Genetic Access Control Code Uses 23andMe DNA Data For Internet Racism 312
rjmarvin writes: A GitHub project is using the 23andMe API for genetic decoding to act as a way to bar users from entering websites based on their genetic data — race and ancestry. "Stumbling around GitHub, I came across this bit of code: Genetic Access Control. Now, budding young racist coders can check out your 23andMe page before they allow you into their website! Seriously, this code uses the 23andMe API to pull genetic info, then runs access control on the user based on the results. Just why you decide not to let someone into your site is up to you, but it can be based on any aspect of the 23andMe API. This is literally the code to automate racism."
So What (Score:5, Insightful)
1: Stop caring what other people do.
2: Don't have a 23andMe profile (accessible to random websites on the internet, or at all) if you really care and think this will actually affect you.
Perhaps some users will implement it in a harmless and beneficial way, such as creating a safe space for women. But it’s just as likely that, in a few years, Googling for a snippet of this code yields search results that are the equivalent of a who’s who of racist and misogynist sites.
3: Take your sexist, racist agenda and go the fuck away.
Re:So What (Score:4, Insightful)
> 3: Take your sexist, racist agenda and go the fuck away.
Well, indeed. What's the difference between "a safe space for women" and "a safe space for white supremacists"? And who in their right mind can think it's a good idea to have a DNA profile online? Even if set to private, it's begging to get hacked.
Re:So What (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, there's no difference and that's the point.
Who gives a shit if racist groups have a little pow wow on their own servers?
Are you going to tell them that they can't have freedom of speech?
Let them be assholes on their own private corner of the internet.
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Yea I don't get it. It inst as if these groups have not found ways to prevent those they consider undesirables out in the past. What's the problem here, that it might be harder to infiltrate them or something. I don't imagine submitting someone elses sample to 23andMe is all that much tougher than using a fake name and photo on the web anyway.
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I'm pretty sure the feds will be able to insert what ever undercover profiles they want into 23andme, and thereby making it easier to infiltrate what ever terrorist group they all with the correct genetic bona fides.
Re: but hate speech can be forbidden (Score:3, Insightful)
Disagree. Any speech or expression should be allowed, or your remarks
themselves could be considered hate-speech. The Constitution's framers
understood this fine point that speech that is not acted upon is nothing more
than speech. Now if a person acts on their words, then yes, that's a problem
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Depends on the speech, the person, and in what role their speech originates from.
For ex:
-money in politics: not free speech
-private citizen being racist: free speech
-government official being racist in his official capacity: not free speech
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I find your comment offensive and a micro-agression against me and my kind. This is hate speech. Please ban and delete immediately.
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It's called institutional or systemic racism, and it's very much alive in the real estate market.
Re: So What (Score:2)
I'm getting plenty of brainwashing from Marxist, Leninist, Leftist Utopians, thank you very much. The war for public approval and oppression has two sides.
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. What's the difference between "a safe space for women" and "a safe space for white supremacists"? And who in their right mind can think it's a good idea to have a DNA profile online? Even if set to private, it's begging to get hacked.
What's the difference between a safe space for white supremacists and a safe space for native americans? its the difference between a majority and a minority in an area where the majority enjoys the balance of power.
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I think they mean Penis And Vagina Accounting or something.
Re: So What (Score:5, Funny)
I think I'll just stick with debit and credit, thank you.
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I am most definitely not racist nor sexist.
> Youhttp://science.slashdot.org/story/15/07/22/0146236/genetic-access-control-code-uses-23andme-dna-data-for-internet-racism# need to be purged from our society of tolerance and peace.
And what the fuck does that mean?
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Says the anti-semite: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
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It depends on which brand of SJWs [sjwiki.org] you ask.
Re:Do they have a choice? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Do they have a choice? (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's already been shown that Google gives different results to searches that include "black" names vs "white" ones"
And why wouldn't they, and why would you NOT expect to get different results?
Searching for 'Louis Farrakhan' SHOULD give different results than searching for 'Maria Sharipova'. Or 'Lothrop Stoddard'.
Such a vapid argument. Try harder, please.
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Wow - You mean putting different words in my Google search... Gives different results (or in the case you linked, different ads, arguably just another type of result)??? Those racist bastards!
Seriously, what the fuck? No kidding, it gives different results! If I search for my name, it gives different results than if I search for Brad Pitt, despite having the same race and gender. Duh.
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what is up with people abusing the word "deterministic"? it has become a strange euphemism in the computing world, meaning something like "reliable" or "trustworthy".
a deterministic algorithm can fuck up really, really badly (especially when it takes input from untrained or possibly malicious humans), while there are several stochastic algorithms that work quite well, often provably so. even chip cores have layouts optimized by stochastic hill-climbing!
anyway, Google is in the business of showing person A w
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LOL at 'white supremacists'. Do you mean "White people who simply want to live around their own kind, without having any contact whatsoever with other races"?
I don't know if that's white supremacy, but it definitely is racism.
Re: So What (Score:2)
It's also protected by our First Amendment.
"or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,"
That they wish to do this not merely in the town square, or at their favorite website, but in their neighborhood, makes no difference.
It may be racist, but it's not merely legal, it's protected. And our President is actively working to subvert the Constitution and make this specifically illegal. [ourfuture.org]
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It's also protected by our First Amendment.
"or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,"
That they wish to do this not merely in the town square, or at their favorite website, but in their neighborhood, makes no difference.
It may be racist, but it's not merely legal, it's protected. And our President is actively working to subvert the Constitution and make this specifically illegal. [ourfuture.org]
so when your boss asks you to sign a non-disclosure, it's unconstitutional? clearly your freedom of speech is being violated
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You have a point. "Racist assholes" is more accurate. What they do in their private lives is their business; freedom of association is in the First Amendment. The problem comes when they try to apply their own prejudices to public spaces; for example, refusing to serve black folks at a lunch counter, refusing to rent an apartment to a black couple,
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Oh, stop messin' around.
You know perfectly well that Slashdotters are basement-dwelling neckbeards that can't have wives.
On the other hand, you probably still live with your mother...okay, problem solved.
(Sorry, did I just say something that creates an unsafe space for men? And is that okay, because I'm a guy pretending to be a woman on the internet?)
If race doesn't exist, how is this possible? (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought the narrative was that race doesn't exist? That we're all the same race? How then is is possible that one can determine so called race by examining the genetic profile of a person?
Is it possible we were lied to and that race is indeed something that can be determined as a composition of genes and other genetic data?
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Re:If race doesn't exist, how is this possible? (Score:5, Funny)
So you're telling me race exists? That sounds racist! How dare you say that, you vile bigot!
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because there are no clear cut races of humans
Instead I was talking about arbitrary cutoffs where some genetic markers are allowed and others aren't, but they don't fit a racist agenda. You could for instance block off everyone missing both the immunoglobulin A allel and the immunoglobulin B allel, and then you allow access only to people with blood group 0. It would probably work, but your blood group is no indicator for the perceived race.
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If your hair colour is brown, then you'll have different genetic marks than someone with black hair.
If your skin colour is brown, then you'll have different genetic marks than someone with white skin.
Yet we don't separate brown/black hair into 'races'. Segregation into 'racial categories'/discrimmination against skin colour is a societal thing. So it doesn't matter what the genes say, this needs to be solved on a mental level.
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seriously. "ginger" isn't even hard to figure out, as far as anagrams go.
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Ginger is an anagram for black - or at least one of its synonyms.
Re:If race doesn't exist, how is this possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there something in our genes that makes our skin a certain color? Most certainly there is. There's also something in there that determines your facial properties, the color of your eyes and hair, your height and so on, all those little tidbits that make you you.
It's funny, though, that the color of the skin is given such a huge amount of importance. It strikes me as a bit arbitrary. I mean, why that? Why not, say, whether your fingers are skinny or chubby? Why is one genetic expression the all important one, considering there are so incredibly many of them?
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I always figured that it basically boiled down to skin color being easily identifiable. When you look at a person, you can tell their skin color which means (if you're a racist) you can easily tell if the perso
Re:If race doesn't exist, how is this possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly. as humans we love to hate others.
Damn those people that live by the river, they are inferior to us mountian dwellers!
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Not exactly.
It is pure evolution in action stranger=danger. It is a biological adaptation to trust the people that are most like us. You trust your close family more than your more distant family and so on. The easer to see the difference the greater the distrust. From an evolutionary point of view the amount people look, smell, and act alike reflects the amount of common genetic material they share. So you care more about their survival and they care about yours.
Frankly the fact that humans have come so fa
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Fearing the other, along with aggression, blind loyalty, lust, anger, etc. are primitive emotions that originate in the "reptile brain" that we all have in our heads. Ever since the cerebral cortex (the "mammal brain") evolved, those two systems have been in a death struggle for control of the organism. We see the results of our baser dispositions every day. War, aggression, rape, cults, greed.. you only need to turn on the news to find examples of this struggle.
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This is, btw, the reason for business suits. It creates an atmosphere of "belonging" among other people wearing business suits.
It's also the reason why techs react very poorly to people in business suits. Ok, not really, we all know that people wearing business suits all suck at doing anything right and they have no idea about anything.
Only people wearing black t-shirts and jeans along with boots know their shit. I mean, look at the guy, he needn't hide behind fancy clothing, he must be great at his job!
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Complex question (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the narrative was that race doesn't exist? That we're all the same race?
Yup. We're all the same specie. "Race" is just an arbitrary label used to make convenient distinction among a group of individual that would other wise mate together : e.g.: breeds of dogs, etc.
How then is is possible that one can determine so called race by examining the genetic profile of a person?
Is it possible we were lied to and that race is indeed something that can be determined as a composition of genes and other genetic data?
Short answer: Nope, it's not possible.
Not so short answer: Well depend on what you define as "races" i.e.: you'll need to constantly redefine your arbitrary "race" label along as the set of gene that you try to use to map it. With that definition of "race" drifting farther and farther away from what biggots with an agenda would like it to be.
Long answer: Remember that the only valid real barrier is *specie*. i.e.: between groups that *cannot* mate together. Inside that division, all individual can mate together. Humans are specially good at that "mating" (well, maybe except some basement dweller): because from our dawn we've been one of the most mobile specie, only bested by birds and some big aquatic animals. Humans do tend to get around a lot. As a result our specie is constantly under heavy genetic mixing.
You can put some arbitrary labels (hey, let's put together individual that have darker skin tone in one big arbitrary bunch and call them niggers!)
You can even find some labels that are actually convenient (statistically, people who typically come from Caucasian ancestry tend to have a bit higher probability for some disease and a bit lower for others).
But if you got into the details, it starts to get muddy, you'll find that some people that you put in one of your arbitrary categories come from completely different lineage that split quite some time before, whereas other that you wanted to put out of that label actually share much more recent ancestry.
(That white supremacist biggot over there ? He want to be put in a special category, aside "non whites" ? well on the surface it might look like some vague idea like correlating it with skin pigmentation. Except that among those non-white he'll probably put native american, but also african and north african. And his grand-dad happens to be from an italian immigrant family, and over the course of history southern european have had a lot of exchange with northern africa. See where I'm heading ?)
So, in short what works well to separate breeds of dogs (which are bred in very controlled manners and you can somewhat keep something like a breed more or less pure) absolutely doesn't work with human that fuck around a lot.
Same for the genetics.
You'll be able to spot a few marker (let's say: a gene that helps control the base amount of melanin in the skin). But once you start using this, you'll notice that a lot of the "wrong people" end in the "wrong category".
That specific list of markers you've assembled together, will consider some of the white supremacists as non white (because of the complex mixed ancestry most people have) while failing to cast aside one of their usual target.
An idealist (like me) would dream that this would help some of the biggots to realise that we aren't that much different under the skin, we're so much mixed that there's a high probability that the biggot has a bit in their blood what their usual target is.
Saddly, the reality will be that they'll be still endlessly tweaking around their genetic definition of "race", to constantly keep itt more or less matching their agenda. They'll never have a definite set of markers, they'll constantly need to patch them. And over time it will evolve to something that at the genetic level doesn't remotely look like what they pretend to be (by the time they manage to include all their friend and exclude all their targets, melanin-related gene
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I thought the narrative was that race doesn't exist?
You have to understand who you're dealing with in these articles. The narrative is the EXACT opposite of "egalitarianism" or "humanism". The people posting these things are Snake-oil salesmen and their business is to sell on you on their Identity Politics as hard as they can.
To them, Humanism (one race) and Egalitarianism is like rat poison. The very basis of those idealogies runs completely contrary to Identity Politics, by virtue of not recognizing Race, Gender, Sex, Religion or any other "minority op
Re:If race doesn't exist, how is this possible? (Score:5, Funny)
If humanity IS one species means humanity is a single species BUT its members CAN be further subdivided into groups by constellations of heritable traits
Humanity can't be further subdivided. Subspecies is the only recognized taxonomic level below species and the most important trait of a subspecies is that, while they are capable of interbreeding with and producing fertile offspring, they do not interbreed in nature.
While there are racists who fervently wish it wasn't so, we're long past the days when interracial relationships weren't common. While the racists in the world whine and cry about racial purity, the rest of the human race is happily fucking its way toward homogeneity
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is there room on the 23andMe profile page for a complete set of fingerprints, a SSN, a DOB, home address, mother's maiden name, blood type and group, mug shot, all your credit card numbers, expiration dates and security codes, website logins and passwords, religious affiliations, and bust/penis size and circumcision status?!?
No, silly, that stuff goes on Facebook.
The real problem is the very existence of 23andme and its ilk, aggravated by the fact that it belongs to Ancestry.com, a corporate branch of one particularly agressive missionary church. (Caution: If you're gonna come to my doorstep, you're gonna have to listen to MY ideas. This may endanger not just your soul but those of your unbaptised ancestors!)
Re:So What (Score:4, Insightful)
I was saying the same when Facebook started and people complained about it. "So what?", I said, "You don't like it, nobody's forcing you to make an account. Yeah, your friends are nagging you, but so what?"
Now look around you. Tell me, how often have you encountered a webpage that only lets you sign up if you have FB in the first place? Because they can't be assed to have their own registration process? Believe me, not having a FB account sure locks you out from quite a few things that could be interesting.
Let's all hope that this shit never takes off as big as FB did. As long as it's just some wacko nutjob pages that need to make sure your race is "pure" (or your mind puree, rather), there's little harm. If that catches on with something actually useful, things get less funny.
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Tell me, how often have you encountered a webpage that only lets you sign up if you have FB in the first place?
None, but if a site requires a facepalm account, I don't want to log in.
Re:So What (Score:5, Informative)
1. The person who made this uses the name "OffensiveComputing". You fell for what is clearly a troll project. Indeed, reading the description it's full of only slightly subtle MRA troll talking points and phrases, like the "safe spaces = assault on freedom of speech" meme.
2. 23andMe don't post your profile publicly or allow random websites to access it. You have to give permission to each web site. It's a major part of their service, because they only do the DNA testing part and offer some basic info about the result. The idea is that you can then take your profile to other sites and professionals who can interpret it or combine it with other tests. You know, like you would with an MRI scan. The guy doing the scan is just a technician, someone else interprets it.
You might still think that's dumb, but presumably you don't trust the hospital to keep your records on computer either and demand they are never transmitted to other hospitals electronically.
Re: #1 (Score:2)
NBA, Comcast, Toyota, Obama, etc. care though. :P
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> Seems like every day an unarmed black male/hispanic is gunned down by a cop in the US, I'd love to see the real stats, but [snip]
Seems like every day an unarmed white person is gunned down/robbed by a 'minority' in the US. Seems like black and hispanic are statistically overrepresented in crime statistics. I'd love to see the real stats, but the government only shares minorities killed not the other way around. Culturally embedded crime is a a real problem, but people don't want to talk about the hard
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Re: So What (Score:2, Insightful)
The real issues are why is there so much black on black crime such as 4th of July in Chicago where 82 people were shot and 14 of them were fatal. None of the shootings were by police officers and Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the country.
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1- we're supposed to believe that all 82 people were cases of "black on black" crime?
2- the "black on black crime" canard needs to go away. a pretty good summation ( http://www.thenation.com/artic... [thenation.com] ) :
1.The term is a racial canard. Of course, it could merely be descriptive, an adjective for a certain kind of crime, like “same-sex domestic-partner violence.” But it’s not. Same-sex domestic-partner violence is distinguished from opposite-sex domestic-partner violence. But “black-on-black crime” has no racial equivalent: nobody talks about white-on-white crime (see 2) or Asian-on-Asian crime. It’s a construct assigned solely to black people, and it interprets their transgression through a purely racial lens. It ranks alongside “the down-low,” a phrase used to refer to black gay men who lead straight lives, only to cheat on their wives with other men. When white men do it, it’s called “Brokeback Mountain”; when black men do it, it gets a special name. The phrase “black-on-black crime” makes sense only if you understand black people’s propensity to commit crimes against people of their own race as inherently different from the way other racial groups commit crimes.
2.In this regard, black criminals are not particularly different. America is very segregated, and its criminality conforms to that fact. So the victims of most crimes are the same race as those who commit them. Eighty-four percent of white people who are killed every year are killed by white people. White people who buy illegal drugs are most likely to buy them from white people. Far from being extraordinary, the fact that black criminals are most likely to commit crimes against black people makes them just like everybody else. A more honest term than “black-on-black crime” would be, simply, “crime.”
3.It is not a taboo. Anyone who seriously thinks that black people are not talking about black people killing other black people just doesn’t know any black people. Black people talk about it a lot. They have a lot to talk about. But while black-on-black crime is a nonsense term, black crime is a serious issue. Black people may not be much more likely to kill members of their own racial group than whites, but they are still more likely to kill and be killed. It’s not as though the black community hasn’t noticed that. Most cities have several black-led organizations confronting this very thing. Nor do black people grieve according to some code of silence. Go to any inner-city church, youth club, park, concert, barbershop, beauty salon or high school basketball game and listen. Every now and then, like last year after Chicago high school student Hadiya Pendleton was shot, they even get a national platform to talk about it. And when they do, they seize it.
4.The police are a special category. That’s the point. Black people are not, by dint of their melanin content, instructed to protect and serve the public; the police, by dint of their employment, are. Black people do not have a monopoly on violence; the police do. So when the people entrusted with upholding the law kill someone, that raises very different issues than if a kid from down the block shoots somebody. When the people who are supposed to protect everybody show an undeniable propensity to kill one group of people more than others (black men aged 15 to 19 are twenty-one times more likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts), that inevitably raises the question of discrimination. Our taxes don’t pay to support black criminals in their pursuit of black victims; they are currently going to support police in the shooting of black people.
5.The police are not an elevated category. The law still applies to them. When black people kill other black people, families and communities seek justice. When there are eyewitnesses, videos and forensic evidence, they want investigations, arrests, indictments, trials and convictions. They also want the punishment to be proportionate to the crime. They want no less when a policeman is the killer. In reality, they get far less. In fact, they get nothing. There is no punishment because, apparently, there was no crime.
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The anonymous coward is suggesting that everyone should have to provide their DNA in order to prove that they aren't a bot before posting on the internet?
I think my irony meter just blew a circuit.
Sounds PC to me (Score:4, Funny)
A self limiting problem (Score:5, Interesting)
So visitors to his website:
* Must have been sequenced by 23andMe
* And be so interested in his website that they are willing to give him access to their genetic data
* And meet whatever genetic filter he has imposed.
At this point, what he is running is less of a 'website', more of a 'diary', as it will have only one reader.
Re:A self limiting problem (Score:4, Insightful)
This thing was created by somebody identifying as "Offensive Application Programming Initiative".
It is obviously not meant as a serious authentication system, it just shows what is possible if we give out too much personal information.
End of Mankind? (Score:3)
I didn't realize that "race" could now be determined by a genetic sequence (or two). If true this may lead to some very troubling possibilities.
It would be possible using CRISPR (a recently developed means of precisely targeting an exact genetic sequence) to have a virus that could infect just one particular population. Smallpox comes to mind because 1) very few people in the world are currently vaccinated against it (it was made extinct a while ago) and 2) its DNA has been sequenced and published online. So, using a DNA synthesis machine you could make a version of this virus that would target a particular population.
I believe such machines can now make DNA sequences long enough to create viruses. I also remember someone creating a much more lethal version of smallpox that could kill all of the laboratory animals it infected, including ones vaccinated against "normal" smallpox (I think it was 100% lethal).
Of course, making a virus that would go after a particular Sex as opposed to a racial characteristic should be much easier (just target any gene found on one of the sex chromosomes and not the other.) This particular scenario was explored in Frank Herbert's book "The White Plague". A related scenario might be the film "Children of Men" where all the women(?) are made sterile.
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The sociological races can't be determined all that accurately with a few DNA sequences. It's more of a game of probabilities: certain sequences correlate highly with certain sociological races. Quite a few errors, though, in part because not everyone's self-identified race is actually the ethnic descent they think it is. For example, some people who believe themselves to be "ethnic Swedes" are actually of Finnish origin, and vice versa, but don't know their family history long enough back to know that. Als
Re:End of Mankind? (Score:4, Informative)
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So, while I'm blindingly pasty white, I'm still an African-American.
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And they have been using race to determine who to bring in for questioning for decades before that....
All other implications aside, but... (Score:3)
how secure could that actually be as an access control?
I mean, the access control isn't checking your DNA. It is checking if you have access to a genetic profile of someone with matching criteria. Or, as a completly different attack vector: access to body fluids of someone matching the allowed filters. ("whitelisting" gets a whole new meaning here....)
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So, we can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids?
Modern tech for outdated concept? (Score:3)
The correlation between genes and culture is becoming weaker in the modern world. People have far more interaction than before with people from other backgrounds since travel is easier, many people live in large cities and people communicate online. Therefore, to guard access to an online community based on genetics seems like the wrong solution, since a superficial genetic profile will not predict how well an individual will fit into a community.
Life will be full of little surprises (Score:2)
Like this white supremacist [dailymail.co.uk] who found out that he's 14% African.
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Go back far enough, we're all 100% African.
impractical app, pointless controversy (Score:2)
I can't think of any practical use for such a Genetic Access Control method nor of a reason to feel outrage and clamor "racism". For a start, this app only works for users who are also 23andme clients anyway, who also agree to have the app access their data (à la Twitter), and I'd say those people pretty much already explicitly waived their genetic privacy.
Also, I can attest to how widely inaccurate some of the results you get through the API [23andme.com] can be, especially the ethnic origin results. In my case it'
Simple code (Score:3)
IF haveOnlineGeneticProvile
THEN PRINT "You are too dumb to be allowed on the internet."
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According to this code, no one is too dumb to use the internet, considering that haveOnlineGeneticProvile will likely be undefined. :P
LOL. What? You don't have a dozen personas? (Score:2)
The only people bothered by this are the silly gits who have championed real names on the internet, the people who ignorantly believe they are only allowed to have one identity on the internet, and those foolish individuals who broadcast lives to the world.
Online IDs are cheap. They don't cost anything and you don't need to find a shady character in a seedy print shop to score one.
I'm missing something here (Score:2)
Okay, people can register DNA samples with 123andme.com and be entered into their genetic database. When you log into a site that uses this API, racist or otherwise, what quick way is there to authenticate? Touch the tip of your tongue to a sensor? This could be a surefire way to identify an individual, so long as the sensor had a threshold test that would prevent people from using the edge of someone's water glass to log in.
OR (Score:2)
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Or, a way to make sure(ish) the forum you've set up to lure pre-teen girls for raping is attracting bona fide pre-teen girls and not 44 year old men pretending to be pre-teen girls.
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..and I suppose you know the identity of this supposedly objective arbiter of social justice who will decide how technology will be used?
Your shitty argument is little different than the "this is why we can't have nice things" retort often repeated here.
Re:Somebody had to write it (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the author, using the "offensive-computing" nick, knew very well that this would trigger a discussion and that's probably the reason this project was created in the first place.
For this to work, there are two required components: code and data. The code has already been created and if it hadn't been, implementing OAUTH and using a REST API is within the scope of many developers' skills. So the route to avoiding abuse of this technology is by restricting access to the data. Simply put, don't give any web site access to your genetic data.
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The problem is that with enough uptake it's no longer a self-extinguishing problem, but a shutting-you-out problem. No DNA profile with that third party website? No access to facebook, google+, whatnot else. With even governments (like, infamously, the UK gov't) considering using facebook profiles to "authenticate" citizens for access to government services, it's easy to see that this may well end badly.
And you can't really leave this to "the market" because it inherently shuts out the negative control feed
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A sensible government would create its own authentication infrastructure instead of relying on an external platform. Unfortunately, the UK government hasn't displayed a lot of sense lately when it comes to privacy.
As someone without a Facebook account, I know it can be problematic when people and other companies just assume you'll have no problem giving up privacy for a little convenience. I think though that a genetic profile is considered more private to many people than their chats and photos, so they'll
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I think the author, using the "offensive-computing" nick, knew very well that this would trigger a discussion and that's probably the reason this project was created in the first place.
Yes, mod this up as the most insightful contribution to the thread so far. Although the author is careful to use other example in the readme, the code and example application are (provocatively) written to discriminate against everyone except the usual racist definition of 'white Europeans'. The 'European' group of reference populations defined by 23andme would normally include Ashkenazi Jews:
https://customercare.23andme.c... [23andme.com]
but this group is explicitly excluded by offensive-computing:
https://github.com/of [github.com]
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Re:Verified spit (Score:4, Insightful)
Now you won't just have to buy other people's pee to pass your drug test, you'll have to buy other people's spit to get access to racist websites.
If you're paying for their spit you're doing it wrong. I was at a recent rally where the "white supremacists" were in attendance and it seems like sputum is their main contribution to society.
If they're the "supreme" the rest of us whites need to take a good long look at ourselves and ask why we work, can spell, and don't sit around in a pool of phlegm. Seriously - I saw a spitoon of them (that's the correct collective noun) standing around in a circle having a friendly chat before the rally, and spitting on the ground. Really - at first I thought it was a spoof, but no - they were fair dinkum about it (one even had his confederate tattoo on one skinny bicep). And they weren't even angry. If they were angry in a strong wind it'd be a mucal maelstrom.
TB. would be the death of them.
Some people pepper their speech with "ums" and "erms" - so do they, but they punctuate with a hawk and a spit. I agree they've been marginalised - just disagree that it's unjust.
I don't think you have to worry about needing to swab up their spit to get access to their "websites" (but use gloves if you do) - those pinheads couldn't run a bath let alone a secure website. Their "leaders" are a different type - I doubt they believe any of their propaganda. So maybe their websites'd be harder to hack. But if they used genetic confirmation for access control they'd have to exclude some of their membership.
As for whether it's good or bad - I suspect it's neither. How different is that from websites that confirm your economic status, some sort of membership in other groups, or identity? If the information is misused the problem lies with the person who stupidly put their genetic data up on 23andme. Once you give stuff away without license you lose the right to retrospectively determine how it's used.
Re:In other news many racists change their tunes.. (Score:5, Funny)
I agree, because only White people can be racist. Racism is privilege plus power. We need to stop racists from being able to do damage by programming software. They should be restricted from accessing Github and learning how to write software. We should round up all White programmers and scrutinize their political beliefs so that we can eliminate the poison that is racism from our society. It's the only way the future will be free from racism.
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But only white people can be racist. Racism = privilege + power. Only white people have privilege, whereas the People of Color lack privilege and social power. Therefore it's impossible for a Person of Color man to be racist. We must unite against all racists and purge them from our society. It's the only way the future will survive.
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Article G7 of the GitHub ToS reads:
We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service.
GitHub could decide to remove the project as "offensive" or "objectionable", which are pretty generic words.
However, the code itself is entirely neutral: it just requests API access via OAuth. It is the potential use by web sites that could be undesired. I think shutting down the GitHub project would be shooting the messenger.
For me personally, the most shocking aspect of this news is that 23andMe has an API for third parties to access your DNA profile.
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