First of all, congratulations, when you get Bruce Schneier to endorse your work, you have probably done something interesting.
But still the article is not very clear on technical details. Of course on initial contacts your phone has to provide information about your service provider (they will somehow have to pay for your communications) and it has also has to have some form of identification about your phone (so that the service provider can decide if they want to pay for it). If I understand it correctly, normally this identification is the IMSI, which is normally constant for your phone. From the article it is not clear if you are proposing to generate multiple IMSI's for a phone or using other types of information in the protocols.
Do you have some links to a more technical explanation of PGPP?
Thanks! So the paper that the other commenter linked is a good deep dive. The basic answer to your question is that we have multiple variants but the simplest is that phones using PGPP would have the same IMSI; once you do that, you hide who's who but create a new problem of how to make sure users are valid paying subscribers. We solve that new problem by developing a new oblivious authentication protocol that can verify someone is a valid user (i.e. someone who has authentication tokens that are not linked to them but are issued by the network).
From a PR point of view it is probably not a very good idea to call yourself a troll.
Also it does not describe what these people are doing. Typical trolls do not really believe in what they write, they are just trying to start a flame-war.
The people that are described in this article obviously believe in what they write, and are using it to push back against the propaganda by big corporations.
>Also it does not describe what these people are doing. Typical trolls do not really believe in what they write, they are just trying to start a flame-war.
An excellent point. IIUC from TFA, the person spotlighted is trying to piss off the fossil fuel company folks, but that's not really trolling.
The person who brought this article to my attention used a reference to Duty Calls[0] when she sent it to me. That seems a better description IMHO.
It is highly unlikely that recovery will be so fast. Some things take a long time to learn for a population. For example learning which plants are poisonous is quite costly for a population. Elephants in Botswana travel through the Kalahari desert to get to the Okavango delta. On this 650 mile migration they travel from watering hole to watering hole. It will take a very long time to recover from the loss of memories about their locations, because they die if they cannot reach the next watering hole in time.
As for the fiction part, it is written by someone who has a lot of literary talent.
For the science part, I don't believe for a moment that the "computer generated" parts of this story were actually written by computers. But they can already generate very convincing texts. It is very well possible that they will be able to generate texts similar to these in the near future.
> What is likely is that the virus jumped from bats to humans 'in the field', i.e. in nature. This is what happened with SARS and MERS to the best of our knowledge.
Both SARS and MERS had an intermediate host before it jumped to humans. Many other species are vulnerable to COVID, so it is not at all necessary that it was directly transmitted from bats to humans
Insinuating that this was caused by the group that was studying bats at the Wuhan institute is not really good science because there are so many equally likely hypotheses.
This does not really help finding the real origins of COVID. The most likely outcome of the current pressure on China is that this country will try to destroy all results they have on bat viruses.
This is a temperature at which humans normally cannot survive. It is yet another example why climate change is not just about raising the average temperature by one degree.
If the ambient humidity is low, 120F outside of direct sunlight is very survivable. Provided you can stay hydrated and don't wear sweat-trapping clothes...
We're talking about a high of nearly 120F experienced on a single day, in a place that last experienced nearly the same temperature decades ago.
Climate change is clearly a problem worth dealing with, but that doesn't turn every exceptionally hot day into some kind of "The sky is falling!" end times event.
It's no coincidence Italians historically have eaten dinner relatively early, around the hottest time of day, followed by a nap until the sun is lower.
Civilization can tolerate an occasional high of 120F no problem.
The 1-3 degrees Celsius warming always seems to underplay the implications of what is to come. I wish there were some other number that would jump out and be more alarming.
No idea if or how it might be calculated, but "Percent of humanity who will need to move elsewhere. Either because their old homes are now too besieged by flood / fire / drought / extreme weather to be viable any more, or because the agricultural areas previously providing them with food are similarly besieged."
That kind of figure is isn't just determined by climate science but also by economics. Relatively well-off people in rich countries can hang on for a lot longer in the face of unpleasant climate trends than world's poor can. The better-off can afford air conditioning systems, rooftop solar, etc. First world governments will often pay for sea walls, flood mitigation systems, desalination plants (indeed in many places they already are).
True - but as a recent condo tower collapse in Florida illustrated, "can pay" !== "pay", even when there are no NIMBY, legal, environmental, etc. barriers at all. Thousands of communities in California, Oregon, etc. could be far more resistant to wildfires...but aren't. If New York City gets flooded by another hurricane or few, will angry culture-war America rush to spend enough $billions to build a huge sea wall system? Or will the rich start leaving NYC for higher ground, similar to how so many of them left during NYC's worst COVID spells? Large sea wall and flood-control systems can take decades to agree upon, design, and actually construct.
At the other end of the spectrum - ask a European politician how great it is, when things are just fine in your relatively rich country...but an endless tide of desperate refugees from broken countries are washing up on your shores. (I had that in mind when I originally said "Percent of humanity who...".)
To try to put numbers on it - at least in America, rising sea levels, shoreline erosion, etc. have been chewing away at well-to-do coastal communities for decades now. Getting enough real-world data to say "If it would cost $X to seemingly protect a $Y property for the next Z years, then there is a W% chance that the $X will be spent" would not be all that difficult.
BUT - historical $X / $Y / Z / W% numbers could badly under-estimate the rich-country problems, if (say) public perception was that Greenland's ice sheet was doomed. (Melting that would add ~7 meters to global sea levels.) Perceived Z's would fall, and folks figuring that the deal was "after Z years at best, we'd lose both $X and $Y" might cause W% to plunge.
> If New York City gets flooded by another hurricane or few, will angry culture-war America rush to spend enough $billions to build a huge sea wall system? Or will the rich start leaving NYC for higher ground, similar to how so many of them left during NYC's worst COVID spells?
NYC is the media, financial and cultural capital of the US, and the diplomatic capital of the world. The US cannot allow flooding to ruin it; that would cause immense damage to both the US national economy and national prestige. The US is legally obligated to protect the UN Headquarters from flooding; if it fails to do so, the UN may respond by moving their headquarters somewhere else, which would be a huge loss of national prestige and diplomatic influence. So if the city or state governments don't do something about it, federal intervention would be very likely.
> Large sea wall and flood-control systems can take decades to agree upon, design, and actually construct.
In a national emergency things can happen very fast. Special funding becomes available, ordinary regulations can be suspended, special legislation can be passed. COVID is a good example of this. Normally it takes years to get new vaccines approved by the FDA. But the FDA suspended its normal approval process. Similarly, if coastal flooding starts to get a lot worse, don't be surprised if Congress establishes a special multi-trillion dollar "Coastal Defense Fund", suspends all environmental and planning regulations, and the President sends in the Army Corps of Engineers to build it. Major metropolises such as NYC will be a priority.
> At the other end of the spectrum - ask a European politician how great it is, when things are just fine in your relatively rich country...but an endless tide of desperate refugees from broken countries are washing up on your shores.
Australia basically eliminated the problem of people arriving on boats by taking an extremely hard line against them. The Royal Australian Navy would intercept them at sea and take them to camps in a third country (such as Papua New Guinea or Nauru). PNG and Nauru were happy to host these camps because the Australian government paid them untold millions for the privilege. Many people argue that the Australian government's actions are immoral and even illegal (under human rights laws and the Refugee Convention). But the Australian government has gotten away with it, and the majority of Australian voters rewarded them. Could European countries take a similar approach? I think they could, and maybe in the future some of them will. Europe accepts millions of refugees out of a moral belief that it is the right thing to do, not out of a practical impossibility of refusing them. The anti-refugee measures of Viktor Orban's right-wing government in Hungary are an example of the practical possibility of refusal. Far-right political parties are growing in Europe, and stand a real chance of winning elections, and many of them admire Australia's approach and hope to emulate aspects of it.
What matters for survival is wetbulb temperature (35C wetbulb limit IIRC). I would expect humidity in Palermo to be much higher than that in midland Africa / in a desert.
What is happening here is the same thing that happens with UFO's. There are multiple incidents for which there is no good explanation, and many people automatically assume that they have the same cause.
Just a few remarks.
The incidents occurred in foreign countries. These countries may have diseases to which US citizens have not been exposed.
The persons involved were mainly CIA. They are payed to be paranoid, but sometimes paranoid people are wrong.
What is the motive and who is the perpetrator? Russia is the obvious candidate, but why would they do it with some weird kind of radiation. They are perfectly capable of killing people with chemicals.
For many HN readers (like me) Washington DC is in a foreign country. But Washington DC is not a US state, so it is not at all surprising that many Americans treat it as a foreign country :)
What is happening here is the same thing that happens with UFO's. There are multiple incidents for which there is no good explanation, and many people automatically assume that they have the same cause.
Automated reporting only works well if you have got good input data. The article gives many examples of problems with input data. Using automated reporting on an important and sensitive subject is probably not a good idea.
This article does not give any explanation, neither from a business point of view nor from a technical point of view, why a new microservice was needed.
Please, let's have a brief moment of silence for the poor souls who build this system, and especially for those who will have to maintain it in the future.
Hi @NotSwift, thanks for the comment. Have you read the article? I believe it's mentioned there the technical reasons why we need to decouple the service into a separate one. I'm aware that I haven't mentioned the business needs explicitly, that's entirely on me.
And as for the maintenance, it's me who'll maintain the existing as well as the new service and I find it (so far) to be very easy to maintain as well as to develop. We've seen that we achieved the accomplishments we set at the start of this project. So, let me know if you still have something to discuss further and let's have a fruitful and constructive discussion, shall we?
Some people don't have English as their native language. When such people want to write a scientific article in English they will have to use someone who can write English but probably does not know much about the research. So of course there will be articles with "Tortured Phrases".
Did you even read the abstract of the TFA? This should not even be a cultural background issue. As an L2 English speaker myself I have never ever thought about throwing a thesaurus onto some established phrase so I can turn “artificial intelligence” into “counterfeit consciousness”, or “deep neural network” into “profound neural organization”. These are deliberate use of fancy words without trying to make sense.
Heck, we got a word for this sort of rampant plagiarism masking on Chinese internet — 洗稿 (manuscript (or blog post)-laundry).
OT: I do appreciate the funny phrase “elite figuring” for HPC. It’s kind of like how they translate things to Anglish.
People who don't speak English natively could use machine translation, and people plagiarizing could use machine translation. How do they distinguish (if you don't mind saving me digging into the research)?
Phrases like AI and big data are already pretty well defined in almost every major machine translation set. You'd have to forcefully try to thesaurus your way through to make it do that 99% of the time.
But still the article is not very clear on technical details. Of course on initial contacts your phone has to provide information about your service provider (they will somehow have to pay for your communications) and it has also has to have some form of identification about your phone (so that the service provider can decide if they want to pay for it). If I understand it correctly, normally this identification is the IMSI, which is normally constant for your phone. From the article it is not clear if you are proposing to generate multiple IMSI's for a phone or using other types of information in the protocols.
Do you have some links to a more technical explanation of PGPP?