7 ms·

Aw man I loved your comment right up to the point where you gave people a suggestion on how to make better surveillance tech :(

zem 12y ago
the people working on surveillance tech already know how to do it better. the comment was for the rest of us to get a glimpse of how the tech might be modified if it became cost effective to do so.
- thanksgiving 12y ago
  also i'd think the more we know how to make better surveillance, the better someone can build systems that can subvert it
jonmrodriguez 12y ago
Seriously. It's extremely important that we as engineers be ethical about what we build. If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  The problem is that a lot of people genuinely think "If a large institution approved of it, it must be good". Which is a lot scarier than people not giving a damn about good or evil. Morality is not something you outsource.
  - dec0dedab0de 12y ago
    The bigger problem is that many potentially evil things are really cool.
    - krenoten 12y ago
      Things cannot be evil in and of themselves. It takes sentient intention that you judge to be so for it to be (to you).
      - jonmrodriguez 12y ago
        I guess it's hard to prove, but I think certain objects are inherently correlated with good/evil. E.g. a torture device is inherently evil IMHO, and a vaccine is inherently good.
        seba_dos1 12y ago
        I guess you could kill with vaccine if you really wanted to, and you can have sex using torture device if you're into that kind of stuff.
        fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
        Maybe for some object, but I can't think of any, and I don't think that vaccines or torture devices fit the bill. One could sell a spoiled, ineffective, tainted, or defective vaccine. That would be evil. Or, one could torture Hitler to learn how to disarm the doomsday machine.
        Dylan16807 12y ago
        The original vaccine is still good, and it's evil to torture anyone, even Hitler. I think you're stretching too far.
        krenoten 12y ago
        "Good" is inherently normative. Nothing can be "good" exterior to a normative claim. This is in contrast with "positive" statements, which are true regardless of anything happening to perceive them that way or not. The original vaccine, if it exists in a vacuum, is neither good nor bad, because there is nothing else to attach the normative claim to it. Further - and while this is an entirely normative claim - if you would happen to agree that if you could save 1,000,000,000 lives by torturing one person for 5 seconds, that you should do so, then I would argue that torture is not inherently evil within your own normative value system.
  - baddox 12y ago
    A lot of people (probably the vast majority, at least in the West) also believe that, because you can occasionally vote on things, anything the government does is fine because, after all, "government is us."
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Who, exactly, is this "lot of people" you refer to? > "anything the government does is fine" I have literally never met a single person who believes this. I have met someone who believes that anything the market does is fine (revealed preferences, doncha know?) but fortunately he's a minority, even among libertarians. If we instead interpret your statement as hyperbole with the intention of accusing people of complacency, then... http://xkcd.com/610/ http://xkcd.com/610/ ... you're no better.
      - baddox 12y ago
        Right, so "anything the government does is fine" was a really bad way to phrase it. What I meant is that many people have the same attitude toward government as the attitude toward markets that you reference. It's not necessarily that they agree with or personally like all actions of government, but rather that they believe that the fundamental workings of government are sound, and that the occasional disagreeable actions are acceptable because this is simply how society has chosen to come together and solve certain issues. Many people also go further, and claim that even when there are unjust government laws or actions, they should not be disobeyed or resisted, and that political action is the only valid approach to disagreeable actions of government. This is extremely common in any discussion about police violence.
- tomkinstinch 12y ago
  Ethical engineering is important. With great capability comes great responsibility. This is why I think it is good for engineering students to take as many courses in the humanities and liberal arts as possible, to get better perspectives on the world we're all building for.
  - rjempson 12y ago
    Or they could just make sure the have a good spidey collection.
- vonuebelgarten 12y ago
  There is a lot of ethical uses of such trackers (e.g. a company tracking its own vehicles, shipping container tracking, etc.). We can't assume the developer of the original board knowingly designed it for evil purposes. Full disclosure: I design smart-grid and telemetry applications, including a GSM + GPS device (GPS was initially used for getting accurate timestamps, but we also added positioning registers, which made the field maintenance people very happy).
  - krenoten 12y ago
    Interesting, I always thought that google using it for TrueTime was a strange use-case, but I guess it was the original use-case!
    - vonuebelgarten 12y ago
      That's a pretty common application when you need to synchronize clocks to microsecond accuracy or to a second accuracy but have neither a stable network connection nor a time broadcast (like the German DCF77). It's also used to replace Cesium clocks in cell base stations or for the precision timing protocol (IEEE 1588) for PWE3 networks. Iep, is there a lot of systems depending on GPS and a major system failure will bring us some chaos.
  - mseebach 12y ago
    > There is a lot of ethical uses of such trackers (e.g. a company tracking its own vehicles, shipping container tracking, etc.) Never mind court-warranted law enforcement tracking of legitimate suspects under investigation.
- ripb 12y ago
  >If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare. I honestly do not know how those working for the NSA, GCHQ, etc. can live with themselves for the damage they're doing. Snowden said he was getting something like $120k p/a as a consultant for the NSA, so it's not like it's massively financially lucrative.
  - Symbiote 12y ago
    A friend of a friend suggested to me that a job in his team would suit me. I said I refuse to make weapons or spy on people. He said he liked "catching baddies".
kabdib 12y ago
A good designer would know how to make the device harder to muck with, they don't need help in the form of comments on web forums. There are whole companies (in the financial and security sectors) whose job is to create devices that are difficult to tamper with. Here, it looks like they didn't even try, or if they did, their designer wasn't very good.

zem 12y ago

the people working on surveillance tech already know how to do it better. the comment was for the rest of us to get a glimpse of how the tech might be modified if it became cost effective to do so.

thanksgiving 12y ago
also i'd think the more we know how to make better surveillance, the better someone can build systems that can subvert it

jonmrodriguez 12y ago

Seriously. It's extremely important that we as engineers be ethical about what we build. If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare.

spiritplumber 12y ago
The problem is that a lot of people genuinely think "If a large institution approved of it, it must be good". Which is a lot scarier than people not giving a damn about good or evil. Morality is not something you outsource.
- dec0dedab0de 12y ago
  The bigger problem is that many potentially evil things are really cool.
  - krenoten 12y ago
    Things cannot be evil in and of themselves. It takes sentient intention that you judge to be so for it to be (to you).
    - jonmrodriguez 12y ago
      I guess it's hard to prove, but I think certain objects are inherently correlated with good/evil. E.g. a torture device is inherently evil IMHO, and a vaccine is inherently good.
      - seba_dos1 12y ago
        I guess you could kill with vaccine if you really wanted to, and you can have sex using torture device if you're into that kind of stuff.
      - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
        Maybe for some object, but I can't think of any, and I don't think that vaccines or torture devices fit the bill. One could sell a spoiled, ineffective, tainted, or defective vaccine. That would be evil. Or, one could torture Hitler to learn how to disarm the doomsday machine.
        Dylan16807 12y ago
        The original vaccine is still good, and it's evil to torture anyone, even Hitler. I think you're stretching too far.
        krenoten 12y ago
        "Good" is inherently normative. Nothing can be "good" exterior to a normative claim. This is in contrast with "positive" statements, which are true regardless of anything happening to perceive them that way or not. The original vaccine, if it exists in a vacuum, is neither good nor bad, because there is nothing else to attach the normative claim to it. Further - and while this is an entirely normative claim - if you would happen to agree that if you could save 1,000,000,000 lives by torturing one person for 5 seconds, that you should do so, then I would argue that torture is not inherently evil within your own normative value system.
- baddox 12y ago
  A lot of people (probably the vast majority, at least in the West) also believe that, because you can occasionally vote on things, anything the government does is fine because, after all, "government is us."
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Who, exactly, is this "lot of people" you refer to? > "anything the government does is fine" I have literally never met a single person who believes this. I have met someone who believes that anything the market does is fine (revealed preferences, doncha know?) but fortunately he's a minority, even among libertarians. If we instead interpret your statement as hyperbole with the intention of accusing people of complacency, then... http://xkcd.com/610/ http://xkcd.com/610/ ... you're no better.
    - baddox 12y ago
      Right, so "anything the government does is fine" was a really bad way to phrase it. What I meant is that many people have the same attitude toward government as the attitude toward markets that you reference. It's not necessarily that they agree with or personally like all actions of government, but rather that they believe that the fundamental workings of government are sound, and that the occasional disagreeable actions are acceptable because this is simply how society has chosen to come together and solve certain issues. Many people also go further, and claim that even when there are unjust government laws or actions, they should not be disobeyed or resisted, and that political action is the only valid approach to disagreeable actions of government. This is extremely common in any discussion about police violence.
tomkinstinch 12y ago
Ethical engineering is important. With great capability comes great responsibility. This is why I think it is good for engineering students to take as many courses in the humanities and liberal arts as possible, to get better perspectives on the world we're all building for.
- rjempson 12y ago
  Or they could just make sure the have a good spidey collection.
vonuebelgarten 12y ago
There is a lot of ethical uses of such trackers (e.g. a company tracking its own vehicles, shipping container tracking, etc.). We can't assume the developer of the original board knowingly designed it for evil purposes. Full disclosure: I design smart-grid and telemetry applications, including a GSM + GPS device (GPS was initially used for getting accurate timestamps, but we also added positioning registers, which made the field maintenance people very happy).
- krenoten 12y ago
  Interesting, I always thought that google using it for TrueTime was a strange use-case, but I guess it was the original use-case!
  - vonuebelgarten 12y ago
    That's a pretty common application when you need to synchronize clocks to microsecond accuracy or to a second accuracy but have neither a stable network connection nor a time broadcast (like the German DCF77). It's also used to replace Cesium clocks in cell base stations or for the precision timing protocol (IEEE 1588) for PWE3 networks. Iep, is there a lot of systems depending on GPS and a major system failure will bring us some chaos.
- mseebach 12y ago
  > There is a lot of ethical uses of such trackers (e.g. a company tracking its own vehicles, shipping container tracking, etc.) Never mind court-warranted law enforcement tracking of legitimate suspects under investigation.
ripb 12y ago
>If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare. I honestly do not know how those working for the NSA, GCHQ, etc. can live with themselves for the damage they're doing. Snowden said he was getting something like $120k p/a as a consultant for the NSA, so it's not like it's massively financially lucrative.
- Symbiote 12y ago
  A friend of a friend suggested to me that a job in his team would suit me. I said I refuse to make weapons or spy on people. He said he liked "catching baddies".

kabdib 12y ago

A good designer would know how to make the device harder to muck with, they don't need help in the form of comments on web forums. There are whole companies (in the financial and security sectors) whose job is to create devices that are difficult to tamper with. Here, it looks like they didn't even try, or if they did, their designer wasn't very good.