chroem

Still, though, the weak link remains that everyone has to trust these officials will actually uphold the constitution. Unless we can develop something more binding than swearing on a Bible, we're going to keep coming back to this same problem.

That's not to say I don't like the idea of a constitutional court, though. I just think we need to also add some sort of protections against blatantly unconstitutional actions.

Well, it can be seen and it can be used, but just not by everyone yet.

I have no idea where I'll go to do a beta now.

While I think it should apply to non-US citizens, the fact that it technically doesn't is irrelevant as long as they're still willfully violating the rights of US citizens too.

>The job of three-letters agencies is to find out all various enemies of the state.

Within the confines of the law and US constitution.

If all you care about is rooting out enemies of the state, then you're left with organizations like the SS or Stasi.

I'm actually kind of bothered by this.

I was about to release signups for a private beta of my current project, but apparently that no longer fits the formal criteria of "Show HN."

Disappointing to say the least.

This isn't 2004. The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works". I have yet to see an installation with driver problems. Not to mention that the battery life on my ThinkPad easily compares with, if not exceeds, that of a Windows installation.

Why should this even matter in the first place?

How can we be a supposedly post-racial society and yet have this level of scrutiny on the racial makeup of a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race? I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but this isn't far off from having political overseers at production facilities in the former Soviet Union.

>As production techniques for hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines improve, cost of access has dropped significantly, leading to increased use of these substances in children. Technological progress is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it and accept the fact that children will be using hard drugs from now on.

Of course, that's an extreme example of the argument that has been used on HN a lot lately in favor of data collection, but it still gets the point across. Just because there's an industry push towards something doesn't mean that it's right.

Well, in terms of package and code validation, there are definitely strong arguments to be made for source-based distribution models and FOSS-backed fuzzing operations. Although freely available source isn't perfect for combating government intrusions, it still is the gold standard since it's impossible to implement fully-featured, unobfuscated backdoors. Despite the fact that things like heartbleed are damaging, keep in mind that they're only a bugs rather than deliberate backdoors.

The answer to imperfect software freedom isn't no software freedom.

Well, RMS exclusively uses a Lemote Yeelong that has been formally verified to not contain backdoors, and he runs purely free software on it. If that's not enough, he never connects it directly to the internet by having another computer wget certain websites on a regular basis and also download/ upload emails, which get transferred to the Lemote via physical media.

There may still be vulnerabilities, but he's a whole lot more secure than your average person.