Visit http://1.2.3.50 to disable this image compression for your device.
Add "Cache-Control: no-transform" to your headers to disable image compression for all your site's visitors.
Web devs should make sites that work without javascript, so that turning on NoScript is also a solution.
The bmi.js injection may look a bit nasty, but it is there to save bandwidth for users who are on a bandwidth budget. Vodafone would profit from higher bandwidth usage.
What you say is technically true, but for a user it's complete BS:
- As a developer I looked for a way to disable this system - maybe something changed, but ~5 years ago I couldn't find any information about the 1.2.3.50 address and support told me it's not possible.
- Unless you're running a site that's professionally based on image distribution, you're unlikely to know no-transform exists.
- NoScript can block the bmi script specifically, not everything. Vodafone doing MITM shouldn't concern webdevs.
- The injection does not look nasty. It is nasty - you get no easy switch for it and cannot decide for yourself what behaviour you want. If you really want bandwidth saving, use opera mini - it's available for all phones now.
Sorry for being harsh, but I don't see how Vodafone's MITM can be defended in any way.
Progressive enhancement is easy. Your framework or development tools should do most of the work for you. Maybe try different tools?
> run on Gopher
Nonsense - CSS is very powerful, and all the functionality most websites need works fine with <form>s.
Part of the problem may be the difference between nice features with necessary features. Nobody would expect fancier features such as custom buttons/widgets or fancy client-side form verification to work without Javascript. You have to do all the checking on the server anyway.
> cognitive dissonance
Err, no - leaving out progressive enhancement is just lazy. Why would you prefer to shows people a broken website as a first impression? Do you even know how many people see a broken website? (i.e. do you check server logs?)
Do you do web development professionally every day? If so, how long would you estimate you spend on making sure HTML-only pages render correctly?
Do you ever do advanced sites where multiple actions exist on one page that can't be easily encapsulated in HTML?
I ask because calling devs lazy for not backwards-checking their JS scripts is a bit much. So you want them to solve the problem they just solved, except this time, do it without some code assistance? That seems a bit unreasonable.
For many sites these days it is acceptable and justifiable to run Javascript. That was not true in the early 2000's, but we are a long way from there.
Facebook and YouTube, as highly interactive applications, are not "most websites".
Practically ever single blog, news site, store, business page, and the like have zero need for Javascript, and requiring it only makes your site look broken. The maybe better with Javascript, of course.
While I haven't worked on websites in the last year or so, I have made websites professionally in the past for many years. Making a progressively enhanced store that works without Javascript in Rails 2/3 was really easy.
> vast majority of your users will never even consider turning it off.
How do you know this? Are you guessing? Are you relying on Javascript-based analytics and are therefore blind to people that disable Javascript? Do you have server logs that show how many people disable Javascript? Is you site broken without Javascript so this claim becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I ask this every time someone makes that claim, and have never gotten a response.
This is honestly just out of touch with most modern Web development. Even if its "easy" to develop (which is debatable), if its not a priority with product managers it will simply not happen in today's "more with less" technology industry. Consider also that users who block JavaScript also block most analytics packages (by design)--from a data-driven product management standpoint, users who block JavaScript literally don't exist. Web QA is hard enough across multiple browsers and OSes; adding to that a second version of the site for users whose presence can't even be quantified is not going to be popular.
> Nonsense - CSS is very powerful, and all the functionality most websites need works fine with <form>s.
"You don't need a language other than __. __ is a Turing-complete language, thus is very powerful, so it should have all the functionality most developers need."
Most websites don't even need a Turing-complete language. Which is kind of the point - Javascript is a security risk and a privacy risk precisely because it is Turing-complete.
No need to apologize for giving your opinion. I have strong feelings on accessibility and security, perhaps a bit too strong. Others may rank design or "a fast development pipeline" higher than me.
I expect content websites to function without requiring JavaScript. I'll settle for a much poorer experience, as long as I can access the content.
Put more strongly: Nothing is gained (from a user perspective) by requiring JavaScript, but security is lost (Tor disabled NoScript because too much of the web would break, leading to disclosure of user data [1])
>> Web devs should make sites that work without javascript, so that turning on NoScript is also a solution.
> Sorry but this is a ridiculous statement, it's like saying websites should still be able to run on Gopher.
Sorry, but your statement is ridiculous. Unless the website is an
application, that is, it does something useful, it's just bunch of text
and images. You should not expect people to give you full Turing capability
just because you're too full of your awesomeness that you can write a program.
> It's cool if you want to run NoScript but if you think website should/would be made around that you have cognitive dissonance.
I don't think that term "cognitive dissonance" means what you think it means.
Also please avoid ad hominem statements on Hacker News. It's not far away from saying "if you think that then you are stupid", and no more constructuive.
1.2.3.50 is within the "APNIC Debogon Project" range. I don't understand using these kinds of ranges as internal IPs - Vodafone controls the DNS servers for these devices so just make it optout.voda and resolve that somewhere that you actually own.
Well it's pretty much the addresses you start using when you've run out of IPv4 addresses everywhere else.
A very popular example of this is 100.64/10, but one can find little bits here and there. Plenty of providers don't just use that range but 1/8 is pretty safe to use.
There are even posts on networking mailinglists about tests for using the multicast ranges (multicast doesn't work* anyway and is now widely considered a "never gonna happen" design). Leave 224.0.0.0/24 alone and you can pretty much use the rest of 224.0.0.0/4. Also, most of broadcast is fine to use on most networking equipment.
* of course, locally within a network it does work for a very small number of multicast streams (certainly doesn't work for 2^28 multicast streams as designed, so in ipv6 they upped the number of available multicast channels to 2^120)
For complex platforms I may see your point. But what about personal pages or blogs (including hosted like Wordpress)? Why do webdevs even remotely consider publishing an empty webpage in case the client does not run javascript?
What do you think my impression of your website is when all I see is a blank page or an endlessly spinning loading wheel?
Yes, I agree. For static content pages, the content should largely render and its content should be largely digestible whether or not the client's javascript engine is running.
That being said, an easy defense against webscrapers and content re-purposers is to make sure the client is running javascript.
Of course, there are ways around this, but I liken it to this scenario: If there are two similar houses on a block and only one has an alarm system, the cat burgler will choose the one without the alarm.
Interesting. The "new terrorist tool used in the Paris attacks, encryption" is far from new, and that story has revolved around the Playstation network (which the media told us was used by the Paris terrorists, despite the originators of that rumor retracting their story about Jambon).
The "problem" here is not secure communication. It is media propaganda / information warfare. Facebook and Twitter being used to instill hate and spread conspiracies. It is all in the open: Facebook images stating that Israel is behind ISIS, or Twitter accounts that post nothing but Anwar al-Awlaki videos. Could you imagine that happening 10 years ago, on your own homepage, without being raided? If Twitter can block porn, surely they can block terrorist propaganda too. But the law enforcement probably want to use these for fishing. Instead Clinton wants to build another nuke.
> "Dad, what happens if Donald Trump wins and we have to move out of our homes?"
These are propaganda tactics close to character assassination. In the next sentence he says that "freedom of expression" unites us, but when Trump uses this freedom of expression he is suddenly scaring Muslim kids. Very recognizable.
> especially from someone as untried and as incompetent as Donald Trump.
You just know that they made this a talking point, a hook. And O'Malley wrestled it in his answer, because that is what he prepared.
> where do you draw the line between national security and personal security?
I think this kind of research is rather unethical and farcical. Like the previous research, where they came to the conclusion that Putin was an autist, based solely on Youtube video's.
it seems like a clumsy attempt to discredit Putin, so
that people don’t take him seriously.
we’re just being given pure conjecture, dressed up as
convincing scientific knowledge. This sort of practice
doesn’t offer any useful scientific insight into, well,
anything, and it misrepresents how science works, and
what good quality scientific research looks like.
I do understand that as a public figure one attracts more scrutiny. But I also thought that medical professionals, like neurologists, fall under Hippocratic Oath:
Whatever, in the course of my practice, I may see or
hear (even when not invited), whatever I may happen to
obtain knowledge of, if it be not proper to repeat it,
I will keep sacred and secret within my own breast.
If a neurologist is allowed to dig up old KGB manuals to classify heads of state as gunslingers, I am allowed to say this has nothing to do with fast gun access, but everything with signalling stature through body language: People will pass you by at your swinging arm and not bump into you when you employ this gate. Either that or old habits really do die hard, and Putin carries a gun to summits.
it's the christmas BMJ, which is traditionally full of somewhat tongue in cheek articles. That said, how does your dominance hypothesis explain the consistent asymmetry?
Absolute and utter FUD article, with zero basis in science and all the markings of another self-fulfilling social research trick.
Of to Google "Are all The New York Times articles shitty journalism?" Our research shows that in the months after these searches, the number of shitty articles on The New York Times seems to rise. We know this before the FBI does so, because we wield the power of Google Trends.
Do note that this is the most basic of SEO: Actually having the search engine access your content, so it can index it.
It is, and has been, a far cry from actual optimization: Giving your content the best possible ranking it deserves.
Want to be able to rank for an exact sentence match? Sure, use Angular. Want to actually compete for rankings? Do not build a single-page Angular application.
Solid SEO is about optimizing for users, thinking: "would I do this if search engines did not exist?". SEO for Angular apps has become: "Detect and redirect one of the major search engines to a text alternative".
I interpret the above blog post as Google basically saying that the playing field is now leveled.
If they can fully render client-side applications, why would there be any downsides to using a SPA?
It seems like the days of
>"Detect and redirect one of the major search engines to a text alternative"
The AI field has been a prolific source of hokey new
terminology
...
AI is about the same age as the rest of computing.
...
If DOD spending on AI drops far enough, universities
like Stanford, MIT and CMU may even find the integrity
to rid themselves of scientifically embarassing, but
formerly profitable, AI programs. The quality of CS
faculties and budgets at universities across the
country will continue to be diluted by the presence of
large numbers of AI meatballs.
-- Gary Martins (former RAND manager)
> It was not clear whether the encryption was part of widely used communications tools, like WhatsApp, which the authorities have a hard time monitoring, or something more elaborate.
"PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp," Jambon [Belgium minister] said at a debate in Brussels.
"The most difficult communication between these terrorists is via PlayStation 4," he said. "It’s very, very difficult for our services — not only Belgian services but international services — to decrypt the communication that is done via PlayStation 4." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/playstatio...
So: It is less about encryption (PGP, Tor) than it is about companies running their own communication networks with encryption, and the intelligence agencies have increasingly more trouble tracking extremists using games or phone apps to plan their attacks.
Is that Snowden's fault? No. Did Snowden's leaks contribute to companies making their networks harder to tap? Definitely.
Apparently there was a failure to share and to make actionable sense of this information.
Is that Snowden's fault? No. Did Snowden's broad indiscriminate leaks cause less willingness to share information between intelligence agencies? Definitely.
This is, in my view, a side-effect of these revelations, but a real effect too. I don't want to weigh up these two on a scale, as that will be difficult and everyone will have different priorities anyway.
"Correction: It has not been confirmed, as originally written, that a console was found as a result of specific Belgian terror raids. Minister Jambon was speaking about tactics he knows ISIS to be using generally. "
"C" the applicants you're looking at have roughly
equal distribution of ability.
makes the reasoning more tautological/weak.
If we take two dart boards (one for female -, one for male founders) as a visual, where hitting near the bull's eye counts as "startup success".
If we take "C" to be true, then the darts would be thrown at random.
Now we draw a circle around the bull's eye. Anything landing in this circle we fund. If this circle has a smaller radius on the female dartboard, than on the male dartboard, then evidently the smaller female circle will contain more darts closer to the target (better average performance) than the larger radius male circle.
But then we do not even need performance numbers: Smaller radius circles will have less darts in them. Using "C" we only need to know that the male-female accept ratio is not 50%-50% for us to have found a bias.
In short: If you see a roughly equal distribution of ability, and (for simplicity) a roughly equal number of female to male fundraisers, then you should always have a roughly equal distribution of female to male founders in your portfolio, performance be damned.
The technique is still useful for when you do not have these female vs. male accept ratio's, and a VC publishes only success rates, but this information on ratio's is often more public than success rates/estimates.
I am sorry for all posts in this thread (including this one). Imagine being PG and reading 200+ negative replies to a blog post you did. I could have reasoned in line with Graham and learned a lot more than when resisting and attacking a viewpoint different than yours.
I feel that a different number of darts is salvageable for this logic, but having thought about this blog post some more, I feel bias is inherently non-compute-able. Our decision on how to compute influences our results.
What PG did for me was show that there is no Pascal's wager in statistics: All outcomes/data/measurements/views are equally likely. The view that the female variable alone is able to divide skill/start-up success is weak. The assumption of non-uniform points is weak. The assumption of no variance/unequal rankings is weak. The assumption that a non-random sample is significant is weak. The assumption that VC's are unbiased in their selection procedure is weak. The assumption that nature/environment favors skilled women is weak. The assumption that decisions of who to fund does not influence future applicants. The assumption that women are still selected for capability is weak. The assumption that women ignore nature/environment and keep focusing on start-up capability is weak. It is much more likely that any other thing happens. PG's alternative is certainly a sane one, but one of many.
Perhaps women perform better because, while VC offers the same chance to men and women, they are better at picking capable women than capable men. Bias in favor of capable women.
Perhaps women perform better because, they are naturally better than men.
Perhaps women perform better because, VC is biased against women, and only the strong survive.
Perhaps women perform better because, affirmative actions to remove the inequality in performance (perceived bias) actually increased our objective bias.
Perhaps women perform better because, VC is bad at picking capable women, so they pick incapable women, of which there happen to be a lot more.
Perhaps women perform better because, now the smart and capable women start to act like the mediocre ones (bad funding decisions influence actors looking for reward)
Perhaps women perform better because, nature is "biased" against older risk-averse, but available, men and, older, unavailable women who have children, and nature favors both young males (who have to compete with the old males) and females (who compete only among themselves).
Perhaps women perform better because, our sampling method was biased.
Perhaps women perform better because, our measurements were 5 years old and we are seeing an old static state of a highly complex dynamic system.
Perhaps women perform better because, they are more variant. The good ones are really good and the bad ones are really bad, making it easier on VC's to pick the cream of the crop.
All I know is how little I know. That (algorithmic) bias is an important subject, worth thinking about, and that we need very smart people working on this subject. I would never have gotten away with upvotes on my posts in this thread if the subject was cryptography. I clearly know very little about both subjects (and only now I know that, which I hope is at least a start).
PG showed that we (I), perhaps too easily, go along with the status quo: Our measurements are all correct, our conclusions are all correct. While, if you think about it.. objectively I agree that women and men are equal in capability. If you believe this to be so, then you may have a selection bias, if you observe that men and women perform differently.
I think the least all views could do is to make sure the environment for female founders to flourish is healthy and in line with skill/capability. Then let nature do its thing.
P.S.: If we know that females actually perform better than males, what is the ethical thing to do? Fund even more female founders and make it harder for men? It would make you richer. Affirmative action? It would not remove a bias, it would introduce one.
Assumption: There is no fundamental difference between a female and a male founder for achieving start-up success (average rates and variance/distribution of rates is the same)
Observation: VC funded start-ups with female founders are (on average) 60% more successful than start-ups with male founders
Hypothesis: VC funding is biased against female founders. The ones that do receive funding are better vetted, less risky, and have higher individual qualities.
Experiment: Start funding more female founders.
If we then observe: The numbers start to even out, then there is no fundamental difference. VC funding bias may have been the cause of the difference in success rate.
If we then observe: The numbers stay the same, then there is a fundamental difference and our assumption is flawed.
Rational choice: Start funding more female founders. This either removes a bias (levels the playing field), or increases your profit (funding more potentially successful founders).
PG should of course not use an hypothesis to prove an assumption (experiment/probing is needed for verification). But also: The possibility of an uneven distribution should not invalidate such an experiment (or PG's line of reasoning), it will merely bring it to light (the numbers would stay the same, thus we have shown that the difference is fundamental and not caused by a sampling bias).
Add "Cache-Control: no-transform" to your headers to disable image compression for all your site's visitors.
Web devs should make sites that work without javascript, so that turning on NoScript is also a solution.
The bmi.js injection may look a bit nasty, but it is there to save bandwidth for users who are on a bandwidth budget. Vodafone would profit from higher bandwidth usage.