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That attitude sounds like a myopic focus on the software at the expense of everything else.

Say that in the year 2160 you have perfect, unbreakable encryption on your pocket computer. How will you use it? With a touchscreen or keyboard, allowing microscopic cameras to see you input it or read the thermal signatures off your input device afterwards? With your face or voice that are continuously being recorded from hundreds if not thousands of angles? Plugging in the future equivalent of a yubikey that someone can just steal from you? You're lucky if fMRIs don't become good enough to just pluck the information out of your brain as you think it. Of course, the master key is most important but all of these concerns apply to the data being protected as well.

The real thing that can never be effectively enforced is privacy. People who need encryption can have access to it or not. It matters not one whit. Our duty (as people) is to push society in a direction where this change feels less catastrophic, not to fight a Caligulan war against the sea.

That's what happens when you are on someone else's web. So far, China is the only one deciding they are unhappy enough with the arrangement to build their own web, but the option exists for any country, or even non-geographically-bound organization if you are willing to tolerate shitty satellite connections.

So you simultaneously think the other side is so powerful that you cannot even compromise with them without being pushed back further, but they are also so weak that you believe you can achieve a total victory without conceding any points? How you you reconcile that? Or do you just resign yourself to fighting for a purer goal since you know you will lose without achieving it regardless?

Anyone can find a quote that says anything.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." - George Orwell: 1984, 1949.

Welp, guess that's it for freedom. A person from the past wrote something. No more for us to do here.

It's a corollary of Clarke's law. When technology is described by someone too stupid to understand it (like nearly all journalists), the explanation makes it sound like magic, because that's how the writer sees it.

What do you expect the non-competes to accomplish, exactly? Thanks, California.

That's a pretty outrageous claim. Do you have any evidence this is possible?

Yep, just shoulder surf the passcode the user enters on the train, or read their fingerprints/retinal patterns off their body and print it out onto your key material.

Mass surveillance is not going to go away without huge cultural reform of the security services. They don't take concessions.

FakeComments was mostly talking about targeted surveillance, but I agree with him/her in spirit, since I believe that mass surveillance is not going to go away. Ever. So you can either yell futilely into the wind as it happens over your objections, up to, including, and perhaps going beyond a swarm of camera-bearing networked nanodrones coating the planet, or you can try to nudge it towards happening on slightly preferable terms.

And any business whose users are too stupid to be meaningfully informed. AKA just about everyone.

Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.

It's easy to make nice-sounding speeches when you're not accountable for delivering any results.

If only god had created runoff voting.

It's very difficult to keep your digital record clean your entire life. Anyone who manages it is either very able and motivated or Amish.

If everyone were working together, it wouldn't be stealing. I don't steal someone's software when I fork a project on github, and they don't steal mine when they accept my pull request.

That narrative is only applicable retrospectively. It doesn't say anything about the future. Whichever way the arc of the universe bends, we call justice.

As natural as it might be, it's wrong. If you are, for example, a US resident, the US government is in a great position to use any information they have about you. The Chinese government, not so much, especially if you have no desire or plans to travel to China.

Buying and installing your own permanent elevators is too difficult and expensive. Think of what happens in 25 years when they need to be replaced. You'd be a fool not to pay a monthly fee for elevators-as-a-service.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Canada doesn't have anything to do with this. Amir's account was closed because of his Iranian ties, not his Canadian ones.

What is so clearly wrong about trade sanctions between two countries? Do you think foreign trade is always a moral good?

Other way around. The EU is the one who bears the burden of forcing American companies like slack to comply with their laws. Though jumping straight to a shooting war feels like an overreaction. Maybe start with a fine and ban the company if they don't pay.

Not a great analogy since you normally can't shop at an American grocery store from Cuba, but you can use an American web site from there.

Others sufficiently cover the actual killing. I would only add that wasting peoples' time and/or money at scale is just as bad. Waste 30 seconds for each of 100 million people and that's an above average human lifetime.

BTW, how do you think anti-vaccination, healthy at any size, and minor attracted people ideas became popular? I specify those only because they are particularly heinous, but if you want official policy, just look at literally any election, though the 2016 US presidential election and the brexit referendum are the standouts in terms of memes.

I would hope for 100.

We deserve it. Though of course others deserve it more.

Execution. Facebook is big enough that it would serve as a useful warning.

Absolutely. Fine everyone into the ground. Doesn't look like there is any other way to make people take security seriously.

I'm not a fan of the overregulation of industries like aviation, but consumer software has gone too far in the other direction and is long overdue for an adjustment.

Even more good could be done if the money were spent well, but the fact that the tax must be paid at all serves as the incentive that pushes behavior in a more environmentally friendly direction.

Not agreeing isn't the same as not understanding.

If I legitimately didn't understand it, it would be right to teach me. That's why we have mandatory schools for children.

Yes. Obviously you'd narrow things down and compare like to like. Anti-vaxers being the hot example of the day. Sometimes it's so obvious that we act on it, like with secondhand smoking, but I bet there's a lot more to dig into.