HN user
Thank you for being one of the few commenters on this thread who point out the HBD streak on that thread. The insistence that that is not reactionary has been a strong undercurrent in that forum, and so when people from there talk about the weirdness of that thread, I hope more people notice that it's not about uh, weird music or humor. It's about an obsession with race and genes that easily goes into very dark territory.
That is a great summary, thank you.
I really, really wish I got a penny every time I get accused of wanting to censor conservatives simply because I criticized them.
Not sure if there's more mocking or calling out, HBD and otherwise. The forum's focus on HBD seems something worth critiquing extensively.
The thread wasn't banned off of reddit though, just his site and subreddit. So no such issues here.
Otherwise I agree with worrying about the big platforms, though for I dont think stormfront would be the case to be upset about. We need net neutrality, then user controlled social media based on open source and probably federated. At that point users can decide what to let onto their feed.
Signal did a version of that with the help of aclu.
It's not that the author didn't get to chat about people's lunch on Facebook every morning. It's that the author wasn't invited to things he should have been invited to because to many people, "I invited everyone from my FB list" sounds like they invited everyone they reasonably could. Which is not true. The author explicitly says that he is easy to find. And his school friends should take the extra several minutes to searchengine each person they didn't have on facebook if the event is relatively big and organized. It should be the default response. And the author is rightly frustrated that it isn't, because people are lazy and can unintentionally be careless.
That isn't comparable to not being invited to a spontaneous dinner in 2 hours at 9PM by someone clicking invite all of their contacts list tagged as classmates because you're living in the mountaints a one-hour flight and a two hour hike away without any communication tools around you and you don't even believe in flights.
I don't mean these examples to sound flippant, they're here because I'm trying to underline how there's reasonable compromises between convenience and being a good friend / event organizer, and not being on facebook doesn't make you hard to contact. It definitely didn't in the case of the author.
Considering they partnered with facebook, they don't quite see it that way, instead looking at it as a way to bring good e2e crypto to millions of people.
It's a tradeoff.
It is more that without centralized servers, if that's what you mean, you have a lot of ux disadvantages.
Cooking the books with libor? What does cooking the books mean?
Sure, in theory... In the end you either educate the users if you can, or try to make the big platforms more accepting of this, or both. There is no perfect solution. Being an "entertainment site" isn't a good excuse.
The idea of tech-socialism is so dumb here, you would think the ad would have an opposite effect...
Privacy really isn't transactional, it's a ecological issue. There's no way for you to make that decision without (as a group) impacting others. A choice to not use Google or Facebook can now be crippling for some people, and fairly bothersome for most.
Is this sarcastic?
Oh, I was thinking about this upon typing my message for the first time, but then forgot it upon retyping (my browser was being erratic). Thanks for the note.
At least parts of the server are open for a long time though[1], and they also recently exchanged some stuff into WebRTC. Could anybody clarify what part of it is still nonfree?
Exactly this - it exists. It's just overblown, as states have forever recognized that they can use fear for conformity and submission. But we should be careful to not say it's fabricated unless in specific cases where there is good evidence for it.
People don't just don't care that much.
Well, it's not easy to understand. At times they've cared enough to extract meaningful change, so we shouldn't assume that that will never happen again. If you ask them privacy questions phrased in the right ways (I mean for clarity, not trick questions), they will often be pro-privacy.
Also, as Schneier says, we're relatively new to the internet. Who says people won't come to understand it, and the privacy issues that come along with it, better? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XF2EL43S8E
It's not that they don't care, it's that they're conditioned to think it's too hopeless and complicated. The common people have the power, they only need to understand they do.
Well, there is evidence to the contrary, at least: the lack of success of the NSA mass spying programmes, with experts like Schneier repeatedly showing why such programmes cannot in the near future even be useful for their stated purpose (anti-terrorism), and officials from the government admitting that they didn't really get much out of it - just some taxi driver who could hardly be called a threat.
The evidence that such systems endanger safety, meanwhile, should be obvious to anyone who has read about how surveillance has been used, from totalitarian states to even liberal democracies (even in the somewhat recent US history), as well as knowledge of how quickly the latter could turn into the former.
To get that data, governments may need a bunch of things: the company being under their jurisdiction in some legally relevant sense, laws allowing for such requests (those may or may not be needed, sadly), the company keeping the data. If the company doesn't keep the data, they could try to compel it to or hack it, but those may be more difficult. So that's a lot of steps.
For this reason Signal is hardly comparable to Whatsapp and many other apps using the same protocol: the latter group openly logs metadata, the former says they almost don't, is open source, is more trustworthy due to the organizational structure. Finally, there's even some evidence ( https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand... ) that they don't.
I believe there are two critical components of that that aren't simply natural result of the democratic nature of the internet, nor are necessary.
First, WWW is relatively young, so people haven't learned how to use it well.
Second, large platforms have been created to shift the democratic nature of the internet - make pseudo-open spaces that are not truly open, like various social networks, and give the users content that is a) tailored to them, so leads to less openness, less improvement and more mindless consumption and b) does it in an obfuscated way, via closed algorithms that prioritize you staying on the website to improving your life.
Those might be somewhat naturally occurring, but the degree to which they occur doesn't have to stay the same.
I agree that Google is worse in most of the ways you noted. However, I would note that the choice of not using Facebook is a somewhat-arbitrary one, due to the incredibly strong network effect and the huge userbase.
Google is somewhat better in this regard - they're so huge because so many people use them, but in many cases you have options for not using Google, or most of their services. Or using them less intensively / intrusively than people tend to use Facebook.
Depends on the user, mostly. Both are quite detrimental to the liberty of users overall, I would say.
I concur. Parent's post was interesting, but if we narrow down to datamining and surveillance, it has gotten a whole lot worse to a degree that is beyond appreciable.
Do you need the results to be personified? I use DDG / startpage to avoid it.