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Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

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Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#101

Post by justincormack »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #84
sp4ke wrote: post #78

I have always been fascinated by computers and passionate about programming. I never taught I would ever feel ashamed of my passion ... that maybe I have been part of the decline of freedom and privacy, the same things I've always believed in and fought for . I've finished reading again 1984 a short time ago, and I felt sick reading this article and realizing we're making a monster. I stopped using Facebook a few mon…

You feel awful now, but what you've written is very encouraging. You're doing the right thing. Coding can be put to good use too. Perhaps there's an open-source project you can contribute to that has a positive benefit to offer society? What social injustices are you most passionate about? I also intend to leave Facebook (again) very soon. The only reason I haven't in the past is that I didn't want to lose contact wi…

I use runbox for email [1], they are very privacy focused.

[1] https://runbox.com/

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#102

Post by justincormack »

hamoid wrote: post #68
brianbarker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A flip phone doesn't really stop surveillance. They still track where you are, who you call. Sure, maybe no app data, but since you don't use Facebook and such that data wouldn't be there anyway.

A faraday bag probably helps to reduce the tracking: http://killyourphone.com/

Thats an art project about raising awareness. Just turn the phone off.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#103

Post by Futurebot »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #82
Futurebot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different read on that. Control doesn't work if no one cares about social opprobrium. If the culture has changed so that whatever behavior you're engaging in is no longer considered taboo / everyone else is doing it, you cannot be controlled by others using the threat of exposure against you (this doesn't apply to behaviors that are actually made illegal, so would be protestors/dissidents get no help from th…

> Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority? Or impermanence. Who's going to give you a hard time for a comment you wrote six months ago? Two months? Two weeks? Thanks for posting. You described a lot of what I've been mulling over, but you did it way more articulately than I could've. (I'm saving it for later reference.)

I think impermanence would probably fall in the foolishness bucket. Those photos of doing shots out the beak of a pelican may be 5 years old; they'd still be used against someone. It's all a Google/Facebook search away now.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6968320/Half-...

Edit: FB website integration comments aren't indexed by default, but FB does offer instructions on making them indexable.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#104

Post by csandreasen »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #89
throwawayaway wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can go with yandex, but it's all very much a case of pick your poison.

Thank you for the suggestion throwawayaway, but I don't think Yandex is quite what I'm looking for. They might state that they don't share data with the NSA, but I wouldn't trust any company that relies on data mining for their profits with my email. I don't mind paying a small monthly fee for a secure email service. Does that expand my options?

That's because Yandex is a Russian company - they share their info with the FSB. Ditto for QQ mentioned in the sibling comment and the Chinese MSS. Like throwawayaway said, pick your poison.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#105

Post by happyscrappy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
c1sc0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I'm at a total loss for where to start. (Edit: grammar)

I don't think we should want to fight this. The way I see it, things increasingly tend to look like "privacy or the progress of mankind, pick one". There are tons and tons of potential benefits to society stemming from all that data being available for constant real-time processing, and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that would properly weight the costs and benefits. What we get is constant surveillence state fe…

This is a good, but probably unpopular, point. Even Stallman's info leaks everywhere. If his great lengths aren't enough where does that leave typical people? The article states satellites can recognize your face. At some point you throw up your hands and say I give up. On Star Trek no one seems to care that the Federation always knows where they are because they trust that their rights are respected uniformly. Attacking the problem from the standpoint of hiding all info about your doings is a castle made of sand.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#106

Post by ZenoArrow »

csandreasen wrote: post #104
ZenoArrow wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the suggestion throwawayaway, but I don't think Yandex is quite what I'm looking for. They might state that they don't share data with the NSA, but I wouldn't trust any company that relies on data mining for their profits with my email. I don't mind paying a small monthly fee for a secure email service. Does that expand my options?

That's because Yandex is a Russian company - they share their info with the FSB. Ditto for QQ mentioned in the sibling comment and the Chinese MSS. Like throwawayaway said, pick your poison.

Yes, I know, that's why I don't have to 'pick my poison' I know that better options exist.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#107

Post by ZenoArrow »

justincormack wrote: post #101
ZenoArrow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You feel awful now, but what you've written is very encouraging. You're doing the right thing. Coding can be put to good use too. Perhaps there's an open-source project you can contribute to that has a positive benefit to offer society? What social injustices are you most passionate about? I also intend to leave Facebook (again) very soon. The only reason I haven't in the past is that I didn't want to lose contact wi…

I use runbox for email [1], they are very privacy focused. [1] https://runbox.com/

Thanks justincormack, that looks promising.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#108

Post by zzzeek »

hansdezwart wrote: post #98

For me as the author of the piece, it is wonderful to find an informed and critical discussion of the themes that I tried to discuss here in the comments. I will likely try and answer some of them here in the next couple of hours and am happy to answer any questions.

how about more background info on the "US Warehouse (think amazon)" that will actually fire someone "on the spot" for taking a 31 minute lunch? (think actual company / location names, backing documentation?) I find it hard to believe that's not just a bit exaggerated.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#109

Post by LiweiZ »

crucialfelix wrote: post #53
LiweiZ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my observation of those iconic people in China, I have to say that a sad truth is nearly 100% are performers in media. It took me a long time to accept this. I was looking for some really contemporary thinkers in my nation but failed. Instead, I found a "career path" for some iconic guys. I know it sounds unbelievable, given the context of life in US.

I saw the Ai Weiwei show recently and I was noting that he uses his brief imprisonment for its performance value and I was a bit critical of this. There was one room that was just all the artifacts laid out (police reports, confiscated computers). This didn't seem like much of an artwork compared to his much better and more complex ones like http://www.zodiacheads.com/about_exhibit_gold.html But after a while I under…

The interesting part is, in my experience, his famous works in Chinese media are all political ones and I see little art in them, if those can be called true art. Most of what I see are just iconic man doing visual protest in art's name. This is actually such a privilege in China, if you know the consequence average people face by doing this. This is maybe where my bias comes from. And he seems quite enjoy people in developed world see him as a fighter and some in his own country see him as one of the most famous artists. I just want to point out what I see since no one mentions this online and HN readers may be able to accept some different point of view.

Re: Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future

#110

Post by TeMPOraL »

happyscrappy wrote: post #105
TeMPOraL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we should want to fight this. The way I see it, things increasingly tend to look like "privacy or the progress of mankind, pick one". There are tons and tons of potential benefits to society stemming from all that data being available for constant real-time processing, and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that would properly weight the costs and benefits. What we get is constant surveillence state fe…

This is a good, but probably unpopular, point. Even Stallman's info leaks everywhere. If his great lengths aren't enough where does that leave typical people? The article states satellites can recognize your face. At some point you throw up your hands and say I give up. On Star Trek no one seems to care that the Federation always knows where they are because they trust that their rights are respected uniformly. Attac…

Yes. I won't pretend I'm not scared of the bad consequences of the tech we have, be it oppressive governments or evil private companies. Though to be honest, it's something we had to deal with since the dawn of mankind, I don't think surveillance tech is anywhere close to the root of the problem.

Since you mentioned it, I grew up watching Star Trek and I guess it might have formed some of my views on society and technology. The technology present in that universe can - and sometimes is - abused, but like you said, they generally trust each other a lot, both on personal and on societal level. It's a way of life I try to follow and a future I hope we'll one day reach.

Pretty much everything again hinges not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used. There's a lot of good we can leverage even current level of "antiprivacy" technologies - optimizing agriculture, traffic and public health, learning more about ourselves and how societies evolve, improving the general well-being of everyone.

The last two or three generations seem to have grown up with irrational hate of centralized systems. Yes, distributed and democratized is great, but those systems also have their failure modes - many of which we see every day not only in technology, but in economy, politics. There are some things that are better done centralized, like any kind of optimizations. With the levels of computing power we have nowdays, I think we should embrace centralization some more.

Another thing - that I do need to check up with history books, but I feel that the current notion of "privacy" is an artificial construct, an artefact of growing urbanization. I can't imagine villages having any level of privacy similar to what people in cities nowdays consider a minimum standard.

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