History is watching, and you are complicit.
How long are you going to justify censoring anyone against the Grand Free Speech Absolutist?
What is going to be _your_ red line?
I'm going to do my job the same way as always. History will come to its own conclusions.
This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are. They come in an endless sequence, and they aren't what HN is supposed to be for. They're also not that hard to resist; it's not as if this is a borderline call.
> This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are.
I would agree in a lot of cases.
But we aren't all complicit at the same level.
I know it's how Trump and Elon work: they make outrage after outrage, crime after crime, so that one shadows the other, we can't keep track, we get exhausted, etc.
But there has to be a tipping point, or we just boil like frogs in the fascism saucepan.
If this is not the tipping point, what will it be? A proud, intense, in-your-face nazi salute, the day of the inauguration. If your tipping point is when they finally come after you, you'll be all alone. It's textbook 1930s Germany.
You seem to be saying there will be no tipping point for you.
People wonder how the darkest moments of history happened, and how people let it happen.
It happened gradually. I realized that an 80 year old man that is that hateful even after life gave him miracle after miracle (god gave him everything), is just a bad force.
There is a foul wind in the air, and I finally accept it. I can smell it.
The second is (and has been) defined independent of length for a while. It's the time it takes for a certain number oscillations of a caesium atom.
The meter was redefined as the distance light travels in a specific time. So you could say that either the meter or the speed of light was redefined to make the speed of light a round constant, but not the second.
That’s a weird take. I would expect it not being the same cost to do a rewrite in Rust, like, not at all.
You can do it incrementally with C++, not to mention not needing to hire a team of rust developers. I don’t think you want to let a team of C++ devs that are just learning Rust do a full rewrite as their first big project experience.
Also, when switching from, say, C++20 to C++23, thinking it’s the same amount of work as a full rewrite in Rust is laughable.
When some repetitive task (rebuilding a program, running tests, …) tend to last more than 30 seconds, I like to make it beep when it’s done so I can do something else and not get carried away and loose some precious time on my #1 priority goal.
I'm not sure what you mean with this "Wir schaffen das" reference. By attempting to be host refugees, one is committing the fault of being self-righteous?
We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors.
Come on, Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false. You’re mostly enabling all sorts of criminal activities, from benign to major. Hosting a tor exit nod doesn’t make you a hero, quite the opposite actually.
> We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors.
Locks aren't for the really bad people, who are in fact going to break down the door. They prevent crimes of convenience.
But Tor is the lock, and the crimes of convenience would be e.g. mass surveillance of the population, in the event that ordinary people don't have it. So it's not clear what you're arguing here. That everyone should use Tor?
> Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false.
Add to this, the illegal stuff isn't accessed via exit nodes, which link into the ordinary internet. Those things use hidden services, which are internal to the network and don't use exit nodes.
But let's even explore the premise. Suppose a lot of the traffic is people trading in illegal materials. Well, that's not really a big problem; people do that stuff via several other existing channels and the societal cost of each instance of someone buying pot over the internet isn't very high. Whereas the societal benefit of one single whistleblower is massive. These things can change the lives of millions of people. So even if it's 99% contraband, the remaining 1% is ten million times as valuable.
It's true that keys are mostly there to deal with minor bad actors and don't do much against determined adversaries. They are however not much of an obstacle to authorized persons which is why we use them.
You also may notice that in most civilized countries we do stop at somewhat weak keys and glass windows and don't bother with fortifying each house to withstand a full on assault from a criminal organization. That's because this will have a very high cost and we are better off dealing with criminals in other ways so this lack of protection is not a real concern.
I would use that argument if I were an oppressive government that was troubled by journalists using Tor to expose me. It's only 1% right? Think of the children.
Quoth Fidel Castro: ¿Armas para qué? (What do you need guns for?)
If your weapon against oppression is 99% enabling child pornography to thrive, I fail to see what overall good you are making. How many lives ruined for how many articles read?
You try to paint me as a "purist" that would allow the world to fall into the worst abusive governments just to save 1 child, but if you look at it honestly, you are at least as purist as me, because you would enable arbitrary amount of crimes just to save 1 journalist.
Assuming my 99% is accurate, the numbers are really not in your favor, plus journalists are grown adults that make their own choices, while children don’t chose to risk being abused, filmed and exposed online.
Even if we assume 99% of Tor is CP, that doesn't mean blocking Tor will remove 99% of CP. In fact, it probably will have no impact, as criminals will just use other methods, as they are well funded unlike oppressed journalists.
Surely there are also other ways for whistleblowers/journalists to communicate secrets. And why do you assume the random child porn creator/enjoyer is well funded? This kind of crime is more about availability and lack of consequences than money. Tor makes it invisible as no one will ever admit to it, but it's still easily available to anyone, with no consequences. Why are you so convinced that going after it is necessarily useless, necessarily harmful and necessarily wrong? I can't help but feel that it's a principled position, and that no amount of harm done would justify making it law-enforceable to you. How much lawlessness should we accept in exchange for how much whistleblowing? Any amount vs the slightest act doesn't sound like a good balance to me.
VMS[1] is an OS for VAX[2] systems by Digital that Dave Cutler worked on before Windows NT (with the abandoned MICA OS for the equally abandoned PRISM CPU architecture between the two). As people have noted, the NT kernel is rather VMS / MICA like, because it's written by some of the same people, so they're solving problems with things they know work (with some people suggesting directly copied code as well, although VMS and MICA didn't use C as their main programming languages).
Some people point out if you shift characters by one "VMS" becomes "WNT", and give it as an explanation of the name choice of Windows NT, but it's a coincidence. For one thing, nobody ever explains how this gag was going to work back when the project was "NT OS/2"[3].
[1] Virtual Memory System, originally VAX/VMS, later OpenVMS.
[2] Later DEC Alpha, Intel Itanic and now AMD64 systems.
