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Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Comment The Web3 Fraud (Score 4, Insightful) 65

What is .xyz?

Hype.

"So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only âoeutilityâ for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."

https://www.usenix.org/publica...

Comment Nice job slipping pro-CCP propaganda into the summ (Score 5, Insightful) 156

These abuses are not âoeallegedâ; they are happening, and they are not based on dubious âoeresearchesâ [sic]:

https://www.propublica.org/art...

There is a genocide happening in Xinjiang; one that is erasing an entire culture, language, religion, and history of a people.

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Comment Re:mRNA vaccines are scary for a reason (Score 2) 603

"The mRNA vaccines are taking over our own cell machinery to produce the spike protein." = how positive-strand RNA viruses, including the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2, work

"Yet somehow the body is supposed to recognize this as a foreign protein and not one of our own." = how the immune system fights viruses

"Secret sauce?" Read the list of ingredients.

The mRNA vaccines are a piece of the virus modified to be less inflammatory in a tiny lipid droplet.

Comment Re:That sounds safe... (Score 2) 219

Not really-- this solution is even weirder. We've already been moving toward a "thin client" solution with everything running in web browsers, which actually runs a web application on the server. That's already a push toward the "thin client" model.

This then takes that and runs the browser on the sever, and streams the output locally. So it's like saying, "What if we emulate the thing client on the server too, and try to make a thinner client that just connects to the emulated thin client, which then connects to the server to run things."

If web browsers are such resource hogs that you can't even run the browser on your local computer, it's time to reevaluate what you're doing.

Comment Re:I don't think their CPU is better (Score 1) 243

Right now even if you don't think Apple is eating Intel's lunch, AMD certainly is. Their desktop CPUs are faster than Intel and use half the power. Their laptop CPUs are maybe twice as fast with less power consumption. Their EPYC CPUs make the Xeons look like a bad joke.

I think Intel is attacking Apple because of what's coming, not because their first foray into a low-power CPU is a huge threat. We'll see though. Most people who pick a Mac laptop aren't trying to decide if they want Windows or not. They either need Windows, or they don't. Only in the second case are Apple machines in the running.

Comment CarPlay (Score 1) 89

My biggest issue with removing the port is CarPlay. My iPhone is a $1000 investment -- my cars are a $50k+ investment that lasts a lot longer (hopefully until about 2027). If they remove the port and don't offer some sort of wireless->wired adapter, I won't be upgrading. At this point I have 3 vehicles at my house totalling $130k in cost that all rely on CarPlay for navigation.

There are a couple of such adapters today made by third parties, but (a) you still lose the ability to charge your phone in the car and (b) reports are that these adapters are either somewhat or very unreliable, depending on which review you read. Apple would need to make and warranty and support such an adapter (ideally with a wireless charging pad that goes along with it) for this to be a good solution.

Comment Re:Free vs Paid (Score 1) 35

Not only do paid apps have a hard time competing with free apps, but apps that don’t come bundled with the OS are going to have a hard time competing with apps that are bundled with the OS.

It’s not just laziness. Bundled apps are generally assumed to be the “default app”. Users assume that it’s the safest, least problematic choice, and often enough they’re right. The fact that the app is bundled often means that it has some amount of OS integration that 3rd party apps won’t have. It may be, for example, that you can download a competing 3rd party app, but if you click on a link it’ll load the default app anyway.

So a bundled free app against a paid unbundled app? Why take the risk paying for something that’s probably not going to work well anyway?

Of course I think operating systems should generally not ship with applications beyond a bare minimum, in order to lessen this problem. If Apple wants to release a free podcast app, that’s all well and good but they shouldn’t have it installed on iOS by default, build iOS functions to assume it’s installed, or give it any priority whatsoever over other podcast apps. It’s the Internet Explorer problem all over again.

Comment Re:This is just deananomizing (Score 2) 63

I don't know/understand the technical details of how he plans for things to work, but I think there are a couple of different concepts that people conflate:

  • Being able to establish and verify an identity online across various services - This would be that if I establish myself as nine-times, I could have a kind of SSO that lets me prove that identity to other websites, so that you could look at nine-times posts on Reddit and Facebook and other places and know that you're talking to the same nine-times.
  • The ability for other people to track, whitelist, or blacklist that identity - That would be the ability for you to see me on Slashdot, to look up where else I'm posting and find my Facebook and Reddit accounts, and potentially block or highlight my posts across those platforms. Or, for example, to block emails from me if I tried to email you.
  • The ability for you to verify that online identity links to your real-life identity - That would be an ability for me, if I wanted to, to prove to you that I'm John Smith from Denver, Colorado. This would come in handy for avoiding identity theft.
  • To necessarily link that identity to a living person - That would be the ability for you to discover that I'm John Smith from Denver, Colorado, whether I wanted to or not.

Right now we can't really do any of those things, or at least private individuals can't do it easily and reliably. Some of those things are abilities for you to control your identity, and some are for you to get information about me. Some of those things aren't possible without another one, but some would be technically possible to do on their own.

For example, I don't think it'd be possible to allow me to verify/authenticate my real-life identity online for banking without also establishing some ability for me to authenticate my activity to an online identity. I can't make it possible for me to verify that to Twitter and Slashdot account that I really am John Smith from Denver without also making it possible to verify that my Twitter and Slashdot account are controlled by the same person. On the other hand, it'd be technically possible to do the opposite, and allow me to verify that my Twitter and Slashdot account are controlled by the same person (via certificate or SSO) without tying that identity to a real-life person named John Smith. In fact, you could still allow people to create multiple completely independent verified identities, and not link any of them to a real-life individual.

In fact, I'd argue that each of the capabilities that I listed should be made available to individuals, except for the last one. I should be able to establish any number of online identities, verify them across multiple sites and services, and if I choose verify any or all of them against a real-life identity. I should be able to do that easily, using open standards and protocols. Inherently, that opens the possibility of you tracking any one of those identities across sites and services.

However, we should always seek to prevent the last item that I listed, in order to preserve anonymity. The fact that I posted something here as nine-times shouldn't necessarily and automatically give you information about my real-life identity. I think making anonymity complete and absolute carries some danger, but we need to preserve the limited anonymity we currently have online, and perhaps expand it in some areas.

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