domain:abc.net.au
Tomato
1m ago
I genuinely cannot think of a single "smart" device that has made my life better but it's easy to think of a ton that have made my life a little bit worse. This isn't a privacy or security thing. The devices are genuinely pointless and annoying. We recently unplugged our Alexa because it was pointless and annoying. There was probably a week where I could come up with contrived tasks for it to help with so I could pretend it wasn't completely stupid. I'm tired of tech people telling me I need this or that and making it impossible to find a house in the Bay Area with a normal boring thermostat. It's an immense treat that the used grill I just bought has no electronics built in.
Supah_Schmendrick
3m ago
There is no killing an idea for "the rest of human existence"
SSCReader
5m ago
They were what? Note some of the non-Catholic Churches burned down were on reservations/native land as well. So how much increased risk Catholic churches have over churches in general still isn't clear.
SSCReader
7m ago
https://tnc.news/2024/02/12/a-map-of-every-church-burnt-or-vandalized-since-the-residential-school-announcements4/
Note that "100 Christian churches in Canada have been vandalized, burned down or desecrated" is a different measure than number of churches burned down. Your source lists around 50 churches that with a fire or arson attack. Of those it lists around 27 as destroyed or razed, with another few have no description of the severity.
My count only covered those burned down. 33 looks to actually be consistent with your source as well using that metric.
So perhaps adjust your trust in the AI counting somewhat?
2rafa
8m ago
Depends on the economy, but I’d say they can if it holds. Racial hostility in America today doesn’t seem worse than it was at the low point of the 90s, between the LA riots and the OJ trial. President Newsom can spout Bill Clinton 2.0 talking points (he has no ideological principles anyway) about unity etc.
2rafa
11m ago
I think a Biden victory would see a linear decline along the current trajectory of extreme wokeness being less cool (note this is very different from the grander arc of liberalism).
Trump could go either way. The DEI zealots might become only more enraged and zealous, and those on the left who don’t like Biden will be quickly stirred up if Trump actually gives people like Rufo some amount of political power and attempts even a small amount of Project 2025 stuff. Trump is a controversial guy and most powerful people in America don’t like him, that can’t be dismissed.
But there is another possibility, which is that 2016-2021 sucked all the political energy out of the system, especially on the left, such that the whole thing just kind of crumbles ideologically. Again, not the grander arc of liberalism, which will continue, but a crisis of conscience, as happened to the left after Reagan and Thatcher won and the postwar corporatist consensus crumbled.
I think a lot of it will depend on the specifics of the election, whether it’s a landslide either way, conduct of both parties during the transition period, and on Trump’s rhetoric. As weird as it sounds, I don’t think it’s impossible that he leaves office at the end of his second term having accomplished almost nothing and yet being more liked, or at least more tolerated, than when he got in in 2016.
IGI-111
13m ago
I probably agree that i'd come back even stronger if they succeeded, but can they? Can we get another Reagan and postpone the total war a few more years? Because I'm sure all the people in charge would like to embezzle a bit more money and retire before it happens.
SteveKirk
19m ago
They already stuffed it back in the bottle in the 90s, and it just made it worse when it finally escaped. Acceleration to total war and the possibility of completely exterminating it for the rest of human existence is the only viable strategy.
quiet_NaN
24m ago
I think there is a world of a difference between camping illegally and detaining others.
Believing in the rule of the law does not imply believing that every law should be rigorously enforced all the time. Just like I don't think you should go after every kid's lemonade stand for lack of a business licence, I also think that universities should have some leeway in deciding which of their student groups they tolerate having protest camps on campus.
I think as long as it is not the government deciding that would not be unconstitutional.
For example, a university might tolerate a protest camp to Save The Whales (as long as they do not single out Japanese students or something) but might decide not to tolerate a protest camp about God Hates Fags.
So the amount of antisemitism and especially the attitude towards Jewish students might matter a lot to the universities -- who I imagine are doing damage control. The question for them is if it is worse PR to call the police to dissolve the camp or to continue to tolerate it and thus to some degree be endorsing the messages they spread.
There is this ongoing bet between right wing intellectual influencers Neema Parvini and Auron MacIntyre over whether we'll see the "woke be put away" in a Trump presidency that signs a return of "fresh prince" 90s liberalism or instead a continuance of acceleration and radicalism.
Some part of the elites definitely understands that this isn't sustainable and that these beliefs are luxuries that are no longer affordable now that the West has to compete again for supremacy. Some have been made even more keenly aware of this by the recent Iraelo-Palestinian controversies.
But the outcome of the bet doesn't really depend on this, that's the premise, the outcome depends on whether or not this faction of the elites has the power to take a culture where DEI and somesuch have taken hold and purge it or make it marginal enough that it's no longer the constant center of attention.
Can they put the culture war back in the bottle? It's hard to say, but this looks like some people are really trying.
2rafa
29m ago
By roided I don’t just mean bodybuilder physique, I also mean the distended stomach, like what Joe Rogan has which people say is a result of steroid use. Muscles help but they’re not a significant factor as long as he’s neither skinny fat nor actual fat. Henry Cavill is hot because he’s tall and has a great face, if he had the physique of a runner or something it would make minimal difference, that was my point.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
38m ago
In Germany, the BSI is a federal agency tasked with enhancing computer security (except for when they are tasked with breaking computer security).
This sounds like the role NIST plays in the US. But those are also contractually enforced on companies doing business with the government.
WhiningCoil
42m ago
There is all that. Although it seems baked into the post is the unsaid premise that the problem is the laws were crafted poorly/maliciously. But, IMHO, the problem is all the enforcement agencies have been captured by neoliberals. And so there simply is no law that they won't interpret in the manner that most suits their objectives. I mean, already with the constitution, you'd think "shall not be infringed" is clear as day. But to a neoliberal lawyer, or a judge that decides "The second amendment does not exist in my courtroom", it's all very nuanced.
So I suppose my opinion is that no law can possibly be crafted to prevent these enforcement agencies from just doing whatever they wanted to do anyways. As such, if you really want to curtail their behavior, you must abolish them.
But I'd be willing to settle for abolishing the undemocratic regime where unaccountable agencies get to make up whatever regulations they want without any oversight from congress, and seeing how things go from there first. A guy can hope.
Jiro
49m ago
"Unrapeable" doesn't mean "morally unacceptable to rape". It means "unattractive even to rapists". The implication is that the others on the list would be attractive to rapists, but not that the writer would rape them personally.
quiet_NaN
53m ago
Just cap the liability costs at 10x the costs of the device. This should be enough to get vendors to take security seriously without having to worry about black swan outcomes.
Also, a hospital getting attacked by ransomware should obviously not only be liable for the ransom they elected to pay, but be fined on top of that if it turned out that any patient files were accessible to attackers.
IGI-111
56m ago
So, will you then make a prediction along the lines of what I asked for in the OP?
I can easily commit to saying that no major IoT startup success is likely to be based in the UK any time soon. But that's saying nothing given they're pretty much all American already for many other reasons.
Maybe some guy at Arm will have to add one more form to some pile or something.
I'm really not sure what your concern is
Europe at large is a dying crab bucket that everybody who can make things is leaving because if you try you reap only taxes and lawsuits.
That's my concern. John Galt is my concern.
Do you think he's wrong?
Yes and no. No chinesium lightbulb maker is ever going to bother with formally proving their code is correct because they don't care. But some connected things actually need to be secure so that you don't explode, catch on fire or get robbed.
I find the actually useful non gimmicky applications of IoT are in this latter category, and that for those the customer and the manufacturer usually know better than to cheap out.
quiet_NaN
59m ago
I am not sure that government providing long detailed lists of how to do security is going to help anyone.
My solution would be to simply make vendors liable for damages caused by security flaws of their devices, up to say 10 times the sticker price. Or impose a fine per vulnerable unit per day. An authentication bypass for a cloud-enabled webcam might cost 10% per day it is known for an exploit which allows recording if the fact that the camera is recording is visible from an LED, or 30% if the camera-on LED can be bypassed.
In Germany, the BSI is a federal agency tasked with enhancing computer security (except for when they are tasked with breaking computer security). The gist I get from German IT blogger fefe is that most of their security recommendations serve more to cover the backside of the company than actually prevent incidents. 'We were running two different anti-virus programs plus a Cisco Firewall, and our Windows+ActiveDirectory network was still compromised by ransomware. This simply shows the immense criminal energy of our attackers, we are the victims here!"
Again, laws should not try to specify the process, they should specify the outcomes. In this case, minimizing the time a device is exploitable.
Ensure software integrity
In practice, this will mean Tivotization. Personally, I am following the philosophy of "if you did not install the operating system, it is not your device". Owning a mobile phone is a lot of hassle. First you pick a vendor which supports OEM unlocks at all, then you find out that their dreadful unlocking process does not actually work, send the phone back, order a phone from a different vendor, request the unlock code, wait a week and finally unlock it. Give me a PC with a legacy boot option or a RasPi any day instead.
On the other hand, if it is no longer possible to sell Rasbian in the UK, I will consider that a win. "Let us just put a default user+password usable via fucking ssh on the image, YOLO" is so far from any responsible security mindset that I can hardly fathom it.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
most women prefer a guy with lower bf% to a roided beefcake type
Since "low bf%" and "roided beefcake" are not mutually exclusive, this is an interesting view into the female view of men.
Gaashk
1hr ago
That makes sense, closer to a preindustrial household economy, where cooking, cleaning, and textiles/crafting were much more important and harder to replace. I think it was CanIHaveaSong who used to write sometimes about (her?) mother hand washing everything and growing up without running water.
On the other hand, the original context was about the kind of woman who might get a degree in psychology but not take her eventual career path too seriously, since ultimately she's more interested in meeting a future husband at college, which to some degree higher status than I am. My grandmother was of the Mrs Degree class, and went to university to get a BA in stage or something before settling down to raise her four children in the 50s and 60s, and even when she lost her husband and became the head of household, I'm not entirely sure what she did, actually. Which isn't judgment on her as a person, and seems to have been appropriate to her class.
So I suppose I was thinking of a socioeconomic situation somewhere between my grandmother's and your mother's, the kind of lower middle class woman who's certified as a teacher or nurse or something. I personally get summers off and spend the time going on road trips with my family, reading Motte posts, and painting in the garden, and would absolutely be a poor candidate for an actually useful stay at home mom. This is related to why old female novels make such a huge deal of women, especially, dropping classes -- they won't necessarily know what to do or have any useful instincts for it, having been trained mostly to read books and paint (or whatever) for their entire childhood.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1hr ago
Thanks a lot for the recs. Irontower indeed seems quite interesting.
gattsuru
1hr ago
The Death of Trust in Bipartisan Lawmaking
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is a 2023 law, driven by nearly a decade of cross-party and cross-tribe interests, best summarized by the intro to this 2018 Atlantic piece:
Mattes honed in on one particular case from the Times story, in which a salesperson at the healthcare company Novartis, a single mother was told by her boss she should consider an abortion. “She didn’t, and after her maternity leave, she said they advised her not to pursue any more promotions due to her ‘unfortunate circumstances at home,’” Mattes said. Those weren’t unfortunate circumstances at home, Mattes said: “That is her son Anthony. Pregnancy isn’t a disease. Babies are a blessing.”
On this particular issue, the conservative Mattes had an unusual ally. A week earlier, several hundred miles away, New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo had ordered an investigation into New York companies accused of pregnancy discrimination...
While a 1978 amendment to Title VII established pregnancy as a protected characteristic, the PWFA's congressional support saw it as too limited in scope and in what accommodations it could require businesses to hold.
Another point, however, dropped in mid-April:
This isn't necessarily new, or a surprise: some courts had already held that the 1978 Title VII amendment protected abortion as a pregnancy-related medical condition, albeit with the more restricted scope. There are good pragmatic or philosophical arguments in favor or against, either in regards to abortion specifically or as a law in general, and some !!fun!! questions about a possible that the EEOC's rule-making treats as purely theoretical. There are some, if not exactly strong, arguments that the text of the law requires it.
Several Republican congresscritters who voted for and cosponsored the bill promptly blasted this interpretation, swearing that they were sure and assured it wouldn't happen. Social conservatives, on the other hand, prompted sang I told you so.
Mattes and his organization do still exist, but haven't commented on the new regulation. They're not, it can be fairly readily assumed, in a huge hurry to partner with the ACLU on statute-writing or sponsor-wrangling any time soon.
Okay, well that's not a policy I actually care about, so it's at least kinda funny, and .
FFLs and How To Get Your Dog Shot By The ATF
The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act had many components, but one of many that gun rights advocates pointed out at length as a matter of concern, even well before the law's language was fully concrete, was the redefinition of gun dealers and engaging in the business of firearms sales, from "principal objective of livelihood and profit" to "predominantly earn a profit". The ATF released its final rule on this new statutory definition in early April, shortly after shooting someone in the head while all their agents forgot their cameras at home, explicitly citing the BSCA's new language as cause.
Three guesses on how that went, and the first two don't count:
The activities described in these presumptions are not an exclusive list of activities that may indicate that someone is ‘‘engaged in the business’’ or intends ‘‘to predominantly earn a profit.’’ These presumptions will provide clarification and guidance to persons who are potentially subject to the license requirement and will apply in administrative and civil proceedings.
The presumptions will be used, for example, to help a fact finder determine in civil asset forfeiture proceedings whether seized firearms should be forfeited to the Government and in administrative licensing proceedings to determine whether to deny or revoke a Federal firearms license. These presumptions do not apply in any criminal proceedings but may be useful to judges in such proceedings when, for example, they decide how to instruct juries regarding permissible inferences.
The only thing that the new rule explicitly does not consider to be "predominantly earn[ing] a profit" is if an individual is liquidating all or part of their owned firearms, without (ever?) purchasing new ones, and I wouldn't bet my pet's life on it. In some ways, it's kinda impressive: the final rule, as opposed to the original proposal, reacted to gunnie concerns about the underspecificity of one resale exception by explicitly removing firearms owned for personal protection from it. In some cases, it breaks from the text of the statute. Halbrook highlights a statutory exception that the ATF refines down to covers repair and customization.
I've written before about the same act smothering archery and hunter training programs at schools, and while this was eventually (and to my surprise) amended, that passed late enough to leave programs screwed over for last school year. We'll see how many schools are willing or able to bring them back.
All around me are familiar faces, Worn out places, worn out FACEs
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a 1994 statute from the old days before backronyms were popularized outside of the military, and consisted of three major prohibitions:
- blocking someone from trying to access or provide abortion services
- blocking someone exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship
- destroying or damaging a reproductive health care facility or a place of worship
It was considered the height of bipartisan compromise at a difficult time (and Bill Clinton's statescraft, in contrast to the then-expensive Assault Weapons Ban), and like many laws from that era, it reflects a draconian view of punishment. While a first nonviolent offense can 'only' result in a maximum of six months imprisonment and a 10k USD fine, these numbers scale rapidly for repeat offenses, and can be rapidly stacked, even in marginal cases, with other charges to boost the scope of a trial and the possible punishment.
Uh. Except you might notice a pattern in what direction both the successful and failed cases go, and what prongs of the FACE Act they cover. It's not that the feds never prosecute someone for clear violations of this law; they just do it by using an entirely different law that predated and does not scale, and accept plea bargains for the most minimal punishments. That disparity has been around for a while, even if it's only become more obvious with Jane's Revenge floating around.
It does not, as a matter of law, matter whether the FACEs is ever enforced against a specific political viewpoint. And from the view of the 'don't break the laws, fucko' or 'don't block access to public spaces' caucus, I've got little sympathy for protestors getting burned when they signed up for the frying pan. But if you sent a message back in time to the 1994 GOP and told them they were just repeating the 1988 18 USC 247, I doubt they'd have trumpeted it.
Joe Wilson and the Affordable Care Act
There's a number of famous controversies during the run-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, along with some lesser-known ones. The extent trans-related healthcare would be covered and what expectations that invoked was a sleeper, while the question of "encouraged end-of-life" care rather famously got above the fold at length.
Joe Wilson is best-remembered, to the extent he's remembered at all, for one of the better-known ones. He shouted out "You lie" during the middle of a joint session of congress where then-President Obama disavowed that "our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants", a matter Republicans feared would be thrown.
Thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration’s actions, today’s final rule will remove the prohibition on DACA recipients’ eligibility for Affordable Care Act coverage for the first time, and is projected to help more than 100,000 young people gain health insurance. Starting in November, DACA recipients can apply for coverage through HealthCare.gov and state-based marketplaces, where they may qualify for financial assistance to help them purchase quality health insurance.
To be fair to President Obama, he's (officially) been out of office for the better part of a decade. To be less fair to Biden, there's no statute changed about any of this in that whole timeframe, and Obama was using the future tense. Whatever Obama thought he was proposing, this is what his proposal got, and it's not like he's complaining.
Wilson received a reprimand for his outburst. There'd be some irony in him living long enough to crow about it, though he hasn't done so yet. And even if he did, being right is cold comfort for anyone other than the politicians.
One of These Things Is Not Like The Others
The Affordable Care Act, unlike the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act or Pregnant Workers Fairness Act or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, was more the result of long negotiation rather than long negotiation and compromise between the parties. There are no Republican cosponsors or even congressional votes for the law to be betrayed, because there were no Republican congressional votes for the ACA at all; at most, there were some (long-booted) Blue Dogs.
Quite a large number of moderates, of one stripe or another, drew that as a particular failure. They could, we were told, have gotten more serious concessions; they could, we were told, have achieved their own separate goals. How much they were moderates or 'moderates' often said how much 'they' in the previous passages stood for the GOP or for that particular person's particular goals. During the second half of the Obama years, many of the particular goals side painted the Republicans as the Party of No; after, this obstinate unwillingness to give up a slice of the cake was drawn as both cause and effect of various Republican maladies, from poll numbers among young professionals to failure to integrate into the administrative class to the price of tea in China.
The PWFA and BSCA rulemakings and FACEs prosecutions come as the punchlines to those particularly jokes. No one's come away from any statute feeling the GOP has a better finger on the interests of the public, or was able to represent its people's interests better than the What's The Matter With Kansas asshole. Perhaps these laws are all cherry-picked, and every other major bipartisan statute had everyone walk away smiling, or the GOP betrayed the Democratic Party. Nor, given the speed that even matters as simple as dictionaries have turned to political ends, is there any way to promise that the next time would be different, or that even laws and statutes that conservatives badly want would be resistant. Indeed, the longest delay was the case where they compromised in no amount at all!
You still don't get that many tries to break trust, and it's expensive to rebuild.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Ok, so not a prediction about consumers' willingness-to-pay slightly more for slightly more secure products. That's fine. It would have been an easy thing to make a prediction on if your step function catastrophic model was correct, but I think we can conclude by this much longer-term, contingent prediction that your step function catastrophic model really really wasn't ever a serious attempt at a model in the first instance.
Does TheMotte have a RemindMe bot that can come back in 20 years?
Flying cars actually are pretty close to my area of expertise, so I'm betting that you probably have some misconceptions of the reality on the topic. What do you think is "the way we talk about flying cars today"? Let's see if it reflects reality.
YouEssAyyy
1hr ago
I predict we will see more and more of this stuff. Red state governments & AGs are increasingly hostile to DEI and I think there is real legal risk of DEI hiring policies. I’m noticing the vibe shift occurring in corporate America. At my mega corp the most cringe of the DEI initiatives have gone away and sr leadership is no longer emphasizing it.
The wildcard is how a Trump victory might impact this. I could see a world where him winning galvanizes the DEI activists.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
You won't change it without breaking it such that it can't produce the new stuff any more.
This is just hyperbolic catastrophism. Hilarious, really. I mean, honestly. You can't possibly have a real argument for this. Did you really think that this was an actual argument? Or do you have some weird twisted argument that literally any epsilon>0 of regulation instantly grinds innovation to a halt? I hate to break it to you, but no one else believes this, because it's just not true. Not even remotely true. Tons of industries that are infinitely more regulated than tech still have plenty of innovation. There may be a tradeoff on some margins, yes, but your step function model is not remotely serious.
"Technokings" is not a reasonable description of the people building them. The people building them exist, and are not people with the regulated-industry mindset, where there are a ton of boxes to be checked and rechecked every time something is built or a change is made.
What shall we call them, then? "Bored Pandas", the culture of folks too bored by things like making sure there's no default password on their devices?
Tell that to the Albigensians!
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