skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why would it not be possible to create a system that required several manual and offline steps in order to break the encryption?

When done correctly and with everyone's knowledge and consent, this is a form of key escrow. But there's some simple math at play here - the more unlock options there are, the more points of vulnerability and failure. https://haveibeenpwned.com/ lists 8 breaches of my data and I'm aware of more they don't list - the industry can't even keep my data under lock and key without adding more points of failure via key escrow as another thing they can fuck up.

> For example (and perhaps similar to offline cold storage of bitcoin) why couldn't a system be designed whereby 3 or more people in geographically diverse areas were in a position to agree that a request for information was legitimate (by court order) and thereby produce what is needed to unlock certain information? So one person would not have the key or access.

Bitcoin is a great example, in a way - there are several stories out there of exchanges fucking up and losing access to their coins or having their coins stolen, even when they were using cold storage. All 3 people will likely be duped by the same fradulent (or just overreaching) LEO email, in part because of the all too human tendency for each of them to assume that "one of the other two would have caught it if it was fishy, right?"

> After all right now you have a case where a single person (the owner) is able to unlock information. The feeling is a back door can be hacked. What if it's not a back door though?

The label you use doesn't matter - the more people who can unlock things, the more points of failure you have, and the more likely things will end up hacked. The industry struggles enough to secure things even when it takes a hard line approach and espouses end-to-end encryption. Defending against abuse by insiders/employees usually means going through a bunch of trouble to lock your own employees out of customer data - or making it unavailable to the company in the first place - not giving them more tools to access it.

Governments already have more than enough tools to completely pwn my privacy if they actually need to. Convince a judge to sign a sneak and peek warrant, have law enforcement covertly install a hardware keylogger, and I'd wager you'll pwn most people - even if they're tech savy. But that requires pesky things like indivudalized suspicion, "checks and balances", actual work, and involving multiple people (your landlord or a locksmith for the keys or entry access, your security company to silence the alarms, a judge to sign off on the warrant and a leo to execute it) so it's harder to run a long term secret warrantless suspicionless mass surveilance dragnet as a rogue employee or agency. But not impossible, as certain three letter agencies have shown.
A computer is like an extension of your mind. for centuries, law enforcement has been unable to search your mind, by court order or otherwise. I see no reason to change that.
Law enforcement likes to talk about big, scary threats like terrorism, because those make the public more likely to accept their position.

The article below argues that the real use case for breaking encryption is to catch everyday criminals, not to go after shadowy Bond villains. Would the public still go for it, if they looked at it this way? Probably not...

The Encryption Debate Isn't About Stopping Terrorists, It's About Solving Crime
https://www.lawfareblog.com/encryption-debate-isnt-about-sto...

Edit: And most everyday criminals are not technologically savvy. Half of them probably have a hard time using Telegram safely.
No, we absolutely don't want strong encryption viewed as "illegal but accepted", we want it viewed as "absolute necessity for day-to-day life and personal safety, unacceptable to ever weaken".
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Yeah. But I disagree with the larger position it argues for. Like all "real world" analogies applied to digital concepts, there's a sort of impedance mismatch.

In the real world, resources are naturally constrained. It's usually impossible to read everyone's mail in real time and retroactively pull up the contents of a letter sent 3 years ago. This limitation vanishes with online communications. Encrypted messages can be stored indefinitely and later decrypted.

The super safe backdoor we build today could very easily be used by a tyrannical regime a decade from now to get dirt on everyone. We can dream up all sorts of technical solutions that allow for a backdoor, but make it really hard to abuse, but at the bottom, those solutions rely on the government obeying their own law.
This was a big thing for us at Netflix too. It was extremely rare for all of Netflix to be down. Almost every outage was a partial outage.

For us to measure our success in increasing availability, we first had to figure out a way to measure availability.

We came up with a multi-pronged approach. The first thing we did is figure out how to predict how much traffic there should be at any given time. This was basically using historical data to determine the shape of the curve and then adjusting it to fit current traffic.

Then we would figure out how far off of the predicted traffic we were and the was our downtime.

Since we also had control of the client experience in almost all cases, we were able to measure from the client side as well (and trust that data), and include that data in our measurements.

Where things got interesting was when say a large ISP was down. A bunch of people couldn't get to us, but that wasn't really our fault (or was it?). At the end of the day the users didn't care if it was our fault or their ISP, so we counted that against ourselves.

All of this is to say that yes, it's really hard to figure out uptime, especially for distributed systems where almost every failure is a partial failure.

But at the end of the day your users don't care which microservice or network segment was at fault, they only care that they couldn't use the product.
I don't think using a local web port for the UI of a desktop app is a good idea, at least for security reasons. I guess much of the resources of the alternative solutions are used to mitigate just that (in addition to having a powerful backend framework). So if you don't want either, than maybe it is an option, but it severly limits the scope of the architecture.
A book a month would be a more achievable goal, if still unreasonable if they're all technical books. You can't speed read technical books, specially if they're about new topics that require practical exercises.

Reading x books doesn't count as learning x topics.
This will just push people to open source applications and peer to peer networking. Basically, devolve back to the early days of the internet with regard to person to person communications.

How is the DoJ going to force Signal or even Telegram to add a back door?
I get the same behavior. It appears that the text is becoming white, highlighting it makes it visible.
why is this in my hacker news
It seems many people were quite surprised about Bercow taking precedent from 1604, which seems to be from Erksine May.

This precedent certainly doesn't come from vellum, which GP misses.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-parliaments-46810616
What’s behind the hype about Blazor?
there's something very sick and sad about this video ...
> issue #23: Cleaning up, or getting to zero, is a constant, wasted effort.

Absolutely not wasted, but is now constantly in a zero enough state

Most points seem debatable or biased towards their unknown solution

TL;DR We are going to fix email when we releases our product
1 why not get the top say 10000 smartest people that want to study medicine and offer them free education. If some rich person is not in the top he can pay. Why would you prefer to lose some smart but poor people.

I understand that the system is super complex and if you clean it up you would probably don't need to pay more insurance or taxes though I seen there is a lot of FUD that an European like system would cost people more then already pay (I am not sure if you are in this camp)

Do you think something like Canada, UK or other countries have are not american enough for USA?
Let's be clear - encryption can absolutely enable those things.

That is not all it does, but pretending it does not is stupid.
What did happen to Germany? Are you thinking about the national socialism from the Nazi party?

If you don't live in USA, why are you bringing their politics in the debate?
How the U.S. could tackle climate change
It's not as though the police in this nation were created for some other reason...
No one is certain you can't get it twice.
> Criminals being able to hide evidence is a serious concern for the average person.

Suspects. Alleged criminals. Until convicted, they're not criminals. The government does not have an unlimited right to collect all information; they have a limited, judicially controlled right to try to collect information.

One key detail: strong encryption does not prevent investigations from targeted collection of information, such as through physical surveillance, bugs, etc. There are many tools available to law enforcement, those tools are just less convenient. Framing it that way helps: in order to make investigations more convenient, the DOJ wants to prevent anyone from using secure communications.
Well, at first sight yes, but a) they would gather everything instead of just actual targets and b) their access could not be protected properly from third parties who are not authorized.
You are mistaken. PRISM is specifically a program that "collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies" [em. mine]. NSA wiretapping the non-public links of Google et ol was not PRISM (I'm not even sure that the name of that program was ever disclosed).
My daughter was arrested in preschool at age 4. Want to know what she did? Spit on another child (assault). I had to pick her up at the police station, where she was sucking on a lollipop (and we do not give our children candy in our house). This was also in Florida.
Not just in vitro - Italian media reported today that the two Chinese tourists who fell ill in Rome have been successfully treated with Remdesivir (freely provided by Gilead). Source (Italian): https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_febbraio_26/coronavirus-...
The easy counter: "Except encryption works on maths; a mathematical "warrant" is more like a skeleton key that applies to every single letter ever sent and every safe ever made and every house ever built – and not one of those fancy keys that's hard to forge, because it's data; once you've seen one, you can just copy it and use it without anybody ever knowing. What happens if [terrorists] see one of these "warrants"?"

And to pre-empt: "And no, we haven't discovered the maths to make it not work like that. Nothing we know about comes even close, and such mathematics might not even exist."

A slightly more abstract counter:

> The government can get a warrant to read your letters. The law can regulate that, and there's no way they can get a warrant to read everybody's letters; only suspects will have their letters read. But these are computers. A computer could just go through, unlocking and reading everybody's letters, and looking for — look, imagine a future, slightly more evil government decides that puppies are illegal. A computer could look through everyone's letters for anybody who'd ever been pro-puppy, and then fine them for puppy-supporting, and then anybody who continues to support puppies would be put in prison. I know that puppies are a stupid example, but imagine that the government really wants to start a war, or something, and you disagree, and the election's coming up, and you can't talk about maybe not starting that war.

> Okay, so you trust this government, and all future governments, not to do that? Do you trust every single person who's ever seen a warrant? Say you want to get a job, but you can't, because you maybe don't want to save the pandas while children are starving in [impoverished nation] and you said so in a message to a partner three years back and your employer does a quick background check with some company somewhere and it comes back "[person's name] does not like pandas". It's your dream job, and now they don't want to hire you because the HR person is a really big fan of pandas. I'm picking innocuous examples, but come on, you can think of more significant ones. (And those background check companies already exist – they literally Twitter-stalk people; do you really think they'd ignore private conversations if they had access to them?)

> Do you trust anybody who's ever seen a warrant with your bank details? Sure, those skeleton keys will be kept fairly secure, but it only takes one person to make a mistake and then every single message that's ever touched a computer, past, present and future, is public.

> Or they could just look at the lock and figure out what shape of skeleton key would fit it. That's how all of the other backdoors the government put in computer systems like this were spotted. And once you've spotted it, you can just decrypt everything almost instantly, because you're just getting the computers to do maths and computers are fast at maths.
I would've just solved it directly: jonk ab aii = aii . (. ab)

then because I'm a jerk: jonk = flip (.) . flip (.)

or using Control.Arrow: jonk = (>>>) . (>>>)

edit: formatting
No matter where you were in the developed world, the majority in 1932 (though not necessarily the majority of the elites) would have held similar views or views that were even further away from yours. The US, for instance, had just recently passed an immigration law that was explicitly racist in design, which wasn't repealed until 1965, and even then the proponents of the replacement legislation had to lie through their teeth claiming it would not alter the demographics of the country. England similarly was cracking down on immigration during that period.
But it still is/was/whatever in EU, where the self extinguishing cigarettes are also mandatory.
Industrial chloroquine manufacturing was developed in the 1940s. There is an extensive description in this 1949 article from Industrial and Engineering Chemistry:

"Chloroquine Manufacture"

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1021/ie50472a002

I mention chloroquine specifically because

a) It looks like it was effective at a lower concentration than remdesivir, according to this Nature article.

b) It's a simpler molecule. High volume production started back during World War II.
I care to disagree. I read for getting different perspective on life, having fun with ideas presented in a book. So I don't retain much and I don't care about "doing those things" because I am not going to be next Warren Buffet after reading his biography.

What reading does to my mind is that it shapes "personality". I am not going to live by the "How to win friends..." but what I got from it is to be more friendly and open to other people and to be more empathic. I think it kind of stayed with me even thou I read that book once and did not follow recommendations to live by it and challenge myself to do all stuff there is in that book.

Then if you read multiple books and see common ideas presented by many authors you kind of get really great insights that stay for longer than when you read one book. Because then you see that more than one person thinks that way.
Overly large companies wield disproportionately large amounts of influence in our lives and probably should be regulated more. But that disproportionate influence doesn't mean "tech" is the root cause.

There shouldn't be a backlash against tech companies specifically, but really companies that are overly large and use and abuse their power and position in ways that benefit shareholders in ways that are severely detrimental the common good. Such as limiting competition, influencing and manipulating legislation, ensuring people have no other options and then raising prices exponentially, selling your data to the highest bidder, etc.
Somewhat similar. 3 years of intense effort to find out what was wrong.

Constantly told it was depression or anxiety.

Turned out it was an auto immune problem.

Anti depressants made me care less about problems but didn’t fix them.
It is worth noting that a user was recently banned for pumping a penny stock. Additionally, it seems within the realm of possibility that powerful people could use a shitposting forum to signal each other for market movements.
Please don't use "objectively" as a replacement for "in my opinion". The two are not the same.
I am free to put the postcode in an envelope if I feel the message is private or confidential; terrible example.
The problem with these fines is not that they are an effective deterrent for poor people; it's that they are an ineffective deterrent for the rich.
I know but I have never heard any details especially how they want to keep the backdoor secret. Cracking the backdoor would be such a high value target that a lot of people would spend insane amounts of money and energy on it.
Blog: Degrowth’s Relation to Animal Agriculture
Is Ghost a better choice than WordPress for blogging?
This is overly black and white thinking.

“Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.”

When in reality, it’s luck and effort that matter. You can’t control the luck part, but you can control the effort part.

It's similar to health - a great deal of how healthy you are has to do with luck (e.g. genetics). If someone said "the health game is rigged so there is no use in trying to be healthy" we'd think they were nuts.
Has anyone here switched to Ghost and used it for a while that can comment on how you've found it?

I'm considering switching my sites over but Ghost's tools for switching don't look great.
A general rule of thumb: if a nonfiction book has been published in the past ±30 years, is about some vague new concept like "outliers" or "a Black Swan event", and is written by someone that hasn't spent decades working in their field: read the Wikipedia page or a summary instead. You'll save yourself hours and hours of time.
Definitely. The State Department has a set of pages noting that mosquitoes with malaria have developed chloroquine resistance in every country with malaria, and recommends other drugs instead. The main manufacturer of chloroquine, Bayer, stopped producing it a while back. Not sure who if anyone even makes it these days. I'm assuming the Chinese trials are using some old stock.
thanks, very interesting
Why is the no mobile friendly css on this site? It is almost impossible to read this on a phone.
I agree in large with your point that multi-GB documents is perhaps excessive but this does create a heck of a migration problem for a lot of users that aren't even close to 4GB.
Burned After Reading Endless Mayfly’s Ephemeral Disinformation Campaign (2019)
> How is the DoJ going to force Signal or even Telegram to add a back door?

Hypothetically: they could easily force the Apple and Google stores to stop carrying it, or even to prevent its installation using the same mechanisms used to scan for malware. Do not underestimate the means by which use of real encryption could be made inconvenient.
There's a fairly substantial overlap between the people who completely drank the cryptocurrency kool-aid and the people who got sucked into so-called "alt-right" and associated fellow-traveling stuff ("red pill," NRx, etc.) around the same time period. Seems like there were some incredibly virulent meme plagues that afflicted the high-IQ-but-gullible crowd in the middle part of this decade.

Cryptocurrency has done a lot of damage to the tech world due mostly to the sheer amount of brainpower it's sucked up that might otherwise have been used for more useful stuff. It's been kind of a tar pit where you have vast resources chasing things that have no actual real world value. It sort of reminds me of that Star Trek TNG episode where they try to kill off the Borg collective by giving them an impossible geometric shape to ponder endlessly.
It's specially liberating in fiction works. You don't have to soldier through a big book you don't like, allow yourself to drop it in favor of a better one.

There's always the option of resuming it if you feel like it.
I base my comment on the effort required to make a simple web page that a) looks the same across different browsers and devices, b) is responsive, c) supports relatively basic concepts like dropdown menus, columnar layouts, etc...

It’s way too much effort for me to want to mess with, and then you have to repeat the same things for every site you make.
Can you show me a larger payment-focused company that's been revealed to be storing passwords in plaintext within the past 5 years? Not saying there's not a ton of incompetence, but that's a very specific level of incompetence.
Degrowth and Animal Liberation
They'll force device manufacturers to give access to keys locally locally. China did it with Apple's iCloud backups by just nationalizing the servers.
My favorite approach is to go in under the table and cut a hole underneath the bank's pile of money.
>I'm not sure what Discord uses because I only run it in the browser

Me too, and you just made me realize, there already exists a system for running Electron apps in a shared instance of Chrome, and it's installed on almost everyone's computer! You just... open the web version, in Chrome :)
> I’ve been downvoted to oblivion simply for stating my view; also not necessary.

I personally downvoted because I believe your statement is wrong in fact and problematic in opinion.

> Secret police worked when criminals were put away with parallel reconstruction, for instance.

Parallel construction is a morally dubious method of hiding illegal and unconstitutional activity on law enforcement's part. What crime was truly committed to warrant law enforcement's action is therefore hidden.

Using the idea of parallel construction to support secret police is likewise dubious.

> “You can’t stop math.” Not true, strictly anyway. You can ban tech oligarchs from using unbreakable E2EE which slows it down and reduces the proliferation of digital entropy.

When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.

It's illegal for citizens to download and distribute music and movies too, but illegality doesn't stop them from doing it. You might block tech oligarchs from using it, but you won't be able to block citizens from using it.

Likewise when you outlaw math, only outlaws will have math. Banning tech oligarchs from using unbreakable E2EE won't undo the fact that that encryption has already been created and disseminated in open source repositories.

> The proper way is to provide third party access that is truly exceptional (living up to the name), and not based on flaws that a malicious actor or rogue nation can break. Instead of E2EE, how about building E2E2EE. Doesn’t need to be measurably weaker.

I have yet to see even a single idea which isn't open to abuse by someone, whether it's law enforcement or citizens. And, frankly, the constitution's goals are fairly clear: citizens have rights and law enforcement is prohibited.
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Humans are still the prime movers who cultivate the parameters and models on which the model is trained, and more importantly decide whether or not the results are credible.

Thinking like yours is called Mathwashing; and it's a serious problem if we as a society are willing to accept it as a valid justification for dismissing culpability for our choices/actions.
I think it comes down to popular vote versus government policy. While things like speeding and marijuana are illegal, popular votes have made these things legal (or quasi legal) in their respective jurisdictions. For example, votes to remove speed cameras or make them illegal, or votes to decriminalize marijuana.

But you are correct in that we really should make it completely legal so that the government doesn't have an excuse to target individuals for engaging in a practice that is generally widely accepted.