tashian

Claude, please read this article for me and tell me what I should think about it.

The way I see it, as a new technology builds momentum it starts to accumulate power in many ways. Control of the narrative is just one piece of that.

I think of it as a long term negotiation with society about what we are all willing to sacrifice for the conveniences of a new technology.

I don't think that negotiation ever ends, either. It just evolves with the tech. Robert Moses exuberantly covered New York City with highways during the mid 20th century. Each new bridge and highway he built induced demand for more cars. So, every road was clogged as soon as it opened. And his answer was always to build more roads.

Moses built a base of power that depended in part on revenue from toll booths. But, some of his projects were disastrous for communities and should not have ever happened. Because of his fixation on cars, and because of how he was benefitting from cars, he was unable to recognize that a city's transportation infrastructure must be balanced between different modes.

Personal cars are almost the least ideal form of transportation for a dense city and for intercity traffic. But once the power around a single technology becomes locked in, it can freeze the negotiation around it and the power structures can safely ignore any further resistance.

In the 1920s, "jay" was a slur similar to "country bumpkin" — an unsophisticated person who didn't understand the city. As cars became more common, the term "jaywalker" emerged, and the auto industry's PR arm seized on it and eventually helped it codify into law. Before jaywalking was a thing, newspapers blamed drivers for accidents, assuming people had the right to walk anywhere (as they always had) and cars needed to yield. It didn't take long for the auto industry — makers of the hottest new technology in the world — to convince their friends in the media to flip the narrative and start shaming pedestrians for getting in the way of cars.

If Facebook is really a "utility" then it should not arbitrarily pull the plug on accounts with no recourse. Other utilities have due process for cutting off access: written notice with a clear reason, a chance to dispute, etc. That's because utilities are regulated.

What Facebook has is an opaque process run by AI with no way for most people to appeal.

The proof itself relies on asymmetric crypto, and that part is not tenuous (well, until Q Day, but that's a different story...).

But:

- You cannot prove that no one has ever been able to break a Secure Enclave or a YubiKey or another secure element. That's okay, these companies focus on making it so expensive that it's not worth doing.

- The analog "attack vector" is real, but that was always true with analog cameras as well. Anyone could have taken an analog picture of a screen, or even painted a hyper realistic image of something that never happened.

I think a realistic goal for provenance is to at least get to parity with analog cameras ("this is a picture directly from a sensor"), not to make the perfect system for proving that a photo is of a real world event.

I have a feeling Apple is going to knock it out of the park on this when they get around to it. They have a great foundation for doing image provenance well. The device attestation workflows are already there. And the same attacks that work against Android won't be as easy or effective because of Secure Enclave. Apple could run the whole signing process inside SEP.

And, Apple could choose to integrate a LiDAR depth map into the signed photo as a mitigation against the analog attacks (eg. pictures of screens).

The notion of "zero trust" shouldn't just mean corporations not having to inherently trust users and networks. It should also mean users not having to inherently trust corporations.

VPN providers all run the same two or three VPN protocols, all with similar security guarantees and privacy limitations.

I've been playing with MASQUE relays over the last year. Apple's iCloud Private Relay is a MASQUE relay (two, actually). MASQUE can offer genuine privacy improvements via traffic separation, preventing any single party from correlating the traffic source and destination.

Some of the privacy concerns of VPN users can be mitigated with better technology. And relays are built into Apple operating systems today. I'm surprised that they aren't very widely deployed yet.

or to hide the AI content areas

Just copy/paste from the chat window. I kept running into token limits. I came away from it wanting a much better workflow.

That's the next step for me in learning AI... playing with different integrated editor tools.

Good point.

Primarily, the YubiKey is there to lock away the private key while making it available to the running CA. Certificate signing happens inside the YubiKey, and the CA private key is not exportable.

This uses the YubiKey PIV application, not FIDO.

As an aside, step-ca supports several approaches for key protection, but the YubiKey is relatively inexpensive.

Another fun approach is to use systemd-creds to help encrypt the CA's private key password inside a TPM 2.0 module and tie it to PCR values, similar to what LUKS or BitLocker can do for auto disk unlocking based on system integrity. The Raspberry Pi doesn't have TPM 2.0 but there are HATs available.