Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

greenwald.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 696 posts

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#681

Post by mmooss »

3form wrote: post #610
mmooss wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an unusual claim: Freedom breeds innovation - people are not only free to think for themselves, to ignore the orthodoxy and established power, but they are raised and encouraged to do it and admired for it (to a degree). I think it's accurate to say that all the wealthiest (per capita) economies in history - i.e., the wealthiest economies over the last ten years - are in free societies.

Your last point might be true, but it doesn't necessarily imply causality of freedom -> wealth.

It's pretty strong evidence!

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#682

Post by foxyv »

gcanyon wrote: post #448
roywiggins wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain. And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.

If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake). And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.

It's a false dichotomy. There are 4 options:

1. Don't give up liberty, give up security.

2. Give up liberty, give up security.

3. Give up liberty, don't give up security.

4. Don't give up liberty, don't give up security.

Number 4 is completely possible. It's just that people in power don't like it because it means they have less power. They want to pretend that only options 1 and 3 are available and ignore that they are actually offering option 2.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#683

Post by gcanyon »

foxyv wrote: post #682
gcanyon wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake). And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.

It's a false dichotomy. There are 4 options: 1. Don't give up liberty, give up security. 2. Give up liberty, give up security. 3. Give up liberty, don't give up security. 4. Don't give up liberty, don't give up security. Number 4 is completely possible. It's just that people in power don't like it because it means they have less power. They want to pretend that only options 1 and 3 are available and ignore that they…

Your argument is with GP who proposed that the security might be false.

But I will say I don't think you should say "options," but rather "possibilities." "Options" implies that all four are actually available. I don't think you get to assume that 4 is possible without offering evidence.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#684

Post by gcanyon »

roywiggins wrote: post #481
gcanyon wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake). And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.

It's not that security is fake, it's that giving up liberty doesn't naturally produce more security, and pursuing greater liberty doesn't necessarily erode security either. It's not like pre-Revolutionary America was a notably secure place that inevitably see-sawed into a freer but insecure place afterwards.

As I said to the other respondent, I think it's important to justify the idea that both security and liberty can be achieved simultaneously.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#685

Post by wredcoll »

user3939382 wrote: post #665
wredcoll wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the "culturally russian civilians" that... were mostly part of the ukraine army or the russian sponsored rebellion. Boy. How awful. > I count a war as started when someone starts murdering people w the military So saddam hussein started the second iraq-america war? Don't answer that. Also tell me more about your evidence of united states soldiers landing in ukraine and killing/capturing the existing governmen…

tell me more about your evidence of united states soldiers landing in ukraine and killing/capturing the existing government to replace it We have the phone recordings of our government picking the new government BEFORE the coup. What part of that don’t you understand? So saddam hussein started the second iraq-america war? Don't answer that. Whatever your counterpoint is here it’s so weak I don’t even know what it is.…

> Using the military to kill civilians in Eastern Ukraine was definitely the start of the war, you can save the attempt at cleverness.

I mean, you just made this up out of whole cloth. It's fiction, no it's worse than that, it's a deliberate lie, a fraud, a sham. And not a particularly believeable one either.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#686

Post by mmooss »

dwoldrich wrote: post #587
mmooss wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination. Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd ge…

Get to work, ha. People are too fickle and their brains are too easily hacked with the latest craze to trust them to do the right thing, whatever that is in your opinion, especially en masse.

They've done it many, many times before; the evidence is everywhere. Why seek hopelessness; why advocate for it?

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#687

Post by dwoldrich »

mmooss wrote: post #686
dwoldrich wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get to work, ha. People are too fickle and their brains are too easily hacked with the latest craze to trust them to do the right thing, whatever that is in your opinion, especially en masse.

They've done it many, many times before; the evidence is everywhere. Why seek hopelessness; why advocate for it?

I just see right through each of these latest crazes. Power is everything, divide to conquer. I don't play along with the identity games that destroy people anymore.

Beyond that, there is no consensus on any of these gobbledygook movements - all these comments up and down these threads make the implicit assumption that we all agree.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#688

Post by eszed »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #670
eszed wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. Ranked choice is easy to explain to a naive voter: everyone understands how a preference order works, and the result is "the candidate more people like the most". Counting the votes is (a bit) complicated, but I think the (minority of) people who get excited by implementation details out-smart themselves, by worrying that most people won't understand the details. Of course most people won't underst…

massively false based on actual data. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/star-voting-is-simpler-than-...

That's fair. RCV does break down with a large number of candidates. Though doesn't star voting have some odd corner cases? Regardless, every alternative scheme I've seen seriously proposed would be a massive improvement over FPTP.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#689

Post by m348e912 »

drnick1 wrote: post #424
m348e912 wrote: post #72

I know Ring is getting a bad rap for enabling state level surveillance, but the Ring app offers an option to enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone. The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effo…

Who has the keys of the encryption algorithm?

For a Ring user, the keys are generated on your phone via the Ring app. So technically just the user/owner. However there is no certainty that Ring can't obtain access to the keys, just like crypto wallet maker Exodus could decide one day to retrieve private keys from their user's wallets with a software update.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#690

Post by dopidopHN2 »

OutOfHere wrote: post #426
dopidopHN2 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your perspective. I've been using tuta since a year now. Nothing to report

Tuta is pathetic because it asked for my real name, ID verification, and real phone number, altogether defeating the point of anonymity. When I refused to provide identification, it disabled and deleted the new registration. This makes it as bad as Discord. Perhaps you have a grandfathered account, but times have changed for the worse with Tuta alone.

Han. My only grippe was having to install a app. None of the rest.
Post reply on HN