21–30 of 240 posts
I take issue with the phrasing. No one can force upon me their moral obligations. It’s my choice alone.
> (Norway) the most robust democracy in the world (which also happens to be a EU member state)
Norway is not in the EU.
> Hungary and Poland, are still immature barely-liberal regimes with more than a whiff of political repression (“flawed democracies”)
Coming from a Spaniard? Go fuck yourself.
Like tripu, I am strongly and vocally in favour of privacy and individual agency. But some of the ideological drip in this piece left a bad taste in my mouth.
The easiest way to combat "you have nothing to hide" is if you were in a country taken over by dictators or terrorists, those leaders don't care and cannot be reasoned with. They will use the backdoor at any time to punish dissent or any misalignment with their rules. And if people say, "but our country is free", tell them that if your country was not, how would you get back to freedom? Is your software and hardware…
I take issue with the phrasing. No one can force upon me their moral obligations. It’s my choice alone.
I stand by what I wrote, although it could be argued in less stringent terms.
The easiest way to combat "you have nothing to hide" is if you were in a country taken over by dictators or terrorists, those leaders don't care and cannot be reasoned with. They will use the backdoor at any time to punish dissent or any misalignment with their rules. And if people say, "but our country is free", tell them that if your country was not, how would you get back to freedom? Is your software and hardware…
> If the E.U. really made Chat Control, it would require a DRM that would restrict non-signed OS from running I have seen this claim, but I don’t believe it is necessarily true. If EU legislation limits encryption on WhatsApp and other messengers offered on the Play Store, then that already implements the law for the vast majority of the population. Us nerds might be able to run whatever OSs we want, but we and even…
Since most Android phones and all iPhones cannot install freedom software, they don't have to explicitly put a DRM at the hardware level, because it is already there from Apple or most Android manufactures.
Apple devices can only install software from a signed key. Most Android phones can only install Android from the device manufacture signed key (unless Google Pixel for example).
However, Android allows installing apps from not just the Play Store on most devices, so either the Android OS would need an update, or the hardware would need an update.
A bit of a tangent, but I followed the link at the bottom to https://stopchatcontrol.eu/ and while I want to take the site seriously and agree with the message, I can't with that silly usage of emojis (scroll down). Seems more like a joke website than a serious piece of advocacy it purports to be. The original blog post is good though.
> We should all use PGP, SSL or equivalent tools; VPNs, Tor and/or SSH tunnelling; IPFS, or other distributed file systems — and ditch proprietary OS's in favour of Linux or truly free Android distros... Those tools and techniques should cease to be arcane nice-to-haves for nerds: we must get more non-technical people onboard.
This is so unrealistic and impractical as a moral "duty" for "all", it undercuts my ability to take the rest of the piece seriously. It's not any kind of seriously considered ethical analysis, weighing the pros and cons of what's actually best or most effective in the real world -- it's a pipe dream.
The easiest way to combat "you have nothing to hide" is if you were in a country taken over by dictators or terrorists, those leaders don't care and cannot be reasoned with. They will use the backdoor at any time to punish dissent or any misalignment with their rules. And if people say, "but our country is free", tell them that if your country was not, how would you get back to freedom? Is your software and hardware…
How often does this easiest way win you an argument?
1. My government will use this tech only for good. 2. I don't live in China, so why should I care about that.
If you say that your current government loses freedom and how do you go back to freedom, then they think differently.
It makes them think they need freedom now in hardware and software, so they can go back to freedom, instead of being permanently stuck in non-freedom.
> you would be morally obliged to disobey In days of yore my CS law module was taught by a QC - that's a high ranking barrister in the UK - who explained the world of difference between the "The Rule of Law" and "the law" in a class called "jurisprudence". Rule of Law (capitalised conceptual) is there as permanent ground truth in contrast to the ephemeral du-jure laws. At times I still struggle with that profound cou…
I mean you can literally go to eastern Europe to see the vestiges of the Stasi where they used to listen to the conversations of their citizens while trying to find dissidents among them. This isn't some kind of distant past, this is almost like yesterday and yet here we are again.
How come we end up here again? Why can't the powers that be just leave the people to live their lives in peace without being snooped on by the surveillance apparatus?
And then to turn around and seeing the EU wanting to give lessons of democracy to China or NK? What a joke.
The future is grim and to be honest I would just rather they came out in the open and acknowledged the fact that democracy and privacy as we know it is dead. Then each and everyone can decide to accept this fact or fight back.
Instead we get this grandstanding about civil liberties but in the background they are ever so working on diminishing our individual freedoms.