251–260 of 357 posts
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But they're right. The next guy will do it if you don't. And you'll be fired meaning you won't have any power any more, and the person who thinks DRM is good will be hired and become powerful in your stead. How does that help?
> You are the next guy If you don't understand this, then you just don't understand.
Yes, but this is preaching to the choir. The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your…
Don't forget all the pedos working for government to watch all the reported images.
I 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…
Politicians always had that power, because it was always technically possible. To think we could have done anything to stop it once there was a will to do it is naive. If you doubt it, just look at Palantir. People like us built that - Thiel and his minions only paid their salaries.
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Christian fascism exists. In the US it's how fascism came to the country. Christofascism doesn't seem to have any problem with the absence of atheism.
that's not Christian though (in the sense that their beliefs are not scriptural and not subjected to scriptural review)... it's something else, and it's really ugly.
I 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…
They (developers) did what they did for money. Just like everyone else. And they would do it all again. At a corporate level, no one cares about lots of freedoms, except if it is a selling point. If 'keeping freedoms' is a selling point then the ideal position is to gain the kudos of appearing to support this whilst also getting the benefits of the loss of freedoms. Why not get both?
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Why do people vote for large, strong governments that are able to take the power you suggest Tech is enabling them to take?
It's starting to feel like ethno-nationalism is the answer. See: the PRC. Support for surveillance is allegedly high. Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and practice my mandarin), they generally like it. Makes them feel safe. The CPC has sold them on a vision of them as membe…
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We all also know they know they will be absolutely ravaged in the next GE, at the scale of the Tories. The question - why hand that to Farage and his far right? Is Keir Starmer a far right operative in Labour? His track revord would suggest so, but do we have any receipts?
Incompetence. I don’t remember when there was last a competent PM or government - not in my lifetime, certainly, and I am no spring chicken.
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It's an opt-in feature. https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/signal-introduces-free-and... A service that advertises itself as privacy focused refusing to update their privacy policy while adding features like this seems like a pretty big dead canary.
Did we read the same article? You're complaining about an optional back-up service . No data is being "collected," you're giving it to them (in an encrypted form) to store on your behalf. How else would a backup service work? If you don't want to use the cloud version, there's a feature to store backups locally on-device. Signal blog: https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/ HN: https://news.ycombinator.co…
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Signal did such things always. They delayed years to clarify licensing to allow iOS forks. And hid server source code for a year to hide MobileCoin integration.
Is Signal compromised?
Is it possible the child nudity detection could be done on-device, fully private? This wouldn't amount to surveillance. The statistics on global child porngraphy rings are quite shocking. The UK is a big market consumer for these images/streams.