One should probably also ask how much research would not have gotten done or other issues that would crop up if less tech-savvy researchers didn't have a beginner friendly tool like Excel available.
I'm not OP, but I'm also irritated by these kinds of questions, especially during discussions about labor disputes. This is a well-established recipe to muddy the waters for all posts touching on tech workers and labor unions (all 3 are present in the comments, here):
- 'They make enough money, why do they need collective bargaining?'
- 'Why does NYT need SO MANY tech workers? It's a newspaper after all, right?'
- 'The job market is bad, so they should be THANKFUL to even have a job' OR 'They should just get a new job that pays better, the free market will fix it' - depending on how the job market looks.
Observation: answering the question you wished you were asked as opposed to the one you were asked is a conversation dominating tactic which reduces your credibility towards good-faith socratic dialogue.
I'd expect bananas to have lower than average amounts of pesticides though.
The edible part is enclosed in a thick skin that is discarded. And all the small-time banana growers I know, who use pesticides on other crops, just let their bananas grow naturally.
There's no fundamental property of the monetary system that prevents transfers of arbitrary value across international borders. There's just a large number of financial regulators, border guards, etc. who will throw you in jail if you carry a big block of gold across the border or accept a large wire transfer without filling out the necessary forms. In many countries, the laws governing those forms don't yet apply to cryptocurrencies, but I'm skeptical it will remain that way forever.
That's true, and the AML laws for crypto are already becoming more strict, especially in Europe. But in practice, it will be much easier to evade those laws than it is with fiat transfers or moving physical cash/gold.
Unless the "baddie" in this case is the government, why would it be easy for anyone to obtain access to multiple secrets stored in multiple boxes/banks?
Multisig is a pretty common setup for crypto and there is software that makes it easier.
Sure, they could. Would that be any different from how a bank could steal funds from a traditional deposit account?
By making a bank the custodian of your crypto wallet, you're placing your trust in them and should have similar legal recourse you would have had with a fiat deposit.
I am not sure if you are objecting. Definitely you need to trust your bank if you are going store your crypto with them. I just do not see any large traditional bank stealing their customers' crypto and hoping to get away with it.
As far as I know all the cases of stolen crypto have been newly founded companies with their only business being your crypto. That is quite unlike the other kind of bank.
That is a common novice take on the problem, but it only makes sense if the only way harm happens in the world is by people accidentally seeing things they didn't want to see and that can be easily filtered out.
I think we just don't agree on what the problem is. I don't want a discussion platform protecting me from "dangerous" content that I am choosing to engage with.
Yes, I think most people feel the same way as you. The question then is what to do about the societal harms enabled by the platform.
I think that's a question for society, but also for the people working at the platform. For example, if you read interviews with 4chan founder Christopher "Moot" Poole, you'll see that he started out with a similar ethos to yours. He ended up reining in things some over time, still grew miserable with what he created, and eventually quit.
The problem is much larger for a platform that aims to be larger and not generally despised. If you look through the big platform rules, it's worth thinking about each item from a perspective of, "Am I happy devoting my life to enabling that?" E.g., the people who are into CSAM don't want protection from content their are choosing to engage with, just like you. But how many people want to go to work each day and say, "Yay, another day of supporting machinery to distribute child porn across the globe?"
A business needs to have the freedom to kick out shitheads so as to protect itself from becoming a place that non-shitheads don't want to do business with.
A grocery store doesn't let people walk around in their store saying just anything to their customers. They're (rightfully) not bound by as high of a standard for what they allow to be said in their store as the government's standard for how much they'll let you say before they imprison you.
You could say the same thing about a telephone company or a postal service. After all, they are just like a grocery store, so no need for them to uphold free speech.
They're probably not doing it through smartphones, since the leaked slide deck never actually directly mentions the devices they're using to listen in on people only stating they're "smart devices": https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25051283-cmg-pitch-d...
It is much more likely they're listening in using the microphones in smart TVs, which have much weaker privacy protections. This would also make sense since Cox Media Group is a broadcaster, thus they're much more likely to have broad access to data from smart TVs than from smartphones.
None of those articles provide evidence and the last article mentions how difficult it would be to hide such activity on a smartphone due to power and data constraints. A smart TV has none of those issues.
I have been using NoRoot Firewall since my day1 with Android. It takes some times but I allow the least amount of rules per app, then block . per app, and block globally the ones I identify (trackers etc.)
I also block 31... range globally and the FB and FBCDN addresses (namely)(but I don't use FB/IG/WA anyway)
So the "Hey siri"/"alexa"/"Ok Google", those features don't show your mic is recording, i dont think. Whether it's TVs or phones. all of the speech recognition and hands free control features are probably enough. there are masses of consumers that opt-in to these companies collecting data "to improve services" and other sketchy stuff. Honestly, I would think if you wanted to build a business around this it would be much better to go after the data collected behind EULAs that never got read than try to collect data from people who have all that shit turned off..
"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition," Samsung posted in its SmartTV privacy policy.
Sure there is. I would expect a feature called "Voice Recognition" would only be active when I was using voice commands (and perhaps the occasional accidental activation), but not at other times.
> How would you activate certain voice commands if it wasn't listening to all?
One common implementation is to use a locally detected wake word (described in another post), but I've also seen many which require you to hold down a button to speak voice commands. Both solutions answer your technical question satisfactorily.
However, this is how I (and most people) expect voice commands will work based on plain reading of the fine print: the voice commands will be transmitted, but it won't establish 24/7 audio surveillance of your house.
The fine print (and therefore the "explicit" "consent" so obtained) is deceptive and fraudulent.
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However your real concern is apparently a trust question, not a technical question. The technical question was apparently just a distraction.
Obviously if you don't trust the implementer not to lie about their implementation (ie you assume fraud at the outset), then any microphone (or speaker for that matter!) could be a 24/7 listening bug regardless of trigger implementation or EULA fine print. I see that in another reply you already moved the goalposts thusly.[1] ;)
I think amazon solved this partly with hardcoding "alexa" as the wake up word. Meaning a specialized program monitors for "alexa" and ignores everything else and does not record.
Smart TVs might work similar, but I surely won't have anything like it in my home anyway.
I was under the impression that was still infeasible on mobile devices (battery, processor, etc). Happy to be corrected, because I have to admit it's only a matter of time.
> And I haven't started on the slavery side of the production side of the supply chain.
That exists primarily because of the legal status. If cocaine were legal, for example, the production wouldn't be much worse than say coffee cultivation.
And that's terrible what happened to your cousin, but I don't see how those relatively limited cases, as bad as they are, compare to the millions of lives that have been destroyed globally by the war on drugs.
Then you need a system that prevents drug users from getting into vehicles, and also a system that disqualifies them from public healthcare. It's easier to criminalize drug use than to deal with the consequences.
> you need a system that prevents drug users from getting into vehicles
Driving under the influence is already illegal and would obviously remain so in a society where more drugs were legal. I think we mostly all accept that needing to pass a breathalyser test to start your car would be absurd, so why are currently illegal drugs any different?
> a system that disqualifies them from public healthcare
Why? We don’t exclude obese people, those who do no exercise, smokers, alcoholics from public healthcare. In my eyes that is the bedrock of a public service, you get it whether you “deserve” it or not. To say otherwise opens the door to far too many situations where people cannot get the help they need.
> I just opened Telegram right now to check and sure enough the third contact in people nearby right now is called “Weed, Coke, Viagra - Buy now”. At some point, if you don’t see the issue, I think you might be intentionally blind.
Or we just see these discussions as something that shouldn't be criminalized. I'm happy that those who wish to buy drugs can do so on a safer platform than the street corner.
Well then lobby for drugs to be legalised because arguing for free expression when you are actually sad that your drug dealer got busted is completely hypocritical.
I do support drug legalization and decriminalization of all "victimless" crimes.
But I also realize that libertarian policies are unlikely to be adopted in today's political climate, so I also support technology that gets the government out of personal lives, regardless of the law.
