Most people willingly ignored this because they feared that panic and a'bank run' on tether would cause a crash similar to Mt.Gox.
Tether is infact a fed instead of the fed, but without the largest military power in the world to defend it, a scam that is backed by nothing and there have been a lot of attempts to point that out. Check out 'bitfinexed' on twitter and medium.
You should look up "shadow profiles". Facebook knows almost everything about you from people you interact with by collecting that data into your shadow profile. Also, regardless of what you do, Facebook (along with other big tech companies, but Facebook in particular) is a menace for society and should be treated as such.
The key to this is that you need to think of your "online identity" as something that is not directly controlled by you, ever. It's like a collection of related "behaviors" and heterogeneous data points on the internet that can be associated together with some amount of confidence that they are all from the same person, through a myriad of tracking processes.
You actually creating an account (username data point), and logging in and using the service (actions) are actually minimally relevant to the process of ad targeting. All they do is slightly bump up that "confidence" score I mentioned earlier, and even then only for that specific set of behaviors/data for that page/service.
Your user accounts are only transient links between sets of behaviors and targeted ads. The actual account is easily replaced by just making it a generic "entity" not related to accounts and then link any accounts that do end up being created to these "higher level" entities that you already have.
For a simple example: "A web client hit our tracking pixel on X service from the same ip address as a hit on our tracking pixel on Y service, so let's assume these two behaviors are the same person for ad targeting purposes, and we'll just use that address as the unique indicator, regardless of any existing (or not) user accounts on either service. If we get a user signup action that originates from the same address, then we can link in the specific service account/username to our existing tracking entity for this person."
This is just circumstantial evidence, but from my personal experience of just not participating in "playing the game" it would always result in losing friends and relationships. This was before the time of Facebook and other modern social media, but there are all kinds of social games you are expected to participate in if you want to be part of things. Perhaps I won the game by not participating and never being stressed about these things, but who knows what things would have been like if I didn't close so many doors by not playing along.
I imagine today you would be more isolated than ever before if you decide to not participate. This might not matter much in work life, but for kids in school it is huge.
It's certainly a trade-off: by not partaking in social media and/or popular culture, you are bound to come up empty and alone in modern day. I usually like to say, do whatever you like to do, but remember to wear the world like a loose fitting shirt and don't let it bind you.
3 links. One is pure opinion saying social media is important, another saying it's not, and one is a survey saying that having social media can help or hurt your application, which explicitly contradicts it's own reporting. That adds up to nothing.
"Facebook does not help you in getting any success at all."
Young people often define 'success' basically in terms of popularity and social acceptance.
And FB/Instagram is the basis for that now, in many ways.
I think there's always been considerable pressure upon young people to 'get along' & 'have friends' i.e. in a time before they 'know who they are' - this is a serious issue for kids I think.
And even into one's 20's these days, it seems everyone is 'building their personal brand' and some may find it hard to simply opt out.
I'm glad I hit 30 by the time this inanity started, I think it's an age wherein we start to take control of our identities.
> Facebook does not help you in getting any sucess at all.
I guess it depends on how you use it and what's your success condition. In a world where all your friends use it to communicate and tighten bonds, you staying out of it means losing that experience and being left out.
Right now I have a FB account that I haven't actively used in 5 years probably and I can live just fine. But I imagine for the younger audience it's going to be a bit harder when they realize they are left out of stuff. So sometimes this is no longer about using it to get ahead, it's using it to not be left behind.
I agree with your point, but in my experience it's people 50+ that are actively using FB to maintain social networks. People under 30 seem to only maintain a ghost account and use other apps for their social networking. Your point stands regardless of the platform most popular in your social circle, however.
Yeah, i am like a social media hermit but doing fine in life. I kind of lucked out finding a wife whom I love. I care about her more than anyone in the world. I have 10 or so really close friends that i dont keep in touch with much. However when we see each other face to face (every month or so) it feels as good as ever. I dont feel left out because i'm not looking at their social media posts...
I got my own shit goin own. Thankfully i've been able to separate myself from everything. I dont think that is as 'easy' for younger folks. However, there are always going to be punkers and alt kids right? I'm sure there are some youths who dont live their lives on social media.
There have always been fads that the cool kids do. That is never going to change. You dont have to have a cool presence online.
Let's say your wife is looking for a job, but you plan on having kids some time in the future. That data is collected by either facebook, whatsapp, your mobile phone provider or something else. Or her data collecting menstrual calendar isa sending back info (yes this actually exists).
Now, it's illegal to ask that in an inteview, but the boss might buy that data, and your wife will never get a job.
Let's say you are a supporter of a political movement that is not mainstream, all of that data can be used to exclude you from society one small step at a time.
>Like, why does such a critical system like MCAS take only a single AoA sensor as input
The classic approach is to have three sensors, so in case one fails you can know which one. Having two only indicates something is wrong but is not useful on the fly.
Of course, even with triple-redundant systems failures can still occur.
Air France 447 [1] three independent air data systems, two of them failed due to environmental conditions
XL Airways 888T [2] three independent AOA sensors, two failed because the plane was washed without the right covers in place
US Airways 1549 [3] two independent engines, both disabled by bird strike at the same time (No fatalities)
Qantas Flight 72 [4] three independent inertial reference units, bug in voting system if a single sensor's output had multiple spikes 1.2 seconds apart (no fatalities)
An in the data centre, no amount of power-supply redundancy will save you if a technician pulls out the power cables on the wrong server :)
Three with a disagree algorithm is definitely what I’d expect out of such a critical system, but two with signal averaging would still be much better than just one.
Or alternatively with two, and disabling MCAS if they disagree, seems a better solution than having one and having no way to tell if it is working (keeping in mind both can still fail simultaneously). Not an ideal solution but better.
Unless I am misunderstanding what signal averaging is (quite possible) isn't it possible that in situations where the average of a signal is still going to crash the plane, a 50/50 guess is actually more likely to end up with a better chance?
If true, it's possible signal averaging isnt necessarily the best choice
In 2008, on a customer-acceptance flight of an Airbus A320, two of the angle-of-attack sensors froze and those two sensors then outvoted the third. When the pilots went to demonstrate the stall-prevention system, they were not aware of the malfunctioning sensors. The plane crashed, killing the seven people on board.
The same problem arose again on a 2014 Airbus A321 Lufthansa flight leaving Spain. Eight minutes after takeoff, two of the angle-of-attack sensors froze at the same pitch. This time, after a drop in altitude, the pilots were able to regain control and complete the flight. [1]
I don't think the fundamental problem with MCAS was the number of sensors, but that it was too difficult for the pilots to override MCAS when it faulted.
Boeing has been using only two for quite a time. Having a failed and a working one would simply indicate that something is wrong, but this information is valuable anyway -- it could be used to prevent MCAS from engaging based on wrong data, exactly one of the features the new software update is bringing.
Besides, those AoA sensors are EXTREMELY reliable. So reliable that some have raised the hypothesis that the real problem is not in the sensors themselves, but in some piece of hardware or software between them and the flight computers.
It seems plausible to me since failures in those sensors are too rare in the other planes but, despite that, they allegedly failed in two 737 Max 8s and in a really short timespan.
"completely undocumented and has access to the memory, peripherals, network interface etc. "
They were documented in the sense Intel publicly advertised them for years under AMT and vPro as enterprise features. That's why all the discussions on HN about whether Intel had backdoors or weakened randomness were funny. While people were "countering misinformation" here, Intel was publicly advertising backdoors in their chips to ease the management burden. I mean, I guess you could call them front doors with the publicity.
The sneaky part was how they started including them in all chips without a way to (a) buy chips without them or (b) know for sure you could turn them off. I immediately suspected NSA paying them off given most of this started in Trusted Computing Group activities which included classified sessions with NSA. They were always a stakeholder in that stuff. AMD did it, too.
Our only hope for x86 now is the Chinese company that's sharing AMD's chips. They might make a chip with no U.S. backdoors: only Chinese backdoors. If you're worried about local government but not I.P. theft, then the Chinese backdoors won't be any threat to you. Problem solved if the computers get here with no interdiction. Gotta do shell games.
I am not surprised that their inclusion was sneaky. I recall when Intel attempted to market TPM for the first time. The reaction was swift and very negative. Slashdot was not in favor of 'security' through including security holes and relying upon obscurity of the information on how to exploit the holes being the single point of failure. It was closer to when the government was trying to mandate key escrow and Clipper chips than now and back then they had to walk it back and not release it with a high profile. Back then the most common worry focused on was that this would be used for hardware-based DRM in service of the entertainment industry.
TPM was (unfortunately?) far more positively received, likely because it was marketed as a security instead of DRM feature --- and the same goes for a lot of other antiuser features today... the manufacturers have gotten smart about it.
The TPM got almost universally negative negative coverage outside of the enterprise IT space because there wasn’t an obvious benefit to anyone else and many concerns that it would prevent alternative operating system installs, lead to unbreakable DRM, etc.
This was unfortunate as it largely evaporated the middle ground who recognized that without some trusted base you also can’t recover from malware or have robust anti-theft measures. I wish the politics had been such that we ended up with a robust open-source implementation before so much shoddy, unreviewed code had shipped so widely.
> "If you're worried about local government but not I.P. theft, then the Chinese backdoors won't be any threat to you."
Not necessarily. It's possible your local government has infiltrated the Chinese agencies that have access to your data. Maybe not likely, but possible. It's also possible the Chinese might choose to sell that data to your government.
Yes I agree. However the calculus may change for people in smaller countries that are diplomatically closer to China than America (increasing the chance that their government will do business with the Chinese government.)
