The whole point of these Bayesian filters is that you don't have to spend mental cycles thinking of clever words to filter on. Just mark 'em spam and not spam, the algorithms are plenty good at finding which words are spammy or legitimate without human help.
I believe this raises the issue of short-term solutions (such as filtering on 'click') for which spammers will eventually find turnarounds vs long-term solutions. But do we need really need long-term solutions if an update of filtering terms every year is enough to keep the pace? Also, does a long-term solution against spamming even exist? Since the Graham solution from 2002 doesn't seem to have been implemented yet, the answer is no?
Another issue is the carbon/energetic cost of spamming. I'm no expert, but given the probably high figures, should this issue be escalated to a higher level, e.g. an international agreement along with heavy penalty if caught running a larger spamming farm? Compared to the difficult issues of drug trafficking etc. I don't see how there could not be a consensus for spam.
"Ratio of servers hosted in countries with mature legal frameworks (needs work)" is one that's pretty hard to measure and has huge capacity to misinform.
The US, UK, Russia, 5 Eyes countries, China, the EU; everyone has a stance on whether they're safe or not.
I think it better to just measure "location diversity", and give a heatmap of server locations (indicating replication and mirrors) so the user can decide for themselves.
> The US, UK, Russia, 5 Eyes countries, China, the EU; everyone has a stance on whether they're safe or not.
It might just be me, but I think it's reasonably clear that some of these places have mature legal frameworks where the rule of law exists (US, UK, EU) and some generally do not (Russia, China, Venezuela). But perhaps I'm mistaken and simply do not understand what a mature legal system is.
>mature legal frameworks where the rule of law exists (US-
whaaaaaa
How is 'recording everything, decrypting everything, targeting persons of interest without warrant or record, extensive networks of informants and agents in all branches of politics, art, and business while bombing people based on their cell phone ping location globally without oversight or any attempt at legal justification'
The United States is 0 privacy, 0 honesty about the actual laws in place, 'fusion centers' completely removing any sane separation of national and regional power or separation of police from military, and 50 TLA's arguing over how best to harass political activists or run criminal gangs themselves. And an entire other spy agency of a different country on the other side of the world allowed to do basically whatever they want in our borders and harvest every ounce of the data of our lives.
That's not a 'mature framework', that is reverting 'civilization' to before the magna carta, much less the geneva conventions.
And since in no case where it was revealed how the government is breaking its own laws and using technology to make an illegal monstrosity out of the internet has the government ever meaningfully been held to account of actually changed, behold what rules you.
Stop pretending something is worth your trust just because there are flags and rotundas and people in suits on the news 24 hours a day and a cultish military junta hasn't completely taken completely over yet, visibly. edit: ...in the united states.
I knew this kind of objection was coming. It was very predictable. Your objection to the massive infringement of basic human rights is morally and ethically completely and absolutely correct in every single possible way.
It's also, for the moment and strictly for the purposes of this particular conversation at hand, irrelevant.
Though I understand if some might choose to believe otherwise for political reasons. The discussion at hand is about overarching legal systems, their general reliability, and how much bearing laws have on what actually happens.
Similarly, one could probably point at some by-the-book handling of a parking ticket in China as proof that it is a nation with rule of law. It would be similarly possessed of opportunity to come into greater alignment with relevance.
I knew someone was going to say I was off topic, what a coincicence.
If human rights are not relevant to the article and thread, then the article and thread are for robots and someone should clearly post that.
If the article does not discuss rights, which to me appear to have completely disappeared and any semblence of them we only have is due to a lot of this generation of TLA officeres not being total monsters
Now we just have to hope Kushner doesn't use his global admin rights to do anything mean. /s
That is the state of the internet, this silent well-born manchild who has chummed with madmen since he was a child has clearance and hooks into everything the nsa scoops up, which is nearly the entire internet, and the entire pollyanna internet.
I think the point of the ID is (partially) to reduce the chance that ad agencies will use scummy workarounds. If the ID isn't guaranteed to be there, I can see them using the scummy ways instead.
You can have issues opening an account in the UK if you're not allowed to get credit, since many bank accounts include free access to credit, or an overdraft facility, that you can't turn off or decline.
You can be banned from getting credit pretty easily too; if you've failed to pay council fines (parking, tax, etc.), or missed a repayment on a loan, a judge can give you a ban. It can be a real problem for people who get into a bad financial position and want/need a new bank account later on.
> not like the garbage you see on ATMs and gas pumps though
What don't you like about these buttons? As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, this is a proved design that works well for a great number of people. Plus, the elderly / tech averse are likely to already know how it works.
Nobody mentioned the Euro Zone before you did; they're talking about Europe "as a continent", for the most part.
Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. And having lived in both Switzerland (where they use CHF), and Germany (Euros), I can say it's much the same across Europe.
International payments within Europe are fast too; a couple of days if you're changing currencies, and faster if both sides are in the Euro Zone.
Banks don't have to be slow. The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!
> The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!
Exchange fees show up in a number of different places. I have a Capital One card that I got specifically for the advertised "no foreign exchange fees". In reality, it consistently charges me about 1% more than the official exchange rate at any given point. 1% doesn't seem like a terrible fee. I wish it would itemize it, though.
Many merchants will not bill the card in their local currency -- instead, because it's a US card, they refuse to bill it in anything other than USD. That means they end up making me pay extra to cover their exchange costs, which are always exorbitant, maybe 10 times as much. They appear to have something worked out with their local bank, where the bank accepts payment in USD and gives them payment in CNY or HKD. Here, the bank is teaming up with the merchant to screw the customer without even benefiting the merchant.
I recently ordered something from Amazon's Canada site, and they generously offered to let me have them bill me in USD -- they would cover currency exchange themselves. Left unstated was that they would charge, again, an order of magnitude more for the service than my card would. At least they gave me the option to say "no, bill me in CAD".
The best option I generally have for transacting in China is to pull cash from an ATM (paying Capital One's 1%ish fee), and pay cash even for very large purchases. It's quite possible that banks aren't where you're getting hit by exorbitant fees -- transact directly with a bank, and you should be able to get low fees.
> Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions.
Well, anything within the same bank is instant. There is a commonly used mechanism in business accounts called "Faster Payments" which tend to settle even across banks in the UK within 2h.
Very recently - as in, in the last 4-6 weeks - a system called "SMS" was rolled out. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with text messaging. It's a new cross-bank settlement mechanism which promises to settle the transfer in 20 minutes within UK.
The reality is that SMS transfers don't work reliably across all the banks. Our payments and customer service teams had a bad week after we enabled SMS payments. When a supposedly faster transfer takes 5-6 days and you have to chase the bank(s) about payment states, there's clearly a fault somewhere.
I love TransferWise. I live in Canada, and had 2k USD sitting in a Canadian bank account. I was going to convert it to CAD, but the bank's exchange rate is atrocious. So I opened a free US-based account with my bank's US division, transferred all my USDs there 1:1, then sent it through TransferWise to my Canadian account. A bit convoluted, but I saved close to $100 and it didn't take long to set up.
That money has to come from somewhere; I'd happily pay for Firefox but most people wouldn't and it's not cheap developing a browser.
Their outreach, web literacy, and STEM education work is also not cheap and is doing amazing work.
It would be nice for them to list two or three VPNs they've audited though. Their endorsement goes a long way for many people and we would still have a choice then.
