181–190 of 377 posts
Are they going to vote on that every year until it passes?
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher: you have to be lucky every time, we just have to be lucky once.
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I'm worried that as soon as this is implemented, someone will make a patched version of the signal client which doesn't do the scanning, and soon after all the affected apps will be forced by law to use remote attestation like Play Integrity.
Signal said that they will the EU market if push comes to shove, so there won't be a Signal client to patch because there won't be a Signal app.
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So shouldn't be a concern then for Germans? Somehow I don't buy that. See for example https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-artikel-5-e-v-anot... and that's not an isolated event. Before that were jabber chat nodes.
So did they go to court? I think that would be crucial to rectify that. If not, they let the rogue agents have a free hand.
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I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points. As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things colla…
>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy I'm not a fan of democracy. You wouldn't be either, if you thought about it for very long... you just can't help yourself, it was championed as some sort of virtue ever since you were old enough to realize that governments existed. From kindergarten or pre-k. The things you'd claim you like about democracy aren't even t…
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Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is. Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war. Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands…
If you think the republic is one of the worst books in human history I would ask what makes a good book? When there are plenty of implementation issues for direct democracy it feels strange to blame Plato... Particularly when the world has benefited from the republic in so many ways.
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>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy I'm not a fan of democracy. You wouldn't be either, if you thought about it for very long... you just can't help yourself, it was championed as some sort of virtue ever since you were old enough to realize that governments existed. From kindergarten or pre-k. The things you'd claim you like about democracy aren't even t…
Defining something in the negative is always tricky. What are some better designs, or design principles?
And yet it preserves everything you like about democracy.
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Public Unix server will get a Reissanance. Tons of folks will learn to live under small Nix account to chat privately under remote Tox accounts or over I2PD. This will only boost up populace's knowledge. Kinda like in Spain tons of people learnt to either burn cards with microcontrollers in order to pirate TV top boxes or run Nagra and satellite decoders with keys dumped fron sketchy sites to be read with Kaffeine. A…
These things won't magically boost populace's knowledge. People are born every day and they don't know anything. Each year the burden of things you need to know to be an adult increases. The populationbon general will not get hands on with something optional.
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On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected. So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents. The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There's no ground swell of public opinion in favour of being continually monitored.
> The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising. The means by which we're supposed to hold the elected officials accountable for not representing our best interests is voting. It doesn't work. Most people don't, as individuals, hold any sort of stable policy positions to begin with. People have a poor un…
However, democracy is not as feeble as this analysis would suggest. After all, we can see that major shifts in political support for policy positions are possible, and these do require public support (democracy) to occur.
For example, in the US the civil rights movements of the 1960's and 1970's. Or more recently the Brexit referendum in the UK or populist anti-immigrant positions that have arisen in recent years and acquired major political support. Whether you agree with these or not, they are politically impactful, and democratically supported.
Issues surrounding civil liberties have often attracted strong political and popular support. So the question here is how such support can be generated for privacy, which itself a right under numerous legal regimens including the US constitution and the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
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They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty. What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious. Maybe they're not paying attention to the part…
Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.
I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.
I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
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Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.
I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad. I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership. I don't think it was always that…