Spring is about to sprung, but at the pond ennui is in the air, as well as reptile allergens ...
For a change, the pond thought it might open with a flourish directed at Crikey.
It seems that Chris Berg has decided to set up shop there, a dangerous move, though possibly inexpensive.
The moment the pond reads a click bait trolling headline like this: "Telegram founder’s arrest is radical — if it’s a crime to build privacy tools, there will be no privacy" - then the pond's eyes immediately glaze over ...
It's no crime to build privacy tools, the crime is to allow privacy tools to hide criminal activity.
The pond realises that loons are proudly concerned about Democrats molesting children in basements below pizza stores with non-existent basements, but a far more likely way to molest children is via an app which hides the deed, and for which the owner allegedly fails to introduce effective monitoring.
Telegram says it does, French authorities say it doesn't, let the courts decide, but in the meantime let there be no blather about privacy for the molestation of children, unless you happen to be Tuckyo Rose, Uncle Elon or Chris Berg.
Sure this sort of idle provocation generates clicks and exasperated comments, like this from a certain drsmithy, starting with a Bergian flourish:
No, the French claim is that Durov’s company is very uncooperative when it comes to legal requests for information from Telegram about suspects under investigation. I can say this with confidence and no need to speculate, because it’s the second bullet point in the list of French accusations you linked to but obviously did not read (or did and have chosen to lie about):
“Refus de communiquer, sur demandes des autorités habilitées, les informations ou documents nécessaires pour la réalisation et l’exploitation des interceptions autorisées par la loi”
Which Google translate tells me is, in English:
“Refusal to communicate, upon request from the authorized authorities, the information or documents necessary for the performance and exploitation of interceptions authorized by law”
Additionally, if you go and read reporting about this that isn’t just the usual wannabe tax evaders libertarian chicken-littling, the French authorities are being very clear that is the reason, and it’s not just them having the problem, but a bunch of other European Governments as well.
So, it seems reasonably safe to assume that every other accusation involving “complicity” is a product of his organisation’s consistent refusal to answer legal requests, rather than because he simply “developed a tool”.
As an analogy, consider that the police had the phone number of a suspected paeodphile discussing one of his crimes via text message, and Telstra refused to provide that information when presented with a formal request. They’re not doing the wrong thing because they run a mobile phone service, they’re doing the wrong thing because they’re not assisting a police investigation when requested.
I’m not sure many people would consider this is “a radical position”. Indeed, even if you replaced “paedophile” with “bicycle thief”, I doubt many people would find it particularly outrageous.
This entire hysterical rant is based on a false premise that is the product of stupidity, wilful ignorance, or deception. Given old mate is associated with the IPA and ATA, and boasts about being part of the “Blockchain Innovation Hub” it could easily be all three.
Well yes. If the pond wants IPA lite or heavy, it knows where to go. Crikey needn't try to match up ...
There were many more comments including the usual from the barking mad loons that cluster at the site, but if this is the trolling, click baiting tip of the libertarian iceberg, then Crikey is likely to be off the pond's map. If the pond wants inane arguments, there's always the reptiles and they're always on splendid parade in their Easter bonnets in the weekend Oz ...
Before going there, as a correspondent noted, how could the pond resist noting the splendid news in yesterday's Weekly Beast?
Possessed of only a modest level of self-awareness, the pond at least knew it had long been in the grip of a niche cult product, the work of a wild-eyed dangerous clique, a bunch of extremists well outside the mainstream, and that few on planet earth 2.0 shared the pond's bizarre desire to plunge into the maelstrom.
Then came the evidence ...
The pond ventures to suggest that if it wasn't for the ABC constantly recycling reptile talking points and giving them respectability in "what's in the papers today" type idiocies, no one would know or care what the reptiles wrote or thought ...
Weirdly, News Corp stays in the game by offering a free news service, news.com.au, which studiously avoids lizard Oz extremism and has no paywall.
But do the lizards of Oz ever learn that lesson? Does News Corp? Nope, the same old stew, the same old slops, the same old gruel, is served up day after day, while the pond holds out its bowl and begs for more niche clique cult gruel please ...
Something broke in the pond this day, and the desire to tip the gruel on the floor was overwhelming.
The reptiles have hit on the trick of dragging some of their commentary away from the far right column, embedding them in what allegedly passes for "news".
So there was nattering "Ned" blathering on about Gaza as the genocide goes down and the pond simply couldn't do it.
Above him was Dame Slap, blathering on about the Voice, and the pond simply couldn't do it. Dame Slap opened this way ...
There was a time when the Yes side infuriated me with the shallow quality of their “debate”. Now the Yes side bores me. It has been 10 months since the proposal to change our Constitution failed, and its proponents still have not moved past the second stage of grief. They are now wallowing in anger. Why did this happen, who is to blame? Someone, please wake me up when the bloodletting stops. Even better, let’s hope they get to the final stage – acceptance – soon. Please.
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly, I'm cryin'
Waiting for the van to come
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Saturday
Man, you've been a naughty boy
You let your face grow long
They are the Ughmenn
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob
For anybody vaguely interested, a short commentary on the Harris-Walz CNN "interview":
ReplyDeleteRating the CNN interview(er)
https://jabberwocking.com/rating-the-cnn-interview/
GB - thanks for that link. Much better than the blatant over-acting of 'presenters' on Sky News Australia, although, interestingly, James Morrow, whose 'you know' quotient can run above 100%, had that in control for his theatrics yesterday. That was the only improvement on his usual blather, and I have not bothered to dial up Ms Panicky.
DeleteYair, I especially liked KD's comprehensive list of 'Questions asked'. Noodlenuts are to be found everywhere. especially on 'popular' media.
DeletePS: you might like this one too:
Deletehttps://www.eschatonblog.com/2024/08/its-important-for-harris-to-answer.html
I did like that one too, GB. Always worth being reminded that low unemployment generates benefits to multiple numbers of people, in giving them opportunities to renegotiate the terms and conditions of their current jobs, or to seek another, which offers them more satisfactions.
DeleteThe Chadwick quotient aka the "you know" quotient, leads to...
Delete"Normalization of deviance can exist in conjunction with corporate omerta where deviation from rules is held up by a code of silence surrounding the deviations or an unspoken agreement on rhetoric within a group of executives. One of the reasons Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302crashed was normalization of deviance based on a criticism of corporate omerta with a "culture of silence".[8]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
The koolaid reverses "corporate omerta with a "culture of silence" making it a culture of noise. No less omerta.
Anonymous - we do seem to have more fun around the pond than many other discussion sites manage, and I have enjoyed your further investigation of what a 'you know' quotient might become in our culture. Your comments, and references, might even make the excessive use of that 'filler phrase' less irritating to me, personally, on the odd occasions when I still attempt reviews of what is blowing across the Sky News broadcasts.
DeleteThe Owl-man did set out a useful truth this day, but with no self-awareness. ‘Illiteracy about how the world actually works is everywhere.’ The device takes him to his understanding of how he thinks the world actually works, with coal tar as one example.
ReplyDeleteMight we go back to 1856, when the remarkably young William Perkin, was actually trying to synthesize quinine in the cause of British dominance in the malarial tropics. The elements did not co-operate for Perkin, and he was left with a reddish powder. A further attempt at synthesis, with aniline, gave Perkin the first mauve dye, and the foundation of his fortune.
So far, so the flowering of ‘science’ in the middle of the 19th century. Yes - Perkin’s financial success set off many other, similarly random (such as Fahlberg with saccharin), investigations of the coal tar that was an abundant waste-product of the age of gas lighting, available by the barrel from the gas producers at no cost. Those further successes took organic chemistry from a branch of botany, to the industry that supports much of our life now.
The Owl-man, in typical booster fashion, would have us believe that this was unending triumph of human progress. Yet, through the second half of the 19th century, particularly as manufacturers competed, in ‘free enterprise’ fashion, much of the history of producing dyes and colourings from coal tar was caught up in the distressing, sometimes deadly, side effects of using colours on clothing, then in foodstuffs and drinks, which had been made with arsenic or aniline as mordants. Or bright yellow sweets for children, with a significant level of picric acid.
So that early history of organic chemistry, should have been a useful reminder to the Owl to moderate his boosterism for sheet plastics in the 21st century. But, of course, in best cost-benefit analysis - claim all the benefits, steer the costs to some sad failing of human nature which the mighty market has not yet corrected.
I don't think he reckons there ever is anything for the market to correct - it's all just down to the incorrigible failings of the lesser homo saps saps, isn't it ? Market creations are all perfect from the moment of conception aren't they ?
DeleteAfter all, if you developed cancer from all the cigarettes you smoked, it was just because of your own failure, wasn't it ?
Hasn't everybody worked out that Musk is just a hater who wants to exterminate the human race ? After all, he loves his wives and children so much he can't stop having them, and he can't stop hating them all.
ReplyDeleteWhat he really wants, though, is that the Mars colony will consist entirely of Musk descendants and that Planet Terra will just end up uninhabited.
Ughmann's knowledge of the philosophy of science is very superficial. A theory is not discarded because of 'black swan events' eg, it was known in the 19th century that Newton's theory of gravity was wrong (the orbit of Mercury was not as predicted) but it was not discarded. Imre Lakatos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos) noted "that one can always protect a cherished theory (or part of one) from hostile evidence by redirecting the criticism toward other theories or parts thereof" (to rescue Newton's theory, a planet Vulcan was proposed in an orbit that fixed the error in Mercury's orbit, but in a position that we couldn't see it). I haven't studied philosophy of science for a very long time, but back then the best answer to "what is science" was, "it's what scientists do".
ReplyDeleteJoe - I wondered why my Owl-Man went off on that digression. I am wary about any claims for a general philosophy of science, because my professional time was in biology. The foundations of biology are laid by taxonomists. Of my personal experience, the best taxonomists were somewhere on the 'spectrum' - they sorted and categorized organisms simply because that is a human thing to do. That attribute is known to have a significant genetic component. I believe that comes from our time as hunter gatherers, when it was of benefit to tribe, or clan, or whatever grouping, for someone to know the important characteristics of several thousand plants and animals. No doubt clans were reduced or eliminated because they did not have the member, often also shaman, who knew which red berries were good to eat, and which ones could kill you before sundown.
DeleteThe quote attributed to Rutherford, about science being either physics or stamp collecting, is apposite.
Well it's hardly unpredictable that Ughlmann is as ignorant of rational inquiry as he is of all other human 'knowledge'.
DeleteBut I think it's worth contemplating the conception of N. David Mermin enunciated in his 'Boojums All The Way Through' that our 'scientific investigations' are comprised of two components:
1. 'explanations' which are the theories, models and concepts that we develop to allow us to interpret the universe and predict its behaviour
2. 'descriptions' which are statements about reality.
As may be just a tad obvious, we have lots of explanations, but not quite so many descriptions. So 'gravity' is an 'explanation' whereas the orbits of planets is the best we can come up with in the way of a 'description'.
Therefore, 'explanations' are subject to continuous revision and improvement as our set of 'descriptions' changes as our means of observation and recording improve over time.
Just don't let us ever fool ourselves that our 'explanations' are actually 'descriptions'.
My partner has been 'streaming' ER of late (in the old fashioned way, episode by episode at the rate of two episodes daily). And in one episode I just happened to catch, one of the performers decided not to sing a memorial prayer at a pre-burial gathering, but to go for some Green day Good Riddance lyrics.
ReplyDeleteFrom which, I thought this sounded good:
"Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go
So make the best of this test, and don't ask why
It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time
It's something unpredictable
But in the end, it's right
I hope you had the time of your life."
Ooops: https://youtu.be/mwnoNVOj1Fs
Delete(if you are at all interested).
Clearly having an 'inside' day; 'outside' is setting a winter temperature record, and not in a pleasant way.
DeleteBut, a bit of 'verse', from when 'Punch' tried to be amusing, and celebrating that early boom in British organic chemistry, at industrial scale. The author did use 'alembic', but pity they did not have a Kez then.
There’s hardly a thing that man can name
Of use or beauty in life’s small game
But you can extract in alembic or jar
From the ‘physical basis’ of black coal-tar
Oil and ointment, and wax and wine,
And the lovely colours called aniline:
You can make anything from a salve to a star,
If you only know how, from black coal-tar.
Speaking of the angelic one's dreaded elites sometime a long time ago in Palestine the political and religious elites executed a certain long haired sandal wearing character for being a trouble maker who is now famous for throwing the money lenders out of the temple.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile the church founded on that minor atrocity is collectively the worlds second or third largest property owner, and a major behind the scenes player in world politics.
It is also historically infamous for executing thousands of trouble makers who dared to question its self appointed "authority", especially uppity women as defined by the toxic Hammer of Witches tract.
ReplyDeleteOn the Crikey story about Telegram, it's worth noting that messages over Telegram are encrypted only under very specific conditions, never by default, see https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram-is-not-really-an-encrypted-messaging-app/