8 ms·

Ajit Pai is stoked about this. If you work for AT&T, Verizon, etc you have a responsibility to stop this even by sabotage.

ethbro 9y ago
If one works for AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum (ex Time Warner / Charter), pretty sure they don't have a soul. I know network tech is technically difficult and interesting, but the consumer businesses built around it seem completely devoid of ethics.
- tehwebguy 9y ago
  I don’t agree, it’s still worth reaching out to these people.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Granted as possible, I'd just offer the following points. (1) These companies (as far as I know) tend to be technically and creatively conservative (in the sense that they don't like new ideas). (2) They have a captive market and effective monopolies. (3) The type of engineer likely to work at such a company values stability over risk. (4) There is C-level and down support for policies / products like the original article that generate profit. (5) It's a small enough industry (in terms of number of companies) that getting blackballed is feasible. In that context, I don't foresee a logical person making an ethical decision (for leaking or sabotage) when it goes against his or her employer's wishes.
- murukesh_s 9y ago
  It's different being the top-management vs working there. You can't generalize all of them as not having soul or is evil. Seriously. Unless you have been in their situation, you cant judge. Not everyone would get the freedom to work at their dream role/job/company.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Within the last year, I took a 20% pay cut to move to a company I felt more ethically comfortable with, and I still feel good about the decision. It's not about one's dream role/job/company. It's about whether one is willing to tolerate something that makes one ethically uncomfortable for a number on a check... or not. And although everyone's circumstances are different, I know far more people who work for shady companies and live in McMansions than ones who do it to support their family. Judgy? Absolutely. But there are a lot of jobs out there: if you work at Comcast / US NSA / Chinese Bureau of Public Information and Network Security Supervision then it's because you don't have a problem with how they conduct business.
droopybuns 9y ago
Should google employees? Facebook? Twitter? Chrome devs?
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Anyone with a sabot to throw, and a brain at this point.
  - AckSyn 9y ago
    We're i in a position to do something about this, I would in a heartbeat. People's privacy is hugely at risk from predators like corporations and government. It's time to take a stand.
  - saimiam 9y ago
    What’s a sabot?
    - pilsetnieks 9y ago
      A French wooden shoe.
    - enraged_camel 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot_(shoe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot_(shoe) It's where the word sabotage comes from.
    - tritium 9y ago
      An adaptor fitting, intended for kinetic energy penetrators which occupy a smaller diameter caliber than the barrel of the ballistic weapon they are being fired from.
      - nasredin 9y ago
        Used in modern anti-tank rounds. The DSAT in the name of these rounds stands for Discarding Sabot Anti Tank
tootie 9y ago
So are the 45% or so of voters who picked Trump knowing he opposed internet privacy.
- Bud 9y ago
  Most of those voters probably have a very poor or non-existent understanding of internet privacy and an even poorer understanding of government's impact on internet privacy.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Or they do not care about privacy, they only care about their taxes being lowered while believing that voting GOP will get them lowered taxes.
    - chronicy292 9y ago
      Yep. Software engineer at Google in Mountain View here. I voted for Trump. I literally do not give a damn about anything else other than lowering my taxes. I don't care about climate change (it is being accelerated by humans, I agree) and I literally don't care about BART or SF public transit or homelessness. Just give me my clean air vehicle tag so I can drive in the carpool lane as a single driver in my Model S. Yes, there are tens of thousands of people like me in the bay area.
      - wfo 9y ago
        You are quite right to point this out so explicitly. It is something we all have to deal with -- the way that wealth and power and privilege insulate people from having to care about anything other than their own excess and immunize people against normal human emotions like empathy, kindness, the ability to recognize and appreciate your own luck and consider the misfortune of others, etc. STEM folks are the most susceptible to this, I think -- working in a technical field tends to isolate you from other people. Being wealthy and working in a technical field is horribly alienating. You literally, over time, lose the capacity to understand others or consider them as people.
just2n 9y ago
> Ajit Pai is stoked about this. This seems like an unfair claim. Since you didn't provide a citation, I looked for one. I found plenty of articles insisting that Ajit Pai and through association that Trump are both out to harm privacy online, but this is typically an inference based on the fact that Ajit is blocking more regulations placed on ISPs. His reasoning has consistently been anything that makes it harder to compete (the context is in small-medium businesses, think tiny companies trying to upset Comcast or AT&T) is bad, and specifically in this case that extra regulations on ISPs that businesses (read: the entities that actually have virtually all of your data) are not required to follow is unnecessarily limiting to competition. That's really not the same as "Ajit Pai is stoked about this." I will thus consider this bullshit until someone actually asks him what he thinks about this and whether he supports it. I doubt he does, because I doubt anyone does, and because it appears it may already be illegal. The DNS entry for this site is already gone, though I can't tell if it was an action by GoDaddy or if it was explicitly removed to hide the page. In either case, that kind of response indicates guilt to me, and unless the ISPs are explicitly informing people that this is happening, it may already be illegal. I'd expect a class action lawsuit to determine that, and legislation to make it illegal for ANY ENTITY, be it a business operating on the internet or an ISP, to do this without consent from the user, which is what we really need. I've been very annoyed at businesses like Spokeo that operate entirely in the realm of selling information about people, and they're fueled by shit that Facebook, Google, and friends freely offer about people, and now worse what about cross-referencing what they already have (everything in this case plus things like residential history, criminal history, etc) with your entire credit history and SSN and more thanks to Equifax and even hashed passwords due to the dozens of leaks we get every year. I don't think this belongs in the FCC's wheelhouse, this belongs in Congress, because this kind of shit is getting out of hand, and it's not just ISPs.
- burkaman 9y ago
  Last year he voted against regulations that made this illegal: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/23/521253258/u-s-senate-votes-to-repeal-obama-era-internet-privacy-rules http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/23/521253258/... Voting against the regulations means he did not want them to pass, but they did. They were repealed this year, which logically he must have been happy about. Unless he publicly states otherwise, it is fair to conclude that he is happy with the most direct obvious consequences of the repeal. In theory it's possible that Pai supports the goals of the regulations but disagrees with the means, but has stayed completely silent about his support and made no effort to accomplish the goals through more appropriate means. There is no meaningful difference between that and simply opposing the regulation because he doesn't like its goals.

ethbro 9y ago

If one works for AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum (ex Time Warner / Charter), pretty sure they don't have a soul. I know network tech is technically difficult and interesting, but the consumer businesses built around it seem completely devoid of ethics.

tehwebguy 9y ago
I don’t agree, it’s still worth reaching out to these people.
- ethbro 9y ago
  Granted as possible, I'd just offer the following points. (1) These companies (as far as I know) tend to be technically and creatively conservative (in the sense that they don't like new ideas). (2) They have a captive market and effective monopolies. (3) The type of engineer likely to work at such a company values stability over risk. (4) There is C-level and down support for policies / products like the original article that generate profit. (5) It's a small enough industry (in terms of number of companies) that getting blackballed is feasible. In that context, I don't foresee a logical person making an ethical decision (for leaking or sabotage) when it goes against his or her employer's wishes.
murukesh_s 9y ago
It's different being the top-management vs working there. You can't generalize all of them as not having soul or is evil. Seriously. Unless you have been in their situation, you cant judge. Not everyone would get the freedom to work at their dream role/job/company.
- ethbro 9y ago
  Within the last year, I took a 20% pay cut to move to a company I felt more ethically comfortable with, and I still feel good about the decision. It's not about one's dream role/job/company. It's about whether one is willing to tolerate something that makes one ethically uncomfortable for a number on a check... or not. And although everyone's circumstances are different, I know far more people who work for shady companies and live in McMansions than ones who do it to support their family. Judgy? Absolutely. But there are a lot of jobs out there: if you work at Comcast / US NSA / Chinese Bureau of Public Information and Network Security Supervision then it's because you don't have a problem with how they conduct business.

droopybuns 9y ago

Should google employees? Facebook? Twitter? Chrome devs?

QAPereo 9y ago
Anyone with a sabot to throw, and a brain at this point.
- AckSyn 9y ago
  We're i in a position to do something about this, I would in a heartbeat. People's privacy is hugely at risk from predators like corporations and government. It's time to take a stand.
- saimiam 9y ago
  What’s a sabot?
  - pilsetnieks 9y ago
    A French wooden shoe.
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot_(shoe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot_(shoe) It's where the word sabotage comes from.
  - tritium 9y ago
    An adaptor fitting, intended for kinetic energy penetrators which occupy a smaller diameter caliber than the barrel of the ballistic weapon they are being fired from.
    - nasredin 9y ago
      Used in modern anti-tank rounds. The DSAT in the name of these rounds stands for Discarding Sabot Anti Tank

tootie 9y ago

So are the 45% or so of voters who picked Trump knowing he opposed internet privacy.

Bud 9y ago
Most of those voters probably have a very poor or non-existent understanding of internet privacy and an even poorer understanding of government's impact on internet privacy.
- cmurf 9y ago
  Or they do not care about privacy, they only care about their taxes being lowered while believing that voting GOP will get them lowered taxes.
  - chronicy292 9y ago
    Yep. Software engineer at Google in Mountain View here. I voted for Trump. I literally do not give a damn about anything else other than lowering my taxes. I don't care about climate change (it is being accelerated by humans, I agree) and I literally don't care about BART or SF public transit or homelessness. Just give me my clean air vehicle tag so I can drive in the carpool lane as a single driver in my Model S. Yes, there are tens of thousands of people like me in the bay area.
    - wfo 9y ago
      You are quite right to point this out so explicitly. It is something we all have to deal with -- the way that wealth and power and privilege insulate people from having to care about anything other than their own excess and immunize people against normal human emotions like empathy, kindness, the ability to recognize and appreciate your own luck and consider the misfortune of others, etc. STEM folks are the most susceptible to this, I think -- working in a technical field tends to isolate you from other people. Being wealthy and working in a technical field is horribly alienating. You literally, over time, lose the capacity to understand others or consider them as people.

just2n 9y ago

> Ajit Pai is stoked about this. This seems like an unfair claim. Since you didn't provide a citation, I looked for one. I found plenty of articles insisting that Ajit Pai and through association that Trump are both out to harm privacy online, but this is typically an inference based on the fact that Ajit is blocking more regulations placed on ISPs. His reasoning has consistently been anything that makes it harder to compete (the context is in small-medium businesses, think tiny companies trying to upset Comcast or AT&T) is bad, and specifically in this case that extra regulations on ISPs that businesses (read: the entities that actually have virtually all of your data) are not required to follow is unnecessarily limiting to competition. That's really not the same as "Ajit Pai is stoked about this." I will thus consider this bullshit until someone actually asks him what he thinks about this and whether he supports it. I doubt he does, because I doubt anyone does, and because it appears it may already be illegal. The DNS entry for this site is already gone, though I can't tell if it was an action by GoDaddy or if it was explicitly removed to hide the page. In either case, that kind of response indicates guilt to me, and unless the ISPs are explicitly informing people that this is happening, it may already be illegal. I'd expect a class action lawsuit to determine that, and legislation to make it illegal for ANY ENTITY, be it a business operating on the internet or an ISP, to do this without consent from the user, which is what we really need. I've been very annoyed at businesses like Spokeo that operate entirely in the realm of selling information about people, and they're fueled by shit that Facebook, Google, and friends freely offer about people, and now worse what about cross-referencing what they already have (everything in this case plus things like residential history, criminal history, etc) with your entire credit history and SSN and more thanks to Equifax and even hashed passwords due to the dozens of leaks we get every year. I don't think this belongs in the FCC's wheelhouse, this belongs in Congress, because this kind of shit is getting out of hand, and it's not just ISPs.

burkaman 9y ago
Last year he voted against regulations that made this illegal: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/23/521253258/u-s-senate-votes-to-repeal-obama-era-internet-privacy-rules http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/23/521253258/... Voting against the regulations means he did not want them to pass, but they did. They were repealed this year, which logically he must have been happy about. Unless he publicly states otherwise, it is fair to conclude that he is happy with the most direct obvious consequences of the repeal. In theory it's possible that Pai supports the goals of the regulations but disagrees with the means, but has stayed completely silent about his support and made no effort to accomplish the goals through more appropriate means. There is no meaningful difference between that and simply opposing the regulation because he doesn't like its goals.