Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
locusmag.com
Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
1–10 of 255 posts
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#2The chaos and banditry is caused by software churn. Nothing is ever finished, so nothing is ever secure, so you must ally yourself with a powerful warlord.
This is why I am in the process of migrating my website from HTML to PDF/A.
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#3What really puzzles me about Apple fans and it's userbase is that they do not care. They simply do not care at all what's being done to them.
It's the strongest example of consumer cultism. Absolute in their exceptionalism and ignorance. Similar problems discussed in the article are found in Tesla.
The lowest common denominator of consumer cultism is surveillance and it's no surprise that both Apple and Tesla do exceptionally well in authoritarian countries like China.
When our data is worth more than a barrel of oil, strange things are happening.
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#4I love the idea of a Ulysses Pact. Something like https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491 would be good. I note that while right now there’s no way to override the malware safeguards, Apple's promising to fix this. (I believe that update was made after this article was written, btw.)
Now: it’s absolutely true that Apple could change their mind. Given that possibility, I understand why someone might prefer to avoid Apple. I'd be sincerely interested in some thoughts on how you can make such a Pact enforceable, or do you just have to take it on a case by case basis?
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#5The chaos and banditry is caused by software churn. Nothing is ever finished, so nothing is ever secure, so you must ally yourself with a powerful warlord. This is why I am in the process of migrating my website from HTML to PDF/A.
> This is why I am in the process of migrating my website from HTML to PDF/A.
With tags for accessibility, I hope.
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#6The chaos and banditry is caused by software churn. Nothing is ever finished, so nothing is ever secure, so you must ally yourself with a powerful warlord. This is why I am in the process of migrating my website from HTML to PDF/A.
> This is why I am in the process of migrating my website from HTML to PDF/A. With tags for accessibility, I hope.
Who cares? We should not force the majority to be serfs so a minority is served.
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#7"There is no way for us to defend ourselves: even skilled technologists who administer their own networked services are no match for the bandits. To keep bandits out, you have to be perfect and perfectly vigilant, and never make a single mistake. For the bandits to get you, they need merely find a single mistake that you’ve made."
Ooof. What a boot-to-the-face reminder. Despite my use of a Tor Router, three ubikeys and Google authenticator, password manager, non-GSM voice (GoogleVoice), and several hard tokens from various financial institutions, I still have no idea if I'm doing enough because I don't control any of my three OSes, including Ubuntu 18.04 (we almost missed elliptic key backdoor in OpenSSL, what else is in there?).
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#8What really puzzles me about Apple fans and it's userbase is that they do not care . They simply do not care at all what's being done to them. It's the strongest example of consumer cultism. Absolute in their exceptionalism and ignorance. Similar problems discussed in the article are found in Tesla. The lowest common denominator of consumer cultism is surveillance and it's no surprise that both Apple and Tesla do exc…
And what to do about it?
Windows & Linux probably aren't the answer to the trillion-dollar juggernaut that is Apple.
OSS has drawn the talent, and there's a lot of talent building enterprise applications, most of which are the bricks in the wall of mega-tech as they re-write our rights.
Macs are great if you want access to the financial funnel that is the app stores now. That probably defines the echo chamber of silence that exists on this subject.
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#9"There is no way for us to defend ourselves: even skilled technologists who administer their own networked services are no match for the bandits. To keep bandits out, you have to be perfect and perfectly vigilant, and never make a single mistake. For the bandits to get you, they need merely find a single mistake that you’ve made." Ooof. What a boot-to-the-face reminder. Despite my use of a Tor Router, three ubikeys a…
You could run your system completely in RAM, to at least limit the duration of exposure.
Persistence is overrated! :)
Re: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
#10It would be great if there were a way to ally with multiple 'warlords' to achieve security without having to trust just one of them. It should be possible since there's the hardware level, the OS level, and the application level. At least for computers, it should be possible to build an alliance that doesn't require you to put too much trust in any single warlord.
Of course on mobile, there's so much vertical consolidation (especially on iOS) that you just have to pick one warlord.
EDIT: curious about the downvotes — what part of this do people disagree with? That it would be good to not be stuck with this dilemma? That mobile is vertically integrated?