"hidden" here refers to not visible to the communication partners (e.g., me and hackernews); my understanding is that government access should remain hidden to the immediate communication partners in this way. However, it should remain accountable. This is still a backdoor in the communication system by the definition you cite, although it is much less problematic than a backdoor no-one knows about (this is also what the article talks about, for example under 'vital technicalities').
Note that for the purposes the government (claims to) want access to the communication or hosts, it is _necessarily_ hidden. If it would not be hidden, that would mean a criminal(/terrorist/$insertBadGuyHere) would be aware that (s)he is being monitored, which probably does not provide the information the government (or in this case, the police or intelligence agency) is looking for.
And here's the problem: all of them are mutually incompatible in most situations. Even moving .tex documents over different platforms is an enormous pain, and pdflatex/xelatex don't possess the error reporting you need to quickly find which packages are missing on which systems.
Don't get me wrong, I love LaTeX, and I agree that the author misinterprets 'proprietary', but from a user standpoint the problem is the same: old documents are not rendered correctly, and new documents don't work with old compilers. It's a mess.
Intriguing concept, but I have some doubts about its security, considering there isn't any kind of security proof at all. I'm not really an expert in zero knowledge proofs, but what I've been taught about them raises some questions here...
For starters, notice that a hash function as a commitment scheme is neither information-theoretically hiding, nor information-theoretically blinding [1], unlike e.g. a simple Pedersen commit. Another problem is that the XOR in the example table needs to be exactly one bit -- it is non-trivial to show that this actually works. Thirdly and perhaps chiefly, it is unclear why this would actually produce a zero knowledge proof, since the same inputs will produce the same circuits and the same output. Thus, I think we can build a distinguisher better than guessing to decide whether two inputs are the same given the same output (and all other inputs being equal).
Maybe these aren't a definitive end point, but they sure as hell require merit investigation.
No, I'm saying that AI has wider applications, and I was responding to the manned flight safety example. Also, I'm arguing that we shouldn't dismiss the guy's arguments just because he's an ass. Especially with regards to this article, we really don't need to resort to a straw man to refute what he wrote.
IPS for cars. Interesting, considering that most discussions I've had with people working on automotive security point to the fact that it's basically impossible to do due to the large amount of proprietary communication built on top of CAN. Mainly by third party vendors that produce ECUs. Maybe this is different for US cars, though...?
Also, the claim that attacks haven't been found in the wild is definitely false -- though AFAIK, all of those have been focused on stealing cars, not altering the control traffic (which is what this is about). There's plenty of examples of these on YouTube, and car manufacturers have similar demos in-house. Under strict NDAs, of course, which I think might be part of the problem. Earlier today there was a post on HN about an attack on a Tesla car -- I hope they'll show the industry a better way to deal with these issues.
I think it's far more interesting and productive to use facebook posts for this, rather than GPS coordinates in EXIF data and comparing it with a phone book (which is essentially what they're doing, according to the about page). Facebook posts often contain much more information and that information is easier to extract.
Realistically speaking, neither of these cases will be addressed. Although properly using the privacy settings can help, the entire reason people use tools like these is to express themselves about things they're seeing, and that usually doesn't happen at home. This coupled with the fact that the risk is extremely low, and that there are much better ways for a burglar to obtain this information, I don't think this is the best way to go about privacy awareness. It was probably fun to build, though.
This seems like intended behavior -- the assumption on Twitter's part is that when you're setting your account to protected, you're also going to clean out the list of followers you have. I guess it'd be an improvement if Twitter added a notice, but I don't see what else they can do -- I doubt you'd want to tell all your followers to re-follow you.
Are you really trying to deny that google cars and other automated systems at least partially based on AI have safety issues? Even if we're talking autonomous, "life-like" AI, there is a long list of interesting philosophical and legal questions to be asked.
I can't say I find any of the statements here or in the article very appealing, but you shouldn't dismiss real safety/security issues just because you don't like the guy.
Note that for the purposes the government (claims to) want access to the communication or hosts, it is _necessarily_ hidden. If it would not be hidden, that would mean a criminal(/terrorist/$insertBadGuyHere) would be aware that (s)he is being monitored, which probably does not provide the information the government (or in this case, the police or intelligence agency) is looking for.