If what you really need is security, then I don't see how (1) and (2) can be overriding concerns. If I were in a situation where my life depended on my messages being confidential, my choice of medium wouldn't turn on the convenience of long-form messages or social conventions around reply time.
To put it another way: if I'm in a situation where being able to type an easy-to-read long-form message is more important than it being end-to-end encrypted, I'd just use Gmail. I don't see why Signal needs to satisfy both use cases; at worst it's kind of ergonomically awkward, but it isn't making false promises of security, which is worse than useless.
Obviously, if what I really need is security, these aren't overriding concerns! But I think part of the point is that you should be using these things even when you don't need security -- otherwise when you do use it, it's potentially suspicious. Secure messaging needs to be ordinary, not something special you only do when you need security. Signal accomplishes that well for text messaging! Nothing, apparently, really accomplishes that well for email while also being seriously secure.
Edit: Or to put it another way -- tptacek talks about people "LARPing" by using attempts-at-secure-messaging when they have no need for security. But, such "LARPing" is actually important, as it creates cover for those who do need it! Just, y'know, we still need the actually-secure part.
I'm a programmer, but I'm not good at math. I know this. And yet, the Tau Day Manifesto explained the geometry of the circle to me more clearly and understandably than any of the math classes I've ever taken. And it's not just because it's a well-written work; the concept is genuinely simpler to understand.
Pi really is a pedagogical disaster, and tau really does help.
By this logic, Coinbase basically can't win. If they do what they need to do to allow Bitcoin to become popular -- that is, make it as pleasant to use as a bank with credit and debit cards -- they essentially become a bank, thus earning the scorn of the Bitcoin community. But if they don't, Bitcoin remains a niche product that no one besides a few ideological supporters with axes to grind will ever use.
This is a false dichotomy. Bitcoin is a useful protocol for other things besides consumer payments. It is also possible that even if Coinbase's value proposition is 99% as an exchange, there may still be some value to its users in providing a convenient device for extracting $ from their btc balances. Someday I could see Coinbase as a sort of wrapper around multi-currency wallets. Users may have btc, ltc, $, and various other digital assets which they (stupidly or not) wish to leave in one repository.
You can argue that "undocumented immigrant" doesn't capture the actual meaning, but that doesn't make jorgeleo's point any less valid: the action is illegal, not the person.
But the person committed the action, so it doesn't seem unfair for the description to describe both. Much like how we use various descriptions to describe people based on their actions.
Some years ago, there was a video about the moon landing in Washington DC airport (it was at a Smithsonian exhibit or store or some such). It included video of the control room when the alarm went off during descent. There was silence and blank faces - nobody knew what to do.
But by the time the alarm went off the second time on descent, it was completely different. Someone - whoever was in overall charge - called a role (something like "descent control officer") and that person responded "go", all within one second.
But, yes, it wasn't a problem because the priority scheduling recovered from this problem, and that recovery was a really big deal.
> Some years ago, there was a video about the moon landing in Washington DC airport (it was at a Smithsonian exhibit or store or some such). It included video of the control room when the alarm went off during descent. There was silence and blank faces - nobody knew what to do.
You have to be careful interpreting something like that. Without the backstory, you run the risk of projecting your own emotions onto the events.
Mission Control was actually not very worried about the program alarms. According to Gene Kranz in his memoirs, the white team had been fed a program alarm during a pre-flight simulation. In fact, it was the last simulation they ran through before launch, so it was fresh in their minds.
During the simulation, Mission Control incorrectly called an abort. During the debrief, the instructors told them that the program alarm was non-fatal, and they should have continued to a lunar landing.
During the actual lunar landing, Mission Control was astonished to run into the same scenario. It was like running through the simulation a second time.
> But by the time the alarm went off the second time on descent, it was completely different. Someone - whoever was in overall charge - called a role (something like "descent control officer") and that person responded "go", all within one second.
Neil Armstrong did have to ask twice, but he did get a response from Mission Control on the first alarm. Mission Control did not ignore the first alarm.
The delay was caused by having to consult a list of fatal and non-fatal program alarms. Once they had that list, it was easy to call a Go on subsequent program alarms. However, they couldn't just give a Go to the first alarm without checking the list.
Armstrong and Aldrin hadn't participated in that earlier simulation, so they were probably a lot more worried than Mission Control was!
Wasn't that the same alarm that was randomly thrown at the astronaughts in training and they made the wrong choice then and learned to make the right choice on the moon?
I will look up the story in Kranz's autobiography when I get home tonight.
I do believe it was. The Simsups threw a 1201 alarm at them, and the controllers got confused, and Kranz called an abort. Afterwards, they told him, "It wasn't an abort, you should have continued the landing...I thought you guys had it, but then you went off the rails and called for an abort...You violated the fundamental rule of Mission Control: You must have two cues before aborting. You called for an abort with only one! " As a result, one of the controllers went more into depth on program alarm codes, and they put a rule in dealing with which alarm codes would be grounds for an abort. Neither 1201 nor 1202 were on that list. They saw both those alarm codes during Eagle's descent, and were able to say, "We're Go on this alarm...we're still Go, same type, it's a Go." And the rest was history.
My understanding, unless I'm wrong, is that a Title II reclassification can be done unilaterally by the FCC without Congressional assent (though it would immediately be sued by all the carriers). Accordingly, I'm reading it as a political ploy to force Congress into giving the FCC a better-suited regulatory regime for it than Title II, despite Congress currently not being friendly to such a thing. He's saying, in effect: "I want net neutrality badly enough that I'm willing to use this horrible regulation to do it that no one really wants, unless you cave and give me a better way." It might be a bluff?
Today we have users voting with their feet: eg I use Twitter/I stopped using Twitter after they pissed off the developer community.
The fraction of users who actually do this is so tiny that they don't make a dent in Twitter's userbase. The vast majority of users don't care about "trust", or "privacy", or ads, or federation, or API limits, or the ability to leave the provider if it turns evil. They care about where their friends are. That's literally the only feature that draws users in the numbers that make a social network last. I wouldn't expect Ello to be able to convince enough people to join and stay without massive, enthusiastic, engaged adoption -- and what engagement it has is coming from the bandwagon effect, not its promise of no ads.
By the way, remember Diaspora[0]? It's an open-source, federated social network that anyone can host, that requires no trust in any individual provider, and with no ads. It still exists, after attracting quite a lot of attention and Kickstarter funding a few years ago. And it dropped almost entirely off the radar, because its selling points have nothing to do with people's friends actually being there.
I feel like they should rename the Millennials the "Give Up Generation". You guys just take defeatism to 11 every time any tries to say something hopeful for people to start doing what's better for the world. Good grief. Let the poor guy dream for a minute.
Could you explain how idealism and volunteering are mutually inclusive?
I would definitely agree that Millenials are optimistic. About themselves personally. Defeatist about everyone else. That was what I was talking about in the above comment and maybe I should have clarified that more carefully.
We can probably go back and forth for hours on whether I'm being "defeatist" or "realistic". :)
I would love to see positive change in this area, but we need to be aware of what's really important to our intended audience if we're going to try. I could storm off of Facebook and leave a post behind to follow me to my self-hosted Diaspora pod, but I know no one's going to do it, so why bother? My friendships are worth more than my irritation at Facebook-the-company, and I can promise you that the vast majority of users will come to that exact same conclusion. Let's be honest with ourselves about that, before we try to fix this problem. Otherwise we'll only get as far as Diaspora did.
I'll give you an example. 15 years ago most people thought being Vegan was borderline insane outside a couple cities and college towns. There were little if any Vegan options at restaurants and if you asked they often gave a puzzled look. It looked hopeless. I can't tell you how many times I've been yelled at and made fun of. But we didn't do it because we knew it would be successful. We didn't do it to be cool. We did it because we felt it was the right thing to do. We had feelings, and we followed those feelings. We believed in something bigger than ourselves. Fast forward to today. Things look a lot different. Just think about the amount of carbon emissions that did not happen in the last 15 years for that crazy ideal? No one makes the world a better place because they know it will be successful. Or even if any of it is going to work. They do it because the care.
Pragmatism can be a dangerous thing when used as an excuse not to try.
Without remarking on the relative rightness of the moral stands in question, the difference between being vegan and switching to a new social network is that the latter affects people beyond the person making the moral stand. It's perfectly possible to switch by oneself to a free-as-in-freedom social network, but what's the point if no one else does?
And in any case, I'm not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should be respectful of what our audience actually wants as we do. The uphill battle is the social aspect of convincing users that the change is worthwhile, not the technical aspect of building it (which is easy).
That's pretty unfair. Should we label you the WW1 Trench Warfare Generation? Because rushing towards the machine guns might work this time. Heroic, and exceedingly hopeful, but ultimately an utter fail.
Not just "ideally"; I would go so far as to say that the situation where the rejected person does not gracefully accept it is the point at which anyone in that situation has first done something "bad". (We have a term for further retribution against the rejector in a professional context: "sexual harassment". In an ordinary personal context, we would simply say it makes the person an asshole.)
