No... dealing with other teams in an organization to discuss things like resource allocation, priorities, and timing is a legitimate role which is outside the interests and competency of many devs. It's an important task and teams that can find someone to do that without micromanaging other things are lucky.

Is there anything new here?

If you don't want your content scraped and use, then isn't the usual solution to opt out via robots.txt?

The debate of whether it should be opt in or opt out is pretty much over unless you have some kind of captcha and TOS wall on your content.

"This isn't news"

A social media site suddenly changing policy and violating user expectations for cash in a new way is definitely tech news.

It's one thing for a free site to decide they don't like a user and discontinue an account.

It's quite another thing to _replace_ their content, a relatively definitive article on a topic, with a paid ad.

Both content creators and media companies should find this interesting news, as expectation management on both sides is key to such sites being viable.

Because that's _also_ the wrong metric. If the system was able to figure out that it can get a virtual cookie by killing the boss who kept too tight a lid on the cookie jar, it could also easily figure out that something like the following might get it a reward: target a Russian airliner because the coders forgot to mark foreign assets as friendlies. Alternatively, what the coders do to prevent the above might make the system ineffective in dealing with a suicide attack using an airliner. 'deep learning' or whatever the buzzwords are today is scary enough when we let it make hiring or marketing decisions. Weapons systems for the foreseeable future should have strict and explainable rules for their behavior, not opaque optimization algorithms.

If the government wants an expansive precedent, they'll pick a pedophile terrorist who will need to rely on a public defender if they can find one. At that point, civil rights groups have to either run with the case or let the government conduct become common and accepted at which point it's harder to fight.

For criminal law, the people who want to limit scope of laws generally don't get to pick which cases make it to higher courts. (this can be different for some civil cases where an org like the ACLU or EFF can find a more palatable client and file a suit)

Another possibility is that companies will _want_ to share a common open source infrastructure. It would be enormously expensive for a single company to try to keep up with all of the hostile ecosystem for any companies which actually sell consumer products and software rather than totally focus on the crypto libraries themselves. There probably aren't enough competent crypto implementers in the job market for _everyone_ to try to roll their own security separately.

Why is the referral to an independently monitored vote news and a pile of controversy? Would you want the employer _or_ the people claiming to represent the workers conducting their own informal election and want both employer and employees to respect the result? The vote should be fair and impartial, and if either employer or aspiring union runs the vote the workers would be right to be concerned about accuracy and anonymity (for fear of reprisals).

From the description, it sounds more like browser _and_ user fingerprinting. Which is a bit disturbing, because it's another step away from casual anonymity.

No. As an example, overpay your credit card bill sometime. The bank will either apply it to your next month's charges or (if you run a zero balance for a while) mail you a check.

Don't throw me in as agreeing with what seems to be his general point, but I assume he's talking about the aspect of that sentence which assigns the death of the police officer to the attack: he did die but the cause is argued about. Once medical examination was complete, the cause of death was ruled as natural causes (stroke then death).

Some initial statements had claimed that the death was the result of injuries sustained on duty.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

Just giving a reference which I think clarifies, not hopping in with anyone defending the rioters in any way.

Another subthread addresses this technically. My question is whether a legal requirement to make an algorithm transparent to users (phrasing of the linked Verge article) would allow a company to use a learning algorithm like that.

In short, can a requirement to have a transparent algorithm be met while still being unable to explain what the algorithm was doing and why when a particular challenge is brought?

Not the training, the end results of Bob getting a series of "You should work here!" ads for prestigious companies and Alice gets ads for kitchen products: this might be fine if you explained that the last ten things Bob clicked through to were technical articles in the job area they asked for and Alice has been reading articles appropriate to starting a food truck, but if the company just shrugs and says "I dunno why it did that" is showing the training set and some source code going to get them off the hook if it's just a big neural net without so clear a set of direct inputs?

A pencil is a glib solution, but in zero g it's not great to have loose graphite dust drifting around through the air and into electronics and people. Or the debris from sharpening it. Or the broken tip if you push too hard. A grease pencil would be better but still has those little curls and such when you 'sharpen' it by removing layers. So sometimes it's worth going a bit more high tech if you're a superpower trying to do superpower things.

What? The only way laundering money works is if the criminal or an associate control it afterwards.

Such as: criminal A conspires with criminal B to buy a $5 paperback on eBay for $500, followed by some scheme where the 'clean' proceeds are split between A and B (or A is getting some other benefit, such as a reciprocal deal within a network of launderers).

But unless you're claiming that Tim is knowingly and deliberately running a criminal enterprise (or something equally bizarre like this being a way for some criminal to pay off a massive debt to him in a way that he can deposit into a bank without getting investigated for it), that doesn't make any sense in this context because he's just an author getting, pocketing, and keeping a big fee for a high prestige signing event.

We can't tell from the information we have.

The business end of the service being based in Russia (or even a primary technical facility) doesn't tell us what information is stored and where it's kept.

Further, we don't know the actual goals of the police involved. As was said, you don't necessarily need to raid a particular physical location to:
1. shut down the service (maybe they got to the dns people for it, or shut down enough nodes to effectively if not literally kill the network)
2. seize some end nodes and get logs enough to unravel the next hop (such as getting warrants to raid customers)
3. get a partial list of users, and then clandestinely investigate them - once you know who to watch, it's a lot harder for them to stay not-caught even if they do find another good vpn to connect to
4. or maybe this was the last step and they already have the perps they wanted and now just want to make this particular service go away
etc.

Poorly phrased name.
The security coming from 'double', according to the article, is really about having an extra hop:
User-> VN1 node 1 -> VPN node 2 -> destination

That's one more problem for an observer to figure out vs
User -> VPN node -> destination

It might seem like you can just draw a line around the VPN nodes and call it one "thing" you are watching traffic in and out of, but it's a much harder problem for observers (bad actors if the user is a good guy or the police if the user is a bad guy) if VPN node 1 and VPN node 2 are in different physical locations and possibly different legal jurisdictions.