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tl;dr, anybody? I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might b

tl;dr, anybody? I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might be are too buried in story for me to find them easily so I stopped reading.

zaat 7y ago
lithub.com. tl;dr'ing literature is senseless.
- Jeff_Brown 7y ago
  The fact someone calls a story literature does not imply someone else could not benefit from a third party's bullet points. If you like stories, don't worry; it's not an endangered art form.
  - zaat 7y ago
    Nothing to worry about, I just didn't feel there is much to lift off the story beyond its literary value. It is a bunch of small stories about ordinary folks told from the point of view of a foreigner.
egypturnash 7y ago
When you do not have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, then the private enterprises that fill in those gaps can, and will, make use of any physical or informational resources they find in the trash they pick up in an effort to make a decent living. Examples given include "a nice camera", "drugs", "porn", and "knowing exactly how much money an ambassador is making". There are no examples given involving blackmail but I feel that's definitely an elephant sitting in the room of this story of one journalist's relationship with one private garbage collector. Now that I put it that way I feel like this is the core of a good argument for nationalizing social media.
- Jeff_Brown 7y ago
  Scary. It's not obvious to me that I should trust the government more than a big corporation with a reputation to defend. If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business (and maybe do much more harm than that). They have the wherewithal to avoid it. The incentives for long-term investment in security infrastructure are weaker in government.
  - mynameisvlad 7y ago
    > If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business Would it? I can't think of a single case where this has actually happened. It's great in theory and all, but it is far from reality. The biggest data breaches over the past century have been with giant companies that are still known today. Yahoo, Marriott, Adult Friend Finder, eBay, Equifax, Heartland Payment Systems, Target, TJX, Uber, JP Morgan Chase, the US OPM, Sony's PSN network, Anthem, RSA, Home Depot and Adobe are all still in business, and for some of them, the lack of repercussions have been staggering (looking at you, Equifax). Granted, not all are credit card breaches specifically, but several are, and in all cases a lot of personally identifiable information was stolen. Source: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-b...
- cbnotfromthere 7y ago
  Actually Cairo did and still does have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, separately from guys like this one in the book excerpt.

zaat 7y ago

lithub.com. tl;dr'ing literature is senseless.

Jeff_Brown 7y ago
The fact someone calls a story literature does not imply someone else could not benefit from a third party's bullet points. If you like stories, don't worry; it's not an endangered art form.
- zaat 7y ago
  Nothing to worry about, I just didn't feel there is much to lift off the story beyond its literary value. It is a bunch of small stories about ordinary folks told from the point of view of a foreigner.

egypturnash 7y ago

When you do not have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, then the private enterprises that fill in those gaps can, and will, make use of any physical or informational resources they find in the trash they pick up in an effort to make a decent living. Examples given include "a nice camera", "drugs", "porn", and "knowing exactly how much money an ambassador is making". There are no examples given involving blackmail but I feel that's definitely an elephant sitting in the room of this story of one journalist's relationship with one private garbage collector. Now that I put it that way I feel like this is the core of a good argument for nationalizing social media.

Jeff_Brown 7y ago
Scary. It's not obvious to me that I should trust the government more than a big corporation with a reputation to defend. If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business (and maybe do much more harm than that). They have the wherewithal to avoid it. The incentives for long-term investment in security infrastructure are weaker in government.
- mynameisvlad 7y ago
  > If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business Would it? I can't think of a single case where this has actually happened. It's great in theory and all, but it is far from reality. The biggest data breaches over the past century have been with giant companies that are still known today. Yahoo, Marriott, Adult Friend Finder, eBay, Equifax, Heartland Payment Systems, Target, TJX, Uber, JP Morgan Chase, the US OPM, Sony's PSN network, Anthem, RSA, Home Depot and Adobe are all still in business, and for some of them, the lack of repercussions have been staggering (looking at you, Equifax). Granted, not all are credit card breaches specifically, but several are, and in all cases a lot of personally identifiable information was stolen. Source: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-b...
cbnotfromthere 7y ago
Actually Cairo did and still does have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, separately from guys like this one in the book excerpt.