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Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

drewdevault.com

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Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#41

Post by Barrin92 »

osteele wrote: post #29

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the ex…

It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise.

Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#42

Post by redthrow »

jdiez17 wrote: post #37
redthrow wrote: post #32

It would be more convincing if the author had their Mastodon account info at the bottom, not their Github / Twitter account. Also I'd like to hear the author's thoughts on GPG's viability, as discussed below: https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who c…

The link next to the bird icon is sircmpwn's Mastodon profile, not his Twitter account.

> not his Twitter account

I stand corrected. I'll have a look at Mastodon.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#43

Post by gargron »

snvzz wrote: post #40
eitland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on! Twitter by default broadcasts everything you write to the entire world! Why should open source solutions be held to a higher standard?

>Twitter by default broadcasts everything you write to the entire world! To be fair, at least your connection to twitter is encrypted. This means that an observer can't tell it's your IP that's posting on twitter as you. That is, your location. Thus twitter is actually better. A court order would be needed for them to disclose IP addreses, at least.

>To be fair, at least your connection to twitter is encrypted

What!? Are you talking about TLS? Because this is true for Mastodon as well then.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#44

Post by cwyers »

AHMagic wrote: post #3
panarky wrote: post #2

I see this form of argument a lot: Companies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions} Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things. The problem with this reasoning is tha…

We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. They worked great in 1998. Why can't they work great in 2018?

E-mail is largely centralized now. There's a handful of major companies who are able to run an e-mail service and communicate with the hordes of GMail's users who are living behind GMail's spam filters. (Spam filters, it should be noted, that make the service usable for most people.) So what happened is that decentralization worked for a moment in time, but as the Internet grew it worked less well, and we reinvented the pre-Internet solutions (BBSes/Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve) on top of the open Internet.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#45

Post by danbruc »

Barrin92 wrote: post #41
osteele wrote: post #29

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the ex…

It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire bus…

Well, they could just make users pay for the service, there is nothing that forces them to collect money from them via the indirect route of ads.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#46

Post by daveid »

snvzz wrote: post #38
tscs37 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it need to be signed and encrypted? We have PGP, Signal and Co. for that. Mastodon is a microblogging service, it's perfectly fine to not sign all messages (though ActivityPub does support signing) Mastodon is as trustworthy as your instance administrator, so you'll have to find a place where you can trust your admin.

>Why does it need to be signed and encrypted? We have PGP, Signal and Co. for that Note it IS signed. It's just not encrypted. It needs to be encrypted, too, because it's the reasonable expectation when private messages and followers-only messages exist. Additionally... should I be some location and post something, I'd be broadcasting my location, even if that isn't intended. All because it's not encrypted, where it…

>should I be some location and post something, I'd be broadcasting my location, even if that isn't intended

Can you tell me how and where you would broadcast your location via Mastodon? There are no geolocation features in Mastodon.

>It needs to be encrypted, too, because it's the reasonable expectation when private messages and followers-only messages exist.

Has anyone attempted to encrypt a message to 64,000 recipients yet? I don't think restricting a message to followers is an applicable model for e2ee. Direct messages yes, I can see the point in that.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#48

Post by daveid »

snvzz wrote: post #39
kodablah wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, if the messages themselves were encrypted externally, would this solve most people's concerns? Or is the metadata that is leaked (I assume to/from, timestamp, size) also unacceptable? Also curious for those that have this beef with Mastodon, would transit anonymity help alleviate some of the concerns w/ data transparency?

Note metadata includes where someone is posting from. Connect to post something without encryption means your location is revealed to anybody observing the network. This is indeed dangerous.

>Connect to post something without encryption means your location is revealed to anybody observing the network.

Where are you taking this from? You think connecting to your Mastodon server you have an account on somehow broadcasts to the whole network?

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#49

Post by osteele »

Barrin92 wrote: post #41
osteele wrote: post #29

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the ex…

It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire bus…

A company gets to decide what business it's in (Facebook and Google have each explored several), what its ethics are, and how these ethics apply. For example, Google is in a substantially similar business, but it is interesting to contrast Facebook's pattern of behavior with Google's.

Google isn't a paragon, and it's alarming (to me) that Google is building a universal panopticon too. But these two companies, despite the similarity in their business models, appear very different with respect not just to how they collect data, what they collect, how much they sell, and what breaches or not-breach breaches have occurred, but also how forthcoming they are about all this, and whether they act like they've got something to hide. Facebook used tricks[1] to run their iPhone app in the background when requested not to, and only backed this out when the new iOS “battery shaming” feature outed them; they uploaded Android call history with text that mislead the user into thinking they were just uploading contacts. Google has made mis-steps and knows a scary amount about us, but I don't recall this kind of systematic boundary-pushing and post-discovery obfuscation and denial.

Or contrast Lyft and Uber.

These differences in behavior aren't from a difference in business models. They are from differences in “corporate DNA”, or culture. Zuckerberg was a teen when he wrote these messages[2], but most people I know don't speak or act like that even at that age. Some people advance to a different moral stage even at the end of, or after, their teen years; it looks from a longer pattern of evidence, only some of it recent, like Zuckerberg and his company may not have done so. Yes, business incentives are a factor, but explanations don't begin and end with “money made me do it”.

[1] http://pxlnv.com/linklog/facebook-background-data/

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-se...

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