Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago
That attitude sounds like a myopic focus on the software at the expense of everything else.

Say that in the year 2160 you have perfect, unbreakable encryption on your pocket computer. How will you use it? With a touchscreen or keyboard, allowing microscopic cameras to see you input it or read the thermal signatures off your input device afterwards? With your face or voice that are continuously being recorded from hundreds if not thousands of angles? Plugging in the future equivalent of a yubikey that someone can just steal from you? You're lucky if fMRIs don't become good enough to just pluck the information out of your brain as you think it. Of course, the master key is most important but all of these concerns apply to the data being protected as well.

The real thing that can never be effectively enforced is privacy. People who need encryption can have access to it or not. It matters not one whit. Our duty (as people) is to push society in a direction where this change feels less catastrophic, not to fight a Caligulan war against the sea.

Comment · 7 years ago
That's what happens when you are on someone else's web. So far, China is the only one deciding they are unhappy enough with the arrangement to build their own web, but the option exists for any country, or even non-geographically-bound organization if you are willing to tolerate shitty satellite connections.
Comment · 7 years ago
So you simultaneously think the other side is so powerful that you cannot even compromise with them without being pushed back further, but they are also so weak that you believe you can achieve a total victory without conceding any points? How you you reconcile that? Or do you just resign yourself to fighting for a purer goal since you know you will lose without achieving it regardless?
Comment · 7 years ago
Anyone can find a quote that says anything.

>"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." - George Orwell: 1984, 1949.

Welp, guess that's it for freedom. A person from the past wrote something. No more for us to do here.

Comment · 7 years ago
It's a corollary of Clarke's law. When technology is described by someone too stupid to understand it (like nearly all journalists), the explanation makes it sound like magic, because that's how the writer sees it.
Comment · 7 years ago
What do you expect the non-competes to accomplish, exactly? Thanks, California.
Comment · 7 years ago
That's a pretty outrageous claim. Do you have any evidence this is possible?
Comment · 7 years ago
Yep, just shoulder surf the passcode the user enters on the train, or read their fingerprints/retinal patterns off their body and print it out onto your key material.
Comment · 7 years ago
>Mass surveillance is not going to go away without huge cultural reform of the security services. They don't take concessions.

FakeComments was mostly talking about targeted surveillance, but I agree with him/her in spirit, since I believe that mass surveillance is not going to go away. Ever. So you can either yell futilely into the wind as it happens over your objections, up to, including, and perhaps going beyond a swarm of camera-bearing networked nanodrones coating the planet, or you can try to nudge it towards happening on slightly preferable terms.

Comment · 7 years ago
And any business whose users are too stupid to be meaningfully informed. AKA just about everyone.
Comment · 7 years ago
Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.
Comment · 7 years ago
It's easy to make nice-sounding speeches when you're not accountable for delivering any results.
Comment · 7 years ago
If only god had created runoff voting.
Comment · 7 years ago
It's very difficult to keep your digital record clean your entire life. Anyone who manages it is either very able and motivated or Amish.
Comment · 7 years ago
If everyone were working together, it wouldn't be stealing. I don't steal someone's software when I fork a project on github, and they don't steal mine when they accept my pull request.

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