And that it uses a proprietary encryption protocol, "MTProto", which has been repeatedly found to have vulnerabilities, like every other self-made encryption scheme.
I'm not particularly thrilled, given Telegram is based in the United Arab Emirates, its client-server encryption is almost purposefully garbage (they basically rolled their own TLS, and predictably researchers keep finding vulnerabilities in "MTProto"), they don't enable e2ee chats by default, and they don't e2ee group chats at all.
> This event left a lot of scar tissue across all of Technical Infrastructure, and the next few months were not a fun time (e.g. a mandatory training where leadership read out emails from customers telling us how we let them down and lost their trust).
Bullshit.
I'd believe this if it was not completely impossible for 99.999999% of google "customers" to contact anyone at the company. Or for the decade and a half of personal and professional observations of people getting fucked over by google and having absolutely nobody they could contact to try and resolve the situation.
You googlers can't even disdain yourselves to talk to other workers at the company who are in a caste lower than you.
The fundamental problem googlers have is that they all think they're so smart/good at what they do, it just doesn't seem to occur that they could have possibly screwed something up, or something could go wrong or break, or someone might need help in a way your help page authors didn't anticipate...and people might need to get ahold of an actual human to say "shit's broke, yo." Or worse, none of you give a shit. The company certainly doesn't. When you've got near monopoly and have your fingers in every single aspect of the internet, you don't need to care about fucking your customers over.
I cannot legitimately name a single google product that I, or anyone I know, likes or wants to use. We just don't have a choice because of your market dominance.
> I also know that I have near-zero risk from COVID
There's no such thing as "near zero risk from COVID." There are factors that make you high risk (age, obesity, etc) but whether covid ends up being "nothing" to "a bit sick for a few days" to "sick for weeks" to "hospitalized" to "fatal" is basically luck of the draw.
The odds of dying from covid are far, far worse than the odds of any complication from the vaccine.
95%+ of the people in my area's ICUs for covid are unvaccinated, according to the supervising physician who was interviewed on the radio.
> I don't like injecting unnecessary stuff in there.
That's...not how that works. This sounds like the same stuff new parents believe about how they don't want to "overload" their baby's immune system with too many vaccines at once. Their immune system sees more "load" from them picking a pacifier off the floor of their living room and sticking it in their mouth.
But if an expert in fasteners says "use this nail/bolt, made of this material and grade, for this application"...and then Joe Roofer says "WELL I actually work on roofs unlike those ivory tower mechanical and structural engineers, I'll use what I think is best" and then years later a couple people get killed...
There are a lot of infamous incidents caused by people thinking they know better than the people who designed stuff and actually had training, experience, and education in that field. Doing things like changing fastener grades, or styles, or completely changing how something is put together. The most ready example I can think of is the hotel bridge collapse that killed a couple dozen people, because some mouth-breather thought he knew better than the structural engineers that drew up plans on how to anchor the bridge to its overhead supports.
Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines, and the people who do are people I don't want anywhere near patient care because they're going to second-guess other experts, like the doctors they work with, the instructions for equipment and drugs, etc.
As a possible patient, good riddance as well. These people clearly don't believe in science and/or they don't believe in trusting experts and following their instructions.
That's the last person I want anywhere near me. Especially if they're nurses. I've run across a lot of nurses who think they know better than doctors, and this seems like a fantastic way to weed them out.
How much you want to bet "accidental" deaths go down after this?
I recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library.
I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before, and one can find some parallels today (for example, Siri now on a sufficiently new enough iPhone isn't completely useless, but much more capable when within range of a data connection.)
My only complaint about FUtD was that some elements of the plot, namely stuff going on in the planet, felt drawn out and slow.
Thank you both for recommending another one of his books.
You're implying that because they're within legal limits everything is A-OK (how are the limits set? Exhibit A: US drinking water pollutant limits, which were raised by Bush, not based on science)
...then launching into an ad hominem attack (either the pesticide amounts are safe or not, and it has nothing to do with who is asking "is this safe or not?")
...and jumping on the word "fear" (I say "I fear the gun you've pointed at me is loaded and the safety off, would you stop pointing it at me until you check it?" You: "Oh ho look who says they're about to get shot based on NOTHING BUT FEAR". No, I'm asking you to CHECK the gun, and in the meantime stop pointing at me, because the nonzero chance of me suffering harm)
...followed by a lot of personal opinion about modern farming techniques
...including a bunch of hand-waiving about how an incredibly complex problem will be magic-bulleted (or even helped) by rolling back the incredibly loose environmental rules farmers are required to follow.
The reason we have 'trouble' feeding 7 billion humans is because of trade policies and protectionism. For example, corn in Mexico is artificially high in price because the US turns a fuckton of its corn into ethanol (which is an energy-negative process) and high fructose corn syrup (which is only cost-effective because the price of sugar imports is kept artificially high by government regulation, to protect US sugar producers.) It's also because we do things like dump food in countries with hunger, thus collapsing prices for local farmers (who then can't survive and stop farming), instead of helping those countries produce or buy more food.
Also, please provide evidence that EU farmers (using lower pesticide amounts) have lower yields than US farmers. Don't forget to account for the cost of the pesticides vs reduced yield.
Now add in the fact that it's a UAE company...