241–250 of 409 posts
This is the lasting legacy of Apple’s CSAM photo scanning debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity. Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
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What would we have done differently? All this stuff is really convenient. Would we have really said “no” to turn-by-turn navigation? Avoided online purchases? Used cash for most of our transactions? Printed things out so we don’t use the internet while outside?
You could have recognized that if you even think you need Tor and Signal to protect yourself from your own government, you need to organize politically to install representatives who ensure you don't think you need those things. We overlook that young people with tech jobs in the 90's humiliated a lot of their peers, ones who went on to pursue messy politcal careers instead of business ones. Those peers learned to ha…
This legislation comes from politicians believing that the general populace would vote for a government that places catching criminals over having e2e encryption. I doubt those legislating have a grand surveillance of the masses plan, or much in the way of philosophical thought at all. Now we're trying to convey to the general public that will be the consequence one way or another even if it's not the intent.
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All kinds of advantages go to one sides benefit. Can we set up an automated monitor on all the traffic cams and licence plate readers and facial recognition systems just to catch cops and politicians breaking laws or just to track their movements and associations the way they do to everyone else? Can we access the same cam footage that the state uses to accuse you of something, to clear you instead? Only occasionally…
Ambient sousveillance. You'd have to get a critical mass of people who care enough to buy the hardware, deploy it, and release the video though.
The surveillance already exists, and is already being used only against you, rarely for you.
If you or I shouldn't have unrestricted access to it, then neither should anyone else. If it is to exist, and anyone is to have access to it, then so should you and I.
I've always wondered why politicians in America take similar stances (outside of a few like Rand Paul). Even a wild card like Trump should see how unpopular some of these policies are. Are the intelligence agencies really that influential?
The problem is that they aren't as unpopular as you think. Once the government and media trot out the "think of the children" and "law and order" narratives, with a helping of "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", a lot of people support legally mandated broken encryption. It's a lot harder to explain to the average voter the negative consequences this has on privacy, in a way that will actually m…
E2E apps and fully encrypted phones prevent the police from executing legitimate search warrants. This has never been the case with traditional communication mechanisms, e.g. phones, mail. I agree that privacy is important, but it's not absolute, by law. So what we're saying is E2E apps are more important than current law we have, and we want to invalidate the ability of the police to investigate crime. How can that…
What folks are saying is that requiring a backdoor in encryption for “blessed” individuals is wrong. I can tell from your comment that you trust cops. Not all of us do (at least - not all of us trust all cops) and so we don’t want ANY cops to have a backdoor through EVERY encryption, for fear of what ONE of them may do, or ONE person in their chain of trust may do.
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Well as far as political systems go, Switzerland seems the gold standard from what I've read. And if you can deal with the cold then the Nordic nations seem pretty good, particularly Iceland. As for general day to day, I quite like the look of the laidback Mediterranean countries and la dolce vita rather than whatever the fuck the UK is about nowadays.
Switzerland is impossibly expensive, and immensely bureaucratic. The Nordic nations are lovely but so cold. Iceland is one of my favorite countries ever. But I could never live there.
Expensive yes but their system of government is absolutely superb.
> Switzerland's voting system is unique among modern democratic nations in that Switzerland practices direct democracy in parallel with representative democracy, which is why the Swiss system is known as a semi-direct democracy.[2] Direct democracy allows any citizen to challenge any law approved by the parliament or, at any time, propose a modification of the federal Constitution.
Plus those mountains are bloody beautiful.
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I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from that job I've bought a house I rent to a local association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement account buys. So I'm both? Who do I fight for?
Where does most of your income come from?
For other UK citizens: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/634725
Goodness, I hate to be this guy, but do these petitions ever actually help? I can’t think of one that I’ve followed up to the debate that has been successful in anything except getting a solid “no” from the sitting government. Direct action, enough to be villainised by the media, seems to be the only way that politicians will actually listen — though even then its a massive uphill struggle. God, I feel so unrepresent…
The Tories have been in power since the year before I could vote.
I’m not 100% on the same page as Labour by any stretch, but I’m yet to experience government as an adult that isn’t in total opposition to almost all the values I hold.
I was a teenager from a poor working class family then, I’m now a homeowner earning a comfortable wage. I still think they’re dishonest, self-serving cretins.
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Ok, so what's your point? Mine was to alleviate the burden on Signal. Fact is, this can be done and done well. Real harm is happening and this popular bandwagon is part of the problem, not solution. Find a better way for govs to have an advantage against CSAM and other boogeymen. Technical people are supposed to find optimal technical solutions, not pretend to be technocrats or underdogs fighting against governments…
So, technical people are supposed to "just follow orders"? Nope. If what the government is trying to do is unjust in my own ethical judgment, then I have no obligation to help them find an "optimal technical solution" to do it - on the contrary, I have a moral duty to make it as hard as possible for them to do that. The usual argument is that if we don't "help" them, the regime that's actually enacted will be much wo…
No, just be honest about technical matters. You can refuse to publish your software entirely or ideally in this case, make it available only outside the UK and let UK users seek it out on their own or use vpns. You can also protest the measure and try to prevent the law from being passed on ideological grounds.
> on the contrary, I have a moral duty to make it as hard as possible for them to do that.
So long as you are not being dishonest because then why would anyone trust you with anything else. You can comply with laws by doing it well or simply refuse to participate in publishing software there. What is happening now is they want to publish software there but refuse to obey the law of the land. What kind of law do you get to follow, only when you agree with it?
> We'll see how much of the public still supports all this stuff when the "for CSAM only, pinky promise" tech will start being routinely used to bust them for stuff like drug use.
That's sort of my point. You can disagree with it ideologically, saying it will be abused. But if the people trust the government and think preventing CSAM is more important then it is their right to self-determine and find out for themeselves and repeal the law later on. You are not the people's nanny, they made their bed.
Perhaps we can talk about phones without app stores and OSes people can use whatever unbackdooree app they want then?
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I think we have had royalty and "democracy". I think you have been watching too many films. I don't think people act as a mob, overthrowing anyone. The governance structure doesn't really accept any real inputs from you and I. They are a bloodline. You get to vote in a 'representative democracy' where your vote every 5 years is aggregated with 100k+ of other to choose one of 2 candidates, who then purports to represe…
I get the sense that you just aren't familiar with any nations that actually have coups. Here, a list — it's very, very long, and most entries are from the last 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coups_and_coup_attempt...