5 ms·

Nico Sell: ‘To me, the NSA and Edward Snowden are just the tip of the iceberg’

35 points by greenvaio 12y ago

marcusgarvey 12y ago
"Properly paranoid." So far the most apt term I've seen for the state we ought to be in.
vladharbuz 12y ago
“You know what, Mom? Those problems don’t exist anymore. It’s obvious that girls are smarter at math and science.” So she decided that, since people aren't saying that girls are inferior anymore, she should declare that boys are inferior.
- exit 12y ago
  > How do you find the male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley? > I think the walls are gone; more than 50% of hackers are girls. I took my 14-year-old daughter to a breakfast of women investors and she listened to them talking about how tough it was to be one of the first female investors in Silicon Valley. When we left the breakfast, she said to me: “You know what, Mom? Those problems don’t exist anymore. It’s obvious that girls are smarter at math and science.” does anyone have a source on "more than 50% of hackers are girls"?
  - WalterSear 12y ago
    http://eunter.net/2015/01/nico-sell-to-me-the-nsa-and-edward-snowden-are-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/ http://eunter.net/2015/01/nico-sell-to-me-the-nsa-and-edward...
- faitswulff 12y ago
  There is some evidence that girls are doing better in school: > The Hundred Girls Project tells us some really nice statistics. For example, for every 100 girls that are suspended from school, there are 250 boys that are suspended from school. For every 100 girls who are expelled from school, there are 335 boys who are expelled from school. For every 100 girls in special education, there are 217 boys. For every 100 girls with a learning disability, there are 276 boys. For every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed, we have 324 boys. And by the way, all of these numbers are significantly higher if you happen to be black, if you happen to be poor, if you happen to exist in an overcrowded school. And if you are a boy, you're four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD -- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning/transcript?language=en#t-57000 http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_enga... There are now also more women in college than there are men, proportionately, and for the same reasons that Chellman outlines: > Another aspect in the reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, is the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females. Boys often mature more slowly than girls. In grades K-12, boys tend to have a higher incidence of behavioral problems (or lower level of non-cognitive skills) than girls. Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college for the high school graduating class of 1992, the authors figure. It allowed "girls to leapfrog over boys in the race to college." Similarly, teenage boys, both in the early 1980s and late 1990s, had a higher (self-reported) incidence of arrests and school suspensions than teenage girls. http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html
  - lazyjones 12y ago
    > There is some evidence that girls are doing better in school There is also evidence that they're simply being treated better by teachers: https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=385839 https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=385839
    - graycat 12y ago
      Of course: (1) Crib. There is a recent study indicating that already in the crib girls are paying attention mostly to people and boys, to things. I wish I'd kept the reference. (2) From the crib on, girls are much better with people, and socially more generally, than boys. So, net, in K-12 and college, the girls are much better than the boys at the social aspects, e.g., wanting to please the teachers, sensing what the teachers want, especially in humanities subjects, and giving it to the teachers, in K-12 usually women. And there are other differences: In K-12 girls are much better behaved in class, have much better verbal aptitude, and have better manual dexterity, e.g., much better handwriting. There's still more, much more, on the differences between boys and girls, in K-12, college, etc. And over those years, the nature of the differences change, markedly. There's more in D. Tannen, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation'. E.g., she shows a really neat experiment at age 5: Each student is asked to go into the hall and pin a tail on a donkey or some such. Well, there's no donkey or it has no place for a tail, or some such. So, right, it's a psychology experiment where the subjects have been lied to -- set that aside for here and now. Well, the purpose of the experiment is to show the difference between the boys and girls: Typically a girl returns to the room and meekly tells the teacher that there is no donkey. The teacher says, "That's fine," and asks the girl to take her seat and she does so. All very courteous. Typically a boy returns to the room, goes to the teacher's desk, stands with his feet apart, puts his hands on the front of the desk wide apart, leans toward the teacher, and with anger and outrage asserts to the teacher that there is no donkey. Again the teacher tells the subject "That's fine. Take your seat.". That's already at age 5. Net, boys and girls are different, not the same -- not saying that in total one or the other is inferior, but they are just very different. Dogs and cats are different; so are boys and girls. In general, though, it appears from my experience that can expect that throughout life the boys are more interested in things and the girls, in people. Yes, a dog can, with difficulty, walk on just its hind legs, and from all I can see with difficulty a girl can get as interested in things as a boy -- commonly with difficulty. Just what the nature of the difficulty is, social pressure, self-image as a girl, desire to avoid competing with boys and desire to let the boys feel superior in something, say, changing a flat tire, desire to appear to need to be cared for (important if she is to be a mommy, which will be important as long as there are humans), native ability, just more interest in other thins, ..., for a huge list. But, net, in a word, they are different. Now, supposedly the French Revolution got Western Civilization to fear that any recognition of any difference would be a threat of unfair treatment. I'm not trying to justify unfair treatment. Indeed, I would suggest we assume, human males and females deserve equal respect as persons. > they're simply being treated better by teachers Sure: In K-12, nearly all the teachers are females and, thus, find it easier to appreciate the girls. This stuff is very well known and is readily accepted by movie audiences, e.g., as in the Disney children's movie Bridge to Terabithia. E.g., one girl in the class is nasty, but several boys are. The class goody-goody, star student, is a very confident, diligent girl. The lead girl is creative in story telling, and the lead boy is creative in art. "Boys' handwriting sucks. No offense" -- she was correct, but in time the bad handwriting improves. At one point, the teacher goes ecstatic in praise of the role of adjectives in "any writing". Hmm ... Well, maybe for writing in fictional literature! Alas, definitely not for most writing in the STEM subjects! Sorry lady! So, he teacher is pushing fictional literature, and the girls are better at that, i.e., story telling. Did I mention, they're different? One reason girls are doing better in college: They are going for one of the two traditional fields, K-12 teaching or nursing. And girls have found that they can do well in law. Girls have long generally been better in the humanities, especially fictional literature. And psychology and sociology are now popular majors for girls. The STEM fields -- not so much. The movie The Social Network has some of the differences clear: Zuck is totally wrapped up in computing, e.g., understands the various bits involved in virtual memory paging and, thus, finds his operating systems course beneath him. The girl he wants to impress is very sensitive and astute socially, while Zuck is very clumsy socially. The girl insults Zuck's interest in computing and his Web site The Facebook as playing with "video games". Yes, maybe Aaron Sorkin's writing was not true to Zuck, but it was likely true to what movie audiences were quite prepared to accept from norms, experience, thinking, or just old social stereotypes. I.w., movie audiences are willing to accept such differences between boys and girls.
userbinator 12y ago
Something about her attitude towards privacy reminds me of Fravia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia
WalterSear 12y ago
Self-aggrandizing hyperbole.
andyl 12y ago
"Trust me, Wickr is secure". Right. Until I can see the source and build the app myself, I'll assume Wickr is just another government op.
- lazyjones 12y ago
  > Until I can see the source and build the app myself, I'll assume Wickr just is another government op. You absolutely should and Sell must be aware of this (she sounds smart enough to not be delusional about it). It is apparently not addressed by the Wickr team on their web page as far as I can tell, so that's suspicious. They do have an impressive $100K bug bounty, but that doesn't exactly make it look less spook-ish.
an_engineer 12y ago
Visiting the wickr.com sends requests to doubleclick, google-analytics, and youtube tracking.
logn 12y ago
The main way people add contacts on Wickr is by entering a friend's email or phone number which is hashed locally and then checked against a database of hashed identifiers. An intel agency could presumably build a rainbow table by trying every known phone/email, and then they can track meta-data and interactions. Many of their investors, advisors, and C-level execs seem to be part of the revolving door Valley-D.C. culture. I doubt they're expecting to accomplish anything radical. Nico's probably most honest when she says their goal is to be the number one messaging app and that privacy is currently fashionable. I don't doubt they offer at least improved privacy over e.g. Facebook, especially considering their Terms of Use conditions. But I think they are pretty plainly selling the image of privacy instead of actually useful/innovative tools.

35 points by greenvaio 12y ago

"Properly paranoid." So far the most apt term I've seen for the state we ought to be in.

“You know what, Mom? Those problems don’t exist anymore. It’s obvious that girls are smarter at math and science.” So she decided that, since people aren't saying that girls are inferior anymore, she should declare that boys are inferior.

exit 12y ago
> How do you find the male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley? > I think the walls are gone; more than 50% of hackers are girls. I took my 14-year-old daughter to a breakfast of women investors and she listened to them talking about how tough it was to be one of the first female investors in Silicon Valley. When we left the breakfast, she said to me: “You know what, Mom? Those problems don’t exist anymore. It’s obvious that girls are smarter at math and science.” does anyone have a source on "more than 50% of hackers are girls"?
- WalterSear 12y ago
  http://eunter.net/2015/01/nico-sell-to-me-the-nsa-and-edward-snowden-are-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/ http://eunter.net/2015/01/nico-sell-to-me-the-nsa-and-edward...
faitswulff 12y ago
There is some evidence that girls are doing better in school: > The Hundred Girls Project tells us some really nice statistics. For example, for every 100 girls that are suspended from school, there are 250 boys that are suspended from school. For every 100 girls who are expelled from school, there are 335 boys who are expelled from school. For every 100 girls in special education, there are 217 boys. For every 100 girls with a learning disability, there are 276 boys. For every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed, we have 324 boys. And by the way, all of these numbers are significantly higher if you happen to be black, if you happen to be poor, if you happen to exist in an overcrowded school. And if you are a boy, you're four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD -- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning/transcript?language=en#t-57000 http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_enga... There are now also more women in college than there are men, proportionately, and for the same reasons that Chellman outlines: > Another aspect in the reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, is the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females. Boys often mature more slowly than girls. In grades K-12, boys tend to have a higher incidence of behavioral problems (or lower level of non-cognitive skills) than girls. Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college for the high school graduating class of 1992, the authors figure. It allowed "girls to leapfrog over boys in the race to college." Similarly, teenage boys, both in the early 1980s and late 1990s, had a higher (self-reported) incidence of arrests and school suspensions than teenage girls. http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html
- lazyjones 12y ago
  > There is some evidence that girls are doing better in school There is also evidence that they're simply being treated better by teachers: https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=385839 https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=385839
  - graycat 12y ago
    Of course: (1) Crib. There is a recent study indicating that already in the crib girls are paying attention mostly to people and boys, to things. I wish I'd kept the reference. (2) From the crib on, girls are much better with people, and socially more generally, than boys. So, net, in K-12 and college, the girls are much better than the boys at the social aspects, e.g., wanting to please the teachers, sensing what the teachers want, especially in humanities subjects, and giving it to the teachers, in K-12 usually women. And there are other differences: In K-12 girls are much better behaved in class, have much better verbal aptitude, and have better manual dexterity, e.g., much better handwriting. There's still more, much more, on the differences between boys and girls, in K-12, college, etc. And over those years, the nature of the differences change, markedly. There's more in D. Tannen, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation'. E.g., she shows a really neat experiment at age 5: Each student is asked to go into the hall and pin a tail on a donkey or some such. Well, there's no donkey or it has no place for a tail, or some such. So, right, it's a psychology experiment where the subjects have been lied to -- set that aside for here and now. Well, the purpose of the experiment is to show the difference between the boys and girls: Typically a girl returns to the room and meekly tells the teacher that there is no donkey. The teacher says, "That's fine," and asks the girl to take her seat and she does so. All very courteous. Typically a boy returns to the room, goes to the teacher's desk, stands with his feet apart, puts his hands on the front of the desk wide apart, leans toward the teacher, and with anger and outrage asserts to the teacher that there is no donkey. Again the teacher tells the subject "That's fine. Take your seat.". That's already at age 5. Net, boys and girls are different, not the same -- not saying that in total one or the other is inferior, but they are just very different. Dogs and cats are different; so are boys and girls. In general, though, it appears from my experience that can expect that throughout life the boys are more interested in things and the girls, in people. Yes, a dog can, with difficulty, walk on just its hind legs, and from all I can see with difficulty a girl can get as interested in things as a boy -- commonly with difficulty. Just what the nature of the difficulty is, social pressure, self-image as a girl, desire to avoid competing with boys and desire to let the boys feel superior in something, say, changing a flat tire, desire to appear to need to be cared for (important if she is to be a mommy, which will be important as long as there are humans), native ability, just more interest in other thins, ..., for a huge list. But, net, in a word, they are different. Now, supposedly the French Revolution got Western Civilization to fear that any recognition of any difference would be a threat of unfair treatment. I'm not trying to justify unfair treatment. Indeed, I would suggest we assume, human males and females deserve equal respect as persons. > they're simply being treated better by teachers Sure: In K-12, nearly all the teachers are females and, thus, find it easier to appreciate the girls. This stuff is very well known and is readily accepted by movie audiences, e.g., as in the Disney children's movie Bridge to Terabithia. E.g., one girl in the class is nasty, but several boys are. The class goody-goody, star student, is a very confident, diligent girl. The lead girl is creative in story telling, and the lead boy is creative in art. "Boys' handwriting sucks. No offense" -- she was correct, but in time the bad handwriting improves. At one point, the teacher goes ecstatic in praise of the role of adjectives in "any writing". Hmm ... Well, maybe for writing in fictional literature! Alas, definitely not for most writing in the STEM subjects! Sorry lady! So, he teacher is pushing fictional literature, and the girls are better at that, i.e., story telling. Did I mention, they're different? One reason girls are doing better in college: They are going for one of the two traditional fields, K-12 teaching or nursing. And girls have found that they can do well in law. Girls have long generally been better in the humanities, especially fictional literature. And psychology and sociology are now popular majors for girls. The STEM fields -- not so much. The movie The Social Network has some of the differences clear: Zuck is totally wrapped up in computing, e.g., understands the various bits involved in virtual memory paging and, thus, finds his operating systems course beneath him. The girl he wants to impress is very sensitive and astute socially, while Zuck is very clumsy socially. The girl insults Zuck's interest in computing and his Web site The Facebook as playing with "video games". Yes, maybe Aaron Sorkin's writing was not true to Zuck, but it was likely true to what movie audiences were quite prepared to accept from norms, experience, thinking, or just old social stereotypes. I.w., movie audiences are willing to accept such differences between boys and girls.

userbinator 12y ago

Something about her attitude towards privacy reminds me of Fravia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

WalterSear 12y ago

Self-aggrandizing hyperbole.

andyl 12y ago

"Trust me, Wickr is secure". Right. Until I can see the source and build the app myself, I'll assume Wickr is just another government op.

lazyjones 12y ago
> Until I can see the source and build the app myself, I'll assume Wickr just is another government op. You absolutely should and Sell must be aware of this (she sounds smart enough to not be delusional about it). It is apparently not addressed by the Wickr team on their web page as far as I can tell, so that's suspicious. They do have an impressive $100K bug bounty, but that doesn't exactly make it look less spook-ish.

an_engineer 12y ago

Visiting the wickr.com sends requests to doubleclick, google-analytics, and youtube tracking.

logn 12y ago

The main way people add contacts on Wickr is by entering a friend's email or phone number which is hashed locally and then checked against a database of hashed identifiers. An intel agency could presumably build a rainbow table by trying every known phone/email, and then they can track meta-data and interactions. Many of their investors, advisors, and C-level execs seem to be part of the revolving door Valley-D.C. culture. I doubt they're expecting to accomplish anything radical. Nico's probably most honest when she says their goal is to be the number one messaging app and that privacy is currently fashionable. I don't doubt they offer at least improved privacy over e.g. Facebook, especially considering their Terms of Use conditions. But I think they are pretty plainly selling the image of privacy instead of actually useful/innovative tools.