Viewing profile — mrexcess

There are a number of technological / legal hybrid policies developing that come at the very jugular vein of computing freedom - the notion of a “general purpose” computer itself. …

I definitely buy into the “monoculture” argument a bit. When hundreds of millions of people are all voraciously consuming the same very limited cultural messaging - three TV statio…

The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarms…

lol honestly, I think a little on the contrary. If we can make a thing impossible technically, the law defers to that. One thing the government really can’t do easily in Western co…

Legal solutions to technical problems are always dubious, especially when privacy against government surveillance is the problem.

Web of trust or centralized trust are the main answers here. Compromise of the secret key is a whole other issue - revocation. MITM of a key can be solved pretty well via web of tr…

True but the out of band secure channel could just be something like DNS, automated and constantly subject to distributed monitoring for deltas.

Webs of trust based on OOB key verification and signing, or centralized trust authorities are the two primary models I’m aware of. I’ve always been enamored of the idea of DNS as a…

I would agree that it’s silly. So did former President Obama when he mocked the notion recently. While motivating intent is always opaque to some extent, this would appear to be an…

You’re not sure what key fingerprints are? Bob and Alice are setting up their e2e channel, and because they have some extra level of concern about snooping, they telephone each oth…

I’m not sure why you think so? If the service provider claims E2E but intentionally provides a defective version of this, it’s a pretty clear cut violation of the federal statute, …

> Public pressure works to a certain degree. Do you think a product manager at Meta would want to be labeled as "protecting pedos"? I think that Meta can afford as much PR as they …

That would seem to constitute Honest Services Fraud under federal law, if they promised E2E then sabotaged it intentionally…

> And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm? Fingerprints. Again, this is like Crypto 101. Not saying that as a persona…

> The authority holds Meta responsible anyway What form of accountability are you suggesting is even being leveraged, here? No law could force Meta to backdoor its encryption, afai…

The answer to most everyone question you’re asking is just, “public key cryptography”. It’s kind of disheartening to me that such basic 1990s tech as implemented by Phil Zimmerman …

“Operation Infektion” attempted to blame the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 80s to biological weapon attacks by the US. There has been some coverage of the explosion in occult and uf…

Shades of late Soviet distractioneering, of the sort one would see in Pravda back in the day. Really disconcerting tbqh.

Or, worryingly, unsolicited brainwashing, no?

China does not have “shareholders”, though. There are incredibly substantive differences between the accountability structures and expectations of shareholders, and those that gove…

Comparisons between CCP and private industry in the West seems misaligned in several respects. CCP does not have fiduciary duty to shareholders, instead, it has accountability to n…

So you prefer to avoid the competition entirely because you expect to lose? Not very confident in American industrial competitiveness, are we?

> You have a near-permanent upper class that has no real political opposition that could impact their value creation ambitions. Sorry, what? China regularly prosecutes billionaires…

Given the Trump administration’s actions against private industry from TikTok, to Anthropic, to a hundred other examples from auto makers to air conditioning manufacturers, is it f…