I couldn't find anything about IBM working specifically on self-driving cars, but given their work on AI (people haven't forgotten about Watson already, have they?), it seems only natural that they would have a lot to bring to the table.
As far as I understand, Yelp is a pretty scummy company. Apparently, they frequently call small business owners and offer to hide negative reviews in exchange for payment. (http://www.ibtimes.com/yelp-extortion-rampant-say-small-busi...) From Yelp's perspective, it's not in their best interest to protect the companies their users review because there's no money in it for them.
The fact that Yelp allegedly sells their services by promising to manipulate Yelp results is beyond despicable, if true. However, the lawsuit has its dangers too - as making Yelp liable for reviews should be possible only if it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that indeed review manipulation is a common practice at Yelp and not just a lie by a rogue salesman. I'd be very interested in a discovery process that would allow to decide this question one way or another, but I understand so far there's no hard evidence for it. So I also understand EFF's side when they say absent such proof it is very bad idea to make Yelp liable - and would have very bad implications on other sites, including this very forum.
Sorry, but I don't trust anyone who uses the phrase "Big ______". Your argument isn't even coherent. You're just making a fallacious appeal by putting the scary capital-B "Big" in front of a random noun and acting like that's supposed to mean something. Who makes up "Big Food"? Who controls "Big Food"? Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal, but that isn't really an argument for why Soylent is better or worse than Ensure.
He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.
Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal
Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.
that isn't really an argument
To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.
> He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.
No, because "Big _____" is a Progressive catchphrase that is normally used to villify whatever their target is and rationalize taking away some freedom from the marketplace, wheras "mass produced" just means "mass produced."
Of course, some people might use "Big _____" in a useful way, but it's definitely like a code smell but for English.
My interpretation of what he meant was "when the original post under discussion used the phrase Big Foo, the intent was to villianize the topic under discussion by the use of a recognized catch phrase for abusive and villainous scheming, and that moving the phrasing to the more neutral mass produced helped establish an honest baseline for discussion."
Actually, it wasn't particularly. It was intentionally written in very plain, common English, in a way that refers to concrete things, not big ideological abstractions.
Properly "Big X" refers to the biggest players in the X industry, particularly with regard to trade groups and lobbying. It's useful because often this section of the industry will have unique qualities compared to the industry as a whole or other industries (such as how much they spend on lobbying, how much innovation they are responsible for, etc)
It is true that people will often use it as a lazy and fallacious way of vilifying but please note this is not exclusively a progressive phenomenon. Many of these groups lobby for things like govt subsidies, laws which restrict personal freedoms in ways that help their industry, etc...many conservatives aren't thrilled with such behavior.
In a brief non scientific survey of a few subreddits (r/libertarian, r/socialism, etc) phrases like "big oil" appear roughly comparably.
People on both ends of the political spectrum are (perhaps rightly) displeased with some of the actions of such groups and vilify them - they just disagree about what the root cause is and how to prevent such behavior.
The fallacy comes in when people use some particular actions of some players in an industry to invalidate everything that comes out of it. (such as implying that anything produced by a startup is ipso facto healthier than something produced by a large pharmaceutical company)
> He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.
"Big Food" is a meaningless scare phrase. It literally means nothing in the context of the comment I was replying to. On the other hand, "mass produced" has a very clear and well-established general meaning that I'm pretty sure most HN readers understand (and one that can easily be found online or in a dictionary; when I try Googling "Big Food", I just get a lot of random sites that use it as a buzzword without ever bothering to define clearly what they're fighting against).
> Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.
The question was rhetorical, and the point was to illustrate how absurd the phrase "Big Food" is. My statement about mass produced food was intended to show that I'm not defending major corporations that produce unhealthy food, but pointing out a rhetorical and logical flaw in tlb's post.
> To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.
tlb didn't include any sourced information about Soylent (other than "it's not sweet", which means nothing about its sugar content), so that's irrelevant. My point, again, was that calling anything "Big Food" is a meaningless, bullshit scare tactic and I was calling it as a saw it.
> * Show me all the VPN startups in country X, and give me the data so I can decrypt and discover the users.
> * These events are easily browsable in XKEYSCORE
As I understand it (and I may be wrong), most encrypted VPN traffic uses SSL. Given that XKeyscore data is only held for a few days (due to the immense volume) and given how nonchalantly they just throw out that they can decrypt VPN traffic, it sounds to me like they've either got the root SSL certs and are MITM'ing every connection they can or they've somehow broken SSL, either by breaking the actual encryption used or by exploiting vulnerabilities in how browsers handle it. If that's the case, then they don't need to ask Google or anyone else for your data, they can just read anything they want.
Poul-Henning Kamp: """With expenditures of this scale, there are a whole host of things one could buy to weaken encryption. I would contact providers of popular cloud and "whatever-as-service" providers and make them an offer they couldn't refuse: on all HTTPS connections out of the country, the symmetric key cannot be random; it must come from a dictionary of 100 million random-looking keys that I provide. The key from the other side? Slip that in there somewhere, and I can find it (encrypted in a Set-Cookie header?)."""
Even better would be for the NSA to penetrate Thwate, Verisign etc and make the keys they "generate" non-random (perhaps only for a subset of certificates sold)
Uh, no. We aren't subsidized by the NSA or any part of any government or any organization or person for that matter. We bootstrapped Private Internet Access with 500$ and a lot of caffeine and have been profitable since our second month in operation.
We believe what the NSA is referring to when talking about "VPN startups" is the initial stages of PPTP sessions. PPTP has been crackable for a while, check out moxie's cloudcracker.com. We believe it highly unlikely that they have broken OpenVPN (which is what our application uses) or SSL.
