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That doesn’t work as a defence in common-law jurisdictions (at least), because all participants who deliberately participate in a crime are considered equally guilty of it.

I’d say this is not a strategy to avoid prosecution, but more the brazen acts of individuals who don’t fear prosecution.

Unfortunately, scams are incredibly common with both fake recruiters (often using the name of a legitimate well known company, obviously without permission from said company) and fake candidates (sometimes using someone’s real identity).

No or very few legitimate recruiters will ask you to install something or run code they provide on your hardware with root privileges, but practically every scammer will. Once installed, they often act as rootkits or other malware, and monitor for credentials, crypto private keys, Internet banking passwords, confidential data belonging to other employers, VPN access that will allow them to install ransomware, and so on.

If we apply Bayesian statistics here with some made up by credible numbers - let’s call S the event that you were actually talking to a scam interviewer, and R the event that they ask you to install something which requires root equivalent access to your device. Call ¬S the event they are a legitimate interviewer, and ¬R the event they don’t ask you to install such a thing.

Let’s start with a prior: Pr(S) = 0.1 - maybe 10% of all outreach is from scam interviewers (if anything, that might be low). Pr(¬S) = 1 - Pr(S) = 0.9.

Maybe estimate Pr(R | S) = 0.99 - almost all real scam interviewers will ask you to run something as root. Pr(R | ¬S) = 0.01 - it would be incredibly rare for a non-scam interviewer to ask this.

Now by Bayes’ law, Pr(S | R) = Pr(R | S) * Pr(S) / Pr(R) = Pr(R | S) * Pr(S) / (Pr(R | S) * Pr(S) + Pr(R | ¬S) * Pr(¬S)) = 0.99 * 0.1 / (0.99 * 0.1 + 0.01 * 0.9) = 0.917

So even if we assume there was a 10% chance they were a scammer before they asked this, there is a 92% chance they are given they ask for you to run the thing.

I think there is some value to MBFC, even though there are also cases where it is problematic - I don’t think a blanket rule would be right.

The issues (& mitigating factors):

• Some of the ‘mostly analytics’ sources still have ‘bias by omission’ problems or misleading headlines, even if the facts in the articles are accurate. But I think on the fediverse, we aren’t beholden to algorithms or their editorial choices in terms of the balance of what we see, so the impact of this is limited.
• Opinion pieces have a place, although arguably not on World News. At the very least, factual pieces from outlets that also publish opinion have a place. But MBFC downrates outlets for having an opinion at all even when clearly labelled as such.
• The attempt to categorise every bias on a left to right scale when really there are so many dimensions any bias could be along isn’t as helpful.

So I’d suggest:

• Only mentioning it when an outlet has a history of publishing things that are factually incorrect (or there is reasonable doubt over it). Not every fact can be verified from first principles (and sadly often articles don’t name their primary sources - in a better world having no source would reduce credibility, but it is often hard to find articles that meet the well-sourced bar). People deliberately muddying the waters create think-tanks to cite with fake facts, fake scientific journals, and cite other unreliable sources - fact checking often requires on the ground investigation, asking reliable experts, and so on; it is simply impossible to be in expert in everything you read in the news to spot well-executed fake news. I think of the approach like a tree - there are experts in an area who can genuinely apply critical analysis to decide if something is fact or bogus. But there are also bogus experts. Then there are aggregators of facts (journals and think-tanks, etc…) that try to only accept things reviewed by genuine experts. But there are also bogus aggregators. Then there are journalists and outlets that further collect things from genuine aggregators and experts, and refine them. But there are also bogus outlets. Sites like MBFC try to act like a root to the tree and help you identify the truthful outlets, who have a good record of relying on truthful aggregators, who rely on truthful experts.
• The left / right bias part means very little - I’d suggest ignoring it if you’re looking at a single article.
• Any of the higher tiers of factual reporting should be fine and not worth a mention.

If there are reliable sources countering some facts, posting those instead of (or as well as) complaining about the source is probably better.

The US for years kept the screwworm from spreading back into Panama by maintaining a virtual wall of sterile flies across the Darién Gap, which was a cheap way to protect all of North America.

But then stupid MAGA politics came along, put idiots in charge, and they decided that they’d rather try to protect the Mexico-US border and not give Mexico and Panama the incidental benefit, rather than protecting a smaller border that happened to help other countries. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/we-once-rid-the-us-of-this-nasty-parasite-now-it-could-be-coming-back/ar-AA1DKRSV has some information about how it became a problem again.

With the added complication that it’s unlikely that Mangione actually killed anyone - someone killed someone in favour with the Magats, so by their logic, someone has to be killed to send a message.

Like how likely is the story that someone (who looked nothing like the surveillance photos released at the time) was called in by restaurant staff, and despite having allegedly travelled a long distance from the scene of the crime, and many opportunities to destroy everything, had a manifesto confessing to the crime, and the murder weapon still on him? Despite him having no prior inclination towards that sort of thing even?

Hopefully any jury has good critical thinking skills and can see through an obvious set up.

That’s a false dichotomy though. There are ways to prevent cheating that don’t rely on the security of the client against the owner of the device on which the client runs (which is what both of what your ‘ways’ are).

For one thing, it has long been a principle of good security to validate things on the server in a client-server application (which most multi-player games are). If they followed the principle of not sending data to a client that the user is not allowed to see, and not trusting the client (for example, by doing server-side validation, even after the fact, for things which are not allowed according to the rules of the game), they could make it so it is impossible to cheat by modifying the client, even if the client was F/L/OSS.

If they really can’t do that (because their game design relies on low latency revelation of information, and their content distribution strategy doesn’t cut it), they can also use statistical server-side cheat detection. For example, suppose that a player shoots within less than the realistic human reaction time of turning the corner when an enemy is present X out of Y times, but only A out of B times when no enemy is present. It is possible to calculate a p-value for X/Y - A/B (i.e. the probability of such an extreme difference given the player is not cheating). After correcting for multiple comparisons (due to multiple tests over time), it is possible to block cheaters without an unacceptable chance of false positives.

Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan described it as “obsolete” and said it “completely misrepresents Amazon’s current water usage strategy”.

Interesting that they don’t say in which direction it misrepresents (is it saying it is too high or too low). Maybe they are hoping the reader will infer from what they are saying that they’re using less now, without them having to say that.

While someone’s political beliefs are highly multi-dimensional, there are two axes that are commonly used to define where someone sits:

• Economy - Left is favouring social responsibility for people receiving economic support (supporting people to meet their basic needs is everyone’s collective responsibility), while right is favouring individual responsibility (meeting your basic needs is your responsibility, and if you die because you can’t, even if it is due to something outside of your control, tough luck).
• Social liberties - Social Libertarian is favouring individual decisions on anything not related to the economy / rights of others, while Social Authoritarianism supports government restrictions on social liberties.

Since there are independent axes, there are four quadrants:

• Socially liberal, Economic left - e.g. Left Communism, Social Democrat, most Green parties, etc…
• Socially authoritarian, Economic left - e.g. Stalin, Mao. Tankie is a slang term for people in this quadrant.
• Socially liberal, Economic right - Sometimes called libertarian. Some people with this belief set call themselves Liberal in some countries.
• Socially authoritarian, Economic right - e.g. Trump. Sometimes called conservatives.

That said, some people use tankie as cover for supporting socially authoritarian, economic right but formerly economic left countries(e.g. people who support Putin, who is not economically left in any sense).

I’m not sure why people choose Youtube as their platform to criticise big tech like Google.

Cloudflare are notorious for shielding cybercrime sites. You can’t even complain about abuse of Cloudflare about them, they’ll just forward on your abuse complaint to the likely dodgy host of the cybercrime site. They don’t even have a channel to complain to them about network abuse of their DNS services.

So they certainly are an enabler of the cybercriminals they purport to protect people from.

I am not sure why anyone would use an AI code editor if they aren’t planning on vibe coding.

Vibe coding means only looking at the results of running a program generated by an agentic LLM tool, not the program itself - and it often doesn’t work well even with current state-of-the-art models (because once the program no longer fits in the context size of the LLM, the tools often struggle).

But the more common way to use these tools is to solve smaller tasks than building the whole program, and having a human in the loop to review that the code makes sense (and fix any problems with the AI generated code).

I’d say it is probably far more likely they are using it in that more common way.

That said, I certainly agree with you that some of Proton’s practices are not privacy friendly. For example, I know that for their mail product, if you sign up with them, they scan all emails to see if they look like email verification emails, and block your account unless you link it to another non throw-away email. The CEO and company social media accounts also heaped praise on Trump (although they tried to walk that back and say it was a ‘misunderstanding’ later).

• Measles estimated case-fatality rate: 1.3%
• Estimated US population: 346,715,067
• Measles deaths if everyone in the US got measles: 4,507,295
• Upper limit on estimated MMR vaccine caused anaphylaxis: 0.000066%
• Anaphylaxis case-fatality rate: 0.3%
• Estimated vaccine-caused fatality rate: 1.98 * 10^-7 %
• Estimate vaccine-caused fatalities avoided by not vaccinating US population: 0.69
• Net increase in fatalities from switching to measles natural immunity for everyone in the US: 4,507,294

So it would only be better if he wants an extra 4.5 million Americans to die.

Legally, he’s not even allowed to drive.

I think more like the SS advises the president not to drive for their own safety, and to leave it to experts.

Or as Trump probably sees it: The deep state is being insufficiently loyal and trying to tell him - the president - of all people - what to do. So he totally shouldn’t listen, and should drive if he wants to, and they should fall in line or be fired.

The awkwardness here actually works in favour of abolishing tips and replacing them with the pay being factored into higher prices.

No one wants to be the sucker - human nature is that people are generous if they think everyone else is generous, but if they feel that others are not ‘pulling their weight’ on generosity and are instead taking advantage, that’s the fastest way to dry up other people’s generosity. Right-wing media use this fact to undermine support for social welfare - e.g. if 0.001% of welfare payments are fraudulently taken, they set editorial policy that makes it seem like beneficiaries are rorting the system instead of being truly needy.

But when it comes to tipping, the dynamic actually works the other way - people feel generous by tipping, even though it is harmful long term. If a few people ahead of someone in the line don’t tip, should they be the sucker who does tip? And for the employee, you want them to be the advocate on the inside for forcing people to pay their share instead of taking advantage - by having the displayed price be the total upfront price that includes the compensation for employees, instead of an optional tip.

There is a minimum amount of total money the employee could make before they’d go and work somewhere else instead. So if, hypothetically, everyone in a country where tipping is common even for non-exceptional service just stopped paying tips, hospitality employers would be forced to pay more to stay competitive with other non-customer-facing industries.

Of course, a drastic shock to the economy like that would probably cause a lot of upheaval, as some employers struggle to accept the new norm.

However, the same thing would work even if the change was slower - e.g. if 5% of people didn’t tip, and did it very obviously and vocally, and then the practice spread as it reached 10% and so on.

Obviously it sucks for the employees who get hit by the first few non-tippers, but over the long term it would be for the better for worker rights. So I could absolutely see it working.

That said, I say this from a country where tipping is not the norm (except maybe the occasional ‘keep the change’ for exceptional service), and the law and expectation is that the most prominent displayed price is the total price you pay - and people react very negatively towards businesses seen as trying to bring in American style tipping culture.

The FBI pressured Apple to create an encryption backdoor to bypass their security features

This was more like a hardware security device backdoor - the key was in a hardware security device, that would only release it after receiving the PIN (without too many wrong attempts). But the hardware accepts signed firmware from Apple - and the firmware decides the rules like when to release the key. So this was effectively a backdoor only for Apple, and the FBI wanted to use it.

Systems would create a public audit trail whenever a backdoor is used, allowing independent auditors to monitor and report misuse of backdoors.

This has limits. If there is a trusted central party who makes sure there is an audit log before allowing the backdoor (e.g. the vendor), they could be pressured to allow access without the audit log.

If it is a non-interactive protocol in a decentralised system, someone can create all the records to prove the audit logs have been created, use the backdoor, but then just delete the audit logs and never submit them to anyone else.

The only possibility without a trusted central party is an interactive protocol. This could work as: For a message (chat message, cryptocurrency transaction etc…) to be accepted by the other participants, they must submit a zero-knowledge proof that the transaction includes an escrow key divided into 12 parts (such that any 8 of 12 participants can combine their shares to decrypt the key), encrypted with the public keys of 12 enrolled ‘jury’ members - who would need to be selected based on something like the hash of all messages up to that point. The jury members would be secret in that the protocol could be designed so the jury keys are not publicly linked to specific users. The authority could decrypt data by broadcasting a signed audit log requesting decryption of certain data, and jury members would receive credits for submitting a share of the escrow key (encrypted so only the authority could read it) along with a zero-knowledge proof that it is a valid and non-duplicate escrow key. Of course, the person sending the message could jury shop by waiting until the next message will have the desired jury, and only sending it then. But only 8/12 jurors need to be honest. There is also a risk jurors would drop out and not care about credits, or be forced to collude with the authority.

Cryptographic Enforcement: Technical solutions could ensure that the master key is unusable if certain conditions—such as an invalid warrant or missing audit trail—are not met.

Without a trusted central party (or trusted hardware playing the same role), this seems like it would require something like Blackbox Obfuscation, which has been proven to be impossible. The best possibility would be an interactive protocol that would need enough people to collude to break it.

I have submitted a DEIA role report to DEIAtruth@opm.gov giving my feelings about how DEIA roles are useful, and I’d encourage everyone to do the same. To help ensure it gets read, pick a subject that makes it hard to tell if it is a report of a person vs your feelings.

IANAL, and it will depend on jurisdiction. But generally transformative uses that are a completely different application, and don’t compete with the original are likely to be fair use. A one-line summary is probably more likely to promote the full book, not replace it. A multi-paragraph summary might replace the book if all the key messages are covered off.

Copyright laws are illogical - but I don’t think your claim is as clear cut as you think.

Transforming data to a different format, even in a lossy fashion, is often treated as copyright infringement. Let’s say the Alice produces a film, and Bob goes to the cinema, records it with a camera, and then compresses it into an Ogg file with Vorbis audio encoding and Theora video encoding.

The final output of this process is a lossy compression of the input data - meaning that the video and audio is put through a transformation that means it’s represented in a completely different form to the original, and it is impossible to reconstruct a pixel perfect rendition of the original from the encoded data. The transformation includes things like analysing the motion between frames and creating a model to predict future frames.

However, copyright laws don’t require that an infringing copy be an exact reproduction - lossy compression is generally treated as infringing, as is taking key elements and re-telling the same thing in different words.

You mentioned Harry Potter below, and gave a paper mache example. Generally copyright laws have restricted scope, and if the source paper was an authorised copy, that is the reason that wouldn’t be infringing in most jurisdictions. However, let me do an experiment. I’ll prompt ChatGPT-4o-mini with the following prompt: “You are J K Rowling. Create a three paragraph summary of the entire book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”. Include all the original plot points and use the original character names. Ensure what you create is usable as a substitute to reading the book, and is a succinct but entertaining highly abridged version of the book”. I’ve reviewed the output (I won’t post it here since I think it would be copyright infringing, and also given the author’s transphobic stances don’t want to promote her universe) - and can say for sure that it is able to accurately reproduce the major plot points and character names, while being insufficiently transformative (in the sense that both the original and the text generated by the model are literary works, and the output could be a substitute for reading the book).

So yes, the model (including its weights) is a highly compressed form of the input (admittedly far more so than the Ogg Vorbis/Theora example), and it can infer (i.e. decode to) outputs that contain copyrighted elements.