331–340 of 409 posts
Don't forget to https://signal.org/donate/
What does exit the UK market mean here though? Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play? Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right? I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states? Doesn't th…
Signal could block all UK IP addresses from accessing its messaging server. UK could require ISPs to block access to Signal messaging servers. Both of these are fairly trivial (my understanding is that UK already forces filtering on ISPs for e.g. pornography). Of course you are correct that anyone motivated and/or technical enough could still access Signal. However, their less motivated/less technical contacts won't…
If Signal were really sticking it to the UK-vassal state they would be able to continue to provide end-to-end encryption and force their EU aircraft carrier to go through the public, international embarrasment of running their own version of the Great Firewall.
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I don’t see how a Tally stick results in non-anonymous transactions. It’s just a basic way to create an arbitrary non-fungible physical token, just like a door key.
The authorities holding the sticks are acting as a public ledger, in that they bear witness to person A originally handing them half of stick A — and they could write that association down, if they like (picture a little tag saying "person A" wrapped around stick A in their stick storage closet); but even if they don't write it down, they may just remember the person, remember the probably-pretty-unique-looking stick…
Notable people resorted to things like Tally sticks when actual physical currency like gold was in short supply. So the idea that people moved from Tally sticks to gold due to concerns for privacy just doesn’t hold water. Especially given gold as currency predates Tally sticks.
I'll post a comment which will probably not be that popular, I don't trust signal... I'll risk going conspiracy theorist here but to me it's just a govt backed/cia backed alternative to telegram when telegram started gaining heavy ground
Islamic terrorist, international crime rings, political dissidents all use telegram. I am not aware of any serious criminal orgs that use Signal.
Who persuades politicians it’s a good idea for the security services to be able to scan all their messages? I am absolutely certain that the politicians have absolutely no clue what they’re being asked to implement.
Oh, politicians' messages won't be scanned. They'll make sure of that. Only the peons will have their messages scanned. The French law that makes it legal for the government to hack your phone has a bunch of exceptions so it's not legal for the government to hack important people's phones.
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That’s what Constitutional amendments are for, and it’s happened 27 times in the history of the US, most recently in 1992. The corporate media doesn’t typically like to talk about that process since it is a threat to the entrenched powers that be. The ombudsman of the American people is their state legislatures. We have sovereign states in the US. Let’s not add any more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perce…
> That’s what Constitutional amendments are for, Yes, you'll note that I said "the data will lead to a mandate for a constitutional amendment." My point is that the mechanisms that create and ratify constitutional amendments are broken for this purpose ; not that we need a thing other than constitutional amendments. Given the actual way bipartite or tripartite governments (at all levels — from municipal to federal) f…
I read your whole comment tree. I used to think something like this would be nice. An incarnation of some kind of wise intelligent force that could cut through the morass of mainstream politics in an efficient and principled way.
What I have realized is that mainstream politics is exactly this. The premise of your argument is wrong. There is no more proactive or efficient mechanism for accomplish collective action than our current political process. It is ruthlessly fast and efficient when you consider how accurately it reflects general sentiment in the country. We all, moreso the more intelligent we are, operate in a bubble of assumptions about what other people believe. Whatever you see on the news is a mindbogglyly low error match tailored to what the target audience believes. And all target audiences are covered in proportion to their size. We often hear that the extremes control the narrative, and you do hear from them a lot, but the overall picture painted by popular media and politics is the most accurate reflection of what people believe or will believe.
There's nothing we could construct that would outperform it.
I think we could tweak it to lower the error rate with some different voting schemes or rules, but at the end of the day there isn't some other paradigm that will beat it.
This is the lasting legacy of Apple’s CSAM photo scanning debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity. Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
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It’s imaginary in the sense that no matter who wins an election, you’re going to end up with substantially the same government every time. If you’re so concerned with political tribalism that you can’t see how utterly corrupt your own team is, then you’ve simply fallen for the distraction.
That's because government is a collection of institutions, the administration of the executive branch inherits them and has only limited ability to restructure them without legislative assistance (speaking about the US here, terms vary depending on the country and governance structure).