6 ms·

Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

95 points by jules-jules 6y ago

nkurz 6y ago
It probably doesn't merit its own submission, and this thread is long dead, but for the historical record, let it be noted that Binney came back and successfully completed another Reddit AMA in a different sub with less stringent moderation a couple days later: https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ihnp8j/hi_im_bill_binney_nsa_whistleblower_the_russians/ https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ihnp8j/hi_im_bi...
johnklos 6y ago
"I have proof", but no proof is given. Perhaps Reddit is just trying to stop a misinformation campaign.
- paraxisi 6y ago
  IMO if you're not familiar with the story, this alone makes it worthy of deeper inspection: "Would you like me to post the last modified times for all of the 35,813 emails? And include the Podesta email last modified times for comparison? Because the Podesta stuff was hacked." Again, in my opinion, but there are major inconsistencies.
  - w0de02 6y ago
    “I have proof” should be followed by the posting of said proof, not an angry response along the lines of “oh, sorry, the proof is too long to actually post; how dare you ask! You ignorant fool!”
  - addicted 6y ago
    So the proof that a certain set of files were not hacked by an expert hacking agency is that the last modified time stamps are not consistent with them... I remember fooling my 9 year old sister by modifying the metadata for files when I was 14. I didn’t realize expert hackers are incapable of figuring out what I did as a 14 year old.
    - nickysielicki 6y ago
      I can't stand to see this sort of logical inversion take place. There are exactly two possibilities: A. The timestamps weren't modified at all, and the modification time on the file truly represents the time at which they were written. ie: the timestamps are a roughly accurate indicator of transfer speed. B. The timestamps were modified, but the hackers specifically went through the effort to calculate timestamps that align with 23MB/s, and then set those timestamps on the files. Possibility B is much more contrived, is unfalsifiable, and yet you're defending it as if those that believe Possibility A are the real conspiracy theorists. In reality, you're the conspiracy theorist! You're saying there must have been an explicit effort (say, a conspiration) to set modification times to align with 23MB/s. It's ridiculous.
      - AaronFriel 6y ago
        There is a much more plausible explanation: 1. The timestamps reflect some process that occurred before the files were uploaded to the internet. That's it. That's the plausible explanation. * Secondary transfer to removable media that changed timestamps * Transfer to network file server, likewise * Archival * Compression/decompression * Encryption/decryption * Analysis of files that touched them (set timestamp) to indicate completion Basically any process that proceeded at an average of 23MB/s would produce that pattern. And note, that it doesn't preclude the possibility that the timestamps changed many times between when they were on the DNC server and when they were made public. So indeed, the 23MB/s could indicate removeable media was involved, but it could have been from one Russian intelligence officer's computer to another's. Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is the most likely one: The timestamps reflect a process that occurred at a rate of about 23MB/s. We just can't speculate on what process that is.
        justinclift 6y ago
        It'd be interesting to note which application was supposedly used to copy the files around. eg `rsync -aP` widely used by SysAdmin/DevOps people specifically sets the timestamp of copied files to match their source.
      - 6y ago
- ffggvv 6y ago
  i’m so glad we have reddit here to baby me and make sure no big bad “mis information” ever hits my precious ears. who knows what dangerous thing could happen. i might be forced to use critical thinking and evaluate claims on their values. i’m so glad billion dollar corporations do my thinking for me :)
- Kihashi 6y ago
  According to the subreddit mods: > EDIT: OP is making very bold claims with insufficient proof. This AMA has devolved into a significant vector for disinformation. We have removed and locked it.
johnnyo 6y ago
The headline is a bit misleading. Is it “Reddit” as a company shutting it down, or an unpaid mod team? Is the AMA mod team employed by the company?
mixmastamyk 6y ago
The original page is interesting: https://archive.is/WWKu2 https://archive.is/WWKu2
pcdoodle 6y ago
dude made a video response: https://twitter.com/Burke4Senate/status/1298318463610560512 https://twitter.com/Burke4Senate/status/1298318463610560512
- AaronFriel 6y ago
  Please don't enable the spread of disinformation.
  - pcdoodle 6y ago
    How is this misinformation?
    - AaronFriel 6y ago
      The basis of William Binney and Patrick Lawrence and other grifters is: 1. Filesystem timestamps are a reliable indicator of transfer speed, mechanism of transfer, or anything at all 2. It's impossible to transfer files over 23MB/s over the internet The first is hard to disprove, admittedly. There might be some cases in which filesystem timestamps, which can be changed by all sorts of different things, are relevant. The second though is laughably absurd. I don't know what internet the DNC server hosted in a colocation facility had. I do know for a fact that from my residential internet connection in Iowa I could transfer data well in excess of 23MB/s (a mere 184mbps) over the internet, even to servers in Russia. From these two claims above, they state without any reservation that the DNC hack must have been an inside job, that Russia was never involved, etc. The intelligence community, the Mueller report, and multiple bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports all point to the hack being committed by Russian state actors.
      - nickysielicki 6y ago
        > 1. Filesystem timestamps are a reliable indicator of transfer speed, mechanism of transfer, or anything at all How do you figure they're not? Can you explain this? Obviously they can be modified after the fact, but you seem to be presenting a wild theory that the timestamps were presumably modified after-the-fact to represent 23MB/s. That's a wild unfalsifiable theory with zero evidence. The most likely and reasonable explanation is that the timestamps line up with 23MB/s because they were actually transferred at 23MB/s.
kats 6y ago
That's outrageous. If someone is a public figure, they should be allowed to speak.
- codezero 6y ago
  They allowed him to speak. The mods also made it clear that unsubstantiated claims (from users or the guest) would not be productive and would devolve - yet he did it anyways. I think it's safe to say the audience was aware of his POV, so expected more than regurgitation.
  - tanseydavid 6y ago
    Who will substantiate the substantiators?
AaronFriel 6y ago
The central component of the allegation that the DNC leak was an inside job as opposed to a hack has been repeated by writers at Consortium News and by journalist Patrick Lawrence: > Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Here's the article from Patrick Lawrence in 2017 (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-raise...) and a quote: > “A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).” I have two issues here: 1. The basis for this allegation is nonsense. Filesystem timestamps using local clocks are not a reliable indicator of transfer speed. 2. Back in 2017, I lived in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I was fortunate to live in a place with a municipal fiber optic internet connection, and I wrote to The Nation and to Patrick Lawrence and tweeted at them back then. I was able to get far in excess of 23 MB/s using my residential internet connection to servers in Russia, from Iowa. Here's a screenshot I took back then: https://twitter.com/AaronFriel/status/896072426143993856 https://twitter.com/AaronFriel/status/896072426143993856 I raised this with Patrick Lawrence, aka @thefloutist, on Twitter back then and the article in The Nation was never retracted or fact checked, and this absurd claim keeps being repeated.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  The argument isn't that 23MB/s is so outrageously fast that it must be from a USB drive and couldn't be from the internet. The argument is that 23 MB/s is a peculiar number because it is so close to USB 2 max throughput (480Mbit in spec, but practically closer to 280Mbit due to bus access overhead and underlying storage limitations.) It's not at all unreasonable to expect that a USB2 mass storage device would cap out around there for write speeds on a larger USB 2 flash drive. What's more relevant is the jitter on the timestamps. IF it was just an average of 23MB/s, I'd agree with you. But what I suspect is that it's sustained 23MB/s with little variation. Putting aside wild theories about the timestamps being intentionally modified to represent a USB transfer, a sustained 23MB/s with no variation is awfully characteristic of a USB transfer.
codezero 6y ago
Binney seems like such an interesting person who stood up for what most folks on HN would probably agree with - that the government had been overreaching in surveillance - and he was mostly sidelined for his opinions. People shunned by the establishment often end up being abused by the enemies of the establishment - so in this case, Fox and Infowars who would love to give this guy time on air. He could be right, but I think his lack of awareness of why he might be wrong has really hurt him, he seems to like the attention he's been missing for the past twenty years, so I guess we're all human.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I think I will cancel my monthly support for Reddit, partly over this and partly because I find it less valuable than Twitter and HN and don't visit that often anymore. BTW, in general I support whistle blowers - they play an important part in free and open governments. I have heard Bill Binney before and thought that his experience and opinions were interesting.
- blnqr 6y ago
  Ever since my service in the Navy I've thought that whistleblowers (1) should definitely speak out, and (2) should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    What do you think these consequences should be? What do you think of the consequences suffered by those who were exposed?
    - blnqr 6y ago
      Consequences for the whistleblower should depend on the laws that were in place when (or if) they broke the law. For example, Edward Snowden probably committed treason and that carries a harsh penalty but it is good that he leaked the NSA classified docs. Not sure what you mean by exposed, but I think the same logic applies. Those who suffered harm should get redress. Those who committed harm should be punished.
- Kihashi 6y ago
  It looks to me like this thread was shut down by the AMA mods, not reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_binney_former_nsa_technical_director/g2tcs71/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_b...
justanotheranon 6y ago
while i disagree with the Forenaicator's theory that file time stamps prove it was Seth Rich and not GRU, i think this is shameless censorship by Reddit. Aaron Shwartz would be disgusted by what Reddit has become. instead of censorship, the correct approach would be to refute Binney and Forensicator's claims with counter evidence. file time stamps can be trivially modified to whatever you want and so cannot be trusted. as we saw from the CIA Vault7 leaks on Wikileaks, CIA had dozens and dozens of programs for forging metadata in files to frame foreign govts with attribution, which is one of the biggest reasons why the whole narrative that Russia hacked the DNC is on shaky ground.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dustingetz 6y ago
"we have an economic phenomenon sometimes called the lemons problem. Suppose you want to sell a used car, and I’m looking for a car to buy. From my perspective, I have to worry that your car might be a “lemon”—that it has a serious mechanical problem that doesn’t appear every time you start the car, and is difficult or impossible to fix. Now, you know that your car isn’t a lemon. But if I ask you, “Hey, is this car a lemon?” and you answer “No,” I can’t trust your answer, because you’re incentivized to answer “No” either way. Hearing you say “No” isn’t much Bayesian evidence. Asymmetric information conditions can persist even in cases where, like an honest seller meeting an honest buyer, both parties have strong incentives for accurate information to be conveyed." Yudkowsky, Eliezer. Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (pp. 49-50). Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Kindle Edition.
joelkevinjones 6y ago
Calculating transfer rates based on time-stamps is ridiculous. At any point from source to destination, the individual files making up the emails could have been aggregated, transferred, and then disaggregated, potentially multiple times. Preserving time meta-data during these sorts of operations can go wrong even when one is trying to preserve it. The delta file times could simply reflect the transfer rate of the final disaggregation step in the chain. This could have been a from a directly connected storage device over a less than full-disk-speed interface, or from such a device accessed over a network.
troughway 6y ago
Reddit is just another propaganda arm in the same vein as FB, Twitter and the rest. As usual when these things come up, jedberg is very quiet.
Kihashi 6y ago
I looked at the linked thread and don't see anything to substantiate the claim in the title here. It looks to me like the thread was shut down by the AMA mods, not the Reddit Admins. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_binney_former_nsa_technical_director/g2tcs71/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_b... > While this is a fascinating topic from a notable public figure, the mod team would like to remind everyone not to believe everything they read on the internet. Normally, we’d hesitate to allow an AMA with a topic like this at all, but Mr. Binney meets our notability qualifications better than most, and he has the support today of a US Senate candidate. Consequently, we think it’s important we offer them this platform to share their views. That being said, we have a policy against disinformation being shared on this subreddit: we won’t hesitate to remove harmful disinformation if posted by the OP or users, particularly if it’s harmful to innocent people or spreads incorrect information about elections and voting. We also encourage all users and AMA participants to review Reddit’s site-wide rules carefully before posting - it would be quite easy to let this AMA venture into territory that would get it shut down by the Reddit Safety teams. > > EDIT: OP is making very bold claims with insufficient proof. This AMA has devolved into a significant vector for disinformation. We have removed and locked it.
- jdhbbbhb 6y ago
  Thank God those subreddit admins are keeping us safe from disinformation. We wouldn't want anyone to think.

95 points by jules-jules 6y ago

It probably doesn't merit its own submission, and this thread is long dead, but for the historical record, let it be noted that Binney came back and successfully completed another Reddit AMA in a different sub with less stringent moderation a couple days later: https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ihnp8j/hi_im_bill_binney_nsa_whistleblower_the_russians/ https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ihnp8j/hi_im_bi...

johnklos 6y ago

"I have proof", but no proof is given. Perhaps Reddit is just trying to stop a misinformation campaign.

paraxisi 6y ago
IMO if you're not familiar with the story, this alone makes it worthy of deeper inspection: "Would you like me to post the last modified times for all of the 35,813 emails? And include the Podesta email last modified times for comparison? Because the Podesta stuff was hacked." Again, in my opinion, but there are major inconsistencies.
- w0de02 6y ago
  “I have proof” should be followed by the posting of said proof, not an angry response along the lines of “oh, sorry, the proof is too long to actually post; how dare you ask! You ignorant fool!”
- addicted 6y ago
  So the proof that a certain set of files were not hacked by an expert hacking agency is that the last modified time stamps are not consistent with them... I remember fooling my 9 year old sister by modifying the metadata for files when I was 14. I didn’t realize expert hackers are incapable of figuring out what I did as a 14 year old.
  - nickysielicki 6y ago
    I can't stand to see this sort of logical inversion take place. There are exactly two possibilities: A. The timestamps weren't modified at all, and the modification time on the file truly represents the time at which they were written. ie: the timestamps are a roughly accurate indicator of transfer speed. B. The timestamps were modified, but the hackers specifically went through the effort to calculate timestamps that align with 23MB/s, and then set those timestamps on the files. Possibility B is much more contrived, is unfalsifiable, and yet you're defending it as if those that believe Possibility A are the real conspiracy theorists. In reality, you're the conspiracy theorist! You're saying there must have been an explicit effort (say, a conspiration) to set modification times to align with 23MB/s. It's ridiculous.
    - AaronFriel 6y ago
      There is a much more plausible explanation: 1. The timestamps reflect some process that occurred before the files were uploaded to the internet. That's it. That's the plausible explanation. * Secondary transfer to removable media that changed timestamps * Transfer to network file server, likewise * Archival * Compression/decompression * Encryption/decryption * Analysis of files that touched them (set timestamp) to indicate completion Basically any process that proceeded at an average of 23MB/s would produce that pattern. And note, that it doesn't preclude the possibility that the timestamps changed many times between when they were on the DNC server and when they were made public. So indeed, the 23MB/s could indicate removeable media was involved, but it could have been from one Russian intelligence officer's computer to another's. Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is the most likely one: The timestamps reflect a process that occurred at a rate of about 23MB/s. We just can't speculate on what process that is.
      - justinclift 6y ago
        It'd be interesting to note which application was supposedly used to copy the files around. eg `rsync -aP` widely used by SysAdmin/DevOps people specifically sets the timestamp of copied files to match their source.
    - 6y ago
ffggvv 6y ago
i’m so glad we have reddit here to baby me and make sure no big bad “mis information” ever hits my precious ears. who knows what dangerous thing could happen. i might be forced to use critical thinking and evaluate claims on their values. i’m so glad billion dollar corporations do my thinking for me :)
Kihashi 6y ago
According to the subreddit mods: > EDIT: OP is making very bold claims with insufficient proof. This AMA has devolved into a significant vector for disinformation. We have removed and locked it.

johnnyo 6y ago

The headline is a bit misleading. Is it “Reddit” as a company shutting it down, or an unpaid mod team? Is the AMA mod team employed by the company?

mixmastamyk 6y ago

The original page is interesting: https://archive.is/WWKu2 https://archive.is/WWKu2

pcdoodle 6y ago

dude made a video response: https://twitter.com/Burke4Senate/status/1298318463610560512 https://twitter.com/Burke4Senate/status/1298318463610560512

AaronFriel 6y ago
Please don't enable the spread of disinformation.
- pcdoodle 6y ago
  How is this misinformation?
  - AaronFriel 6y ago
    The basis of William Binney and Patrick Lawrence and other grifters is: 1. Filesystem timestamps are a reliable indicator of transfer speed, mechanism of transfer, or anything at all 2. It's impossible to transfer files over 23MB/s over the internet The first is hard to disprove, admittedly. There might be some cases in which filesystem timestamps, which can be changed by all sorts of different things, are relevant. The second though is laughably absurd. I don't know what internet the DNC server hosted in a colocation facility had. I do know for a fact that from my residential internet connection in Iowa I could transfer data well in excess of 23MB/s (a mere 184mbps) over the internet, even to servers in Russia. From these two claims above, they state without any reservation that the DNC hack must have been an inside job, that Russia was never involved, etc. The intelligence community, the Mueller report, and multiple bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports all point to the hack being committed by Russian state actors.
    - nickysielicki 6y ago
      > 1. Filesystem timestamps are a reliable indicator of transfer speed, mechanism of transfer, or anything at all How do you figure they're not? Can you explain this? Obviously they can be modified after the fact, but you seem to be presenting a wild theory that the timestamps were presumably modified after-the-fact to represent 23MB/s. That's a wild unfalsifiable theory with zero evidence. The most likely and reasonable explanation is that the timestamps line up with 23MB/s because they were actually transferred at 23MB/s.

kats 6y ago

That's outrageous. If someone is a public figure, they should be allowed to speak.

codezero 6y ago
They allowed him to speak. The mods also made it clear that unsubstantiated claims (from users or the guest) would not be productive and would devolve - yet he did it anyways. I think it's safe to say the audience was aware of his POV, so expected more than regurgitation.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  Who will substantiate the substantiators?

AaronFriel 6y ago

The central component of the allegation that the DNC leak was an inside job as opposed to a hack has been repeated by writers at Consortium News and by journalist Patrick Lawrence: > Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Here's the article from Patrick Lawrence in 2017 (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-raise...) and a quote: > “A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).” I have two issues here: 1. The basis for this allegation is nonsense. Filesystem timestamps using local clocks are not a reliable indicator of transfer speed. 2. Back in 2017, I lived in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I was fortunate to live in a place with a municipal fiber optic internet connection, and I wrote to The Nation and to Patrick Lawrence and tweeted at them back then. I was able to get far in excess of 23 MB/s using my residential internet connection to servers in Russia, from Iowa. Here's a screenshot I took back then: https://twitter.com/AaronFriel/status/896072426143993856 https://twitter.com/AaronFriel/status/896072426143993856 I raised this with Patrick Lawrence, aka @thefloutist, on Twitter back then and the article in The Nation was never retracted or fact checked, and this absurd claim keeps being repeated.

nickysielicki 6y ago
The argument isn't that 23MB/s is so outrageously fast that it must be from a USB drive and couldn't be from the internet. The argument is that 23 MB/s is a peculiar number because it is so close to USB 2 max throughput (480Mbit in spec, but practically closer to 280Mbit due to bus access overhead and underlying storage limitations.) It's not at all unreasonable to expect that a USB2 mass storage device would cap out around there for write speeds on a larger USB 2 flash drive. What's more relevant is the jitter on the timestamps. IF it was just an average of 23MB/s, I'd agree with you. But what I suspect is that it's sustained 23MB/s with little variation. Putting aside wild theories about the timestamps being intentionally modified to represent a USB transfer, a sustained 23MB/s with no variation is awfully characteristic of a USB transfer.

codezero 6y ago

Binney seems like such an interesting person who stood up for what most folks on HN would probably agree with - that the government had been overreaching in surveillance - and he was mostly sidelined for his opinions. People shunned by the establishment often end up being abused by the enemies of the establishment - so in this case, Fox and Infowars who would love to give this guy time on air. He could be right, but I think his lack of awareness of why he might be wrong has really hurt him, he seems to like the attention he's been missing for the past twenty years, so I guess we're all human.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

I think I will cancel my monthly support for Reddit, partly over this and partly because I find it less valuable than Twitter and HN and don't visit that often anymore. BTW, in general I support whistle blowers - they play an important part in free and open governments. I have heard Bill Binney before and thought that his experience and opinions were interesting.

blnqr 6y ago
Ever since my service in the Navy I've thought that whistleblowers (1) should definitely speak out, and (2) should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  What do you think these consequences should be? What do you think of the consequences suffered by those who were exposed?
  - blnqr 6y ago
    Consequences for the whistleblower should depend on the laws that were in place when (or if) they broke the law. For example, Edward Snowden probably committed treason and that carries a harsh penalty but it is good that he leaked the NSA classified docs. Not sure what you mean by exposed, but I think the same logic applies. Those who suffered harm should get redress. Those who committed harm should be punished.
Kihashi 6y ago
It looks to me like this thread was shut down by the AMA mods, not reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_binney_former_nsa_technical_director/g2tcs71/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_b...

justanotheranon 6y ago

while i disagree with the Forenaicator's theory that file time stamps prove it was Seth Rich and not GRU, i think this is shameless censorship by Reddit. Aaron Shwartz would be disgusted by what Reddit has become. instead of censorship, the correct approach would be to refute Binney and Forensicator's claims with counter evidence. file time stamps can be trivially modified to whatever you want and so cannot be trusted. as we saw from the CIA Vault7 leaks on Wikileaks, CIA had dozens and dozens of programs for forging metadata in files to frame foreign govts with attribution, which is one of the biggest reasons why the whole narrative that Russia hacked the DNC is on shaky ground.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dustingetz 6y ago

"we have an economic phenomenon sometimes called the lemons problem. Suppose you want to sell a used car, and I’m looking for a car to buy. From my perspective, I have to worry that your car might be a “lemon”—that it has a serious mechanical problem that doesn’t appear every time you start the car, and is difficult or impossible to fix. Now, you know that your car isn’t a lemon. But if I ask you, “Hey, is this car a lemon?” and you answer “No,” I can’t trust your answer, because you’re incentivized to answer “No” either way. Hearing you say “No” isn’t much Bayesian evidence. Asymmetric information conditions can persist even in cases where, like an honest seller meeting an honest buyer, both parties have strong incentives for accurate information to be conveyed." Yudkowsky, Eliezer. Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (pp. 49-50). Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Kindle Edition.

joelkevinjones 6y ago

Calculating transfer rates based on time-stamps is ridiculous. At any point from source to destination, the individual files making up the emails could have been aggregated, transferred, and then disaggregated, potentially multiple times. Preserving time meta-data during these sorts of operations can go wrong even when one is trying to preserve it. The delta file times could simply reflect the transfer rate of the final disaggregation step in the chain. This could have been a from a directly connected storage device over a less than full-disk-speed interface, or from such a device accessed over a network.

troughway 6y ago

Reddit is just another propaganda arm in the same vein as FB, Twitter and the rest. As usual when these things come up, jedberg is very quiet.

Kihashi 6y ago

I looked at the linked thread and don't see anything to substantiate the claim in the title here. It looks to me like the thread was shut down by the AMA mods, not the Reddit Admins. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_binney_former_nsa_technical_director/g2tcs71/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_b... > While this is a fascinating topic from a notable public figure, the mod team would like to remind everyone not to believe everything they read on the internet. Normally, we’d hesitate to allow an AMA with a topic like this at all, but Mr. Binney meets our notability qualifications better than most, and he has the support today of a US Senate candidate. Consequently, we think it’s important we offer them this platform to share their views. That being said, we have a policy against disinformation being shared on this subreddit: we won’t hesitate to remove harmful disinformation if posted by the OP or users, particularly if it’s harmful to innocent people or spreads incorrect information about elections and voting. We also encourage all users and AMA participants to review Reddit’s site-wide rules carefully before posting - it would be quite easy to let this AMA venture into territory that would get it shut down by the Reddit Safety teams. > > EDIT: OP is making very bold claims with insufficient proof. This AMA has devolved into a significant vector for disinformation. We have removed and locked it.

jdhbbbhb 6y ago
Thank God those subreddit admins are keeping us safe from disinformation. We wouldn't want anyone to think.