imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work for you ?
I'm really surprised at how they would rather ignore or silence all and report that they is strictly no problem among their pool of employees, to say they have the best employees and good KPIs
It doesn't look like a winning strategy indeed.
I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small. They prefer you to say you don't know nobody.
Also yeah, I agree with you. These forms are straight out of the 1950s when more liberal habits have been coming since the 60s. And we're straight up declining anyone who is outspoken about his habits while he knows the true boundaries of the laws.
The government is just selecting applicants who do the sharia or some straight up vague "you have to be a good guy" menaces that completely opens them to blackmail
> imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work for you ?
To complicate this further I think people don't recognize how people can start their jobs without problems and then gain them. These are stressful jobs (and with low pay) so that itself is a common gateway to a drinking problem. But there's also very mundane ways too. A large number of heroine and fentanyl addicts had their addictions begin through use of legal medication. The problem is we have a culture that pretends addiction is a choice and that the only to become addicted is through poor decisions and that to kick an addiction just requires "really wanting to stop". But that's not really consistent with the definition of addiction...
It seems like a poor strategy for high security topics, like you say. If anything, I want these people to have zero fear of opening up about their addictions. Be it gained unintentionally or through bad decisions. Reason being that 1) it reduces the risk of blackmail and 2) giving them a pathway to help also reduces their chance of blackmail. We don't even need to mention the fact that these are people and should be treated with kindness, we have entirely selfish reasons to be selfless.
> I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small.
I always found that odd myself. Do these people know what the demographics of a typical American University are these days? If you don't have a decent list of foreign nationals then you're either 1) a social recluse or 2) in a cultural bubble, and probably not the kind that we want people with this kind of authority to have... But I think they could resolve some of this by clarifying what level of contact they mean. Is it someone you sit next to in class and talk to frequently? Or do they not count if you don't talk with them outside class or study groups? Last time I looked at the forum it seems like they want you to just list anyone you ever talked to.
Personally I've avoided getting a clearance because I just don't see the value. It is a lot of work to put together, forces you to be more quiet about what you work on, means you need to be more careful/vigilant in every day things and especially when traveling, and all for what? Low pay and not even that cool of work? I mean if it was working on alien technologies and cool sci-fi shit, sign me up! But the reality is that most of the work isn't very exciting. I'd rather have more freedom, more pay, and work on more interesting things. Maybe their work can have more purpose and more impact, but I am also not convinced that's true for the majority of things you need clearance for (even as a person in STEM).
PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.
The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight
I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site
Your bank and mobile data carrier and cable company already did for you, on your behalf. It’s all searchable via your phone number, which you have to provide to all the apps you DO sign up for, so they can easily query your name, photo, address, purchase history, etc.
They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data
You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.
If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it
Right, I understand they don't need a warrant for the databases. I'm saying that they use the databases to get enough data for a warrant that they wouldn't be able to get without the databases.
To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street.
One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them.
Now Peter Thiel's Age verification truck has been parked across the street for 2 weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza ?
They need to replace it with Flowers By Irene van ? Who wants to create that company and try to sell it ?
I'm dumbfounded that a big tech company that says they take age verification so seriously just subcontracts that part to this set of various subcontractor with no apparent vetting.
I do love Discord as a platform and I happily took subscriptions for me and some friends, but I don't understand who steers it.
Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.
I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.
They also never say it goes through datacenters in room 641A or though Utah before it's "deleted", because it's a US company and they can't refuse that.
In case someone is unaware, 641A and Utah and both references to the US mass surveillance systems in this context. Specifically interceptors that a company wouldn't be able to prevent from saving your data for the few seconds they need to process and delete it
I might be misremembering, but AFAIK, that kind of surveillance mostly worked because many companies didn't bother encrypting datacenter-to-datacenter traffic, thinking that those networks are trusted. That mistake has since been rectified though.
With almost everything going over TLS these days and HTTPS being the norm, even for server-to-server APIs, it's much harder to snoop on traffic without the collaboration of one of the endpoints, and the more companies you ask for that kind of collaboration, the higher your risk of an unhappy employee becoming a whistleblower.
That's also about US companies that can't refuse or can't bother to challenge that a dragnet is set up in their process.
ISPs themselves didn't save any data.
However, they gave interception rooms to the NSA (which is indeed technically not them).
Nowadays ISPs aren't the right scale to do it for the reasons you mentioned. But the USA lowkey moved the dragnet to the main datacenters with prism, then made it mandatory for all with the CLOUD act.
And if the threat is not coming from the USA, but some other country starts to ask Discord to BCC them the IDs of their citizens, we can do the odds on whether Discord will challenge it or not.
Now I want to ask Discord who is their third party provider ? Why don't they process IDs themselves ?
Unless you use Cloudflare (or roughly any other DDOS protection system), in which case you're letting those companies MITM all requests on purpose. Protected between you and Cloudflare by PFS and any other acronym you like.
I think the odds that Cloudflare hasn't been forced into data snooping by the government are approximately zero. It's the by far the biggest, juiciest target.
I hope Discord understands the risks they pose to their audience when they open source their IDs again.
Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names.
A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghanis are still on Discord)
For me, a company that open sourced 70,000 IDs and ask for moooooore just weeks later is just a joke about the sharing economy
The problem isn't even for new users. Some users have over a decade of private hobbies and will now need to associate their governement ID to their profile. Discord pinky swears they ask but don't keep this time, which isn't enough.
Companies shouldn't be allowed to change such fundamental ToS after an account is created.
> Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names.
Exactly. I am sure they won't share their face or ID and will move somewhere else. Big opportunity for other platforms to stand up and grow their user base.
Discord also calculates a whole lot of (inferred) demographic information. Estimated age, gender, and surely much more. They also feed all the messages into a ML model, which guesses what people are talking about, and pushes a notification to other users. This is probably the culmination of all that, this is why they refuse to be e2e like every other reasonable messaging app...
Discord is focused on large groups. E2EE doesn't work in this case. Group management overhead traffic is too high and too unreliable, and a bad actor could just join the group under a pseudonym to log messages. Discord isn't E2EE for the same reason Hacker News isn't.
For large public servers it would be pointless. But for DMs and small private servers, it would be meaningful. Most people in DMs and small private servers would not appreciate their messages being publicly accessible like HN comments are.
I REALLY doubt anyone XYZ while XYZ is illegal/pursued/banned in their country hasn't already extensively thought about their own threat model, and that disclosing this kind of infomration on a public platform is not safe.
Isn't making 1200$/h while being self employed the goal for HNers ? Isn't HN supposed to be open minded ?
This is the most HN post we saw ou there in a while.
As if boasting how code was improved at GAFAMs despite actually thought challenging social implications, reduced wages and layoffs was the only point of this board.
Thank you so much for reviewing flagged content and giving a second chance to this post
As a rare contributor to these sites, I often feel blunt and unbalanced when some old users just flag your work made with good intents so that it vanishes, without taking any time to even comment why, fix it, or think about prejudices for the platform (which it not just their bubble) and users.
My first new page on wikipedia was immediately marked for deletion as some random user who wouldn't bother message me, reference it on related articles or contribute just flagged it for being orphaned and bad. I won't bother creating pages anymore. (While OSM has forums to discuss things and is overly chill about learning to contribute on the actual map)
I will not complain that this happens often on HN as it does not. Most users are kind and curious. * Flags aren't overwhelmingly abused. *
However, this particular story is about sex workers who opened up, giving rare accounts that you won't find anywhere in a way that not only agrees to guidelines but looks like any popular story here.
Sex workers are often discriminated against in a lot of places. Flagging this story could warn that HN is public places and everyone isn't that safe or open minded.
Any actual discussion shouldn't be trapped in private Discord servers, this site should remain the place to challenge your technical, sociological and business related perspectives.
I hope this was already clear, but in case not: we don't have any problem with the OP and did turn off the flags on it. Same as the last time it was discussed:
Btw I do think that some of the flags may have been because of the "whorelord" bit in the title, which counts as linkbait in HN's sense (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That's why we took it out.
dang, it's not like I don't understand what HN is trying to do (...on paper, at least). I know how it works (or, how you wanted it to work).
The problem is that there is a fundamental tension between an user-controlled ranking system and an editorial board.
And make no mistake, the mod team + few (trusted) people that flag stories constitute an editorial board.
I would be very happy if HN would plastered somewhere, really visible, the fact the content is editorialized and, while the upvotes matter, they're not the whole story. Not that I can see that happening, I can imagine the shitstorm coming from the wider (more naive) audience.
In the end, as the audience grows, it will become harder and harder to reconcile this two systems. People will grow angrier and angrier as they are unable to discuss the things they want to discuss. Not that they can leave, everywhere else is shit. And so, the grumbling will continue, and the huge war-chest of good you amassed these past years will slowly go down until there's nothing left.
I don't like how companies behave like that and basically push users to upgrade their phones
Garmin in particular makes it mandatory to use their app for SOME connected functionalities (while others work just fine on wifi or wifi tethering).
They unsupported old version of android for the garmin connect app pretty fast (my mom's phone was incompatible within 4 years of its release) while they don't support you to connect older devices on newer phones and say they know it doesn't work.
As a user, I don't care whose fault it is.
I ditched both Google in favour of degooglized android on older Xiaomi and Pixel phones that support custom ROMs, and Garmin for any sport equipment.
My next phone will be a Fairphone if they make something with a smaller screen.
I don't know which app you're doing, but I would most likely permanently just not download it or find an open source alternative if it stopped working for me, as no app is essential.
Pay attention to the user-base, in particular is your app is supposed to work with a web of users.
While i always try to look for open source utility apps (i use several), our userbase simply don't care.
Context: Our apps are means to connect to our devices via BLE, are free and without ads (fuck ads, fuck all ads), no integrity checks. We don't publish the API but we know of a couple of clients that reverse engineered the protocol and made their own. Good for them. (one of them also came by the office to bring a friend and showed us his app that glued together the functionality of several modules from also our competitors. Cool!)
But given what we do our customers are complete normies, doing what google asks us is the path of least resistance, and gets us most audience.
Those who don't want to use the play store can find the APK in the usual sites, don't care.
If i made app for myself i would indeed distribute it differently.
I'm really surprised at how they would rather ignore or silence all and report that they is strictly no problem among their pool of employees, to say they have the best employees and good KPIs
It doesn't look like a winning strategy indeed.
I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small. They prefer you to say you don't know nobody.
Also yeah, I agree with you. These forms are straight out of the 1950s when more liberal habits have been coming since the 60s. And we're straight up declining anyone who is outspoken about his habits while he knows the true boundaries of the laws.
The government is just selecting applicants who do the sharia or some straight up vague "you have to be a good guy" menaces that completely opens them to blackmail
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