GSM && android phones - <AUTHOR>

Which android phone would you suggest right now - whats the best phone / best deal? Just thinking about getting one. It should be a GSM phone - I like to travel ...<p>thanks - Johann (Santa Clara - CA) <comment><USER2> Nexus S</comment>


Bechtolsheim Thinks New 10G Switch Changes the Game Again - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/19/bechtolsheim-thinks-new-box-changes-the-game-again/

<comment><USER2> What a brilliant concept. Force10 had better watch out, it looks like this is serious competition for their exascale product.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see some comparison with real Ethernet switching companies like Extreme, Brocade or Force-10.

Ethernet switching isn't really Cisco's cup of tea. They're OK at it but it's not really what they're best at. Same with Juniper.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anybody know how active a role Bechtolsheim played in the actual engineering on this? The article makes it sound like he personally worked on the design. If true, that's uncommon for someone in his position and I'm impressed.

<comment><USER5> He is definitely the "real deal."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Smart guys, going for the pickaxe business in the gold rush. The software side is also interesting (EOS, vEOS pages). From <http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/products/7500series>: _Arista EOS ... Access hundreds of Linux networking applications_

<comment><USER7> "Open network operating system - add your own applications and components"

Does that mean I could deploy an app directly on the switch? That would be seriously cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope they have learnt the lessons from Vyatta. A solid product which couldn't make it against the networking giants.

</comment><comment><USER9> It sounds like Arista only makes the sheet metal and control plane; Dune should really get the credit.

</comment><comment><USER10> ...It has 384 ports–think of them like pipes for data–that connect to racks...

Seriously? Pipes for data? Sadly, the article does not go on to say

...really deliver 10 gigabits a second... think of a gigabit as a lot of water...

<comment><USER11> They got their terminology wrong. They're "tubes", not "pipes".

Journalists really screw things up...

<comment><USER12> In datacenter speak we say pipes = network. Customers who collocate ask for ping, power and pipes.

They got it right.</comment></comment></comment>


Meditation reduced an opioid dose needed to ease chronic pain by 75% - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/11/11/743065892/meditation-reduced-the-opioid-dose-she-needs-to-ease-chronic-pain-by-75 <comment><USER2> The linked JAMA study does not show the opioid reduction was 75%.

In fact, to quote, " The findings suggest that MBTs are associated with moderate improvements in pain and small reductions in opioid dose and may be associated with therapeutic benefits for opioid-related problems, such as opioid craving and misuse. Future studies should carefully quantify opioid dosing variables to determine the association of mind-body therapies with opioid-related outcomes."

I will dig into this more this evening - chronic pain management is my area - but on first glance, this is a bullshit clickbait headline.

</comment><comment><USER3> The actual title is:

Meditation Reduced The Opioid Dose She Needs To Ease Chronic Pain By 75%.

It's the story of how one user was able to supplement a smaller dose of opioids with other therapies and reduce her need for opioids. The title as is makes an extraordinary claim never made by the article and as such is a lie. It would be great if we didn't mislead our readers to get them to click a link.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I submitted the title as written by the author. I assume it was changed by the moderator and inadvertently got mis-titled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People that are surprised by this should consider investing more in their meditation practices. Meditation has a way of making your emotional and physical state data the mind considers instead of a force that drives the mind.

<comment><USER5> There's something I find sad/distressing. If I can control/filter/ignore my emotions.. who am I ?

I like meditation as a life saving mechanism to cope with emotional failures in hard times though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Was laying in a park this weekend on a below freezing night with a friend who's been doing TM. I meditate pretty regularly, but never tried a mantra. Anyways, I feeling very cold and ready to go inside, but after a few minutes of meditation, I felt warm again. Meditation definitely increases my tolerance of uncomfortable conditions.

<comment><USER7> While meditation in general tends to help one manage pain/discomfort, the Wim Hof method deals specifically with coping with cold temperatures.

<comment><USER8> Wim Hof is not a normal human, it's not clear that there is anything about his "method" so much as that he has remarkable physiology.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D6EPuUdIC1E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D6EPuUdIC1E)

<comment><USER9> The very video you link to concludes that his method does in fact have real effects on physiology.

<comment><USER8> Yikes. My memory is faulty then. I will have to rewatch it. (He's still a bit of a freak of nature though, that much I'm sure about. (At least I think I am.))

<comment><USER10> Drying cold, wet sheets with body heat is a standard monk thing that even a non meditator like me has heard of:

[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation- ch...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation-changes- temperatures/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The other night I had my first real case of heartburn due to a poor choice of meal. Unfortunately I had no medication on hand so I just tossed and turned on the bed. I was trying my best to alleviate the pain so I could sleep. I tried to focus away from the pain and for moments it felt like the pain dulled down. I was pondering if this is something that those skilled at mediating can do by reducing the pain just by the mind.

<comment><USER12> > I tried to focus away from the pain

I've done exactly the opposite and have had some success and some failures.

I've had headaches where I focus 100% on the pain and try to objectively think about the sensation - where it is and exactly how it feels. I've found that often the pain fades away because I can't really pin it down.

On the other hand, if I do the same things with a mildly upset stomach, I can pretty much always make myself barf.

<comment><USER13> I do the same thing when having a headache. Focusing on the pain and all the details about it causes the pain to get weaker, I keep focusing on it, "digging it out", untill it subsides. Thinking about anything other than pain does not cause relief. Interesting. I have noticed some benefits of motionlessly sitting, breathing slowly but deeply and replaying the day in the evening to relax and improve my socialization. This is different to the usual anxiety of ruminating on past thoughts, for me at least. In the end I am tired but feel in control and decisive, self confident. It makes it super easy to fall asleep!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazing how and what Indians knew three four millennium ago.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd be curious if her pain can be managed with non-opiods now.

</comment><comment><USER16> I read this as:

"The answer to the opioid epidemic is just some meditation and reducing your dosage. Everything is OK, guys. Really."

Effectively, a native ad to prop up big pharma.

<comment><USER17> An ad to prop up big pharma by suggesting that people cut their opioid use by 75%?

Lets assume that this is an ad to prop up big pharma. Something between 1 of the 2 following extremes happens.

1\. Every opioid user takes up meditation, and is able to reduce their opioid use by 75%. This would generally be considered a very good thing, even though it would cost big pharma 75% of their opioid profits.

2\. The woman in the article is the only person in the world with this reported success, nothing changes.

Are you suggesting that forces at play are hoping that the second happens, yet all the lawsuits and criminal investigations against opioid manufacturers and distributors will go away, in part due to articles like this, despite the lack of change in numbers?

<comment><USER15> It's easier to coax people into a trap when they believe there's an escape.

It's a big part of pressure sales dark patterns, I believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Meditation will never gain mass acceptance or practice no matter how many more of these articles we see.

People seem to forget there is a huge percentage of the population that will never meditate or can't meditate due to extenuating circumstances.

While this article is interesting it's not helpful for this subsection of the population.

For them it is far more beneficial to seek alternative therapies like rTMS, tDCS, tACS, and DBS tech, of which meditation is probably a self propelled variant.

It is well known that these technologies have analgesic effects and modulate brain state with desirable outcomes, just like meditation.

They have the added benefit of also being directly applicable to nerve branch areas/PNS in the body itself and not just the brain. So they go beyond meditation and what is possible with meditation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation)

<comment><USER19> >People seem to forget there is a huge percentage of the population that will never meditate or can't meditate due to extenuating circumstances.

This is just a restatement of what you said in your first line, but again it's just an assertion: "they won't do it" \- well okay, why won't they? Is it because they feel they don't have enough time? Then we must give them more time. Is it because they have little regard for their mental health? Then tell them the dangers of letting mental health go unchecked. Is it because they are averse to it because they see it as a satanic ritual? Then we must educate them.

<comment><USER20> Only a small amount of the population engages in any behavior that requires active lifestyle modification. Exercise and diet are hardly adhered to despite being relatively simple. Meditation has the added difficulty of being solitary, and, for most, boring and difficult (compared to the instant- feedback world surrounding them).

<comment><USER19> I think that fits into the wider goal of educating people to care for their health for their own good; clearly the methods we're using don't work, and haven't adapted to the world in which you could be doing a million other things. Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing, you can easily escalate how much time you spend and plan accordingly. The answer isn't to give up on them.

<comment><USER21> Most people won't live their lives intentionally no matter what you do. It's a noble goal to increase the number from, say, 10% to 20%. But getting even a majority of people are going to 'care for their health for their own good' is demonstrably impossible. At best you can turn self-care into a game or entertainment, but extrinsic motivation is kind of the exact opposite of the practice of meditation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: 11:35 am EDT is new T-0 for inaugural Falcon 9 launch. - <AUTHOR>

The feed seems to be down though :(
edit: correction, feed is up at the moment :)
http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php
spotted on twitter:
"Your launch is important to us. Please stay on the pad and an range representative will be with you shortly." <comment><USER2> Is there a webcast with sound? I want to leave it running in the background and be alerted when something interesting happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> 12 minutes 30 seconds to launch</comment></comment>


Show HN: A tool to upload/download files from command line - <AUTHOR> https://bashupload.com/ <comment><USER2> For people that prefer privacy, I've been building a fully featured CLI tool for Firefox Send. Maybe someone is interested: [https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend](https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend)

<comment><USER3> This is awesome. You should share it on ShowHN!

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Yes, I was planning on doing so once I've proper pre-built binaries available. I might do it in sync with a new upcoming Firefox Send release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this is yours, I recommend adopting some sort of inverse relationship between file size and retention time. 0x0 does this and I think it makes a lot of sense: [https://0x0.st/](https://0x0.st/)

        retention = min_age + (-max_age + min_age) * pow((file_size / max_size - 1), 3)

       days
        365 |  \
            |   \
            |    \
            |     \
            |      \
            |       \
            |        ..
            |          \
      197.5 | </comment><comment>----..</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
            |             ..
            |               \
            |                ..
            |                  ...
            |                     ..
            |                       ...
            |                          ....
            |                              ......
         30 |                                    ....................
              0                        256                        512
                                                                  MiB

<comment><USER5> Why?

I don't see what the correlation is between a user's file size and how long the user will need it to remain.

Generally people use these services to host a file for around the time it takes someone to check their e-mail/ticket/etc. to download the item -- hopefully within a day, usually a couple days, worst-case scenario a week.

The time-cutoff is based on human behavior.

Plus, it's too much mental overhead for a user to have to worry that each file uploaded lasts for a different amount of time.

<comment><USER6> For a host providing a free service that they have to pay actual money to run, and having a finite & non-advertised limit on disk space, it makes sense to put a heavier mental price on large files, so that a 1GB upload actually does feel heavier to the user than a 1KB upload.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lol, proxy all my file uploads through your servers, no thanks!

<comment><USER8> Seriously how is this tool even getting upvoted? Why use this compared to straight up curl or scp to your own instance? This makes 0 sense, I need an aspirin.

<comment><USER9> This is for situations when you can't scp your file, like when I use a jump server to go through some network restrictions.

<comment><USER8> Then you can upload to your own jump server first. This is just a bad idea on multiple levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I usually recommend [https://file.pizza](https://file.pizza) to non-tech people who want to send large files, as it is a very easy-to-use solution. The sender adds the file and then sends the file link to the recipient who simply loads it in their browser to download the file.

Files are sent peer to peer and are encrypted. The main downside is that the sender has to keep the browser tab open until the recipient receives the file.

<comment><USER11> Yea, the only feature file.pizza is missing is a download complete alert to uploader so they can close the tab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice idea. I guess you can make a nice extra buck from uploads containing sensitive personal/financial information or intellectual property.

<comment><USER13> You could also encrypt them before uploading them (even if most people won't do it)

<comment><USER14> Firefox send is mentioned elsewhere in the thread. It does that by default, and keeps the key as a uri fragment so that the servers don't see it. I don't know why this tool doesn't do something similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No thanks. scp works just fine for that purpose.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting, though I just prefer using a S3 bucket myself. I have a small script that uses curl and openssl under the covers to upload so I can upload from random machines I don't want to install AWS tools on.

<comment><USER17> This is really the best solution. It's next to no cost for short-term upload, especially if the files aren't that big. However, you're protected by one of the largest and most secure public cloud platforms rather than some random server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone find a privacy policy anywhere? I went to the mother site listed at the bottom, but it is entirely in Russian. Tried translating privacy to Russian and searching various terms, but getting nothing.

Edit: nvm I found it

"Bashupload has no control over, and assumes no responsibility for, the content, privacy policies, or practices of any third party web sites or services. You further acknowledge and agree that Bashupload shall not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any such content, goods or services available on or through any such web sites or services."

<comment><USER19> So basically just a copy-paste and search replace for their name. This is boilerplate, what were you expecting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Have to mention [https://wsend.net](https://wsend.net) here

</comment><comment><USER21> What's wrong with good old-fashioned wget?

<comment><USER22> Can `wget` easily upload files? More like `scp`, isn't it?

<comment><USER23> It's probably a decade that I use woof[0] to "send" files on a LAN. It's packaged for Debian but essentially it's a Python HTTP/1.0 web server in a single file without external dependencies. With an option it can distribute itself and it can also offer an upload form to receive files...

[0] [http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/woof.html](http://www.home.unix- ag.org/simon/woof.html)

<comment><USER24> IIRC "Writing" an HTTP server is close to a one-liner in Python anyway.

<comment><USER23> Well, launching " _python -m http.server_ " should be enough to serve the content of the current dir so you are right. To be honest I never looked what that script does...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Related tool: magic-wormhole. Discussed before on HN [1] GitHub [2] documentation [3]

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=magic%20wormhole&sort=byPopula...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=magic%20wormhole&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

[2] [https://github.com/warner/magic- wormhole](https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole)

[3] [https://magic- wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html](https://magic- wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html)

<comment><USER26> There's croc[1] too, which is basically the same thing but written in Go.

[1] [https://github.com/schollz/croc](https://github.com/schollz/croc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Similar: [https://transfer.sh/](https://transfer.sh/) [https://0x0.st/](https://0x0.st/) [https://www.file.io/](https://www.file.io/)

<comment><USER13> I tried uploading a 60MB file to those four services and apart from needing to upgrade my curl they all went fine, returned the url from curl and file was directly downloadable with wget/curl from the url provided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Either I'm unfamiliar with the word or there's a typo in the "Links and Files" section of the disclaimer: 'forbinned' instead of 'forbidden'</comment>


FriendFeed is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://blog.friendfeed.com/2015/03/dear-friendfeed-community-were.html

<comment><USER2> We had a wonderful, thriving life science community [1] on Friendfeed, which we have not been able to replicate since. Some of that crowd even published a paper about it [2]. Most of the original crowd left sometime after the FB acquisition. While many of us hang out on Twitter, it's not the same thing).

\----

1\. [http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists](http://friendfeed.com/the- life-scientists)

2\. [http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000263)

<comment><USER3> I miss that interface and community. Even if FriendFeed was still around, though, I wonder if it would be as popular. That group contained the early adopters of internet communication among scientists, a movement that has now grown exponentially. My guess is that the signal would be overwhelmed by noise, or broken down into sub-groups by specialty, which would overwhelm the delightful serendipity of it all.

<comment><USER2> Great question. No idea. The other thing to note is that a lot of the people who were involved then have moved on to other things and probably could not stay as involved (pointing at myself). It remains the best time I've had online.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you there. I had a lot more free time in grad school than I do now (both personally and professionally). Judging from the updates I see on twitter and blogs, most of that core group has gone on to bigger, better, more time-consuming things.

I wonder if the kids these days are using snapchat to complain about how we're all dinosaurs. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FriendFeed had the best social network mechanics of all social networks I ever saw. Part of it made it into Facebook now (but I can't consider really using FB).

Unfortunately, it had no monetization strategy. I suspect that if they had optional paid accounts by now (e.g. $3/mo), many people would pay just to keep the thing afloat and their community intact.

Unfortunately, there seem to be only two ways for an online service to last: to become paid by users commercially, or to become "paid" by users' labor of love when they install and maintain it. The later practically requires the service to open its source code.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thank you FriendFeed - I'll miss you. At some point I thought Friendfeed was going to take over the world... But as usual I have to be reminded that I am not representative of the mass audience.

<comment><USER6> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> best thing to come out of friendfeed, Tornado. I remember asking Bret Taylor on his blog [0] when he gave a Tornado example if he'd ever release it. A bit of time went by, then he did. [1] Thanks Bret.

[0] [http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado](http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado)

[1] [https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed- news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...](https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed- news/9b8fbaed/technology-behind-tornado-friendfeed-web)

<comment><USER8> Goddamn Tornado was/is the best Python HTTP server ever. Asides from the wide utility library of non-blocking IO (years before node got popular) it had Sinatra-style class based routing that was far simpler than django's bizarre route.as_route() stuff.

A friend once said the worst thing about Tornado was how little publicity it got.

<comment><USER9> Why all the "was/is" in this subthread? Tornado's not going anywhere.

<comment><USER8> Only reason I wrote 'is/was' because it's been a couple of years since I used Tornado and other Python HTTP servers might have gotten better. I hack node all day now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An interesting Quora answer by Bret about the status of FriendFeed some weeks ago.

[http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of- FriendFeed](http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed)

<comment><USER10> And FriendFeed would have still be running if not that question. Bret was reminded about FriendFeed and decided to take it down completely.

<comment><USER11> Bret did not make the decision to close FriendFeed. Bret left Facebook more than two years ago. He had no involvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of those things...

Friendfeed was technically better medium than twitter in every single way at the time (maybe still) yet it died (don't mean that it failed). Another example of why making social startups is a huge risk.

<comment><USER13> It was much better for me than Twitter, but once the acquisition happened (FB w/ a rumored $50M), they decided to show the middle finger to its users. Isn't this the same as what happened to the thesixtyone (t61)?

<comment><USER11> They kept the service running for more than five years after the aqui-hire. I wouldn't call that showing the middle finger.

<comment><USER14> I suspect he was referring to the FriendFeed founders giving their user community the middle finger by cashing out to Zuck. People are going to do what is in their own self interest so you can't exactly blame the founders for that.

As I recall FriedFeed's growth had plateaued so they probably figured it wasn't going to compete with FB and Twitter. Mobile and apps were also starting to take the world then too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Archive Team on the case to archive the content as usual #humancentifeed [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280)

<comment><USER16> I think the Archive Team is going to have a hard time preserving Friendfeed content, due to resource limitations of the platform. For example, it only provides a very limited amount of data through the frontend (was 600 posts, now slightly higher), and slightly more through the API (10,000).

I'm currently working on a system, but it requires user input, in order to bypass the limitations of the API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I personally hate when services let people down. I prefer a much more "future oriented" approach much like the one from Basecamp [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the- end...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end-of-the- internet)

or the idea behind [https://posthaven.com/](https://posthaven.com/)

I guess it's all about vision and how to delight your customers. All the people who believed in a product are people who trusted your words, and gave you access to a lot of their information. Yet it's so easy to let them down and shut down a service. It was for springpad, it now is for friend feed. Sometimes it's about the money sometimes it's about the users (I guess it's always about the money though).

But I can't help it, I prefer when you can trust a service,and I'd be willing to pay as long as I know that service will stay up even if I'm the only user.

<comment><USER18> They continued to run FriendFeed for 5 years after it was clear the core team was moving on. That is above and beyond the call of duty.

37 Signals has a healthy business with good revenue building only "sane" products. To compare the two is apples to oranges.

<comment><USER17> I know they are not the same kind of business, and I didn't want my view to sound harsh, sorry if it seemed that way.

As you said they did A LOT for the friendfeed platform even after it was somewhat decided they would have not mantained anymore, that is not something I want to ignore.

My point is that many services are born and die, some of them die because they weren't building "sane" products. It's a choice, not complaining about that, but I personally prefer when there's a path ahead that won't let the users down because they weren't relying on funding or other things to stay up, but only on the power of their users.

Maybe I'm asking for something impossible? Dunno, but the PostHaven/Basecamp thing is giving me hope :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sad to see it officially shutdown. I have been using their API for years on my crusty personal page. It has been rock solid.

</comment><comment><USER20> How can I export my data? I know there is an API but it will be incredible useful to have a link to download everything.

Google Reader had an option to export your data when they closed their web service.

<comment><USER21> You could only export your feed URLs from Google Reader. They had content archived, but you couldn't easily export the content. People wrote their own scrapers, it was a big mess and no one knows how much content only existed in Reader that was deleted when it went down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It might make sense if they can opensource the code.

<comment><USER23> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I forgot all about friendfeed about the time facebook bought it. I remember it being quite good.</comment>


K-anonymity - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity <comment><USER2> A friend is writing a good series of blogposts about formal privacy definitions. The first one was about k-anonymity: [https://desfontain.es/privacy/k-anonymity.html](https://desfontain.es/privacy/k-anonymity.html)

Follow-ups:

\- k-map: [https://desfontain.es/privacy/k-map.html](https://desfontain.es/privacy/k-map.html)

\- l-diversity: [https://desfontain.es/privacy/l-diversity.html](https://desfontain.es/privacy/l-diversity.html)

\- δ-presence: [https://desfontain.es/privacy/delta- presence.html](https://desfontain.es/privacy/delta-presence.html)

\- differential privacy: [https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy- awesomene...](https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy- awesomeness.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> We recently gave a workshop on k-anonymity (+l-diversity and t-closeness) and differential privacy, you can find the iPython notebooks and slides here:

[https://github.com/KIProtect/data-privacy-for-data- scientist...](https://github.com/KIProtect/data-privacy-for-data-scientists)

In the workshop we implement the "Mondrian algorithm" to produce a k-anonymous dataset. We then look at the problems of this approach (i.e. missing diversity in the sensitive attribute) and try to fix it using l-diversity (which is also not optimal) and finally t-closeness. The third notebook includes an implementation of a differentially private "randomized response" scheme, showing how it changes the data and how we can take into account the added noise when working with the randomized data.

I think it's important to keep in mind that k-anonymity and differential privacy are not algorithms but mathematical privacy definitions. To implement them, you need a suitable method like the "Mondrian" algorithm or a randomized response scheme.

If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements please open an issue or PR on Github!

</comment><comment><USER4> A recent common usage is by the [https://haveibeenpwned.com](https://haveibeenpwned.com) leaked password check database, worked on in part by the Cloudflare team:

[https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned- passwords-v...](https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords- version-2/)

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords- with...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with-k- anonymity/)

<comment><USER5> Okta's PassProtect Chrome extension also uses k-anonymity.

[https://www.okta.com/blog/2018/05/add-passprotect-to-your- we...](https://www.okta.com/blog/2018/05/add-passprotect-to-your-web-browser/)

<comment><USER4> Looks like that's just a wrapper around the Have I Been Pwned API, of which there are many examples. 1Password built it into their password manager which is probably one of the best integrations for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're curious about the matter, there's an alternative technique called differential privacy that adds randomization to the data, and is able to provide guarantees that individual records cannot be identified. k-anonymity is subject to e.g. linkage attacks of the kind that differential privacy seeks to eliminate.

<comment><USER7> Bonus: The differential privacy algorithm is so simple. "When you're about to insert some data, flip a coin. If it's heads, insert it as-is. If it's tails, insert a random value."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I brought k-anonymity and l-diversity to nodeJS a couple of weeks ago.

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/node- mondrian](https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-mondrian)

</comment><comment><USER9> ARX [1, 2] is an open source software that (among other features) supports most of the methods mentioned in this thread. Full disclosure: I'm one of the developers of ARX.

[1] Website: [http://arx.deidentifier.org](http://arx.deidentifier.org)

[2] Source: [https://github.com/arx-deidentifier/arx](https://github.com/arx- deidentifier/arx)

</comment><comment><USER10> We wrote a review of anonymisation methods here: [https://hazy.com/files/Hazy_Anonymisation_Review_110718.pdf](https://hazy.com/files/Hazy_Anonymisation_Review_110718.pdf)</comment>


Oura launches new small smart rings - <AUTHOR> https://ouraring.com/ <comment><USER2> Headline is a lie. The launch is April 2018. This is more like a Kickstarter announcement -- no guarantee of shipping on-time (or at all).</comment>


Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/cicada-solving-the-webs-deepest-mystery-20150115?page=3

<comment><USER2> Hi, sorry if what I'm saying here is obvious and well-known; I'm coming to the whole Cicada thing late.

When the article listed the names of cities, one jumped out at me: Fayetteville, Arkansas. I used to live in Fayetteville, and it's tiny and insignificant -- totally out of place in a list with cities like Seoul.

But surprisingly, weev lived briefly in Fayetteville. So I search for weev and cicada, and find that he wrote an essay in 2013 called "The Tiger and the Cicada".

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like a modern-day Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, for you Pratchett fans out there.

If there _was_ a serious super-secret illuminati secret ubermensch braintrust, I expect they'd have fundamentally better ways of attracting members, ones that don't get confused with marketing ARGs, hoaxes, or not-as-serious groups.

However, if they only wanted free labor from people who are easily motivated by puzzles and affirmation... people with no no easily-traceable relationship... people they can casually cut-loose when convenient... Hmmm.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't feel like reading yet another cicada article that in the end has no new information. Is there anything new in this article that wasn't in the last 1/2 dozen cicada articles?

<comment><USER5> I thought it was worth reading, initially I had my doubts about the veracity of the claims by the person being interviewed, I imagine some of this is as much the writers fault as anything else.

Toward the end it provided some insights that I had not previously read anything about (e.g. broods), but maybe I haven't paid enough attention to the other cicada articles.

It seemed counterintuitive to me that in the interest of free information he hid the piece of software they worked on on the "darknet"... Surely given he has come out publically the sane thing to do would be to make it easily available and open source.</comment></comment>


Astronomers make history in a split second with localization of fast radio burst - <AUTHOR> https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/06/fast-radio-burst.html <comment><USER2> "Since ASKAP is an array of 36 dish antennas and the burst had to travel a slightly different distance to each dish, it reached each one at a slightly different time."

"From these tiny time differences—just a fraction of a billionth of a second—we identified the burst's home galaxy and even its exact starting point..."

Simply amazing that they can get such precise measurements from so small a differential in distance.

<comment><USER3> > Simply amazing that they can get such precise measurements from so small a > differential in distance.

How do they know the billionths of a second differences aren't due to the radio waves travelling through pockets of air that have slightly different densities/temperatures/moisture/refraction properties?

That just seems like incredible error tolerance

<comment><USER4> A lot of the atmospheric affects are on longer timescales than the sampling times, which means they can be calibrated out.

Most observations of this nature (interferometric observations) will point at a nearby calibrator source (usually a well characterized quasar or other "point source" star/object), and an atmospheric noise model will then be constructed based on this calibrator to apply to each dish to minimize/account for the atmospheric influence.

This is often repeated periodically to account for changing weather over time. And on top of that, a benefit of the location chosen for ASKAP was relatively dry air (being in the western desert climate of Australia).

<comment><USER5> That's really interesting! Would you be able to point me towards some resources to learn more about this?

<comment><USER4> A lot of it I learned when I studied Radio Astronomy in college (my major). I'm a little rusty now after about 7 years.

However, here's a few resources I remember and was able to dig up.

1) A presentation from Max Plank University, which has one of the strongest radio astro programs around: [https://www.mpifr- bonn.mpg.de/3244052/IMPRS_BB_HRK5.pdf](https://www.mpifr- bonn.mpg.de/3244052/IMPRS_BB_HRK5.pdf)

2) Presentation from ASTRON, an interferometric array in the Netherlands, part of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy: [https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2015/eris2015/L6_Heald_cali...](https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2015/eris2015/L6_Heald_calibration.pdf)

3) George Moellenbrock's slides from the 14th Synthesis Imaging Workshop (hosted by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory) is pretty detailed on calibration specifically: [https://science.nrao.edu/science/meetings/2014/14th- synthesi...](https://science.nrao.edu/science/meetings/2014/14th-synthesis- imaging-workshop/lectures-files/MoellenbrockCalibration2014_FINAL.pdf)

There was at one time a video of the last link, but it appears the hosting site is no longer live. There are other lecture slides on radio interferometry available from the Synthesis Workshop site: [https://science.nrao.edu/science/meetings/2014/14th- synthesi...](https://science.nrao.edu/science/meetings/2014/14th-synthesis- imaging-workshop/lectures)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A more interesting account by two of the members of the project that did the novel bit: [https://theconversation.com/how-we-closed-in-on-the- location...](https://theconversation.com/how-we-closed-in-on-the-location-of- a-fast-radio-burst-in-a-galaxy-far-far-away-119177)

Also, the full science paper, might be decent too: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/26/scie...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/26/science.aaw5903)

</comment><comment><USER7> They made history in a split second, presumably after spending decades on building the infrastructure and gathering all the prerequisite knowledge.

The first observed binary black hole merge signal was probably also quite short (I'd wager less than a minute, possibly even less than a second), and many of us have read about how much effort that one took.

</comment><comment><USER8> This has been happening since 1999 by the NAAPO (the same group who ran the "Big Ear"). They had a cluster of helix antennas being fed into a VA Linux Systems Hardware Cluster doing analysis on radio astronomy events:

[http://www.naapo.org/Argus/docs/docsmenu.htm](http://www.naapo.org/Argus/docs/docsmenu.htm)

I volunteered there from 2004-2008. I believe that the cluster is still active today.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's great news- but I'm confused by the following analogy:

>> "It's like looking at the Earth from the Moon and not only knowing what house a person lived in, but what chair they were sitting in at the dining room table," Bannister said.

What are chairs and dining room tables by analogy to galaxies and in the context of fast radio bursts?

Could someone please clarify?

<comment><USER10> Further in the article they mentioned telescopes have to be placed certain distances apart to calculate differences in radio wave arrival by billionths of a second. These differences gives them granular placement within the galaxy (I'm assuming the analogy is referring to arms, stars, planets, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> cached: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:89RLX_...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:89RLX_fqiIMJ:https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/06/fast- radio-burst.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment><USER12> Amazing they can measure timing differences less than nanoseconds and use them to localize phenomena millions or billions of light years away. And I can't reliably measure whether I made my program 1% faster or not :(

<comment><USER13> I bet you could, but you need more measurements and statistical analysis. Keep in mind that a lot of these astrological measurements - and a more notable recent example is the black hole visualization - are not based on direct measurements, but statistical analysis on huge datasets.

<comment><USER6> It is spelled > _astronomical_ < measurements, you squidface!

<comment><USER14> Well, it still stands as written, as long as you're one of those big-data astrology people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This as well as the recent imaging of the M87 black hole are both phenomenal feats of signal processing. Is this the new normal for astronomy?

<comment><USER16> Radio astronomy has always been pushing the frontier of signal processing. Gamma ray telescopes also need large amounts of data crunching. Until recently optical telescope where much more about instrumentation than data processing. But even that is changing, e.g. with small and mid-sized robotic telescopes that automatically search for transients and schedule their own follow-up observations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing I don't understand from the article is whether they took into consideration galaxy movements. Given that this is a 3.6bn years old signal wouldn't it be safe to assume that the place we can pinpoint now as the originator might not be the same it was back then?

<comment><USER18> The radio signal is just as old as the light (both being EM), so they align (more or less).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Galaxy: Honey I'm 3.6 Billion light-years away.

Scientist: I'm getting mixed signals I don't know what to do anymore.

</comment><comment><USER20> Amazing engineering

</comment><comment><USER21> My confirmation bias says it's aliens. Who moved my car keys? Aliens.

<comment><USER22> If an Albecurrie Drive is feasible, could an FRB be a sign of operation?

<comment><USER23> Only if someone was around to hear it</comment></comment></comment>


The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by "PRC-affiliated cyber actors" - <AUTHOR> https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/peoples-republic-of-china-prc-targeting-of-covid-19-research-organizations <comment><USER2> If you're doing research of any significance in today's world and don't have an active security program looking for harmful actions by foreign intelligence your organization opens itself up for all sorts of nasty liabilities. You don't even have to have an electronic intrusion. The PRC's government also pays people off as the case of this former Cleveland Clinic researcher shows: [https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2020/05/former-cleveland- cli...](https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2020/05/former-cleveland-clinic- researcher-charged-with-fraud-for-failing-to-disclose-china-ties.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I agree that it's the responsibility of the people doing research to protect against foreign nation state attacks (whether cyber or legacy intelligence).

1st: most people outside of government don't know how much they are expected/"required" to do to protect their work against foreign nation states. Except for heavily regulated sectors (government, military, heavy industry, banking, core telecom, and more recently elections) very few companies will actually get help from 3-letter-agencies to actively protect against foreign nation state attacks.

2nd: _many_ people expect that the {NSA, Cyber Command, et al} are actively defending _all_ US organizations. I don't see evidence of this (although if there was evidence, I probably wouldn't see it anyway).

3rd: In a national emergency (which the COVID response was declared), there are limits to the liabilities which would otherwise be enforceable in court. There are frequently/always legal escape clauses like _force majeure_ and _act of god_ which would likely alleviate liabilities due to fallout from acts of war or a severe pandemic, so it's not clear that those "nasty liabilities" could be enforced. There are currently 2 important cyberinsurance cases[1] which are winding their way through courts right now which may effectively decide if cyberinsurance is a viable product (depending on whether). Violations of HIPAA are possible, but similarly may not amount to much in terms of prosecution because of the pandemic.

In reality, it's damn near impossible to protect against a motivated+targeted nation state attack (especially with the resources of PRC). If the liabilities incentives require all projects (large and small) be able to withstand nation- state attacks, then all of the project resources go to cybersecurity and none into research -- your productivity is now zero.

It's important to remember that it's the FBI's job to do counter-intel. If a medical research group is defrauded by PRC spies and you blame the researchers for not being able to spot a non-trivial espionage attempt, you are just victim blaming. I work as a product developer in cybersecurity and I doubt I could identify most spy craft if it were to happen right in front of me.

[1] [https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/aig-case- highligh...](https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/aig-case-highlights- complexities-of-covering-cyber-related-losses/)

<comment><USER4> > _many_ people expect that the {NSA, Cyber Command, et al} are actively > defending _all_ US organizations. I don't see evidence of this (although if > there was evidence, I probably wouldn't see it anyway).

If you keep your confidential research results on an unpatched server with weak passwords and exposed to the internet, what is the NSA supposed to do about that?

About the best thing they could do is to scan for and find the vulnerability before the attackers and notify you about it, which in general they don't. And it still wouldn't solve most of the problem because there would be objections if they did more than a cursory scan, which means they won't find most problems, but the attackers are under no such limitations.

> there are limits to the liabilities which would otherwise be enforceable in > court

I don't think this is the kind of liability they're talking about. If your confidential research falls into the hands of economic spies, the problem isn't so much that someone is going to sue you as that your research and any relevant patents have now lost their economic value because a knockoff product will beat you to market.

> cyberinsurance

This is liable to be more of a grant hog than liability would. Not only do you have to pay the premiums -- which would be high unless researchers adopt good security practices, which having the insurance would give them the incentive to do the opposite of -- but you also then have the insurance company imposing some kind of bureaucratic best practices procedures that gives you even more compliance costs than you would get from having liability, because the insurance company has misaligned incentives with respect to the level of compliance burden to impose, since they don't pay any of it but get all the benefits.

The reality is, the researchers are the ones operating the systems their research is on. They're the ones who have to secure them. And they already largely have the right incentives to want to do that, but they also have a poor understanding of the necessity of it and the process for doing it.

What would help here are the things that would help in general. Fund vulnerability research in free software so that the software people are using (because it's what they can afford) is secure by default, and easy enough to use that people don't commonly make mistakes, and well-documented. Things like that. Make it easier to do the right thing so more people do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I appreciate that there's probably a lot I don't know or understand about the national security aspects of this but it seems wrong to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as possible in order to help as many as people as possible. Protecting security interests is one thing but this press release specifically mentions protecting intellectual property and that seems kind of tone deaf.

I also wish they would explain _how_ treatment options are jeopardized, even at a high level:

> The potential theft of this information jeopardizes the delivery of secure, > effective, and efficient treatment options.

<comment><USER6> > to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as > possible in order to help as many as people as possible.

this presumes that the stolen information would be used 'to help as many people as possible'..

Also, 1st country with viable vaccine/treatment/etc will have a huge geopolitical bargaining chip & it will likely be used as such no matter the country of origin.

<comment><USER7> _...huge geopolitical bargaining chip..._

Ummm, I'm not sure how to break it to you, but USA is already laughingstock of world due to our comically misguided reaction to the "pandemic". Everyone expected Trump to screw up (and he hasn't disappointed), but there isn't any person or institution in USA that hasn't totally whiffed on this. CDC mandated tests that didn't work, news media remained unconvinced until late in the game and now jump from one conspiracy theory to another, in-person elections were held as late as _April 7_ , some states required that diseased patients be forced into _nursing homes for the elderly_ , effective masks are still somehow difficult to acquire, Congress has passed numerous "bailout" laws representing trillions of dollars yet has somehow not been able to arrange healthcare for every citizen as most comparable nations have had for decades, our deaths have passed 100k and seem certain to pass 200k as well, etc.

It's difficult not to see this "investigation" and especially this silly press release that purports to inform the public about it as just more of the same. Furious pretend activity with no view of long-term strategy or of benefit to anyone other than the bureaucrats who wrote the release.

<comment><USER6> relative level of (dis)respect of any country to another doesn't mean that country won't use something to their advantage

<comment><USER7> What is "advantage" in this case? Nations with reliable treatments and vaccines might use those to improve their citizens' health? Sure that's not something we'd do in USA but it doesn't seem like a _bad_ idea...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always wondered how you can be so sure it's PRC in the age of easily being able to mask your true IP address. Perhaps the identified attacks have been previously linked with the PRC, or another option is that the actors were not as covert as they thought.

Like remember the indictment of 12 russians ( [https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download](https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download) )

The FBI linked a pool of bitcoins used to purchase a VPN service and other things to the Russians. Probably best to not use a crypto with a public ledger for criminal activity.

<comment><USER9> Same here. I remember once I was watching the news and they claimed a hack was done by Russians because they found Russian comments in the code. That didn't sound very convincing :). The ledger evidence sounds better.

At the same time in this case I would be more surprised if the PRC , since their need for control, and since the stakes are extremely high, wasn't doing such things.

<comment><USER10> Similarly, I recall a strain of malware being attributed to Chinese hackers because variable names were in Chinese; then when you actually inspect the code, it's clearly Unicode gibberish generated by an obfuscator... That is to say, the hackers weren't even trying to be misleading, it was just a result of obfuscation reminiscent of mojibake. (I read the article on Ars Technica but don't remember enough details to find the article.)

If I ever code a hacking tool I'll throw in some Korean comments for sure.

<comment><USER11> Do keep in mind that intelligence services are probably not being fully transparent about how they know the source of an attack. They wouldn't want to reveal their methods, to avoid them becoming unreliable in the future.

<comment><USER12> Which makes it impossible to have an open, informed discussion on the subject.

Instead, you get tribalist arguments over who believes which secret police.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This press release encourages me to think China is covering up something.

This /may/ be the case. But the FBI wants me to come to this conclusion.

It seems a little fishy.

</comment><comment><USER14> I know I might be the weirdo here for browsing 4chon, but for the last few months I have seen a huge incursion of "PRC-affiliated"... "contributions"... and not only to high traffic and high turnover boards but even to niche ones. On boards using flags, these "contributions" come mainly from Canada, USA, and France.

Although I am secretly grateful for this spam, as it cut down my time spent there from 3-4 hours a week to 3-4 hours a month, it's still disconcerting as they are highly organized and apparently take huge pleasure in bludgeoning seals and other harmless creatures. Heck, I am amazed that the boards were clean even after the US Elections, the shutdown of 8chon and other such events.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why would they be press-releasing this other than to drive public opinion against China?

<comment><USER8> While the admin is currently pushing a very negative image against China, I do not believe the FBI would do that so lightly.

<comment><USER16> Why would the FBI be hesitant about faking/sensationalizing this? It's nearly impossible to prove, China's unlikely to make an issue out of it, and even if the lie got exposed what punishment would they face?

<comment><USER17> Are you an infosec expert? You have said that it is impossible to trace origins of hacks multiple times but only offer two shallow points that you would learn about in your first week of a network security class.

There are papers out there that have multiple ways of using language to identify specific authors, determine multiple authors, and even decode unknown language. That's my first shallow example and would be a pretty reliable indicator if you could get your hands on their code. With a budget of millions of dollar I'm sure they have dozens of ways that can be combined. It would make no sense to reveal every single method they use to defend against people on the internet. That also assumes they don't just have a mole who told them about it, which they also wouldn't reveal.

<comment><USER16> >You have said that it is impossible to trace origins of hacks

I have not said this. The evidence they have provided makes it equally likely that they've tracked these hacks (correctly or incorrectly) or that they've made the whole thing up. You can't rule out either action.

>There are papers out there that have multiple uses of using language to identify specific authors, determine multiple authors, and even decode known language. That's my first shallow example and would be a pretty reliable indicator if you could get your hands on their code

There have been multiple papers on these subjects, with a budget of millions of dollars I'm sure identifiers could be faked. Particularly with password spraying, the only method mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just for additional context several super computing sites in Europe were attacked a few weeks ago and are still down, among them PizDaint at CSCS, which ranks 6th in the world, several super computing sites in Germany (FZ Juelich) and so on. I think no-one wishes this to turn into a kinetic war, but for all we know besides the economic warfare that has been going on for quite some time, this feels like we are in an all out conflict with China.

<comment><USER19> These are crypto mining schemes, though. This looks a lot more like run of the mill money making cybercrime than espionage - I don't think any nation state would be interested in outing themselves for a pittance in bitcoin.

<comment><USER18> At least according to this incident report [https://csirt.egi.eu/academic- data-centers-abused-for-crypto...](https://csirt.egi.eu/academic-data-centers- abused-for-crypto-currency-mining/), one of the two attacks had "unknown purpose". In particular it was not tied to crypto mining.

<comment><USER19> From the site you linked, the one with "unknown" motive has exclusively attacked Chinese academic victims. It would be extremely bizarre to suggest that the Chinese government is behind this.

<comment><USER18> The second one is the attack that spread all the way to a basement HPC cluster in the Physics Institute at LMU Munich, the IP addresses listed are indicators to look for that your system might be compromised, not the victims of the attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Shouldn't all countries be working together openly on fighting the pandemic? Given that it's hurting the whole world.

<comment><USER21> Companies across all countries have proprietary data that they are using to develop treatment options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love the term "cyber actor". That's basically like Hugh Jackman and Jonny Lee Miller, right?

<comment><USER23> And my favourite: Rami Malek

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How can western leaders condemn China's lack of publishing info related to COVID-19 and protect private research for curing it at the same time? Research like this should be public and accessible to everyone. I don't know why I shouldn't applaud any hackers spreading this information.

<comment><USER25> Companies will stop working on it the moment they lose incentive, etc etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> COVID-19 affects the entire world. Shouldn't all COVID-19 basically be done on a globally viewable wiki? It's going to take the cooperation of all countries to get through it. I don't understand why the US should hoard any COVID-19 data it has, besides extremely non altruistic ones.

<comment><USER27> Let's see who else is putting valuable IP it out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone really wonder if we (the US) and China are going to be at war in the next 10 years?

<comment><USER14> I come from an ex-communist country. So this is probably (hopefully) the only moment my talent of spotting this kind of shit is useful. The thing is that whatever bad behavior the USA committed in the past, and then anxiously analyzed and mulled over for decades... the Chinese are doing day by day, routinely, without ANY remorse or second thought. With the Russians it was different. Sorry to say this, but compared to the Chinese, they had soul. I do not foresee anything like the collapse of the Soviet Union in China. They are too "rational" for it. Not to mention their numbers. Our only hope is Jesus Christ. US and China at war? I don't know. China at war? By their logic of expansion, I'm afraid it is guaranteed.

<comment><USER29> Seems strange to me to assign any emotion to the political entity of a huge country. I don't even mean what it means. What does China / America/ Soviet Union feeling remorse even look like?

History has shown us that any super power will go to war. The Romans, the British, the Americans. Maybe we've learned our lesson from history or maybe today things are different due to greater education, multiculturalism and just rapid communication. Either way we shouldn't be pinning our hopes on "Jesus Christ", as again I don't know what that means. Would he come down and disarm everyone or something?

We avoid conflict by having rational open dialog, educating people and increasing transparency and accountability. The way to increase the probability of conflict is by having this tribalistic us vs them mentality. Everything they do is bad, they are evil and we are just.

<comment><USER14> When that political party is set on dictating not only how every citizen but how every ethnic should behave... well...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/china-superpower-two- pa...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/china-superpower-two-paths-global- domination-cold-war/)

</comment><comment><USER30> There is a big business opportunity, which I am sure is already fulfilled to some extent, to provide air-gap and other securities/countermeasures to businesses and orgs that deal with highly sensitive data, equipment, specimens, whatever.

Something akin to an anti-Palantir.

</comment><comment><USER31> Some of the comments here discuss how an attacker could tamper with data. What are some good ways for a scientist to ensure the integrity of their data in this case?

Post it online with a hash, particularly in a way that will get archived by others?

Keep off-site backups?

<comment><USER32> Where it's possible, perhaps using a deterministic process that can be easily repeated to verify the groupings haven't been tampered with? (Not to reduce the importance of backups, though they themselves can be attacked, but just as an idea for discussion...)

Here's an idea for how this could work for an example given elsewhere in the thread about the risk of an attacker mislabelling the subjects so the outcomes are unclear or deliberately skewed.

For a binary double-blind placebo trial (one group gets the medication, another gets the placebo), compute the hmac of each subject identifier (name, some participant ID), keyed with a key known to the principal investigator. Everyone whose hash MSB is above 0x80 gets the treatment, and everyone whose hash is below 0x80 gets the placebo. If you need more experimental groups, adjust the thresholds as needed

Clearly this is very restrictive and limited (you might need to ensure a proper demographic and medical/age profile distribution of subjects between both groups), but there are likely ways to achieve this by creating multiple "groups" and doing this process within each demographic balanced group.

You'd get a reproducible outcome, as long as you can recover the patient names or participant ID numbers, and the PI or experimental lead takes careful note of the hmac key used.

Just a straw man idea for how at least the patient to group allocation could be done deterministically. If someone attacked this and muddled patients and groups around, it could be reproduced just from knowing who the subjects are, and the hmac key. Clearly this doesn't scale to results or beyond, but I imagine this is where digital signatures start to help. And with modern ed25519 signatures we aren't talking massive signatures either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Related: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/uk_archer_supercomp...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/uk_archer_supercomputer_cyberattack/)

"One of Britain's most powerful academic supercomputers has fallen victim to a "security exploitation" of its login nodes, forcing the rewriting of all user passwords and SSH keys."

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/coronavirus_researc...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/coronavirus_research_hacking/)

"Foreign state hackers are trying to brute-force their way into pharmaceutical and medical research agencies hunting for a COVID-19 vaccine, British and American infosec agencies are warning.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) cautioned of a "password spraying" campaign targeting healthcare and medical research organisations."

<comment><USER34> > Foreign state hackers are trying to brute-force their way into > pharmaceutical and medical research agencies hunting for a COVID-19 vaccine, > British and American infosec agencies are warning.

I have a hard time believing foreign state hackers are using "script kiddie" tactics. But that's just me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is information that can save lives, so I support any nation to hack on COVID research, anywhere in the world. If they patent COVID research, I also support breaking any patent.

<comment> kube-system Compromising remote systems puts researchers, their work, and patient rights at risk. Patents are published publicly and available free of charge, so I'm not sure how that would be a reasonable justification for compromising other's computers. "Research" per se isn't patentable anyway.

<comment><USER36> Patents provide country-by-country protection -- a US Patent doesn't mean anything in other countries - except for being evidence of prior art in their own patent offices.

Also, some/many countries have laws that disallow patents or patent infringement claims associated with medicine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Have family that work in encryption, you can think of barriers to entry as orders of magnitude in cost.

AWS can decipher decade old encryption standards for about $100k brute computational cost.

Nation states have access to 5-8 zeros of effort if it is valuable enough. Private entities have no chance against nation-state backed hacking efforts.

It's one-sided or 'asymmetric', because western intelligence refuses to share commercial intelligence with western businesses (probably because there isn't much of value to share... yet).

Only solution is political change.

</comment><comment><USER38> I mean, who cares? If they aren't altering data let them read it. We are surely reading theirs too.

<comment><USER14> Why would we read it? It's just a copy of our data + some propaganda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Given today's anti-free-thinker HN climate I'm probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for saying this, but I feel I need to say it.

I don't think COVID-19 research should be secretive, I think it should be a global effort, and I'm perfectly happy with the idea of any nation having open access to all COVID-19 research, vaccines, results, and (anonymized) data. There should NOT be a concept of intellectual property when there are people dying in droves from a disease. Please, China, Italy, Spain, everywhere, scoop up all the COVID-19 research you can find and act upon it to save lives. Copy ideas. Copy drugs. Re-do and verify tests. Immediately. Don't mind the courts. They suck, and are sitting in armchairs killing people by delaying the effort and enforcing intellectual "property".

<comment><USER37> Someone should profit for figuring out how to stop COVID because otherwise there is little incentive beyond the government, and they don't typically work nights and weekends.

If China succeeds in stealing the solution, that will harm mankind because it will reduce future incentive to stop these things quickly.

<comment><USER14> Not to mention that if they find a cure before the world they will mark it as "strategical advantage" and not shared because it's of "national interest." At least based on their past history.

<comment><USER40> Are we talking about China or US?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If the PRC gets a workable vaccine first, they can gain influence to get everyone to use a WHO run global vaccine passport instead of separate national systems. They can then tie the WHO's databank into their global surveillance system and franchise out China's surveillance state and social credit score system throughout the world.

<comment><USER42> Those are good points, I'd add two more:

\- "If you want to buy our vaccine, you need to buy Huawei equipment for all your communications systems" \- we've already seen that in France with PPE

\- What would that do for investment in vaccine research if you know China can drop in theirs at any time and address the entire market? Investments dries up, China pulls back, go back to 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't recall the last time I saw a public statement by the FBI that wasn't a lie used for some nefarious purpose.

<comment><USER44> The FBI lists _many_ public statements per day about all sorts of operations and arrests: [https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel](https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel)

What you're encountering might just be a selection effect since many of these press releases don't raise people's interests. Perhaps it's the people amplifying certain stories to drive their narrative than the FBI themselves?

<comment><USER43> The FBI is a highly political organization that uses its position of authority to routinely intervene in politics often at the behest of the state.

Usually I list the interference they do in left wing movements where they spy and infiltrate spaces to disrupt and discredit vital activities aimed at e.g. preserving the environment. As a highlight, they tried to get MLK to kill himself. Much of this was documented by the revelations of COINTELPRO. That stuff was never punished, so why would they ever stop? It's good for the integrity of the state.

For a conservative example, the recent "Obamagate" disclosures show how the FBI was instrumental in creating the now totally discredited Russiagate conspiracy which raged in the media for two years as a ploy to disrupt the Trump administration by an insane xenophobic conspiracy that Trump was the manchurian candidate, going so far as to create speculation that he was some kind of soviet sleeper agent from the 1980s. He's of course a bad guy, but this stuff is off the wall.

Now the FBI is being brought under control by the current administration which is attempting to distract from it's total failure to respond to the pandemic and its actions which are widely acknowledged to have made it far worse that it should have been. The United States, the richest most powerful country in the world, has had one of the worst responses in the world. So the administration is attempting to clumsily pin the blame on a "foreign enemy" by saying it's attempting unfairly to do something about the pandemic. What an incredible world we live in.

EDIT: To conclude: Is withholding medical information in a pandemic for any reason ethical? What about for making money? Is stealing such information from such an actor unethical?

<comment><USER45> That doesn't make it magically impossible for the PRC to do nefarious things of their own, which I'm sure you'd agree the FBI would gladly publicize.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


World's richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1T this year - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/dec/27/worlds-richest-500-see-increased-their-wealth-by-1tn-this-year <comment><USER3> As capitalism matures, it's clear to anyone with a thread of financial literacy that most wealth is created through capital gains rather than salary. We're approaching a state (at least in developed countries) where productivity is so high, that you can literally park your money in 500 of the biggest businesses and you're almost guaranteed a 7% annual return (if you hold stocks for the long term).

Using the commonly accepted safe withdraw rate of 4%, if you inherit $3 million (which is not even that much), you can safely collect $120,000 of capital gains/dividend income every year without _doing anything_. This also frees you up to work on other things that will acquire you even more wealth. People whose parents didn't leave them a large inheritance have to rely on salary, which is taxed at a higher rate and more difficult to earn.

In effect, late stage capitalism becomes the anti-thesis of the spirit of capitalism - devoid of competition, free innovation, and upward mobility. In an ideal capitalism society, the most talented should earn the most, but the compounding effect of capital makes it so that whoever holds wealth the longest earns the most.

<comment><USER4> I agree with much of what you said, yet I just don't see it as all that _bad_ of a situation.

I still think there is a lot of upward mobility even in that scenario -- the smarter people I know earn good salaries and have nice lifestyles. Nicer than their parents, in most cases, mainly because consumer technology constantly gets better and cheaper.

And there is still opportunity for risk takers to start their own companies, and it's really not all _that_ hard with some traction to get acquired by a bigger player.

Of course, people with a lot of capital get rewarded for holding onto it / being conservative with it, but that's just common sense, not throwing good money after bad.

It's like we're all supposed to say, "Yeah! Late stage capitalism is so awful!" and nod along, but it doesn't _feel_ awful to me at all. I have a 2016 Mazda that cost $18k and it's just awesome for the price. I bought a brand new iPhone SE for $150. I bought a 50 inch TV on black Friday for $200.

My parents as kids didn't have running water in their houses.

I'm not all about materialism, but I'm really at a loss for what exactly I'm supposed to be feeling outraged about. I don't even really make that high of a salary, just average middle class.

<comment><USER5> My parents had paid off their mortgage when they were my age. My father was self employed and my mother a housewife. I'm on a reasonably good salary but banks won't loan us enough to buy an averaged sized family home even though we have a reasonable deposit. My partner would have to be on an equally sized salary but her teaching job pays very little.

Sure we have some nicer gadgets and personal comforts but the cost of accommodation and property has skyrocketed way out of proportion.

<comment><USER6> I suspect a lot of these comparisons are not apples to apples.

Declining wages are real, but populations are declining in the affordable but undesirable towns where property is cheap that my parents and grandparents bought into.

My mother's parents bought their first home in Minot, North Dakota and saved up for a tiny home in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was an engineer who put himself through school while living in a boxcar in Montana in the depression. She was a housewife. They scraped and saved, and did well for themselves despite hard circumstances (the depression, world war II, etc.)

My parents bought a starter home in Bloomington, MN. He was an attorney, she stayed at home. They moved to a wealthier suburb to find better schools when they could afford to.

Both sets saved aggressively, didn't go out, didn't drink, maintained cars themselves, didn't take elaborate vac actions, and lived in relatively low cost areas.

Me? I live in a booming tech hub. Prices aren't even comparable. I spend on food and wine and travel. I have a fancy phone I don't need and take my car to a mechanic for standard maintenance. I "can't afford a home" because I don't want to repeat the decisions of my elders. I could certainly buy a home in Minot with cash, and could get a mortgage in Bloomington without too much effort, but I don't prefer those options to what I'm doing now.

That's speaking for me only, but I'm pretty skeptical that prudent living doesn't have similar or better payouts than it did fifty years ago.

<comment><USER7> The problem is not that the growth is not there. But the sharing the growth corresponding to people's contribution.

Do the super rich really should enjoy the wealth? Are those really justified? Do their employees has done proportionally smaller amount of contribution to only entitle to that much less wealth in salary?

<comment><USER8> Wealth != salary. Most wealthy people who got wealthy didn't get there by making a large salary, they (at some point) booked capital gains on something.

Nothing is stopping you from venturing out into the world and setting up a business, and making your way into the 1%.

Most work is commodity work. And in a lot of cases, you have a significant amount of people who can solve a problem. This results in a race to the bottom in terms of compensation.

<comment><USER9> > Nothing is stopping you from venturing out into the world and setting up a > business, and making your way into the 1%.

Nothing except the 1%-ers who are pulling up every ladder behind them they can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article provides paragraph after paragraph of supporting data that the richest have gotten richer, but none that I can see supporting its claim that "billions of poorer people across the world have seen their wealth standstill or decline".

<comment><USER11> Is it possible for everyone's wealth to increase? I think they might be assuming this is not possible and there if richest wealth increases by this much it had to come from the rest?

<comment><USER12> Yes it is possible for everyone's wealth to increase.

In the year 1900 Global GDP was 1 Trillion. Today it is 77 Trillion.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product)

In Layman's the Global Pie is growing. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen DRASTICALLY over the last 25 years. [https://twitter.com/humanprogress/status/913901718823489538](https://twitter.com/humanprogress/status/913901718823489538)

So the people with the smallest piece of the pie are slowly getting a larger piece, but the people who already have the biggest piece of pie are getting even bigger pieces faster. But because the pie is growing, it doesn't mean that their larger piece is making someone else get a smaller piece.

The only people who have a proportionally smaller piece than they used to are in the middle class. Which is what happens when first world work more closely with developing nations. Taking more people out of extreme poverty but putting slight downward pressure on the middle class.

<comment><USER13> Even if it did increase, most of that increase is just inflation anyway. And it's usually the wealthy that benefit from inflation (at least more than regular people do).

<comment><USER12> Compare the "regular" person of today to the "regular" person of 50 years ago.

Is it easier or harder to afford basic foodstuffs? Do they eat out (luxury) more or less? If they own a home, is it larger or the same size? Who travels more? Who has better healthcare? Who spends more on entertainment? How much do they spend on the family pet? Who spent more time furthering their education?

All of these are measures of wealth, and the modern "regular" person would be wealthier in every one of these categories. And that's not even factoring in advances in technology that make the quality of life of a person better even if there share of societal wealth goes down.

<comment><USER14> This is very shortsighted-claiming that all of these trends have to do with being richer, is simply absurd. Also, "regular" person? What age? Male? Female? What does that even mean? This is just utter nonsense. But I will humor you:

> Is it easier or harder to afford basic foodstuffs?

Processed foods are far easier to afford, but they are extremely unhealthy. As for other basics, many have gone up over the last 50 years.

> Do they eat out (luxury) more or less?

Women now work. 50 years ago they did not. Less time/people to cook at home. Not like everyone is eating at steakhouses. They just don't have the time so they go to Chipotle or McDonalds or Panera.

> If they own a home, is it larger or the same size?

Most people own legacy homes-they are the same size because they are the same homes. New builds are building bigger houses but what "regular" person builds new homes?

> Who has better healthcare?

This has more to do with advancements in medicine and technology than people becoming richer.

> Who spends more on entertainment? How much do they spend on the family pet? > Who spent more time furthering their education?

Furthering education is largely on credit, so this is a bad measure.

> and the modern "regular" person would be wealthier in every one of these > categories.

Nope.

<comment><USER12> > This has more to do with advancements in medicine and technology than people > becoming richer.

It's impossible to separate people becoming richer from advancements in technology. We didn't grow GDP by 77 times, because we work 77 times harder.

Improvements in underlying technology are what help us create more wealth. The problem is that the new wealth being created and benefits of that new technology is being shared so proportionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was an interesting study posted (I believe here) on how a flat 10% re- distribution (10% taxed from everyone, then redistributed evenly across everyone, aka basic income), created a more stable "society" in simulation. It did this by helping support a larger "middle class". Does anyone know the link/can point me to the study? Google is failing me at the moment...

<comment><USER16> With UBI everyone will have more money but overall production would drop which is the only meaningful way to improve peoples lives. So people would be worse off because prices would adjust to the decreased supply and the increased demand of goods and services.

<comment><USER17> Why would overall production drop when there is more capital in the market?

Maybe read up a bit on fiscal multipliers. Government spending (redistribution) is one of the better ones. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> $1tn / 500 = $2 bn

$2 bn / 7.6 billion = 0.263

Another way to think about it is that the 500 oligarchs of the world were able to capture a worldwide average of 26.63¢ from _each_ person. In the course of 365 days it's as though each person in the world bought each of the 500 oligarchs in the world a full $0.26/$1.50 = nearly 1/5th of a single vending machine 20 ounce bottle of coke. Multiply that by 500 and you can have a very proper sit-down meal anywhere in the world.

Of course, maybe they generated $500, or $1000, or $3,000 in wealth to do so.

After all, the worldwide real income increased by well over twice that.

But it's that fifth of a bottle of coke that bothers me, personally. Why should bill gates get a quarter from me? He obviously didn't work for it as much as I did. If anything _he_ should be paying _me_. Why, you ask?

What did I make that he uses? Why, I might as well ask: what do the 500 oligarchs of the world make that anyone uses - wait, don't answer that, I have a point to make here and it would kind of ruin it to know the answer.

My point is, the rich need to stop getting richer. It's just not right.

/s

[1] [http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/global- wag...](http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/global-wage- report/2016/lang--en/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER19> > advisers to the super-rich are warning them of a "strike back" from the > squeezed majority

That's an understatement. When revolutions come, the rich are always the first at the guillotine.

Of course, that's rather unlikely, but these people have so much money that they can afford to make that consideration.

</comment><comment><USER6> This isn't interesting at all, and should not be a headline in a respectable newspaper. The wealth gains are on par with market gains. The absolute dollar value of the gains is almost certainly not headline worthy. The richest individuals lost trillions a few years ago in the crash, they gain trillions in a boom. That's exactly what one would expect.

I'm fiercely opposed to the regressive turn the economy has taken, but I'm just as fiercely opposed to hysterical garbage journalism. We won't correct the broken social contract by heaping nonsense upon injustice.

I'm all ears for constructive policies to tie earnings for the least wealthy to market gains, since the real problem is lack of ability to invest wages in the market, but I don't see that on offer here.

</comment><comment><USER20> If the wealthy had any interest in self-preservation, they would advocate higher taxes on themselves or some sort of UBI. But I'm sure Sam Walton's kids think they deserve everything they have.

</comment><comment><USER21> That's how it is when the Federal Reserve creates an asset bubble to deal with an asset bubble collapse.

This is NOT something a capitalist country should be doing. It's not the job of government to make your investments work out. It's YOURS.

</comment><comment><USER22> And I'm sitting here being happy that my "stock fortune" approaches four digits.

</comment><comment><USER23> A small percentage of bank accounts should be randomly swapped each year, and the owners of the swapped accounts become part of a reality TV show to follow how they dealt with their change of fortune

<comment><USER24> That's called the lottery. A typical lottery winner will be back where they started after a few years.

<comment><USER23> no I mean the reverse! A random rich person looses all their money

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Curious are the ways in which a world born of binary, "carries over" and manifests the very same patterns in broader social settings, into seemingly unrelated levels of abstraction. Similarity across scales.

Binary winner-take-all, all-or-nothing markets?

There seem to be deeper natural forces at play; the proposed _evil divide_ between the rich and poor just incidental symptom. Surface ripples in a powerful river.

<comment><USER26> I think it's just a consequence of the fact that having money enables the acquisition of more money. It explains the long tail in wealth distribution.

<comment><USER25> Sure, but that's been the case for thousands of years.

The novelty is in the global nature of the competition, the physical and informational proximity that accelerate evolution of patterns. That's what makes them spread so quickly and prominently, across seemingly unrelated scales and disciplines.

Another curious manifestation is how humans are changing the way they treat each other, how they structure their (human) relationships. Did humans tame the computers, or did computers tame the humans?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So what? Inequality should only matter to you personally if it means the lower bound on income, the poorest of the poor, is going down. If the richest is getting richer, maybe that means the poorest are becoming poorer as a consequence, but not necessarily, in fact, most likely not.

<comment><USER28> It matters to me personally that a small group of people have such a massive amount of power. It's already completely uneven regarding voting power - I can vote once in an election, but if I had a trillion dollars I could vote once, and then I could pay lobbyists, and fund advertisements, etc. I, as a single person or small group, with a trillion dollars, can have a massive influence.

This is regardless of how poor anyone else is.

No one should have this kind of money, it's really absurd.

<comment><USER8> Didn't Trump get elected with 1/7th the budget of Hillary Clinton?

<comment><USER28> I don't think boiling any single political event down to money is going to be meaningful.

I can't imagine anyone denying that lobbyists exist and that large amounts of money can buy you a lot of political power.

<comment><USER29> > large amounts of money can buy you a lot of political power.

That is not true. Hillary spent the most money in any American campaign (nearly $1 Billion) and still lost. Strategy matters more than money

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/3/8/14848636/hi...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/3/8/14848636/hillary-clinton-tv-ads)

<comment><USER28> See the post you replied to for the same response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Top 500 YouTubers see their subscribers_count increase by 100 million this year. Meanwhile, I got 0 increase in subscribers. It's not fair!

Just imagine how much influence these popular YouTubers have compared to regular folks, the impact they have on cultural and political life. Should we allow a tiny group of YouTubers to have such a massive subscribers_count and influence?

I say NO! Behind every popular YouTube channel lies a great crime.

</comment><comment><USER16> In other words, the 500 wealthiest people added a trillion dollars of value to the economy this year.

Edit: you all that are down-voting need to learn how the economy works.

<comment><USER31> The creation of wealth, in various forms, is what adds "value" to the economy; rich people ending up owning/controlling that wealth isn't the same thing as those rich people having created that wealth.

Edit: Don't passive-aggressively revel in victimhood. If you feel misunderstood, explain better - don't blame your audience.

<comment><USER16> Providing capital to those with talent IS providing value. Thats why entrepreneurs exchange a portion of their company for the capital - <USER2> has value and helps the entrepreneur. Money doesn't appreciate in value by doing nothing. Once you have wealth you can use it to make more wealth by taking risk based on the demands of the market.

<comment><USER31> That is a much better comment than your previous one.

I would counter that right now, money is ridiculously cheap. Interest rates are breathtakingly low. There are enormous amounts of money running around begging to be borrowed. As such, if this system you posit was accurate, then the very wealthy would be seeing the smallest returns on their money for decades, as they effectively competed to be the lender/investor to the people creating wealth.

But that's not what we're seeing.

It's also not what we see with investing in the stock market; that provides nothing to a company beyond the first time a stock is sold (barring a secondary argument that there is value in demonstrating that people are trading shares in the company which makes everyone feel good about the company and there's a value in that), but the rich are seeing some fantastic returns on their money in the stock market, extracting a nice steady stream of dividends and capital value increases, without having given a penny to the company named on the stock.

As an aside and speaking purely from my own experiences, I draw more each year from the stock market than my country's median salary, and I'm generating no wealth whatsoever for that (although I expect some would argue that by _not_ selling all my shares, I'm providing value and that's what I'm being rewarded for). I could retire and get by for the rest of my life, entirely on the backs of others. The rich do the same to a breathtaking degree.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Control Flow Integrity (CFI) in the Linux Kernel [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://outflux.net/slides/2020/lca/cfi.pdf <comment><USER2> [https://youtu.be/0Bj6W7qrOOI](https://youtu.be/0Bj6W7qrOOI)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. But the inevitable question, wouldn't the performance suffer because of the additional integrity check for every function call in the kernel?

<comment><USER4> "There is sometimes a bit of a performance hit from doing the validation, he said, but it is "not terrible"."

LWN has a good article about this presentation: [https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/810077/ee9afb4cb5991cdf/](https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/810077/ee9afb4cb5991cdf/)</comment></comment>


Tor developer the first known victim of the NSA's laptop interception program? - <AUTHOR> https://privacysos.org/node/1311

<comment><USER2> Is a Tor developer a "terrorist", or even a "criminal"? If not, then I see this is a serious abuse of power. It's no different than the government spying on anti-war activists and MLK in the past. Yet, every time Obama or any of the NSA apologists come on TV they say "no abuses have happened", and unfortunately many people still believe them. This strikes me as something they do quite regularly, and it's only a small part of a series of other such abuses.</comment>