Does China have the right idea with respect to kids and the internet? Should we effectively ban kids from social media and restrict their usage at the ISP level?
As parent, I think China may have the right idea. From my perspective, I think kids shouldn't have social media until late teens especially stuff like instagram. Go through an average 14 year old girls instagram feed and it is easy to see how eating disorders are increasing.
The other thing is if every other kid in the class has social media, I will allow it because it important to be involved in the social aspect of school. So, China has the right idea because it is forced to be a social norm of not having social media and I think the whole community and individuals will be healthier because of it.
They do something with limiting the amount of video games you can play, I think they are on to something there.
I never see anything like that happening here in the USA though
I think any blanket policy that just apply the same rule to everybody is just lazy policy. A less lazy approach is provide the capability (through e.g. ISP or device manufacturer) to do so to parents/guardians and let them make the choice on an individual level.
Even for education, its much better to have options for home school or special needs school, than it is to just blanketly say all children must go to a regular school like every other child.
Reading the threads here about parents trying to manage their kids' online usage something strikes me. It's a little hard to articulate, but I might call it the "assumption of normalcy" in regard to media/technology. People assume, to various degrees, that current forms of technology and levels of usage are "fine, just fine", yet if you think about it for a bit it seems really more like a "boiling frog" situation. What I mean is that we are engaged in a massive open-air social/psychological experiment of sorts, and we're more or less doing it on auto-pilot.
From that POV the policy changes that China has introduced seem like an attempt to opt-out, which would make Chinese kids into a kind of "control group" for our media/internet/phone/game mass experiment. The problem is that there are so many confounding variables that it seems unlikely that we can learn much from it after all. And it's moot anyway since there's no political way to enforce similar bans in the West.
FWIW, if I had kids I would ban the Internet, smart phones, and even cable TV. I've been on the Internet, there's no way I would expose my kids to it, even with ad-blockers. The Internet used to be Burning Man, now it's Bangkok. I wouldn't let my kids wander around the open Internet any more than around the back alleys of Bangkok. I feel for parents that are dealing with this.
That's a bad analogy, although you point out a possibly good thing for L2/crypto - the bug bounties are massive because the projects have a silly amount of funds.
Password managers don't operate with those economic models though.
In fact, I'd argue that, if they are positing that the reputational risk for a successful hack exceeds 10% of their notional valuation, then they should try to commit at least 10% of their market cap as insurance against that ever happening, or at least if they would gain enough information to prevent this from ever occurring. This isn't that hard to figure out.
The best thing about that insurance is that it's literally free -- they never have to pay out unless the event actually occurs.
Depends on the cost/benefit. 3x security engineers to detect/respond vulns and attacks is less expensive but gets similar coverage plus a lot of other work capacity, for instance.
Unless a successful attack actually occurs, in which case it's literally almost priceless in terms of their reputational damage, unless they can get their hands on it before someone else.
Although PWMs would get a reputation hit from a breach, there isn't any precedent yet for a high-trust software being breached publicly and what happens to their reputation.
But, if you ask around enough with security teams at the large cloud providers, there are definitely rumors of APT-level activity being detected/blocked at the infra level. Yet, cloud is still the most secure option out there vs. on-prem in 90% of the use cases for it so to speak. Similarly, there is just too much precedent of high trust firms being breached, and nothing really happening to them as a result (fines, loss of users, etc).
So, you allocate $1mil, possibly spend it, and either way can't use it for anything else, or you allocate a fixed cost of $600k/yr and get a lot more out of it on the security front, to include solid defense-in-depth, detections, and IR capabilities for if/when the successful PWM attack finally occurs. Personally, yes probably worth putting out a hefty bounty, but pragmatically you'd get more out of hiring the engineers.
Given that the payout is probabalistic and serves business goodwill, I'd argue for a more substantial reward. Possibly secured through a bond or insurance policy.
They could store it in the form of digital energy (Bitcoin). With that you're able to capture what would otherwise be wasted energy.
"The gas, which would otherwise have been burned off, is instead routed to a bitcoin processor.
For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it’s 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields.
The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring.."
And how do you convert back bitcoin into electricity ?
How do you turn money into energy ?
Can the FED print some money to fill back the empty oil fields ?
I'm not advocating for "use excess energy to mine bitcoin", but you don't need to convert it back into energy--the theoretical nuclear plant is calibrated so its power output is equal to the max power demand and any excess due to lower-than-max demand is channeled to bitcoin mining.
A better solution would be to interconnect the electricity grid with neighbouring grids. With sufficient size, time-dependent peaks and troughs would be smoothed out.
You're right, if the bitcoin is mined anyway. I'd argue that things like cryptocurrency, social media, Youtube, government spying, are best shutoff and the carbon kept underground.
There's a lot of people who don't want to admit (to themselves even) they were wrong about Bitcoin 12 years ago and are still grasping onto that belief for dear life. Hoping that it will fail and prove them right all along. See, I was right Bitcoin wasn't worth $10 and is a useless technology!
So the cognitive dissonance is getting worse the bigger crypto gets and the longer it lasts.
Let me know when BTC succeeds. I still can't walk into the grocery store and trade some BTC for a pack of smokes.
I can buy some BTC and then lose the private key though. But that's already a feature I get from my local fiat currency if I just drop my wallet in the park for three hours (in fairness; this is a bad analogy... Dropping my wallet in the park at least has the pro-social positive that someone else can benefit from my loss, whereas nobody benefits when I lose my BTC private key).
> He has a crypto fund that he needs to make returns on, so he has been shilling crypto / web3 / "decentralized" / blockchain hard with his personal brand.
That's unfair. What if the reason he has a crypto fund in the first place is because he genuinely believes it's the future? That seems to be the case with everything he's said for years and how he makes investment decisions.
The hard problem that needs to be solved in a Decentralized blockchain is the risk and effect of bad actors. None of the current funds, including that of MA, addresses this risk.
Instead, all current plays are about building Managed Blockchains that's just needless complexity where federated databases would have sufficed and been far more efficient (perf., cost, complexity)
There's a fine line between vision and orchestrated fraud.
It's always been easier to commit fraud and once you're managing billions of other people's money, it's extremely hard to not take the easy path.
Bottomline: This is a pump and dump speculation play. HN is too smart to fall for it.
Which bad actors? One way MA manages at least some of them is by not investing in them, and instead investing in high quality teams. That’s a large part of the value-add of professional VCs, be it in blockchain/web3 or any other domain, that they have the expertise to discern legit teams from scam ones.
I see it as more how do we allocate resources to better causes in society, something blockchain based ecosystems purported to solve, but have this far not, exactly because it is a social problem not a technology one.
Blockchain makes all of these things harder and more complex. I have yet to see something a blockchain can do that we could not with existing technology. The supposedly better incentive structures aren't and are rather the opposite from what I can tell.
> That’s a large part of the value-add of professional VCs, be it in blockchain/web3 or any other domain, that they have the expertise to discern legit teams from scam ones.
That's a tiny part of it and as useful to society as hiring away nuclear physicists to work on ad prediction and tiktok recommendation algorithms.
Vetting early stage ventures is actually a large part of the VC job, not a tiny part. It's the entire reason for the accredited investor laws, to make it more difficult for scammers to scam the public.
His response to some of the reactions he's getting:
Even after all these years, Twitter still surprises me. This is the tweet that makes people accuse me of lying and announce that they're unfollowing me? People are that attached to business plans and balance sheets? How completely mystifying.
The reason I don't care about business plans is that I can learn more from 5 minutes of interrogating the founders than from 10 pages of fluff they've written.
The reason I don't care about balance sheets is the same reason I don't care who's leading 100 yards into a marathon.
It's crazy to me that this hasn't been done.