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I had written a toy social network a few years back the past which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted version of usenet.

This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the technology doesn't seem like the hard part-

I always understood that having an resilient network means people will use it to post some bad things, but I don't know if I really internalized the scope of that until later.

I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you're in the midst of people who feel like that describes them.

As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences for such networks - Idealists, and those who can't get away with stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other "good" people away from the service, amplifying the effect.

Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to hire a large team of default moderators, you'll never be able to keep up. The default experience for the average user will be terrible.

Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It's relatively easy to built the technological network, but managing the social network aspect is an unsolved problem.

This is wonderful.

Not sure if the submitter is the one who made this, but thank you for making it and/or submitting it.

These sort of code-as-art projects always make my day brighter :)

You're talking about people.

Regardless of if they are annoying you, you shouldn't try to treat this like a pest-control situation.

I urge you to re-think your position, with the understanding that they are real in the same way you are.

Its OSS. The language is good to know for anyone who might be interested in assisting.

That's an amusing example.

You are aware that Google scrapes almost every page on the internet, without having any agreement with most of them, right?

Yes, you can add noindex and robots.txt to tell them you'd like to opt-out, but:

a) That only works so well, and b) they're default is to use your page without your permission.

This was my favorite game of 2019, and if it had mandatory telemetry like that I would not have played it.

If it were opt-in, it could be used well however, similar to what the Telltale games had done.

65% of people made choice A. 35% of people made choice B.

They have a sort of proxy for that with Achievements however.

If he's using an up-to-date browser and a firewall it feels like the practical risk is relatively low.

What remote exploits are you concerned about in that scenario? Where it would affect 10.9, but not 10.16.

I'm not doubting they exist, but I'm really curious the threat scenario that would apply here, and how likely you think that might be.

A) We should stop putting devices that are in the home onto the internet.

If you want to have a security camera, keep it limited to the local network only.

B) People need to stop having a default assumption that these are secure. Mentally assume they are public by default, and don't put them in children's rooms for gods-sake!

It isn't trivial for most people to buy a 55" computer monitor.

What a silly attitude.

It is almost certainly /possible/, but most people in a position to do so haven't thought it was worth the amount of effort involved.

Discounting someone's complaint because "This isn't new" isn't helpful. It doesn't need to be new to be a problem - Writing an article about it to raise awareness is a good idea.

Calling this tinfoilism is also not constructive. The author points out that data is being shared, in ways that even people who try to be privacy conscious may not be aware of, or have good ways to stop.

It doesn't solve the immediate problem, but once enough people are using chips you could disable the ability to do old-style magstrip transactions (or at least flag them for manual review / extra scrutiny).