301–310 of 409 posts
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Your insinuation that the UK will implement a Ukraine war draft in order to advance a totalitarian agenda is weird, unnecessarily conspiratorial, and dilutes your point. I encourage you to make one point and to make it well.
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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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Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get money by making other people who work give you theirs (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?
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?
What does exit the UK market mean here though? Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play? Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right? I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states? Doesn't th…
It's more symbolic than anything else. The Signal folks don't really care how effective this action would be. Sure, they can pull the app from the app stores for the UK region, disable any accounts registered with a UK phone number and/or block connection attempts from UK IP addresses. Some people will work around it, but many won't have the technical know-how to do so. The end result that's important, though, is tha…
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> Goodness, I hate to be this guy, but do these petitions ever actually help? No. Honestly, online petitions aren't worth the paper they're written on.
In the Netherlands, a petition was required to force a national referendum. Online or offline doesn't matter. You needed to reach some percentage of the Dutch population in signatures, I'm not sure about the exact number, but they did and we had a referendum on mass surveillance and people voted against. That's when the government decided these things are kind of a nuisance and abolished the whole concept of referend…
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Where does most of your income come from?
From work, but I hope at some point it switches around. So I'll be a good person until then, and after that I'll become a bad person it sounds like
I think squatting land to make people rent from you to be able to live is already pretty bad, so you could easily already be a bad person, but the concepts of individual ownership over public goods is the really problem,
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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.
> Switzerland is impossibly expensive, and immensely bureaucratic. 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 l…
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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…
> So, technical people are supposed to "just follow orders"? 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…
Why? The other side isn't playing fair by any metric.
> What kind of law do you get to follow, only when you agree with it?
I don't particularly care about "dura lex sed lex", so - all of them. Of course, if you get caught, that's unfortunate - but ethics and law are two different things, and in my book the former always wins when they are in conflict. I believe that it's always moral to break unjust laws, and it's always moral to help other people to do so.
> But if the people trust the government and think preventing CSAM is more important then it is their right to self-determine
"The people" are not a singular entity with rights. Even if there's a majority that wants this, it's not "their right" morally - not when it imposes surveillance on the rest of us. They will do it anyway, of course, because the most fundamental principle of any government is that might makes right. But I don't intend to make it any easier for them, majority or not. Let them work hard for every such law they pass, and then work even harder trying to deal with all the tech that makes those laws so difficult to enforce.
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This is why the Federalist Papers are some of the most important documents when understanding the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights – and simultaneously the least read! I'm not saying that case law isn't also an important aspect of the 'law' and that the constitution shouldn't be amended – I'm not really a hardcore 'originalist' – I just mean that any time a SCOTUS ruling comes out, it's clear that in the…
The Federalist papers are one half of the story. It takes two sides to have an agreement, and it's a mentally convenient and lazy task to decide that because the sides came to an agreement that favored one of them, that the other is completely irrelevant to the discussion, ESPECIALLY when the nebulous task of trying to divine intent is concerned.