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EFF is leaving X

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Re: EFF is leaving X

#591

Post by schoen »

baggachipz wrote: post #415
schoen wrote: post #340

I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019. When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-w…

> the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects. Is this due to them literally changing their mission and tack, or is this a shifting…

I'd say both of those.

There is a conscious effort to focus more directly and consistently on helping groups that are seen as oppressed.

There was an associated mission statement change sometime around 2015

> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world.

(The "for all the people of the world" part is doing a lot of work there.)

Re: EFF is leaving X

#592

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

LastTrain wrote: post #456
davidw wrote: post #118

My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology. They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white h…

I live in Idaho I know loads of people and family who I would have bet would reject what is happening in today’s Republican Party but man was I wrong. With very few exceptions they gobble it up.

[flagged]

Re: EFF is leaving X

#593

Post by yongjik »

bluebarbet wrote: post #257
davidw wrote: post #118

My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology. They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white h…

But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner? Seems to me that this is what has changed. PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.

I keep saying this, but do you remember a single political remark made by owners of Toyota or BMW? Do you even know who owns these companies without looking it up?

People aren't raking through Musk's obscure remarks to find something objectionable. Musk has been force-spraying his political opinions onto everyone for quite a while, and people have gotten tired of it.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#594

Post by sixothree »

650REDHAIR wrote: post #227
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #135

Astounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.

He banned me after I replied to his tweet with my display name set as "Elon's Musk". I think I lasted <1 week after this takeover.

Almost as bad as saying vaccines are safe and effective.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#595

Post by commandlinefan »

madeofpalk wrote: post #23
mellosouls wrote: post #19

If they justify it in terms of reach and impressions then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological. Which is fine but just be honest about it.

They're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point of their existence. Anyway, > Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries…

> Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point

Yes, but their ideology _was_ free-speech absolutism. This move, and this statement, suggests that they're moving away from that ideology to one of selectively free speech.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#596

Post by aaron695 »

davidw wrote: post #118

My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology. They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white h…

[dead]

Re: EFF is leaving X

#598

Post by txrx0000 »

lynndotpy wrote: post #485
txrx0000 wrote: post #31

[flagged]

You absolutely need to pop the bubble you're in, because what you believe is the opposite of reality. There's a reason cryptographers laud Signal (the protocol) over MTProto (Telegram's protocol), and Signal (the app) over Telegram (the app). Telegram is not E2EE by default, does not have E2EE for group chats, and does not have a good crpytographic protocol, and Musk has long been rallying against Signal. Under Elon…

Which part of what I said is the opposite of reality?

I'm aware that Telegram is not E2EE by default, and you have to turn it on manually. But it's not true that Elon has long been rallying against Signal. In fact, he endorsed Signal a while back along with Edward Snowden. He also later criticized Signal, as well as other encrypted messaging apps. I remember seeing a podcast clip of him saying something along the lines of "none of them can really protect against the government spying on him", which is true. If you're a high profile individual like Musk, nation states will expend lots of resources to spy on you, and no messaging app will protect you from that. The point of encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram is to raise the per capita cost of doing surveillance so that surveiling the entire population becomes prohibitively expensive, but it doesn't prevent targeted operations on an individual by determined state actors. Having multiple options for those apps is a good thing, even if the apps are individually imperfect, because the government will have to deal with multiple apps instead of one, and that takes more resources.

As for the rest of your comment, those claims aren't true, at least not in the way you stated. DOGE has been accused of mishandling sensitive records, and that part might be true, but I've not seen any evidence pointing towards the mishandling being a part of a evil plot to strengthen the surveillance state and promote fascism. Mass surveillance was already a problem back in 2013 when Snowden leaked it. In fact, it was already a problem before Obama's first term, and Snowden held off on leaking it because he thought Obama would introduce reforms, which didn't happen. The surveillance state is not a recent fascist movement spearheaded by Musk or DOGE. And I think a lot of the vitriol towards Musk is manufactured. He occasionally lies and is prone to manipulation like everyone else, but he's not the supervillain you think he is.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#599

Post by Arathorn »

lucb1e wrote: post #590
txrx0000 wrote: post #31

[flagged]

> He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago. Wouldn't that only strengthen one's resolve to not get invested in anything Elon controls? Telegram started out as being the privacy option, not owned by Facebook, encrypted chats were possible long before WhatsApp did that (not sure if whatsapp still sent messages in plain text on TCP/443 when telegram launched with TLS). It was a thing, and I believed it, and t…

On the Matrix side, "unexpected" decryption errors got fixed in ~Sept 2024.

(There are still a few scenarios where e.g. if you delete your identity keys by logging out of all your clients, you may get "expected" decryption errors. We're still working on those.)

Re: EFF is leaving X

#600

Post by reppap »

deadeye wrote: post #589
davidw wrote: post #118

My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology. They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white h…

[flagged]

I'd rather turn into reddit than turn into a nazi.
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