For most websites today if someone can intercept traffic somewhere close to the server they don't even need the keys, they can just fake responses to pass CA validation and issue valid certificates with their own keys and MITM like there is no encryption.
And coldboot attacks performed by a hosting provider staff of dumping memory and finding keys isn't that realistic of a threat, just like putting servers into a locked cage on someone else's property isn't much of a protection.
Right, there is plenty of confidence that climate change is real and caused by humans, but pretty much zero confidence in the long term effects of climate change on human population.
In web and online infrastructure pretty much nothing is out of your control except for two things: ISPs people use and domain name registrar you use for your domain name. And even domain name registrar centralization can be mitigated against by having multiple domains from multiple registrars and promoting different domains to different users and having backup communication channels to inform users about new domains in case something happens.
Other than that it's your choice whether to make your infrastructure dependent on a bunch of unreliable centralized SPOFs from big corporations or build highly available infrastructure relying on servers from many different providers running your own DNS servers with DNS routing, failover, etc. You will definitely beat Cloudflare's availability this way many times over.
And you will still be exposed to being blindsided by something out of your control. It's really only in your control of you can think of and plan for it ahead of time. And there will certainly be things that we don't consider. You can call that a failure but it happens all the time and it's reality.
What if a political event impacts you, for instance? A pandemic? A storm taking out a major data center? A weird Linux kernel edge case that only happens beyond a certain point in time? That only sounds ridiculous because it hasn't happened, but weird things like that happen all the time. There are so many unseen possibilities.
I understand that might sound unreasonable or facetious or like I'm expanding the scope.
The point is, the more confident that you've built something that has no SPOF the more exposed your are to the risk of it, because one probably does exist.
Honestly, you are not making any sense. This is not how engineering works. If you design for resilience, you get more resilience and you build confidence as you see the evidence how the system works in real world. Furthermore, with resilience you have to always cover all risks, it's just that you don't immediately reach fine granularity of decisions that don't trigger failover to servers in different countries, you improve granularity as you learn from actual operations and modify your designs accordingly.
I remember when I first deployed DNS routed system it was too reactive, constantly jumping between servers, monitoring was too sensitive, it didn't wait for servers to stabilize to return them into the mix and exponential backoff was taking servers out for far too long. But even given all that it was still able to avoid outages caused by data center failures and connectivity problems.
The whole idea behind resilience is to cover unforeseeable risks, the turkey problem just doesn't apply here. I would even say if the system doesn't solve the turkey problem it cannot be called resilient. And high availability without resilience is not practically possible.
It's not difficult, it's just different. It's the difference between predicting that a truck might crash into a data center and building concrete wall around it, and designing a system in a such way that users only ever resolve to servers that are currently available regardless of what happened to some of them in a data center that had a truck crashed into it.
... and after you've solved for the truck problem, you have a potentially infinite list of other things to plan for, some of which you will not foresee. And of course, there's probably an upper bound on the time you can spend preparing for such things.
Famous to the point of being a cliche, the titanic was thought to be unsinkable, and I would have a similarly hard time convincing the engineers behind the ship's design to believe otherwise.
The level of confidence you're displaying in predicting the unforeseeable is something you may want to take a deeper look at.
You are missing the point. Solving the truck problem is exactly what you shouldn't do, well, at least until your system is resilient. Because it could be something entirely different, it could be law enforcement raiding a data center and your wall around it won't protect it from them. So instead you approach the system in terms of what it has to rely on and all possible states of the thing it has to rely on. Which maps to a very small number of decisions. Like whether a server is available or not. If it's not available it really doesn't matter which of the infinite things that could happen to it or to a data center it is in actually did, you simply don't return it to users if it's not available and have enough independent servers to return to users in enough independent data centers to achieve specific availability. It's really not difficult.
I understand that most of those leetcode corporations don't care much about resilience, likely even incapable of producing highly reliable systems, and may give you a false impression that reliability is something of an unachievable fantasy. But it's not, it's something we have enough research done on and can do really well today if needed, we are not in titanic era anymore.
I have high confidence in these things (not in "predicting the unforeseeable"), because I've done them myself. My edge infrastructure had like half an hour of downtime total in many years, almost a decade already.
Wouldn't that make you more happy, not less? Always figuring out how to improve things and having endless possibilities to improve them is almost a definition of fun.
Objective journalism was never ever a thing. That's why Manufacturing Consent happened and all the works from Edward Bernays and all the way to Noam Chomsky.
What journalism had before though is just more consistency in worldview, because mass media was very centralized and pushed much more consistent propaganda with nothing to oppose it.
There might never have been some noble objective, but there were at least the business incentives to appeal to a broader audience because of the centralized distribution methods, no? I think Matt Taibbi wrote about this. Market forces then and now.
I mean, as much as Matt Taibbi articles are fun to read, he never came across to me as objective nor trying to be objective. A lot of what he writes is all about showing his viewpoint and appealing to people with similar viewpoint.
Objectivity will be subjective even outside of the communication model described in Manufacturing Consent.
Ie, you can read the French newspaper, "Canard Enchaine" and verify that it doesn't tick the checkboxes of the five filters of editorial bias. Nonetheless that's a very opinionated newspaper. Opinions are by definition subjective. And, as even Chomsky acknowledged, journalists intentions are in the majority good. But, like we are, are very much trapped in an unavoidable ideology.
I don't know who warned you, but no, going against the dominant ideologies here is not a bannable offense. It can be bannable if 1) that's all you talk about here and 2) you talk about it in the wrong way?
What's the wrong way? Personal attacks, attacks on groups of people, and/or consistently too much snark and not enough substance. Complaining about the moderation and/or downvotes doesn't go over big, either.
It's more like a mix of solar and wind energy investors with fossil burning energy investors, both benefit from shutting down nuclear reactors. Solar and wind investors just want to have their huge returns with nothing wasted, as each kWh is pretty expensive, but lacking nuclear power most of the energy generation will still go to burning fossils, who will profit massively from it. Happened in other countries too, like Ukraine, which was recently forced to temporary stop some reactors to benefit those two groups and of course make things worse for the climate.
It's a private company, it's very unlikely for them to outright push government propaganda. They'll probably just censor "political activism" on the platform altogether and someday if government establishes tighter control of the platform they might be forced not to censor some of it, like things that undermine the US government.
Large "private" companies in China are not private as you would think of them in the West. The Chinese government or the CCP will own outright or through holding companies shares in a company. So even at the most benign the government or CCP will have influence in a company's governance. Executives and upper management will always be outwardly enthusiastic about all Chinese government/CCP talking points and decisions.
Due to China's "security" laws security and intelligence agencies have essentially full access to large companies' data. There's no real due process so a "private" company's data is essentially government data. There's also the overt and covert censorship and propaganda imposed by the government.
Company executives serve at the pleasure of the government. Anyone not towing the party line or acting with too much independence will get caught up in "anti-corruption" investigations or just be arrested for crimes they may or may not have actually committed.
Realistically it's better to just assume a priori that a Chinese social media company is pushing propaganda and building dossiers of users. It's certainly safer to assume that.
It takes a lot to produce and push government propaganda. It would require a tech company to essentially turn into a government run news organization if they were to do it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of even having different businesses, rather than all of them being propaganda producing news outlets.
China's already got multiple overt state-run "news" organizations. So it's not like there's some dearth of China-friendly content readily available. Propaganda also isn't necessarily just content produced by some Ministry of Truth. Simply censoring or "discouraging" negative coverage of China/CCP in state influenced media can be/is propaganda.
That's just "official" propaganda. The CCP's various astroturfing brigades are well documented (see "50 cent army" and "internet navy"). They show up in public forums of all stripes.
TikTok doesn't allow discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Falun Gong, Free Tibet, or anything other topics the CCP deems inappropriate. That censorship is propaganda by omission. Content users see being primary algorithmic makes it trivial to add in pro-CCP or just anti-West content into people's feeds.
But isn't this part of the point? Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions. In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong.
This statement doesn't even make sense, where are you acquiring this knowledge if not from experts? Are you out there doing field research and conducting your own scientific experiments on every subject you're interested in?
I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.
You are confusing opinions with evidence and facts. Obviously you acquire knowledge by reading papers where people are doing research and experiments and presenting evidence, analytics and all the facts from which you can make your own conclusions.
OK, I don't think that this delineation is actually as black and white as you're making it out to be, given most subjects are complex enough to require nuanced interpretations of data/facts, but I'll give you that in some instances there is a fine line, and there are certain areas where there is a lot of disagreement even amongst experts.
Still, an expert, by definition is just someone that has "comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of a subject." You could argue that as soon as you've acquired enough knowledge on a subject to form an accurate opinion, you have yourself become an expert.
Although I'm guessing when you're referring to "experts" you mean "establishment experts." For example, your average doctor whose spent decades studying medicine as opposed to your online research on how to best treat/prevent a certain ailment (you didn't provide an example so I am just referring a fairly common one). What's the difference between your expertise and theirs? On one hand, they have decades worth of rigorous academic study and personal experience over you, on the other hand, you may have a "fresher" perspective that may be devoid of certain institutional biases. I would just strive to stay humble.
I may have looked more in depth into my condition (though that may imply listening to crackpots) than doctors who despite years of study may not be as in depth as me. There is a lot to the entire human body (which is why doctors refer people to specialists, but they need to choose the right specialist which isn't always easy)
"Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions."
Not quite. It's observation of the world around you. It doesn't preclude experts' opinions, it takes them into account. Reinventing the wheel isn't the goal of science. The goal is to understand why a circle might be the best shape for rolling and under what circumstances it might not be.
More specific to current times, ignoring the advice of epidemiologists with respect to masks and social distancing is proving to be costly in life and economy.
"In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong."
What you're describing was true in the Renaissance, but it's incredibly, achingly difficult for someone to gain expertise in multiple areas of science in this era.
The original comment is about dang jumpyness and unfairness in moderation. He won't touch some people for the things he will shadowban or downweight others. Whatever you can praise dang for, moderation isn't one of those things. On HN there are effectively no rules and no objectivity, only what moderators say goes.
I sort of agree, he's definitely trying to enforce policies to advance an agenda while claiming pretty subjective justifications [1] for any action that he takes to shut down discussions. But to me that agenda looks like it's just about rich capitalist interests - just trying to make this place mostly corporate, capitalist friendly, not satisfy anyone's interests and "intellectual curiosity" as he likes to claim.
[1] Subjective justifications cannot teach anyone anything, as people can't know what exactly is the problem, only that they have to shut up, because moderator doesn't like what they are discussing.
For most websites today if someone can intercept traffic somewhere close to the server they don't even need the keys, they can just fake responses to pass CA validation and issue valid certificates with their own keys and MITM like there is no encryption.
And coldboot attacks performed by a hosting provider staff of dumping memory and finding keys isn't that realistic of a threat, just like putting servers into a locked cage on someone else's property isn't much of a protection.