Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken • Hacker News Board

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#131

Post by specialist » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:03 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #99

themartorana wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has never, in my life, been a time that the government and the people they work for/represent/are have ever been more adversarial. When you realize government has stopped working for you and are actively treating you like a criminal, you ask who they are working for. It's hard not to land on banks, corporations, and Bernie's "Billionaire Class" - whether that's true or not isn't part of my point. So it's hard t…

I didn't say "trust government", I said "trust people". Do you trust your neighbours? Do you attend meetings or organizations with like-minded people? The surveillance state is most powerful when everybody sits at home afraid to go out. If you get out in public and organize with people and talk about these issues, you'll find strength and courage in your neighbours. The #1 goal of the Neoliberal elite class is to cru…

I'd like every person to attend a few public council meetings per year. In person. So much criticism about The System is so wide of the mark, its not even wrong.

If people are upset, enough to effect change, they only have to start showing up. Find the game, learn the game, play the game.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#132

Post by specialist » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:13 AM UTC

tmptmp wrote: post #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"…

"...people's freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia."

Snowden got stuck in a Russian airport when his US visa got revoked. He then applied to many countries for asylum. Russia granted it. I've read that Snowden is still trying to find another host country.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#133

Post by mercurial » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:16 AM UTC

tmptmp wrote: post #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"…

> 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).

Yeah, well, I don't think Cuban or North Korean spies are really at the forefront of anyone's concerns (apart from South Korea and Japan).

> 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.

Funny how pedophile rings are regularly dismantled (and made of "otherwise normal citizens" in majority). As for the "wolf in sheep's clothing" thing, it's not necessarily true (look at the profile of the attackers in France and Belgian, most of whom were linked to petty criminality - not to mention the guy who actually went to Syria).

> 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.

It was only a choice in the sense that the alternative was "kidnapping by the CIA". Russia was way down in Snowden's list of countries to flee to. What you don't seem to realize is that even if it's not abused now, it could very well be abused tomorrow. You want a Donald Trump nominating one of his cronies at the head of the US intelligence services and starting to dig into untold amounts of already-recorded communications?

And it's not only the US. Us Europeans are doing exactly the same thing, just with less money. The potential of it being abused by organizations which by their very nature have little to no external oversight (or by their political masters) is absolutely frightening. And that's compounded by the panopticon effect: if you're never sure of how much you're being watched, you will self-censor.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#134

Post by mercurial » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:19 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #34

0xCMP wrote: post #16

> But at the same time, we technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It seemed so antisocial as a basic concept. I guess so? Not me though. Snowden literally only proved what I had learned on my own. > But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consi…

Yeah, he's full of it. We in high-assurance community and even the cypherpunks have been telling people forever it was being abused. Because people were abusing it and its design practically asked for it. These were ignored as externalities by people motivated by convenience, feature bloat, price, and/or profit. Even getting it down to almost identical cost/speed didn't help if it lacked unnecessary feature X. This w…

> Yeah, he's full of it. We in high-assurance community and even the cypherpunks have been telling people forever it was being abused. Because people were abusing it and its design practically asked for it. These were ignored as externalities by people motivated by convenience, feature bloat, price, and/or profit. Even getting it down to almost identical cost/speed didn't help if it lacked unnecessary feature X.

So, you're saying that Snowden is right, that computer people as a whole were not aware of it. There is a huge difference between a theoretical risk and someone coming forward with a huge amount of proof that it is, in fact, happening right now.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#135

Post by marssaxman » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:48 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #56

badminton1 wrote: post #14

The EFF warned long ago something was going on when AT&T was putting beam splitters on Internet backbones to feed the NSA. Then Snowden revealed how everything is tapped. Then, be sure all mainstream encryption is "NOBUS". Nothing is truly random. Someone somewhere has the master key: elliptic curve cryptography using magic numbers from NIST? "Secure boot" by Intel? OpenSSL? Microsoft software? All backdoored. Trust…

For as long as technologically minded folks insist on technological solutions to political problems, we will be stuck in this quagmire. The answer is a political solution to a political problem. Admittedly, that's a hard one for some folks. It requires talking to people and building relationships. It takes a long time and change can be frustratingly slow to present itself. But that's how it is. Trust no one With this…

"Frustratingly slow" as in "not happening at all, and in fact getting steadily worse"? I'll take the gamble of a technological solution which might actually work over the certainty of a political solution which will happily consume more time and energy than I can afford to waste on it without showing any results whatsoever.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#136

Post by xg15 » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 8:00 AM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #103

AckSyn wrote: 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.

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.

That might be, however languages usually evolve on their own.

Simply inventing a new word and expecting that suddenly everyone understands it feels arrogant and leads to discussion derailments like this one.

I would also agree that "they" is the best choice.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#137

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 8:49 AM UTC

Semiapies wrote: post #111

mirimir wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#138

Post by return0 » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 8:51 AM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #103

AckSyn wrote: 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.

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" has a logical connotation that it translates to "either he or she" (hence the plural). Something like "ve" seems to imply "neither he nor she" , as if, "something else". That's why it may alienate ppl.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#139

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 9:03 AM UTC

I have absolutely no faith in any government that gives the impression that they will add tighter controls or a reduction on the collection of personal data.

They've been doing this for many years before Snowden and will continue long after any new laws are passed to give us the impression of an improvement.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#140

Post by happyslobro » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 9:13 AM UTC

1stop wrote: post #96

dcposch wrote: 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?

I wonder, would it be possible to build a secure P2P client using encrypted Media Extensions and WebRTC? Going to check to see if EME supports encryption as well as decryption...

update No. EME is only intended to be used by content consumers; even if it could be hacked to encrypt uploads / outgoing transfers, that use case wouldn't even be considered important as the spec evolves. Super lame.