Honestly If i had to guess, I'd say the answer is as simple as: a freely distributable, easily verifiable document was needed for testing purposes, and some engineer thought it'd be a cheeky little easter egg to use that file as bitcoin was starting to gain back traction in 2019 after it's first big surge and fall the years prior.
Yup. I can't even think of any other "famous PDF".
If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.
Ah isotropic.org, once the home of the best ever online version of Dominion. The mobile version is now good enough, but it took nearly a decade and multiple development teams to catch up to what one developer did in his spare time.
Actually I just wnat the card information and text as per isotropic plus the statistics generated e.g. how good or bad were you if a particular card was in the kingdom.
Isotropic was so fast and minimalist, the new mobile app, if you have it on a brand new phone, runs at decent speed, but it is still slower than isotropic was 10 years ago on a Nexus 5x.
(I was actually shocked the mobile app is so poorly optimized that I needed a new phone to run it at full speed...)
Amazing site, even if it was only targeted at the true enthusiasts!
I was surprised that the 52 KB PDF compressed to only 45 KB on my machine. There seems to be about 13 KB of text; perhaps the rest is the illustrations?
This is fun. I needed a test with many different sized PDFs. Originally I tried project gutenberg but it didn't have the variety I wanted. I ended up going to the Anarchist Library which checked all the boxes w.r.t. file size variety and ease of download (as well as minimizing fear of downloading copyrighted material on a work computer)
Dang. That's just an arrangement for voice and one guitar (or ukulele?). The song pretty clearly includes accompaniment from a cymbal and some kind of metallic pitched percussion too.
It wouldn’t surprise me if you couldn’t distribute the form globally due to US export restrictions to Iran, NK, etcetera. Obviously not a problem for Apple since it is already restricted/tainted.
It's in the public domain, so the limits are not on the content itself. The media, and the facilitation of the transfer might be limited, but this is a question for the legal department, which I'm not part of.
I would’ve went with Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” (converted to PDF via a faithful rendition of the original open letter, assuming it wasn’t available as a PDF originally.)
I would take Ken Thompson’s “Trusting Trust” over Djikstra’s “GOTO”. Djikstra’s “GOTO” is a rare lowlight, but as Torvalds said, we don’t speak ill of the dead.
I can't think of a PDF but there are images like this. "Lenna". There are also really famous datasets that are used for examples in similar ways (iris).
Lenna is copyright-encumbered (despite its widespread use, Apple is a commercial operator and can't do that sort of thing) and it's not very inclusive to use a playboy centerfold image (even cropped) and it's taking some heat on the sexism front these days.
"In today’s age of high-resolution digital image technology, it seems difficult to argue that a 512 × 512 image produced with a 1970s-era analog scanner is the best we have to offer as an image quality test standard".[2]
I’d be willing to bet that there have been significantly more viewings of that image this century as a result of the documentary. What a ridiculous way to try to end cultural awareness of a meme.
And I’m sorry but I just can’t fathom the controversy. The cropped version is the only one I’ve ever seen used in the context of a sample image. It is utterly unremarkable unless you’re aware of the image’s provenance, (which I bet most people didn’t). Even the uncropped version, which I have only ever saw because of the controversy, isn’t any more racy than many historically important paintings hanging in art galleries.
I’m not saying this is an appropriate canonical test image. But I am saying that it’s disingenuous to single it out as a problem. There is so much of mainstream culture that is orders of magnitude more degrading of women than this image.
I am certainly not equating the two, but I do see parallels in the hysterics around “Lenna” and hysterics around David of Michelangelo’s little noodle.
That’s not the point. It’s being singled out among the millions of instances where very slightly racy depictions of women have entered into mainstream culture. Except in this instance it never did break into mainstream culture; it was only ever a meme among a comically narrow set of programmers and researchers.
Bringing mainstream attention to it was an extreme example of the Streisand Effect.
You seem to have the idea that the intended outcome was to prevent people seeing the image (it's going to be online forever, no chance of that), while I believe it was for people to stop using it in the places I described, as a part of scientific papers, etc., and help bring about a wider discussion of such imagery.
Forsén was interviewed in a documentary that featured the image. The entire point of which was to bring more attention to the fact the image existed and how it had been/was being used. Claiming this is an example of the Streisand effect is nonsense.
I'd be interested to hear what other specific images you feel should be getting a similar amount of discussion.
The documentary is literally called "Losing Lena" and tried to advocate for the removal of a meme image from an academic context. And it did so by immensely amplifying its exposure in a mainstream context.
The supposedly "deeper" part of their argument is even more pathetic, maternalistic, infantilising nonsense. Are they seriously claiming that women are so fragile that they will forego pursuit of their intellectual passion because sometimes, some academic papers use the image of a women wearing a fancy hat and bare shoulders? What a low view of women these documentarians have. What a vile insult to half the population.
I can only imagine that the movie was made by freak puritanical zealots who would literally explode if they ever saw a television advertisement for shampoo. And these zealots seem to have zero concept of how technology works. The movie's tagline falsely claims that "There's a secret hidden in almost every website and every digital image you've ever seen." The fact that anyone took it seriously is itself a sick joke.
Careful, there is someone whose name I shall not mention who is suing people claiming he is Satoshi and has copyright over the Whitepaper. He even got it banned from Bitcoin.org in the UK
The first surge towards 20k was at the end of 2017. It was down to about 4k in the first half of 2019 and up to about 10k in the second half of 2019. It went up and down between 30k and 60k in 2021. It's almost 30k now.
So 2019 was a good time to buy but maybe the mind share moment for bitcoin was 2017, when even TV news were talking about it every night.
I mean, it's not just wikipedia - the genesis block itself contained a news headline from 2009. So whatever it is you remember, it is not using bitcoin in 1999.
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
A while back we figured that the system we work on technically allows loading nigh anything as a texture, including stuff like SVG and PDF. So we also ended up with a bitcoin whitepaper textured surface used as a test, even though the actual project formed in part around opposition to cryptocurrency.
"The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. This new identity manifests itself in an authentic geometry that is to become proprietary to the Pepsi culture."
OK fine, except for IRS Tax Form 1040. Each year's form is probably the most intentionally distributed PDF on the planet (so excluding PDFs bundled with software like this story). I don't think there is a country larger than the US that requires its citizens (or their tax agents/software) to download a form and submit it each year.
No. We're talking in the hundreds of millions of people who either make a 1040 PDF themselves or have one made for them, and every year. The number of people who have used a cryptocurrency is probably larger than but within one order of magnitude of the number of people who have filled out a US 1040. But the number of people who have intentionally downloaded the original Bitcoin whitepaper? That's a tiny, tiny fraction of cryptocurrency users.
Edit: Now that I think about it, the W-2 probably is even larger than 1040, because you get one from each employer, plus families can file jointly, and not everyone has to file taxes if they make below a certain amount. So a household with 4 people working 2 jobs each generates one 1040 but 8 W-2s per year.
Even if only half the people in China or India did that, they would be double the numbers of the US for such tasks. They have taxes, work and PDFs too.
For Google search numbers, that would be different considering PDF searches in China wouldn't be done using Google. But perhaps taxes aren't done using PDFs either, that important detail I don't know.
There are significant percentages of people in China and India that have never used the internet on any device at all, let alone opened any PDF.
The number of people filing taxes on a computer in India rounds to zero. For example, a quarter of India is illiterate. And 97+% of them don't make enough money to owe tax. And of the final 3%, many have someone else file for them.
https://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-india-pay-income-tax....
The linked article is 10 years old, and the situation on ground has changed a lot, specifically due to concentrated efforts by the central government to prevent tax evasion. I'm not aware of the figures, and a majority chunk of income-earners still doesn't pay income tax, but it's most definitely much less than the 97% that you mentioned.
Tax evasion as I know it, and as has been informed to me by many financial consultants I've talked to, is now increasingly difficult. You really need to have back-channel contacts with the right people and spectacular know-how of the loopholes to pull it off. I'm talking about large-scale evasion here, but much of it stands true for small-scale as well.
> Even if only half the people in China or India did that, they would be double the numbers of the US for such tasks.
Well, no, because each is more than double the US population, and only half the US population files tax forms (2021 had 165 million individual filers, on 332 million US population.)
I'm fairly certain most people outside of the US never even heard of that form at all, as most people don't work with/in US companies, nor deal with the US government at all.
W-8BEN has nothing to do about dealing with US companies or government.
If you open investment account to buy any US stock, index funds or a some other US-based financial instruments you have to fill W-8BEN. Otherwise you might be charged 30% tax on your investment income by IRS.
So even if you open brokerage account in UK, EU, India, Russia or any other country you'll surely know about this form.
"Lorem Ipsum" completely confused me the first time I ran into it.
I was trying to make a document for work, using Apple Pages for the first time. Pages had a template that seemed good for the kind of document I had to make so I used that.
The template included "Lorem Ipsum" text. But since I hadn't heard of it before I thought it was some sort of sample document showing how to use the template but in a language I didn't recognize.
I figured that I'd somehow gotten Pages configured to default to a foreign language and spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how to set it to English. Eventually it occurred to me to search for some of the exact text from the template, hoping to find someone else had already dealt with this problem, and found the Wikipedia article that explained what "Lorem Ipsum" is.
TextEdit's icon used to have a copy of "Here's to the Crazy Ones" letter/poem/whatever. It was barely legible in the days of 256px icons but was extremely legible in the 512px version. I forget when it was first added, IIRC early versions of the icon used Lorem Ipsum text.
As the identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto" is extremely unclear, the only way that the real satoshi could identify themselves now is by moving a bitcoin out of one of the very early wallets, which nobody has been able to do. The australian guy named Craig Wright claiming to be Satoshi was clearly a fraud. How would a person showing up claiming to be Satoshi enforce copyright on this if they can't prove they're the original author?
The justice system is broken, with enough money you can make a mockery of it. The guy has filed so many lawsuits and sometimes they do go to trial. He's sued Bitcoin devs to change BTC Core code to unlock "his" lost Bitcoins that he says he doesn't have the keys to anymore. This was not admitted in the past but then his lawyers found a gullible British judge and they actually heard the case - although he ultimately lost.
He's also tried to sue Coinbase and Kraken for violating his supposed IP. Then he sued Peter McCormack for calling him a liar and "a moron". Although the court noted there's no evidence that he is Satoshi, the court still awared him £1 for his tarnished reputation. He's fabricated a story and lies to the entire world, then sues anyone who calls him out.
The story mentioned how one of the reasons to put Bob on each CD was to make any download of the ISO longer, since the actual XP data didn't fill the CD's capacity. Someone this conjured a memory of downloading XP/2000 back in the day, when I first got DSL, and how it was almost an hour. I thought that was quick at the time. 1.5mb/s vs 56k and all.
I recently upgraded to 1GB internet, a 600mb game update took under 10 seconds. I wonder what 20 years will bring?
Probably not much. At least advancements wont be like the difference between going from 1.5 mbps to 1 gbps. It's the same reason why 10gbe ethernet has not become a common thing for consumer level desktop hardware. While 1gbe ethernet has been the standard offering since the mid-2000s. Recently lot of manufacturers have started supporting 2.5gbe. But low cost switching/routing hardware that fully supports 2.5gbe isn't quite there yet.
Here in Singapore Gigabit Internet is pretty much standard with fibre-to-the-home almost everywhere.
My main problem is that wifi is slower than that. So to benefit from faster speeds, I'd either have to upgrade to wifi 6 or lay cables throughout the house.
The ISPs here are happy to sell you faster broadband, though.
Same thing in US, but, at least in my US apartment, ethernet cables were already built into the walls, with outlet or two for each room. As I prefer desktop to a laptop for everyday work, I gladly used it.
I wonder what the accumulated climate impact of this cryptographically-validated-bloat-as-friction-for-filesharing across the claimed half-a-billion copies is on the earth.
30 MB * 500,000,000 copies = 15,000 TB = 15 PB. Per [1], that's about one month of global Internet traffic in 1999, and about 6 minutes of global internet traffic in 2017[2]. I'm too lazy to re-do this math with today's numbers, but it's probably more like 2 minutes today.
For symmetric encryption quantum computing doesn't do much. It reduces the running time of brute-force search by sqrt. So in 2^128 operations you could brute force a 2^256 big search space (i.e. a 256 bit key).
That's why many symmetric systems have moved to a 256 bit key. It makes them quantum safe because 2^128 operations are considered impossible. (According to some physicsists it is guaranteed to boil the oceans).
And you are an adult. Imagine all the children and how that effected them on their ipads. My son used to come running over to me says “it’s back” and I’m not exaggerating he was afraid, fear in his eyes. It was an actual scary experience for many little kids.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
Tim Cook raised an eyebrow. “You mean we pay for the album and then just distribute it?”
I said, “Yeah, like when Netflix buys the movie and gives it away to subscribers.”
Tim looked at me as if I was explaining the alphabet to an English professor. “But we’re not a subscription organisation.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Let ours be the first.”
Tim was not convinced. “There’s something not right about giving your art away for free,” he said. “And this is just to people who like U2?”
“Well,” I replied, “I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it’s their choice whether they want to listen to it.”
See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is.
If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood.
Not. Quite. True.
On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.
I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.” Or, less kind, “The free U2 album is overpriced.” Mea culpa.
At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth.
Check out the actual directory. There’s a bunch of stuff in there including a cover image that does show up in the interface of Image Capture. In two minutes of testing I haven’t quite figured out where to click to get it to preview the Bitcoin white paper but decent chance they needed a “simple document” PDF for something at some point and it came down to “why not the Bitcoin white paper?”
I mentioned it in my post: in Image Capture, select the “Virtual Scanner II” device if it exists, and in the Details, set the Media to “Document” and Media DPI to “72 DPI.” You should see the preview of the first page of the Bitcoin paper. But that's only possible if the virtual device exists, and it's still unclear why it's hidden for some people but not others.
Huh. So I had a "Virtual Scanner" but not "Virtual Scanner II" when I was seeing the Treasure Island picture as a preview, but then after like a minute of doing other stuff I went back to Image Capture and it was gone and I couldn't get it back.
Gotta fill up these non-user-replaceable/extendable hard drives somehow!
Another favorite of mine were the super-high-resolution touch pad gestures that the corresponding System Preferences pane would display in a loop to illustrate how to perform them. Must have been a few hundreds of megabytes at least.
For what it's worth the virustotal page[0] for the sha256 hash[1] of the pdf file has it marked as "File distributed by Apple" so it must have been known for some time now? Would be interesting to know when that notice was added but there is no archive of the site unfortunately.
I guess some scientific work would make it into the list owing to their profound impact on society through overthrowing established philosophical thinking. Among others:
- Copernic's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium enabled the copernician revolution, which had profound impacts on how people thought about their place in the universe.
- Darwin's On the Origin of Species had more or less the same kind of impact, and provoked a strong reaction in the society, especially within churches.
I'm sure with more research we could find other scientific work that had a profound impact not only on our understanding of ourselves and our surroundings, but also on the way we think about ourselves.
We’ve seen many instances of documents that weren’t highly thought of at the time of their publication, with that changing radically later.
Vannevar Bush‘s essay “As We May Think” in 1945 is a visionary document that describes technologies we take for granted today more than 70 years ago.
It’s possible the Bitcoin white paper will be looked at in similar ways, especially if Bitcoin ends up being one mankind’s most important inventions in addition to being a critically important financial asset.
Sure, maybe there are useful consequences, especially if you need to defy governments or whatever. But surely not something in the same league of importance as, say, fire, the wheel, writing, powered flight, the hammer, steel, math, or even Quicksort.
It seems that some people really build their world around one element, and become obsessed about it that they make outlandish claims about its utility.
Based on the simple reality that bitcoin wouldn't exist without them, we can find a couple seminal papers of cryptography that had way more impact than this white paper. To name a few :
Solutions to the problem have been proposed since at least 1982. if you wanna get theoretical Bitcoin isn't even a game-theoretically unique
In fact that's probably the biggest criticism in general of the technology. What does it solve? I can't really think of a single use-case that couldn't have been solved using other, existing technologies. It seems like it's just adding extra constraints with no actual benefits. And it never lives up to the supposed benefits. In terms of centralization that's turned out to pretty consistently be a false promise. One Bitcoin transaction uses about as much electricity as a US household uses in a month so it's not scalable or sustainable. The cryptography techniques aren't particularly novel except maybe the way they were put together. But you can usually get a lot more use out of just using those cryptography techniques without all the added baggage. The idea that it provides anonymity is also very false. If anything, quite the opposite.
The one thing it does somewhat well is introduce scarcity where there previously was none. Which is often a major cost rather than a benefit but even when it's the main benefit it's not really an effective tool (see all the examples of non-tech-literate people buying "NFTs" as art and then finding that that encrypted URL they just bought got taken down)
I like bitcoin. I use it. It's cryptobro nonsense to claim anything to do with it is in the 'top 100 non-literary' documents ever produced by humanity.
Solutions to the Byzantine generals problem have been long known before that (PBFT was in 1999 for instance).
The interesting part of bitcoin was the “permission-less BFT algorithm” (because other algorithm at the time required to know the list of nodes up-front) through proof of work and game theory”.
The game theory part is only applicable to Austrian-style (scarce money) crypto-“currencies”, not to other cases of byzantine generals problem (it only works because everybody has financial incentives in the robustness of the system), and even in that specific niche, the proof of work scheme has been abandoned by pretty much everybody else in favor of proof of stakes (which isn't really a permission-less system anymore).
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies only solve the byzantine generals problem inside of the blockchain itself. The second anything has to touch the real world you are right back to needing trust. It's robust against a pointless thing.
It's like building a bridge that can withstand the earth being swallowed by the sun. Sure the bridge will survive but that's pointless, and the energy and material being spent on that bridge has a billion better uses.
Yeah, but, it's really not going to be. Like, there is absolutely no chance of that, ever.
Even in the very-unlikely world where some sort of decentralized cryptocurrency is used for anything other than scams and drugs, it's not going to be bitcoin, and blockchains existed for decades before bitcoin did.
> blockchains existed for decades before bitcoin did
That's absolutely not true. Bitcoin was the first blockchain like the ones we know today, the idea existed before but no one had implemented it in a decentralized way [0][1]. Bitcoin was also the first to solve the double spending problem. [2]
We had linked lists of hashes which themselves referenced hash-tables, and we had a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem, but the bitcoin whitepaper combined them, and the combination of those two properties (not even tied to the consensus mechanism) is the thing people are talking about when they use the word "blockchain" now
Maybe take others advice and stop commenting on this topic because everything you said is wrong. I’ll contradict all your points using specific personal examples of my usage.
I’ve bought Bitcoin many times without any KYC. In old days localbitcoins and these days ATMs in many countries.
There aren’t any “exchange in the coins path”. I’ve exchanged paper fiat currency at Starbucks, in a hotel lobby.
The wallets I use are open source 100%. In fact I’ve personally written a python script to manually generate a transaction to broadcast. There is no third party. only your operating system, the internet connection and the source code. In that particular case I was using NixOS linux and so my operating system was also open source. I also broadcast my transaction over the ToR network so my internet provider and the Bitcoin network has no visibility.
Now onto usefulness. By holding Bitcoin I’ve preserved and grown my wealth. But how has it been used practically. Lets see.
- yesterday I bought my lunch for my wife and I, $21 using by Bitpay debit card. I loaded the card 2 mins before with those dollars by sending Litecoin which was auto exchanged by Bitpay at exactly the current exchange rate and with no fee. I exchange Bitcoin for small amounts Litecoin periodically as Litecoin is fast and cheap to send for small payments. Savings vs Checking.
- Years ago I met an artist from Argentina on an internet forum. She was painting what I thought were nice paintings. She was selling professional prints of those. I sent her Bitcoin and she sent me the prints. I’ve framed them and they hang in my home. I get many compliments on them.
- I’ve hired a developer in Crimea to work on a security software and he was paid for his work in Bitcoin
- When my sister in law had a baby shower I bought all the gifts at Buy Buy Baby using a digital gift card purchased 30 mins earlier using Bitcoin.
I could actually go on and on and on. But clearly you don’t have experience or understanding of what you are discussing as you proposed sending cash in the mail, which I don’t know anyone who would do that.
Bitcoin is revolutionary and has a decent shot at bringing fiat government currencies to their knees so they are forced to act responsibly and not brr brr money print.
> Maybe take others advice and stop commenting on this topic because everything you said is wrong.
Oh lord.
> I’ve bought Bitcoin many times without any KYC. In old days localbitcoins and these days ATMs in many countries ... There aren’t any “exchange in the coins path”. I’ve exchanged paper fiat currency at Starbucks, in a hotel lobby.
Sure, ok. Now take just one tiny step forward. Think about what happens next. Those coins have extremely high odds of passing through a KYC system in the near future. That can, will, and frequently has been used to trace users who are dumb enough to think "I paid for bitcoin for cash, I'm now anonymous".
> The wallets I use are open source 100%.
And nothing nefarious has ever slipped into open source software, right? Do you have no idea what a supply chain attack is?
You use NPM, you really ought to.
> There is no third party. only your operating system, the internet connection and the source code.
And, of course, your OS and the internet can be trusted. This is a great example of the level of critical thinking cryptobros achieve.
> I also broadcast my transaction over the ToR network so my internet provider and the Bitcoin network has no visibility.
Ok, so you mitigate the announce IP, which is one of the least useful ways to do analysis. Cool.
> yesterday I bought my lunch for my wife and I, $21 using by Bitpay debit card. I loaded the card 2 mins before with those dollars by sending Litecoin ...
So it has objectively worse utility, UX, and more dependencies than fiat?
This is not a good example.
> Years ago I met an artist from Argentina on an internet forum. She was painting what I thought were nice paintings. She was selling professional prints of those. I sent her Bitcoin and she sent me the prints.
Ok. This is still not useful. Western Union, Paypal, SWIFT, all cheaper and in some cases faster.
> I’ve hired a developer in Crimea to work on a security software and he was paid for his work in Bitcoin
Protip: if someone is willing to be paid in bitcoin, they are not worth the bitcoin you're sending.
> When my sister in law had a baby shower I bought all the gifts at Buy Buy Baby using a digital gift card purchased 30 mins earlier using Bitcoin.
As above: "So it has objectively worse utility, UX, and more dependencies than fiat?"
> Bitcoin is revolutionary and has a decent shot at bringing fiat government currencies to their knees so they are forced to act responsibly and not brr brr money print.
You have absolutely no idea what a central bank does, do you? Well, I mean, you obviously think you do. But you really don't. A basic class on economics would do you a world of good.
Despite being nominally on your side in this discussion, the way you reply makes me actively wish I agreed with you less, because you are so hostile and abrasive.
A civilized discussion would certainly be much more productive. I can easy address the claims made and they are false.
If this poster actually knew how much experience I have with all the topics they profess such knowledge about I’d hope in that case they could be more mature.
Probably one of the must outrageous statements was to try and lecture me on the function of central banks. I’m intimately familiar with the US financial system and the function of central banks. I’ve extensively discussed Bitcoin with a very senior researcher of the Fed and was also directly involved in preparing private presentation to the ECB in Frankfurt. The central banks themselves are very concerned about how competitive Bitcoin is with fiat currency.
Bitcoin has more utility nowadays than dollar funds. It can be converted to almost any currency anywhere almost instantly and can be used by consumers with no friction via instant funded prepaid debit cards worldwide.
This poster brings up legacy payment systems that can’t even remotely compete with Bitcoin on the technical merits.
I keep thinking I should respond as you are so unbelievably wrong it really needs refuting these categorically false claims of yours.
However it’s seems doubtful you will even be willing to acknowledge your flawed understanding and perhaps even unlikely you will see my response give how HN works.
Sure. Whitepaper was released in 2008. Genesis block was in 2009.
In 2007 we had Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems[0]. Prior to both the whitepaper and the genesis block, we had Distributed Double Spending Prevention[1].
These are all particular subsets of distributed consensus problems, which have been studied in the context of CS for at least 30+ years (Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony[2]).
I think it depends on what you consider to be the first such system.
The earliest ones I personally recall using were Liberty Reserve and E-Gold, which were basically fine, I guess. It was a good way to send money around with less eyes on it. Before that there were things like DigiCash, but I don't know much about that one. There was a whole bunch of random ones during the 90s, but most of them were ponzis and rugpulls (some things never change).
In my opinion, BTC took off in a way that others didn't for a bunch of reasons:
1) It was the first usable system that was decentralized, AFAIK. This is a pretty desirable characteristic, of course.
2) It had (and has) flaws, but there was no obvious means of it being a rug-pull or complete scam. E.g., it wasn't supposedly backed by gold/silver/whatever that didn't really exist.
3) You were able to get some bitcoin to use for 'free' by mining. Prior systems you had to buy into. The threshold to participate and profit was much lower.
4) The protocol is simple enough for those first few points to be trivial to verify.
5) It entered a sort of 'spiral' relationship with darknet markets and more general cybercrime. As those surged in popularity, the demand for bitcoin surged, which fueled interest in bitcoin, which fueled interested in markets, which.. etc.
No-coiners are exhausting. Bitcoin triggers a deep psychological anxiety in some people and their reaction is to construct these defensive arguments in their heads about why Bitcoin is stupid, a scam, useless, etc.
If in another 10 years it continues it’s success and we have widespread point of sale usage and micropayments etc, and value is, maybe $200K/coin. Then these people might require some type of specialized psychological therapy to handle their disbelief.
On the other hand, Bitcoiners even if it crashes to zero somehow, will be saying at least we tried, oh well.
Bitcoin opinions are some type of strange personality litmus test. I find it very curious as the test result feels very unpredictable for me when applied to people I know well.
> Bitcoin triggers a deep psychological anxiety in some people and their reaction is to construct these defensive arguments in their heads about why Bitcoin is stupid, a scam, useless, etc.
It is obviously stupid, slow, and wasteful. Ignoring all the other problems with cryptocurrencies, just on those three axes ETH is superior.
> If in another 10 years it continues it’s success and we have widespread point of sale usage and micropayments etc, and value is, maybe $200K/coin. Then these people might require some type of specialized psychological therapy to handle their disbelief.
You love to monologue, huh?
> On the other hand, Bitcoiners even if it crashes to zero somehow, will be saying at least we tried, oh well.
A great sign of a moron is that they attach themselves to non-falsifiable ideas so they can't be wrong.
> Bitcoin opinions are some type of strange personality litmus test. I find it very curious as the test result feels very unpredictable for me when applied to people I know well.
It's very predictable. Is someone naive to the point of being borderline childlike? Wants to get-rich-quick? Hates the government? Bitcoin fan.
To be blunt, you have no idea of what you're talking about and should refrain from commenting on a topic you clearly don't understand. You're all over the place and clearly letting your emotions take over reason.
You are the one making sexist comments, spreading misinformation and using insults... If you have concerns about Bitcoin or wish to express your personal dislike for it, there are certainly valid points to be made without resorting to fabrications or personal attacks.
I didn't say it did. But the idea of distributing data in a P2P fashion is not novel.
> - The term blockchain was coined after the Bitcoin white paper was published, to describe the mechanism used in Bitcoin.
I'm not very interested in the particular etymology. The fundamental ideas of a blockchain, regardless of what you call it, had been laid out by multiple people years before the bitcoin whitepaper[0].
> - Bitcoin was the first system to solve the double spending problem in a decentralized way.
No, it wasn't[1][2].
> The network is actively used. Just yesterday, there were 345K on chain Bitcoin transactions totaling a value of around 4 billion USD.
..Ok? That's about the level of activity I would expect between speculation, scams, and drugs, sure.
Maybe you don't know, for sure governments of Europe and North America don't advertise this, but it's used more and more in various countries. For example here in Costa Rica, the most popular country after Mexico for North Americans. People using a smartphone app leveraging the lightning network, check that video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrEDaFEW6yI
That's not quite right. If I recall correctly, HTTP predates the HTTP RFC by a few years. I agree that HTTP was more impactful than Bitcoin but I'm not sure about the RFC itself. Maybe.
That's the norm for an RFC. It rarely defines something new; it's a formalization of what's starting to occur to ensure interoperability.
And really, the RFC comment is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The idea that the bitcoin whitepaper is some holy document, or even anywhere near the "top 100 non-literary" documents created by humans is profoundly stupid.
If someone genuinely believes that, I need to talk with them synchronously to try and figure out where, exactly, it ranks. Obviously ahead of the Rosetta Stone and the Treaty of Versailles, but does it beat out the Magna Carta?
Silicon Valley tech-bros know that the money-printer drives the malinvestment bubbles that feed them. They're natural enemies of a decentralized, deflationary currency.
Of all time? This almost certainly isn't true. Many treaties, laws, RFCs, and so on would be more impactful than Bitcoin.
Do we really think the Bitcoin white paper is more impactful than, say, the Magna Carta or Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses? I think you might be inadvertently succumbing to recency bias.
(Not trying to defend the grandparent's comment, but) You might be also succumbing to the country bias – outside of UK/US, most people wouldn't have ever heard and wouldn't care about ML's 95 or Magna Carta, and it's not going to impact their present and future life in any way.
> (Not trying to defend the grandparent's comment, but) You might be also succumbing to the country bias – outside of UK/US, most people wouldn't have ever heard and wouldn't care about ML's 95 or Magna Carta
I think you're underestimating the colossal, compounding effect that these have had over the centuries. It would be very surprising to me if, say, Germans did not learn about the Ninety-Five Theses, considering that it was a seminal event in German history. Just because it's not obviously affecting your life right now does not mean it was not impactful in dramatically changing the course of history.
Most of the significant laws like “don’t stab people” were never written down because they’re so obviously the law. So I reckon there is space in the top 100.
I'm going to sound like a grouch, but that's not my intention. If the bitcoin PDF was chosen as a test file, it seems far too basic to be a valuable test for an Apple developer to be using (after all, PDFs can be insanely rich) and I have to believe that Apple is full of people that have Adobe on speed dial or are otherwise sufficiently creative to make a nice Apple-grade PDF that stretches the format to its limits.
It's possible that the test file is for an end user to verify function, not an Apple dev, I guess, but then in that case Id expect Apple to provide something much more clear (say, Apple logo with "if u can read this, great" rendered in multiple languages") that supported their aims of branding, lack of legal encumbrance, and international support.
> A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since.
What an absolutely foolish way to broadcast to your employer that you’re willing to leak information.
Interesting, Executive Order 6102, forcing US and non-US citizens to sell gold at a fixed rate, in order to prevent gold hoarding so the US could meet it's obligations to back it's currency via gold.
Also interesting that it led to the sort of related Brenton Woods system, and all the effects of that and it's de facto ending in the 70s under Nixon
"Executive Order 6102", the infamous conversation between Darth Sidious and his Clone Commanders that started the systematic elimination of the Jedi. I remember like it was yesterday...
On my Mojave machine the files modtime is “ Mon Aug 20 2018”! (Which seems to be straight from macOS, not the date of my install, since the modtime on other macOS system files varies widely)
That’s roughly the date they’d have done the full world build for the first non-beta release of Mojave based on its actual release date. It’s unlikely it was actually the date of creation
I love the comments here all so awe struck by this that they don't realize how stupid it is. Literally any PDF document would have served the same purpose, the printer test page could have been enough. But this just reveals that even deep inside Apple development there are cryptobros who don't mind all the millions of dollars that the whole crypto movement has scammed from hard working gullible people.
I feel a difference between the rationality of a critique and the disappointment caused by disappointing human behaviors.
The paper in question is a genesis, discussing it doesn't imply you "don't mind" about all the scammed people.
The weird easter-egg-y nature of "hiding" this document inside a commercial OS makes your contribution a bit extreme; you created a imaginary bridge between two mountains.
the fascinating thing about observers of the crypto world is that they assign the same level of importance to an individual's phishing attack as to a 10 billion organization as to the entire 500bn commodity that powers them.
imagine doing that to the rest of the tech industry. "my friend lost money in an email! duh 'puters r scam!" come to think of it, there were people in the 90s like that.
Another OS include is that Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme. Wonder if the Bitcoin paper has any function beyond its written content.
> Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme.
Only insofar as it made the image slightly larger, making it slower to distribute an ISO image of the CD online. I don't think the installer actually checks its presence or anything like that.
I think macOS has tried something like that though with "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" back in the day (which actually did contain a human-readable poem), but I don't really get the point of all of these attempts – surely the entire operating system is already copyrighted, even if it doesn't rhyme?
The primary purpose of DSMOSX was a basic form of DRM to ensure that the DMCA provisions against bypassing DRM applied. The poem was a legal hedge against the idea of software being declared not copyrightable or something along those lines.
I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster and the whole fiasco of BHA Carl Sagan code names. Easter eggs and codenames were supposed to be fun, not lawsuit material.
> I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster
I don't understand this reference and Google leaves me totally blank here. I could ask you to clarify, but there is the chance you don't see it or dont reply so … ChatGPT to the rescue?
-----------
Prompt: What was the Paula Abdul office background poster controversy?
ChatCPT: The Paula Abdul office background poster controversy refers to a incident that occurred during a live episode of "American Idol" in 2009, when fans noticed a poster hanging on the wall behind Paula Abdul's desk during her pre-taped video segments. The poster, which appeared to be of a semi-nude woman, caused a stir among viewers and led to accusations that Abdul was promoting sexual objectification.
Abdul and the show's producers initially denied that the poster existed, but later issued a statement acknowledging its presence and stating that it was not intentionally visible during the broadcast. They also apologized to viewers who may have been offended by the poster.
-----------
This does sound plausible … But wait! Is this truly true or just hallucinated?
Googling "Paula Abdul American Idol" just finds countless gossip posts about an alleged affaire with ex-contestant Corey Clark, but nothing about a poster.
> Googling "Paula Abdul American Idol" just finds countless gossip posts about an alleged affaire with ex-contestant Corey Clark, but nothing about a poster.
Why would you expect that to return results about a specific controversy from 2009? She was a judge on American Idol for years, it's the only reason I know who she is.
It is maybe noteworthy that I am in Europe. The google results have a disclaimer that some results could be missing and link to https://policies.google.com/faq
> How are you implementing the recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision on the right to be forgotten?
I don't think that is really the issue though, I think there is just too much noise around the signal. But I am struck that GPT could answer my question (I guess?) and Google not.
I also wonder when demands are done for a "right to be forgotten" in the training data for AI.
Okay, here's my take: whoever put it there held a bunch of BTC at the time and hoped that tech enthusiasts would come across it and get interested, increasing the value of that person's wallet. Alternatively they just needed a PDF for some QA reason and that person just picked the paper as an easter egg because it felt like cool tech lore.
How long before Craig Wright, an Australian "academic" who has very dubious claims of being Satoshi and who has attempted to bully via the legal system, claims Apple owes him billions?
The entire directory is really weird. Looks like some sort of directory of assets for automated testing the data from scanners (like, physical document scanners) returning properly? Built in macOS md5 hash reports the PDF's hash as d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042
Why can't they clean up their OS distribution. This kind of content clearly does not belong there at least if it is practically hidden in there. There should be a reason why every file in the OS distribution is there. This kind of looks like Apple does not know what is in their OS. What else is there?
«A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. They’ve indicated it will likely be removed in future versions.»
It’s a convenient way of backing up the document that can be used to re-create this impactful technology from scratch… may a disaster take place. Think like sending backups of human civilization into space. There are probably now hundreds of millions of copy of this file, pretty cool.
Currently the only impact Bitcoin had is burning a large amount of electricity. I would not say this is a particular worthy technology to safe. There would be far better ideas like Transformers in AI or 5nm chip technology.
Meh, being able to synchronise an append-only tamper proof linked list and control who gets to put what on it in a decentralized way is pretty cool. Not to mention it's far easier to implement with limited means, than 5nm chips, or large tansformer models.
(Also implementing money on it does seem pretty intelligent -- its a scarcity device -- peoble just seem to do stupid stuff with it)
Git (and any merkle tree) already implements a tamper proof linked list, there’s no reason to burn electricity in a proof of work algorithm to accomplish this.
Controlling who gets to put things in it in a decentralized way isn’t as important as many people think, at the end of the day almost all applications (other than currency) can just use a central authority to publish hashes.
> Git (and any merkle tree) already implements a tamper proof linked list, there’s no reason to burn electricity in a proof of work algorithm to accomplish this.
You should probably reread git’s documentation if you think git push -f rewrites any commits. It doesn’t. It makes new commits and re-assigns the named branch to track the new commits you just pushed. It rewrites branch names, not commits.
It is impossible (without finding a SHA collision) to rewrite a commit in git.
And before you say “yeah but how do you know which SHA sums are the right one if you don’t trust branch names”, please reread the final paragraph of the post you replied to.
Add countries with hyperinflation too such as Venezuela and Argentina.
Every cryptocurrency-related post here in HN is flooded with extremely negative comments, even if the post itself does not promote cryptocurrencies. These people have seen countless examples of cryptocurrency scams, but they cannot understand what life under an economically oppressed or unstable country is because they never experienced it.
- People living abroad who are completely debanked because local banks refuse to open banks accounts for people who are merely suspected of being US citizns, despite them not being US citizns, with no path to resolve their predicament. This is a real problem that is effecting real people right now.
- Any legal activity that the banks and payment processors don't like for one reason or another; onlyfans, "right-wing" websites (whether actual or merely alleged), ...etc.
We no longer live in a world where you can live a dignified life with cash alone. Cryptocurrecy is a net positive to humanity, even if the technologies behind it may currently be more wasteful and make the lives of criminals a bit easier. There is simply no alternative for a lot of honest people in financial dead-ends the government can't or won't help.
Thank you Satoshi and anyone who works to support this technology for making the world a slightly better place.
But vast amount cryptobros being idiots doesn't make crypto itself useless. Similar to how there are a vast amount of AI/GPT-bros who are going to annoy us for the next few years, while AI itself is still very cool and beneficial.
"We use bitcoin because it’s a good legal means of payment. The fact that we have bitcoin payments as an alternative helps to defend us from the Russian authorities. They see if they close down other more traditional channels, we will still have bitcoin. It’s like insurance."
They even use Paypal and card transfers for donations... Bitcoin is just another payment they accept in the hope it will be hard for the government to block funds... but they don't say it anywhere that's been the only way, or the best way to do that, it's just one of the ways they're looking and so far has not been shown to be more government-resilient as I am sure getting the money out from the blockchain is not going to be easy if the Government doesn't like the idea... you make it look like Bitcoin is their saviour or something which is a gross misrepresentation.
> but they don't say it anywhere that's been the only way
Sure but if it wasn't significant, they wouldn't have mentioned it.
> so far has not been shown to be more government-resilient as I am sure getting the money out from the blockchain is not going to be easy if the Government doesn't like the idea
It seems you have no idea how bitcoin works then. All you have to do is memorize 12 words. You can then take your wealth to many corners of the world, some of which will be free from the tyranny of your government and still have an ecosystem which will let you cash out your bitcoin for the local currency. A good example - Dubai, where a lot of real estate is being purchased in crypto by the Russians fleeing the war.
You may not be aware of how Bitcoin has consistently aided people facing extreme and dire circumstances worldwide, caused by the sanctions you seem to hold in high esteem.
Every time you cheer for sanctions, you're cheering for the suffering and death of the most vulnerable people in the world under the guise that somehow a miracle will arise and the malnourished and starving will topple an already oppressive regime. Bitcoin has saved countless many from ruin from within these totalitarian states, despite their attempts at enforcing bans. It also doesn't help that marionettes echo propaganda created by media organizations, and those companies are owned by billionaire elites that benefit the most from Western sanctions.
Anyone supporting this is the enemy of the people and deserves everything that comes of them.
Any way around sanctions that helps me send money to my family in Russia is a way that is exploited by the dictator orders of magnitude more, maintaining the situation where my relatives need financial help in the first place (to say nothing about undermining world peace etc). Yes it is unfortunate.
It does not have the kind of liquidity, nor anonymity, which could be successfully used at any significant scale whatsoever, and there's no point to it given the USD is a convenient, anonymous, trivially falsifiable source of funds which are fully launderable.
You're missing the point. Cryptocurrencies are specifically designed to evade regulations. Everything else —efficiency, cost, convenience, usability— is sacrificed in order to achieve this goal.
Call me old school but I don’t understand the hype about regulations. The less power the government has, the better. They certainly don’t need to know my spending habits. And a stack of banknotes evade regulations pretty well anyway.
The function of the state is to enforce private property rights. Regulations exist to alleviate the consequences of private property rights by adding various forms of exceptions. Whether you think that's a good thing depends on whether your idea of utopia is a egalitarian commune or a neofeudal federation of corporate city states.
Note that I'm talking about private property not personal property. Variations of the latter exist and have existed in almost every society but the concept of the former has increasingly been maximized to the point that patches of land, ways to do things, ideas in your head and sincere promises are now things you can own and exchange and people refusing to suffer hunger or lack of shelter are seen as unreasonable if they want to use what isn't eaten or isn't lived in.
Abolishing the state as long as other organizations (or individuals) are allowed to hoard resources/wealth/power seems as catastrophic a suggestion as abolishing the police as long as other gangs exist. You're just substituting one evil for another without affecting any material change.
Bitcoin specifically, even at the height of Silk Road, and at Bitcoin's nearly weakest-by-comparison point, has been and is cleaner by proportion when compared with virtually all countries' grey markets in terms of what proportion of its economy is used for crime.
The crime trope is ancient, old, and has been repeatedly debunked. The evidence for its prevalence simply isn't there—because Bitcoin is not anonymous.
Yeah, I wish cryptocurrencies haven't been invented so that human trafficking wouldn't exist at all.
I mean just think about it. A FULL 3%* of all cryptocurrency transactions are related to criminal activities! If we ban those 3% (and the other 97% because why not), we will stop all human trafficking or at least make a noticeable dent in it because most traffickers rely on cryptocurrency and absolutely don't use traditional currency as the main way to transact.
Perhaps if cryptocurrencies do finally get banned, it would at least help certain individuals to think more critically, or perhaps start thinking at all. One can only wish.
[*]: 3% because it's the most extreme reputable statistic out there. Most reputable studies place transactions related to illicit activities well bellow 1%.
okay, someone give me a cloud development platform where I can host anything and do arbitrary executions for
a) single one time cost.
b) no list of approved or unapproved uses
c) unlimited free read bandwidth
d) all my users pay to change the application
I've looked at AWS, GCP, Firebase, bare metal and none of their offerings have the same pricing structure of blockchain nodes. Additionally, the target audience for non-blockchain applications require a much larger funnel and friction to get users to for anything, while the overhead costs of getting them into the funnel soar. Free tiers are okay but can't handle a spike in traffic. Whereas audiences in the blockchain space have already crossed all the friction and have an insatiable demand for 1-click payment funnels.
This perspective doesn't really seem to arise in these conversations. But perhaps there is a counterpoint that I missed about some other cloud platform? This is very high impact for me and I can see many developers continuing to bring their audiences to this development platform.
I remember one time installing Bob on a test machine in an IT lab running 32 bit XP.
Marvelously it ran, but frustrated my poor coworker who was didn't know what it was.
I bet it was Satoshi who put this in MacOS. it would make sense if Satoshi was the kind of person to hide in plain sight and leave small traces to find him/her.
Bag holders are going to try to spin this into a conspiracy theory to pump the value of BTC. Next they will be saying that Satoshi was Steve Jobs or some nonsense.
There should be a Bitcoin Satire Impossibility Law. Posts about Bitcoin that look like satire either a) oh boy are they not satire or b) will soon be interpreted acted on in earnest by Bitcoin zealots anyway.
E.g., Dogecoin.
Rest assured there is a gaggle of Bitcoin zealots hitting up reddit et al to spread the word about how good this discovery is for Bitcoin's bottom line!
I'd make a joke about Kind Midas here, but in light of BSIL I'm afraid someone here would use the premise as an idea for a startup and end up hurting themselves (or others).
A theory: they needed an existing PDF to test PDF rendering. The Bitcoin paper was (1) handy, and (2) has a diverse variety of content in it, including images and math symbols.
Isn't is a bit like comparing Donald Trump to Jesus Christ? Bitcoin was a genius invention, but did Steve Jobs ever invent anything, except perhaps some great sales pitches?
Steven Jobs marketed himself, Satoshi did not.
Not to say Jobs wasn't a great guy but I know many great guys who never could have invented bitcoin.
> One other oddity: there’s a file called cover.jpg in the Resources folder used for testing the Photo media type, a 2,634×3,916 JPEG of a sign taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. There’s no EXIF metadata in the photo, but photographer Thomas Hawk identified it as the location of a nearly identical photo he shot in 2008.
If I were Thomas Hawk, I’d be sending Apple a bill for the use of my photograph.
I don't think it's his photograph -- they just both photographed the same sign (the Apple version contains parts of the wall that are not in Thomas Hawk's version).
The interesting thing here is that I don't believe the Bitcoin whitepaper was released with any license. If someone could prove themselves to be the author they'd probably be able to make a case for a lot of money from Apple.
Incorrect; it was released under the MIT licence with the rest of the code, since it is "associated documentation" as it was published alongside the code on the bitcoin.org website upon first release.
Further, Satoshi explicitly reassigned copyright over the entirety of Bitcoin essentially to posterity by rewriting the licensing. That, similarly, includes the bitcoin whitepaper.
How could it be that versions of MacOS released in 2019 have the paper due to a court case from 2021? Even ignoring the temporal issue I really can't see any plausible connection.
That explains the temporal issue. Then, for the connection, I remember a lot of people on the internet reacted negatively on that news given that they don't agree that he should have ownership for that document as he never proved to be satoshi. I could see Apple or an employee inject that document in a way to "challenge" or "protest".
The quoted CoinGeek site is owned by Calvin Ayre who works together with Craig Wright. All their BSV related articles are very one-sided and extremely biased.
Basically he registered a copyright, but this does not mean that he "got" the copyright, as the copyright office does not verify authorship and as it's possible for multiple adverse claims to exist.
This is like a slightly better version of https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-th... someone wanted to pick an example PDF and picked the bitcoin one. Just like in the article above back in 1973 they didn't realize the harm in what they were selecting as the sample photo. And maybe there is no harm with this PDF selection? We'll know in 2073!
we don't know the harm, because we don't know how many women encountered this image and may have been made uncomfortable because of it.
we also don't know how many men felt encouraged in their sexism upon encountering this image.
while the image didn't make men sexist, it undoubtedly helped normalize that view among those coming across it during their work.
context matters. if you read playboy at home, that's on you, but if it is found in the breakroom at an office then it has an effect on everyone working there.
fair question. i haven't looked at the picture to closely.
how about if someone recognized the phto as coming from playboy and making a remark about that and some men laugh about it. a women knowing why they are laughing could feel uncomfortable about that.
She felt violated and wanted people to stop [ETA: Or not, see below]. Why isn't that harm? Why would using pornography in a professional context (outside of the pornography industry or other edge cases) be considered appropriate? Of course it's off-putting to people, women and otherwise.
> In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said.
Probably more harm has been done by the internet mob demanding she feel a certain way about her picture, than any harm done by the image itself.
My mistake on that claim, I still roll my eyes at people who say it's totally normal and okay. How many racey pictures of men have been canonicalized like that? There's a leering element to it.
The statue of David comes to mind immediately. It's been canonicalized like that for over over 500 years, yet I don't hear anybody saying that it's not ok, or talking about how it projects an unhealthy stereotype of men.
> How many racey pictures of men have been canonicalized like that?
To be fair, very few other racy pictures of women have been canonicalized like that, either; about the only pictures I can think of are paintings, specifically the Mona Lisa, which is hardly racy, and Boticelli’s Birth of Venus, which I suppose you might look at as racy, though I wouldn’t particularly. There’s a couple other non-picture works of art that are canonicalized in that way, but aren’t themselves pictures – Michaelangelo’s David as mentioned in a sibling comment is a good example. But then, even though the canonicalization makes them into something else, it is usually based on upon perceived artistic importance, the Lenna is a different and arguably sui generis phenomenon.
But the topic of this subthread is the cropped, non-racy image that got circulated. Is there anyone who actually got offended by a picture of a woman’s face and shoulder? Besides maybe people in ultra-religious societies that insist on women’s shoulders being covered?
The comment you are replying to is simply bad faith white knighting. As soon as I indicated I felt violated by their comment, suddenly it was "different."
You're trying to stir me into anger by, yourself, acting in bad faith. It's a cheap trick which won't work, and patently obvious to most any observer.
If you had a point, you wouldn't need to behave this way. (As opposed to some other people who disagree with me in this thread, who do have a point, and don't feel compelled to do this.)
The full image from which it is clipped is, at a minimum, erotic photography (where the boundary with pornography is…well, opinions differ considerably.)
But, yeah, the crop that has become known as “the Lenna” isn’t (considered on its own) even that.
It seems bizarre, she was a model and presumably the photo was created while she was doing her job? The cautionary tale seems to be "don't sell rights to pictures of yourself".
Tech isn't about fun any more. It's about making huge stacks of cash. We used to build things because it was fun and half-way artistic. Now we only build things if we think we can convince a VC to give us cash for it.
Though... I suppose this isn't exactly the venue to encourage people to do things simply for the joy of it.
I hope Apple sees this as a bug and removes this in their next major update, hopefully an Apple employee files a radar and gets this removed.
This should have never been allowed on macOS, an endorsement of a pyramid scheme, borderline ponzi scheme, incinerating the planet and evading sanctions.
I use Linux and macOS and the former would never allow this to happen ever.
It’s not even relevant, though. You can make your claims about the supposed endorsement without making a reference to Linux at all, or even if you did, appeal to the freedom aspect of it - you can probably remove it and compile it yourself. To claim that none of them are even ideologically supportive of it? An absurd claim
It isn't hidden if it was found with a full path to file and now on full display.
By adding it into the main macOS, a sentient being at Apple deliberately chose that file to place it into a major operating system. I consider it an blantant endorsement.
I'm questioning Apple's review process because of this. At worst this is akin to malware.
