Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the "clueless" users are 99.99% of the users?
Why as an Apple user in the UK am I considered too dumb to use a 3rd party app store but if I were 30 miles away in France I would be considered intelligent enough to cope? Because this was never about my safety. It was about their 30% as correctly supposed above.
Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
231–240 of 357 posts
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it". There's zero point in changing the law if you don't expect it to be obeyed and enforced. Those positions are not opposites.
If you don’t expect it to be obeyed or enforced, then I would say that means it should be fast tracked to be changed. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#233Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. It can be used to create safety (as it is by police forces, when authorized by judges, in compliance with democratically voted laws), or can be misused to create terror (and, as we've seen before, it never needed cellphones for that). We should guard against the misuses and create enough legal frameworks to protect individuals' privacy (and aggressiv…
What is it a tool for, it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy.
Privacy, a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people.
Any tool is (as long as it exists) always used for right or wrong, good or evil. However what might be good or evil is very subjective. Both in the moment and looking back on the use of the tool. Therefore it might be best to consider not creating the tool at all, instead of the current we'll try it and see what happens rhetoric.Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#234I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to ex…
My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This i…
Suppose there is some peon at Microsoft who is ordered to write code for Pluton and then does it because they don't want to be fired, expecting to hide behind the Nuremberg defense. The people in your second group will naturally disapprove of this.
But regardless of that, we can ask the same question of the person giving the orders. Someone in these companies initiated these programs, so are they merely fools who couldn't predict the obvious consequences that others did, or are they truly malicious?
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you are the first kind. Since the law will not change, you will continue to follow it.
> "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it". There's zero point in changing the law if you don't expect it to be obeyed and enforced. Those positions are not opposites.
You can follow it anyway and make no attempt to improve the situation, allowing the stupid consequences to follow indefinitely. (Notice that anyone who follows the law while doing nothing because they've been convinced reform efforts will be ineffective are in this group.)
You can follow it anyway while trying to change it, attempting to limit the time the stupid consequences exist.
Or you can refuse to follow it.
But the people in the last group should still be trying to reform the law, both so that they don't have to risk being prosecuted for doing the right thing, and in order to get the people in the first and second groups to stop doing the stupid thing the people in the third group are already refusing to do.
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it". There's zero point in changing the law if you don't expect it to be obeyed and enforced. Those positions are not opposites.
If you don’t expect it to be obeyed or enforced, then I would say that means it should be fast tracked to be changed. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#237I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to ex…
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#238I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to ex…
The people in the industry that I know were/are trying to stop fraudsters, script kiddies, nasty people, and governments from trying to exploit weaknesses and take unauthorised control of devices and services. The problem with that is it generally requires a central point of trust. Sure you can allow multiple points of trust, but for the unskilled user, that means that the little lock symbol becomes unreliable (or wh…
The problem with it is that the people who want to use a central point of trust as a chokepoint for censorship, surveillance and monopolization keep claiming that this is required when it isn't.
> Sure you can allow multiple points of trust, but for the unskilled user, that means that the little lock symbol becomes unreliable (or whatever)
The premise being that if you have a monopoly then ordinary people can trust it. Only that isn't the case. A monopolist not only can be just as malicious or incompetent as any of the multiple players in a competitive landscape, they're more likely to be because the lack of competitive pressure allows them to be more abusive and complacent and more capable of capturing the government.
> under a certain age, if they took photos or videos of other kids, that makes them liable to be on a list, for life
That seems like a problem caused by the law. Why is it possible for any actions taken as a minor to cause someone to be put on a permanent list when we recognize that minors aren't mature enough to be held responsible for that?
> Now imagine not being able to get that photo back.
Now imagine what would be necessary to get it back. It's on some other person's private device. Either you invade everyone's privacy and private communications to check if they might have it or be privately sharing it, or they could be. The cure is worse than the disease.
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.
The practical alternative is sabotage. Write the code poorly, with obvious bugs. Don't sign the full URL so the user can just delete the drm=true parameter.
Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
#240I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to ex…
Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.