"VPNs are mostly outlawed worldwide." Lol yeah. Good luck with that.
The boiling frog of digital freedom
401–410 of 467 posts
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.
No. Just No. Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach. 20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the…
Those of us who voted for Brexit think it beneficial, not "self harm". I agrred with your view of the consequnces I would have voted remain.
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#403It's an urban myth that the frog will stay in the water to be boiled, it actually jumps out. Unless of course there's a lid on the pot. Humans have a lot to learn from the frog. And it's not about putting lids on pots.
The "boiling pot" is rubbish as a literal claim but quite apt as a metaphorical one: the Overton Window moves over time, particularly as people misremember history ("rose colored glasses") and as folks are born or grow up after major shifts.
There are folks on HN today who weren't alive on Sept 11th, or were in the US but were too young to remember it -- their idea of "normal" is very different from folks who were 20 or 40 or 60 years old on the day of the attacks. That's an example of the "boiling pot".
I remember talking with a college student in the mid 2000s about music and he was excited that he didn't own physical media, and instead had DRM copies and subscriber access to more. He was a "tech savvy" exception then, but the window has shifted and college students don't buy physical copies of music. In another decade, I doubt they'll buy physical copies of movies.
Not all changes are good.
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah. I want to rule the world of course. But I would far rather setup a system of democracy to rule the world with everyone else than let some other bugger be king instead of me. And I believe in actual government - government that builds roads to deliver food on, government that agrees ways to make researchers to discover medicines and hospitals and nurses to inject them, and governments that force companies to labe…
> And I believe in actual government No, you believe in _utopian_ government, which is not actual government. Actual government is what we have right now, in reality. > I call this real government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman
Oh for heavens sake. There are 192 different governments (at least) on this globe and they lie along a spectrum. what we have now (I kinda assume USA) is up and to the right on this spectrum (ie some definition of good, free, whatever is up and right). my utopian government is further up and right but anyone living in any of those 192 places will benefit from their government going more up and right, freer, better, more open whatever.
So yeah i think there are things a real government does and does not do. That is not utopian, it's not naive. it's here and now and rooted in practical real world examples.
Whatever you or I dislike about the governments we live under, we are incredibly fortunate to live in democracies- where we can force the buggers up and to the right. Make them more utopian more free more open.
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#405The more tightly the control freaks seek to grip public communication, the more likely a rebirth of hard-copy pamphleteering, codes, and physical post amongst those not interested in living in "1984". Mankind is not meant for some ersatz technocratic utopia.
The UK is putting bar codes on stamps, which will make physical post a lot more yraceable.
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but at the same time, if your grandma's identity was stolen you'd be more likely to be willing to discard some freedom for the sake of security. There's a general willingness to trade incremental freedom for security in many arenas but ascending that gradient is a hard sell
False dichotomy. Security does not have to come at the price of freedom.
What security can be obtained without sacrificing _any_ freedom?
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#407There is hope: - 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers: System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few. - It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other options. For office suites we h…
just like living the hermit life, leaving all of these services behind is surprisingly alienating. I say this as somebody who has done several of these and is trying to continue to expand. but damn, the is a lot of stuff that you miss out on and I'm starting to be squeezed by the losses to move back. I guess I'm saying, even though I feel driven by a massive moral imperative to engage with technology in that fashion,…
I predict you will never feel like you "win" .. Instead, find what else exists and use that ALSO not instead of.. paper exchange has some positive sides to it, expect much less volume and currency of course.. radio is not dead, etc
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#408> Youtube, Gmail, Spotify, banks and a few other major websites start using Google's WEI API for internal user reputation scoring, forcing non-compliant browsers through more captchas. You forgot the biggest threat: CloudFlare
It's ironic: four years ago, everyone was cheering and wooing for CloudFlare. And now four years later we have rebuttal.
Strange that. Well, not really. But still. I dislike being the "told you so" guy.
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah. I want to rule the world of course. But I would far rather setup a system of democracy to rule the world with everyone else than let some other bugger be king instead of me. And I believe in actual government - government that builds roads to deliver food on, government that agrees ways to make researchers to discover medicines and hospitals and nurses to inject them, and governments that force companies to labe…
> I want government run on empirical data with justice and equality at its heart. You're asking for technocracy, and this is what is lined up already - you might wonder whether you are being engineered. All those cameras, smart phones, smart meters, legislation, facial recognition, etc - this is to allow micro-management at the most granular level. It's all quite far from freedom indeed, which is where this conversat…
I am asking for science. That before we decide if we want to teach phonics at school we guinea pig a few thousand to see if it meets some p-value.
Is that technocracy? Maybe. Is it something easy to explain - yes. Is it something for some reason is not explained fully and at length? Yes oddly it's not.
Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom
#410The other day I read an HN comment that thought that when you buy consumer PC hardware, it comes with a ToS that limits your property rights as the owner. It's the kind of uncanny experience I run into more and more often lately: talking with people so immersed in our new normal of cyberpunk dystopia, they seem not to remember how things were in the before-times. So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, w…
> In the before-times, [...] You used to get full schematics along with the electronics you bought. And by "get", I do NOT mean that you'd have to ask for them. They'd be shipped WITH the products, on paper. It was a normal part of your purchase, just like the manual.
In Russia it was the case even in the 90s, but all locally produced consumer electronics in ex-USSR quickly got replaced by Japanese and Western devices.