181–190 of 342 posts
I've been using Matrix (and element as a client) for a little while now for personal and business stuff - I even wrote some fun little bot to shitpost random memes on my behalf. Anyone else using matrix actively for professional stuff? Any thing I may find later on that is a show stopper?
> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize. Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progress…
The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it. I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
>Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
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That was about introducing sex ed to third graders. Have third graders put down their toy cars, dolls and blocks yet? And then you have a Cal governor suinf a school dist demanding they teach the curriculum he believes is correct. So you have an example of two governors, one on each side, tellig districts what to teach But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it…
I think that's (grade 3 -> 9yo) an ok age to start talking about sexuality. Lots of age appropriate topics there. Not sure why this is such a big deal.
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> If a judge ordered you to unlock your phone and hand over all your messages, you’d probably be sour but you should also be morally ok with complying. No. It is not my moral obligation to obey the orders of other human beings. Ever. If you want this to be a moral issue you must first prove that there is a moral basis for compliance and I've yet to hear one. Pointing a gun to my face and telling me what to do doesn't…
There doesn't really have to be a moral basis nor does there have to be consent. You can refuse, and you can choose to live outside of society. That might be very difficult, but you have the choice. For many, society doesn't provide any advantages and so they choose non-compliance and all the consequences that come with it.
The social contract is the only contract in the world that you can be legally bound to the terms of without ever having agreed to it. In this way, the government acts very much like any other organized crime group: "follow the rules we create or else".
> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize. Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progress…
I don't see anyone asking that besides you, so it really begs the question why given all common sense and reasoning, you'd have to ask this.
”Signal [pioneered] end-to-end encryption, a feature that WhatsApp turned around and copied from Signal.” It wasn’t copied from Signal — at the protocol level, it is Signal: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp/
Also as a slight but important aside, the article mentions end-to-end encryption technology that existed prior to Signal in its opening sentence. It may be that Signal pioneered E2EE chat, but it didn't pioneer E2EE itself. It built upon it in a way that was perhaps more accessible or appealing to a mass audience. That prior technology, by the way, PGP, is not and was never universally hated. Many businesses continue…
Also false. XMPP OTR existed long prior.
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We have no idea if whatsapp really implements it, and if it does but also adds a bunch of side channels for the NSA.
This idea seems to rely on the flawed assumption that you can’t security audit closed source software. This is not an assumption I’ve ever seen an actual security researcher make. Quite the opposite, they start with techniques they work on the binary and only use the source (if available) as a helpful reference. Hiding back doors in source has a long and storied history so relying on it to audit security has long bee…
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Would it be unfair of me to rephrase as, "It is possible to do this ridiculous, difficult thing that doesn't even always work in order to get some insight into a situation which would be trivial if the source were available with reproducible builds"?
Security auditing an app by source is not automatically easier than security auditing an app from its actual runtime behavior. Source can be a 1mloc tangled mess or have some vulnerable dependency deep in your dependency tree causing app to behave insecurely which could be quickly detected by monitoring how the app behaves in use, network packets sent, memory etc. How else do you think many 0days to closed products w…
If we're interested in whether WhatsApp's developers have implemented the Signal protocol in good faith, because we suspect they have not (we suspect they've put in backdoors at the behest of bad governments), then having the source available (and reproducible builds to use) allows us to check that more easily than analysis on the binary's behavior.
This is because the primary way the duplicitous maintainers would do this is in their own source. It's possible (and for three letter agencies probably common and desirable) to deliberately introduce bugs in dependencies that provide the desired behavior in some end product, but it probably shouldn't be our base case. Our base case should be: you swear your code implements the Signal protocol without backdoors...ok, great, you show us the code.
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I was more talking about this kind of reaction.
If you say something incisive to piss people off and trigger a reaction, and you get the reaction you're looking for, what we've established is that you are willing to piss people off to serve your rhetorical ends. Nothing else. This of the "stop hitting yourself" form of argumentation.
> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize. Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progress…
The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it. I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
Girard explores this phenomenon of scapegoating and postulates it goes back to primitive humans e.g. during a drought tensions rise within a tribe, and a certain "witchy" tribe member is singled out to take the blame and either expelled or murdered. After this, social tensions in the tribe are relieved (even if the drought does not subside), and the scapegoat paradoxically becomes a sacred, or savior, figure. Through history, this develops into ritual and religion. It provides a useful lens to reason about messianic cults, as well as social power dynamics.
There's a good overview on his Wikipedia page, but he delves into this particular topic in the book Violence and the Sacred. He also pioneered the field of Generative Anthropology, which other academics like Eric Gans have built upon, theorizing about the mechanism in much more detail, and using it to explain effects in modern culture.