Yes, but you don't need a complicated ratcheting protocol if you've eliminated forward secrecy in other ways. This post is about "post compromise security," but there is already no post-compromise security after the cloud backups feature
Do you also think it's "strange" that they're introducing that (optional!) feature while also storing all the messages on your device? The cloud backup is strictly more secure than that on-device database. Their blog post on the subject also explicitly says it won't include disappearing messages that disappear within 24 hours.
It's not optional because you don't know whether the people you are communicating with have it enabled. One person in a group chat with the feature enabled undoes the forward secrecy for everyone in the group chat.
A cloud backup eliminates any forward secrecy. It used to be that in Signal, when you have a message on your device and it is deleted (or a disappearing message disappears), then it is truly gone and can never be recovered. Now with backups, since the key that was used to encrypt it to the cloud remains on your device, it can be recovered even after the message is deleted or disappears.
The only way to "truly" opt-out is to, as you say, set a disappearing message timer for <24 hours.
Yeah, and all of that's already true right now because messages are stored on those users' devices already. You'll be heartbroken to hear that those users can also take a screenshot of your disappearing messages and send it to anyone. There are fundamental limitations to what a messaging app can protect you from.
While the analog hole will always exist, and you can't make it actually impossible, Snapchat's quite good at that screenshot thing. Both platforms have APIs to prevent, or at least notify on the use of screenshot. It's weird that signal doesn't use any of them.
i know of ~3 currently working methods to take screenshots on snapchat
it isn't "weird that signal doesn't use any of them" because it does [1] use both, just not for giving a false sense of security to your correspondents
android emulator (i think bluestacks still works), web snapchat client + BetterSnap extension (you can even save the original media file!), on graphene it seems to detect screenshots but not video recording (likely not intentional, there was an open issue to block screenshot detection but no devs were interested iirc)
it's a lost cause except maaaybe provisioning drm keys but even then, as you say, analog hole
re: screen security isn't the same thing - that's what i mean, signal does use those very APIs but not for a half-assed snitching feature
Oh interesting. Yeah, I mean, iOS has the API so it seems silly that they don't do anything about it there, but I guess if you support a diverse userbase like they have to, then user education is impossible and a false sense of security would be a bad thing to give to uaers
this is the same argument as saying "you shouldn't have remote delete requests". Yes, people can screenshot or export. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a nicety that generally works pre-compromise or pre-evil. Locks just keep honest people honest.
That character is actually the en dash (properly used in ranges, e.g. 5–10). The em dash is [shift][option][-]. I would also include triple hyphen in that list; for those of us used to TeX a double hyphen (--) is an en dash and a triple (---) is an em dash.
GP was incorrect that it doesn't increase supply, but correct on pricing. Besides, if I can't afford $3000/mo rent, it doesn't matter to me how many rental units are available at $4000/mo. With massive pricing collusion having been the standard for the last few years (RealPage) and the demand for housing always being extremely inelastic, the supply/demand curve is extremely complex.
Someone, if we stretch that metaphor, intentionally opened the bag for profit. We can and should hold them accountable.
> the people involved with that have to deal with that
Yep, and they should hold the people who caused this accountable.
> is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success
You may be correct that it has a low chance of success. However, people who think like you are exactly the cause. People who value Musk's net worth more than science, people who fetishise "progress at all costs," regardless of whether or not the progress actually helps people or is what makes sense (municipal internet, folks!). Understanding physics is also critically important progress, but it doesn't make money next quarter so you don't care.
So you'll forgive me if I don't take your advice on the situation.
Launching tens of thousands of satellites is better than municipal internet, which would serve the same purpose, be cheaper, and not interfere with critical scientific research? This solution is better only for the private internet oligopolies. I would say astronomical research is orders of magnitude more important than that.
Ah, the techbro defence. "We already started doing it, so I guess you're just going to have to let us".
> Whether they like it or not,
A swarm of LEO satellites because in the current political climate it's easier to massively pollute orbits and prevent astronomy than do municipal internet is not, in fact, a law of nature; nor is it inevitable.
> But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging.
Ah, a challenge! Let's all give up immediately; this could make some rich people a lot of money, after all!
> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware.
Would you like to pay for launching Vera C. Rubin (8.4m, nearly 20,000kg for just the camera and mirrors) into space? How about the TMT (30m, expected ~2.6 million kg)? Truly spoken like someone who knows nothing about astronomy.
> And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth.
Apparently fundamental physics is not very relevant to us here on Earth! This is one of the most small-minded statements I've ever read.
Oh, whoops. I only saw that they mentioned charging a fee but thought it seemed hostile—I figured, seems like there's a way to mitigate that, but I guess they realized that too.
Not the person you were replying to, but the Cass review was quite clearly bunk. Its main thrust is essentially: "there are no double blind studies on the effects of affirming care for minors, so we should stop prescribing it immediately". Aside from the fact that the conclusion does not follow from the premise, how exactly could one do a double blind study on puberty blockers? So the report throws out essentially the entire body of research for failing to meet an impossible to meet standard.
> Did the Review reject studies that were not double blind randomised control trials in its systematic review of evidence for puberty blockers and masculinising / feminising hormones?
> No. There were no randomised control studies identified in the systematic reviews, but other types of studies were included if they were well designed and conducted.
That's very funny, because I think it's the opposite. There's a ton of interactions, but those (in my view) are to encourage group tactics. Individual characters can definitely be built wrong, but so long as you have at least a +3 in your class's key attribute the difference in power between a vibes-based player and a hyperoptimizer isn't all that large. Feats in Pf2e mainly add versatility instead of power. Lots of first edition players hate it for that reason (first edition seems to be the hyperoptimizer's dream game).
> [If you] prefer to lean into the storytelling and roleplaying, there are significantly better options than Pathfinder.
That's true in the sense that Pathfinder has far less support for the more modern style narrative-first play and most of its rules focus on tactics. I dislike the premise that story and tactics are opposing goals, though; in my view they're two separate goals a game may or may not have. Pathfinder 2e has both, though its story-support is very traditional. If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver, and it also features significant amounts of tactical combat. If you're just not into the combat, then there are totally far better games. If you like the modern narrative-first game approach to story, then it's also not the best. But I absolutely like storytelling and roleplaying, and I enjoy Pf2e quite a lot.
> If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver
That's how I feel about D&D - but only in the hands of a decently skilled DM. I think other games provide a lot more tools & framework for the storytelling aspect.
And I like the combat; Pathfinder just has a lot more ... work involved than D&D. It could be, though, that I'm just more familiar with D&D, and if I played as much PF2E as I do 5E, I would find it totally easy and intuitive, too.
> And I like the combat; Pathfinder just has a lot more ... work involved than D&D. It could be, though, that I'm just more familiar with D&D, and if I played as much PF2E as I do 5E, I would find it totally easy and intuitive, too.
It's very much about familiarity. I've played quite a lot of both (and D&D 3.5 and PF1 before them).
It's not wrong that PF2E has a harder and more demanding focus on mechanics and tactics, especially teamwork, which is for both better and worse. D&D5E doesn't just allow for the DM to define more outcomes through narrative-focused hand-waving, it _requires_ it by lacking rules or guidance and having imbalanced granularity in some rules or builds over others. PF2E is more demanding in both design and practice, but in exchange provides more tools out of the box that a GM doesn't need to invent on the fly when players invest time and effort into tactical cooperative play. 5E has the shallower difficulty curve, but experienced 5E players who get past 2E's steeper curve find it has a higher ceiling... _if_ combat is a heavy focus.
I had a rather contentious argument last year with a fellow freelance designer when I tried to suggest that PF2E is a roleplaying game. There's a significant cohort of PF2E players who play it almost exclusively for its combat. To me, that was telling in ways that I think the combat advocate didn't intend. Part of the allergy to D&D4E that players of D&D3E and earlier had when it came out was its narrowing of focus to combat. PF2E is likewise (and borderline ironically) a response to D&D5E's reduced focus on combat balance.
To put it more generally, adept improvisational DMs with players who don't care as much about combat balance or fidelity are better served by D&D5E (or a wide array of TTRPGs with even less focus on simulation in tactical combat over giving players difficult choices, like Powered by the Apocalypse games, Mork Borg and its OSR-adjacent or -derived family of short-lived character gantlets, or narrative playgrounds like Bastionland).
GMs who struggle to create fair mechanics for unusual circumstances mid-game and players who demand greater balance and fidelity in combat are better served by PF2E (or a smaller but still robust field of TTRPGs with more streamlined _or_ more extensive mechanics with similar goals, like 13th Age, the Warhammer family of games, or even D&D4E.)
You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.
This is a common claim, but it only ever seems to be made by people with a strong ideological commitment who are mad that the opposing commitment isn't banned on the site. In other words, the complaint is that we don't moderate HN based on ideology. Since to do that would contradict HN's reason for existing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'm not inclined to start.
The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]
It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.
This is a very late reply, but I think it's quite revealing that you seem to be implying that having an ideological stance is (a) optional, and (b) value-neutral. Why yes, people who are opposed politically don't think the other is right, and hope for their views to be promoted at the cost of the other's. That's as trite an observation as I can think of. It's like pointing out that every political ideology supports some violence but disavows violence from others; it's the political analysis of a child, or someone who thinks they are above ideology because their ideology is the dominant worldview of their culture. Ideology has substance and verifiable consequences that can be judged.
But I think you've read into what I'm saying too much in order to defend yourself and the terrible job you do moderating this website; my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences. Speech does have consequences, even if it's polite. But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate than be seen as taking a side, so here we are. That's the charitable interpretation, anyways.
I haven't implied that, and in fact am careful never to imply nor assume it. I'm making an empirical observation about the conditions under which this complaint comes up, and how similar they are.
> my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences.
That sounds fine in principle, but in practice it just shifts the language from 'what is the correct ideology' to 'what speech has negative consequences'. Since you can easily predict the latter from the former—that is, if you know what a person says about the first, it's easy to predict what they will say about the second—I don't see much difference there.
> But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate
Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
One can be on board with the critique of naive neutrality which you refer to in your first sentence (and which, btw, is so often repeated that, if we're going to call things trite, we should include that one), without agreeing that a community like this must be run by mods who publicly consign themselves to a single ideological box and moderate based on the definitions it dictates. That may be what committed ideologues would like, but the majority of the community would not. It's also incompatible with the intellectual curiosity that the site is trying to organize around, so we don't have the option anyhow, if we want HN to exist for its intended purpose.
But you absolutely are implying that, because you're implying that you're acting without ideological commitment. You're obviously not saying it, but the implication is that I'm ideologically committed (and therefore myopic, foolish, not intellectually curious) and you're either not or able to act as though you're not.
> Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
This sounds to me like a slippery slope argument (or perhaps an argument for a strong form of moral relativism): because someone, somewhere might disagree that something is misinformation, it's actually impossible (or maybe just undesirable) to definitively say something is or isn't that. There are certainly gray areas and practical limits (I'd be totally incapable of judging whether any article on chemistry contains disinformation, for example). That's not a reason not to try.
Optimizing the site for "intellectual curiosity", narrowly defined as a _free marketplace of ideas_, is itself a strong ideological commitment. Intellectual curiosity is absolutely good, but restricting misinformation and hate significantly improves the signal to noise ratio of that discussion. I understand the fear that fringe points of view with merit might be drowned out, since historically some things we now broadly regard as true were fringe positions.
But at the same time the quality of discussion here is through the floor when certain topics come up because large volumes of people who know nothing on the subject are simply regurgitating culture war nonsense and abusing the voting system to prevent actual knowledge on the subject from spreading. This site ends up just being another avenue for bad-faith argumentation and outright lies to drown out the truth. This is especially obvious when discussions on some minorities happen: because the people spreading outright lies or repeating culture war talking points are numerous, loud, and _polite_, actual discussion is utterly impossible. The moderation policy serves to provide a shield to bad-faith actors (for example, through "just asking questions"[1]) while silencing those who are actually intellectually curious through inaction.
For a concrete example, some of the most curious and intelligent people I know happen to be transgender. The subject of transgender people is one of the worst topics on this site right now because that group is the scapegoat du jour for the far right. When those people try to argue against commonplace lies and share actual information, they're shut down through the voting system and are outnumbered. They're subject to being called all sorts of horrible, false things... politely and indirectly. As such, they've left. The quality of discussion everywhere goes down, anyone _actually_ curious about the subject only has the loudest but wrong opinions available, and my friends end up feeling isolated and hated. Who benefits from that? Not those of us interested in good discussion. Only the people spreading misinformation for their own political purposes and people who have more emotionally invested in the idea of a free marketplace of ideas than in the truth.
Anyways, I realize your opinion on the matter is unchangeable. I just wish that the site were more honest about its own strong ideological commitments.
I feel like we're hitting a point where we'd have to clarify what we mean by some of these phrases or risk talking past each other, and that's too hard to do in this context. (For example we probably mean something different by "ideological commitment".) I'd like to add a few things though—and of course you're also welcome to do that if you want.
One thing is, I personally wouldn't put the HN concept of "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" anywhere near the phrase "free marketplace of ideas". The word "marketplace" has many associations, some of which are inimical to what we want here. Ditto for "free". Neither word belongs to, let's call it, the domain language of HN moderation (and I could even say bad things about "ideas").
For me, "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" has to do with (1) learning from each other (which implies community, and a marketplace is not a community); and above all, (2) avoiding tedious repetition. The problem with political and ideological battle (on HN) is that it falls on the undesirable side of both lines: its endless hammering of talking points is repetitive; and its pitch of high indignation is destructive to openness and curiosity. If this is a 2x2 matrix, that's the bad/bad quadrant—and note that it's the bad/bad quadrant regardless of which ideology generates the content.
Another thing is, this community has lots of transgender members, they're as welcome as anyone, and some who I know of make some of the best contributions to the site. We don't tolerate slurs or abuse, and warn and/or ban accounts that post those. The community also does a good job of flagging them. Some stick around for a while, but people are welcome to (and do) email [email protected] when they see them, and we always follow up. The topic, of course, is fraught on HN, just as in society at large, and people inevitably have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a slur or an abuse as opposed to, say, a wrong opinion. But I don't believe the site is as bad as you say it is on this front. If it is, then there are a lot of posts going unflagged and unmoderated that I'm unaware of.
Last thing is, what does 'misinformation' mean if not 'falsehood'? But then you're asking mods to decide what's true vs. what's false and impose those decisions—which strikes me as absurd. How on earth would we do that? We don't have a truth meter [1, 2]. We have our views about what's true vs. false like anyone does, but I'm not so hubristic as to imagine that my views are the correct ones and wield power with them. That is the worst quality I can imagine in a moderator, and the thing the community would most reject. (I'm also not so hubristic as to imagine that I don't do that, unintentionally—at most I can say that I've spent 10 years trying to get better at not doing it, and practice has an effect.)
Eager ideologues of every flavour say "you don't have a misinformation meter? no problem - use mine!" But the power to decide and enforce what counts as misinformation is literally the power to decide what's true and thereby control the site. Now I'm repeating what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418981 and we're in a cycle.
Moderation, at least as I understand it on HN, simply can't work on such principles (deciding contentious questions by decree). It needs principles on a different level that can foster the kind of community and discussion that has a chance of remaining curious, and then maybe the community can do the job of figuring out what's true vs. false together.
That doesn't mean I'm reducing this to relativism and I suspect if we were to look at a list of borderline posts together, we'd end up agreeing about many. Maybe most. I don't want culture war talking points, for example, or just-asking-questions baiting, any more than you do. But I want grounds for saying "we don't want that here" other than "you are wrong according to my ideology"—and indeed, I don't want culture war talking points or just-asking-questions baiting in any direction. It's not as if it's ok for curiosity one way and then not ok if you flip an ideological bit.
The top comment on this very thread at the time I write this is clear bad-faith disinformation. Life is a Cabaret, but the Cabaret is not life. The tone here has changed for the worse, especially since the election, and I cannot keep pretending.
Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385079? I have zero idea what the technicalities of the bankruptcy judgment are or should be, but what I do know after an embarrassing number of years doing this job is:
(1) there's no such thing as "clear bad-faith" - to decide that would require knowing someone else's inner state. We don't have access to that about each other, and people are far too quick to draw conclusions about it—thousands of times too quick;
(2) usually the person who seems to be in bad faith just has a different working set of information and a very different background than you; they may be wrong of course, but that's not a crime or sin. We're all wrong anyhow.
(3) the only response to "disinformation" that works (or has a hope of working) is to answer false claims with true ones and bad arguments with better arguments.
I can also tell you that HN hasn't much changed since the election. Or if it has, I haven't noticed, or seen data suggesting it. People have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
> people have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever the real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
I think it is generally agreed upon that the volume of shared misinformation and individuals believing misinformation has been dramatically increasing over the last decade as preferences in media has shifted.
It would be interesting if the population of HN wasn't following this trend.
The two sibling commenters spend hours per week on HN and haven't seen this. I spend an hour or so a week looking for this --- you can see it in my comment history --- over and above the probable hours per day I spend on HN (I am on HN professionally).
It's an open-access site, so if you go looking for this stuff, you will absolutely find it. But it tends, strongly, to come from throwaway accounts, and is virtually always flagged off the site. I used to point this stuff out to Dan, but have mostly stopped, because by the time he sees the email it's already dead.
So, no, sorry, I don't think the "festering" charge will stick.
I also spend many hours per week and haven't seen something like this in months. I don't think you're being honest, especially because you're on a new account and likely are an alt of another poster here. You're definitely stretching the definitions of "plenty" and "at every opportunity" at the very least, if not outright misrepresenting the situation as more common than it actually is.
If the comments made are downvoted or flagged, then your claim is also dishonest, because contrary to your claims, nothing is "festering" because its getting penalized and hidden and banned.
I appreciate the substance of your reply, but please don't tell people that you think they're being dishonest (even when you do think that) - it weakens your comment and breaks the site guidelines. If you stick to your substantive points, your posts will be more effective and you won't run the risk of misinterpreting someone else's intent.
I don't want to pick on you personally (so I apologize if it feels that way), but I also don't want to leave this unresponded to when we've had to ask you so many times to stop breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40910766).
I think most HN readers are glad that we ask users not to personally attack others (questioning whether they can read, calling them morons and rubes, telling them to grow up, that they should be ashamed, are out of touch with reality, and so on), —or that we ask commenters not to post that women are asking for too much, that European capital rightfully belongs to the United States, and so on.
Is that "moderation based entirely on tone, not content"? I don't think so; I think that distinction is unsupportable. But whether it is or not, it's clear that we can't have people attacking each other like this, and I'm pretty confident that the community agrees.
Of course it's based on tone. You repeatedly let users antagonize one other, until someone breaks guidelines, you advocated for a startup that was named "fucking awesome," after the concept that they were taking advantage of labor arbitrage, you seem to ignore the realities of mainstream sentiments when they are controversial in order to make your job as a message board janitor easier, and you pick and choose when to ignore hyperbole.
All a reader has to do is observe your behavior, and it's clear what kind of person you are. You make it obvious by your retelling of your personal judgement of my commentaries here. I didn't realize you were St. Peter, Dan.
So Dan, if you don't want people to think you're an asshole, don't be an asshole. But don't tell me Hacker News janitorial moderation isn't based on tone when the guidelines themselves dictate it.
You're bullshitting every reader here and you're showing every user that you're comfortable opening up your admin tools and regurgitating pinned comments without context to stick it to me, and any other reader who dares question your methodology.
Oh and by the way, thank you for privately downweighting my account and numerous other people's here when I had previously consistently been a top comment in a number of threads. When it was inconvenient for you and a comment had well over a hundred upvotes, it's so nice that you can hide behind moderation tools and just send that comment straight to the bottom of a thread.
Don't lie. I have what, hundreds? Thousands? Of comments here? You thought a single percent? A tenth of a percent? Were distasteful? I've been here for probably 15 years and yeah, you pick on people personally.
It's supportable, but unlike what moderation tools you have, Hacker News' codebase doesn't allow me to pin your comments unless I want them to end up in my general pool. And unlike you, I'm not paid a salary to pour over people's comments online.
Don't do this. You do this bad faith stuff all the time and have for years. Don't lie to me and everyone else by saying sorry and then acting like an asshole the next few sentences. Oh whoops. Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you. Then reading off everything you can.
This articulates something I couldn't put my finger on. I think it comes from the internet becoming the main propaganda tool of -- well could be any government -- but for the audience here nation states or actors hostile to the English speaking "west".
The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.
Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.
This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.
