>Yawn. Another battery breakthrough with x10 price...
>I will believe in Solid State batteries when iPhones come with them.
Wow this community is full of assholes who vote each other to the top as to avoid or derail conversation.
The title itself says it is about research, if you don't care until the technology is packaged into a product which is then packaged into an iPhone please just shut up, go elsewhere. Find an article about iPhone accessories to comment on.
Sorry about the coarse language but its much more civil than a lot of the supposedly enlightened takes I see here, and its only gotten more snotty in time.
Was thinking about this when dwelling over archive.is's habit of blocking Cloudflare DNS users due to Cloudflare not sharing specific types of identifying info on user traffic. I like archive.is but that practice smells so funny it makes me believe the entire site will go dark or paywalled/private in time.
In contrast to the greasy nature of archive.is the owner of archive.org is a data nerd in the purest form. This guy archives, he makes other people want to archive. Archive.org has been such a smashing success that its now too large for it's own good.
We need more alternatives, in the same vein and spirit as archive.org. Please keep all venture capitalist/disruption/innovation agitators away from making the issue over complex or stilted towards a commercialized end game. Just archive.
Would a distributed version work? I mean I can't dedicate much bandwidth or enough storage for the whole archive but I could dedicate a few terabyte. Is there anyone working on such a thing?
Its really hard for me to define when we're over-complicating the premise that made Archive.org flourish, but I would love to distribute the data to alleviate the dangers of centralization in general.
I believe something like ipfs, a strong search engine, coupled with the activism that brought traffic to archive.org initially would be wonderful:
Always be cautious of a technological solution to an organizational problem.
A distributed file system would build robustness into the system and keep the data from getting deleted, but only at appropriate scale. Even assuming enough scale, how do you ensure ongoing operation of the data collection aspects of archive.org, or the development of the distribution tools like the wayback machine. I’ve also seen enough distributed files systems come and go to have concerns about data rot.
As important as a distributed technological solution is setting up legal entities and ownership structures to ensure the archiving activities continue even if one of the entities does something risky.
A one-off tweet from a wikileaks twitter account about some other organization publishing something questionable is not at all the same as the document dumps that wikileaks publishes and puts their name behind. I'm obviously talking about the latter.
I think it says something that this is the best you can come up with.
>I think it says something that this is the best you can come up with.
Hi I can basically see you sneering with a "gotcha" face through that text. Sorry but Assange's history of leak revisionism, favoring Russia specifically, is deep.
When Assange was working with "Anon" who was really an FBI snitch, he accepted files hacked from Syria. When they were released they were missing information about Russia including bank transfers of billions of dollars. Assange's selective leaking based on his biases has been documented for years:
>The court records, placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court and obtained by the Daily Dot through an anonymous source, show in detail how a group of hacktivists breached the Syrian government’s networks on the eve of the country’s civil war and extracted emails about major bank transactions the Syrian regime was hurriedly making amid a host of economic sanctions. In the spring of 2012, most of the emails found their way into a WikiLeaks database.
>But one set of emails in particular didn’t make it into the cache of documents published by WikiLeaks in July 2012 as “The Syria Files,” despite the fact that the hackers themselves were ecstatic at their discovery. The correspondence, which WikiLeaks has denied withholding, describes “more than” €2 billion ($2.4 billion, at current exchange rates) moving from the Central Bank of Syria to Russia’s VTB Bank.
We know this because the courts showed the data that Assange personally held back.
Selectively releasing documents is not the same as releasing something later proven to be false, which is what the GP asserted.
FWIW you could play devils advocate here and say that wikileaks could not independently verify the omitted things; but I'm not going to go there because it's conjecture. Just as your suggestion that it's collusion with Russia, however likely, is also conjecture.
To use an extreme example, if a reporting organization writes a story about one nation launching missile strikes against another, and leaves out that they were retaliatory strikes from a previous attack, that dramatically changes the perception of those events. If this sort of thing is continually done to benefit one entity, it is reasonable to question the honesty of the reporter.
Even if the released documents are all accurate, the previous lies of omission would cause a reasonable person to question whether or not the released documents provide adequate context.
This is the primary reason why every time I read a news article that seems to have a bit "too perfect" narrative about who is good and who is bad, I go and check Wikipedia or other news sites. It usually result in a broader context. Few things tend to be black or white, and never in any political topics.
Out of all news I read there is maybe one small set of investigative journalist that I trust to give me a balanced amount of context to from my own opinion, and as a mark of quality, they are disliked by the government, activists, the left and the right.
I want to downvote this for having loaded controversial commentary, but I can't as it's a direct reply.
"who their friends are" is an uncharitable interpretation of the situation. You might not like that they didn't report on some information that was Russian, but to assume it's due to friendly relations and not fear of reprisal is spinning a narrative. Just as asserting the exact inverse is also spinning a narrative.
I don't claim to know everything and people seem really emotive about this so it's common to see people finding things that please their current mindset and presenting it as if its evidence of whatever they believe.
Please attempt removing your emotions and coldly look at the facts, try to consider an alternative theory for what happened or is happening, especially if you're American because Americans seem to be _especially_ heated when it comes to Assange.
Whatever your beliefs on the subject, a lot more has happened due to wikileaks stories; over something like NYT or bloomberg stories, which are highly regarded news outlets. So a charitable interpretation is that they're doing "real journalism" because they're digging in to things in the public interest.
>I wouldn't think that "Real journalists" would selectively choose what to report based on who their friends are.
Then who is a "real" journalist anymore these days?
That's is exactly why so many people are abandoning mainstream media (CNN, Foxnews, NBC, BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera), because those established entities time and time again choose to selectively report on events when it fit their political bias and omit when it isn't possible to put a spin on the story.
>In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records.
>WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
>The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks’s side of the conversation.
>“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
>“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.
Assange would later go on to propagate and distribute manipulated leaks sent by Guccifer 2.0 and other known Russian fronts like the "CyberBerkut" promotion of his I linked at the thread top.
WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands documents about Russia[0][1] and there's no evidence for your quoted claim made by ForeignPolicy. Where are those chatlogs?
For matters about Assange you should definitely look for more independent sources than only FP. A lot has happened since 2016/17, and there's been cases which show that certain groups within the US establishment been wrong for alleging Assange of a Russia connection[2].
In 2016 the relationship between Julian Assange and the US is about as hostile as possible. He was seeking asylum against this very extradition process that is ongoing. A big part of that drama was also that the US secretary of state under the previous years, ie the U.S. government's minister of foreign affairs, was a candidate for the 2016 presidential campaign and thus is it likely that there is a personal grudge between Assange and her.
And he was given documents that could hurt her. He used them.
It seems pretty clear that neutrality has not been on the tables for Assange ever since he sought political asylum. As pointed out above, this does not mean he has fabricated documents, or knowingly distributed fabricated documents, but since 2012 he has been in an active conflict against the government of the USA and in particular the foreign affairs side of it and thus leaks should be seen in that context.
"since 2012 he has been in an active conflict against the government of the USA and in particular the foreign affairs side of it and thus leaks should be seen in that context."
Thanks, I think this the lense that should be used when viewing all the facts. It's very hard to view Assange as impartial, but it's too soon to tell if he's anyones agent but his own.
Since they have provided links and supporting evidence for their assertion I would have to say that right now it seems to look like you are the one engaging in blatant propaganda and deception.
If one clicks through, one discovers that the "leaked chat log" isn't even quoted or linked from that oddly non-sourced article. If it had ever actually been leaked to the public, a journalist would have shown us rather than just implying.
What most people seem to fail to realize is that in of itself is not necessary proof of collusion. There is the "street" theory that publishing records on powerful Russians ends with a bullet in your head( or worse) and not jail or any legal proceedings. Something to think about.
Is it really necessary to leak information on Russia? Outside Russia we already know that they have done bad things. Besides was the information he leaked untrue? As an US citizen I am most interested in when is going on inside my own country not only because it affects me but also because I have the ability to push for change.
>Guccifer 2.0 — believed to be a misinformation campaign operated by Russian intelligence — posted an 860-megabyte file on Tuesday afternoon that he claimed was donor information he hacked from Clinton Foundation servers.
>A sampling of the posted documents include a spreadsheet of big bank donations, a list of primarily California donors, an outdated spreadsheet of some Republican House members — and a screenshot of files he claimed to have obtained, one of which was titled “Pay to Play.”
>But there are a number of red flags that suggest the documents are in fact from a previous hack on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), not a new hack on the Clinton Foundation.
>A spot check of some of the people on the donor list against FEC filings found that they all lined up with DCCC contributions.
It is not worth engaging. I have met powerful people who have an unreasonable bug up their ass about Assange.
These are Americans who state that this Australian is a traitor who should be prosecuted and executed for treason over the collateral murder video. It is the same exact moral and ethical rot that has corrupted our police forces.
Ask yourself this: why is it so important to leak information that is being held in secrecy by a state that is committing war crimes at an alarming rate?
The answer is: because the 5-eyes War Coalition is committing war crimes at an alarming rate. It literally started what it hoped to conflagration into World War 3, by invading Iraq illegally and on false pretences in 2003. And every day since that invasion, the world has been on fire.
The world has not forgotten the victims of these wars. Millions of innocent people have been massacred by the USA and its War Coalition in an utterly dire conflagration. The sheer SCALE of the war, of which the Western public are indeed extremely ignorant, is staggering.
If you had two criminals in the room, one of them was thieving the cutlery and the other was burning a pile of dead bodies in the corner, which would you want to deal with, first?
The USA and its War Coalition has a lot of criminal activity going on. Like, a lot. And every twenty minutes for twenty years, it has been dropping bombs - mostly on innocent people - for its own economic purposes.
That is a fire that the leaks will put out.
(The leaks will continue, because the crimes are huge.)
> And every day since that invasion, the world has been on fire.
Obviously things were peacable around the world beforehand, and every conflict or human rights violation since then can be blamed on the Iraq invasion.
Never mind that civilian casualties by coalition forces are absolutely dwarfed by those by the opposition, or that US in general gets an extremely high degree of scrutiny and commits relatively few war crimes / civilian casualties.
This is a brilliant attempt at distraction from the incredible corruption and human rights violations from other countries such as Russia. Should the US get a free pass? Of course not, but it's rather tiresome to hear Chinese and Russian agitators say "but what about the 10k civilian casualties over 10 years" while asking the world to please ignore the Uighur genocide or the invasions of Ukraine.
The fact is that Wikileaks has a well established bias. They publish things that are true when it harms the US, and often leave out as much exonerating context as possible. Collateral murder for instance specifically tried to downplay the aspects where the gunner provided a rationale for engaging and sought approval, instead using voiceovers and editing to imply a lack of ROE.
>Millions of innocent people have been massacred by the USA and its War Coalition in an utterly dire conflagration.
I'd love to see a source on this. The most critical estimate I've seen (Iraq Body Count) has coalition innocents killed around 30k, Over 15 years. While opposition are over 300k. Please source your facts.
"The world is always at war" is not an excuse for the following illegal military murder and death campaigns waged against innocent people: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen.
You should probably read the source you provide. Like many of these body counts, they make no attempt to differentiate US-caused, coalition-caused, Russian-caused, or opposition-caused deaths--or even whether the rise in mortality was actually caused by the war!
So, as is reasonable, you are just blaming them all on the US.
I think you didn't read the report. It very definitely does make an attempt to differentiate. If only this task was made more reliable and accurate by way of true facts from the very people dropping the bombs.
Alas, the American military is as terrified of the true statistics as anyone could be. Even General McMaster, an utter war criminal, has made an effort to ensure all his peers know how much danger they are all in, should the true scale of the wars be revealed to the American public.
"Good thing" there is a lot going on right now to distract people from the burning piles of rubble America has left all over the world.
I assure you, the victims and the families of those victims, and the friends of those victims HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN.
If you're going to choose to misrepresent / misunderstand what I said, there isnt going to be much point in discussion.
But in case there was confusion here, I would like a claim that X deaths were caused by Y war to be backed up by evidence rather than "obviously war causes death, so this war must have caused that death!"
The rise in mortality could be partly caused by war, and partly by changing political factors, and partly by changing responses to vaccinations (relevant in Pakistan re: polio), and partly by a hundred other factors.
When you ask how many deaths in Iraq were caused by "the Russians", you lose any assumption of intent to engage in good-faith discussion. We know you didn't read the 97-page study linked by GP, because it discussed the question of who caused the many deaths in several sections, including one beginning on page 28. Before examining the figures more closely, the Physicians for Social Responsibility observe the following:
A priori, of course, those who started the war also carry the main responsibility for all victims. Since the assault on Iraq unequivocally constituted an aggression in violation of international law, the U.S. and its allies are also responsible for all its consequences.
What could you possibly be thinking? "Of the million violent combat deaths in Iraq through 2012, we should only blame USA for 600k, not 850k!" Such an argument would be silly, if it weren't completely monstrous.
It is utterly monstrous, and you've successfully pointed out the culturally disastrous moral authority that Americans use to justify their nations heinous crimes against humanity.
For every George Floyd there are a thousand unnamed Iraqi's. The outrage isn't there for those victims. Yet.
But there will be a time when Americans are confronted with their nations horrendous legacy for the last 20 years, and it will erase, entirely, any pretence of moral authority. One hopes that day comes sooner, and with fewer victims, but as we can see the stubborn "might makes right" attitude so many of us are exhibiting in the West, alas makes it more likely that this won't happen until even more innocent bodies are thrown on the pile ..
So few see the connections between slaughter/persecution of non-whites overseas and slaughter/persecution of non-whites here, among those indigenous both to this continent and to Africa. No sooner had we extended our predations to the whole of our territory than we set our sights abroad. The script used in Philippines was a farcical echo of that followed in America over the preceding 150 years, just as numerous massacres there echoed that at Wounded Knee just a decade before. Emilio Aguinaldo would have done better if he had taken notice of previous American treaties and their aftermath. Shortly after he allied with Admiral Dewey against the Spanish, he found the Americans rather wanted to replace the Spanish as imperial overlords, except with more murder. Anywhere from a quarter to a whole million Filipinos were murdered while suffering vicious libel in the USA press. Six decades later, similar numbers of Indonesians suffered the same fate, although in that case CIA was running the show rather than Navy and Army.
Indeed, if there has been any innovation in our racist slaughters, it has been to occasionally keep our fingerprints off the machetes. All the bombs falling in Yemen still say "Made in USA" on the side, though.
The USA political system is a machine that transforms the blood of non-white people into the profits of armaments manufacturers and (sometimes) resource extraction firms. This has been true since before the founding of USA. Even many minorities in USA would rather not acknowledge this awful legacy. Your appeals to the judgment of history will eventually be answered, but I expect that to happen only after this totalitarian polity is replaced by more humane ways to organize life here in North America.
>The USA political system is a machine that transforms the blood of non-white people into the profits of armaments manufacturers and (sometimes) resource extraction firms.
This statement is now incorporated into my own mindset.
Selective leaking and selective redaction do not correspond to any US crimes and if they did could be leveled against many publishers.
What is the point of raising this in the context of a criminal
indictment? I haven’t even examined what you are raising for accuracy, I’m merely asking, what does this have to do with throwing someone in prison?
Mr Nils Melzer, Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; is part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.
>they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.
A - This is a special process meant to assure that reports are truly independent and neutral. These conclusions are even more trustworthy.
B - UN Special Rapporteur can't be trusted, it's is a random nobody that can publish untrue allegations and slap UN logo on top.
It appears you are implying B is the correct interpretations. If so, why? Additionally, can you suggest a more trustworthy, unbiased party than the UN?
You attempted to spin the opinion of special rapporteur into that of the UN. In every special rapporteur article they have to put the disclaimer I posted because of people like you attempting to frame something in false or malicious ways.
To recap your claim:
>Its not just my opinion, its the UN opinion.
UN's actual position as stated in the article you posted:
>The Special Rapporteurs are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council's independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures' experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.
There is a reason people have to put annoyingly long official titles in when discussing persons and their opinions. "UN Special Rapporteur" does not equal the UN, it specially does not equal an official position of the UN which is what the user tried to do.
You have to be specific. "UN Special Rapporteur" does not equal the UN, which is why that specific language is put onto the footer of all their articles.
>I don't know how you cans ay that, when the UN press briefings literally refer to them as a "UN expert".
His claim:
>Its not just my opinion, its the UN opinion.
It's not the UN's position, its a position of a Special Rapporteur for the UN. Thats why I can say it. You are arguing a different subject, if he is a UN expert. Notice I'm not debating his affiliation with the UN. A position of the UN would be a decision made by council, not by someone who:
>are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.
This paragraph contains neither "UN's actual position" nor a disclaimer, so I don't why you keep posting it.
If you actually understand how the UN works, clarify for the rest of us, who would be the UN authority on the matter. I would humbly accept the enlightenment.
Alternatively, if you don't know, you should not be running around and accusing people of "false or malicious ways" and "spin". You seem to be misinterpreting the statement .
Not everything UN does needs to be a resolution passed passed by 194 countries in the general assembly.
Any proof that WikiLeaks actually had the emails about that particular Russian bank transfer?
The theory you're promoting is that Assange leaked a huge trove of emails on Syria, a Russian ally, including large numbers of emails detailing Syria's relationship to Russia. But then, because Assange is secretly a Russian agent, he removed one particular set of emails.
The obvious question is: why did he publish the emails in the first place?
>A few hours later, the assessment worsened: a friendly source from CNAIPIC was telling them that some of the documents had been forged. One document number, when checked against CNAIPIC’s system, reportedly corresponded to a wholly unrelated matter. The remaining real documents didn’t seem to have come from CNAIPIC either. Instead, police were apparently investigating “a small IT company that has worked for CNAIPIC in the past and that apparently some of the stolen data were on a machine they took to repair in Rome.” There was an immediate suspicion that it was “a giant op by the police to [discredit] anonymous and to tarnish our reputation and credibility.”
Despite the Pentagon and Navy’s recent actions, Julian was right — all of this is a sophisticated operation that uses bad actors to perpetuate disinformation. It is probably illegal but concerns national security with China.
You can't document Assange's drifting from seemingly neutral leader of a leak network staffed by individuals across the world to a lone operator of a clearly biased outfit, without people throwing their accounts into the fire. Making personal attacks like a fella just did here minutes ago.
I didn't think so many people would be saying "Russia anything is lies!" so vehemently given the activist/journalist/governmental sources documenting Kremlin's role in fostering relations with Wikileaks while spinning up their own personas like Guccifer 2.0 to act as fronts for the distribution of hacked data to Assange.
That crosses into personal attack and breaks HN's guideline against insinuations of astroturfing etc. You can't do those things here, regardless of how strongly you disagree with someone, so please don't.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style and using HN for ideological battle? You've done these things repeatedly already, and it's not what this site is for. Indeed it's destructive of what the site is for, so we eventually have to ban accounts for doing it. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
There are others in this thread arguing both sides of this debate respectfully and within the guidelines, so you needn't look far for good examples.
The whole Russian story was a scam. We have documents saying that is was told to abuse FISA powers. Not that I like the persons it was employed against, but it is far larger than watergate if we had honest discussion about it.
If you still talk about Russia, you have been fooled immensely and for me it is beyond comprehension how anyone could earnestly believe that story arc.
This time the candidates are going to fight over which is more antagonistic to China. Turns out Russia is a weak country that has very little reach outside of itself other than the activities of its billionaire oligarchs. China is a far more believable big bad.
I edited to include a source after you posted: the founder of BLM refers to herself as a trained Marxist.
The reason people are speaking about it more now is such Marxist groups seized part of one city (Seattle) and staged riots nationally. Generally speaking, when an ideological group uses their network to stage violent riots, people talk about it.
People such as Jordan Peterson or Michael Knowles have been speaking about Marxism in universities and other institutions for a while.
These people have nothing to do with classical Marxism.
The people who seized part of Seattle are anarchists, which, if you read about the history of the labor movement, broke with the Marxists in the 19th Century over some very fundamental issues of how they view society.
Modern identity politics is diametrically opposed to classical Marxism, whatever its proponents choose to call themselves, because it emphasizes identity over class. In those circles, calling someone a "class reductionist" is an insult.
Where are these antifa affiliates? Who are they? Can you name them specifically?
I find your entire narrative hiliarous and non-factual. You jump from one BLM guy being marxist to all BLM being marxist to riots being due to BLM Marxists with antifa affiliates.
Please tell me what led you to these conspiracies? Do you recognize police were executed by right wing extremist groups who have been named by prosecutors?
Marxism is a basic methodology for societal analysis. Anyone worth their salt in social science is a "trained Marxist" whether they like it or not, because Marx was one of the fathers of social science, and the tools he developed for the analysis of social systems on the basis of interest, class and material reality are foundational to social science being useful at all.
So yes, she is probably a trained Marxist, in that she knows how to do class analysis and material analysis. So are most social scientists worth their salt, it's just that not all of them know that it came from Marx. Jordan Peterson and Michael Knowles for example, are not trained in such methods of analysis because they are extreme fringe kooks.
As far as riots, read what Durkheim wrote on rioting. When a societal need is not accounted for and there seems to be no avenue for change, then rioting is the natural consequence. This was the case for what happened after the killing of George Floyd, where there seemed to be no realistic avenue to stop racist police violence, and so riots arose, as they did throughout centuries again and again. Crime in general follows a similar pattern.
This was reported before the election detailing the agency that would go on to be fingered by the state department and others in their role in US election meddling.
This involved actual reported places, actual employees. Same with with "Guccifer 2.0" and "CyberBerkut" or any of the other Russian fronts Assange worked with.
>You are spreading lies.
You'll be able to find specific things I've said and detail how they are lies right? Because you have factual information about this yes?
Adrian Chen actually complained about how people were exaggerating and misusing his reporting on the Internet Research Agency.[1]
> The thing is, I don't really want to be an expert on the Internet Research Agency and Russian online propaganda. I agree with my colleague Masha Gessen that the whole issue has been blown out of proportion. In the Times Magazine article that supposedly made me an authority, I detailed some of the Agency's disturbing activities, including its attempts to spread false reports of a terrorist attack in Louisiana and to smear me as a neo-Nazi sympathizer. But, if I could do it all over again, I would have highlighted just how inept and haphazard those attempts were.
Adrian Chen also gave an interview with Chris Hayes on the Internet Research Agency, in which he made the point that it was an unsophisticated marketing campaign, staffed by around 90 people with a poor grasp of the English language, American politics and culture.[2]
Of course Russia meddles in election, the US does that too. That is not relevant to the FISA abuse wich let to severe surveillance of the current administration to find a straw to attach it to them. They didn't find one btw. which is unusual in politics. Trump may indeed be extremely clean and that is something quite hard to say.
I downvoted this comment because it is dizzying how quickly you moved the goal posts from "the whole Russia thing was a scam" to "of course Russia meddled".
Would admitting that the country of Russia exists be a goalpost move from "the whole Russia thing was a scam"?
The idea that if Russia had an opinion about a US election and utilized its diplomatic powers to encourage its preferred outcome, all of the endless conspiracies about Russian meddling have been verified - it's not good.
It's not as bad as the thing where if a Russian national ever spoke to anyone, "Russia" was involved.
I've got to say, when I hear 'the whole Russia thing' I assume people mean that the Trump administration broke the law to co-operate with Russia. That is a very different question from whether Russia decided to throw it's weight behind a candidate. Doesn't look to me like a shifting of goal posts at all.
There's very little argument about whether trump broke the law (he did) - it was just a matter of whether his corrupt party would vote for impeachment (they didn't.)
The link you posted refers to the Ukraine aid scandal, not 'that whole Russia thing'. Do people honestly not remember that in 2016-2017 the smoking gun was thought to be 'Russian Collusion'?
Interesting. That is not what President Trump means when he talks about "the Russia scam". He still maintains (in conflict with his own intelligence apparatus) that there was no active campaign to meddle in the election at all. If he had been making the argument from the start that yes, there was meddling, but that his campaign was completely uninvolved in it, and that even if it may have benefitted him this time, we should take defensive steps for the future because that is in our nation's best interest, then I would be a lot more sympathetic to your argument here. But that is not what happened; he has maintained that the whole thing is a scam, so I think a more narrow reading of what scam we're talking about is extremely over-charitable.
Russia meddled on both sides of the political aisle in the 2016 election - The Steele dossier was primary evidence used in the FISA surveillance warrant application for Carter Page [1] despite earlier official statements from House Democrats that the dossier did not inform the FISA court [2]. We also have significant evidence in the form of State Dept official communication with Steele (released by FOIA) [3] that two of the sources for the Steele dossier information were Russian government officials, one a former head of Russian intelligence (summarized here [4]). This is not to mention the other malfeasance by the FBI including forging e-mails in order to obtain a FISA renewal. This is serious stuff.
So the one-sided reporting of Russia meddling is indeed a scam. Russia meddled on behalf* (originally said behest - wrong word as far as we know) of both candidates in order to sow discord. The meddling against Clinton is well known, probably the wikileaks emails and a bunch of Facebook ads. The meddling against Trump's campaign resulted in constitutional violations by a court which is only made accountable to the public by the Inspector General report - which the mainstream media has broadly ignored or mischaracterized because it does not support their narrative that Russia meddled only on behalf of Trump. As well as Russia, our own government also meddled against Trump's administration - and they appeared to coordinate to do so. See 18 U.S. Code § 2384.
Not only was it a scam, it was the first time in US history that a shadowy cabal of unelected federal government officials tried to invalidate the results of an election. It also led to the erosion of rule of law, which will impact the US greatly in the future.
New accounts are welcome on HN. Your comment breaks the site guideline against insinuation of astroturfing, shilling, etc. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that. The rest of your comment is fine.
It was made then. This was a very dumb question. One that tells more about where the person asking it is coming from than what could possibly be put into the answer itself.
What did you expect?
"Oh yes I made this account for the purposes of manipulating public opinion about Assange in this specific thread. Muahaha and I would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for someone looking at my profile creation date."
Wikileaks used to be something, then Assange decided to filter leaks based on whatever biases he felt that day. He alienated a lot of his initial supporters doing this, focusing only on leaking content from "the west." Later fully engaging with state sponsored hackers to meddle in the US election[1] while again ignoring any leaks about Russia[2] and friends.
As far as I can tell there is nothing left of Wikileaks, its just Assange now.
>"if you have anything hillary related we (Wikileaks) want it in the next tweo(sic) days prefable(sic) because the Democratic National Convention is approaching.."
>WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
>“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
>By June 2016, Assange had threatened to dump files on Clinton that would be damaging to her campaign prospects. A month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails out of the Democratic National Committee — preceding the massive dumps in October of emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
>In late August 2016, when WikiLeaks’s Clinton disclosures were in full swing, Assange said he had information on Trump but that it wasn’t worth publishing. (In a message to FP, WikiLeaks now says the organization “received no original documents on the campaign that did not turn out to be already public.”)
Weird that data "already being public" didn't stop Wikileaks from forwarding the content before when it came from Russian backed fronts:
So not only are Assange and the people who gave him information supposed to risk their lives to bring these things out to the public, they are also supposed to do it in an objective balanced manner?
Facts are facts. As long as they are printing true facts, they can only be doing good, even if they are only printing the truth about one particular country. Even if they were only printing leaks from a single policital party in one country (which is not the case), as long as all that they are printing is true, they are helping much more than they are hurting.
If you know that Russianoor Chinese or whatever else leaks exist, and if you have enough access to know that they are also true and that WikiLeaks refused to print them, why don't you print them yourself?
> As long as they are printing true facts, they can only be doing good
This is obviously not true. Releasing a fact has a tangible effect on the world, usually a slight change of opinion in the minds of those who learn the fact. Sometimes the effect is more dramatic, for example a government changing policy or someone being killed.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could go very wrong very quickly, which is why the entire journalistic profession, counted among whom are many moral and intelligent individuals, decided not to simply release facts as they received them.
I happen to believe Assange affected the world negatively by releasing the facts he did. I’m not asking you to agree with me, but to suggest that he not only did not but could not is perfectly ridiculous.
I don't think that's what OP meant. At one point, I also thought WikiLeaks was going to be a new type of internet-era news organization pushing for full transparency, regardless of the target. I was disappointed when it turned out they were aimed solely at discrediting America and would editorialize and time their drops for maximum damage. They decided to become that kind of an organization, and they lost credibility in my and many other people's eyes.
>Facts are facts.
No. Facts are never enough. "The Sun sets in the west" is a true fact ... that is compatible with both the heliocentric and geocentric models of our solar system. Facts always need to be contextualized in some narrative or ideology before they are useful (for a specific purpose). True facts can be used to lie about the greater context. That's why objectivity and fairness is so important for news organizations. WikiLeaks is a dishonest organization.
Any government discredits itself when it commits horrible acts, like torture. When these actions become public, their reputation suffers, that's right and proper.
> Facts always need to be contextualized in some narrative or ideology
Like we contextualized Covid19 in Republican ideology to refuse to wear masks? Facts stand for themselves, ideology is harfull.
When the George Floyd protests were ramping up 3 weeks ago, the media and many public health officials made statements in support of them and minimized (or outright dismissed) the risks of breaking bans on large public gatherings. Apparently the facts around COVID infection rates couldn't be taken at face-value but needed to be balanced with the righteous intent of the protests. So don't pretend one side is different from another. That one politicizes the pandemic, and the other doesn't.
You missed the salient point though. Facts do not imply policy. They can inform policy, but policy comes out of ideology. You can state a fact about poverty rates, but you will get radically different answers about how to solve it from a Marxist and a Libertarian.
Your observation supports my point of view: when ideology trumps facts and proper understanding, it is harmful.
We have a moral obligation to have policy that makes best use of available facts. And for most areas of policy we have a lot of knowledge: we know that 'broken windows policing' delivers terrible results, we know that rehabilitation services deliver better ones. We know that advocating abstinence is worse that contraception at reducing teenage pregnancies, and we know "trickle down economics" is a joke, and a thousand other things.
Sure there are areas that are largely unknown, but even there the people of relevant expertise are not described as "a Marxist and a Libertarian"
Every account of Assange shows a deeply flawed man. Even the generous ones - and whilst he was painted as a freedom fighter for a short period, I'm not convinced that was ever due to anything more than his agenda accidentally aligning with pro government accountability campaigners for a very short time. Also, it seems unlikely there was ever anything to wikileaks beyond Assange - that's certainly what his colleagues from the early days say. Just a man with many different sock-puppet accounts.
I find this fascinating. You excuse a state apparatus who you are responsible for as a democratic voter. That state apparatus had clear interests in a certain region and fabricated evidence to justify a war.
And you moan about character flaws of someone who helped get evidence of misbehavior to the public? Seriously? No other problems?
edit: You know that intelligence agencies try to discredit dissidents and make up fake evidence, do you?
Sorry what? At what point did i excuse anything the state has done? I didn't even mention the state, I talked about Assange. Also, I'm not moaning about him, I'm just talking candidly about who he is, and that's not based on some massive government conspiracy its based on the accounts of the people who have worked with him - people who also risked their livelihoods to publish the early leaks.
As a non US person is clear that his support in US fall because of Russia-Trump business (I have no idea if that was clarified by an investigation or it was suppressed) anyway the hypocrisy is clear: "We like lacks about corruption in Russia or China abuses but if you upset my favorite politicians then justice and laws are irrelevant, we can find some bullshit reason to suicide you or put you in prison". what is extremely disappointing is UK and Sweeden authorities abuses revealed by UN , I did not expect them to still be ass kissing US so deep.
> As a non US person is clear that his support in US fall because of Russia-Trump busines
His support in the US was only ever on the fringes (because they liked anything damaging to the then-current war efforts regardless of methodology) and ,because of the partisan affiliation of the President, that was mostly on the left fringes, and the reason they supported it was partisan politics.
Naturally, even without the Russia connection, the “Trump business” destroyed that. But it's not “hypocrisy” the lost him support.
Yea you are keeping it real civil there huh. I can tell you are here for honest debate and won't just move the goalposts or start with personal attacks again.
WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
The Russian cache was eventually quietly published online elsewhere, to almost no attention or scrutiny.
...with no f#@*ing link to the "eventually quietly published" material so we may examine it for ourselves! Does this material actually exist?! FP is truly a useless excuse for journalism!
They are paid too much for the supposed labor they give out, so they have the finances and time to ruin the lives of people they deem to be below them.
Which just happens to be everyone who is paid less than them.
The solution is to gut executive pay several thousand percent so it is back in line with the rest of the world.
Agree with you 100%. Funny how we have the thread next door here on HN full of people explaining how billionaires worked hard to get their money and deserve to create their little dynasties with it.
Conflating the 2 shows little understanding of the issue at hand.
The same logic would put Bush and Obama as statesmen, at the same level of Washington and Adams.
Yet, the former 2 are examples of people that didnt risk much in order to attain power and achieve their ambitions.
The latter 2 put everything on the line, risking their own loved ones by going against the single most powerful empire in the world.
Let that sink in.
This is why founding fathers, like Ford, MLK, and even Trump, have a cult-like following despite their personal failings.
Thats why billionaires are inspirational (the ones that didnt make their fortune from using govt, or its handout) . They have scars of battle, like real warriors.
Executives are only good at 1 thing. Climbing the ladder... at others expense. Pushing buttons...to kill people. Like cowards.
Dont put executives and billionaires in the same bucket.
Cowards don't belong in the same group as warriors.
This is the correct comment, they purposefully block Cloudflare traffic due to them not forwarding user data.
They stated they need it to stay in line with the law but they can do that with things like the user's IP. To go that far to insist on getting a specific type of user data is sketchy.
Notice the vast variety of files Wikileaks was publishing early on.
This practice was eradicated when Assange abandoned much of his peers to go full anti-west love-Putin. Now you know every single release is going to be agenda driven, with the leak timed to benefit the party that gave it to Assange.
About that selective bias, some news today:
“Stone claimed to the [Trump] Campaign as early as June 2016—before any announcement by Assange or Wikileaks—that he had learned that Wikileaks would release documents damaging to the Clinton Campaign.”
Corroborated by multiple witnesses, redacted by William Barr.
Are you commenting on all of the WikiLeaks, meaning, have you read every publication/selections from every collection?
Or are you basing this perception based on what stories a bunch of bloggers decided to key in on because Trump happened to be in their spotlight at the time?
>I will believe in Solid State batteries when iPhones come with them.
Wow this community is full of assholes who vote each other to the top as to avoid or derail conversation.
The title itself says it is about research, if you don't care until the technology is packaged into a product which is then packaged into an iPhone please just shut up, go elsewhere. Find an article about iPhone accessories to comment on.
Sorry about the coarse language but its much more civil than a lot of the supposedly enlightened takes I see here, and its only gotten more snotty in time.