Open Heart Protocol

I wonder what energy-saving optimisations the human body has which lead to worse outcomes in our energy-rich environment.

I don't just mean fat storage algorithms leading to metabolic syndrome and T2D, but for example whether we could afford to have better immune and musculoskeletal systems, more cancer-fighting cells, better regeneration etc if we were tuned to an energy budget of 3000kcal instead of 2000kcal.

Engineering in general is a pile of kludges on top of other kludges. Theory looks good in physics textbooks but it hardly ever survives contact with reality

It's not a moral panic it's called "an extended engagement with law enforcement will be unpleasant and costly" and you probably don't want that.

And if you're wondering why it's that way, then casually observe everytime people declare that people under arrest or being tried "don't deserve..." something.

> I mean, in this case we're talking about emoji, so I'm having a hard time picturing the criminal use, but in general anonymous file uploads or text uploads absolutely get used by criminals as soon as they're discovered

You can use the emoji service as an anonymous data upload service because it transfers information and you can encode arbitrary data into other data. But that sounds like work and people are lazy and criminals are people so they'll generally do the lazy thing and use one of the numerous other options available to them which are less work than creating and distributing an emoji encoder.

If you make a generic file upload service, well, they don't have to do as much work to use that. Then the question is, what should we do about that?

The next question is, does preventing them from using a given service meaningfully prevent any crime? That one we know the answer to. No, it does not. Because they still have all of the other alternatives, like putting it on a server or service in a foreign country or compromising random Wordpress instances etc.

Then we can ask, from the perspective of what the law should be and the perspective of a host under a given set of laws, what should we do? And these are related questions, because you want to consider how people are going to respond to a given set of laws.

So, what happens if you impose strict liability on hosts regardless of whether they know that a given thing is crime? Well then you don't have any services hosting data for people because nobody has a 0% false negative rate but without one you're going to jail.

What if you only impose liability if they know about it? Then knowing is a liability because you still can't have a 0% false negative rate, so they're going to prevent knowing and you end up with Mega encrypting user data so they can't themselves see it. That seems pretty dumb, you'd like them to be able to remove obvious bad stuff without putting liability on them if they're not 100% perfect.

What if you only impose liability if someone else reports it? This works like the DMCA takedown process, and then you get a combination of the first two. They can allow uploads but they can also remove things they're aware of and want to remove, but they end up de facto required to remove anything anyone reports, because if they don't and they ever get it wrong then they're screwed. So then you get widespread takedown abuse and have created a trolling mechanism. This is not a great option.

What if you let them moderate without any liability but require a court order to force them to take something down? This is like the approach taken by the CDA and is the best option, because you're not forcing risk-averse corporate bureaucrats to comply with evidence-free fraudulent takedowns but you still allow them to remove obvious spam etc. without liability. This leaves the service with a good set of incentives, because in general they'll want to satisfy users, so they'll try to remove spam etc. but not remove non-spam. Meanwhile this still leaves the option for crimes to be investigated by the people who are actually supposed to be investigating crimes, i.e. law enforcement, and then the courts can still order things to be taken down -- and more than that, put the actual criminals in jail -- without putting penalties on the service for not themselves being infallible adjudicators of what is and isn't crime.

Ok, so? Provided the receiving server is configured to redirect the arbitrary data into the trash, you're in the clear, right? Not your fault someone sent you extra data, and you're not expected to keep it, and if you don't keep it anywhere, law enforcement could search your server but there's nothing to find because your system doesn't retain anything from the arbitrary data.

This nerd-sniped me, I wrote a tool for encoding arbitrary strings into one emoji: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42829938

I tried with ZWJ but it turns out variation selectors were easier to make work.

Yup, ZWJ was my first thought, and yes, it works.

Tried up to 4.

Too lazy to push it to see how many joins until the api breaks.

https://emojipedia.org/zero-width-joiner

Ottoman harem emoji is valid Unicode now.

This probably refers to emojis made out of multiple codepoints (e.g. skin color + person, or flags which are built out of the country code in a special range).

A single emoji is a sequence (of bytes)

The problem isn't that criminals can use your service, its that the service provider really doesn't want to be liable for that happening, which generally only happens when you host illegal content.

Sure, I guess that could happen. Hackernews allows anon data uploads over long periods. How many online services actually do KYC if they don't legally have to?

Any motivated criminal could also just use a book cipher or any number of less trackable options.

The GET request does not return data in sequence, does it? Just counts fr each emoji.

What exactly does the govt do if you do not have data they want? I assume if you run a service like this you would comply with any data retention requirements in your country and hand over logs - although older ones which you might have deleted to comply with other laws!

Unless you have id verification crminals can sign up with false identities.

Why not just use pastebin for a "hey I left ur drugs at this coord", or even just a plain ol' encrypted message over email, Signal, etc...? I'm a little lost here, probably due to naivete. Is the storage of URLs or crypto wallet pointers really the bottleneck for cybercrime?

like yes, theoretically somebody could probably manage to encode a few bytes of secret message.

but it's just that there's so many easier and better ways to do that, and even if they managed to accomplish it here it's hardly hurting this project - worst case scenario it's a bit of unwanted noise. it seems very silly to worry about it.

Spelling out words feels like an anti-feature in this context