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Oppose the Earn IT Act

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Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#501

Post by read_if_gay_ »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #456
bananasbandanas wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems they are cherry-picking their cases somewhat. This graphic [1] shows a comparison of European countries with Germany pretty much in the middle. [1] https://de.statista.com/infografik/16765/todesfaelle-auf-aut...

I can't read that one, but I did read a few newspaper articles on the topic and it sounds like there is a lot of debate around the issue. I can imagine its almost impossible to take into consideration all various factors like road conditions, and local cultural issues, and quality of cars and everything. I'd also like to know how much the spend building and maintaining the unrestricted stretches of road, I would imag…

> I would imagine you don't want to hit a pothole at 180km/h

You would just kinda fly over it, unless it's huge. The faster you go, the less potholes are a problem. What's more dangerous is that braking distance is quadratic in velocity.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#502

Post by lubesGordi »

apeace wrote: post #208

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…

You don't feel you have anything to hide, now. But if ever the government started doing something you disagreed with, like started getting too powerful, or using that power unjustly, your ability to check that power would be significantly diminished.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#503

Post by Frondo »

whatshisface wrote: post #311
el_dev_hell wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Some people are also so good at compartmentalizing that they believe this, but ask the right question and they realize they do in fact have (deeply shameful, at least to them) things to hide. Of course, you have to know the dirty secret.

Case in point: I had an ex whose grandparents lived in a mansion on a ranch in the Ozarks, and were very well off (some kind of corporate lawyers). Their public image in the community was one of great wealth and benevolence; due to some bad financial moves, they'd lost everything a few years back and their kids, grandkids, and great grandkids had scrambled to buy the house out from them, a loving gesture, so they could maintain their image. I learned of this secret (which itself isn't really shameful, people make mistakes, even big ones!) after a year or so.

They were both of the "we have nothing to hide," but one day I asked whether they'd like their neighbors to know about their penury; they told me to shut up and mind my own business.

Nothing to hide? Everyone's got something to hide, but for the most part we don't know it, because they're hiding it!!

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#504

Post by surround »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #405
surround wrote: post #121

“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%…

> Mujahedeen Secrets (first release: 2007), Al-Queda’s own encrypted messaging software. Those developers aren’t going to respond to a US court order. 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, Muja…

The point is that the EARN IT act primarily affects the general population. Al-Queda hasn’t used American-made encryption software for the past 13 years.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#505

Post by kube-system »

Tainnor wrote: post #471
MaximumYComb wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher speed makes all road behaviours riskier. I'm also from the Kangaroo states and while I know of not a single person who likes getting a speed fine I think the vast majority agree that having some speed limits makes things safer. Australia doesn't have the same cultural views as America with regard to freedom. We have high taxes, virtually no guns, heavily enforced traffic policing, etc. On the Wikipedia page fo…

In addition, hackers from the US probably tend to lean more libertarian than the general US population. By contrast, the hacker scene in e.g. Germany, while of course being government-critical, tends to lean more traditionally left

I consider my politics left-leaning and not libertarian.

I'm making an engineering argument about risk and blame, not a political argument about freedom. I am not arguing that we shouldn't have speed limits. Speed limits are like democracy. It's a terrible system... except for all of the others.

Ideally we'd have a better measure of unsafe movement -- We could much better measure risk if the speed limit was set to an equation based on the difference in momentum vectors between vehicles, the capabilities of the drivers and vehicles involved, the weather conditions, etc... but that has a much larger weakness in that we don't have a way to effectively measure/calculate/communicate those expectations to drivers.

I am all in favor of a utilitarian solution to the problem, but I'm under no illusion that it is a rigorous benchmark of risk.

The libertarian argument is that we shouldn't penalize risk at all. I am saying we should penalize risk, but that speed limits do a mediocre job of measuring it.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#506

Post by goldenManatee »

apeace wrote: post #208

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…

I’ve had those encounters, but I do not understand how many people don’t view privacy as a default to being human.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#508

Post by RHSeeger »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #205
treis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as horrible as this is do you think that banning encryption will put an end to the abuse itself? No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse. >prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives. Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2…

> No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse. call me old fashioned but every time I look at porn (which is very rare these days) I am disgusted by the meta-data that is added to these videos. It shows that people love to click on videos that read "stepdad and stepdaughter ..." and similar taglines. America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetis…

> America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho

I would challenge that. I would argue that it is a that there are a lot of people (regardless of country) that get a rise out of things that are taboo. One of those things is the step-parent/child thing (because parent/child is too far for many people).

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#510

Post by a1369209993 »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #323
apeace wrote: post #208

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…

Unless this bill's critics are mistaken, if your friends are using "file encryption", i.e, encrypting the contents of the communications themselves before sending, then this bill has no effect on that. IMO, your friends, unless they are nerds, are never going to place much value on encryption when they never actually use it themselves. When some third party tech company is doing the "end-to-end encryption" for them t…

> "We have made it technically impossible to see your messages."

That one's not actually a "promise"; it's either true and sufficient (although it's hard to imagine how if the software supports automatic updates), or a direct lie because they have not in fact made it impossible.

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