We have this problem in Haifa, Israel too. The city borders on natural woodland, and the boars go into the neighborhoods looking for food in the trash.
Very nostalgic for someone who grew up with an Atari 800XL!
Also shows how much creativity is possible even within severe constraints - there are many fonts there that have real "character" (pun intended).
You seem to come at this useful tool with a very negative mindset.
- The scanned documents are stored in the filesystem in PDF format, so you can certainly access them without going through the web application.
- OCR doesn't have to be perfect, because it's just being used to locate a specific document when you need it. So if you have 1788 documents and you want to find your apartment lease, you search for "lease" and there's a very good chance that word will be found in the correct document. That's the whole point - storing documents with a low amount of manual effort, in a way that makes it very easy to find them when you need them.
Building paper airplane models was a very popular hobby in Israel (and probably other countries) during the 1960's. Each issue of the Israeli Air Force Journal came with a model which you would painstakingly cut and glue.
Here are some examples of what these models looked like: http://starry-side.com/wpe/wordpress/index.php/2019/08/08/ol...
Of course, this guy is on a whole different level of detail and dedication (plus he designs everything himself). Amazing work.
Was also very popular in communist era Poland, including people extending the paper models to be capable of self-propelled taxiing and certain set of "moveable" features implemented as extras.
Same thing in Bulgaria. One good side of "communism" was free modeling clubs for kids like me, so we've got rocket modelling (made 2, even 3 phase rockets while 3rd-4th grade), plane modelling (balsa wood, rice paper, etc.) - all for free - you pay for neither materials, nor courses, later it was computers (that's how I got into them). Before that also slot cars racing, ship modelling, there was even knot-making club (our city is on the black sea, so makes sense - future sailors!)
I mean, even if communism is evil, there were some good things - way overpay, or pay anything for clubs that should've been free to begin with and get kids into them... It doesn't take much to support them compared to many other things...
Czech Republic, reporting in! I'm too young to remember much of communism but I remember the balsa and rice paper gliders I built with my grandpa very fondly. There's something so fantastic about the fragile beauty of those planes with their skeletons visible beneath that translucent skin.
There's a magazine in the Czech Rep. called ABC which always had plans for some sort of papercraft model in the back. I used to love them as a kid.
I also had a book about techniques to use when building planes from such cut outs, and it included a chapter on "extras" like putting lights, small electric engines, etc. into the plane which sometimes allowed enough power that they would taxii on the table :)
Is there any country that doesn't have a bad human rights track record? Sure, some are worse than others. But where do you draw the line, and how far back into history are you willing to look?
This is a decent source: https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new
There are 16 countries with personal freedom ranking above 9 (out of 10). US is ranked 26 with a score of 8.72, which intuitively makes sense.
Morocco is 135th with a score of 5.68, which pretty obviously indicates, that there is more than one thing wrong about offering hacking tools to the government
I was recently offered a job by NSO, didn't take it due to their terrible reputation. I won't be surprised if some countries start denying entry to NSO employees. Even Facebook suspended accounts of NSO employees after NSO hacked Whatsapp - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x5nnz/nso-employees-take... .
On the other hand, their product is just a tool which can be used for good (stopping terrorists) or evil (spying on human rights activists). Just like a kitchen knife can be used for good (cooking a meal) or evil (stabbing people). So I find it hard to find the moral justification for the actions you suggest. The problem is not the tool or the tool's manufacturer, it's how it gets used.
I’ll play the opposite side of this argument, for the sake of discussion. You point to knifes having a good use: cooking. It’s by far the dominant use of knifes, and no doubt it makes cooking sunstantially easier.
But hacking tools: to what extent are they actually being used for good? Stuxnet is the clearest example I know of these tools almost certainly decreasing a threat to US citizens (at least for the time before it was found out). But beyond that, there’s very little publicly accessible information demonstrating that these tools are actually effective at stopping or decreasing terrorism. Moreover, even if they turn out to be effective at that, their use in this manner comes with other questionable effects on law and personal rights. I don’t think the knife is a good analogy because while everyone agrees that a knife can be put to either good or bad effect, there’s not consensus on whether hacking tools can even be used for any good.
When I was in the Israeli army, I personally saw a phone being hacked, info being pulled and the info being used to stop a terrorist attack targeting civilians. I was not involved in the hack (I served in the navy).
In that particular case (but not the majority of cases) the target of the hack was an Israeli citizen who was practicing terrorism (against the Arab minority). After their info was intercepted they were arrested and the situation was de-escalated.
Tech like this saved lives that day. I don't think it justifies the freedom cost, but let's not forget real lives are saved by tools like Pegasus.
> Tech like this saved lives that day. I don't think it justifies the freedom cost, but let's not forget real lives are saved by tools like Pegasus.
Additionally, even if the tools are developed and used only by governments that are deemed democratic today (e.g. USA, Israel, Germany) and under strict independent and parliamentary oversight, who can guarantee that future governments of these country will be democratic (obvious recent cases Brazil, Poland, Hungary, but one might also ask that question about the US)?
These are tools of the Regime, and some regimes will wield them against minorities (like Uyghurs in China), journalists (in Mexico and Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia) and protesters (in Belarus).
One good user case doesn't justify selling this tool to autocratic and totalitarian countries, or countries involved in systematic oppression of minorities.
One’s autocratic country is someone else’s ideal of social organization.
Should we stop selling steel to the US because it could be used to put migrant kids in cages, or weapons because it could be used to invade random countries? I’m not saying the answer is obvious, I’m saying the problem is complex and multifaceted.
Take Morocco: not the best government (somewhat theocratic, absolutist monarchy, big on unaccountable and torture-oriented secret police), but overall more peaceful and stable than its neighbors. Do “we” help continuing this state of thing, or do “we” let malcontent bubble up and risk turning it into a failed state and civil war? It’s shades of grey all around, sadly.
I think the question, although genuine, has a flaw, that is, reasoning in terms of "good or bad".
"Good or bad" for whom? Is something that is "not good" inherently "bad" and viceversa?
Is something "good" only because is "decreasing a threat to US citizens"? What about the consequences of "decreasing a threat"? Like Guantanamo Bay, Patriot Act, this poor guy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23625215), bombing a country thousands of miles away?
"Good or bad" is relative, just like right or wrong. It's difficult to correctly grasp a concept or conceal an idea by just defining it as "good or bad".
I agree with you, and believe it or not I did try to go out of my way to avoid calling stuxnet itself good or bad: I kept those words out of the sentence which mentions stuxnet
> Stuxnet is the clearest example I know of these tools almost certainly decreasing a threat to US citizens...
However, you still have to make value judgements at some point when organizing a society. It’s literally impossible to do so otherwise. Even if you make a conscious effort to not organize socially — I.e. to embrace anarchy — you’ve made at least an implicit value judgment that governance isn’t worth the limitations it requires of the people (I.e. limitation of individual freedom is “bad”).
“good” and “bad” are messy things to deal in, but they still have their place. Any answer to “should we allow NSO group to operate” has to make a value judgement at some point. I think it actually helps to make that explicit — for example my point should still stand in most other value systems precisely because it refers to “good” and “bad” — which vary across value systems — without prescribing what is good or bad.
I could have been more clear about separating an example (stuxnet — the thing which brings in a value system) out of the argument itself. But I couldn’t find a way to do it without sacrificing brevity or readability. Such are the limitations of communication, particularly written :|
"to what extent are they actually being used for good? Stuxnet is the clearest example I know of these tools almost certainly decreasing a threat to US citizens"
By this logic an equally good use would be to sabotage American military-industrial complex thus reducing threat to the citizens of many countries around the world.
> But beyond that, there’s very little publicly accessible information demonstrating that these tools are actually effective at stopping or decreasing terrorism.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly in this context where the actors involved are highly incentivized to keep success stories well-hidden and well-guarded.
You'll never know about all of the terrorist attacks that didn't happen.
> On the other hand, their product is just a tool which can be used for good (stopping terrorists) or evil (spying on human rights activists).
That applies to lots of technology things though. With the NSO group specifically though, wouldn't their tech have Sales people that need to actively court and sell it to potential customers?
> Just like a kitchen knife can be used for good (cooking a meal) or evil (stabbing people).
NSO knowingly sells tools to repressive regimes that use them to violate human rights. If you sell a knife to someone you know is going use it for murder then you're culpable and your behavior is immoral.
Is it bad for their reputation really? A oil company gets bad rep for the environment, a mill gets bad rep for deforestation. This doesn't matter the slightest to their customers, they "understand" what they're buying.
It might be related to the fact that Toyota championed "Just-in-time manufacturing" which requires tight control over the supply chain. You have to be able to trust your suppliers to deliver what you need on time and in high quality. So you must cultivate close relations with your suppliers over many years. They almost become your partners. You can't just stop working with one supplier and switch to another on a whim.
"Toyota believes in developing mutually beneficial, long-term relationships based on mutual trust with all suppliers. To foster that trust, we pursue close and wide-ranging communication to share our business knowledge to enhance our business relationship." (https://www.toyotauk.com/toyota-in-the-uk/supplier-relations...)
I recently heard about a startup trying to do something about this. Probably not totally mature, but might be worth a look: https://www.kaholo.io/
(I am not related to company in any way)
