mrexcess

6 ms·

1.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
There are a number of technological / legal hybrid policies developing that come at the very jugular vein of computing freedom - the notion of a “general purpose” computer itself. OS level identity / age verification, hardware att
2.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
I definitely buy into the “monoculture” argument a bit. When hundreds of millions of people are all voraciously consuming the same very limited cultural messaging - three TV stations, a handful of movie studios, a handful of major book publ
3.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarms, etc if we looked hard enough. Not to sound an overly consp
4.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
lol honestly, I think a little on the contrary. If we can make a thing impossible technically, the law defers to that. One thing the government really can’t do easily in Western countries is forcing a company to add features or change core
5.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Legal solutions to technical problems are always dubious, especially when privacy against government surveillance is the problem.
6.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Web of trust or centralized trust are the main answers here. Compromise of the secret key is a whole other issue - revocation. MITM of a key can be solved pretty well via web of trust techniques. Apologies if the dialog is frustrating to re
7.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
True but the out of band secure channel could just be something like DNS, automated and constantly subject to distributed monitoring for deltas.
8.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Webs of trust based on OOB key verification and signing, or centralized trust authorities are the two primary models I’m aware of. I’ve always been enamored of the idea of DNS as a back end protocol to enable the former largely decentralize
9.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
I would agree that it’s silly. So did former President Obama when he mocked the notion recently. While motivating intent is always opaque to some extent, this would appear to be another form of a “flood the zone” approach, in my estimation.
10.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
You’re not sure what key fingerprints are? Bob and Alice are setting up their e2e channel, and because they have some extra level of concern about snooping, they telephone each other and read off some form of hash of the public key to each
11.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
I’m not sure why you think so? If the service provider claims E2E but intentionally provides a defective version of this, it’s a pretty clear cut violation of the federal statute, which afaik based on the statute’s language contains no exce
12.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
> Public pressure works to a certain degree. Do you think a product manager at Meta would want to be labeled as "protecting pedos"? I think that Meta can afford as much PR as they would need to out-message this sort of BS, agai
13.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
That would seem to constitute Honest Services Fraud under federal law, if they promised E2E then sabotaged it intentionally…
14.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
> And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm? Fingerprints. Again, this is like Crypto 101. Not saying that as a personal attack of any kind, I just remain incredulous that what
15.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
> The authority holds Meta responsible anyway What form of accountability are you suggesting is even being leveraged, here? No law could force Meta to backdoor its encryption, afaik. Public pressure would be unlikely to work. Is Meta afr
16.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
The answer to most everyone question you’re asking is just, “public key cryptography”. It’s kind of disheartening to me that such basic 1990s tech as implemented by Phil Zimmerman is now obscure enough to merit questions like this. Both par
17.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
“Operation Infektion” attempted to blame the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 80s to biological weapon attacks by the US. There has been some coverage of the explosion in occult and ufo stories from TASS etc, such as “The New Age of Russia
18.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Shades of late Soviet distractioneering, of the sort one would see in Pravda back in the day. Really disconcerting tbqh.
19.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Or, worryingly, unsolicited brainwashing, no?
20.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
China does not have “shareholders”, though. There are incredibly substantive differences between the accountability structures and expectations of shareholders, and those that govern broad based and diverse national geopolitical interests i
21.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Comparisons between CCP and private industry in the West seems misaligned in several respects. CCP does not have fiduciary duty to shareholders, instead, it has accountability to national political goals as well as broad based economic outc
22.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
So you prefer to avoid the competition entirely because you expect to lose? Not very confident in American industrial competitiveness, are we?
23.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
> You have a near-permanent upper class that has no real political opposition that could impact their value creation ambitions. Sorry, what? China regularly prosecutes billionaires. Between 2003 and the mid 2010s it EXECUTED at least 15
24.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Given the Trump administration’s actions against private industry from TikTok, to Anthropic, to a hundred other examples from auto makers to air conditioning manufacturers, is it fair to deem it delusional to think he might possibly succeed
25.
by mrexcess 4mo ago
Hasn’t the US been equally so, including the auto company bailouts, government fleet purchases restricted to US-made vehicles, US national moves to secure supply chain inputs for the auto makers, etc.? The main difference that I see isn’t p
26.
by mrexcess 5mo ago
We can all agree that working for the Nazi government’s military would be morally compromising, right? You propose that other governments militaries would not be so compromising. Seems reasonable. But the question then becomes, what is the
27.
by mrexcess 5mo ago
Wouldn’t Ternus have had a hand in the Apple Silicon backdoor? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230
28.
by mrexcess 5mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230
29.
by mrexcess 5mo ago
Here’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beg
30.
by mrexcess 5mo ago
I don’t think, “too much equality” was one of the themes. Rather, it was about too much centralized power over the individual. And yes I do think that’s somewhat relevant to understanding issues of today, including mass surveillance the cen

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