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IPFS Support in Brave

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Re: IPFS Support in Brave

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you're unfamiliar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Unfortunately part of making things "open and accessible to all" means revoking access to people who would weaponize the internet to contradict those goals. A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.

> A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists. But how do you know who is a 'freedom fighter' and who is a 'terrorist' then? Do you let google and facebook decide? Look, an "Anti soviet warrior", "on the road to peace" - https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...

Orwell wrote a nice essay on this, all the way back in 1940s, when the war was still being fought, and organizations like the British Union of Fascists were around:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

And it could as well be written yesterday:

"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."

"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice."

"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means."

"1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?"

(Note that the guy writing all this was a socialist who volunteered to go and literally shoot at - and be shot by - actual Fascists in the Spanish Civil War less than 10 years earlier.)

Re: IPFS Support in Brave

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in the case of violence it is quite easy to pass judgement and just lock them up. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to those terrorists. Even if they only talk bullshit you should at least try to understand why they became terrorists or else you will just declare more and more people as terrorists because it is the easy way out.

Thats exactly what Karl Popper says. We should listen to them, aslong as society is strong enough to defend a tolerant society against intolerance. The question is: When do we reach the point where the defence starts to break? You could argue that that point is reached when terrorists storm the capitol. I don't know if we reached that point already. What I do know: If we wait for too long, we reach a state of no retu…

The answer is: we need to use as much violence as is necessary to suppress the violent actions, and then revert back to tolerance.

Re: IPFS Support in Brave

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla seems to be moving in the other direction now. "We need more than deplatforming" https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...

Well, Brave leadership isn't that subtle either. Here's Brendan getting salty over Gab's attempted fork of Brave: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1118705815127347200 . I guess we should simply ignore these political endorsements and only take the functional utility into account when choosing browsers.

Gab has not updated Dissenter in 10 months (Windows and Linux) or more than 13 months (macOS). Without backporting or merging up to current Brave, this leaves its users horribly vulnerable to unpatched but disclosed Chromium security bugs, including full remote code execution vulns. Don't use Dissenter. My "salty" tweet was prophetic.

Re: IPFS Support in Brave

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palantir exists to improve privacy of citizen data within the government. Without it, government workers have massive, untraceable and unaccountable access to private data. (See Snowden for more info.) I don't like that there's even a need for Palantir, but given the need, I'm glad it exists and I'm glad someone like Thiel is behind it.

> Palantir exists to improve privacy of citizen data within the government. Huh. So the argument to overcome objections to a

Well, that's annoying. Here is what I meant to post, more or less:

Huh. So the argument to overcome objections to a system designed for ingesting, canonicalizing, normalizing, and correlating private data acquired via dubious means from dubious sources is that at least the access to and use of the data is controlled monitored and auditable, reducing the incidence of LOVEINT and similar abuses as compared to ad-hoc systems constructed on the sly?

That's really damning with faint praise, especially since Jevon's Paradox ensures that both the use AND abuse of such data will increase when you reduce the 'costs' of doing so, and that's assuming there is no unsanctioned/off-book/'black' use or egress of the data (which is far from assured, IMO, given what we know about the history of these systems and projects, eg. Total Information Awareness and Trailblazer vs. ThinThread).

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