subjoriented

The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent, as foreign influence campaigns typically attempt to magnify grassroots dissenting opinions (this is true also of US foreign intelligence efforts). There's many reasons why these kinds of apps, comments, and conversations are taken down due to their content.

Fundamentally, being a gateway to information in a legal environment where the hosting the content as a curator puts you under risk creates deep incentives to whitewash content. Those forces are already present for companies which might accidentally sustain 9gag/4chan type cultures/commentary which contradicts however its productizing its platform.

Reddit is another example a company that has recently scrubbed itself of most controversial content, including content critical of or dangerous to its host's countries political and national security naratives. Twitter has started down that journey as well.

It feels like we're experiencing the growing pains of social network and hosted content boom reinvented on web technology over the past couple decades.

It's kind of amazing in retrospect how controversial some of the "mundane" applications of technology to society have been, whereas a couple decades ago most of the moral panic centered around concepts like "online dating", which to date have actually been relatively controversy scarce.

The history of China's rise as a technologically enabled state is in direct contradiction to the premise of the accusation.

The West invented technologically enabled surveillance. The Stasi in Germany - for example - developed a records and accounting system and would use home telephony equipment to spy on dissidents. As of the 70s and 80s the United States NSA has backdoored much of the modern global communications systems - and has build these systems to scale intelligence into actionable intelligence for partner enforcement organizations (CIA/FBI/etc). At a municipal scale, the United States is networked with threat scoring systems, camera networks with facial recognition, ISMI interceptors (with continuous passive collections events over all major cities), data fusion centers between policing and data networks, requirements to data holding companies to compel data access, and much more - these systems were build several decades ago but are constantly being updated.

China was struggling through these decades to reestablish itself, and has only recently copied modern Western systems of surveillance.

I don't really have teeth in that game though. I realize this is a political topic ("blame"). The fact that the West employs a sophisticated and pervasive surveillance state should not restrict us from criticizing Eastern implementations of the same gross mal-application of technology. And the fact is that who "invented" it is a bit of a non-starter, as state surveillance existed thousands of years ago in rudimentary forms that have evolved independently between states - and the application of modern technology is just one aspect of historical picture.

Of course the surveillance situation in the United States goes much further, with state intelligence agencies actively "engaged" with the public so that public perception can be shaped. The NSA calls this combination of surveillance and engagement "active listening". I don't know whether China has learned from this yet (such topics are hard to research) but it wouldn't surprise me.

Ever hear of the statistician who drown in a river an average of 1 foot deep?

This does seem to be the way that Open Source has gone: The operating system and some other critical components (compilers, runtimes, etc) are open source - but applications, services, desktops, marketplaces, firmware, etc are closed.

I'd still call this a huge win for both open source and free software. But obviously its a much bigger win for open source than for free software.

The fact of the matter is that the United States considers strong industries in strategic technology fields in adversary nations a national security threat. This is why NSA seeks to modify US standards for export across the world. It's why US lawmakers have worked with US telecommunication firms to gain access to international communications. It's why the US has gone after Kaspersky AntiVirus. It's why the US has gone after Huawei, and intelligence officials have supported debunked stories about (e.g. SuperMicro). It's why the Trump Administration has stripped the regulations on 5G development (to speed it up so that American companies and technology can dominate the standard).

This isn't a uniquely American thing. Russia and China are doing the same things (heard of the Great Firewall?)

Opening doors to journalists is a good and appropriate step. It won't fix the underlying issues, though, as they stem from National Security competition - not wrote press misunderstanding.

Others have pointed out some errors with the methods employed in this report.

Still, who else is collecting this kind and fidelity of data? I found the trends very informative. First that we're still a long long way from having hardened base operating systems, but also that the trend is positive and slowly moving in the right direction.

Even just getting a breakdown of CVEs is interesting (though I would have liked better granularity than "bypass something") for both trends and to understand just how many DoS issues come up per year versus say code injections or overflows.

I don't think anything you wrote is wrong!

I have a background in error codes - hamming, and luby and raptor and, and, and. Reed-Solomon is particularly "beautiful" from a mathematics perspective (more so than Raptor) - something I can usually explain to anyone and get them interested.

Wow. I love explaining Reed Solomon codes and this didn't do it justice.

The basic concept is that if I give you five points all on the same line, you only need any two of them to reconstruct the line.

Reed Solomon doesn't use lines (it isn't optimal) and the geometry they use isn't the Cartesian plane (this requires infinite precision) - but this is what the codes do!

Just like it requires two points to reconstruct a line, three points are required to reconstruct a simple polynomial (degree 2). Reed Solomon uses "high degree polynomials" which require n+1 points to reconstruct the degree-n polynomial.

The codes take data, make a polynomial out of it, and then send points from the polynomial to the other side, which can interpolate it as soon as enough points are gathered!

All of this looks like impenetrable discretization and matrix operations if you just get a description of the algorithms, which makes it seem a lot less approachable than it is.

Soon the TSA will be confiscating sticky notes.

Not that I have any real answers here (re: theories of everything), but I do have something to add regarding "laws".

Charle's Law states that Pressure * Volume = Temperature.

That's true and you can do a million experiments with a million balloons and liquids/gases to validate it - until you find a non-newtonian substance, try to apply it to a solid, introduce moving fluids, etc.

Charle's Law isn't a fundamental law of physics, but a consequence of the material properties and statistical outcomes of a large number of interacting molecules. Before atoms and molecules are characterized, it _does_ look like a fundamental law to an experimenter.

It doesn't seem to me that looking for "lower layers" of theoretical physics (holographics, quantum foam, strings, whathaveyou) is an infinite regress and doomed to never be a completed project. I do think that the project may reach some point where the theories fail to be scientific (read: falsifiable) because it could be possible that reaching deep enough through layers of physical abstraction can not be achieved / no physical instrument can provably be built to look deeper (as an analogy, no instrument can be built to probe the full amplitude space of a quantum state).

I started listening to "Serial", "This American Life", "Hardcore History" and a large number of other programs. Podcasts are generally easier to consume, reconsume, and schedule. That said, recently (several years) I've moved off of podcasts because there was a surge of podcast content, and no good mechanism to find quality programs. That and I was never able to find consistently good podcast software.

I've been a long time HN participant. I'm coming back from a lurker status after having lost my credentials a long time ago. shrug.

Can you explain how you consider this suspicious (to the point you needed to create a throwaway account to say that)?

I'm confused why HN is being so aggressive and unwelcoming right now...

This kind of meta-conversation isn't really what I'm on HN for.

This is one of my favorite forms of fibonacci, because it unwinds the recurrence relation without having to apply some kind of relation/master-theorem to it. Rather it describes it as a relation in a way that allows square-and-multiply.

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Can you add more (feel free to edit the current comment content?)

I don't think this addresses the argument I've made. Can you read it again and reply to the strongest possible interpretation you make of it (per the site guidelines)?