> he is correct that giving false information to an officer who asks you where you are going -- even if they don't have a good reason for asking and if it would be within your rights to refuse to answer -- can be a crime.
Twice in the video, Lysiak appears to begin disputing the officer's claim that she told him she was going to a friend's house:
> But Hilde Lysiak, the editor of the Orange Street News, is the real deal. In 2016, when she was just nine years old, she broke the story of a homicide in her hometown of Selinsgrove, Arizona
This is incorrect. Lysiak's hometown is Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. There is no Selinsgrove, Arizona. This incident with the officer took place in Patagonia, Arizona.
> American Airlines spokesperson Ross Feinstein confirmed to BuzzFeed News that cameras are present on some of the airlines’ in-flight entertainment systems, but said “they have never been activated, and American is not considering using them.” Feinstein added, “Cameras are a standard feature on many in-flight entertainment systems used by multiple airlines. Manufacturers of those systems have included cameras for possible future uses, such as hand gestures to control in-flight entertainment.”
And what does 'never been activated' mean? Does it mean they are default off, but a flight attendant (or anyone who accesses the control panel while the flight attendant is otherwise occupied) can turn on a camera to see what someone sitting at a specific seat is doing?
Most likely not being enabled in the software for entertainment purposes, these aren’t a surveillance tool if the airlines wanted to have security cameras they would’ve installed them already and not in a place that is easily accessible by the passengers so they could cover them.
This is utterly useless for anything but to make video calls or for kids to play stupid games with.
Many infotainment systems already have had microphones in them even on older planes with international flights you had the ability to make calls even in coach.
> these aren’t a surveillance tool if the airlines wanted to have security cameras they would’ve installed them already
The fact that it may be designed as an entertainment system and not as a surveillance system has no bearing on the fact that the former may readily be used for the latter. See Weeping Angel [1] for an example of one such manifested use-case.
What exactly does the capability of an intelligence agency to use a webcam has to do with this? Are you also counting the microphone and camera of every device anyone carries around you in your threat model?
If so there already is zero privacy on any airplane, not to mention in every Starbucks.
I interpreted your reply to be that this camera is intended for entertainment, not surveillance purposes. My response was to point out that entertainment-purposed equipment can and has been repurposed to be surveillance equipment, effectively becoming multipurpose. And that it's therefore not implausible that these cameras could be used for impromptu surveillance such as the example I outlined in my first reply.
By whom? There is no such thing as privacy when traveling via commercial air travel what you are saying is utter nonsense.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies already have access to your travel itinerary, identification documents, biometric data and surveillance footage from the airport these cameras would add nothing of value.
Please re-read my first comment, as I feel like we are talking past each other. You are talking about generalized surveillance; I presented a specific example of how this particular technology can be used in my first post. The obvious truism that law enforcement agencies have access to a wide array of traveler information has no bearing on the fact that, as I said in my first comment, a bored passenger or flight attendant could use the system to peep on passengers depending on what 'never been activated' means.
I would be genuinely curious to hear, via throwaway accounts if need be, about how FB staff rationalise things like this happening.
Do you shrug it off as not a big deal in the long run? As FB still doing a net amount of good versus what you perceive as isolated incidents like this? I'm just in good faith trying to figure out how people willingly work and continue to work for outfits that repeatedly engage in behaviour such as this. I know there are lots of speculative reasons we can put forward, but I think we have a great opportunity here in our community to have first-hand input.
I worked with a group at Facebook, and I almost refused to take the project on. I'm the type that has deleted me Facebook and uses a blocker to stop their tracking, and when I showed up to work with the team, there were surprised that I didn't have an account.
From what I could tell, the teams are fairly isolated and thus don't see the forest for the trees. When someone points to an article like this, it seems that they just shrug it off and think the author probably got it wrong because it doesn't seem that way from the inside (again, they only work in isolated teams, but still think they have enough of an insider's perspective to discount it). Even huge companies we know now as bad had a ton of employees, like Enron.
I would really like the perspective of someone "on the inside". Facebook is one of the companies I trust the least with my data, yet they have so much talent that I can't help but wonder how they convinced them to work there (is it just the money?).
Not a employee, and I like my data to be safe and not exploited as much as anyone. But, let me try to take a swing at this.
First, obviously there is the money factor, you may choose to ignore it but it is a big factor for many.
Second, the tech is truly state of the art and it is good experience/skill to have/pickup.
Third, I'd say almost everyone passing judgement about people taking up such jobs also judge having such jobs on your resume as a positive. That drives one's value as a candidate up even post such a job.
If people care so much why don't they provide an incentive, would you hire someone who turned down such a job compared to someone who gained experience in such a job? No one ever asked me - so which jobs offers did you discard and why, during any interview.
Fourth, almost every big company has its scandals, now how does one decide which ideal is worth giving up job offer for, is big financial ok? is big pharma ok? is big tech ok? is big anything ok? is working on open source in such a big something ok, say open source software others use at their jobs? is a start up using questionable practices to get to the next level ok? define what's ok according to you, and why do you expect that would be the same for everyone else.
I'd wager that for any area you pick - they probably have a lot of high-end technology relating to image/video storage, data replication, machine learning, and network-layer infrastructure - there are other more morally and ethically sound places where engineers could learn and apply that same knowledge.
We're already reaching the point where working for toxic companies is considered a negative during resume review; I won't provide any such examples here but the bay area tech scene is full of examples of environments where being a former employee at a company can at least warrant raised eyebrows.
Scandals may occur; what matters is how the organization responds to them. And yes it's certainly acceptable to leave an organization if you're not happy with the way it has handled such situations.
The only point I find difficult to disagree with in your comment is the monetary motivation.
>Which technology at Facebook is state of the art?
Say data at scale, petabytes of data for example. I'd be curious to know if you can name all companies that have this scale of data and are morally acceptable to you. :) Google? Amazon?
> Scandals may occur; what matters is how the organization responds to them. And yes it's certainly acceptable to leave an organization if you're not happy with the way it has handled such situations.
While I can see your point of view, as an engineer you can find other opportunities that may not be as lucrative but are comparably still good. But, I also find it hard that its the engineers that get this judgement regularly on HN while you give users and shareholders a free pass. A scandal surfaces, repeatedly, users and shareholders don't care, nothing changes and for some reason that's ok while engineers are expected to be the moral compass. Wonder how many judging here use instagram/whatsapp/fb and/or own stock in such companies, perhaps even have family and friends that continue to use these services but somehow, I guess, its easier to judge strangers and expect them to behave a certain way instead.
For me personally, none of the 'really' major tech companies are; I don't desperately enough need to work on the very cutting edge to trade-off against morality. But I'm not innocent either, most actions have (ideally unintended, and later rectified) negative externalities.
It'd be an interesting discussion to have with someone who feels like they really need to stay at the very peak of private data accumulation - because in my view those actions are potentially very detrimental to wider society, certainly depending on the culture. I'd extend more respect to Google than the others from what I've seen, although opinions may vary elsewhere.
Regarding scandals and reactions - users and shareholders can and do care, and they vote with their feet, or wallets, or ideally both.
The battlefield in these cases is over how much truth about the scandal and resolution are published. A good organization will generally tend towards more transparency in both, while perhaps keeping a few cards close so that they can react to any potential retaliation (such is the world of rapid fake news that we live in).
Edit: s/data accumulation/private data accumulation/
From personal conversations with tech folk who don’t work at Facebook, I’d say it’s about the money. Most people say they don’t want to work there, but if the money was fuck-you good, they wouldn’t say no
(throwaway)
I started at FB out of college relatively recently and wasn't there for very long, so I can't speak for longer-term/more senior employees but hopefully this is a bit helpful. I myself joined because I needed a job, the money was amazing, and I wanted to be in the Bay Area. When I went in, there were already questions about data privacy/elections, but this was still before Cambridge Analytica and the subsequent weekly bad news that's gone on for a year now. Personally I've never been a big FB user and wasn't that enthusiastic going in, but a) the money and b) the scale of their data/infrastructure/data infrastructure was attractive.
My impression was that many employees hold a self-contradictory view about the extent of their influence at the company. When asked about their jobs, they tell you that they're working hard on fixing the problem and making impact ("where better to fix it than from inside?"). But when confronted w/stories like Onavo, they get defensive because "it's a big company, I had no way of knowing." Which is fair, honestly; the problem is that they think they can fix anything in the first place. Part of the problem is that FB advertises itself internally as being super transparent but it isn't at all. (This applies mostly to product/data+ML people. The infra folks I worked with for the most part just want to make their money and go home.)
A lot of longtime employees joined when FB was good and amazing in the media, and it's hard for them to accept that it's really gone in a bad direction. A lot of younger ones join for the money, and/or because they're coming from FB's massive, culty college intern pipelines (especially if you come out of FBU) and confuse being dazzled by the perks with actually believing in the mission. The money is big for everyone (I was there for part of the long 2018 stretch where the stock price just fell and fell, and you could feel people getting antsy), and the defensiveness that comes from constantly seeing negative news is another part. Lots of blame thrown around internally (leakers, leadership, bad eng practices) but little responsibility; lots of sunk cost fallacy-ish thinking ("we all took jobs here for a reason, we can't just give up and leave").
It’s really hard as a Facebook employee to engage in those topics. The probability of your comment to hit the front page of the New York times is very high. There are a lot of pending litigation so you’re also likely to be involved in those, which is the last thing you want as an engineer.
When have HN comments been featured in an NYT article? I'd say they'd be very hesitant to do that because there's no way to verify anyone is who they say they are, which is usually a requirement.
David Orr has been flinging the same mud at Bukowski and Bukowski's posthumous publications for years now.
He's been using the same exact jabs and barbs for more than a dozen years.
An example, in this 2019 review he writes:
> At this point, new books by Bukowski tend to be pretty old. Bukowski’s publisher has issued something like 20 volumes from “Buk” since the writer’s death in 1994, frequently with large chunks of them scavenged from previously published writing. The many recycled poems, letters and prose fragments in “On Drinking” follow previous collections including “On Cats” and “On Love” and “On Writing,” with “On Cats Who Love Drinking and Writing” presumably waiting in the wings.
In 2006, for a humor issue of _Poetry_ [1], he wrote a review titled:
> Reviewed Work: Charles Bukowski: Drafts, Scribbles, Doodles, Signed Leases, Cancelled Checks, Drawings on Cocktail Napkins, Things He Wrote on a Nerf Football with a Green Marker, Things He Wrote on a Waitress in Tulsa with the Same Green Marker, Things He Wrote (Possibly in Blood) on an Issue of Marie Claire, Things He Wrote (Possibly in Vomit) on a Copy of X-Men vs. the Fantastic Four No. 3, and Sestinas by Charles Bukowski
in which he goes on to write:
> If you've seen the 9,473 Charles Bukowski collections currently for sale in Barnes & Noble, you probably wondered, along with the rest of the poetry world, when we'd finally be given a full picture of this major artist by his choosy publisher. Sadly, this isn't it. Missing,
for example, are five poems known to have been written by "Buk" on scraps of toilet paper during a binge in Sante Fe
Repeating the same lame 'here's a long title to show my displeasure at the amount of posthumous material that is being published because for some reason it is personally irritating to me just how prolific Bukowski actually was' joke for more than a dozen years is pretty hackneyed.
It almost seems like he's just rewriting the 2006 review here and adding some concern trolling about drunk driving.
Maybe... Because his publisher is just reprinting material? Publishing the same thing over and over again seems to work pretty well for them, why shouldn't Orr give it a try?
Dude's been dead since 1994. There's only so much you can say.
Does anyone else find these kinds of Twitter threads incredibly hard to follow?
It's very difficult to contextualize and adapt to reading these short incremental bursts of text or 'Twitter threads'. It always feels like important context and exposition is missing. I seem to understand the gist, that Youtube seems to have promoted flat earth videos disproportionately, but the 'whistleblower' aspect is not immediately apparent.
> the 'whistleblower' aspect is not immediately apparent
The second sentence is "I worked on the AI that promoted them by the billions." and he then goes on to discuss the internal workings of the algorithm. That feels like the actions of a whistleblower to me.
The numbers in the middle of the text and the un-expanded short URLs are annoying, but I'm struggling to see what else about this is difficult to follow. I actually think Twitter itself is better in this regard than this threading service, which tries to hide complexity but just ends up causing confusion.
IMO this is a bug to users of twitter, but a feature to twitter the for profit company. It encourages fuzzy communication, and usually the least charitable interpretations.
Basically it's tailored to push your emotional button.
>(If it decreases between 1B and 10B views on such content, and if we assume one person falling for it each 100,000 views, it will prevent 10,000 to 100,000 "falls") 14/
What does this sentence even mean? It's very hard to parse to the point of being incoherent.
The fact that people have gone from writing long-form essays to "twitter threads" to argue something is tragic.
That given the number of views of this content and how likely a user will fall for it, there are a significant number of people who will not be tricked into believing something not true due to this algorithm change.
In fact, the thread on Twitter itself is even easier to read than this ThreaderApp link that some people demand.
The incessant bloviating from people who refuse to learn how to use Twitter is far more annoying tbh, it's starting to sound like old people complaining about the music being too loud, and it always derails discussion.
I know how to read Twitter and yeah, this one is really hard to read. It's got all these numbers with slashes behind them scattered throughout. It's got a list of numbers with slashes in the middle. It's got random links. It's got the occasional sentence without punctuation
It's just kind of a mess.
I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.
haha, I looked at twitter for 5 min after it launched, I laughed really hard and closed the page. The thought process was something like "Oh, they've maximized unusability! I should now go and learn how to have a normal conversation.... I think not"
Then my life flashed in front of my eyes (by lack of better words) and I recalled a million lengthy conversations that pretty much made me who I am.
There was a funny video with a professor and a twitter "expert" where the professor argued it bad. The twitter fanboy kept interrupting him half way his first sentence until he got angry and asked if he could say something now. The twitter guy then said: But I already know what you were going to say. I laughed so hard. The conditioning clipped up his mind into 10 sec attention bursts then he had to talk to himself out loud again. Nothing of interest was said in the interview. The twitter guy thanked him and said it was a wonderful conversation. The professor frowned silently and looked at him from the corner of his eye. It was the best "what a fucking moron" face I have ever seen.
> I wonder what motivated the article's author to redact the scammer's email address.
This is good practice to prevent the possibility of revictimization in case the actual motive of the phishing attack was not phishing but to cause reputational damage to the owner of said email.
Consider: if someone wanted to target you and cause you potential legal and employment difficulties, they could launch a phishing attack using amateur code such as this, and have your work email appear as the "scammer's email", and then sit back and wait for the attack to be discovered and reported.
And even if not a reputation attack, the scammer could also simply be using a compromised email account, so once again redaction helps preempt the possibility of revictimization.
> Vice's view of politics is always like a naive high school kid who hasn't ever had a real job or read a single book on economics. Which probably accurately describes their (largely freelance) 'journalists' or more accurately bloggers.
> Makes for good clickbait for their demographic though. In an ideal world they should really have stuck to fashion and culture (which their 'talent' is good at) and left the serious topics to people who have a strong grasp of the subjects. But that's boring and doesn't generate outrage on social media aka clicks -> ad views.
The author of this piece worked at Bloomberg and CBC prior to her position as the Economics & Money editor at Vice.
Which part of that discredits what I said about the quality of content at Vice news? Her 18 years working as a “fill in“ news anchor/talking head? In between a short stint as PR pusher a bitcoin advocacy company in Toronto before earning the title as ‘editor’ of the Finance section of Vice?
Even if she’s somehow an exception to the rule at Vice as the editor, aka top tier in her category, she’d be a rarity. But looking at her previous output (only a few as she’s a recent hire) there are quite a few that fit into the clickbait vs signal ratio pandering to an ideological niche.
That’s fine if that’s your thing but I put higher standards on the HN front page.
Twice in the video, Lysiak appears to begin disputing the officer's claim that she told him she was going to a friend's house:
"No, I didn't say..."
"I wasn't going to my f..."
And twice he cuts her off.