Uriel238 [all pronouns]

I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I’ll say this:

When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.

Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.

Yes! That was a vast improvement. It’s not the only way that Americans are felons if the state needs to decide they are, or if they need to add charges / sentencing considerations if the prosecutors really want to throw away the key, such as embarrassing VIPs or killing rich people.

Still, you don’t want the police looking at your entire internet history, even if you believe you have nothing to hide, they will find things that they find objectionable enough to justify treating you roughly.

All Americans who have ever used the internet have violations of the CFAA, since website TOS violations are legally as criminal as hacking NORAD (the CFAA was passed after Reagan saw wargames ) normally letting your twelve-year-old start a Facebook account gets you 25 years, if some prosecutor wanted to enforce it. And they think that’s ridiculous and don’t.

However, if that prosecutor wants to turn a five month sentence into a ten year sentence, then the suspect’s CFAA violation history might be useful after all.

And that is just one of the laws that overreaches and is easily broken and not usually enforced.

Suddenly you may have something to hide after all, say if they’re rounding up gay felons and any petty felony would make your gay ass qualify. (The German SD and US ICE both ignore violent felon requirements when they’re rounding up folk to be detained and deported)

Can Graphene add a feature to run in emulation mode to allow apps to believe it’s on an unrestricted OS?

Remember if US FBI (who is commonly anti-encryption) is suddenly afraid of Chinese state spies, Haxxorz in China and Trump sectarian vigilantes then maybe EU should be as well.

They may already have your data today but as soon as you can cut off pipelines that data starts getting stale.

With accounts that are less data-miney, you can replace all your account details (name, email addy, region, etc.) with gibberish and wait for it all to update, and then replace your password so not even you can get into it.

If it’s more data-miney and you are willing to put in a few months / years of maintenance, you can trickle in the gibberish and false data until it’s thoroughly poisoned.

The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

Kids figure out how to provide false positives in 3… 2… 1…

European aristocracy is scared of the working class. They will tremble…! < Bolshevik chorus swells >

I’m sorry. It came out years ago that Win 10 keylogged and told home all about it (justified as to improve our predictive typing software ) even though there were no promises in the ToS to limit its spyware use, I screamed about how the fucking sky is fucking falling, and now Windows 10 is in bunches of US businesses, and more than a few outside the US. It even says in the EULA MS will snitch on you to law enforcement about anything it feels like.

So yeah, all the people who have legitimate businesses that have real secrets (and break laws as a matter of course) have all wittingly chosen to give Microsoft all the biographical leverage MS needs to take over the world. (Some companies actually got their tech teams to defang the Win10 spyware. But more didn’t than did.)

Now I’m one of those 1960s hippies who screamed about the rising police state in the US to whom no one listened. Another Cassandra crying like a bainsidhe into the wind.

Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don’t yet fully know how it would work, or how we’d get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn’t working.

You might be thinking of USSR, which sought to create a communist state, but was subject to internal corruption and outside threats (not to mention, Wilson sought a pact with the European states – some of which were still monarchist – to sanction trade with USSR, so it was at a considerable disadvantage from the get go.

But while USSR was going through its growing pains, the rest of us were going through the great depression, and those of us living in cardboard boxes and stacks of paint cans were wondering if Lenin had a point, the industrialists boozing and gambling with Hoover were admiring the Austrian fellow. Eventually those industrialists decided they need to create a propaganda package and teach it in our schools.

Huh. I can’t post images anymore. I wonder if it’s a browser problem or a Lemmy problem.

In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we’re not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don’t know if we can actually get there.

I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you’re interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google’s original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.

In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.

As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.

I WANT to disable the Samsung store but that can’t be done in options. I’ll have to figure out how to brute force it.

Bookmarked to look at the other store options.

No, like Prohibition, everyone will keep some around, and the laws will only be enforced against non-whites, non-Christians and uppity women. Oh and gays are right out.

Sure. Which is why autocrats turn to fascism (that is a mythical history of an in-group and out-groups) to redirect that outrage against other races, other ethnicities, other religions, women, LGBT+, countercultures, teenagers, immigrants, etc. And it works because the naked ape is already frustrated with society being too big (hundreds of thousands rather than dozens), and is always looking for common traits among bad drivers and untidy neighbors.

And it works every time, since it takes effort to be rational and practice tolerance. Mostly the lumpenproletariat (simple folks who are not politically savvy) are the driving force behind hate campaigns, but the rest of us start wondering if so many people are negging on the Jews, maybe there’s a point. And rumors like blood libel and groomers helps those feelings along. 24-hour propaganda on FOX News and OAN helps too.

I bet petty crime is the least of EU’s problems.

I bet EU has the same level of problems US does with elite deviance, the white-collar guys who want all the marbles, and will start wars, hook eveyone on toxic drugs and wreck the habitat just to own it all and swim in their vault like Scrooge McDuck.

No one wants to tell the government they’re watching porn, especially in a Catholic country like Spain.

It’s intended to reduce porn use, often to fuel conservative hate-driven ideology movements. Sexually frustrated people are more eager to endorse violence against marginalized groups.

It’s pure sociological manipulation.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.