Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.

So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"

Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.

Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.

This was 1 year ago.

And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection?

How did you know gates are expensive?

It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.

If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.

So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop

Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.

Compare a nature made system to a man made system.

Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.

That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard today. It took a billion plus years for nature to come up with humans and about ten thousand years for us to go from written language to causing a mass extinction. To call such a comparison "hyperbolic" would be an understatement.

You have put together arguments that make sense individually, but do not make sense when you weave them together. Nature changes over time, but over a long period of time (e.g. evolution is slow). Our laws and regulations do not get updated to reflect the times, yes, but the times that are changing is because of humans, not nature. A manmade part of society is having a tough time catching up with another manmade part of society. Human progress is NOT slow, at least when you are comparing it with nature. Humans do not change on an individual level, but they change a great deal en masse culturally, psychologically, etc. We are actually almost built for adaptation and change intergenerationally.

There is a subtle point here about institutions refusing change, but you cannot make a valid comparison of speed between human institutions and nature.

What about "It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been."? That opinion is very important and has implications for how everyone here should act. The last 6 months have been expensively purchased and the best thing that could have been bought was good information. If that time has been wasted then there should be reform of an evidence-based nature. This is an opinion that really deserves debate, opinions thrown about and evidence dredged up. With encryption, HN will basically just agree that he is wrong and everyone likes encryption. Not much more to say. Maybe we will think of the children on the way thorough.

Encryption is an important issue but frankly that isn't what Gates is talking about, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. It is barely even germain to the topic he is talking about. He is talking about a global pandemic.

You can also read in his tone that he feels personally slighted by not being given a seat at the table in the US COVID response. People point to South Korea's success and call the US a failure, not realizing that if you implemented their measures in the US: things like forced contact tracing, forced registration, and locking up the infected in isolated sites, you'd have a civil insurrection on your hands.

A case and point: Seoul is riddled with security cameras on every street. This makes Seoul an incredibly safe city, but also with decreased sense of privacy. Cameras are everywhere, and this is not recognized much as a potential problem in South Korea.

With Covid, there is a pending legislation to sign in your name and social security number whenever you visit designated crowded areas. I am worried for the increased loss of freedom and privacy in South Korea, but the culture worries less about that, and more about mutual subsistence.

Evidently it is interesting to the HN croud, because this is how they vote.

Why argue about this? This is what we have a voting system on HN for. It shows us what is objectively interesting and what is not, we don't really need you or anyone else to tell us what should be interesting, we have real data to demonstrate what is.

Someone like Gates pushing for the end of private speech at scale is always going to be of interest to the HN crowd.

Point is, who cares what else he has to say if he says stuff like this? He's as much an expert on technology as he is on pathology, so if his opinions on technology are bad... well you get the point.

What is frustrating about this comment is that it inevitably commands the top of the HN thread, "for the 8-zillionth time", because its author's moniker automatically attracts "upvotes" due its familiarity, not because the comment is the most interesting.

That said, this comment is probably worthy of being at the top since the E2E debate is indeed a tired one and that sentiment probably has many sympathisers. However, as someone else pointed out, Gates brought this up, not HN. And it does directly relate to discussions about COVID on Facebook (WhatsApp) and the ability to censor them. Of course, there is also the argument that newcomers to HN will not know all the past discussions of E2E, nor are they expected to read them before commenting. We regularly see HN re-post items that have previously been submitted, re-opening discussions that are old hat, inviting us to re-hash them.

While some readers may grow tired of seeing the same topics discussed over and over again, other readers may grow tired of seeing the same usernames at the top of so many threads, over and over again, no matter what their comments.

This is one of the reasons for which I proposed that HN, by default, display discussions collapsed down to first branches. Just show the text for the first branches and collapse their corresponding conversations. Readers would only expand branches they find relevant or interesting and comment within them.

You could take this one step further and only show the first two lines (or n characters) of first branch comments. This would force a style where authors would have to provide a two line summary of their comment (if it is a first branch comment) in order to facilitate scanning. With this approach the list of first branches would almost look like the HN home page, where you can quickly scan the short titles and expand topics of interest.

To address your comment directly, if the inevitable makes it to the top of the first branch list it will be easy to scan other first branches on the same page without having to scroll or take any action. This might promote participation in other threads within the conversation and maybe even the bubbling-up of more "worthy" contenders for the top first branch.

Give me top threads and a level below them to see a rebuttal -- if I want to see more I'll break them down.

I do wish there was a way to see if there are high value or low value posts below, like someone got gilded or got 400 upvotes or something. Not sure how this would be implemented though; I could see terrible pun threads getting too many upvotes and throwing that off.

Plus the tone & tenor of the discussions is usually better, e.g. full sentences, (mostly) coherent posts, etc. Not like on Reddit where the top post on something that makes the front page is literally just "bruh".

I think is generally good. I wouldn't call it "great". I can only assume that people who think it is great only ever care about tech (where HN is a good tech site) and politics (where every politics discussion on the internet is terrible). Every other interest I have has a forum that is better than HN. HN suffers somewhat from its demographic monoculture and seems to have way more opinionated arm-chair quarterbacks than other forums I'm in. I assume that many other "career-related" forums have similar issues, though. I can imagine lawyer forum probably has lots of lawyers who have never practiced Constitutional law but giving strong opinions on it on a daily basis.

Rather the very difficult and important issue, how do you stop someone with 80 million followers from spreading lies and large numbers of people believing them, and who determines what are facts and what are lies. By Facebook, Twitter, etc.. removing Trump's posts for instance, aren't they taking upon themselves the authority of what's true and what isn't?

I have to believe the only answer is something they call freedom of speech. You can say whatever the hell you want publicly. I'm appalled by the fact the highest authority in the world retweeted the sperm doctors video as well, but I'm not so comfortable with FB, Twitter, etc. deciding for me what is true and not, or worth me reading, either.

So, the encryption issue doesn't apply here. It's a serious issue, but separate. The problem is not that encrypted lies can be sent. The lies that reach 1000 people aren't the problem. The problem is the unencrypted lies that REACH 80 million+ people.

Consider that the pile-on of that doctor - an African from Cameroon where Christianity is blended with traditional tribal superstition - happened around the same time as the Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health published a Newsweek piece on how HCL is a valid early-stage treatment [1].

I understand this is how the media works: an advocate of HCL who has fringe cultural beliefs was retweeted by Trump, so the story was irresistible and endlessly amplified (including here by Gates).

But the quality of debate would be so much better if the media engaged with the (superficially) strongest proponents of a position (such as Harvey Risch) and aimed withering criticism and analysis at them instead. Shouldn't the focus be on dismantling the claims of the most, not the least, credentialed proponents?

Instead the media from all quarters deliberately amplifies the most fringe proponents, so now HCL is shorthand for expressing disdain for particular cultural beliefs, and those 10 million views were significantly driven by most media outlets covering her.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exis...

The media, which is mostly left leaning, ignores this and instead prefers to take cheap shots at Trump whenever possible on the subject. It seems very biased, very childish, and entirely divorced from reality - actually that more or less sums up the state of US politics lately.

That debate has of course not been particularly honest: amplifying the weakest proponents, fabrication of negative data with the Surgisphere scandal [1] and fixating on studies which don't replicate the claimed beneficial outpatient (pre-hospitalization) treatment processes (low-dose HCL, zinc, azithromycin).

However none of that means HCL is actually effective, just that the public debate being prosecuted is quite weak when looked at carefully.

It could just be that once a mainstream position is established (which might be correct!) it becomes easier to engage in influencing to enforce or signal tribal commitment to the established consensus in place of continued honest debate.

I really don't want to hear about the cultural beliefs of the weakest advocates, or of studies which don't replicate the claimed treatment.

I want to see engagement with the strongest advocates, and studies which irrefutably rule out the specific treatment, and if they rule this out as just another alluring low-cost, ineffective treatment, then at least we've reached that point honestly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/covid-19-studi...

And honestly, doing placebo-controlled studies might be a colossal mistake. If people genuinely benefit from the placebo effect, it's a feature, not a flaw. If people get HCQ+Z-pac+zinc and recover then it's a victory either way. If people are incorrectly led to believe HCQ is poison and get a reverse-placebo effect then we're not really helping anyone, are we?

Something I've wished for; hacker news only with top level comments

This is one of the things Slashdot did rather well with its categorization and ratings, though if that system were used then I’m sure everything would just be rated +5 Insightful with little signal over the noise.

1) decide what the definition of truth is

2) differentiate between subjectivity and objectivity

3) differentiate between misleading and outright incorrect

4) investigate every piece of media thoroughly

5) avoid bias

6) peer review

7) correct any mistakes

And this list is just off the top of my head.

So what bill gates is saying is that you have to do all this at a scale of 1 billion users, all controlled roughly by a few centralised organisations. I think Bill's words are still kind of stupid even with context. The way to fight all of these problems has always been education, and social welfare, and things the government should ACTUALLY be doing, not vetting encryption schemes.

I've yet to see anyone provide any kind of evidence that suggests censorship changes people's minds about conspiracies - if anything it seems to be doing exactly the opposite.

Very few people are actively seeking to become radicalized into some fringe movement. It instead happens more passively or through active recruitment by another member. Negative content is normalized when it appears on a platform intertwined with mainstream content. People stop viewing it as fringe and it becomes easier for people to be passively radicalized or recruited. When that content is only available on sites dedicated to that content, people aren't going to stumble upon it without recognizing what it truly is. There are plenty of stories about people being accidentally radicalized by what they see on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc. You aren't going to accidentally be radicalized by visiting Storm Front.

Also on that point, the freedom of speech in the US is strongly correlated with conspiracy theories, if only because 1) you can freely spread malicious lies and 2) it can be in a lot of people's interests to do so. I think it's always been in people's interest to spread lies, but I think recently in the very partisan climate in the US the media (and I'm including social media there) have happened upon the discovery that spreading this misinformation is actually very very good for business. It generates outrage in the opposite camp and keeps one side of the divide entertained.

Limiting speech is by definition censorship. There's no value judgement required as to the quality or veracity of that speech to determine whether or not restricting it counts as censorship.

> the freedom of speech in the US is strongly correlated with conspiracy theories

...and water is highly correlated with drowning. We don't say 'water bad, less water'. Just because one thing is a prerequisite for something else doesn't mean it is responsible for that other thing. We have to look to, like you point out, the political climate, as well as the lack of trust in institutions, the education system, and many other factors. Taking a complex issue around how information is shared at an unprecedented speed and scale and saying "just ban it" is, I think, a shallow assessment.

Preventing speech is censorship.

But discouraging the spreading of a message at each spreader, for example by letting the spreader know the message is tagged as misleading by some large number of people before they spread it further is not censorship.

That may limit the rate, intensity, and real-world effect of some kinds of information, without fundamentally limiting the right to free speech.

There are relatively few constitutional curbs on speech. For example, shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater is legal by default but there are a few exceptions. ref: https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

>I'm saying is these limitations can be enforced in WhatsApp.

1) Are you speaking of constitutional curbs on speech (because there aren't many)? Or are you talking about curbing speech that is believed to yield negative outcomes?

2) How, precisely, could these be enforced? I ask because automated moderation at scale is impossible to do responsibly and consistently. This will not change anytime soon.

3) Gates seems to be demonizing encryption. Few options can logically follow that position. Either Gates advocates replacing beneficial (to everyone) encryption with vulnerable (to everyone) encryption or he advocates banning encryption outright. It's difficult to see how either of these outcomes would benefit anyone (other than authoritarian governments and similarly repressive interests).

Even if Gates got his way on #3 (make everyone more vulnerable), #2 remains technically impossible.

1. To spread truth

2. To hold people accountable for what they say

At this point it's been weaponized, and has about as much in common with actual justice as it does with a 1984-style "2 minutes of hate".

And if it all falls apart (like it sometimes does when people are faced with their own failure), then you can at least ask them to give arguments instead of ad homs. I always try to be polite the first time around, but if they double down, I let them have it. But really, if it ever falls that low, it usually means that you already won, and so you don't really need to bother any further with the discussion.

My thinking is that most people who read such discussions can think for themselves, and so giving good arguments, unraveling faulty logic, and showing the truth, will always let truth and logic prevail in the end.

Usually you will never get a person to admit that he's wrong anyway, at least not to your face, so don't even worry about it! But people do change their minds about things. It usually happens in private, especially if they just facepalmed right into their own flawed logic. So if they do, never gloat and pretend like nothing happened, and rather commend them for telling the truth later on.

Perhaps I'm naïve, but I enjoy staying positive like that. :)

Mere faceless fake news and conspiracy theories, however, simply needs highlighting and debunking. There are several sites that specialize in that already, with various success. It's not perfect, but IMHO it's preferrable to outright censorship. Because who can be the final arbiter of truth anyway...

The problem is there’s no agreed upon definition for what’s “bogus”. A while ago someone commented here with a list of statements ranging from obviously false obviously true to show how hard the problem is, I wish I could find it.

Several commenters point out end-to-end encryption would prevent filtering or tagging messages.

But that's not true. The message analysis could be done at either endpoint without violating privacy.

Tagging (or removing) a message before you send/forward it, or after you receive it, with "the central message of this comment has been tagged as "probably a hoax" by hoaxtracker.com; check out this CDC notice <here> to learn more".

<here> does not need to be a URL which reveals much other than your general interest in the subject. But if that seems too revealing, it could already be already available as part of the endpoint's filtering data and readable locally.

Lots of people forward (retweet), or write a little something before resharing what is false or misleading information, not realising they're doing so. I would not be surprised if getting those tags, rarely enough to stand out, before they send the message would cause some people to hesitate and check/think a bit more before sending. Maybe rephrase their attached comment into a question rather than confident outrage.

Technically this is not much different from privacy-preserving spam filtering.

You're likely to feel so much happier, freer and easier sharing your most personal life datastream with an AI assistant, if you can be sure its most intimate analysis is just between the two of you.

It puts me in mind of the two kinds of AI in Manna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

Coincidence or not, the dystopian AIs are somewhere in the cloud and work for someone else, while the utopian AIs are intimately personal to each user and work just for the user.

The part I'm not sure about is whether the on-device certification that the message is "clean" couldn't be (easily) spoofed. But it would probably help curb distribution of illegal material anyway.

This is stupid. Lots of naked baby photos get sent in my culture (Eastern-European country) in a most non-harmful way, i.e. from parents to the kids' grand-parents or even to the parents' close friends (especially from the mother to her friends). Your supposed filter will most probably block that social-sharing process (because it will see photos of naked children => very, very bad), not realising the above mentioned context.

Truth is truth. Saying something is possible isn't the same as advocating that it be done, and it's useful to point out something is possible when people at first seem to think it is not.

Also, I was talking about messages, not baby photos, and with regard to misleading or false information, hoaxes etc that cause people to behave more dangerously to others during a pandemic. Saving lives, that sort of thing.

If it's giving the user advice that others have judged what they are retweeting to be a hoax or bad medical advice, that's not blocking, it's providing context. If they don't like it, they should be able to dial it down.

With regard to baby photos, if a network starts blocking those due to poor filtering, I would hope people switch over to another network that lets them share the photos.

> Your supposed filter will most probably block

I wasn't talking about filtering particularly, the emphasis was on providing a note to the user. Much like when Twitter attached a note to Trump's tweets.

In any case, the analysis I had in mind is not "skin tone filters" and that sort of nonsense. It's not meant to be thought police, working for someone else. It's meant to advise the users themselves to think again about some content. At least at the currently level of sophistication, that would be "we recognise this particular message or photo".

There are better and worse ways to implement it of course.

(Although, something that blocks communication (which I don't think I agree with anyway) based on local analysis is an autonomy violation. But not a privacy violation.)

Something that tells you when you've just received a well documented hoax is not malware, it's probably useful, and most people will probably keep it switched on if the quality is consistently good.

By your logic, spam filtering (outgoing and incoming) is also malware, and a privacy violation. (Even though it protects people against malware, and indirectly protects privacy.)

Do you believe spam filtering is bad? I doubt it.

Yes, people ask for certain kinds of anlysis based message blocking all the time. We begged and pleaded for better spam filtering 20 years ago because the vast majority of messages were pure spam and it had made email difficult to use. It's a major reason people switched to Gmail, because other providers' spam filters weren't good enough.

I think the key feature most people would want in any kind of alerting, tagging or filtering is that it does what they want, rather than what the enemy wants, as it were. As people's preferences differ, that can only happen if it's configurable by them rather than blanket imposed. Things like ad blockers work this way - you can change the defaults if you want - and people seem to like those.

That means no control of communication by the endpoint software either directly or indirectly between willing senders and recipients regardless of justification, and especially on the basis of whether or not data send from a willing sender to a willing receipient represents the "truth". The endpoint software vendor has no standing to judge that unless it's an opt-in anti-spam type feature.

So what I'm saying is it's easy for the app on people's phone to filter or block sharing misinformation, because the app can see what the data is just like your eyes using the app can see what the data is. I'd also be fairly surprised if WhatsApp the app re-uploaded every single shared video, I'd say it's more likely they share a link or hash and encrypt that link in the message (but that is just a guess).

To your second point. All methods of global speech are eventually used for evil. All methods of communication are eventually used for evil, all methods of food preparation are eventually used for evil. There are some flaws in that argument.

Facebook/WhatsApp claims WhatsApp messages are "end-to-end" encypted. For example, here

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

Are the "end-to-end" encryption claims irrelevant if "they have access to the unecncypted information before and after sending"?

"I'll be on my way home in five minutes!" [send]

"Sorry, our algorithms have detected that you were about to spread misinformation. Please contact support to reactivate your account. Premium support is available to subscribers of our membership programme"

I'm actually only half joking: while some local library code surely cannot tell truth from lies, that problem remains just as unsolved for arbitrary amounts of central effort. There's a reason truth ministries are a Bad Idea.

Hey, the way GPT(-2, -3, ...)s are going, maybe soon we can have an offline classifier of truth. /s.

When I look at the medium article, I see this:

And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].

Note the []? Was this added in by Medium? Gates as an edit after a read-and-OK-to-release? Did Gates have editorial input?

Regardless, I believe [] means 'edited afterwards for clarity'. But by whom?

I Googled, and found this:

https://wccftech.com/bill-gates-hate-encryption/

Yet in this case, there was no hatred of encryption, but picked quotes where he suggested that in one case, if you have the means, the government should be aided .. eg, a murderer.

There was another article on hackernews, where many lamented how much the media just spins, takes quotes out of context, basically does whatever it wants to. I wonder, how much of this are we seeing here?

(Note, Gates could very much be for back-doored encryption, but my point is, I don't think it's a clear position due to this medium article.. where that stances was in [] and added by someone after...)

> (I wouldn't see a problem with it personally

The POTUS said CNN is fake news, hundreds of times. So, as you say, people should be prevented from sharing and reading it?! There's no problem with that?! The very first item on the USA Bill of Rights isn't important?

The goal seems to be removing easy access to communications where governments can't listen for signs of dangerous behavior. But individuals can write custom software. Is there a stage in this arms race where one would need company/nation-state level resources to communicate in private?

Is there a potential future in which every piece of end-user software can't run without being signed by the government and is enforced at the CPU level? I'd hate to think this is even possible, but my (limited) understanding of secure enclaves makes me think there's a chance.

Not for walled garden platforms. See also The Digital Imprimatur:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

If you're sitting here going, "gosh, I wonder why someone that well-informed would say that?!", I'd point out that you don't actually know the full detail of what he said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nick-bostrom-mass-surveillan...

IIRC the argument is basically that as tech progresses it will get easier and easier for any one person to destroy the planet. According to Bostrom the only way to prevent that is no secrets and ubiquitous surveillance.

He doesn't seem to realise however that he's making this far worse.

Literally a core part of the Gates/COVID conspiracy theories goes like this:

"Bill Gates want to track everyone and is using a COVID vaccine as a trojan horse to do it"

Then he goes and says, gee, maybe it shouldn't be possible to say things Bill Gates doesn't like and the way to implement this is to ensure tech firms can monitor and track everything everyone is saying.

He's basically giving his critics an intellectual ammo dump with this interview. Dude doesn't seem self-aware, at all.

  - Relative merits of the alternatives to the banning/reduction of e2e encryption, e.g stronger police resources, education and community programs

  - Is there a strong link between the sharing of material and the creation of material?

I wouldn't be surprised if I was having this reaction just because of my idealogical support of encryption.

HTTPS is transport encryption. It's what keeps your bank account info from being intercepted in a usable state.

Reduction w/o elimination means weakening encryption. The advantage is that it can be easily broken by those who want to see what's inside.

His proposal would allow me (or countless bad actors) to decrypt data captures containing secure traffic, like your bank login. Strong encryption is the minimal method for preventing that.

I use reduced to mean non universal.

What does that have to do with encryption?

Also, sidebar:

Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet".

Together they're responsible for a bazillion-fold increase of illegal porn. It's imperative that legislation be passed that sabotages the basic functions of computers and renders them ineffective at performing their primary task.

Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.

No more a trade off than the existence of the internet or computers - which are wholly implicated in encouraging a far worse behavior than the transport of illegal porn. They facilitate it's creation. In this, we have an even more serious trade off.

Encryption was the enemy because it enabled lies.

The difference between Gates and LEO/Politicians? Gates lacks their dishonesty.

LEO & pols have a terribly long history of leveraging extreme behavior as justification for increasing LEO/Gov power+budgets, along with a corresponding loss of our civil liberties (which translates to increased Gov/LEO power).

re:9/11

All of us remember how tech + new gov powers + gobs of cash were necessary to stop the terrorists (practically in our borders and ready any second to unleash more devastating attacks).

Less remembered is how anti-terror Tech/Power/Cash is being used against low-level offenders (eg: Fusion Centers)

And sickeningly predictable, anti-terror tech is today being deployed against people who criticize cops (eg: protests)

Which is exactly what the history of LEO (Gov,etc) suggested was going to happen (eg: War On Drugs). That same history is now poking at us to realize that we can expect the same from War On Illegal Porn.

At least that's something we could learn, if learning from history is something we wanted to do.

My point was that the creation rate of illegal porn exploded because of computers. Your above statement seems dismissive of that.

>we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet. Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped.

It isn't and hasn't been. Large tech companies intercept and report billions of images to LEO regularly, which are largely captured before and after transport.

Meanwhile, actual police work is what leads police to people who harm children - the importance of which is being increasingly eclipsed by the obsession with safe encryption.

I've retrieved plaintext usernames/passwords out of network traffic, both intentionally and accidentally as part of larger captures. Encryption ends the ability of countless bad actors to do that.

Is that sarcasm? Logging into sites w/ usernames/passwords is literally a thing people do many times a day. That's the opposite of off-beat.

>We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.

End to end encryption is primarily about transport encryption. Scanning for content on media servers strongly suggests you're talking about encryption at rest - a very different application than transport encryption.

Source: Day job.

Glancing at the Wikipedia page, your definition is the original one but in the last 6 years it’s evolved to the meaning I was using.

An honest utilitarian would be willing to share their calculations, which would be interesting to see, though I am not sure how you'd balance the interests in the cases described above.

I've fallen into this trap. It led me to realize that, like ideologies, all frameworks are flawed. Assuming otherwise leads to positions that are starved for empathy and compassion - and that are ultimately counterproductive.

I feel that the following statements could both be true.

1. Social media platforms should be able to monitor what content users are sharing on these platforms. Therefore these platforms maybe shouldn't have end-to-end encryption.

2. People need to have access to encryption for their own usage outside of social media platforms.

Where this might get tricky is in decentralized platforms which nobody owns. But we don't need to deal with this right now because it's not yet a problem. This will be a cat and mouse game always.

EDIT: Points 1 and 2 aren't necessarily my beliefs. I haven't put enough thought and research into it to have a more fully formed belief. These points are just my interpretation of what Gates could be saying. The context of encryption is in these platforms. He's not attacking encryption in general. Though other sources may reveal more information which could change my interpretation.

Decent article about section 230: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/business/section-230-inte...

Lie, fraud, child porn is real. Government should install 24-7 cameras in every private room of every citizen to curb all illegal activity.

Because billionaires don't need encryption to keep themselves safe. The billions take care of that just fine.

> Joseph P. Nacchio is an American executive who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Qwest Communications International from 1997 to 2002. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

The simple explanation is that there exist people who in good faith disagree with you about encryption.

Well, strangely, I'm involved in almost everything that anti-science is fighting. I'm involved with climate change, GMOs, and vaccines. The IRONY [emphasis added] is that it's DIGITAL [emphasis added] social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, "OK, there's just an evil person, and that explains all of this."

Well, you're friends with Mark Zuckerberg. Have you talked to him about this?

After I said this publicly, he sent me mail. I like Mark, I think he's got very good values, but he and I do disagree on the trade-offs involved there. The lies are so titillating you have to be able to see them and at least slow them down."

Gates has a reason to be against the spreading of information on social media because recently he became a target of conspiracy theories spread on social media.

If encryption is an imediment to stoping people from spreading theories about him, then he obviously has a reason to be against encryption when used to spread these theories.

Maybe what is more interesting is when he uses the word irony right before he states he is against encryption.

What does he mean?

What is ironic about the fact that it is "digital social media" that allows "oversimplistic explanation[s]"?

HN readers can probably make better guesses than me. Disgreement with the guesses I make is expected.

For example, perhaps it is ironic because:

He has been such a strong proponent of using computers for anything and everything.

Gates was initially a skeptic of the internet, but later believed Microsoft's "internet strategy" was of primary importance. This led to projects like Internet Explorer and MSN. The company is now preparing to spend billions to acquire a social media company.

In amassing the fortune that allows him to pursue these philanthropic causes he and his company presented countless titillating, oversimplistic explanations of the value of using computers for seemingly anything. He wanted us to believe that the computer (running Windows of course) was the great enabler.

I have no idea what he meant and I am grasping at straws.

If there were strong privacy laws defining how and when data could be collected and accessed then in theory I'm happy for the right people to have access to investigate criminal acts. Under a warrant that a judge has reviewed.

But currently it seems to be a free-for-all with tech companies being the ones in control of most of the data.

Gates didn't suggest that the messages be sent unencrypted through government-controlled message routers either. Presumably, he is promoting systems that work like MS Teams or Slack.

Gates attacked encryption. Nothing beneficial (to the public) follows that.

Where did he do that? Slack and Microsoft Teams also use encryption, and he wasn't opposed to the method they use it.

Right here. "And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger]."

Unless you're alleging the stuff in the brackets isn't attributable to Gates and doesn't reflect his position on encryption.

He is demonizing encryption. There are few options that logically follow that stance.

[1]: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhopal/mps-largest-...

Would you sacrifice your privacy if it could eliminate child pornography? The theory is hard to say no to, but in practice that kind of power has never worked out. If we want to retain privacy we have to accept some amount of crime going unnoticed.

It seems to me that there are many instances where child exploitation is ignored when it is politically convenient such that giving up our privacy wouldn't be of benefit to society, and would be largely to our detriment.

This is so asinine, especially because bill lumped this problem in with fact checking, which is in a completely different realm of problems.

It wasn't about the demographic, but about the fact that their healthcare system would get overloaded, which impacts a lot of treatments for everybody else.

Also the problem with predictions of epidemic is that if you actually do a better job than expected at confinement / protection measures, then predictions are meaningless. You "could have" a lot of bad things happen, but once you do things right, they disappear. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have done those things, it just means that people have been warned properly. He said, if they get hit severely, impact would be much bigger than in the west. He didn't say the 10 million was a done deal.

No virus in history has infected virtually everyone, and there are lots of experts calling foul on that particular assumption right now. It's baked into epidemiological models but those models are always wrong, and the assumption of very high susceptible populations is being floated in several papers as one of the possible reasons.

"This is a huge challenge, we’ve always known the potential for a naturally caused, or intentionally caused, pandemic is one if the few things that could disrupt health systems and economies and cause more than 10 million excess deaths.

This could be particularly if it spreads in areas like sub-Saharan Africa and some Asia, it could be very very dramatic.

We’re doing the constant science to provide the tools to do the diagnosis to provide vaccines, to provide therapeutics and hopefully contain this epidemic, but it’s potentially a very bad situation."

(found this here -> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/15/coronovirus-bill...)