That's a great way for someone to siphon a lot of session tokens and then auction them off to a black hat.

It's also a great way to lose everything if you happen to lose your phone or laptop and it gets found a few hours or a day later and the antagonistic finder guesses your weak PIN.

In the US, service providers and manufacturers are often held liable for losses if they make something that has sub-standard security. Kia, for example, was held liable for making their cars too easy to steal. Banks have boatloads of things they have to do to protect their customers.

It's not really your choice to take the risk here, apparently.

His public apology included apologies to his wife and children for hurting them. It's reasonable to believe that he did in fact disrupt his family life.

They aren't, though- a fable is only bigger than a sonnet. Technically, an opus is any creative work, including a music score. A magnum opus would be a person's most celebrated work, but that doesn't have to mean biggest or longest.

A closed loop is probably easier to maintain compared to pumping caustic saltwater and all the things in it near batteries.

One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.

In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.

If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.

Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.

Engaging in a relationship of any sort with a direct report (the second woman he reportedly had an affair with) is typically prohibited behavior. The imbalance of power between a boss and a subordinate in their report line just screams sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.

It's nothing to do with prudishness about his sex life and everything to do with his actions endangering the company.

Typically prohibited because it comes with the *risk* of sexual harassment accusations.

But so does walking around in public without covering all body head to toe, indeed some countries ban women from doing so, just to avoid having to deal with aroused strangers.

Simple risk aversion or trespassing on personal freedom?

Walking around in public isn't carrying the same power imbalance between a boss and subordinate that I'd mentioned.

It is simple risk aversion. A CEO has a whole world of people to have an affair with outside of his or her direct reports, and indeed company. Everyone has equal access to walk around in public. Surely this difference is obvious?

To use an example where we aren't talking about lawsuits, teachers are typically prohibited, by policy and / or law, from relations with their students before they graduate from highschool, even if the student is of legal age. There's both the power difference as well as an implicit duty of care where, even if the relationship is nominally consensual, the teacher is abusing their role as a trusted adult in power. Once the student graduates, there's no longer any official prohibition.

It's more honest, if nothing else

I think most sociological interventions don't follow the scientific method because you need a control group. You can't just use random people you haven't helped elsewhere as a control, because you need to identify all of the external variables that you can so as to properly assess the effectiveness of your method (ruling out changes external to your intervention).

There aren't too many people comfortable with intentionally letting others suffer for the sake of the scientific method, and those who do have a hard time getting past ethics review boards.

Instead we have this reality where we throw money at problems and claim credit whenever something good happens, and claim we did good work when nothign changes.

That's a good point even thought it would be so much more efficient.

> There aren't too many people comfortable with intentionally letting others suffer for the sake of the scientific method, and those who do have a hard time getting past ethics review boards.

The way I see it, it is a mindset problem rather than an ethical one. Because policies are considered de facto as "improving things", it makes sense that not applying it would be unethical. However, the article makes a good point that this assumption is clearly flawed. If the mindset would be more along the lines of "there is a bad situation, we think we know how to improve it but we are not 100% sure", then it would not sound so unethical to form control groups.

For instance, using the "laptop for every child" case the governement could have instead picked a few schools that would receive school laptops with the intention to measure the effectiveness of the policy.

If it had a positive impact, then you can proceed with it and buy a laptop for every student. It seems to me more logical and also less wasteful to proceed that way.

I agree, personally- I have a gut rejection of the attitude of "we have to do something so let's do anything just in case it helps".

In the case of laptops for every child, though, people argued that they were redressing an existing imbalance between kids whose parent could afford Internet and home laptops and those who couldn't.

They really should have trialled introducing them to classrooms and observing the impacts and so on- as you say, this is low stakes enough to not be an ethical issue.

The problem in this specific case is the outcome was entirely secondary to two external objectives; selling laptops and a misguided sense of social justice.

It's always amusing to me to see which hills people will die on for climate change and which ones they refuse to acknowledge as being a part of the existential crisis.