This reminds me that in the USSR they had typewriters that added an identifier somehow that could be traced back to that particular typewriter (and who it was sold to)
Randomizing bit 0 might not be enough but if you know the algorithm used (and you do in this case because it is applied locally) then you can always replace the embedded data with random noise.
There are two relevant decipherment ideas: the new one that is the first one sufficiently "un-bad" to be taken seriously and the one by the Dutch emeritus.
The Dutch guy thinks he can recognize some names (personal and toponyms) and that seems to be his main evidence for Linear A being Hurrian/Urartian. His theory doesn't seem very convincing (and his youtube videos are incredibly booooring).
From what I know, the main issue is that the Linear A script corpus is rather small. Another commenter here said it's only 7500 symbols in total, spread around 1500 inscriptions (so on average 5 symbols per inscription).
The other thing I find odd, however, is that it's found to be a Semitic language. If it's a Semitic language, I would have expected it to already have been deciphered. And certainly linguists would have already looked at Semitic languages, and looked hard.
Also if it were a Semitic language, why wasn't it consonantal but had vowels? Usually Semitic languages (and Egyptian maybe) write only the consonants because their stems are made three consonants and vowels are interweaved to make words.
Example semitic root K-T-B and how vowels are added in-between to form words:
kataba – He wrote
yaktubu – He writes / is writing
kitāb – A book
kutub – Books
kātib – A writer / scribe / clerk
maktūb – Written / fate
maktab – An office / desk
maktabah – A library / bookstore
And another such root - D-R-S which means "studying" or "learning."
darasa – He studied
yadrusu – He studies / is studying
dirāsah – A study / school course
dāris – A student / learner
madrūs – Studied / carefully planned
madrasah – A school
This system of triliteral roots is the reason why usually Semitic languages don't use vowels. Why would Linear A have consonant+vowel syllabary if it were semitic?
Your post shows exactly why it would be useful to write vowels in Semitic languages: to distinguish among the different tenses, passive/active, nominalizations etc.---in other words, to distinguish the various words that happen to be based on a single root.
True, but Arabic and Hebrew use a large number of implicit vowels. Only some of the vowels are actually written (except in school books in the early grades).
I don't really understand how they can leave out so many vowels and still figure out that "this is past tense", "this is a noun", etc.
But the idea that you only learn and write the consonants (that are like 20) istead of learning and writing all the sylabes deiferently (that are like 5×20) appeared much later. (It was a brillant idea, by the way.)
The reason is that auto-updates and CI tools have reached a critical saturation and everybody uses them. Years ago, `npm install` would have been more likely to be run manually, and only if something in the build breaks - which means once in a blue moon. Supply chain attacks depend on people (or more likely, pipelines) mindlessly auto-updating packages as soon as they are released.
This reminds me of War of the Worlds, where the martians had no diseases and thus no immune system. When they came to earth they died from diseases.
A society like that, with no defenses, would be very vulnerable. That's why it's better to actually have some bad actors to keep "selective pressure" on societies so we evolve our defenses.
1.) ISPs can not change the content of websites their users are watching to modify or add additional advertisements. Companies have to buy advertisements at Google.
2.) It is harder for ISP to analyze the web traffic of their customers to build profiles which they can sell. Only Google has these information.
3.) When people feel safer in the Internet they buy more stuff on the Internet. Business will buy more advertisements on the Internet, probably at Google.
>2.) It is harder for ISP to analyze the web traffic of their customers to build profiles which they can sell. Only Google has these information.
Using DPI to view the SNI (which is still in plaintext... for now, anyway) of all connections is very easy.
Even once that's patched, most users still use the DNS servers provided by their ISP, which can easily log queries. Even if you created junk queries to add noise, it's child's play to correlate DNS query with the TCP SYN (or UDP datagram for QUIC etc) to the IP returned by the query.
I’m not sure that’s true. Many people know and simply don’t care.
Using hypothetical me as an example, why does it matter to me that Google can read my emails? Why does it matter to me that Google is improving their searches by tracking my activity? I’ve got nothing to hide.
And before you say “I’ve got nothing to hide” isn’t a good reason to give up privacy and freedom... well that fight isn’t here on HN. It’s a fight with the hundreds of millions of privacy apathetic people who are winning the fight by a landslide.
We can hate on FANG as much as we want, but if 2/3 of the population can validate their business model, does it even matter?
I think that most people implicitly assume that their communications are private.
Mass surveillance is an open secret that is easier on the senses to ignore.
Ignorance can be combatted with information. But now there's a "war on information" with companies like facebook (in true comedic fashion) being the arbiter of "truth". Facebook, one of the biggest players in the mass surveillance game.
The business model is validated because of ignorance. Most people have no idea what pixel tags are, for instance, yet the web is oozing with them. When given the option, people prefer not to be surveilled. It is more or less inhuman to want to be watched surrepticiously. We call that stalking.
I'm not sure this is even useful as a rule of thumb, let alone generally true.
Let's Encrypt certificates and Debian are both "free" in the sense you mean, are you somehow "the product" for those?
Everywhere I'm aware of in the world, COVID-19 vaccines are free, are you "the product" when immunised against a deadly disease? How so?
Air is free, am I the product for like... trees? How does this work?
And in contrast it's pretty clear that many expensive things Americans buy treat them as the product anyway, because it's free revenue. So the rule of thumb doesn't even help you to avoid being scammed, it just means you're more willing to pay for the chance.
>I'm not sure this is even useful as a rule of thumb, let alone generally true.
Because free is a limited word. Which is why we have free as in beer / free as in freedom / libre vs free, the list goes on and on.
"If its free, you're the product" is a perfectly fine statement to help average folks navigate the modern tech consumer world outside of opensource efforts.
>Everywhere I'm aware of in the world, COVID-19 vaccines are free, are you "the product" when immunised against a deadly disease? How so?
For this you do actually provide data back to the providers of the vaccine (depending on country and agreements signed of course). Most of the free vaccine sites near me (USA) have a lot of obvious data collection along with the provided vaccine which I'm fine with.
> Everywhere I'm aware of in the world, COVID-19 vaccines are free, are you "the product" when immunised against a deadly disease? How so?
The people making the vaccines are getting paid, although the vaccine is the product. The people sticking the vaccine in my arm are getting paid, my arm is the product. (Sort of)
The US government is compelling insurance companies to pay for it, and paying for it in absence of insurance, because excess death is a drag on the economy.
LE and Debian, two projects I use and appreciate, are free as in beer, but you're allowed to donate [1] [2]. Mirrors run for example on a university. In the end, it is all paid somehow. Perhaps by altruistic people, perhaps by public funding, perhaps by government funding, perhaps by donations (with a nice mention, aka advertising), perhaps by private money... but its paid for somehow.
You mention air and trees. If we don't pump money into the quality of our air and in trees (to offset Co2 production) we are doomed. You mention COVID-19 vaccines. Who do you think pays for it if its free? All of us who pay our taxes do ie. society.
If you pay for something, you have in some circumstances a stronger legal ground than when its free. I have all too often witnessed free products where, when I give feedback/criticism, I get the reply "..its free /care don't moan". If I pay for it, this argument doesn't hold, and you can hold them legally accountable in some situations. Its also not as if e-mail is expensive. I pay my ISP for it, and I get to pick a domain (all included with my sub, but guess what it isn't free...). I can move from that domain if I desire. There's also something like Posteo which costs 1 EUR a month or so, and then there's Protonmail (which I personally don't like cause of JavaScript webmail but YMMV).
The reference "if its free, you're the product" is a great rule of thumb on the WWW, as it raises awareness on an important issue. I wish more people realize it because all too many people have no idea what exactly is being harvested about them. Which is a shame. It also makes it more difficult for commercial products to compete. And, if I take for example two local research news sources which I like (De Correspondent and Follow The Money) then these are paid for; not free as in beer. Yet, they compete with free as in beer. Which isn't free as in beer. Every time you use YouTube or Facebook you pay, with your privacy. What I foresaw long before it got the standard quo was that we get a divide in world-wide society: those who pay with money, and those who pay with privacy. You can already see it very clearly in the mobile world of iOS and Android.
Am I the only one left in the world who actually likes Google and has a positive opinion of them?
I remember switching from AltaVista to Google and thinking they're much better. I remember a friend forwarding me an invitation to join GMail on its first beta day and how impressed I was with the 2.2 GB storage. I remember switching to Google Chrome when I read about its beta release on Slashdot. It was much faster than Firefox.
Personally, the company I loved to hate was Microsoft, and for me Google was the good guy.
Question to those who hate Google - are you old or young? Have you used the Internet in the 90s, before Google came? Have you used email where you lose your emails once you exceed the 20MB capacity, and you need to pay money to increase it? Have you used Internet Explorer because it was everywhere?
I'm not young and I remember the times when Google replaced Alta Vista and then Hotmail (and released Wave).
I don't think people forgot about those days, but mostly think that the Google they liked has kicked the bucket. (Google's motto was "Don't be evil" those days, remember? It was removed from the code of conduct in 2018).
I think today, Google (together with Facebook and friends) is actively harming the open internet we loved. So, yes, we see what Google has replaced, but I don't think that is enough to worship a corporation forever.
I stand corrected. Wikipedia says "In April 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence." Thank you.
But I think my point remains valid. Google's "attitude" changed dramatically in the recent years and we are just responding to that.
Corporations tend to lose the original good feelings of their founders.
On the other end, people is coming to recognize, more and more, the value of privacy. To understand that "I have nothing to hide" is a meaningless phrase in this context.
What can we do?
The primary thing is to always pay attention and be vigilant towards those to whom we give our data. Even if it's very difficult, being the tracking so pervasive nowadays, even for us HN' readers.
Another palliative is to split our data among different cloud vendors, in order not to let anyone have all your information.
In my opinion, at the end, we should use more paid services.
Most of your positives are more than 10 years old. In the meantime they've remove the "Don't be evil" motto, their Android/Chromebook support is very short lived, they've killed countless services people relied on, ...
I don't think Google is evil like Microsoft was in the 90s but I don't blindly trust them as I might have done in the past.
Yes, but it is no longer their "motto" (the guiding principle for the company). So, it appearing in the CoC does not mean that it's the guiding principle.
But I think you are raising a good point. Why is this piece of "misinformation" being spread so much? What do you think? I think it is because it corresponds to people's experience with Google: "an entity once liked by the users and did good deeds has quit doing those." So, it may be "misinformation" as you put it, but I don't think it bears no value.
