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Prove you are not an evil corporate person
- ataturk 9y agoHard to prove a negative.
- LifeLiverTransp 9y agoI wish there was something like a kharma linkedin- every company who develops such technology, drags the kharma of all employes who spend time at the company during this project down- and it does not go up until a equal kharma positiv project is completed. Darkdeving discouraged at self-interest rate.
- ilovetux 9y agoI never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it! Not only that but training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing seems like they just made almost everyone into accessories of mass killings. I have to come to terms with this and I don't know how I will do it but something will have to be done because this is unconscionable.
- NegativeK 9y ago> we won't see a dime of it! We users click through recaptchas because they're better at spam prevention and they're free. Why would we expect to get paid for two seconds of thought? > training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing The recaptcha in the article is fake. Do either of the citations mention recaptchas for drones?
- lisper 9y ago> Why would we expect to get paid for two seconds of thought? Because the results of those two seconds of thought have value.
- wintermutesGhst 9y agoFurther, we don't know the value. Thought seems cheap to us, but it is clearly valuable to the companies that use it. How do we know it is a fair deal without knowing our thoughts' worth? It seems unfair to ask us to trade for glass beads.
- fancyfacebook 9y agoIs it even ethical to be or remain an American anymore? We can't claim we don't know better anymore.
- bluntfang 9y ago>we won't see a dime of it! I mean, if you're in the US you do live in the safest place in terms of foreign invasion in the world.
- kerkeslager 9y agoSure, if you myopically only look at a narrow definition foreign invasion. But we're not the safest place in the world from attack by any stretch of the imagination. Our aggression in other countries has made us a target for revenge. I thought we all agreed we would never forget 9/11. How many attacks in the List of Islamic Terrorist Attacks[1] page occur in the US? How many occur in Switzerland? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...
- s3nnyy 9y agoI think it is very unfair to compare any country on earth with a heavy outlier like Switzerland (has been neutral for +200 years and did/does business with everyone, sold heavy weaponry to both the US and Japan during WWII etc.) I live there, this country is smart and unique.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoI agree. The original analogy would have been better served with Canada as a reference. Edit: Or even better Italy. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/why-has-italy-been-spared-mass-terror-attacks-in-recent-years https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/why-has-italy-...
- kerkeslager 9y agoThe person I'm responding to said, "I mean, if you're in the US you do live in the safest place in terms of foreign invasion in the world." (emphasis mine). Their wording indicates that they think the US is also a heavy outlier in terms of safety. So I think the comparison is fair. I picked Switzerland because it's a fairly unambiguously disproof of their statement, but I agree that there are a great many other examples of places which are safer from attack by an outsider than the US. Depending the criteria you use to measure this, the US probably doesn't even rank in the top 10.
- aphextron 9y ago>We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it! I have to disagree. We Americans will reap the benefit of a growing stock market and top level military as we passively support the industrial scale automated vaporization of anyone deemed foe with fleets of intelligent killer robots. It's a wonderful future we've created for ourselves.
- imglorp 9y ago> won't see a dime of it It's a business relationship. They provide you with search, entertainment, mail, maps, docs. You provide them with samples of human behavior and with supervised training data. Is it worth 5 seconds of your time to help them train their neural net, in exchange for access to their services? Should our answers change if instead of Google or FB, it was Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics?
- kennywinker 9y agoDepends on if that nueral net is being used to digitize old books to make them searchable, or to help a government’s military automate killing other humans.
- dmitriid 9y agoIf you don’t pay for a service, you are the product. Never for a second believe that what you have with Google is a business relationship. As far as analogies go, you are the cow, and they provide you with a feeder and a shed.
- gumby 9y ago> I never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it! Umm, you are "paying" them with a tiny amount of labour in exchange for getting a web page (or some other access). It's a microtransaction.
- tboyd47 9y agoThat's a picture worth a thousand words right there.
- chrisbennet 9y agoIt's a fake picture designed to generate outrage.
- tboyd47 9y agoExcuse me, I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought it was a real CAPTCHA. Of course it's fake. Still pretty thought-provoking, though.
- stepvhen 9y agoread: it is not an image generated by google's recaptcha service, but an art piece designed to convey and draw attention to the possibilities, and probabilities, of the recaptcha service.
- TheCoelacanth 9y agoIt's not fake so much as satirical. You would have to be pretty gullible to believe that it is a real reCaptcha.
- oh_sigh 9y agoI'd be much happier if I was a googler knowing that my efforts didn't make targeting systems more effective and less likely to result in collateral damage.
- announcerman 9y agosome people have the power to redefine what collateral means, weirdly enough its the same people that google services
- Bartweiss 9y agoIn unexpected collateral damage, at any rate. US drone programs target the occasional wedding, yes, but the bulk of the civilian casualties seem to be either invented targets ("they're moving tactically") or civilians in the blast area of actual targets. I, for one, would spend a lot of time wondering whether raising confidence about targets would help justify firing with civilians present.
- wnkrshm 9y agoIt's statistics, if the probability of zero bystanders killed gets higher, it's easier to justify a strike to oneself and to others without being held responsible. It gets easier to justify to the public and the world. "It was an unpredictable accident, our weapons are precise" But even if one could identify time frames when a target is far enough from bystanders to be hit with a hellfire.. the trivial counter is to always be among bystanders.
- confounded 9y agoThat’s already been optimized; anyone killed by a drone is classified as an enemy combatant by definition —— it’s on their corpse to prove innocence after they’re dead. Now that’s a productivity hack!
- infinity0 9y agoHaving been inside Google I can say I did not see any reasonable justification of the crazy hysterical anti-GPL and anti-AGPL position of the lawyers.
- Bartweiss 9y agoAll other questions aside, does this count as evidence that the AGPL closes a real loophole in the GPL? It looks like at least in this case, Google is hysterically anti-AGPL, but would actually welcome a switch to the GPL. Which, from a certain viewpoint, looks like an argument that the GPL is insufficient.
- mav3r1ck 9y agoYou don’t see why forcing the open sourcing of the entire Google codebase would be a problem? That’s essentially what GPL does, if you use even a tiny portion of it for your code and they prove it, you have to GPL ALL the source code from the same for base.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- infinity0 9y agoNobody is going to seriously argue that google3/ is a single piece of software.
- UncleMeat 9y agoWhen it is worth billions of dollars and judges often barely understand tech somebody will.
- amdavidson 9y agoDespite it being legal nonsense, it's all about finding the right Judge. Perhaps there is more bandwidth in Marshall, TX now that they don't have all those pesky patent cases.
- 9y ago
- rossdavidh 9y agoSo, either: 1) that's a real CAPTCHA which Google is serving up, in which case that's outrageous, or 2) that's not a real CAPTCHA which Google served up, in which case using it as the visual for this article is itself pretty outrageous. I have plenty of reservations about Google's power, but putting that visual on your blog article if it's not a real CAPTCHA Google used, is different from lying to your audience in only a technical sense. It's clearly intended to stoke outrage, and outrage is not a state which results in careful reading of the article. The author must have (or at least should have) known that putting that visual on their blog post would result in many people thinking that Google served up such a visual.
- dsr_ 9y agoI'm pretty sure the author thinks more highly of his audience than that. It gets your attention, then you think "oh, that can't be real", and then, hopefully, "but it's the same sort of thing that they really use, and training to spot cars and signs is probably useful in a military context."
- tedunangst 9y agoLots of things are useful in a military context. Detecting irregular heartbeats is useful in a military context.
- confounded 9y agoOr perhaps it’s not outrageous at all.
- wnkrshm 9y agoIt's an exaggeration of the core truth, it is art. Disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed, as someone said. The news about Google working on this project made me reconsider giving them as much data without at least trying to rein it in (though the chances of success are low). NASA has always been clever about dual use and has an almost immaculate standing in the public view. Google is evil now, this is kind of a turning point. They weren't legally obliged to.
- gagege 9y agoGoogle and Re-Captcha reminds me of the TechnoCore and farcast technology in the Hyperion series. An AI conglomerate gives humanity a free gift, farcasters, instantaneous teleportation to pretty much anywhere in the galaxy. But, SPOILER, it is discovered that the TechnoCore has been using the human minds traveling through these farcaster portals as processing power.
- princekolt 9y agoPeople in the comments here are obliviously missing the point of the article. Yes, the captcha image is fake. Yes, that's on purpose, only a silly person would think it is real. The point of the article is that Google's previously "inoffensive" spam prevention technology is being coaxed into a military tool. And this is evil for several reasons. One: A lot of people disagree with the current US military missions, and would absolutely not collaborate with them if they were asked to. Two: Google is a massive corporation with few or no competitors. They already have overreaching powers over several aspects of society (they're not the only one), and giving them reach over the military can only spell danger, doesn't matter how you look at it. Three: Google is already exploiting their users in several other ways, at no benefit to them. No, convenience is not a benefit, whoever convinced people that this is the case is a genius marketer. I stopped using gmail five years ago and here I am. The general point is: Do we really want to give ourselves always to Google, Amazon, Facebook… like that? Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet instead of 1 minute?
- skybrian 9y agoIs there any evidence that recaptcha has anything to do with training drones? They seem like unrelated areas of machine learning. I have no confidence that whoever wrote the article cares about getting facts right.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoJust because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet instead of 1 minute? There are people who won't be able to find it at all without the 5 second option. There are people who use free services, like gmail, in part because they can't afford a paid service. Your moral outrage won't get you anywhere if you don't address practical realities of that sort. I'm quite poor. There are many factors that contribute to that. One is my gender. Another is my current profession as I am a writer. I often find myself on HN listening to well paid men dismiss my choices out of hand like only an idiot would make such choices. I am no idiot. I wish I had the kind of life where I could afford to act like paying for email service is some minor detail not worth fretting over. But I don't and trying to remedy that is proving to be a huge uphill battle. I have six years of college. I worked at a Fortune 200 company at one time. I was one of the top students of my state. It turns out none of that is insulation against poverty. And before this turns into yet another pile on of people acting like I am just lazy or something, I will note that we currently have worse income inequality than in the Gilded Age. So let's just skip that BS means to avoid the issue today. This is a quite widespread systemic problem. It isn't just a handful of idiots making bad choices.
- to3m 9y agoI only ever see the same car-related CAPTCHA: https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tv/image/1505/57/1505576983483.png https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tv/image/1505/57/1505576983483... (random link via google image search) I wonder if it's actually subtly altered each time, possibly with some adversarial image manipulation that people can't spot...
- imranq 9y agoThis reminds me of Enders Game, especially the ending. Don’t want to spoil it for anyone but distributed military intelligence is scary
- simula67 9y ago> Google is known to be deathly allergic to the AGPL license. Not only on servers; they don't even allow employees to use AGPL software on workstations. If you write free software, and you'd prefer that Google not use it, a good way to ensure that is to license it under the AGPL. Man, the open source/free software community should have taken AGPL seriously
- kec 9y agoLicensing software to make it antagonistic to business is a good way to ensure no one is ever paid to improve it, which is a good way to see it stagnate. Do you really think Linux would have gone anywhere had it been licensed under those terms? There’s a reason it never moved to GPLv3.
- jbboehr 9y agoLooks like it's possible to have a "Lesser" AGPL. libbitcoin[1] uses such a license. Also licensing things under a dual AGPL/commercial license seems perfect for things like databases. Mongo uses it IIRC. [1] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blob/master/COPYING
- SA500 9y agoChrist, this is silly (disclosure - I work at Google)
- EtDybNuvCu 9y agoThis sounds hilarious and awesome. Disclosure: I once worked at Google.
- joshuamorton 9y agoSee this[1] article from 2011 that explains Google's "allergy" to the AGPL. (I work at Google) [1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sour...
- henvic 9y agoCool that Google understands that AGPL is evil and has policies against its use! :)
- Chardok 9y agoFunny we just saw Eric a few weeks ago rambling on about China overtaking us in AI (https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-ai-alphabet-chairman/?partner=YahooSA&yptr=yahoo https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-ai-...) Seems like he might be trying to prime the US into accepting Google's participation in warfare.
- mnm1 9y agoRecaptcha is shit regardless of whether they use it to train military drones. It serves no purpose other than to infuriate legitimate web users who might or might not be using a VPN or browsing with JS off. It's a test of patience and sanity that doesn't need to exist. There's no fucking way in hell I need to pick out dozens and dozens of buildings or cars or street signs just so google can verify I'm a human. I've given up using multiple sites because sometimes, it never stops even after ten or fifteen minutes. If anything, it goes to show how shitty google's tech is. If this is what they have to resort to, a test a significant portion of humanity cannot pass, to detect humans, they are clearly not at the forefront of anything technologically. Of course, if this technology is used to train military drones, it explains the torture google has been inflicting on humanity with this garbage. While wasting millions, probably billions of human viewing hours is not as big an atrocity as helping military organizations commit war crimes with drones, it's still an ugly, disgusting activity that google forces upon so many, often through thoughtless intermediaries like cloudflare. At least now, I have an even better reason for refusing to fill in these stupid captchas.
- nothrabannosir 9y agoIt warms my heart to hear Google despises the AGPL. I switched to licensing everything I make under the AGPLv3 a few years back, let me tell you: every passing day further enshrines my conviction that this is the only fair license for Freedom Software in the new age. MIT and BSD were fun when e-mail was a good protocol. When there were no bad actors and everything was jolly fair and cooperations and bulltetin board rainbows and unicorns (it's before my time but I imagine that's what it must have been like). GPL was fun when computers were computers, not dumb terminals calling APIs on private clouds. But today, the only weapon we have to protect our liberty in a digitising age, is the AGPL. It is a breath of fresh air, and my second favourite four-letter acronym of the decade, just after GDPR. I would like to take a moment to urge anyone starting new software projects: please use the AGPLv3. The proof is in the pudding: this very article. Corporations will suddenly have to do the unthinkable: pay you for your software if they want to limit their users' freedom! Remember, you can always license AGPLv3 by default, and offer less freedom licenses for payment. The Qt model. Win win. Richard Stallman was right. A prophet. Like Snowden, much maligned. Unlike Snowden, oft maligned by the very people who should know better :( but that's the life of a radical. Less flippantly: with every wave of freedom erosion, through cloud computing, DRM, etc, I am surprised at how, yet again, RMS turned out to be less and less ridiculous. I remember thinking him so obscene and extreme, but no: on bloody point. Much respect, and I thank him dearly for the weapons he gave us, for a fight we didn't even know we were about to have.
- jellicle 9y agoRegardless of what you think about the current state of Google's evilness, becoming a military defense contractor is not going to do anything good for their corporate morality. Both in the broad, "killing people is bad mmkay" sense and in the narrower sense of occasionally standing up to the US government for its users, becoming a defense contractor is bad.
- quantummkv 9y agoDisclaimer: what I am going to say might be offensive to some, but it has to be said. Apologies in advance to any offended hippie. So google uses the technology it developed to help the military. So what? How is this different from what has happened throughout history? If you hipsters will take the trouble to pull you heads out of the sand, you will find that everything you use is either used by the military or reuses of military technologies. Linux is used by the military in machines that help in killing people. Will you stop using Linux? The Internet protocols? Microwaves began their lives as military radar components. Will you throw yours out of the window? The satellites that power all you TV, GPS, Uber, etc. Delivered to space based on the work of actual Nazi scientists. The food you eat? The main reason you have it because of Fritz Haber. https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber-the-monster-who-fed-the-world-ec19a9834f74 https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber-th.... The man who incidentally used the same technology to start the era of chemical warfare. And this is just the last century. This same pattern has been present throughout history. The only way to live a morally pure life untainted by things used to kill people is to live like a neanderthal. Not in a silicon valley house typing away on the internet on a MacBook. An impossible task, right? And am I missing the sarcasm in this or people actually believe that putting everything under AGPL will solve the problem? You think google will decline a lucrative military contract just because a piece of code is unavailable. No, they will write their own implementation, while you sulk in a corner in the bubble of your victory. We cannot stop technological progress. If you won't do it, someone else will. Not everyone in the world is high enough on Maslow's Need Hierarchy to think about self actualization. Basic Needs will always come first. A hungry man won't think about the world. He will think about food. Our job as responsible people is to ensure that the people in power do not point this technology at us. Not living in some sort of a matrix of out own creation while ignoring the reality.
- mistursinistur 9y agoHey, no need to make this about "self-actualization" or "a matrix" (?). The point here (and the moral imperative IMO) is to exert any influence you have over bad actors. Open source contributors have demonstrated that licensing and negative PR can be used to influence tech companies. That's all this article is calling for.