skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an article spun to make controversy out of nothing.

The narrative is that a student tweeted something critical about China, and the CCP pressured his advisor into dropping him.

The reality is that the student published a tweet that "depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes". This understandably was perceived as racist by a Chinese student in Canada, who complained to the advisor. The advisor agreed and dropped her racist-seeming doctoral student.

The CCP wasn't involved. Nobody cared about his criticism of China. It was his racist-looking tweet that got him dismissed.

Edit: But yes, the CCP can have a chilling effect on free speech. See the Blitzchung controversy. This article is just a non-story.
An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning
I am as a rule wary of anyone who decides to offer me "privacy" as a USP of their products, I didn't pick up the phone or laptop to get more privacy, but to share more data. Moreover, the iron law of oligarchy seems to suggest that those who are excessively concerned about my data must need it more.
Na they will ruin your life even if you are found innocent and pay no price for it.

That's the problem: the terrible asymetry. The same one you find with TOS, or politicians working for lobbists.
It is not just English. Traditional clothes are also frowned upon. A few years there was a case of a man not being let into a mall because he was wearing a Dhoti(A traditional Indian men's wear, prevalent in some parts of the country.) But the irony was he had to argue in English to be let in.

And something I heard years back. Kids were not allowed into another school where a competition was being held. Why...because they were in dhotis and not in uniform. The only problem, that was their school uniform.
> Here's a thought experiment [...] I would pick the Unix epoch, because I think others would do the same.

Ah yes, nobody will ever need to represent a date/time before 1970-01-01.

As for your thought experiment: recently I had to pick a "NULL/no/unknown date" value to put into a non-nullable database column and I picked 1900-01-01. Unix epoch crossed my mind only briefly and I discarded it immediately because it's too arbitrary and, more importantly, too near valid dates that the user might use. (Use-case: materials from historical archives being ingested.)

So my opinion is that the RFC authors should be commended for having the foresight of choosing an epoch that's widely more applicable and far less arbitrary (the 1st day of the calendar system that most of the world is using today) than the Unix epoch.
Not at all! Courts are a joke.

You still need to know the process, though. Images of police officers are not being used to convict CP charges.
Hearthstone access: for visually impaired screen-reader users
The problem is not perceptual hashes. The problem is the back door. Let's not focus on the defect of the train leading you to the concentration camp. The problem is that there is a camp at the end of the rail road.
The professor should be fired and the university punished (doubtful), but the student was also an idiot to do what he did. It’s not like he was some random guy who just tweeted at China, he lived in wuhan for years and has actual family there now, being critical of a totalitarian government in that scenario is the height of monumental stupidity. It’s ironic that the article paints him as methodological and thoughtful because he seems anything but in his actions.
I don't want to speak for the person you're replying to, but..

> any >=middle-class person who doesn't donate the majority of their wealth to charity is "evil"?

That is pretty much Peter Singer's position (who incidentally is Australian, and it appears the person you're replying to may be also), who is if nothing else at least providing serious and cogent arguments for such a position. You may disagree, but he argues fairly respectably, IMO.

I'm a bit on the fence on that one, but I think there's something to be said for the fact that there is at least some immorality happening if a person worth 100.000$ walks past someone worth 0$ and doesn't help them out at least a little.

If you're curious about this line of reasoning, here's a nice introduction: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/giving...
Fingerprint reader: Works Broken on Always on Display (turn screen on first)

Kind of a big deal. Do you still need to apply to unlock your own device and hope they let you?
+1 for Firefox.

Some think that a local evil dude is less evil than a foreign evil dude. As an European, I would be less concerned if my data was pwned by Xiaomi rather than Microsoft; should my government ask for my data, they're more likely to be served by Microsoft than Xiaomi.
Combined with invasive eucalyptus that thrives by burning.
Seriously, a dinner for two costs $125 in India in a place with $400 average monthly income? This is what it would cost here in Cyprus, short of really nice places in Nicosia or Limassol, and the monthly income is 5x as much. Maybe $200 in the very nicest of places.

I'm a developer and make in mid-six figures, and whenever i see a $125 bill including tips, i start to feel like "oh, this is pricey".
Not sure what the timeline is here. TFA strongly implies it’s a tweet on March 21 inciting a response on March 28, but buries the lede about the racist cartoon posted at an unknown time that the professor claims to have received an email about.

I’m sure political factors play the leading role here, but it’s long past the point where you can casually post racist cartoons and act surprised when you’re hit by undesirable consequences. Imagine an African American studies PhD student casually posting racist cartoons depicting black stereotypes. People have been disciplined for much less (e.g. that professor who spoke a common Chinese phrase resembling the n word several times to caution students and later got suspended).

And before you accuse me of things, I’m a long time HN user and I’m not paid to comment. Using a throwaway for radioactive topics.
Apple is the best venue for the government to get you used to your local data spied upon. Boil the frog.

I do wonder what China and other countries will do. Will this system be under the control of US authorities?
> would be evidence that you broke that hypothetical law

Hypothetical situations are not an argument to real world discussions. Sure, if that happened, it'd be terrible. But, that's not happening....
Me, I’d given up on we, so I do what I can.

I moved off grid two years ago, bought 5ha of abandoned farmland, now more like 30ha, and am rewilding it - transplanted lots of saplings, encouraged wildlife, and within two years we’ve gone from fire-risk scrub to a young ash and oak forest, which is already providing cover for third succession species. We had a fire from a cigarette by a road last week, and it just stopped at the edge of the forest. Green undergrowth doesn’t burn very well.

Long dry springs have started running. Local farmers are taking notice - we’ve had people coming by and turning green with envy at our running water, in August. There was nothing on this land - just a few hopeful looking dips that looked like old water courses. Other people are now planting up around their old springs, which they all bulldozed bare decades ago when they got pumped irrigation from the river - which now runs dry from June - Sept every year, as all the water is pumped out to evaporate on the bare earth of the highlands.

Hunting is a huge part of the lifestyle here, and it’s done pretty sustainably - I’ve been really enheartened talking to people here about the importance of large wildlife to the ecosystem. Local hunt have agreed to have a two year moratorium on boar hunting near us, so we can collect data on population and the impact of their activities - our hope is that by providing habitat for them they stop being an agricultural pest, and their numbers can rebound to the point where their population is stable, and able to support apex predators - wolves. Normal, rural folk are seeing the devastation the changing climate is bringing (fires, floods, fires, floods), and there’s a genuine desire to do something.

Our energy is all renewable, apart from a few weeks in the winter when we run the generator (although that goes next year - new hydro turbine on order).

We don’t fly any more - covid made that decision really easy - all travel is overland. Sure, takes longer - and gives you so much more to see.

I can’t stop global climate change, but I can at least stop being part of the problem - and if enough people take that step, then maybe there’s hope for “we”.
I see no conflict between utter distrust for the NYT and the fact that it is indeed the paper of record for the US [1]. I was even going to say that it lends little credibility to the story itself, which should have to stand on its own merit, but it does speak to the impact of the story in Switzerland and possibly abroad.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record
I love Bandcamp: Waived-fee Fridays, solid app, no DRM, more
It's not exactly within the Disney universe, but they did make "The Winged Scourge": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y68F8YwLWdg
Plaid settles class-action lawsuit for $58M
The scanning is to take place within iCloud Photos, which handles images / videos etc on an individual basis. It would be a pretty easy thing to do for Apple to calculate hashes on these. I'm not sure how iOS handles archives, but it doesn't matter - remember it isn't 100% or 0% with these things - say only 50% of those people store images in iCloud Photo, catching out only 50% of those folk is still a good result.
https://www.bigmessowires.com/usb-wombat/

The person who develops these has some cool blog posts on the development process
What is your deal. You are out here arguing in bad faith all over this thread. What is your motivation?
The Confucius Institutes are part of the CCP's "unrestricted warfare" program.

In summary, it's a way to use non-kinetic warfare against opponents, to gain as much as possbible before a shooting war is necessary.

The fundamentally different value mentioned is Communism.

The CCP has been at war with the US since the Korean Wars and the Straits Conflicts. US politicians somehow overlooked that until Trump/Pompeo responded to the CCP threat. (The Stinger missile ended the second Straits conflict - Taiwan was able to blow CCP's air force out of the sky.)

The CCP is so virulently anti-US that even Russia refused to cooperate with China's requests.
Interesting piece of this is CadQuery, a python library for doing parametric cad like openSCAD.

https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery
You could get something like this if there is good public transport between points. Like the place where I am staying now, its relatively less crowded than the inner cities. I can walk and get any essential items like milk or meat. If I need something that I cant get, just take a bus and shop in the city. Most of the time, my daily needs are met near my home itself
There is a distinction between a budget phone and a small phone. People were calling for a high end device in a small case.
From memory, I think LineageOS 17 took roughly 8-12 hours for an initial build and 3.5 hours for subsequent (ccache) builds on an Intel i5-3570K and spinning hard drive. That's not including the initial git clone.

The idea might seem daunting, but assuming midrange hardware and a decent net connection, it's very much doable in under a day without resorting to cloud services.
No you have to pay me 5c in royalties each time you render it.
Device churn isn't the fault of software developers.
I don't claim to understand the reasoning behind it, these were just the quotes I got shopping around. I never imagined that a $180,000 hybrid supercar would be cheaper to insure the PHEV version of a family oriented CUV but but here we are.
Oh wow, this is actually amazing. I'm really impressed with the work the GrapheneOS folks are doing. Ah, damn, it looks like they've dropped support for the Pixel 2. I have a Pixel 4 as my daily driver, but I'd prefer to try it first on a phone I don't use all the time. Ah well. Perhaps the 4 will still be supported whenever I get my next phone :)

Some non-Twitter prose about the Play Services support (though it doesn't include the tweeted info about dynamite support being nearly finished): https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-play-services
Along this line of awareness is something I've been noticing more.. with housing costs what they are, many people are stuck in toxic (sometimes extremely abusive) living arrangements.

Which may lead one or more people in those living situations to reach for an escape via drugs/alcohol - which may lead the others living with that to suffer more..

Yet neither of the two (maybe more) can afford to escape the living situation, as most people can not afford to move to a new place alone - it seems many are stuck with having (often multiple ) roommates - which keeps the living in pain cycle going, with no way out.

breaking a lease or eviction or leaving and having someone else fail via owing money / damages / eviction can make it even harder to get a better living situation - even if the damages were not in control of the person, sometimes the first person doesn't even know what happened until they've spent time and money to apply to a new place and get rejected.

There are indeed many more social / cultural costs beyond what most people consider I agree.

With people needing to work 75 hours per week to pay for an average place - any with kids will have much of our future generations being raised by cats and tvs, no parents around to guide anything - so we're also creating a repeating social hell cycle in other ways too.
For anyone else wondering if the above commenter is a Chinese propaganda account, you can see from his or her comment history that that is not the case.
This reminds me of 'Reflections on Trusting Trust'. The headline is so relevant here

> To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
My verified fan page on Facebook got hacked. I have no recourse to get it back
> He asked via email: «Do you engage in some degree of self-censorship? Do you think it would be too dangerous for me to open a Twitter account?»

> Although he received no response, he began tweeting in mid-March.

Note: Sometimes, silence is a very loud answer.
About that "manual review"...
Refer to pages 10 and 11 of the technical paper.

>The server then uses the decryption key to decrypt the inner encryption layer and extract the NeuralHash and visual derivatives for the CSAM matches.

This "visual derivative" term shows up repeatedly. To me, the implication seems to be that Apple doesn't look at the actual suspected image before deciding whether to proceed with a report. Instead, I infer that they only verify whether (as the device reports) the image's neuralhash is indeed present in the NCMEC database. If my understanding is correct, their "manual review" process actually provides no protection at all against collisions or erroneous database entries.

Further supporting this, on page 4:

>Apple reviews each report to confirm there is a match

It only refers to a match, not about whether the image appears to be illegal.

This makes perfect sense from Apple's perspective- who would want to be in the business of reviewing reports of probably-illegal images?- but it means that the references to a manual review safeguard would seem to be false reassurance. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the paper.
I agree with most comments here. Just wanted to highlight this is not just a "frontend" thing. I'm seeing the same thing happening in the backend (when overcomplicating everything with Elixir or Go, etc) and infrastructure (Kubernetes, etc...) for what would be a single landing page or a very minimal "CMS" kind of site that with Rails or Django you'd be up and running in less than a week. Instead we spend months with "modern" stacks. Worst part is these stacks have a HUGE amount of custom glue code and what happens is that people eventually leave the company, leaving new joiners with a system which is impossible to understand in a reasonable amount of time. So these new joiners call this old system "legacy" and back to the start. Where if you had used a simpler, well documented, well tested, opinionated, popular solution (rails/django/laravel/etc) you'd at least have a good baseline despite any mess developers could create on top of it.

At my last job I was horribly looked down at when suggesting doing simpler things. People want to master a single gold hammer and use it for everything, no matter what the business problem is. React is THE WAY, Go is THE WAY, kubernetes is THE WAY and now it doesn't matter (we don't even think about it!! what's the actual f**ng business problem we're trying to solve). We just use THE WAY tools because otherwise we're doing "legacy".

It's sad, really sad.
It's exactly like building a bridge... if nobody never built a bridge before.

The only reason you can design a bridge beforehand is because (millions?) bridges have been built before so you can apply the lessons learned. Even if your bridge is "unusual", it will still be similar enough to older bridges so you don't have to invent the vast majority from scratch.

Other kinds of engineering don't have the luxory of leaning on the prior experience so much, simply because there is less of it. SpaceX's reusable rocket could not have been be fully designed before built, simply because nobody built a reusable rocket before. But it could be done through iteration, which is just another name for experimentation.

Software tends to be less like bridges and more like rockets... all of which falls within the spectrum of "engineering".
> You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen; the copper in it is worth a dollar or two. I can't imagine how fast a $200 charging cable with $10 of scrap copper in it wouldn't get swiped. It's unfortunately common here, there's quite a few sections of street where the street lights have been knock out for months now due to copper thieves ripping it out of the conduit

Yikes! Where do you live, San Francisco? /s
A single person can implement a chosen weakening, compromising everything done by lower-level staff. If you don't think this is trivially possible, you know nothing about the fragility of security.
Okay, I’m really trying to have a good-faith conversation about this, maybe my questions weren’t super clear. I am very interested in your opinion, as you seem to have experience and also have thought about this a lot (and I think many of us on HN appreciate the unique perspective you have to offer). I am just having a hard time seeing the difference between “reducing barriers to food stamps in the US”, as you said and “giving regular checks to people”. Could you elaborate what this would look like? And how is it possible for checks to “not solve anything” when they have demonstrated effectiveness in decreasing poverty in the real world? Is the pandemic really that different a situation in this case? Maybe your definition of a solution here is different than mine?

EDIT: And of course I also don’t want to burden you with endless questioning. If you have written about this I would be happy to read links. You just have a lot of websites and a lot of content so it is difficult for me to find your writing on this particular topic.
I started writing an explanation of how you're mistaken, and then I realised just how quickly you went from Apple using a very common method for identifying CSAM (which Facebook already uses, yet I've not really heard much in the way of complaints about that) to Apple wanting to listen for keywords in phone calls, and just how unlikely it is you'd reasonably think through my response.
The advisor who dismissed the student changed their story multiple times, didn't name the accuser, and contradicts the Ph.D. students records of his matriculation and attendance. Furthermore she has a motive, if she is truly under political pressure or is intimidated by the diplomatic consequences of being associated with a critic of CCP. She is a China researcher, so being barred from entering China could be a fatal blow to her career. Finally, the last thing she wants is a viral story in fairly reputable newspaper of record.

I cannot directly refute your claims, only call them into question. But I think that is the crux of the story here anyway, to question. What affect is the mass surveillance and blanket censorship of China having on Western institutions of open inquiry? Are the tendrils of the PRC police state stretching into places we assume will always be bastions of free speech? I don't think we can definitively answer these either way today.
The median price for a home in Brooklyn in 900k, which translates to 6 crores. That’s definitely not a median price in central Chennai but it’s also not very far away. There’s also a significantly larger discrepancy between rent and home prices in India so that’s there.
Lest ye incur the wrath of dang, HN newbies, accusing others of astroturfing or hidden agendas is against the guidelines.
I agree with you, outside of SV I did see older folks at tech companies.

> I am not the one who thought that a 50 year time horizon made any sense at all for this discussion, I'm just playing along.

That's my bad, I thought you initially brought up the 50 years of working at a FAANG-level company to not care of TLD fees.
What's the bad faith? What's single thing have I said that is incorrect? It's not breaking E2E encryption. No one is locking people up for political photos. It's not using facial recongition.

I don't like FUD driving discussions. I think we need to have serious discussions about this technology. I think people that don't understand it shouldn't participate....
This is a neat looking mouse, but damn all "ball" mice to hell. We suffered enough with those.
Thanks to the design of the language, each letter of Esperanto has a fixed pronunciation, and the stress is always on the second-to-last syllable. So after you learn the alphabet and some diphthongs, you are able to pronounce every Esperanto text in the canonical way (even if you don't know a single thing about the meaning). No exception. This is also a great feature for self-learning.

Of course, it takes time to fluently "read out" the words, and in practice, it's much easier if you just know the word and pull the pronunciation from your memory.

For the Common Voice project, there are usually two or three words in a batch of five sentences that I don't know. And there are unfamiliar places and names, since most of the text come from Wikipedia. In such case, I'll take my time to use the spelling to infer the correct pronunciation and practice it several times, until I can put it into the sentence. Then I'll record. And I know it must be correct.

If I am not sure about the meaning of the new word (you can usually guess from etymology or word formation), I look it up in the dictionary and learn a new word.
The Books Briefing: What the Best Translations Share
What makes you think they are not?

Is it different or worse from the US foreign policy of "lets kill brown people half way across the world"?

The anti-China rhetoric has to stop somewhere.