Two federal agents tampered with important evidence, likely fabricated the entire “murder for hire” fiction, abused their law enforcement positions to steal millions of dollars worth of bitcoins, and carefully framed other people.
The literally corrupt federal agents got a slap on the wrist. They’ll both be out of prison soon.
But the young man who built a website for weed is to remain in prison for life.
The whole "XYZ material shouldn't exist in the world" thing seems so naive. It's not hard to manufacture most things and people always will find ways to do it. If we want to use legislation to help people then we should do that but using violence and prisons probably isn't helping anyone.
It's not hard to find a zero day in software used for parts of our critical infrastructure. It's not hard to create potent drugs from small amounts of precursors. It's not hard to build a gun or a bomb in a machine shop.
But the thing is, most people that have those skills are not malicious. At worst, they're money-motivated and will sell these types of society damaging substances or objects, but with the long arm of the law and a credible threat of jail time most of the people that would try to make a quick buck are dissuaded from doing so, or at least slowed by the resultant paranoia.
I know it's not perfect. I know many illegal drugs should be legal and I know that people outside of the western world smuggle in or transmit these things that damage our society, but that doesn't invalidate our struggle. We cannot live in a lawless society and though I think that it is better to cut the root causes of things like drug abuse, we still need to keep dangerous drugs to a minimum.
>But the thing is, most people that have those skills are not malicious. At worst, they're money-motivated and will sell these types of society damaging substances or objects, but with the long arm of the law and a credible threat of jail time most of the people that would try to make a quick buck are dissuaded from doing so, or at least slowed by the resultant paranoia.
If this were the actually the case and people with those skills weren't malicious and were dissuaded by the law then the only way to obtain those substances would be to manufacture them yourself. As it stands you can find sellers on Instagram so that's clearly wrong.
It's not hard to manufacture most things and people
always will find ways to do it.
Ever hear of a drug addict becoming so desperate that they start manufacturing their own drugs for personal use? Aside from growing pot, which I wouldn't call "manufacturing", not once have I ever heard of this happening. If it's so "not hard", why doesn't this happen?
Manufacturing drugs isn't difficult on the order of refining uranium or something, but it's not trivial. You need knowledge, gear, raw materials that are not all trivial to obtain, and a location where you pull off some kind of small-scale chemical manufacturing operation without getting caught.
If we want to use legislation to help people then we should
do that but using violence and prisons probably isn't
helping anyone.
I would certainly agree that we should not criminalize drug users of any sort.
Suppliers and manufacturers of deadly drugs are another story.
The whole "XYZ material shouldn't exist in the world" thing
seems so naive.
What's naive is lumping all recreational drugs together with blanket statements like these.
Recreational drugs run the gamut from nearly harmless (marijuana, etc) to absolutely deadly (heroin, fentanyl, etc). In a just and logical world, they would never even be a part of the same discussion.
At the deadly end of the spectrum, yes, I certainly do feel confident in saying that some drugs have absolutely no place in society. I have seen what they do. I have been to the funerals for friends, loved ones, and family members. There is no safe way to use heroin. Drugs like meth, heroin, and crack destroy lives and towns.
It is the laziest and most naive possible libertarian dream to think that people should be allowed to supply deadlier drugs to people because of one's lasses-faire fever dreams. It's the kind of isolated, privileged fantasy that evaporates quickly when you have to identify your son in a morgue.
>Ever hear of a drug addict becoming so desperate that they start manufacturing their own drugs for personal use? Aside from growing pot, which I wouldn't call "manufacturing", not once have I ever heard of this happening. If it's so "not hard", why doesn't this happen?
The “war on drugs” has exacted a higher human toll on our society than any of the substances which you claim “have no place existing in the world.” Do some research.
I believe it technically started as a "website for shrooms" not a "website for weed." Does that raise or lower the criminality? Because it's actually a lower schedule drug federally...
This is not an isolated incident, it happens every day. The justice system is more worried about putting someone behind bars, no matter if it is guilty or not. That makes death sentences even worse.
I think all drugs should be legal for recreational use, but Ulbricht almost certainly did try to murder several people and believed he succeeded. This evidence was admitted at trial and contributed to the sentence. The crooked agents' actions didn't invalidate those aspects of the fundings: it appears there's very strong evidence he genuinely tried to do that, repeatedly.
So, I have zero sympathy for him. Life is an appropriate sentence. Other DNM owners who don't try to kill people, on the other hand, I definitely tend to sympathize with (though if they allow sale of fentanyl or poisons/weapons, that complicates things).
Having reliable, auditable, public protocols which can operate without the blessing of the world’s existing governments is precisely the point.
Killer examples include any products or services which would provide a net positive value to society but are currently outlawed within various geographic territories for superstitious reasons and/or to protect existing industries from competition.
Prediction markets are an excellent example here: a substantial body of research now indicates that 1) prediction markets are superior to all other strategies in predicting any quantifiable event (because they are “meta tools” which inherently incorporate the best information from all strategies) and 2) non-private markets can’t be used for manipulating elections, sponsoring assassinations, or incentivizing real-world action of any sort. (In any prediction market with a public order book, any attempted “action-incentivizing position” can be consumed by arbitrage until all that remains is a measure of the event’s real probability). For several decades, researchers from dozens of universities have lobbied for relaxing the ban on prediction markets in USA, with little progress to show. Until that ban is lifted (which could take decades longer), blockchain-based prediction markets will have no domestic competition.
Also worth noting: even in the presence of legal, centralized prediction markets, decentralized prediction market protocols may still be competitive because they require far less counterparty-risk, allowing them to safely support higher volumes and larger positions.
> non-private markets can’t be used for manipulating elections, sponsoring assassinations, or incentivizing real-world action of any sort. (In any prediction market with a public order book, any attempted “action-incentivizing position” can be consumed by arbitrage until all that remains is a measure of the event’s real probability)
Source(s) for this?
I know prediction markets will have far-reaching consequences when they aren’t or can’t be constrained anymore.
The mere presence of a payout for low-probability is a broad change. Maybe I’m not being paid to kill someone via the market directly, but I am naturally incentivized to collect information about the world, gain power, and then use my power to bet on and make low-probability events happen.
Another question - How do we solve the decentralized oracle problem without relying on decentralized votes that could be biased due to past voting behavior or their vested interest in the outcome of a truth vote?
> Some worry that censorship-resistant prediction markets will be used to encourage assassinations (and other crimes); this concern does not hold up to a sober examination. “Assassination markets” (AMs), as originally proposed by Jim Bell, are irreconcilably different from Prediction Markets (PMs). My experimental method for funding public goods with PMs has features which render it incompatible with crime. Furthermore, markets would generally present an excessively-complex, risky, and convoluted form of criminal financing. Truthcoin presents a (peaceful) alternative for accomplishing ideological goals, which features greater persuasiveness as well as lower cost. I conclude with a short discussion covering [1] recourse for those affected by AMs (of any kind), [2] features of Truthcoin designed to amplify the inherent impracticalities of AMs, and [3] the (necessarily relevant) total net effect of Truthcoin on political assassinations, general crime and general human welfare.
The linked paper does a thorough job of explaining this scenario, but to summarize: yes, in the absence of other market participants you might try to bet on low-probability events and make them happen. But because it's a public market, anyone can see the anomalous "predictions" you have made, and "free ride" on or even "front run" your position, including your accomplices (who can also sabotage you). On net, your position will be mostly consumed by arbitrage, your payout will be inconsequential compared to the capital required, and the probability "returned" by the market will remain accurate.
Decentralized prediction markets also offer global liquidity, so the counterparty can be located anywhere on earth. Also the friction and fees should be much lower. If someone in Mongolia wants to bet a million dollars against someone in Colombia today, it’s extremely hard to do without a blockchain (think about the fees and time to wire the money, who would you be wiring it to, etc). Prediction markets are not just for gambling, by the way. They could be used for earthquake insurance, for example.
What is the ongoing performance cost of using the official TypeScript compiler for long-running applications? Or is this primarily a concern of startup time for scripts and short-lived programs like CLIs?
AFAIK, tsc is just a compiler, not a runtime. Once you compiled, you're just executing javascript so it only impacts startup time.
ts-node is a runtime able to run TypeScript. It is definitely much much slower at execution, not just at startup time. It's useful for hacking around, I use it as a REPL but even for a dev environment it's faster to use tsc's incremental compilation with a file watcher, and execute the resulting JS
Congratulations on the 1.0 release! I've been using Deno as my primary "hacking" runtime for several months now, I appreciate how quickly I can throw together a simple script and get something working. (It's even easier than ts-node, which I primarily used previously.)
I would love to see more focus in the future on the REPL in Deno. I still find myself trying things in the Node.js REPL for the autocomplete support. I'm excited to see how Deno can take advantage of native TypeScript support to make a REPL more productive: subtle type hinting, integrated tsdocs, and type-aware autocomplete (especially for a future pipeline operator).
There are both ocaml and haskell repls, so it can be done with languages whose type systems are the focus. Not sure if there's anything specific about typescript that would make it hard, though.
The “inflation protection” provided by TIPS relies on the good-faith reporting of the same government which creates and benefits from the inflation.
If inflation as measured by the CPI picks up beyond the single-digit numbers of normal years, do you really expect TIPS to remain honestly valued? Even if that means they outperform all other assets “risk free?”
You can also use the “restart stack frame” option in Chrome DevTools to move back to the beginning of any function currently being executed. So if you skip past something on accident, you can just restart the closest stack frame to bring you back.
It's good to see EFF taking a principled stance on Assange. Too many organizations have chosen to throw WikiLeaks under the bus after their 2016 election leak harmed the "wrong" American political team.
It's a shame that the American political machine is so good at character assassination (of both Assange and WikiLeaks), despite the sorely-needed transparency they've offered to many modern democracies. The world needs more organizations like WikiLeaks, not fewer.
I very much approve of the 'idea' of WikiLeaks. I am not particularly fond of WikiLeaks as an organization. I don't like the way they hold on to material until they think it will make the biggest impact. It makes me wonder how much they've held on to for other reasons, e.g., because it might harm someone they support. To me, WikiLeaks withholding information for political reasons is no better than the originator of the information keeping it secret for political reasons.
I politely called them out on this once, in a comment on one of their early Facebook posts. The comment was deleted quickly. Apparently they are not fans of criticism either.
In spite of my misgivings, and my general disdain for Assange as an individual, I too am glad to see the EFF taking a principled stance.
I think a lot of people, including the media really liked the idea of WikiLeaks, me included.... until it became clear that whatever WikiLeaks was, it wasn't the the open and nobody gets a pass kind of leak site folks wanted it to be.
But yeah whatever the situation here the law should be applied evenly. We'll see.
This has definitely happened. Wikileaks refused to release info on Russia during the 2016 election. Wikileaks may have started out with good intentions, but it seems to be making some explicitly political actions.
There's plenty of legitimate reasons to not release information. Verifying the informations accuracy, that it hasn't been tampered with, and the source is credible is a really high bar to meet. Just because someone dumps data doesn't mean WikiLeaks is going to publish it
I don't know if anyone tried, but if you followed early tweets they talked a lot about having something that was damning and then ... never mentioned it again.
Just taking them at their word you have to wonder what was up.
I'm still personally shocked that Snowden is so widely vilified by my fellow citizens. The guys exposes massive violations of right-to-privacy and the people that he informed call him a traitor.
I’ve heard people say that he released it and fled to Russia. As in, he released it for Russia. The news and people’s biases twisted the story to fit their worldview
>Too many organizations have chosen to throw WikiLeaks under the bus after their 2016 election leak harmed the "wrong" American political team.
I think it was about the fact that he selectively decided what to release in order to harm his own opponents. Wasn't very principled of him, and he effectively did the same thing he pretends to be fighting against.
Agree on the EFF part but what did the "political machine" do in this case? I thought it was more of the media reporting making Assange look like the dick he actually is. Would be nice to have Wikileaks without him.
Sooo.. you've hung out with Assange?
edit: My point is, the fact that you feel comfortable calling him actually a dick despite only knowing him through media portrayal means that the character assassination has worked.
Just about everyone who has ever worked with him has come to the same conclusion, including many people who have entirely overlapping ideologies. See Emma Best's Twitter account for a prime example.
Right, good point. Almost everyone will only know Assange through media portrayal so if you run something like Wikileaks, which relies on reputation to remain relevant, it's important to have a leader that knows how stay out of the spotlight. It's difficult in such a polarized arena.
I think it was more news organizations rightfully view WikiLeaks less as a journalistic org and one that wants to craft their leaks to their liking in order to achieve outcomes. Amusingly, that's sort of what you seem to accuse the other news organizations of....
After that started to become clear news sites were less likely to simply cite Wikileaks copy and paste style as they had been in the past. I think that was a responsible choice.
Nice list! One I’d add: one of my all-time favorite cryptography-related quotes is from Bruce Schneier‘s Applied Cryptography, talking about key length:
> These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
That argument only applies to irreversible computation. The errata for AppliedCryptography corrects this:
> The section on "Thermodynamic Limitations" is not quite correct. It requires kT energy to set or clear a single bit because these are irreversible operations. However, complementing a bit is reversible and hence has no minimum required energy. It turns out that it is theoretically possible to do any computation in a reversible manner except for copying out the answer. At this theoretical level, energy requirements for exhaustive cryptanalysis are therefore linear in the key length, not exponential.
Just curious, have you ever heard of lodge practice?
It was a huge source of medical care for the poor and working class well into the early 1900 (serving ~1/3 of the population), but was strangled by the AMA and the centralization of unions:
http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html
I think it’s particuarly interesting because it was completely absent from all my previous education about medical systems. I only recently learned it existed, and it’s changed my views significantly. (I.e. I’m no longer of the opinion that switching to full government management is a good target, but rather, the government should stop propping up and providing corporate welfare to the systems which strangled mutual aid societies.)
Good to hear! Here’s also a fascinating news clipping from a 1910 issue of the New York Times. It really helps to get a feel for the rhetoric of the era, “Physician Condemns Practice for Lodges”:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1910/11/06/105...
