401–410 of 570 posts
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Oh yeah? And what if there are no other cars on the highway?
Killing yourself is still a cost to society. People have to come out and scrape you off the road, put all your bits in a box and bury you.
A road that meets MUTCD standards is usually guaranteed to have at least 15% of drivers speeding on it by design.
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> Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. If we are doing imaginary situations, the proponents of this bill can also do something like this: Imagine there is a bar, where the police are unable to go inside. Every day, p…
So now, the terrorists and child molesters still use the bar, but they always go into the bathroom to talk. The owner suspects that they are talking about bad things in there, and installs surveillance cameras so that if the police ever need to know what's happening in there, they have access. Would you want a real life bar owner to record you on the toilet just so that one day the police can track some bad guys easi…
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I like this argument. My normal response to "I have nothing to hide" is: "Cool, can I take a look at your browser search/reddit history?".
That argument doesn't work because some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable to anyone they know or work for. (This is impossible when you know or work for diverse groups, but inside of a monoculture it's possible.)
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Humans need privacy because of the selfishness of our survival biology. There simply are bad people in the world, and I wish it were different, but it's not. 'Just trust us' are words often told to us by people who only want power - at our expense. The best sentiment I've ever heard about privacy is from Shoshana Zuboff, and it's now influenced my thoughts. It's at the end of her amazing 2018 book 'Surveillance Capit…
> To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity. >there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled. I would agree. Those are very important points. When people being watched they are not as free as they could be in their actions and exploration of ideas, because they measure what to say and what is forbidden to say. This can have a huge da…
If this is true, then Apple's privacy brand has some long-term legs and some pretty powerful ads in their future - showing creators not being tracked while they freely, privately explore their art on an Apple device.
“A Parable” by Perry E. Metzger (1993) > There was once a far away land called Ruritania, and in Ruritania there was a strange phenonmenon -- all the trees that grew in Ruritainia were transparent. Now, in the days when people had lived in mud huts, this had not been a problem, but now high-tech wood technology had been developed, and in the new age of wood, everyone in Ruritania found that their homes were all 100%…
Even with that, you are now forcing the terrorists to roll their own encryption. The likelihood of finding an exploit in Mujahadeen Secrets is likely much higher than finding an exploit in Apple Messenger or WhatsApp or something by djb or Moxie, etc. In addition, Mujahadeen is likely having to be side loaded - you won't find it in the App Store. This gives a chance to try to hack a single storage location to have a trojan horse version spread through their network. Finally, it affects recruiting. Basically only someone already comitted will go to the trouble of having Mujahadeen Secrets on their device, whereas a lot more people could be expected to have a common end-to-end messenger on their device. So overall, thinking from a purely law enforcement, anti-terrorist perspective, it would still be better for them to not have e2e in widely used apps, even if the terrorists tried to develop their own app.
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So now, the terrorists and child molesters still use the bar, but they always go into the bathroom to talk. The owner suspects that they are talking about bad things in there, and installs surveillance cameras so that if the police ever need to know what's happening in there, they have access. Would you want a real life bar owner to record you on the toilet just so that one day the police can track some bad guys easi…
What analogy does a bathroom have to a messenger app?
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I like this argument. My normal response to "I have nothing to hide" is: "Cool, can I take a look at your browser search/reddit history?".
That argument doesn't work because some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable to anyone they know or work for. (This is impossible when you know or work for diverse groups, but inside of a monoculture it's possible.)
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I agree with you about Feinstein, but: > Her voting record is further to the right than many republicans. She votes according to Trump’s wishes more than any other Democrat in the senate. This seems to imply she's in the middle of the pack for her democratic peers as it relates to Trump's wishes: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/
I think you’re misreading it. It’s sorted by Trump affinity, and there is only one Democrat higher than her (she used to be at the top, but has been dethroned by a large margin by one Democrat).
Such a low percentage of people in CA voted for Trump (2nd lowest after Hawaii) that a middle of the pack Democrat will be high in the default sort. The same for senators from Hawaii, who are 4th and 5th with the default sort.
If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…
There's 10 to a hundred thousand laws on the books already.
How do you know you don't have something to hide?
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I like the speeding analogy. "I have nothing to hide" "Have you ever sped on the highway?" "Well, yes" "Imagine if the government reveals it's been tracking everyone's speed, and has decided to write everyone tickets for speeding." "That's insane, the government can't do that!" "Exactly"
I say, no need to look at hypotheticals. Just sit back and watch what the Chinese government likely has done with the social media posts from people in Hong Kong, who are now in a desperate rush to obliterate them. Tough look, those have already been crawled and indexed. It's not quite the same, because these social media posts weren't meant to be private at the time, but it illustrates the point what can happen when…