The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba...

If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months. Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator.

In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time.

> Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

I'm not in the US. I just read those crazy news, compare it to my grandfather stories, and worry.

It reminds me of the good old "my password takes 2 billion years to crack, but my kneecaps only take a few seconds" metaphor about people in tech forgetting that physical coercion is, in fact, a possible attack vector for your IT security.

To be pedantic, it was diseases and outright, explicit murder. (which is not an excuse. Biological warfare is a modern war crime, after all.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigeno...

banking on the wolf to behave in the hen [house] this time

Fair point, but the United States is rapidly moving towards authoritarian governance right now. There are steps that every U.S. citizen who reads my comment can take to help stop this decline immediately. I don't like the idea of this sort of TPM 3.0 module in my computer's hardware, but it's a 'day after tomorrow' problem for me, not a 'right now' problem.

Face book, for example…

:sigh:

If today it's "obvious" what's bad; When this generation dies off, who is appointed master of the universe and decides what's bad? It won't be you. It'll be the guys with the money; See Pluton. They're already paving the way for just that (at least in tech and what your wallet must must must spend). But, I digress.

You shouldn't ban books. You should teach morals.

My friend, Swim, who is a Jew living in Israel doesn't support banning Mein Kampf. So much so that when Swim's friend ordered it from Amazon, neither opposed it. Curriculum teaches about Hitler's rise to power and the abuse of his people to do so. That's more than enough to understand not to follow in his footstep. Swim's friend was interested in Hitler's political prowess.

I'm not interested in Mein Kampf. But, if someone is, he most surely has the right to read it. Kill the way some fanatics did because of it? No, that's immoral.

Who decides morality? That's complex, I think. But, I also think it is an innate intuition that lives in all of us.

Not everywhere in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf#Current_availabilit...)

In the USA, freedom of speech is in very high regard, and that’s in conflict with the idea of banning any publication.

It's like saying "don't worry about gun control because car accidents kill way more people right now".

I can't fathom a math textbook with pornographic examples. Is this a thing in the US?

You cannot defend against something you don't understand.

Reading it (or the little red book), you will notice there is nothing incredible about it.

It's a good way to understand the banality of evil.

It's a good way to see what currently in our society echoes it: we are not freed from evil, it can come back any time.

And the "push on unsuspecting children" narrative is worn out. Nobody push such dangerous book on children unless already twisted. Nobody ever told me "read it, it's good for you". Everybody always said: "dangerous book, read it with history in mind", if they ever talked about it.

We push Harry Potter on kids, not Mein Kampf.

>I can't fathom a math textbook with pornographic examples. Is this a thing in the US?

I've been out of school for quite a while, but AFAIK while there is plenty of porn out there, it's not in our math books.

No, it's just Florida politicos pandering to their base[0].

I'm guessing that what GP is going on about (please do correct me if I'm wrong) is probably some word problems that include references to non-heterosexual/non-binary folks, which seems to trigger the intolerant among us.

Which is a result of decades of attempts to put christian dogma and ideology back into US public schools, and failing that, destroy the public school system.

And more's the pity.

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/05/fldoe-releases-math...

Edit: Added the missing link.

I say that as a person of Eastern European/Jewish extraction.

Do I like fascists/fascism? No. Do I like Nazis? No.

But I do like freedom of expression. And if the price of that freedom is that hateful scumbags get to speak their piece, that's okay with me. But I'll have something to say about it too. As it should be.

[0] https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-audiobook

[1] https://harperandharley.org/pdf/mein-kampf/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler-ebook/dp/B002...

Unpopular speech needs more protection than popular speech, not less.

Establishing technical means to do something (limiting access to files via DRM) is not as urgent as actually doing it (Florida carting books out of school libraries). And technology is not a monolith. Pluton specifically is far from being a universal requirement on Windows, and the entire PC platform is open enough to support alternatives for a very long time. It's possibly worrying (though it looks like Microsoft's intention is confidentiality management in enterprises for now), but far from "turnkey tyranny".

When computing is controlled at a hardware level, you have far fewer competitors and market places. Working around things can be significantly more difficult and you may be stuck with scrapping up old less capable tech trying to do something you should have better options for. This is the reason technologists fear technology control, not so much because of tunnel vision but because the general population can't work around it, even experts may not be able to work around such protections. Low tech always has easy work arounds--the option exists even if you may fear the consequences.

The one example that I thought might have been somewhat improper was "Multiple exercises related to a debate between Al Gore and Rush Limbaugh, where the publisher was in favor of Al Gore's arguments based on the questions in the exercises."

If the debate in question was fictional, I'd be tempted to agree it would have been better to avoid using the names of real people although I'd disagree that is enough to ban the use of the textbooks. If the debate was actual and the textbook pointed out very real flaws with Rush Limbaugh's logic (especially if they were a real world example of bad math) I'd say that it makes perfect sense to include it in a math text book.

That was in the early 1500s. It was another couple hundred years before Europeans started colonizing and conquering those areas. By the time that started those populations were already reduced by around 90% from diseases that has spread across the continent from the Europeans on the east side.

Before those diseases wiped out so many natives no European colonists were able to survive in what is now the US and Canada without the approval and help of the natives. If the local natives didn't want a colony there, they removed it.

Yes, the colonists had guns and the natives then did not but the guns in those times weren't actually superior to bows and arrows. The guns might have better range, but their accuracy was much worse and they took longer to reload.

Before diseases that the colonists (unintentionally) brought greatly weakened the native tribes pretty much the only colonists that did OK were those that allied with a native tribe.

There were a bazillion tribes, and there was a lot of conflict between them including warfare. Some smaller tribes that were losing their wars with bigger tribes allied with some of the colonies to try to get help against the bigger tribes. Those were the colonies that were allowed the stay and thrive.

For a great look at what life was like in the New World before Europe became widely aware of it, and what happened afterwards the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C Mann is quite good.

Enforcement is a different issue.

Where are the text books in California that teach math using Biblical stories and imagery? Obviously California burned all those books if we accept the argument being put forth with Florida.

But there's nothing wrong with teaching students how they can use math to understand social problems and complex real-world issues. Math is a great tool for thinking about things like income inequality, climate change and economics.

But, imagine that a school adopts the DRM processes described in the article and requires this study level of control even on personal devices that are used for school. Suddenly those book bans can be enforced digitally by the school and will totally cut off access to certain books that the school chooses.

You might say that it's within the school's rights to do this for a device that is used for school and if you don't like it then use a different device. Now that's a system where there is a class-divide on the information that one is physically able to consume on their devices.

You might think Mein Kampf is ban-worthy, but the whole point is actually that you should not ban any book at all, because once you start banning books it becomes far too easy for more books to be banned. All it will take is one regime change in a school district's PTA for new books, that you maybe think should not be banned, to be added to the list.

It's worth considering the most banned books in America. His Dark Materials. A fantastic young adult fantasy novel that pokes harder at religion than some Christians can bear.

[0] When It Comes to Banning Books, Both Right and Left Are Guilty | Opinion: https://www.newsweek.com/when-it-comes-banning-books-both-ri...

Yep, one state decided to do something about this divisive indoctrination of kids and the peddlers of that stuff obviously don't like it, hence the "banning (math) books" stories. If you actually read into this you quicky realize that someone is clearly lying and (this time) it's not the Republicans.

Any such bans will always take the path of least resistance to cover the largest possible population with the easiest means. Pareto Style. And I care much more about those 80% of people having access over maintaining my own. Because ultimately, those people will set cultural standards of the future, not some technologist with their fully libre laptop.

And those attacks are, as of now, not that sophisticated or blatantly censoring. An overwhelming majority already do their computing on locked down devices (running iOS, Android and ChromeOS) and the big censorship wave hasn't hit them. Every half decade or so Amazon removes a book from Kindle as a side effect of capitalism and copyright and there's a huge HN thread mistaking it for deliberate censorship, but overall it really doesn't matter.

Also, let's be completely clear that DeSantis didn't ban math books. This was an attack on ideologically inconvenient books, mostly queer literature. It's part of the push to label us as "groomers" for merely existing around underage people that has caused a spike in violence and mistrust directed towards trans people. Once our rights are sufficiently eroded, they'll go after the gays again, and after that, maybe, we'll have progressed on the fascist cataclysmic us versus them rhetoric to revive blatant antisemitism. Or racism. Who knows. But safeguarding the high end bit of tech that is not even mainstream anymore wouldn't help society out of this and being concerned for it is a very individualistic choice.

Do you know what Critical Race Theory actually is, and where it's taught?

The prerequisite for this to happen is that the school removes all physical editions of the books and has digital editions for all content, and a lending program for the books that is sufficient to satisfy publishers... and all students have digital book readers able to access the school library.

I don't see this happening in the near (or even within the decade) future. There is far too much content that is physical only, publishers haven't embraced digital editions for libraries, school libraries don't have the technical resources (physical or in many cases human) to convert their collections to digital.

The hypothetical school book ban for digital editions is needlessly alarmist.

When those resources are available to schools, then yes - lets talk about it... though the school banning books will continue to mean "that resource isn't in our collection" and a student can go to another library (or in many cases book store) and get a copy of that book for themselves. This is no different than today.

Ibram X. Kendi, in his book “How to Be an Antiracist” states, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

The whole movement is predicated, explicitly, on instilling hatred and animosity on some out-group, it's a viscous ideology masquerading as compassion.

Judging by all of the convenient misreading and straw manning in the replies, many of you must know it is coming too.

I mean, this isn't even about Republicans, Trumpians or whatever, any self-respecting liberal can't possibly subscribe to c(r)t and still call himself/herself a "liberal".