791–799 of 799 posts
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Frame it as "the government will decide what you can do with your phone" and people in America will listen.
Frame it as "won't somebody think of the children" and everyone will listen.
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For people who are just technology consumers they don’t see what could be offered, only what is. This is so frustrating when one understands how railroaded everyone is into maximizing platform ad revenue while holding the reasons people go on the platforms out as a carrot on a stick that gets further and further away. It’s 300 PHD psychologists vs someone just trying to keep up with their family.
It's really kind of gross. Psychologists should know best about what kind of damage the social media shit does.
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If proof of work is the "payment" to prove that you're human, many AI startups will outbid poor people living third world countries. They will even outbid some Americans. Yes, those AI startups can also buy cheap Android phones at scale, but it's a bit harder because they'll pay for stuff that their bots have no use for (a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software, branding, distribution, customer support etc).
As I see it, living requires money. If we have people on this planet that are too poor to digitally prove that they're alive, then we need to figure out a way to distribute the Earth's wealth more equally in general, rather than to require hardware attestation, which seems to be worse on essentially every metric, including inequality.
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My banking app already trusts Face ID right now!
And how is that necessary? It's a convenience feature, nothing more. You might as well trust your bank with your biometric data directly, and leave me and others out of it either way. Even IF there was a real need for a mobile device with which general computing is not possible, that would not justify killing it everywhere just so people who do need it can "just use their phone". That the laziest of us don't mind and…
We can have a discussion about FaceID specifically, but “convenience” is not considered trivial within the security sphere.
Second, I work for a (very large) bank, and you actually do not want to trust them with your biometric data directly. You can be absolutely assured of the privacy of your biometric data with the bank, better than with a Silicon Valley tech company. But I would not trust the bank’s data scientists to come up with a model that will not have an extremely high rate of false positives and negatives.
The reality is, if such an initiative was started at a bank, it would be shuttered after years of delays.
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> they have a choice: stricter annoying rules with fewer victims, or looser rules with more victims? Yep, there's a reason freedom vs safety (or libertarianism vs authoritarianism) is an axis on many political spectrum charts. This is a very common source of tension in politics. As you can probably guess, I usually find myself on the libertarian side of such debates. Freedom is worth the price. > Give them freedom to…
> Freedom is worth the price. I generally lean towards that too, including for this issue. But we do need to own up to it. Explicitly ask ourselves, what kind of bad consequences, and how much of them, are we willing to put up with in the name of freedom? Also, some framings make it difficult: the second someone speaks of protecting the children, all of a sudden freedom becomes secondary. Which leaves two counters, w…
The way I look it is that when someone uses their freedom for evil, the consequences of that are that person's fault, not the fault of freedom itself. Responding to evil done by one group of people by curtailing the freedoms of everyone, including innocents who have done nothing wrong, is fundamentally unjust. Perhaps in some extreme cases it could be justified, but I'd use a standard similar to how the US supreme court defines "strict scrutiny" when evaluating such measures.
Patrick Henry once said "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Unfortunately yes, for some this is a hard sell. I'm not sure how to convince others of the importance of freedom if they don't already consider it to be important, to me it's an almost fundamental belief that I hold.
>> […] which I don't think is an acceptable thing to do to mentally sound adults.
> I haven’t thought of the psychological damage over-protectiveness may cause
My point was more that taking away a person's freedom for their own protection is the kind of thing you do when they're either children or mentally unsound. Outside of those cases I don't think it's acceptable.
> it’s difficult to find a bank that doesn’t require a locked down phone for online payments
Some of this may be due to regulations making banks partially responsible for things they shouldn't be responsible for (like the customer's phone getting hacked). Responsibility and control go hand in hand. But mostly I think it's just due to lack of demand, which would be solved if running modded OSs were more common.
> Do understand though that such a law comes very close to mandating Free Software everywhere
Yes, exactly. I guess I've been radicalized by Stallman. ;) Though to be fair I do partially disagree with his definition of free software, in that I don't think software needs to be freely redistributable without payment (freedom 2) in order to be libre free.
I understand this a pretty radical proposal, and completely politically non-viable for the foreseeable future. It might even be a bad idea to do all at one even if that were possible. But I think probably there are some smaller steps that could be taken in that direction which would be beneficial even if I'm not entirely sure what those are yet.
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Nefariously how?
Remote attestation also uses asymmetric cryptography. (Device-bound private key that can sign attestation challenges, a known public key that can verify that challenge was signed with the device-bound private key.)
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....and this is only Google phones solely because NONE of the alternatives meet the team's stringent security requirements.
The graphene project seems to choose security over freedom in a few cases. They also recommend using the Google Play store over F-droid IIRC. Not my preference, but they seem so far ahead of other ROMs right now that I use it still. I do believe people have built and installed it on other devices without too much trouble, but I don't think that'll ever be supported.
They recommend Google play over fdroid due to some security concerns, not because they like the service. The reasoning is available on their discussion forum.
And yeah, it won't officially be supported on other devices than the upcoming Motorola and perhaps the next pixel. Too bad.
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This is useless. They want to be able to permanently ban an account that misbehaves - not limit it to misbehaving 16 times a day.
I have sympathy for the desire but that isn't something you actually get through google's surveillance-ware. You can change the information you put into the hash in my example to get them one go per site per day or one per year or even one per site ever. But without giving cross site linkablity that does you no good or giving google visibility into everyone all the time. But that still doesn't get you to your desired…