It's always interesting to me the number of people who come out on HN to advocate vociferously for ownership of their private data, given that HN doesn't even let you delete your account ;)
> It's always interesting to me the number of people who come out on HN to advocate vociferously for ownership of their private data, given that HN doesn't even let you delete your account ;)
It's true HN doesn't let you delete your account, but I'm not sure most HN account information is really "private", since submissions and comments are all public. Maybe a user's voting history is more sensitive. But it's not like HN (to my knowledge) is aggregating data on its users from other sources.
I can't speak for anyone else, but when I signed up to HN I made the naive mistake of assuming that of course a pure tech website would be implemented correctly.
I was surprised and disappointing when I found out it didn't support deletion, but I'm kind of stuck now. Maybe one day I'll scramble my password and never come back, that's about the closest I can get to a deletion I guess. I check all new websites more carefully these days.
True account deletion was one of the first features I implemented into my web service. I don't think any non-government site that doesn't offer it has a valid excuse. For example with npmjs.com you have to contact their customer support to delete your account, that's just bad UX.
it also requires almost no private info, so, technically, you can stay anonymous (modulo a dedicated adversary). Granted, I agree with your point. HN should try and mask deleted account, but the website is public, and therefore the point is moot.
If Assange gets extradited on a charge that the previous administration wouldn't push but the administration his organization assisted in getting elected is willing to (because they don't care about such a paltry thing as "endangering the protections provided to freedom of the press by the US Constitution"), it will be the highest of ironies.
The fourth possibility - and this one never ceases to be true in all cases when it comes to the Feds - is that the people seeking his prosecution are spiteful as hell. They are not used to not getting their way. It's extremely fearsome to go up against the US Government when it wants your neck, because they have so many ways to destroy your life all around the world. They have infinite resources for all practical purposes and can just keep coming at you.
One of the few consistencies I've seen in my lifetime across all major US Government agencies is that they seem to hold grudges forever. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, DOJ, IRS or SEC. Assange, out there, is a persistent waving defiance of their perceived power and reach (and worse, right in the US sphere of influence).
Supporting your point are people like Poitras getting extra, random screening after publishing documentaries about US wars. They've often been vindictive given it's power-loving, egotistical, image-conscious politicians running them.
+1. When I was a Boy Scout, I had confirmation direct from an FBI agent that once somebody is wanted, the Agency has a long memory and a long reach.
The anecdote he shared was a fugitive fled to Saudi Arabia. Over a decade and a half, the fugitive grew a small business empire and was well-connected. In tandem with allies in Saudi Arabia, the FBI arranged a lavish party on a yacht to which their target was invited. The yacht sailed out to international waters and FBI agents apprehended him and put him on a Navy cruiser out at sea.
It's interesting that it may have been avoidable if he'd accepted rendition to Sweden to stand trial for the sexual assault accusation, given that the previous administration was apparently uninterested in extraditing him for this charge.
He likely made the situation worse by hiding out in the embassy---he became a symbol of something untouchable by American power, and this administration cares more about that sort of perception than the previous one.
Deport to Sweden then deport to the USA was the scheme Assange was afraid of IIRC. Something about Sweden having a stronger deportation treaty than the UK...
As evidenced by the "Cablegate" leak, it's more the fact that when the US government tells the Swedish government to jump, the latter asks "how high?" like a trained fucking poodle.
Link the leak? In this case, extraditing to Sweden on a wholly unrelated charge than to extradite to the US seems like a thing Sweden would not want because it would have hurt their credibility in future extraditions. All speculative now, ofc.
> The US government is not a monolith, it consists of many competing factions.
The original comment said "administration", not "government". The current administration IS largely a monolith, given that nearly every high-level cabinet appointee has either been unqualified for the role or are ideologues who appear to have been hired on the basis of their loyalty to the Pres.
- Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser
- Scott Pruit as head of the EPA
- Ben Carson as Sec of Housing
- Rex Tiller as Sec of State
- Herman Cain and Stephen Moore on the board of the Fed
I chose to say "US government" instead of "administration" because it may or may not have been the "administration" that requested the UK to extradite Assange.
Other factions within the US government are attempting to hold the executive branch in check, and it's possible that one of these factions requested the arrest and extradition.
> I chose to say "US government" instead of "administration" because it may or may not have been the "administration" that requested the UK to extradite Assange.
No one outside of the administration has the authority to request extradition.
You're basing this on what? St. Mueller has finished his investigation, and precisely no one will be going to prison for "Russian election meddling". If they didn't do this horrible thing (that is entirely protected by 1A), then how could anyone have helped them do this horrible thing?
OP said they won’t go to prison because Trump wasn’t found colluding. It’s nonsensical. As though, Trump not telling Russia what to do means it didn’t happen. We know beyond a doubt Russia interfered. We also know Assange was one of their stooges. Read the indictments.
So what? Netanyahu once gave a speech to Congress in the middle of elections. All countries interfere all the time. Some citizens have positive views of the countries those individuals represent some don’t. It doesn’t matter. Countries don’t have friend, they have interests that either align or don’t. Singling out Russia doesn’t in anyway lead to causation on the part of Assange.
They won't go to prison in USA because they'll never go to trial in USA. Hint: they're Russians who live in Russia. Even if they did show up to a USA courthouse, the trial would just be indefinitely postponed, like for instance the trial of Concord Management which was supposed to start a year ago. Mueller didn't give them a day in court, for a year, and now he has retired.
Don't waste too much effort defending Mueller. Just like with e.g. Comey who was praised before he was reviled before he was praised, alternate orders on Mueller will soon come through for you. The war pigs are not pleased with his performance.
I never said they were convicted. I said the factual evidence is laid out in the indictments.
I said he was their stooge. That doesn't mean he knew he was their stooge.
Indictments contain allegations, not facts. This is Civics 101. An informed commentator could not honestly post multiple attempts to blur this distinction. What does that say about you?
We know, because we are informed citizens, that indictments contain allegations. Having read an indictment, how could it change that? Is there some special incantation that could have been included, which would have transformed it into some sort of super-indictment that also contains facts? No, there is no such incantation. If an indictment claims that the sun rises in the east, that's still just an allegation. Someone might believe an allegation for whatever idiosyncratic reason might personally obtain, but that's totally subjective. No one else cares.
Once an allegation has been defended against cross-examination in a court, it might make the transition to fact. (Or it might totally fall apart. I doubt the charlatans at Crowdstrike would fare well under cross. "You mean you never actually examined the servers, and just took your clients' word that they had properly imaged the hard drives before destroying them? These were the same clients who had placed similar servers that neither you nor FBI ever examined in a restroom next to a toilet?") You're probably ill-informed enough to think that court proceeding has happened already. To be better informed, you should read more reliable journalism.
Yes, but none of the charges are related to conspiracy with the Russian government.
There are only a handful of conspiracy against the US charges, and they are all related to Ukrainian interests long before the 2016 election (which were related to pro-US Ukrainian interests).
So yes, there are many Mueller indictments, but they do not fit the (now discredited) Russia-Gate narrative. Yes, Trump is surrounded by all kinds of criminals (and almost certainly is one himself) but this should be a shock to nobody -- he hired people directly related to mafias in several countries.
I was referencing indictments of Americans (which is what almost everyone thinks of when you refer to Russia-related conspiracies). None of those were in relation to Russia-related conspiracies and the Mueller Report (or rather the Barr summary) confirms as much.
The Barr summary has been disputed by some of Mueller's team but those disputes are in relation to the obstruction of justice questions.
As for the Russian indictments, I'm not sure if there's much to say. Quite a few of the indictments are related to sockpuppet accounts and Facebook ads (illegal but not to the degree suggested by the tone of the media coverage). The ones related to Russia hacking the DNC were disputed by some research done by Bill Binney and a bunch if other intelligence veterans[1] -- showing some evidence that the information must have been leaked by an insider because the transfer speeds were too fast for exfiltration over the internet. Unfortunately all the people indicted are Russian nationals and thus won't face prosecution in the US, so we won't ever know what the truth of the matter is.
Reading is fundamental. Said nationals will never see the inside of USA courtrooms. That being the case, standards for indictment were even lower than their usual ham-sandwich levels. FBI never saw the damn servers. They just believed Crowdstrike when he said "oh yeah those servers were just infested with Russkies. By the way we've melted down all the hard drives. We like to recycle!" Good grief, this wouldn't pass the laugh test even in the pathetic courts we have.
Why did Mueller put on such a goofy show, when he knew all along he would indict no American for "Russian collusion"? He was throwing his friends in the media a bone. They've pushed this long enough to guarantee Trump's reelection, which is all they ever wanted. Ratings gold!
Sorry to burst your stereotype, I'm getting this from such "alt-rightists" as Greenwald, Maté, Taibbi, Caitlin Johnstone, Jimmy Dore, etc. We don't want Trump reelected; we didn't want him elected in the first place. Unfortunately the self-interested news media have at this point made that inevitable.
What are talking points? I thought the claim was that I am "alt-right", except now I find you don't support the only authentically pacifist candidate? Did you know that our blood and our taxes are being wasted at war in eight nations, right now? Which leaves out the dozens of nations where we have troops or spooks lurking in support of God-knows-what evil CIA plots? With Venezuela scheduled as soon as CNN can stage a convincing attack on a soi-disant humanitarian aid convoy? Meanwhile you're cheering on your best buddy Trump in persecuting Manning and Assange? Meanwhile you cling without evidence to a facially risible conspiracy theory about the Russians changing an election with a couple thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads, while most Trump voters aren't online but watch TV news for the entire 27 hours a day that Trump is on it? You're incoherent.
I am skeptical, and I've always been skeptical. You seem instead to be credulous. The topic of the day is bullshit, so skepticism is more appropriate than credulity.
Simple people imagine that "freedom of speech" is primarily good for the speaker. In fact, it's good for everyone in USA to know true facts about their politicians, no matter who publicizes those facts.
> Noncitizens undeniably have a wide range of rights under the Constitution. Indeed, within the borders of the United States, they have most of the same rights as citizens do, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent bans most state laws discriminating against noncitizens. There is little if any serious controversy among experts over this matter.
I was actually intending to reply to somebody else (or the parent post has been edited since I posted my reply) that stated Assange and Wikileaks only ever released stuff about the west and its allies.
My accusation of lies was about that, because there have been leaks of all manner of countries (Russia included) through Wikileaks.
As for that article, I have no idea whether Assange is a Russian operative now, or has been in the past. There are interesting links, for sure, and after the threats of drone strike and execution from various US government officials I wouldn't be surprised if he wanted to hurt the US.
So I don't know if he is or isn't. He may very well be.
As I said above though, my initial accusation was intended for another poster that (falsely) claimed Wikileaks never leaked anything about Russia.
Problem is, Trump says a lot of things that he doesn't mean. Or he forgets, it's a little unclear.
But the American intelligence community appears very interested in the guy and is known to have been working on extradition process in 2018.
If the American intelligence community wants to extradite Assange, I don't doubt somebody high-ranking in the CIA will sit down with the president and by the end of the meeting, have him thoroughly convinced that he's wanted Assange's extradition all along. They have agents trained in psychological operations and negotiation, and Trump is demonstrably an easy mark.
I honestly don't know what assange or wikileaks thought was going to happen when they leaked information that was politically embarrassing to an Ecuadorian ally.
On the plus side, I'm now far more convinced of WikiLeaks' non-partisanship (or naivete), since they threw their own founder under the bus.
Why? Every organization has whistleblowers. By the same token that Chelsea Manning leaked the state department cables, one can imagine a middle-tier operative with differing political ideology dropping a hint.
this is not clear. A sufficiently small organization needn't have whistleblowers. The extreme level of confidentially practiced in the relevant organizations ensures that the number of people privy to the knowledge and capable of leaking is very small.
Sure, it's definitely a possibility - but not a likely one. The people in charge of any such operation against Wikileaks would be particularly mindful of their own operatives leaking to WL itself.
There's no reason whatsoever to assume WL has any information about anything at any given time, unless they've publicly suggested that they have.
I'll be honest, I still prefer it to the world where lack of software kills people.
... I avoided running over that child I couldn't see in my rear-view because the infrared sensors picked him up as a mobile object intersecting my path and the backup warning screamed at me. I like not killing people, so I call that a win.
I am all for the sensors to give me information but when the systems take over control I am not a fan.
Cyclists in the EU have learned that the car sensors will slam on the brakes. Quite irritating when the car slams on the brakes and they are laughing at you.
The lane assist can be disabled and a cyclist who hard-brakes in front of me is taking their life in their hands because my Ford only stops if I touch the brake (it just stops as hard as it needs to to minimize risk of impact, regardless of how soft I push the pedal).
(Sidebar: I almost feel like that cyclist game is something that should be solved with more sensors. If it's a common issue, you really want a dash cam to capture their image and report them to police, as inentionally hard-braking to trigger a car safety system is clearly endangering their lives and the lives of the car occupants, since the auto-brake is designed with a bias towards injuring occupants over killing anyone).
I am an American too, renting an Audi in Germany has caused me many learning experiences. Like take the 30 minutes to learn the computer system before you take off because attempting to turn things off at speed is interesting when you cant find it.
Audi presense is nice, lane assist is nice, adaptive cruise control is nice etc etc but when its not nice it gives you whiplash or heart attacks
And that ever pervasive feeling that you know somwehere is a bug in that code which could yank your steering wheel sideways or slam on the brakes randomly
The cyclist issue is something I don't consider a fault of software or the car's design. Driving/Cycling/Walking in front of a high speed vehicle who has the right of way to the point that they need to break means you should not have been there to begin with.
The car's only other option is to hit the cyclist, so as far as I'm concerned it's doing it job correctly. Like you mention a dashcam is likely the only remedy here. Thankfully they're cheap and pretty common...
I think the grandparent is talking about a situation where the cyclist is _behind_ the car and not in front of it. A modern car that brakes hard can decelerate much faster than a bike, and therefore becomes a brick wall.
When I'm on a bicycle I try to avoid cars as much as possible (by being in a lane for bikes, or on the sidewalk) but sometimes we have to share the road. Then I'd rather ride opposite to traffic because at least I see the cars incoming and can avoid them.
When backing out the bikes can be 50 ft away coming fast and the car senses they will be close so it slams on the brakes way before anyone is in danger.
Whoops my bad! I thought you meant they were purposely traveling in front of the car, knowing it's sensors would force it to stop. It'd be super moronic and dangerous, but if you recognized the car model it would at least be possible.
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