Thriptic

You are of course allowed to employ SOME obfuscation in research process, but you aren't allowed to shield your product and claims from scrutiny behind them. At the end of the day you have to validate that your product can do what you say it can do publicly through independent analysis, you have to run public trials against existing tech, and you have to explain how your tech works, which Theranos never did. They fought against scrutiny from the greater scientific community from day one; "just trust me it works" is not sufficient proof in science.

This is one reason why we have the patent structure, so people can publicly disclose data for validation purposes and still make a substantial profit.

I can't speak about any specific company, but there are several VCs that specialize in life sciences and medicine and have people with the requisite expertise to evaluate claims on their team (or know the people to talk to in order to get it). The average tech VC might not have a deep bench of life sciences people to validate specific tech with, may not know the experts in the field, and may not know how the industry varies from tech.

Similarly, if the company won't validate their tech in peer reviewed journals, they are full of shit. I strongly suspected fraud years before it was acknowledged because Theranos was citing "trade secrets" for why they couldn't release any data about their tech. We don't do trade secrets in medicine or science, and this is precisely why.

Preach. Boston is damn near overly hostile towards young people. They hyper regulate all activities and services that young people want to participate in or use as you point out, do nothing to reign in housing prices, and then are shocked when they have a hard time retaining talented people after they get their degrees. It's absurd.

It's largely arguing that most of the cybercrime jobs basically are desk jobs. It principally says two things.

First, that most jobs in cybercrime involve selling services to end users and whenever you sell services you not only have to provide customer support which sucks but your customers will have reliability and usability expectations which become annoying to fulfill when you have to maintain your infrastructure in a clandestine way.

Second, most of the positions in criminal orgs involve low skill bitch work because if you had the skills to do the real programming / security / ops work required to do more creative cybercrime then you could easily go get a legitimate job with great pay or go do your own thing.

Well, first I can almost guarantee that the surveillance tech being employed on a predator drone is substantially more advanced and wide ranging than a simple human operated video camera, but I also don't think it's a good idea to have guys with video cameras in helicopters recording protests either unless it's to film illegality. It has a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech. Peaceful protesters really shouldn't be getting surveiled / data gathered during protests shouldn't be getting mined, and unless authorities can guarantee that isn't happening then recording makes me uncomfortable.

Under your logic, any time the government breaks a law and harms me, I am automatically entitled to disregard the law as well and retaliate. If government can't follow the law, why should the people? It's pretty easy to see why we don't want to live in a society where rule of law is disregarded.

The issue is there is no transparency about what is happening with the data that is being collected.

Exactly this and I'm surprised that I had to scroll this far down to find this comment.

Extract this scenario out into meat space. Imagine if a town was running a bulletin board where anyone could post town news and a citizen posted a flyer talking about town crime statistics that were wrong. A town employee noticed and posted an addendum identified as being from the town right next to the flyer saying "actually the real data is X". Should town employees not be allowed to do that?

I would argue that Google has an obligation to be transparent, they do not have an obligation to be neutral. As you state, they are a private entity and can do whatever they want.

If news providers and other knowledge providers are allowed to curate what data they present then I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Google be held to a higher standard. Further, literally nothing is stopping you from creating your own knowledge aggregator if you feel that Google is doing a bad job of displaying pertinent data.

I always wondered what was going on when I saw localhost show up in the connections listing for a site in uMatrix, TIL.

It doesn't seem like fraud when they are still delivering an actual pizza; that's basically just leveraging a sale. It becomes more dubious when they aren't delivering the finished good.