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Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

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Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#111
post #98
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ve has lots of vis personas Are those typos? You touched on the cyperpunk fantasy: using multiple online identities, all kept carefully separate from each other and from your real identity. (There's an excellent short story called True Names that explores this idea.) For the majority of ordinary, nontechnical people, there are lots of simpler solutions. * Use cash. In Berlin, many ordinary people have an awareness…

No, they're gender-neutral pronouns: ve = she/he ver = him/her vis = hers/his I encountered them in Greg Egan's Diaspora . And yes, True Names :) An inspiration. With a decent host machine, one can run numerous Whonix instances, each with one or more personas. They can be long-term or throwaway. I do nothing at all private on smartphones. Signal and WhatsApp are cool and all, but radios are untrustable black boxes. E…

Tangentially, I prefer the Spivak pronouns sets. They feel more "natural" to me than spiking the distributions of X and V.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#112
Excellent points.

I think the other part which he hasn't discussed is the rise of Cloud companies like Google, Facebook. We should really be working towards an internet where people can keep the data to themselves and decide how it gets used. But now, the default is for these corporations to own all the data.

Of course, govt can still access the data (which is what snowden is talking about) but that is a different problem.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#113
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh more of that sjw crap. Hope it doesn't infest this place like it has a significant portion of the net. It's utterly detestable.

Why is your OP getting downvoted? Are we assuming they're an SJW because they informed us of the popular meaning of those words? I knew what those words meant and would have shared as well, despite how much I detest the SJW movement.

Damn, I don't even know what SJW is, without googling it ;)

Edit: Oh, social justice warrior. Meh. Me, I'm just an old anarchist ;)

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#114
post #96
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ve has lots of vis personas Are those typos? You touched on the cyperpunk fantasy: using multiple online identities, all kept carefully separate from each other and from your real identity. (There's an excellent short story called True Names that explores this idea.) For the majority of ordinary, nontechnical people, there are lots of simpler solutions. * Use cash. In Berlin, many ordinary people have an awareness…

You can't E2E with a web app?

No, not really. Until there's a standard that allows doing crypto in the browser, enforcing a higher security level for the page, and somehow verifying the hash of contents (so sites can "publish" an app) then web apps are basically useless for security.

I know this is as pathetic as "why aren't scientists working on cancer instead of X", but we have WebXXX including Bluetooth and USB, you'd think we'd have "WebVerifiedApps" or something. Even content-addressable URIs aren't being allowed.

It's funny, given the rise of things like Tutanota, which provide basically zero security over Gmail. (In fact, probably worse, since Google's sec team is way better.)

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're being satirical. This is such a classic formulation of a conspiracy theory that I hope it's intentional. If so, bravo! If not, then like all conspiracy theories you need to account for everyone who would need to be in on the secret, how they're all keeping the secret, and why--what's in it for them.

Just to be clear, a big chunk of what Snowden's leak revealed actualized a bunch of conspiracy theories. Do you see the disturbing irony of dismissing another conspiracy theory so flippantly? I don't believe it's true, but if it turned out to be, I'd hardly be surprised.

The difference is evidence vs no evidence.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#116
post #15

Excellect! It's the most cogent analysis that I've seen from him. Damn, what a fucking hero! A few comments, however ... > ... we had to go to the dark side to be able to confront the threat posed by bad guys. We had to adopt their methods for ourselves. He's using "we" there in reference to the government. But it can also be read with "we" as you and me, and "bad guys" as the government ;) But then, I claim a broad…

Also,

> But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consider to be a fairly forthright upstanding government was abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way.

This really does depend on who you ask.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#117
I guess, the Snowden incidence is being used to hurl undue venom towards USA. But these people are ignoring or deliberately misleading other people to ignore the real dangers posed by extremists (including Islamists, communists, the far right Christians and so on). These ideologically driven criminals (called terrorists) live hidden in the general public. Their identification is a main problem. This "identification" problem is what requires mass surveillance.

The terrorists are significantly different than many other criminals. In the sense that terrorists are not mainly driven by personal and earthly goals but they are driven by the goals set by their ideologies. Thus terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter.

Tell this Snowden to do (or at least talk) a little bit about the dire situation of people's freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia. And the people who are criticizing US way too much should do themselves a favor by looking at countries run by tyrants like China, North Korea, most Islamist countries and Cuba. The way the Chinese government does the mass surveillance of its citizens on the Internet and the way the communists have installed the reward/punishment system based on it will make you realize that what is happening in US is hardly even annoying.

I am not to say that US is innocent person but it has been receiving criticism way too much.

Edit: typo

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#118
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptol is a nice tool, but it can't eliminate most important crypto bugs (for example, the sorts of bugs found in OpenSSL). It's useful for proving things about bit-mixy crypto code like AES, SHA, etc, but that code rarely has bugs (due to known-answer tests).

Well, it actually shouldn't introduce most of the bugs you find in OpenSSL. Plus, you don't use it alone. It works like this: 1. Cryptographers come up with the algorithms and protocols with their mathematical proofs applied to their properties. 2. Someone uses tools like CRYPTOL for algorithms or AnBx for protocols to generate the code. http://www.dsi.unive.it/~modesti/anbx/ 3. The code is run through visual inspect…

You can get a nice PLDI paper by following those steps!

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages do exist with gender-neutral pronouns. Is Hungarian full of "sjw" crap? Adding a gender neutral pronoun to English isn't a crazy idea- "sibling" is a gender-neutral 20th Century invention and it fits in fine. I'm partial to "they" as the easiest option (it has a long history of being used in the singular) but constructed pronouns would work too.

They is the easiest, and already fully adopted, option. Why bother trying to add another?

Are you unable to think of an argument? It's not hard to list some ways in which using 'they' as a singular pronoun when gender is ambiguous is confusing and undesirable. It's not a stretch to then argue we should have a better alternative.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it actually shouldn't introduce most of the bugs you find in OpenSSL. Plus, you don't use it alone. It works like this: 1. Cryptographers come up with the algorithms and protocols with their mathematical proofs applied to their properties. 2. Someone uses tools like CRYPTOL for algorithms or AnBx for protocols to generate the code. http://www.dsi.unive.it/~modesti/anbx/ 3. The code is run through visual inspect…

You can get a nice PLDI paper by following those steps!

Never looked into it. Will do.
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