141–150 of 221 posts
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... and how well does a society function if everyone gets to decide for themselves what rules they follow?
You're describing reality. When was the last time you jay walked?
But then I live in Southern California and nobody walks here.
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That's a nice theory, but has it been demonstrated to work in any real systems? Is it known to be a workable solution at the scale of Usenet/Reddit?
That's a very high bar to set :) No it hasn't been validated for that use case for that large a system. Some examples where it has been used: PGP uses web of trust to validate keys. Freenet boards used web of trust to succesfully stave off spam attack. They are a lot smaller than reddit of course.
Someone made a fake PGP for me several years ago, and many people have chosen that over my genuine key when e-mailing me, just because the fake key is newer, even though my genuine key has lots of signatures and the fake key has none at all. (It was probably Enigmail helping them make the choice rather than a clearly informed decision.)
Meanwhile, there is already a complete clone of the strong set with colliding key IDs. That is, people have spent the computing time needed to make a fake version of every single public key, with the same name and key ID and signatures as the real one, just with a different fingerprint. (There's one at https://evil32.com/, but I think at least one other group has done the same thing!)
If someone uploaded those to the keyservers, there would be a fake copy of each PGP public key with the same key ID and the same signature structure (of course signed by other fake keys rather than by other real keys). At that point you would always have a 50% chance of getting a fake key every time you tried to use PGP to contact a new person, unless you consciously manually used an out-of-band fingerprint verification mechanism to bootstrap your selection of what key to use. You would never be safe in just guessing because you "found a key out there" for someone and it "looked right" and "had a bunch of signatures"!.
I'm willing to be more charitable toward the web of trust than someone like Moxie is -- I think more users could be taught to be more cautious, and software could help automate key exchange better -- but my own experiences with having a fake key out there in my name don't make me very optimistic about the way the web of trust is being used today. It's also sad to ponder, as Moxie has, that it seems PGP isn't even being used widely enough to make it worthwhile for attackers to try to DoS the web of trust, let alone to try to trick people into using the wrong keys on a large scale. (That is, PGP hasn't even reached Gandhi's "then they fight you" stage in the mass market.) This isn't to deny that PGP has provided major communications security benefits to smaller communities and groups that have consciously adopted it and use it carefully.
I actually predicted that this would happen [1]. That particular Evolution thread had a ton of very incriminating statements in it. This shouldn't be surprising; don't post in public forums talking about your highly illegal activities. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229342
I'm surprised so few are being targeted, now that they actually do something about it.
We (speaking as a netizen) need Usenet 2.0; eg: something that can fulfill the role of reddit that is decentralized/distributed. Perhaps reddit can even transition into being a reader (a la google reader) for people that don't want to set up their own node. I'm not saying that drug discussion is the quintessential act that deserves to be protected, but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get t…
If you're interested in decentralized applications, you need to be paying attention to Ethereum, Whisper, Swarm, and IPFS. The building blocks for what you're describing are being built. It will happen.
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That's a view I would see nothing more than government propaganda. 'If you don't like the law, then you should break it and peacefully accept any punishments.' Should we tell homosexuals in some areas of the world that they should go ahead and draft up their wills and turn themselves to be executed because they should accept their punishment for their crime?
You seem to be assuming the government wants people to break its laws, so it gets to punish people. It costs the government money to put people in prison; not only the cost of their food, shelter, supervision, etc. but also the cost of removing a taxpayer from the workforce. Furthermore, a democratically elected government that is increasingly imprisoning more and more of its people is not likely to remain popular. I…
It isn't the majority of all people that matters, just the most consistent individual groups of voters. And felons can't vote. How do you disenfranchise and silence entire communities of people? Disproportionately charge them with felonies. It's obviously broken.
Civil disobedience makes sitting ducks of powerless people. Idealism doesn't change laws, or political culture, or us-vs-them mentalities, or nepotism, or corruption, or revolving doors. Law makers change laws, and not easily. Occupy changed what exactly? Maybe it influenced the adoption of Cop Cams a little, but it had little effect on banking practices, and that system affects pretty much everyone.
Change isn't hopeless, but it doesn't work the way you'd hope it would.
We (speaking as a netizen) need Usenet 2.0; eg: something that can fulfill the role of reddit that is decentralized/distributed. Perhaps reddit can even transition into being a reader (a la google reader) for people that don't want to set up their own node. I'm not saying that drug discussion is the quintessential act that deserves to be protected, but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get t…
I actually predicted that this would happen [1]. That particular Evolution thread had a ton of very incriminating statements in it. This shouldn't be surprising; don't post in public forums talking about your highly illegal activities. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229342
I concede. :) I'm surprised so few are being targeted, now that they actually do something about it.
Any idea on Conde Nast's response to all this? If they were looking for an excuse to shutdown DNM then this would be it.