What ever happened to take it to a dealer or authorized repair place to have it done? While I may be willing to take certain things apart that, the one thing in life I have resisted is any kind of monkeying with my car. There are certain things where I'm willing to accept that I took it apart and it no longer works because I bricked it, shorted something, or otherwise damaged it beyond my skill set to undo. My car is not one of them. However, I also do not want my car to be under the direct control of someone else that can decide I can no longer operate my car. If there's an update, I'll bring it in to have someone trained/responsible for that update.
Some people like messing with cars. They take the time to understand what's happening and learn the process and pitfalls. Hobbyists wiil never be as good as trained professionally but we can still get the job done. I went through the trouble to diagnose and replace a bad alternator on my civic after the battery started dying too fast. I did it cause it was fun.
The other reason i did it is because the dealership and other shops quoted me over 10 times the cost of parts, and I literally did not have the money to take them up should i have wanted to. Car maintenance is expensive, _especially_ at the dealership.
I would like to think that the switch to renewables is inevitable, but could a continuous series of administrations similar to the current US admin be enough to curtail it?
To think a group of people are not going to expend effort in learning about their adversaries is just naive at best. At some point, those adversaries are going to infiltrate your people. The only way to attempt to monitor them would mean you now have the means to monitor your own people.
I'm not saying I'm for this, but just acknowledging that it is only inevitable. You can hope for moral people, but that's farcical.
> Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world).
Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer.
Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got.
(Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.)
Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing.
Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.
It's easy for others to say, "oy, you coward, you should have blown the whistle" from the comfort their web browsers. For what it's worth, I had a security clearance in a previous job (not as high as yours, I'm sure) and I understand where you are coming from. I would have likely done the same as you. Especially with my career and the ability to provide for my family on the line.
It's probably different if you have a family, but I have quit jobs over moral implications no problem. Most people have pretty flimsy morals and will do anything to keep the money rolling in.
Most people in the world? Potentially, though I doubt the "life ruined for years" part holds for >50%.
Most people on HN? Definite no. Most people on HN who work in roles where they're exposed to such mass surveillance or other evil at scale (like Meta)? Absolutely not.
Or just like, don't work for the government. simple as. Some people have morals, some people want money. It's OK. We get it, AI startup engineer hell bent on destroying thought work. We get it rastifarian bomb builder for the US navy. we get it All American who works for the chinese virualogy lab. it's just work its not your life. just do whatever and make money.
The mistake wasn't in not blowing the whistle but it was taking a job with this kind of organization in the first place.
Yeah the solution is to not put yourself into a position where you need to make these choices. The fuel for the fire that are organizations like the CIA are people who don't have moral qualms or who have flexible ones.
The less people who work for these organizations the better.
I never worked directly for them. I was a contractor.
If all the people of conscience quit, they are left with a workforce without a conscience, which I guess is pretty much what they have now, at least in certain areas.
> Yes that frees the people with a conscience to work on endeavours that challenge these corrupt institutions.
That... Isn't really how that works in the real world, though.
What happens when people with conscience leave legitimate institutions is that they lose legitimacy. Now you have a legitimate institution with power and no conscience, and a myriad of non-legitimate institutions with little power and some conscience.
That sounds great in theory, but how did it work out in practice?
It's been thirteen years since Snowden, and twenty years since Mark Klein, and there have been no real reforms in the system, people continue to work for them, and with them and it's only gotten worse.
The course of action that you suggest is exactly what has lead America into a Mad King scenario with big tech oligarchs and theocratic running the show with China on the cusp of becoming the world hegemon.
People keep chasing that carrot, keep working for the man and the end result is that they to chase that carrot a little bit harder, burning them out until the man replaces them with someone new just as eager to chase that carrot a little harder.
And all along the way the noose around all of us tightens a little bit more the temperature outside gets a little bit hotter and America's grip on the world weakens.
I don't know, I think the Left's attitude of making civil institutions socially radioactive has contributed more to the decay than people burning out from within.
You speak as if "the man" is by definition "on the wrong side" (i.e. lacking conscience), but there is no "man", just a body of civil servants trying to do what they think is right, for varying definitions of right. After all, isn't that what folks were out protesting during the DOGE days, when whole departments were eliminated?
Your argument assumes its conclusion, and thus is circular.
I agree with the issue of folks trying their best and burning out--but this is why it's important that the people replacing them be just as hungry to do the right thing, if not more so.
However, it's been a tactic in politics recently to call entire departments corrupt, and insinuate that anyone who wants to work for them are likewise so.
But I don't understand the logic of doing this. If, for example, you think "all cops are bastards"... Wouldn't you want more people who think like you to become cops, instead of fewer? Wouldn't you rather run into your best friend in a cop's uniform, than someone you don't know? Why, then, would you vilify the entire organization, and make it clear you could never stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would dare want to be a police officer?
Wouldn't that make it less likely that someone who thinks the same as you would consider joining?
And yet the need for police persists; thus by vilifying them, your end up increasing the concentration of people who don't think like you. This seems, like my statement above, a strictly worse situation, and seems to be exactly what has played out in many jurisdictions!
You can apply the same line of thinking to all parts of the government, with similar results. In fact, I'll go further: I think this dynamic better explains the rotting of our institutions than yours does.
We should be encouraging people who think like us to work in the government, not discouraging them with pointless fatalism.
You're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.
The way I see it the modern American left-right paradigm that you identify with is the problem. The little gotchas that you describe with people who complained about DOGE or ACAB are the problem.
Modern America itself is the problem.
Many Americans still believe that their country can be saved that it merely requires a reconfiguration of the existing pieces with some hardworking, dedicated people in the right positions to put things back in order. I'm sure there were people who believed the same in the USSR even in the final days before it fell apart but that didn't turn out to be the case.
You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
The time to fix this was twenty years ago. George Bush and Dick Cheney should have spent the last 20 years in prison. Same with the heads of the NSA and CIA and thousands of other bureaucrats, the oligarchs who caused the 2008 financial crisis.
It didn't happen and it won't happen for this bunch of pedophile war criminals.
Authoritarians and theocrats have taken over.
America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up. I don't want that to be the case but it just is.
I'm not the guy you responded to, but I just wanted to say I think you misunderstood him. He wasn't prescribing a solution. He was describing a situation. If good people leave all institutions because of corruption, then only corrupt people will be left. There will most likely always be some corruption. We need to keep corruption and violations of rights from getting out of control because nobody wants to live through a war to restore order.
The US has been leaning toward the worse for years. I think it can be traced back to the JFK assassination or earlier. The Church Committee found out a lot and ultimately changed very little. We certainly have a theocratic influence but I think the Christians are played off the leftists masterfully to subvert the nation. If people weren't at each other's throats over random issues, they might start to think about where all the tax money goes.
It is pure arrogance to think that the US can essentially rule the world forever. Being in this position and having the reserve currency is why we seem superficially rich as all the production goes abroad. Instead of factory jobs, kids get to drive for DoorDash and stuff like that. If this trend is not reversed soon, we won't produce enough of anything to defend the country. We may already be in that position IMO.
Where does it go? I think we are in for a rude awakening. We might see severe economic turbulence and war, hopefully followed by peace and preservation of our individual and national sovereignty. I would count anything past this as a bonus.
Quitting would just be the first step in "I do not want to participate in this". Whistle blowing is much more complicated in that you are hoping to not just not be participating but maybe stopping it altogether. Being young and single compared to being older with dependents would absolutely make that decision harder. Violating secrecy laws to disclose illegal activity seems like something that should have a caveat to allow, but of course they don't.
This is a moral psychological quandary: quit and hope everyone shares your moral compass. (hint: they don’t).
Or work to pressure change internally, and occupy space that might have gone to a more morally flexible person if it was made vacant; but while doing so engage in supporting immoral behaviour.
Neither work without organizing. You cannot apply any meaningful pressure from the inside as an individual worker. You also do not need to work someplace to organize it.
If you work outside of the organization and compel someone to act on your behalf, you will be charged with that. It's how journalists have been tripped up in the past. If someone leaks to a journo, the journo is not part of the leak. If the journo asks someone to get data to be leaked to them, they've overstepped and get into trouble. That's something to not be forgotten.
From the inside, talking to coworkers definitely seems risky. If they are not like minded, they could report you. It'd have been better to just have quit at that point.
Because of all of that, "ethical" leaking really does seem like the only option left. It's then a matter of can the leaker live with the consequences.
Actually they do. The law states that not only is it illegal to classify stuff to hide illegal activity, things classified that way are not actually classified. The whistleblower before Manning was very careful about what they leaked, and apparently went through the right chains. He was found guilty of misusing government property and given a slap on the wrist... And blackballed from working anywhere they had reach. But the law itself upheld that what he leaked was not classified.
Every administration effectively creates their own interpretation of what is permissible in this regard. The rules of engagement as it were that are set down by each administration vary widely. Nonetheless, it has effectively become a one-way ratchet.
I would push back against the idea that intelligence agency behavior changes administration to administration. Looking through history, it's the intelligence agencies which have superior continuity of leadership. Which suggests things about who's directing who.
Bureaucracy in general exhibits that kind of hysteresis. It is like a running average of who has been in charged mixed with a big dose of the culture that people who choose that sort of career create. Ironically, that inertia is considered by political scientists to be a safeguard for democracy.
well people want to finish their work and go home, that's why
I know HNers don't like "surveillance everywhere", but...
if you're some law enforcement, every chance to get info means hours/days saved on your work... so you reach for the "easy-way": if you can get comms of a drug gang, you can identify who belongs to that gang (instead of risking their own life by actually 'joining' the gang)
But... some do cross their lines (eg watching comms of their ex, getting paid by political actors to listen over opponents, etc)
it's not like law enforcements are 100% bad guys, but things are "complicated"
That is an unfair insinuation - ‘that he sounds proud of it’. There are many reasons one stays quiet - like you are sole provider for a family, its beem going on for a while that you ignore/doubt its seriousness etc.
That's just the way the "Unlike Snowden" part read to me. Had you read further down the thread, you'd see I had already stipulated the family part before you made your comment.
I'm interested in how those conversations went between the LaLiga and Cloudflare that convinced them to do this. I know I'm not Cloudflare, but if a company (any company) came to me demanding blocking IP ranges according the their schedule that would require a bunch of work on my end to make it happen, there's going to be a lot of push back. It'd take a dump truck load of money to make that happen.
No conversation at all needed to happen. LaLiga got a court order. The order specifically stated that if LaLiga flag your IP address, the internet providers in Spain must block it during the match. Cloudflare have nothing to do with it.
Who could have forseen, that LaLiga would end up abusing this system!?
That's not how this worked. Cloudflare was not involved at all. Spanish ISPs were ordered by Spanish courts to block their customers from accessing specific IP addresses.
> Google, Cloudflare, VPN providers, and other entities facilitating piracy are responsible for the illegal activities they enable and profit from.
Why wouldn't ISPs be responsible too? or the cable modem providers? or the computer providers? or your eyes. Let's just blame all those things and not the person that made it or the person that consumes it.
Not true, they just proxy the pirating sites to their true host. They have about the same responsability as the ISP themselves. Maybe you want Cloudflare to decide what to proxy and what to block without a judge ordering it.
> Through this conduct, Cloudflare is actively enabling illegal activities such as human trafficking, prostitution, pornography, counterfeiting, fraud, and scams, among other things.
That statement from La Liga is nothing short of embarrassing. Raving about child pornography, in a simple copyright infringement case? And the repeated focus on "IPs" is incredibly disingenuous; Cloudflare's multiplexing of half the internet onto a small number of IP addresses is not exactly a secret in the tech community.
Why are Spain's courts allowing this injunction to stand? It's clearly being used to bring the court system itself into disrepute at this point.
They are only seemingly arbitrary to people that are not actually paying attention. Now that people are, the blocks are known in advance to those that look at a the schedule. Sure, it sucks to have to build this into your own schedule, but that's better than it happening "unexpectedly". You could do something crazy like import these times into your own calendar with reminders.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Obviously the schedule of matches is public. But what are you suggesting the business does during this time...? Their site is offline.
Absolutely ridiculous to make people do that. What you're proposing is not a real solution. The real solution is to not block wide IP ranges at the random desire of some private football league.
What other provider than Cloudflare is out there that offers the things Cloudflare does? Why are people not already switching to them if they are available?
Telefonica, the telecom company who bought the rights of LaLiga and btained the judgement against cloudflare IPs, sells some of those services through its business services branch.
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