dmantis

Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.

Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.

Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.

Such a convenient time frame with all think-of-the-children bs wave to point fingers at the one of the best VPN services our there with spotless reputation and raise a hysteria with duplicated stream of posts, isn't it?

Surely just a coincidence.

Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?

How? There are no forms on the website.

Wouldn't it actually be logical for a person advocating for privacy not disclosing his identity?

World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.

That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.

The first law about building technical and legal infrastructure to enable website blocking in Russia in 2012 was passed under the name of children protection. Everything else is an addition.

People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.

signed/sealed OS image

This way we will just have unremovable age verification, spyware, online accounts to use the os, name another bs from other vendors. What's the point of Linux then? The moment big corps and the state can seal spyware into your computer, they'll happily do it.

I'd rather have a separate burn device with whatever os for state services which lives in a faraday cage most of the time and have a proper OS I control on the main device than give somebody control over it.

That only works for the infrastructure of one entity. It doesn't establish direct connection to my friend's device by a key pair if he is outside of the particular organisation tailscale VPN.

p2p apps need direct connections.

Isn't that a good thing in a way? If everyone has the weapon and defense at the same time, we will fix security holes and live safer lifes instead of having some three letter agencies and military backdoors in everything.

Pandora box is open anyway. It's better now for everyone to have the same power rather than a few national states.

That's called NSA.

Studies say otherwise: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40654-6_...

Cash is actually faster in many cases, the 'slowness' is the matter of perception and the need to make a cognitive operation of 1st grader counting, which is apparently a daunting prospect for many people.

And even if it were slower by 20-30 secs, the advantage it gives in control and privacy is such enormous that I don't understand people who use banks at all.

The last thing other people should know is how, where, and when a person spends their money. And due to the AML surveillance from the discussed article the banking privacy is practically dead.

I don't feel that LLMs are replacing books for professionals.

The problem with LLM learning is not that they can't explain a concept, but you have to know what to ask in the first place. To get a deep proper answer from LLMs you need a deep precise prompt. When you learn the new topic, you don't know about the topic itself, so you need a properly structured interleaved material to grasp new concepts.

After you get the concepts from books, you can prompt the LLM for particular non-covered subjects you are interested in.

So even these days when I'm interested in some topic, I sometimes even ask the very same LLM to provide me top-10,top-20 books for the topic, with short overview for which type and level of readers and style they are, pick a few and read them.

LLM is a replacement for docs and simple questions on StackOverflow, not for the real organized knowledge that requires a few hours session of concentration to understand.

There will be businesses no human can comprehend or manage.

If nobody neither fully created nor manages the business, then we probably shouldn't assume any property rights on it by anyone, therefore all the profits must go to the public.

Law enforcement of another jurisdiction won't, but can try to snoop into the data.

Why would it?

It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it.

Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.

I hope regular people will stop using "national security" and "national interests" as euphemisms and framing, and will call these things a psychopathic fight for power.

Assuming that some humans are worse than others because of their flag picture and that they deserve less access to resources is barbarism. There is no security in limiting access to NSA-style entities; it's an absolute insecurity for everyone but them throughout the whole world. How is that in anyone's "interests"?

We see every day now how suspicious bugs that look exactly like backdoors (i.e., Microsoft BitLocker) get exposed. That's in humanity's interests (and those of particular nations as a subset) — not being subjugated by small rings of professional outlaws. We need these instruments to defend people, everywhere. We don't need to give a leverage to any state psycho. Let's make everyone of them weaker.

Some anon hero cleans up backdoored garbage.

This year looks very refreshing for software. My guess is because of the AI-assitance in grinding an unlimited amount of code. While I feel sorry for maintainers and developers who have a new CVE everyday, society seems to be sweeping away 20 years of backdoor development by shady companies and spies, making computing actually safe and trusted for the first time in our lifetime.

AGPLv3 does.

don't really care about open source.

Exactly. You can sell the products of your work all the way you want.

But pretending to share with the world and then push back when the world actually use it under these same open terms is a hypocrisy.

Amazon doesn’t contribute changes upstream

Are you sure that's the case with AGPL? Cause they can sue them and enforce the contribution. I doubt that's the case. And those who went with MIT/BSD openly allow distribution without contribution.

You just have to use a secure device.

No, you have to use government backdoored device. I.e. the most secure android rom (at least the only rom we know is not penetrable by state-sponsored celebrite based malware) is not covered by google's play protect, while bunch of outdated CVEd phones are.

Same will go with many hardened Linux machines, QubesOS, Whonix stations, you name it. I'd argue they are far more secure than any average windows/macos installation.

Hardware attestation has nothing to do with security, it's censorship.

People who are actually interesting, are often aware of that fact and avoid surveillance at the moment. You can use tor/i2p, proper VPN setups, VMs, alternative mobile ROMs and other tech and cut most of the fingerprints, trackers and identification. Pretty sure the trash from state agencies doesn't like that.

But the current push from all sides to provide id for everything and remote attestation through Google and apple will make the alternatives very hard to use as it basically cuts such people from the economy altogether.

Just curious, out of your class theory, do we need to have worker solidarity with low-level street drug dealers?

Or the worker must have an official contract?

I don't see how their measures will help. It might have helped a few years ago, but one can literally ask to recreate the full book contents 1-to-1 with any local uncensored LLM just from a video of changing pages. You don't even need to break a DRM in a classical way.

If I were them, I would rather respect my users than fight with windmills.

I hope AA will make an onion version in addition to the unstable domain switching.

I've been running RPI-based torrent client 24/7 in several countries and never experienced that. Eats a few TBs per month, not the full line, but pretty decent amount. I guess it really depends on the country.

There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is.

As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.

True, but there is yet a one major OS that allows you to run whatever you see fit on your computer.

If you are really disgusted by those moves, you have a time to switch. If enough people switch, then we can just forget about that garbage.

1. web is too slow compared to any decent desktop client. thunderbird navigation/deletion/message opening is basically instant from human perception, web version operations are visible to human eye.

2. doesn't cut trackers

Well, it's all relative and depends on perception.

I tried to briefly explain a typical i-own-my-computer mindset regarding the linux monetization question from the parent comment.

I can pay for cool stuff I can trust, but the "I can trust" part is very tricky.

Many from linux crowd are slightly paranoid and ideological.

I'm as a linux user very reluctant to install anything proprietary that has such sensitive info as my network traffic and would rather use opensnitch or any other foss fork.

The same time I don't mind to pay for open-source, I donate several thousands USD per year to FOSS projects. But I guess I'm in a minority here and if you make the whole stack open-source you're not going to make many sells really.