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> I consider vision to be a drug -- an addiction. People can get into the horrible habbit of depending on their vision instead of on their brain. IMHO looking at things is a tool of last resort. Once you have exhausted every other avenue of diagnosis, and have given very careful thought to just trying to do the action again, then you may need to open your eyes.

Coding without a debugger is like walking with your eyes closed or driving at night with no headlights. Sure, it may be possible, but you are purposefully limiting your information in order to not become "dependant" on something.

Tooling will always be a compromise of utility vs reliance but there is a reason we don't, for example, build cars by hand any more.


Exactly, we're engineers and craftsmans, all which rely on their tools. If you don't use the tools at your disposal, you're not a good professional.


My experience is the EDI and debugger depedent programmers have a very hard time when those things are taken away or unavailable. The reverse is not true.


If you don’t use your brain first you’re not a good professional. Any other tool isn’t as important.


We are trending towards a world where individuals are becoming more omniscient and more omnipotent. Where any motivated US citizen can purchase a drone, look up how to build a bomb or plant a GPS tracker.

Regulation to prevent access to these capabilities feels like throwing rocks into a river; it may slow some things down, but it seems an inevitability that the capabilities of technologically augmented citizens will continue to grow - we as a society need to work out how to adapt to deal with this future in a meaningful way, avoiding knee-jerk policies like drone registration that inconvenience the masses and serve as no real barrier to the malicious.


Make a better society.

There are a lot of crime of opportunity but just as much criminality from circumstance.

These are smart people doing very bad things, they need to be identified and put to constructive and rewarding work.


Universal Basic Income and decriminalization of drugs and single payer universal healthcare would go a long way towards making the whole criminality arms race dry up and disappear. Desperation, as a constant social background hum, would largely stop.


Poverty, social misery and drug addiction no doubt leads to lots of petty crime but hostage takings and illegal immigration is not going to get solved with UBI.

Decriminalisation of drugs (Portugal) would not negate the need of going after importers and large scale dealers.


Full drug legalization with standardized safe supply would make importing it as negligible a business as moonshine running.

To solve illegal immigration, UBI has to be extended globally - and then the border can simply be taken down.


Lofty ambitions, won't ever happen.


> put to constructive and rewarding work

i like this idea, but i can not quite see how the US constitution's system of individual rights would allow the government to "put" anyone to work. the most it could do is offer someone a job.

and that someone would be free to reject such an offer because it wasn't profitable enough, or because criminal friends and acquaintances might prove to be very threatening to someone if someone were to accept such a job.


I should clarify, I don't mean putting them to work. Like a punitive or job placement type of thing. These are smart people motivated by risk and reward. And they can plan and think and follow through. They just need easy pathways to jobs and lifestyles that can let them do that.


Societal change is at a different scale and pace as other changes.

Not saying the idea isn't correct - just that theres a lot left to figure out in the details.

People cant get to gym or eat healthy even if it has massive differences to their life style.


That's naive, there will always be people looking to subvert the system because they want to see the world burn.


We as a Society need to stop playing in to the fears and come to understand that (in the US anyway) violence is at a all time low and we are not in danger

We also need to stop criminalizing voluntary activity of adult and only criminalize things that injure or harm people involuntarily (i.e legalize drugs, prostitution, etc)


You have to understand that statists, many in government don't want citizens to be omniscient, omnipotent or anything else that gives individuals more power.

Oh no siree bob...that must be stopped with only government authorities to have these abilities


Strongly agree. I feel very strongly that the state needs to be investing into how to use drones to defend against drones. At the end of the day there is no real way to prevent a malicious actor from building an autonomous kill bot, so we need to have the capability to react to this sort of threat.


You are going to have to do a better job of backing that claim up. It certainly seems to be an obvious breach of intellectual property law at the very least. Citing that some lawyers do this does not automatically make it legal.


My initial claim is perhaps a bit too strong. Case law is basically that the unique portions of a T&C or other contract are protected by copyright law, but boilerplate terms that have appeared in lots of different firms' documents are considered public domain.

http://pub.bna.com/ptcj/1051462Jan11.pdf

GDPR-shield's original T&C was actually copied from ShareKit, which is another product from the same company:

https://www.sharekit.io/terms

But going paragraph by paragraph down the terms, you get this list of companies, all with the same language:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Except+for+certain+kinds+...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+must+be+at+least+%5B1...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22To+access+most+features+o...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Service+will+require+...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may+seek+pre-authorizatio...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Service+may+include+a...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may%20suspend%20or%20term...

That's only through section 4, but so far every clause is legal boilerplate except for the first paragraph of section 4, which is unique to ShareKit (and ThreadRadar, another product by the same entrepreneur).


It seems like not accepting any user interaction within the first 500ms for popup dialogues / notifications like this would be a better solution than crushing the notification into the middle of the screen.


It will be a hard road to walk, but if something like this can be pulled off in the way that Wales envisions, it could be a great resource.

My major concern is how you prevent a motivated entity willing to throw resources at skewing certain types of stories a certain way, from outweighing the larger, but more apathetic with group of general contributors.


'Slippery slope' arguments are not inherently invalid.


Please explain. I was under the impression the reason why slippery slope arguments are unacceptable is because events do not necessarily cause more extreme events to occur.


Yeah, I've always found it "curious" (as in, bullshit) that Slippery Slope arguments are invalid, but arguments that invoke the Overton Window are perfectly fine.

They're the same concept. And that concept is also in physics. "Things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force".


Not really. "Slippery Slope"-type arguments are fallacious when there is no evidence provided to support the slope. The fallacy is arguing that the closeness of each "step" in the slope necessarily means that these steps will likely happen, but not providing evidence to support that these steps will occur. If one provides evidence which support that certain steps will likely occur, then it's not a fallacy.

As an aside, there is something called the "fallacy fallacy" wherein pointing out a fallacy in someone else's argument doesn't necessarily mean that the argument's conclusion is false.

With that said, I'm not making an assessment of the above poster's reasoning.


Don't ask people to prove a negative.


Ok I'll rephrase. Given the events of last year (the part with message hashes and public keys changing), what gives you faith in wikileaks and Assange?


Take this as a fairly baseless comment but my reading of analyses around the original incident seemed to be saying that it was closer to microwaves than sonic waves. The side effect of the exposure was that targets had the illusion of hearing sound.


I too thought that - especially given that it's (I think) a well known phenomemon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect


As someone with a company in the ISP space, this is awesome news.

One of the biggest problems in marketing that our team has come across, particularly in consumer broadband, is that as a company attempting to be open and honest about speeds and pricing, it can be hard to compete with the older players using bamboozling pricing and inflated speed claims to trick consumers thinking that they are giving a better deal.

These restrictions will level the playing field in the right direction for a more informed and better served consumer.

At a time of some very bad calls around internet legislation in the UK, this is finally a decision I think we can all applaud.


Yes, that sounds like a very good idea for both sides. It's annoying as hell when as an informed consumer, you have essentially no chance to figure out what the products even are that are competing for your money. How the hell am I supposed to decide between products that only guarantee that they won't provide more than a certain level of service with no lower limit? Just imagine supermarkets filled with "up to" products ... WTF?


It's a disgustingly unhealthy market when the only possible way to find the best product for you is to buy service from each available option for over a year (in order to get the true, not stupid introductory price)


More transparency from ISPs would be amazing.

Despite their flaws, one thing I love about my ISP is that they openly publish the utilization MRTG graphs for their local fiber connection nodes.

So you can see where I live, they're starting to get close to saturation http://qos.plala.or.jp/traffic/flets/kagoshima.html but in other parts of the country they've already started to peak out http://qos.plala.or.jp/traffic/flets/chiba.html


That is a pretty misleading headline - this isn't asking to see their text messages or something like that; It's just tracking when and where a MAC address is seen in order to work out traffic trends. In fact some of the data looks really interesting: https://imgur.com/Hx6mDSm.jpg (credit to bcraven for the link)

Most large public WiFi deploys come with this capability already included (albeit normally with an additional license required), whether or not the owners of the system are aware of the capability / are utilising it. Punishing TFL with sensationalist journalism for being open about this application will only make such use in future more hidden and isn't constructive.


The article does seem to be blowing up a relatively small issue.

However, if the intent is to work out traffic trends, it can be done much cleaner. For example, one can only track addresses within a single commute (it should not be difficult to guess from data). That is, use different hashes for the same MAC at different trips.

Also, IMO any general purpose data the government collects for the public benefit that it does not declare sensitive should be public. That is, quickly posted for public to see, use, check, etc. My 2c.


100% agree. And it's unfortunate that articles like this end up being the ones discussed, it actually hurts privacy discussions by moving the conversation away from your "This data could be better anonymized and published" to "the transportation bureau is tracking your every movement".


Don't Android and iOS randomize the MAC addr these days? Are they investing in something that's going to have a very short life?


At least on iOS it is only randomized while scanning, not while connecting to networks you have used before. Which is kind of obvious because otherwise your login won't persist.


You need to login to the TFL WiFi using your Virgin Media or supported phone network's login, so they can identify you by that instead.


Yes, but this is easy to opt-out from. Naturally, this is not what they are doing:

> At the end of 2016, TfL ran a pilot which tracked the Wi-Fi signals from 5.6 million phones as people moved around the London Underground, even if they weren't connected to a Wi-Fi network.


Is that just if you want signal under ground, or is having WiFi turned on a requirement for riding Tfl?


If you want to use their wifi :)


Another way to think about it is as taking advantage of a window of opportunity to gather the data before it disappears.


I can't imagine people getting as mad at it as the news article wants them to be. I'm picturing a world where the super aggregate data* is available via an API so I can have an app that says something like "For a faster journey today use line xyz via station abc"

* in the image's case, those percentages would do it


Doesn't google maps already do that if you request transit directions? It will route you the fastest predicted way. Worked for me on my trip to London.


Have no idea, I'll have to give it a go. Honestly being from a small town who commutes to London sometimes I'd never even considered maps for that sort of thing - Here it works as basically just a map


Having a state run public transport utility track everyone's mobile devices' unique IDs. Huh. You're seriously asking why this might be sensitive?

Wow, I guess you guys in the UK are seriously desensitized to data invasions like that.


All this stuff is tracked all the time anyway through cell towers, it's way past where the regularization point is for "state intrusion" in the UK.

That might seem weird to an outsider but that's just a culture difference. We're just as weirded out that anyone can own even a handgun in the US, let alone walk down the street with one.

I'm personally far more weirded out by the idea that a private company can track and use this data than the fact the state can.


My two major turnoffs for living in the London area (which otherwise, based on my multiple visits so far, seems lovely) are:

a) the pervasive surveillance (i don't think it's by chance that "black mirror" is written by someone - charlie brooker- living there)

b) the stupidly high housing costs

(in that order, actually)


While London does have a lot more surveillance than the rest of the UK, anywhere in the UK has a lot more surveillance than most other comparable countries.

It was 13 years ago that the UK's then information commissioner warned we were sleep-walking into a surveillance state: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/aug/16/britishidentity.f...

The worries seem positively quaint now in comparison to the data that Facebook, Google and the state now collect.


Except they’re not storing any device IDs at all, they’re hashing the IDs with a salt that they rotate and dispose of daily. They can only infer movement of a device through the system, they can’t tie that back to any device after the fact, and can’t even tie the same device’s movements together over the course of more than one day.


The people who choose to spend their lives on cctv? Yep...


I understood them to offer wifi service and track its use, but maybe I was reading too much into it.

The revenue was discussed as coming from targeted advertising implying tracking of data usage.

I'm skeptical for a different reason: all they're going to see is a bunch of connections to facebook servers which will all look alike. /s


"Targeted advertising" in the sense of real-world, physical targeting. Like, where should adverts be placed in the station to maximise exposure.

That doesn't require and collection of data, and they have explicitly ruled out doing such collection.


They already have, e.g. adverts that run in parts down escalators. If you know plenty of people go from one corridor to another, you could extend such segmentation across corridors.

I imagine they can also do differential pricing of adverts across more of the stations with a better idea of footfall (though simple point footfall figures can be got in simpler ways), and indeed that is apparently part of what they're doing.


The 'sensationalism' is not at the technical detail, but TFL being opaque about their motives.

TFL's intention to "dynamically trade advertising space" is far more interesting though. Once that's in place it doesn't matter if TFL track you or not - Facebook and Google will just repurpose their existing technology, making things a step closer to the advertising in minority report.

This will likely result in a strong pressure to reduce the friction of everyone using the wifi - expect the 'paywall' to drop.


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