2804t3qwp (u/2804t3qwp)

2804t3qwp commented on Bad Binder: Android In-the-Wild Exploit googleprojectzero.blogspo... · Posted by u/el_duderino

tptacek · 6 years ago

Google's competitors are getting a thing of great value at no cost. That's what a donation is.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

If it's a great value then why isn't that effort being directed entirely towards google products? I get the argument you're making I think, that it's free valuable labor. But if that's true then what explanation is there for primarily publishing about competing products? Even if the argument was purely user safety then surely there would be no reason to publish unpatched problems publicly which has happened in the past and seems like the sort of thing that group like P0 could have chosen to handle in a more graceful fashion. Somewhere in the chain of command is a reason for why P0 focuses where it does and it doesn't seem likely that the reason is "Because we're rolling in gold and Apple and Microsoft could use the money."

2804t3qwp commented on Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material aeon.co/ideas/trigger-war... · Posted by u/sillybilly

watwut · 6 years ago

What I am saying is that this is purely theoretical construct. That fine tuned impactful lesson that is so great, but breaks if I dont know the violence will be there, it does not exist. Not even art works that way.

And if it does, it sounds awful lot like something manipulative. Minor red flag wtf is going on manipulative. It is supposed to be college lesson.

Edit: I have seen trigger warning I lecture about American history from one of big schools (on youtube, they released it free). The lecturer just said "I will show violence" or some such and that was it. If you left the room, you would not get any special material. You would just avoid sight of dead mistreated people.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

I'd need to know what you mean by manipulative and why it seems negative in this context, I apologize because I feel like that might seem sort of pedantic but education as a field has a very large collection of practices that could easily be described as manipulation. At the same time, I'm worried manipulation seems like the right word because I've been focusing mainly on surprise content to establish a fast example for the discussion even though what I've really been trying to drive at is the way that trigger warnings and their implementation/expection impacts the teacher-student dynamic.

I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice.

You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.

2804t3qwp commented on Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material aeon.co/ideas/trigger-war... · Posted by u/sillybilly

watwut · 6 years ago

None of those things seem to be like particularly harmed by people being told in advance that violence or rape will happen. Or even knowing in advance that racism or sexism would be depicted.

Knowing in advance that the n-word word appears will not make cornerstone speech different nor make Frederick Douglass book read different. Students don't have to say n-word to read it in context either?

Trigger warning to classic movie would not be the whole plot. Plus plenty of students will know plot or read the plot on imdb and classic movies are very mild about rape and violence due to censorship at the time and generally society overreacting to those depictions back then. (If they are about to show snuff or B movies I am actually fine with students bailing out or at least know in advance.) Are they gonna show whole movie in lecture suddenly? That would be quite unlikely, things like movies tend to be homework.

The movies that made me feel bad about violence and stuff did not relied on surprise. Surprise is for entertainment and being clever in plot.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

I agree that none of the examples I gave would lose much of their impact, but I'd argue that's also not directly tied in to the ovarching point I was trying to express (though obviously I expressed it badly or else that's where the focus would be).

It's easy to point to any one example and say "Well that could still work." but the point I was trying to drive at is that this changes the dynamic of the lecture. Surprise can be used as a catalyst for introspection or introducing a strategic amount of discomfort to illustrate a point, etc. the point I was trying to make is simply that it has utility. When you are /required/ to have a trigger warning, as an instructor, you are being obligated to compromise the effect you were trying to persue and presumably you were trying to persue it because you thought it would help the class with some form of comprehension whether that be intellectual or emotional.

Even if you're not outright required to issue trigger warnings (lets say because a middle ground policy is implemented that encourages instructors to do so but leaves it to their discretion) those instructors are still required to adapt to triggered students or else they wouldn't have been encouraged/required to do so in the first place. But because there's no reliable way to know what specific content will trigger a student in a given class the system is actually incentivizing censorship because now the only way to ensure you minimize trigger events is to assume that every student is triggerable and so optimal content becomes content which is as unchallenging, emotionally speaking, as possible.

Allergies wouldn't be a terrible analogy. Lots of schools, in America I can't speak for Europe and elsehwere, have regulations about common allergies like peanuts. These regulations are targeted towards common allergies because otherwise the task of preventing allergic reactions becomes an all encompassing battle to minimize liability. That's not to say students with rare allergies shouldn't be accommodated at all, but at some point the impact on the other students has to be addressed.

2804t3qwp commented on Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material aeon.co/ideas/trigger-war... · Posted by u/sillybilly

watwut · 6 years ago

What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise? It is one of those arguments that make these all discussions completely outside of my experience. I never seen material that would be harmed by that. Not even movies and I hate spoilers.

I was never triggered. I was never triggered by trigger warning either, I just don't care. For all I know, veterans and raped or abused people can have all the warnings they want and nothing whatsoever changes for me. They can not have them and nothing whatsoever changes for me.

These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most. And the hostility of the whole debate from anyone except those few directly affected is puzzling. Like, one 100 people will skip that one lecture that has detailed depiction of rape. Big deal.

Plus traditionally, education went out of its way to euphemise rapes and sex generally away. Like, calling using the word rape to characterize rape in old text did not used to be common. They used to prefer to talk about it in codes.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

>What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise?

It's a hard one to answer but I'll give the answers I can from my time in university. It's hard mostly because each instructor handles the material differently so often examples are oneshots.

With regard to sociology and anthropology, the Nacirema are often presented as a real tribe at first. Many students will realize what's happening, but the point of the assignment is to encourage students to realize that from the outside even their own culture is strange and in this way, so the idea goes, they are better able to view things from a neutral position because of this lesson on cultural introspection.

Other examples could be things like literature readings of classical texts. Many students are uncomfortable saying the N-Word, for obvious reasons, but censoring it diminishes the significance of the word and while that's not a bad thing in day to day life it's nonetheless bad if your goal is to impart on your students a sense of what weight that word carried in its historical context.

Movies are another good example. There are lots of classic movies that get shown to illustrate a point but part of the point is a conclusion that's arrived at over the course of a movie. On my mind when I say this is the short movie about a teacher who basically invents racism by telling her class children with one color of eye are better than the others and then later she reverses this decision. In both cases the children treated the inferior group overall worse and none of them liked being the inferior group.

>These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most.

This is ultimately the core point. Triggers are nuanced and often specific to the individual. There's no easy way to know in advanced what might set something off and so encouraging trigger warnings is ultimately encouraging censorship of long practiced content (whether that censorship is outright or in the form of encouraging a hopefully less confrontational presentation of the content which diminishes the emotional impact of the lesson).

2804t3qwp commented on Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material aeon.co/ideas/trigger-war... · Posted by u/sillybilly

lilyball · 6 years ago

Yes you can. You can choose to skip a particular lecture if it's covering particularly triggering topics. If the lecture is particularly important, you can approach the professor about dealing with the lecture content in a more sensitive one-on-one context, or see if the lecture is recorded such that you can watch it later when you have more mental spoons to deal with it.

> it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted

Teachers should not be making their students uncomfortable (let alone triggering trauma) by surprise. This is a consent issue.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

Why is this a consent issue? Lots of intro to sociology classes do a lesson on the Nacirema, race and violence are massive components of studying mid 20th century literature, and plenty of other fields of study have lessons that are meant to convey an emotional context and not just an informational one and they do this often with surprise elements. Labeling that as traumatic and non-consensual glosses over the part where the main people who seem to be reporting trauma from these lessons are people who already had trauma and are clearly still influenced heavily by it or they wouldn't need trigger warnings. Calling it a consent issue frankly is just a dog whistle.

And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? The professor already selected the information they felt was relevant and presented it in the fashion they felt was the most useful to the class. Your viewpoint only seems to make sense if the default assumption is that emotional information isn't a priority for the instructor but that doesn't jive with how a large swathe of the humanities and social sciences are often taught.

2804t3qwp commented on Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material aeon.co/ideas/trigger-war... · Posted by u/sillybilly

lilyball · 6 years ago

Yeah, that's because they had to watch the content anyway. Trigger warnings allow people to avoid triggering content, or to delay consuming the content until they're in a better frame of mind. If you say "This content has X, Y, and Z, and you have to consume it right now" the fact that you warned them isn't going to do much.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

It feels like wasted effort in this context then. The article talks a lot about the university setting specifically, you can't just not engage with your course material and expect to have the same educational outcomes as someone who did. It seems like it'd be more effective for majors to list their trigger warnings before the course even starts with the understanding that if you can't handle the content then you should probably choose a difference major. Likewise, it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted.

2804t3qwp commented on Bad Binder: Android In-the-Wild Exploit googleprojectzero.blogspo... · Posted by u/el_duderino

tptacek · 6 years ago

There's no "agreement" or "disagreement" to be had here. Vulnerability researchers don't create vulnerabilities, they find and ultimately eliminate them. Vulnerability research at the level practiced by P0 commands huge daily rates, and Google's competitors actively pay those rates to other researchers. It is simply a fact that what Google is doing is a donation to other vendors and their users.

You can dispute their intentions, but I'm not all that interested in debating those. What you can't do is debate the effect, which is positive.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

If you're not interested in debating their intentions then why frame it as a donation? That by itself is a normative judgement in this context, and the reason I brought up framing, since normally two primary characteristics of a donation are that it can be refused and that it is being offered in good faith.

This is the same general point that the original comment you had replied to was making which itself was an explanation of why people are distrustful of P0 even if the brass tax is positive for the end user. It's fine if you don't find that political side of it interesting but it's not as simple as just being a donation.

2804t3qwp commented on Deepfakes: MIT brings Nixon's Apollo disaster speech to life wbur.org/news/2019/11/22/... · Posted by u/jbredeche

canada_dry · 6 years ago

Deep fakes are yet another prime example of how the writing is on the wall (i.e. it's clear that this technology can/will be used for nefarious purposes - esp. by our enemies) and yet mitigations - through regulation and enhanced standards - won't be pursued until long after the horses have left the barn.

I don't know how/what form this should take, but an older analogy might be how colour photocopier manufacturers imbed microdots into each reproduction so counterfeit bills can be traced to the equipment that produced them.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

I'm curious to know why you feel like regulation and standards are the solution here. It seems fairly clear that the propaganda metagame heavily favors disinformation and is only getting better at creating disinformation products. If we accept that premise, then it seems like the real problem is that we're still trying to preserve the idea that the internet is a tool for learning. Certainly parts of the internet are, but if the bloggers vs. professional press are anything to go by then it seems like the most practical solution is to establish lists of trusted entities and the contexts in which they're trusted. The managing of lists is regulatory in a sense but the trust side of the equation seems more social than bureaucratic, people need to be much less trustful of the internet.

2804t3qwp commented on Bad Binder: Android In-the-Wild Exploit googleprojectzero.blogspo... · Posted by u/el_duderino

tptacek · 6 years ago

I don't understand really any of this. Finding vulnerabilities in your competitors products is in fact a donation to those competitors and, more importantly, their users.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

It sounds like the idea that it's a donation is the part where we fundamentally disagree then. If you expose an unpatched exploit and the number of people using that exploit goes up because of your publication then you've contributed to worsening the security landscape for whoever the relevant user is. If an exploit is years old, or if there's some other relevant context, then sure exposing a vulnerability mainly means that the parent company doesn't have to pay for the research. But it's not a favor they asked you to perform and if you have a competing product with that company then the question becomes "Why aren't you publishing more about yourself?" since surely no one is in a better position to do security research on your products than yourself or a contractor you hired. It's basically PR motivated research and when there's also a lack of transparency it leads to easy speculation that maybe you're holding back research on yourself purposefully or even simply not publishing the more damning research you discover about your own products.

2804t3qwp commented on Tesla Cybertruck tesla.com/cybertruck... · Posted by u/sahin

waiseristy · 6 years ago

I feel like I am taking crazy pills with the amount of good sentiment to this design. This thing is absolutely fugly. The guys over at Rivian must be having a party right now.

2804t3qwp · 6 years ago

I think this really comes down to expectations. Imo, Tesla is a luxury brand. I get that some people feel like the Model 3 is a Tesla for the common man but the common man is either buying used or they're buying something that can be reliably fueled. That being said, and the reason for saying it, in the world of luxury brands idea matters too. The idea that an electric vehicle can compete on most of the spec sheet with a combustion/hybrid engine is sexy to people with futurist enthusiasms because electric things are being pushed as the sexy eco-friendly future right now. Obviously that's all just my own opinions, but I've yet to see much else to explain Tesla's balance sheets (plain incompetence isn't something I'm willing to buy into from the CEO that's working at innovating the astro services market as we speak).