling for labor strikes and strong union protections. Compare her to, say, Martin Luther King Jr and his Poor People's Campaign.
I'll leave you with a quote from her:
"I have to say we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is."
I'm a little surprised you're being downvoted. I thought you captured the philosophy of neoliberalism well and explained how that mapped onto the US political parties.
I'm not super surprised? I think often centrist dems like to think of themselves as different from moderate republicans. (And vice versa.) More extremist right wing types tend to think Pelosi is some sort of progressive bogeyman and that she's nothing like folks like Reagan or Thatcher. I think all of those groups would disagree with my assessment enough to downvote it. (I suspect a lot of people are upset I called Pelosi a neoliberal.)
That said, my view is only one lens, and there are others. Many don't consider Clinton/Obama/Pelosi and their ilk to be neoliberal. Many do.
Edit: Also, I told someone they were wrong, which is usually a few downvotes. :D
Ah classic dang! Abusing your mod powers to punish and down talk anyone who questions your narrative. The comment in question is absolutely on topic and relevant. You just don't like it so claim it's against "site policy". It's ridiculous that you don't allow debate on these topics.
And yes, I know I'm perma-banned for not being feminist enough for you. I just wanted to point out your systematic pushing of a political agenda to those who dare browse with show dead.
BLM is a group that represents economically disadvantaged people. This list is pulled from the upper most echelons of society. Do you think it's ok to represent the wealthy as somehow oppressed?
Please don't take my question as an attack, I'm genuinely curious how people who support these initiatives view wealth.
I appreciate the question and I don't take it as an attack, nor do I think the topic is an easy one. My rough analogy was just meant to argue that focusing on the achievements of women entrepreneurs does not significantly devalue the achievements of men entrepreneurs, as the status quo is heavily weighted in favor of men. I wasn't saying that women entrepreneurs were facing the same burden as what BLM fights against, just that some people think that BLM is "racist" against non-blacks.
To put it another way, most people agree with MLK Jr's dream of people not being judged by the color of their skin. At the same time, MLK Jr. also argued that racial equality wouldn't just come about on its own after victories for the civil rights movement, but would require a concerted effort by society to make up for past inequality:
> "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."
It's indisputable that the achievements of female founders are not as significant as what male founders have achieved. Part of the way to encourage potential female founders is to celebrate what female founders have done so far, even if on certain metrics (e.g. market cap) they are far behind men.
BLM is a group that exists to call attention to the ways that American society structurally devalues the lives of African Americans, most significantly by stubbornly assuming that African Americans killed by police officers (and by their surrogates, such as homeowners patrolling their property with firearms) represent justifiable homicides.
It is not primarily an economic justice movement and cannot therefore reasonably be attacked on the grounds you're attempting to attack it on.
This is, obviously, a tangent not relevant to article. 'danso was drawing an illustrative parallel, between the (implied) "All Lives Matter" rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, to "where's the men-only event" rebuttal to women-in-tech initiatives.
How is this list presenting these people as needing extra help? They're all on the list because they have successful companies or had successful funding rounds, and also fall in the category of 'female'.
If it was 'top Silicon Valley founders' no one would think 'needs extra help'; if it was 'top Midwest founders' probably HNers would think 'needs extra help'. There's nothing in the article format that says 'needs extra help' -- that idea is brought by the reader.
Black Lives Matter could consist predominantly of wealthy white people and it would remain coherent as a movement.
Similarly: there simply is a profound gender imbalance in technology, and celebrating progress toward correcting that imbalance is reasonable regardless of the underlying economic story.
It is reasonable to have concerns both about the structural privileges afforded to wealthy people in technology and the gender gap. What's not reasonable is to use one issue as a cudgel to beat back concerns about the other. If you think the tech gender gap doesn't matter, you'll have to argue that directly.
Whoever released the emails did the American public a huge service. They pulled back the curtain and we got to see how the sausage is made. It doesn't matter who they are or why they did it. The end result was important whistle blowing. We should hope that information like this is leaked out as it helps balance the power between the public and corrupt politicians/media in a way nothing else can.
How do you feel about the fact that they appear to have hacked the RNC too but deliberately chose not to release those emails, in order to favor one candidate over the other. Still think that's a huge public service?
Not to mention that the emails they kept might be used for blackmail in the future.
If I remember correctly, that was walked back to a claim that they'd hacked "RNC actors" but not the RNC themselves - and we already knew that because e-mails from Republicans were released fairly early on. This is a problem with a lot of the scary claims going around in general; they simply don't actually seem to be true.
Yes they did 1/2 have of the work they could but I'm not complaining about getting more information. Someone else should leak the RNC. Or possibly it didn't contain as many bombshells? Either way, I'm happy to get more information than I had before.
Of course the majority were mundane. The majority of Chapo Guzman's private communications would be mundane too. The contents of the DNC emails suggest nothing about the contents of the RNC emails, though I have no doubt that republicans are equally crooked.
The one-sidedness of the attacks? From whom? If you're referring to recent CIA claims that the RNC was hacked as well, then my answer is that I don't trust the CIA. It may have happened, but you have no real proof about Russian involvement at all. Unlike other posters in this thread and Clinton herself, I am not keen on starting a physical war with Russia over conjecture about a virtual attack.
I don't understand how they can say "Ultimately, our goal is egalitarianism" and yet point #1 is "Make Women a Priority". Targets, arbitrary quotas, not holding events if 50% of the participants aren't female... does not sound like egalitarianism to me.
This generic objection is automatically off-topic on HN [1]. We've all heard it a zillion times, and we all know everything that comes next. What about nurses! What about coal miners! Why aren't there diversity efforts for preschool teachers! Well, there are! Well fuck you! You're a sexist, no you're the sexist. Yawn, yawn, snooze. Those of you who actually want to replay this discussion, please find a different corner of the internet to enjoy yourselves. The rest of us want respite from the tedium.
1. This is well covered by the HN guideline that says: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, I did support the moratorium on political posts but it got reversed and here we are again. As long as posts like this hit the front page you should expect people to point out inconsistencies in message.
This has nothing to do with the experiment we tried on political posts. It has to do with the outright ban on pointless repetition.
People come here to have their intellectual curiosity satisfied, and there stopped being anything new in any of this a long time ago. The way I see it, the options are: (1) would we like to be both bored and blared at? or (2) neither. On behalf of the community, I choose "neither".
50% isn't arbitrary in this case. Preventing people from being excluded is egalitarian, and the specific actions they are taking differentiates this from some sort of virtue signaling or tokenism. Hackathons and meetups are also great cases for this because everyone is better off if more people participate.
I don't see how everyone is better off if the event doesn't even get held. Unless 50% of the applicants are women then a 50% participation quota _is_ arbitrary.
It helps to consider the societal context and the unique constraints which certain populations face. Depends on your starting point IMHO - if it's already unequal, it takes additional effort.
Great stuff! One thing that's been broken for me for a while now: Raw links. I just get an empty response. It's kind of an important feature for me (and I'm sure others) so would love to see it fixed.
At a completely different scale to those mentioned by others, council housing maintenance by Darlington Borough Council in England. I used to work for them and looked at privatising it; it was too damned cheap to be undercut by any of the private companies.
Government is full of bits that work very well, as well as bits that work very badly. Governments are complicated; sweeping statements are usually wrong.
A question I've had about Signal is what is stopping Apple from modifying and rebuilding the source with a backdoor in it? Is this technically possible (seems like it would be since they control distribution of the binary to devices)? The article is correct in stating that web based chat is inherently insecure but it seems all iOS apps are also inherently insecure. I'm by no means an expert though so would love to hear from someone with more knowledge.
EDIT: Thank you for the responses! It pretty much confirms what I thought; Apple _could_ access your communication (either through keylogging at the OS level or backdooring Signal) but this solution is better than everyone use plain text communication. I personally would not trust Apple with my life if I needed that level of protection but maybe that's not the main use case for Signal.
Technically? There's nothing stopping them. For that matter, there's no stopping Google from doing the same. There's also no stopping Apple from patching LLVM so that only patched versions of OpenSSL are ever compiled against. The question is how paranoid are you and what is your threat model?
We have to trust someone, eventually. This is especially true for the 99% of the population who doesn't have the skill to compile source themselves (nor should they have to).
Ken describes how he injected a virus into a compiler. Not only did his compiler know it was compiling the login function and inject a backdoor, but it also knew when it was compiling itself and injected the backdoor generator into the compiler it was creating. The source code for the compiler thereafter contains no evidence of either virus.
Which is why standardization is just as important, if not moreso, than openness in making sure things stay secure. Such an attack is made a lot more difficult if you have a second toolchain you can use to verify things, and even moreso if you have a third.
With such a system, you must end up trusting a certain entity; it's turtles all the way down otherwise. No system is independently secure.
Similar questions include: What if a CA is compromised? What if Apple/MS bundles unwanted certs with the OS? What if Intel/AMD biases the on-die hardware RNG or other hardware crypto primitives? What if Apple/MS bundles a backdoored compiler a la "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? What if MS/Apple backdoor the entire network stack, including the physical and data link layers? etc. etc.
The way the App Store works is that the app is signed by both apple and the developer's private key. Without the developer's private key Apple is not supposed to be able to sign the app in a way that the App Store would upgrade an app and consider it to be the same app. But of course Apple could modify the app store or ios in a way to remove those restrictions.
I'm not sure it really matters -- if Apple wants to log your conversations they don't have to put a backdoor into Signal, they could just put a backdoor into iOS itself. An attacker with privileged access to the guts of the operating system doesn't have much need to muck around with hacking the applications that run on it.
Which is to say, security-minded users should strive to trust as few parties as possible, but since at the end of the day you have to trust somebody if you don't trust Apple the only really secure move would be to not use iOS devices at all.
Exactly: as soon as you use Apple, you can as well use iMessage and FaceTime with the other iOS users. You just need something to be able to communicate a bit safer with the users who don't have iOS.
But if the user has another OS, then you can believe those who get control of that OS/device can read your messages to that user and record your calls to him/her.
It's turtles all the way around. The more communication the less can you expect to remain "private." Come to think, it is so without computers too.
But one should never consider oneself secure from targeted attacks. What Signal et. al. protects from is dragnet surveillance, which Apple can perform remotely with iMessage without having to install an exploit on every iOS device. They do not have that opportunity with Signal.
Yes you depend on Apple's cooperation on iOS & Google's cooperation on Android. Even if you flash your phone with your own custom OS, your radio chips will still run proprietary firmware that can be updated over the air without the OS even knowing.
These aren't high priority problems right now for mass surveillance, as we have people using plain text chat. If you're expecting a wealthy adversary to directly target you, then the only safe move is to avoid technology.
There is no technical restriction. But if Apple did do this and someone figured it out it would probably hurt their perception by their users and it would be a bunch of bad PR.
On an open platform, you don't have peace of mind from spying...
Unless every single part of your platform is open and you build it yourself. But then make sure the parts you use to build it aren't tampered with.
I think somewhere along the conclusion of that train of thought you'll need to build a fab to make sure there aren't silicon level backdoors in your hardware.
More information available for the public to make an informed decision seems like it's always a good thing. What's good for Democrats != what's good for the public.
No, I just don't want tech companies "protecting" me from information. I'll read the direct words from people and process them for myself.
Twitter/FB/Apple/Google are not entities I would ever want choosing what I see and don't see.
[EDIT] Ironic that HN has chosen to censor my account. I guess what I said is too "dangerous" for you, the lowly user to read.