scrupulusalbion

>they were first treated as a single group of lock-step individuals by those looking to oppress them. Is it crazy that to respond, they respond as a group?

I think it plays into the propaganda of the oppressive regime by not asserting individuality. "See, they identify as the group we claimed they were the whole time," the regime would say.

That being said, there is acting as a member of a group and identifying as a member of that group. The former need not entail the latter. For instance, donating money to the ACLU doesn't change your identity to ACLU-er (et simis). No, you are just helping that cause.

>it seems pretty reasonable to assume all third-party elements on the web are hostile.

The trouble is that a lot of good and bad JS/CSS/content is gotten from third-party sites. Some websites are simply useless unless your browser loads third-party JS (e.g. Bootstrap). The ability to load third-party code/content is built into HTML and web developers naturally take advantage of that capability.

I see two issues here:

(1) Whether LE agencies are actually finding it more-and-more difficult to access devices that employ encryption. I think this is plausibly true, simply because there are more such devices being sold than ever before (from the perspective of senior LEOs).

(2) Which LE agencies is he talking about? If he is refering to all agencies, then he might be right. Many LE agencies have very limited budgets. However, if he is talking about the more well-funded and competent agencies, then he is probably wrong

>I wish there was some punishment for Government officials for lying to the public. You can be prosecuted for lying to the FBI, so why shouldn't they be prosecuted for lying to you

Get rid of the punishment for lying to LEOs and it is all fair and equal. They lie to us and we lie to them, both without punishment. It would still be illegal to lie to judges.

>(the voter, who is supposed to have the power in a democracy)

The purpose of democracy is to use elections to legitimize a limited group of persons to use the power of the State. The power of voters is limited to selecting who will be in that group. The rest of the power of the State is in the power of the hands of those who were selected.

>I’m finding that “social networks” should be a consequence of a product that solves a real problem, not that product’s raison d’etre.

Facebook mainly solves one problem: How do I keep in communication with the many people I know IRL? This is a real problem for many people, especialy when you have friends/family all over the country/world.

Any would-be strict competitor with Facebook will have to deal with a bootstrapping problem: How do you get enough people who know each other IRL to sign up and use the website?

Relaxing any one aspect of that, I think, will make success much easier:

* Enough people: You could have a niche focus (car forum) or a niche community (forum for one Eve Corp).

* Know eath other IRL: You could have an anonymous forum (4chan) or a pseudonymous forum (Reddit).

* Sign-up: Twitter, YouTube, and most forums don't require signups to view user-provided content. 4chan doesn't even require login to post.

I doubt this could ever be used to arbitrarily read minds. Even if you could do the measurements without the targer knowing, you would have to somehow correlate the target's real thoughts with those measurements. In the article, the targets voluntarily provide that correlation to measurements during a training phase. It might be the case that some neuro-physical patterns might be common across targets, but that seems very unlikely.

If the target is in your custody and you coerce him to give training data, then he could just give garbage data. You tell him to think "fish barrel neuton whale", but he really thinks "somebody once told me".

Do sub-vocalizations only occur for certain categories of thoughts? I suspect that facial memories do not induce sub-vocalizations.

Can arithmetic be applyied to NaN a la i? (e.g. 5 + 2 * NaN = 5 + 2NaN)

Suppose this were an individual's own blog post:

"I was a racist prior to the 70s. Here's some articles where I show clear racism from that time. In the 70s I had a change of heart. Here's some articles from the 2000s where I clearly show that I am no longer a racist, but in fact the opposite of a racist."

This would not be an apology, because it doesn't stop at showing one's previous racism. It continues on to try to give evidence of current virtue as if that were a remedy for past racism. However, the real problems generated by racism are not cured by changing your position on race.

The NG article puts this in the proper context of intention:

>But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others.

Do they mean they are going to expose other magazines as being racist? While that might be historically interesting, it doesn't seem remotely professional. If they are planning to publish such exposes, then the current article is clearly an attempt to preempt the natural claims that NG was racist too.

>Territorial Dispute will search files on the infected computer for file names and registry keys known to have been used by malware deployed by other nation-state hacking groups.

This seems rather easy to defeat; it is analogous to security by obscurity. You only need to learn (1) what files and registry entries that specific malware generates and (2) what subset of those are harmless. If Territorial Dispute only looks at file names, then that makes things even easier.

Honestly, having two computers has been the only way I can sanely function at work. We have to use Windows for at least one application. My solution has been to setup a second desktop (these are small towers), install Linux on it, and remote into the Windows from the Linux machine. Oddly enough, I can actually play some video games on the Windows machine through that remote session.

We replace computers two to three times per year; I get to pick from generally four-year old computers. I assume that a second computer is not an option for most at work.

Virtues are generally disregarded by those who seek instant gratification.

Most of the times that I bring up the concept of virtue to my peers in age they seem either confused with the concept or contemptuous of it. They behave like virtue is a purely religious thing, yet caution in the face of possible danger is a very basic survival skill.

> users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves.

FWIW, this is probably both an historical attitude and a population difference. If you and a colleague at a university just made csh to get your jobs done, then you will help each other out by doing the development. Because ya'll are also the entire userbase, then you are also the beta-testers. Back then, if you used a computer, it was because you were either developing software or entering data for a developer. Not very many non-developer users touched computers until the 80s; most people developed some kind of software, even if it was trivial BASIC programs on a Commodore.

In the OSS world, you have always been expected to contribute fixes to bugs that affected you, because the tools and source code were in your hands. For most non-developers, there exists only a lack of skill to stop them from fixing bugs or at least filing usable bug reports.

Nowadays, there are much more users who cannot or do not submit bug reports, let alone develop software. Nevertheless, the attitude since the days of csh has not changed much, because not a generation has passed since OSS went somewhat mainstream (e.g. in the data center).

Whether OSS will leave behind the historical attitude that users should be able to understand the software they use (this seems a responsible attitude to me) remains to be seen. Regardless, the developer-base will likely continue to proportionally shrink and users will proportionally become less able to understand their computers.