RyanZAG

Seems highly unlikely to ever work, but why assume the technology is evil? If you could create a system that had a high accuracy of detecting terrorists, then that would be a good system, not an evil one.

I get your point that a system that claims to detect terrorists but only really detected Arabic people would be an evil one - but you're automatically calling the terrorist system evil without knowing if it really does detect terrorists or not.

As an extra hypothetical question, do you feel a system that could detect people who were really just about to commit terrorist attacks as good or evil? At a conceptual level, assume the system somehow scanned brain waves or some other truly difficult method.

All reporting is always biased. Every word you select is a direct product of bias, and the choice between multiple sentence phrasing changes emotional direction of the reader.

I don't think many would argue that the content was in any way worse back when the internet was used by a much smaller population. At the end of the day, the content that is really useful and that you actually want is rarely created by an army of everyday internet users. It's created by the dedicated and the ingenious, and those are the types that will migrate quickly to the hidden places.

If an app (even badly coded) causes memory leaks in the OS, that's a fault of the OS still. Of course fast moving OSes like Android or iOS are always going to have these kinds of bugs and it's probably not related to Swift as Swift isn't used in the kernel internals.

Companies are just people though - the guys in charge of decisions are the ones we're ultimately evaluating. That the left hand of the company doesn't know what the right hand of the company is doing isn't much of an excuse, as ultimately the buck stops at the executive and board positions.

There's no way a decision like this one didn't get approval from the top layers of the company as it no doubt had to go through different levels of legal, product and everything in between.

You'd need to get it into all servers too, which is probably a very long time frame.

Doesn't mean you go rob people's houses.

I don't think this is correct. For all the people who would have their data exposed in a public torrent, their data is likely safe at present and just needs to be removed from that website. If you put it in a torrent, you're hurting all of those people in a very direct way - you're the one stabbing them in the back.

What the authors here did is correct - they've publicized the issue. Releasing this data as a torrent is not 'publicizing' anything - it is stabbing millions of people in the back, and then waiting for the crowds to come and gape at the dead bodies.

"Missed opportunity" ?

People can be stabbed in the back if they go into dark alleys without watching behind them. Let's stab a few people who go into these alleys so that everyone will be afraid to do so and we have an opportunity to prevent people being stabbed in future by making them aware.

Why would you possibly think this is a good idea? The idea is to prevent pain, not cause more pain in some bizarre attempt at making people afraid. There's enough privacy violations - we don't need to be making more of them ourselves.

We should probably keep doing studies to check how dentists think we should brush our teeth. We just shouldn't have dentists do a study on a variable that directly harms their income as we would already know the results they would give before the study is even done.

If you wanted a study on that variable, you'd likely need to at least get input from someone who says going to dentists is a bad idea - but at that point, you're just going to have a shouting match and a statistics measuring contest between the dentists and the guy who doesn't think anybody should see dentists. Your results would likely be contradictory and fairly useless.

We haven't yet found a way to do such studies in a useful manner, and it's an ongoing problem in politics that has yet to have a solution. And may never have a solution. And it's very important to be able to determine when such study variables align with the financial and ideological requirements of the researcher.

If you can tell without doubt what the result of a study by a certain group will be before the study takes place, it's usually a red flag.

Yes, it does feel that something is wrong somewhere, but I can't find out where. Nobody would be using the idiomatic goroutine-per-task with that kind of overhead, yet it's one of the most common building blocks of golang projects.

Isn't that already the case though, regardless of net neutrality? Seems the large scale surveillance and manipulation will happen, whether it is legal or not.

Kind of defeats the purpose of using golang for a task like this. The whole point of golang is using the little greenlet threads, but actually using them in this case is terrible on performance.

The remaining performance left behind is all in memory allocation and garbage collection - something you could optimize relatively easily if it were written in C. Such as by using a memory pool, so that you wouldn't need allocations or garbage collection at all.

Of course if performance isn't a big issue for your task, then none of this is really important.

Google stopped caring about search a long time ago. Nobody at Google gets promotions for 'keeping search good', only for adding unwanted features. So more and more unwanted features keep coming from all directions, and Google's core products keep getting worse and worse.

A similar thing happened to Microsoft back around the time of Windows Vista (and similarly poor mismanagement by management at the time), so we already know where this train is going.