Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
> We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption.

I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's something baked into the laws of math that says your society is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption, where the laws of math do say this is always possible).

It is absolutely within the realm of technological possibility to build a society with largely decentralized infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."

Comment · 5 years ago
Corporate sponsorship of open source is entirely dependent on top talent caring about open source and thus being more willing to tolerate working for EvilMegacorp if major pieces of the infrastructure they work on are open.

When top talent just accepts the big money contract regardless, corporations see little incentive to sponsor open source. Software development is the only industry that has large portions of infrastructure free and open for anyone to use, and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago.

It's up to us to carry that torch, or we will become like every other industry.

Comment · 5 years ago
Moderation is when pornography is banned from r/programming. Censorship is when pornography is banned from r/pornography.

Most pro-censorship voices motte-and-bailey the latter by conflating it with the former.

Comment · 5 years ago
Yeah I just tried downloading the latest version and it looks much better now. I remember I tried ~3 years ago or so and it was horribly inefficient, so I deleted it, then gave it another shot around a year ago and came to the same conclusion.

But yes, from running it ~10 minutes just now, it looks quite reasonable.

Comment · 5 years ago
Seconding this. Unless something's changed, my experience with the default Go daemon they provide was shock at how much resources it consumed in the background. It was something like 12% CPU usage while doing nothing at all for hours on end - I wasn't even accessing any ipfs content.
Comment · 5 years ago
Did you bother actually looking up the data? Because intentional homicide in the US is indeed more than 6x greater than it is in places like Austria and Switzerland.

There is no country in western Europe with anywhere near the violent crime rate as the US.

Comment · 5 years ago
Do you want the actual answer or are you trying to make a point with a rhetorical question you assume you know the answer to?
Comment · 5 years ago
> I mean Greenwald has also asserted that no Parler user was involved in the insurrection, which is a straight-up lie.

Actually, what is written is, and I quote, "a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler." But I'm sure that was an innocent mistake on your part, not a straight-up lie like you accuse Greenwald of.

Comment · 5 years ago
"Prison industrial complex" is verbal sleight of hand to blame a system rather than people, but in reality these market forces are merely the revealed preference of what people want. If people wanted these inmates free - and by wanted I mean wanted in the revealed preference sense, not the virtue signal on the internet sense - capitalism would have them free tomorrow.
Comment · 5 years ago
Industry has nothing to do with it. Every country has industry. The reason the US has so many in prison is because its people are the more hair-on-fire moralistic crusaders in the civilized world and they want people in prison.
Comment · 5 years ago
So maybe they just made the same mistake I did?
Comment · 5 years ago
The overwhelming majority don't have any epistemic basis for what they believe and are just saying what they think is socially-acceptable to say.
Comment · 5 years ago
If it was indeed a backdoor, sure, but that's a judgment call, not something anyone knows. As others have noted, e2e was a novelty at the time, not a norm, and the platform itself was extremely new (less than a year old), and their stated reason for this was to protect against weak client RNG, which in retrospect sounds like a weak reason, but looking back at the news of 2013, this was right around the time the Snowden leaks caused everyone to believe RDRAND could indeed be compromised, so "client having state-compromised RNG" was indeed something on everyone's mind.

Further, the fact that this was caught so quickly is in some sense a vindication of Telegram's model - even in its infancy when it had orders of magnitude fewer users, the fact that the client was open source allowed someone to quickly spot a vulnerability.

The verdict? IMO Telegram secret chats are probably secure (90% certain), but if I were plotting a murder or something, I wouldn't do it over a smartphone app anyway. There's just too many leaky, complex layers in the stack, some of which aren't even open, and quite dubiously so. If security is a life-or-death situation for you, you'd be a fool to use any smartphone app.

Comment · 5 years ago
Agree with this. Everyone who was never dependent on FAANG in the first place because of tinfoil Stallmanism is now sitting back roasting their marshmellows as the rest of society burns.

Either you control your device, or your device will be used to control you.

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