This article left out a lot of details, but to me it sounds like what happened is that the FBI infiltrated PlayPen under a warrant granting them access to do so. They then used PlayPen's tor node to trace inbound traffic across the tor network and identify the IP addresses of visitors.
I could be wrong, but if that's the case, it sounds to me like the defendant didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I think of it as sending a letter with no return address. If the letter is addressed to a criminal enterprise, and there is a reasonable expectation that the sender is engaged with said criminal enterprise, to the extent that the FBI can trace that letter back to the sender seems that it would be legal, in my opinion.
However, the TL;DR of this article seems to be that nobody's computer can be expected to be private because everyone's computer can be hacked. I don't think that's what the judge intended with this decision.
Yeah, I get his point that it's the best general purpose rifle out there. If you need to own a gun, it's probably one of your better options.
But I still don't get why you would need a gun. For the most part, we don't need to hunt for our food. We don't need to shoot targets either. Home defense, maybe, but there are other ways to be secure at home without weapons.
I do agree with his point that if you're going to argue against guns, you shouldn't pick and choose categories that are "ok". It's either we ban guns or we continue to live with them in our society.
Do you feel we should also disarm the police? In my mind there's no reason the police should have a firearm that doesn't apply to someone being attacked in their own home.
The language in that description refers to "protected groups". As long as the author is not calculating selection rates for groups of candidates based on some special criteria, such as race, gender, age, etc. he should be ok, right?
"adverse impact" is designed to sniff out hiring criteria that are a proxy for discrimination based off criteria such as race, gender, and age.
For instance, if you selected for college graduates for hiring firefighters, and that causes a lot of rejected applications among African American candidates, then it would be illegal based off of an adverse impact against a protected group.
As an aside, suing employers over requiring a college degree is a seriously under-tapped and under-estimating way to charitably improve the lives of Americans (college is a positional good because college matters when employers are looking at candidates - if employers can't look at whether or not you have a college degree unless it's a bona-fide qualification, then many more people don't have to spend several years and tens of thousands of dollars)
That's not nearly enough. The 4/5ths rule is designed to identify "structural discrimination", or cases where no discriminatory act can be identified, but the outcomes are nonetheless considered discriminatory. As long as a lawyer can show that some protected group is disadvantaged by the quiz, that's enough for it to violate the rule.
I am not a lawyer, but I thought the defence was if you can show that the screening criteria correlated with on the job performance it is OK. No matter what you think of protected groups using a criteria that does not correlate with performance is not very smart anyway.
There may be some certification process you can go through to get a test approved, but mere job applicability isn't enough. For example, this firefighting test was found to violate the 4/5ths rule.
I would applaud the author on trying to take a data-driven approach to discover the best hiring signals, but I must offer one major critique of the approach: These data are ultimately not too meaningful unless you correlate actual job performance with interview performance. By the author's own admission, interviews are often faulty. By correlating final-round interview performance with early-round interview performance, you are really only predicting how candidates will perform in the final-round interview, which is not necessarily a good predictor of long-term job performance.
Which seems totally at odds with what their clients want and furthers the perception that tech interviewing has become a hazing ritual totally detached from evaluating the ability of the interviewee to actually do the job.
If you are serious about this then you should be interviewing candidates, deciding on whether you think they should get a job. Then giving them a job anyway and evaluating their performance after some time interval and see how accurate your interview process was in terms of weeding out those who would fail.
Absolutely, we keep in touch with companies post hiring and are gathering that data too. It won't be meaningful for a while though, interview performance gives us a tangible starting point.
In fairness, the author says at the end of the post that they do intend to rerun the analysis with actual job performance.
It seems reasonable to optimize for hiring right now since otherwise nobody would go to them to find a job, and it'd also be impossible to measure job performance when the people you collect data can not get jobs.
Yes. Even if he was, how is making bank payments less convenient helping? If he's the nefarious Stephen Law, discovered living in the UK, wouldn't it be better to go around to his address and arrest him?
> They proposed that instead of the Van der Waals forces that normally draw water molecules gently together, polywater was composed of molecules locked in place by stronger chemical bonds, somehow catalyzed by the quartz capillary tubes.
Aren't water molecules held together by relatively strong Hydrogen bonds? And if there are stronger bonds in polywater, what are they, then, covalent bonds?
Actually a single water molecule is held together by covalent bonds between the O and two H's, and hydrogen bonds (not Van der Waals) are the intermolecular forces responsible for the properties like surface tension and high boiling point.
I could be wrong, but if that's the case, it sounds to me like the defendant didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I think of it as sending a letter with no return address. If the letter is addressed to a criminal enterprise, and there is a reasonable expectation that the sender is engaged with said criminal enterprise, to the extent that the FBI can trace that letter back to the sender seems that it would be legal, in my opinion.
However, the TL;DR of this article seems to be that nobody's computer can be expected to be private because everyone's computer can be hacked. I don't think that's what the judge intended with this decision.