When BLM is mentioned, I often see people criticize their methods, the underlying ideology of some members and their claims to truth. I have never seen anyone not care about black people being killed.
There is, of course, a possibility that I'm living in an opaque filter bubble and that the racist hordes are just outside. If I am, please pop that bubble and show me the truth.
How would you even trust such results? I mean, lets look at where they come from.
Reported crimes in systems that are biased against some folks, with laws that are easier to break and get caught with when you are poor. Some of the folks are poor because of the situations that have happened to them - war, civil unrest, domestic violence, racism and discrimination of the past still affecting them. And lets not forget, a lot of folks don't report crimes like rape - this is higher in some countries than others. In some cases, reporting a rape might ruin your life.
How can you trust numbers coming from such systems when they say that skin color x or cultural background y does more crimes? We've had reports that do say such things, and the inherent biases in them generally make them untrue.
You are setting up a framework of thought where no matter how much data you gather that shows some group is indeed more violent, you are allowed to just dismiss it on the basis of some situational perceived discrimination.
Not really, I'm just aware that a lot of these sorts of grouping stereotypes are wrong - and much of the past studies have been flawed by discriminatory views.
For example, take the "poor people commit more crimes". Now, I don't know that this is true, though I know folks believe it and some studies have seemed to back it up. But I also know that a lot of poor folks lack ways to hide their crime (no private place to smoke pot in, for example) and live in areas more likely to be policed heavily. The only thing I can really come up with is that poor people get caught for crimes more often, and so are easily over-represented in the prison system. The conclusion that "poor people commit more crime" is one of bias.
This sort of thing is enough to cast doubt on a lot of these sorts of statements and check for such biases. It is a bit different from the data actually being true with the cause of the trend being discrimination. For example, "Felons often return to crime after release in the US" is likely true. Part of the reason for that is because of discrimination and biases against the ex-felon (especially in certain subsets of felons). I'd not ignore the data, but address the discrimination when trying to fix it.
Oh, I don't really think so, no, but it is conceivable. And I'd actually rather have people communicate what they believe to be true rather than what they think they can get away with.
This entire conflict just seems completely absurd to me - why on earth are the 72 "experts" who signed the open letter so quick to trust WhatsApp without access to the source code?
The experts (no scare quotes needed, they really are experts) were commenting on the story's facts as presented. There was no need to read the source of whatsapp, as the facts as stated in the original article were overblown and based on fundamental misunderstandings of cryptography.
The entire story was based on the question of "what do you do when someone you're communicating with using encryption changes keys?" Whatsapp chose to dynamically use the new key, rather than fail & force the user to verify the new key in some out-of-band way. This was described as a "backdoor" in the guardian story. That was simply false. Even calling it a vulnerability is a mis-understanding of how cryptography works and of the risk involved in that design decision.
Thank you for actually replying instead of downvoting...and I'll admit, the scare quotes may have been a bit too much!
That said, the open letter plainly states "WhatsApp effectively protects people against mass surveillance."
How do they know? From this, and the entire tone of the letter, it looks to me like they're still implicitly trusting that WhatsApp does what it claims to do. I see absolutely no reason to do so, and am utterly baffled that top security experts do.
More emphasis should be put on this. Those who know how to reverse engineer apps already look at the code, regardless of source code availability. But posting some machine code to debunk the original story would not do much good, seeing as those who might be unsure would likely not know how to read assembly.
It's still not entirely accurate, or at least conclusive, that WhatsApp effectively protects people against mass surveillance. It might be that there's enough other sources, messages aren't that valuable in the first place or even that mass surveillance itself, between target surveillance and everyone being a public person, isn't that important to protect people against.
I think it's much easier to conclude that WhatsApp protects peoples messages from leaking or being abused by providers and other "softer" merits.
I'm saying that both the claim that "WhatsApp is effective" and that "it is effective against mass surveillance" might be untrue even if it is effective at E2E encryption.
You can argue that WhatsApp itself de facto doesn't effectively protect (against mass surveillance) because it only works with instant messages and a lot of data isn't instant messages. You can argue that there is still mass surveillance of metadata. And that governments could enact secret laws to force vendors to engage directly in mass surveillance of their customers through the OS (less likely in the US, more so in China, especially as Google isn't present).
Sure, it's a nitpick. It's implied that it's effective because it's a good way to use E2E. But it not necessarily explored in the article whether it effectively protects people. I'm sure someone thinks that PGP was effective against mass surveillance too. So it becomes and issue over what you think is worth protecting.
> are capable of reverse engineering and analyzing Android apps (i.e. WhatsApp).
Did you do that before signing the letter?
> Furthermore, if you can verify that the app does what it advertises...
Without reproducible builds you can only verify the specific version of the app on your device. It's quite a leap from there to say 'Whatsapp is safe for you, too, regardless of your use-case'.
Anecdotal experience with twitter's timeline suggests it's viewing time - and that they haven't considered that people are just spending more time finding the tweets they're looking for...
This isn't surprising at all. IQ is highly correlated with genetics (especially for older teens and adults), and the correlation between IQ and income is similarly strong.
Just to be clear - I'm comparing two billionaires who started off as millionaires, and suggesting that Gates is of above average intelligence whereas Trump is not.
They are, but their health care systems are everywhere on the scale from textbook socialism to capitalism-with-lots-of-rules. The UK's NHS, for example, employs the doctors, paid out of general government revenue, and provides otherwise-free health care.
That's not the point. The GP's error was calling the policy in question "socialism". It is not. Even if socialism->bad were always true, that doesn't imply the reverse, i. e. bad->socialism.
Spying on citizen has historically been used by every non-democratic regime, from the right-wing fascists to left-wing communists and west-wing Nixons.
I played around with this, but had some trouble removing the audio stream from the MOV file using ffmpeg.
There's a third data stream in the file, and ffmpeg doesn't know how to handle it, so it either gets removed or replaced with dummy data. The javascript framework seems to need this third stream to work, which is pretty annoying...
I'd love to do something with this, but without a simple (and preferably scriptable) way to remove the audio I probably won't...
There is, of course, a possibility that I'm living in an opaque filter bubble and that the racist hordes are just outside. If I am, please pop that bubble and show me the truth.