If they were actually anonymous users, the company won't be able to unmask them. Most likely they were registered users that posted anonymously. And if they used their real names, they will get burnt.
I don't think it will make any difference whether they used their real names or not. If they used an offshore VPN they might have a chance, but never underestimate the resourcefulness of government investigators. It's a lot harder to be anonymous on the Internet than you might think.
When I buy gasoline for my car, I pay a tax which is used for the construction and upkeep of roads. I also pay a fee when I register my vehicle each year which goes to the same purpose. Bicycles don't consume gasoline, nor does one pay a registration fee, yet it does cost money to build and maintain bike paths. Yes, bicycles are more environmentally friendly and their use should be encouraged, but there are costs to supporting cyclists other than air pollution. Why shouldn't bicyclers pay their fair share?
Besides, we as their creator are flawed beings so inherently, our creations will be also flawed.
I'm not sure this is a flaw. If the data shows a gender or race bias, the AI will reflect that. Some biases based on gender and race exist, regardless of what the PC version of existence is. You can call it unfair, but not inaccurate.
True, but I would say it isn't even a bias if it's based on real data. If the AI develops racial or gender "biases", that seems to support the idea that the underlying data calls for them. I don't hear people complaining about the fact that young male drivers pay far more for car insurance than females of the same age. Young males get into more accidents than young females. If data supports preferences for a particular race or gender, why shouldn't AI reflect that?
I agree, and not only that, there's nothing to prevent people from creating a second Twitter account. You can even read someone's tweets while you're not logged into any account as long as the account isn't private. So, by blocking people, he isn't really preventing anyone from reading his tweets.
According to WaPo article: "High school graduates are guaranteed admission to one of the city’s community colleges, if they apply, and about 40percent of the Class of 2015 enrolled in a four-year college, approaching the national average (44 percent) that year."
Want your diploma and don't have any real plans for the future? Just apply to one of the city's (soon-to-be-extremely-overcrowded) community colleges, get your acceptance letter, show your acceptance letter, get your diploma in May/June, then go do whatever you feel like doing and never show up for community college in August/September.
Given how obvious the loophole is, it makes you wonder if increased community college applications is the real end goal they're wanting...
A diploma is more than a piece of paper. Most future employers, colleges, etc. don't care at all about the piece of paper. They want an official transcript from your high school showing you've graduated. Don't show up to the college you've said you're going to attend? The high school "cancels" your diploma and any future transcripts issued will show you have not graduated.
Look how much of the technology and innovation that is used today all over the world has come from America
Rather, look how much of those were done by immigrants from the rest of the world who came to America.
Now thanks to the wave of xenophobia in the past two decade, and now Trump, it will dry up, the effect will be seen the coming decades.
I agree 100%. But those immigrants did all that great stuff after coming to America. There's a reason for that. I agree totally about the dangers of xenophobia and Trump's immigration policies. America is a nation of immigrants and that's in part what makes it a great country. I hope that isn't lost.
The USA has a unique culture that was bought by the Puritan work ethic that promoted individualism and self improvement.
A good explanation is the three stages of maturity.
Dependance (child), Independance (teen), Interdependence (adult)
The USA seems to revere Independence, where Europe, Oceania focus more on interdependence.
Americans confuse this with socialism/communism and have a great fear that someone may undeservedly benefit from their labor. I can assure you being in one of these 'socialist' countries, that the benefits outweigh disadvantages.
You may regard America as being immature (teenage, as you call it) but it's worked remarkably well. Look how much of the technology and innovation that is used today all over the world has come from America, a relatively small country as a fraction of the world's population: electric lighting, telecommunications, audio recording, motion pictures, aircraft, solid state electronics (transistors, integrated circuits, microchips), electronic computers, GPS, mass produced consumer priced automobiles, the Internet. And companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, which although not perfect, have changed the way people live all over the world. All this from America. I guess it's pretty amazing what "teenagers" can do and I for one hope that America never grows up!
It's a well established legal principle that even fundamental rights can be restricted for children where such restriction has a socially redeeming purpose particularly when outside the home.
The first, fourth, and fifth amendments, for example, basically don't exist in schools, and the 14th is pretty much de minimis.
Wrong. Where these rights are restricted for children, they are restricted by parents, not the government. Children have First Amendment rights same as an adult. You mention rights are restricted in schools, but there the doctrine is in loco parentis, that is school administrators are acting in place of parents while the students are in school, and it is that fact which gives them the right to restrict some students' rights while they are in school.
I do believe there are significant First Amendment issues raised by a law banning smartphones for kids. Note that this bill not only bans the sale of smartphones to kids, but even bans parents from buying a smartphone for their children! Smartphones are communications devices which permit much constitutionally protected activity. This kind of a ban, I would think, is not constitutional.
I don't know if not using the in-store WiFi would help you here. Your phone's GPS location data could give away the fact that you're in the store. Unless you have some kind of GPS spoofing.
While I agree with the motivation for discouraging universities from disinviting invited speakers,
Why would you disagree with that? Since when do Universities get exempted from the First Amendment? Note that that also has some things to say about the government's right to interfere with who you associate with.
I think we're talking about public universities here, so they are primarily funded by the government. I do think governments should keep an arm's length, as universities are traditionally bastions of free speech, but if government funded universities become too lopsided, allowing only one ideology to be promoted, I can see why government might want to intervene in some way. But my original post is arguing that this could do more harm than good.
While I agree with the motivation for discouraging universities from disinviting invited speakers, penalizing the practice may discourage universities from inviting even potentially controversial speakers in the first place, and so the effect of the law might be the exact opposite of what is intended: allowing a diversity of opinions and ideas to be expressed.
Harvard is a private school, not a public school. Their call to reject students based on this sort of thing.
Certainly Harvard can use any criteria they want when they decide to whom they will make an offer of admission. But revoking an offer that was already made is quite a different thing. Kind of like there's a big difference between an airline refusing to allow you to board a plane because it's overbooked and there are no seats available and kicking you off a plane in which you're already seated because it's overbooked and there are more important people than you waiting for a seat.
In particular, once Harvard had made its offer, applicants may have then rejected offers from other schools and thereby lost their chance to attend those schools. Had Harvard not made an offer in the first place, students may have been able to accept those other offers. Rescinding an offer, then, is much, much more serious than refusing to make an offer in the first place. Did the original offer include a disclaimer saying the offer could be revoked because of offensive Facebook posts? If not, they could be open to lawsuits. An offer could be construed as a kind of implied contract.
Also, the article refers to this as a "private Facebook group". What exactly does "private" mean in this context? Could the postings be read by the public? If not, how did the Harvard administration see them? And why do they care what's in them?
Finally, do we know what steps Harvard took to verify that these Facebook accounts actually belong to the people who they are purported to belong to? Suppose I've applied to Harvard and I'm rejected and placed on a waiting list. I know someone who's been accepted, so I create a Facebook account in their name, put their picture on it, and post very offensive, racist comments. Their offer is rescinded, and since I'm at the top of the waiting list, I'm not admitted! Did Harvard take any steps at all to verify the authenticity of these accounts?
The act of giving a password etc. is not actually incriminating in itself.
In the past, at least before cellphones and computers, courts have interpreted the Fifth Amendment much more broadly than you suggest. Any testimony which may lead police to discover crimes you've committed is considered, for the purposes of a 5th Amendment analysis, to be incriminating. The 5th Amendment doesn't merely protect you from having to testify "Yes, I killed my wife," it also protects you from having to testify that you had driven to a secluded spot on the coast the following morning where you hid her body.
The 5th applies to producing testimony against yourself. Data on a phone is not testimony.
True, but the passcode is, as long as the only place it is being stored is in the defendant's head. The way the iPhone works, is the data is encrypted, and part of the decryption key is the passcode. The warrant gives police access to the data on the phone which is ciphertext. The police are welcome to that and no one is stopping them from getting that. But the police don't want the ciphertext; the police want the plaintext. The plaintext is found by combining the ciphertext with the passcode (which is in the defendant's head) using the phone's encryption/decryption software. At least part of the what they want then can only be found in the defendant's head, and that makes it testimony and it is (or should be) protected by the 5th Amendment. Unlike the 4th Amendment, there is no exception to the 5th Amendment when warrants are issued.
where the prior owner just deleted some files..... and sold it to you... and months later you taking said computer for repairs
Then the police would want full details of the purchase and they'd investigate the person who sold the computer to you. It's no good just to say to the police, "What if I had purchased this computer on Craigslist? I'm not saying I did, but I could have."
Okay, I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, but why should they need a warrant even if they were effectively working for the FBI? The customer voluntarily brought his computer to Best Buy and the computer was in their custody at the time of the search. There was no entry into the customer's home: Best Buy was in possession of the computer at the time of the search.
... for a court to be putting into a "like" button.
For one thing, does "liking" using the button imply endorsement?
Exactly. You read a post which says someone you don't like is a child molester. You had no knowledge of that, but you're thrilled to find out. (I'm assuming you really disliked this person.) Therefore you really like the news the post reveals, so you click "Like". It turns out the story was not true. Why should you be guilty of slander? Like doesn't mean you think the news is true; it means you like the news.
For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn't tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square.
This is hard to believe. The vast majority of Wikipedia pages contain several images and the file sizes for each of these images is different. When you load a page, the browser first loads the text of the page, then in separate https requests, it loads each of the images, usually in the order listed in the page's HTML. Each page then has a unique signature: the size of the text, and the sizes of each of the images in order. It would be very easy for an adversary to build up a database of these signatures, simply by analyzing their own traffic when they examine various pages. Even if the traffic is encrypted, by looking at the amount of data transferred and the timing, it seems it would be almost trivial to figure out which pages a user was visiting.
Yep, I had a Hercules compatible graphics card in my first PC compatible computer. But something you forgot to mention is the EGA card. It was the real reason nobody bought CGA. It was a step up from CGA, but not as advanced as VGA which came later. Gamers wanted EGA and they drove the market for color PCs. CGA was never really good enough to make it worthwhile to invest in a color monitor, but EGA was essential for gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
If they were actually anonymous users, the company won't be able to unmask them. Most likely they were registered users that posted anonymously. And if they used their real names, they will get burnt.
I don't think it will make any difference whether they used their real names or not. If they used an offshore VPN they might have a chance, but never underestimate the resourcefulness of government investigators. It's a lot harder to be anonymous on the Internet than you might think.
Never put your real name on the internet. Use burner accounts for everything.
If these users had used their real names, they would not be "anonymous users". The court ruled they can be unmasked anyway.
When I buy gasoline for my car, I pay a tax which is used for the construction and upkeep of roads. I also pay a fee when I register my vehicle each year which goes to the same purpose. Bicycles don't consume gasoline, nor does one pay a registration fee, yet it does cost money to build and maintain bike paths. Yes, bicycles are more environmentally friendly and their use should be encouraged, but there are costs to supporting cyclists other than air pollution. Why shouldn't bicyclers pay their fair share?
Besides, we as their creator are flawed beings so inherently, our creations will be also flawed.
I'm not sure this is a flaw. If the data shows a gender or race bias, the AI will reflect that. Some biases based on gender and race exist, regardless of what the PC version of existence is. You can call it unfair, but not inaccurate.
True, but I would say it isn't even a bias if it's based on real data. If the AI develops racial or gender "biases", that seems to support the idea that the underlying data calls for them. I don't hear people complaining about the fact that young male drivers pay far more for car insurance than females of the same age. Young males get into more accidents than young females. If data supports preferences for a particular race or gender, why shouldn't AI reflect that?
I agree, and not only that, there's nothing to prevent people from creating a second Twitter account. You can even read someone's tweets while you're not logged into any account as long as the account isn't private. So, by blocking people, he isn't really preventing anyone from reading his tweets.
If you had read even the summary, you would have seen that the poster has gone back to using cash for in person purchases.
According to WaPo article: "High school graduates are guaranteed admission to one of the city’s community colleges, if they apply, and about 40percent of the Class of 2015 enrolled in a four-year college, approaching the national average (44 percent) that year."
Want your diploma and don't have any real plans for the future? Just apply to one of the city's (soon-to-be-extremely-overcrowded) community colleges, get your acceptance letter, show your acceptance letter, get your diploma in May/June, then go do whatever you feel like doing and never show up for community college in August/September.
Given how obvious the loophole is, it makes you wonder if increased community college applications is the real end goal they're wanting...
A diploma is more than a piece of paper. Most future employers, colleges, etc. don't care at all about the piece of paper. They want an official transcript from your high school showing you've graduated. Don't show up to the college you've said you're going to attend? The high school "cancels" your diploma and any future transcripts issued will show you have not graduated.
Look how much of the technology and innovation that is used today all over the world has come from America
Rather, look how much of those were done by immigrants from the rest of the world who came to America.
Now thanks to the wave of xenophobia in the past two decade, and now Trump, it will dry up, the effect will be seen the coming decades.
I agree 100%. But those immigrants did all that great stuff after coming to America. There's a reason for that. I agree totally about the dangers of xenophobia and Trump's immigration policies. America is a nation of immigrants and that's in part what makes it a great country. I hope that isn't lost.
The USA has a unique culture that was bought by the Puritan work ethic that promoted individualism and self improvement. A good explanation is the three stages of maturity. Dependance (child), Independance (teen), Interdependence (adult) The USA seems to revere Independence, where Europe, Oceania focus more on interdependence.
Americans confuse this with socialism/communism and have a great fear that someone may undeservedly benefit from their labor. I can assure you being in one of these 'socialist' countries, that the benefits outweigh disadvantages.
You may regard America as being immature (teenage, as you call it) but it's worked remarkably well. Look how much of the technology and innovation that is used today all over the world has come from America, a relatively small country as a fraction of the world's population: electric lighting, telecommunications, audio recording, motion pictures, aircraft, solid state electronics (transistors, integrated circuits, microchips), electronic computers, GPS, mass produced consumer priced automobiles, the Internet. And companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, which although not perfect, have changed the way people live all over the world. All this from America. I guess it's pretty amazing what "teenagers" can do and I for one hope that America never grows up!
Facebook has over 2 billion users and manages to cross each and every one of them? I'm actually not surprised.
No.
It's a well established legal principle that even fundamental rights can be restricted for children where such restriction has a socially redeeming purpose particularly when outside the home.
The first, fourth, and fifth amendments, for example, basically don't exist in schools, and the 14th is pretty much de minimis.
Wrong. Where these rights are restricted for children, they are restricted by parents, not the government. Children have First Amendment rights same as an adult. You mention rights are restricted in schools, but there the doctrine is in loco parentis, that is school administrators are acting in place of parents while the students are in school, and it is that fact which gives them the right to restrict some students' rights while they are in school.
I do believe there are significant First Amendment issues raised by a law banning smartphones for kids. Note that this bill not only bans the sale of smartphones to kids, but even bans parents from buying a smartphone for their children! Smartphones are communications devices which permit much constitutionally protected activity. This kind of a ban, I would think, is not constitutional.
The result was observed at SLAC also.
I don't know if not using the in-store WiFi would help you here. Your phone's GPS location data could give away the fact that you're in the store. Unless you have some kind of GPS spoofing.
Why would you disagree with that? Since when do Universities get exempted from the First Amendment? Note that that also has some things to say about the government's right to interfere with who you associate with.
I think we're talking about public universities here, so they are primarily funded by the government. I do think governments should keep an arm's length, as universities are traditionally bastions of free speech, but if government funded universities become too lopsided, allowing only one ideology to be promoted, I can see why government might want to intervene in some way. But my original post is arguing that this could do more harm than good.
While I agree with the motivation for discouraging universities from disinviting invited speakers, penalizing the practice may discourage universities from inviting even potentially controversial speakers in the first place, and so the effect of the law might be the exact opposite of what is intended: allowing a diversity of opinions and ideas to be expressed.
Harvard is a private school, not a public school. Their call to reject students based on this sort of thing.
Certainly Harvard can use any criteria they want when they decide to whom they will make an offer of admission. But revoking an offer that was already made is quite a different thing. Kind of like there's a big difference between an airline refusing to allow you to board a plane because it's overbooked and there are no seats available and kicking you off a plane in which you're already seated because it's overbooked and there are more important people than you waiting for a seat.
In particular, once Harvard had made its offer, applicants may have then rejected offers from other schools and thereby lost their chance to attend those schools. Had Harvard not made an offer in the first place, students may have been able to accept those other offers. Rescinding an offer, then, is much, much more serious than refusing to make an offer in the first place. Did the original offer include a disclaimer saying the offer could be revoked because of offensive Facebook posts? If not, they could be open to lawsuits. An offer could be construed as a kind of implied contract.
Also, the article refers to this as a "private Facebook group". What exactly does "private" mean in this context? Could the postings be read by the public? If not, how did the Harvard administration see them? And why do they care what's in them?
Finally, do we know what steps Harvard took to verify that these Facebook accounts actually belong to the people who they are purported to belong to? Suppose I've applied to Harvard and I'm rejected and placed on a waiting list. I know someone who's been accepted, so I create a Facebook account in their name, put their picture on it, and post very offensive, racist comments. Their offer is rescinded, and since I'm at the top of the waiting list, I'm not admitted! Did Harvard take any steps at all to verify the authenticity of these accounts?
LOL. I can't believe this was moderated Informative rather than Funny. Reading the last paragraph, I'm pretty sure the poster was going for Funny.
Islam and Christianity are both dangerous evils. Let's be done with this fictional nonsense.
Stalin had the same idea and he murdered about 20 million people to help wipe that evil out of the world.
The act of giving a password etc. is not actually incriminating in itself.
In the past, at least before cellphones and computers, courts have interpreted the Fifth Amendment much more broadly than you suggest. Any testimony which may lead police to discover crimes you've committed is considered, for the purposes of a 5th Amendment analysis, to be incriminating. The 5th Amendment doesn't merely protect you from having to testify "Yes, I killed my wife," it also protects you from having to testify that you had driven to a secluded spot on the coast the following morning where you hid her body.
The 5th applies to producing testimony against yourself. Data on a phone is not testimony.
True, but the passcode is, as long as the only place it is being stored is in the defendant's head. The way the iPhone works, is the data is encrypted, and part of the decryption key is the passcode. The warrant gives police access to the data on the phone which is ciphertext. The police are welcome to that and no one is stopping them from getting that. But the police don't want the ciphertext; the police want the plaintext. The plaintext is found by combining the ciphertext with the passcode (which is in the defendant's head) using the phone's encryption/decryption software. At least part of the what they want then can only be found in the defendant's head, and that makes it testimony and it is (or should be) protected by the 5th Amendment. Unlike the 4th Amendment, there is no exception to the 5th Amendment when warrants are issued.
where the prior owner just deleted some files..... and sold it to you... and months later you taking said computer for repairs
Then the police would want full details of the purchase and they'd investigate the person who sold the computer to you. It's no good just to say to the police, "What if I had purchased this computer on Craigslist? I'm not saying I did, but I could have."
Okay, I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, but why should they need a warrant even if they were effectively working for the FBI? The customer voluntarily brought his computer to Best Buy and the computer was in their custody at the time of the search. There was no entry into the customer's home: Best Buy was in possession of the computer at the time of the search.
... for a court to be putting into a "like" button. For one thing, does "liking" using the button imply endorsement?
Exactly. You read a post which says someone you don't like is a child molester. You had no knowledge of that, but you're thrilled to find out. (I'm assuming you really disliked this person.) Therefore you really like the news the post reveals, so you click "Like". It turns out the story was not true. Why should you be guilty of slander? Like doesn't mean you think the news is true; it means you like the news.
For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn't tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square.
This is hard to believe. The vast majority of Wikipedia pages contain several images and the file sizes for each of these images is different. When you load a page, the browser first loads the text of the page, then in separate https requests, it loads each of the images, usually in the order listed in the page's HTML. Each page then has a unique signature: the size of the text, and the sizes of each of the images in order. It would be very easy for an adversary to build up a database of these signatures, simply by analyzing their own traffic when they examine various pages. Even if the traffic is encrypted, by looking at the amount of data transferred and the timing, it seems it would be almost trivial to figure out which pages a user was visiting.
Yep, I had a Hercules compatible graphics card in my first PC compatible computer. But something you forgot to mention is the EGA card. It was the real reason nobody bought CGA. It was a step up from CGA, but not as advanced as VGA which came later. Gamers wanted EGA and they drove the market for color PCs. CGA was never really good enough to make it worthwhile to invest in a color monitor, but EGA was essential for gaming.