For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients’ machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.
That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn’t impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.
Sure. Although that’s just a matter of unplugging your computer from the Internet. Also, at least in theory, Linux isn’t actively leaking all your data into various Cloud services. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are just invitations for the NSA to paw through your file system.
I just can’t imagine how Linux protects you from posting on Facebook.
Another option and a more long term solution would be to go back to the roots and relearn the basics of living !
That requires large plots of arable land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley
The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was for a time known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries. The growing high-tech industry in the 1960s transformed the area from farmland to densely populated cities, and it became referred to as the Silicon Valley.
But we paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.
There’s no unfucking that chicken. We are living in a world that is substantially less arable than it was a century ago. We do not have an Eden to go back to.
Less criticism and more pity.
Sheryl Sandberg seems like a Grade A asshole to work for - possibly the only woman CEO I’ve ever heard of getting #MeToo’d. Zuckerberg is an absolute baby-brain completely up his own asshole with delusions of grandeur, outright comparing himself to Roman Emperors.
But if you get into the tell-all released by Sarah Wynn-Williams, all you really take away from it is that this company is as corrosive to the body public as it is ravenous for economic expansion. There’s no “keeping close” that’s going to be good for you in the long run. Might as well try to keep a rabid dog on a short leash.
I am very much a left-winger, but I still read right-wing papers and articles, I like to know what the other side is thinking.
I’m not above peaking in on Citations Needed or QAnon Anonymous to see how the other side lives. But the actual right-wing material itself is really ugly stuff, particularly in the modern moment. When it isn’t nakedly xenophobic or Mean Girls callously cruel, its just pumping your eyeballs and ear holes full of the dumbest fucking advertisements imaginable.
Not good to ingest that stuff.
And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.
Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?
Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?
A bunch of government agencies are being told to do business exclusively on X, The Everything App.
Musk’s also trying to build out a financials tool within his ecosystem and to incentivize more people to do business in his preferred basket of shitcoins.
He’s a monopolist, working with other monopolists to corner the Internet as a marketplace. He’s not looking to give people a choice to use other tools.
I’ve seen more than a few theories about exactly what Trump says, who does the stenography, and how much of it gets included in his tweets. Early in his presidency, the tone of his tweets was very fast-and-loose. Then the staff got shuffled and they started sounding more polished. But by the end of the presidency, they’d degraded back down to “Old Man Yells At Louds” levels of comment again.
Tim Apple was going to kick $1M to whomever won. For a guy with a net worth in the tens of billions, this is just a tip to the wait staff at the Table Of Success.
But the Apple photo library is a huge potential source of revenue. Its worth significantly more than $1M. This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images. If you’re not the client, you’re the product.
Mainly because the governments already have access to everything and I mean EVERYTHING.
There’s limits, largely around the speed and accuracy by which data can be ingested and processed. You can look for everyone somewhere sometimes and someone everywhere sometimes and someone somewhere at any time, but it takes a ton of digital resources to monitor everyone everywhere all the time. For the data to be meaningful it has to be interpreted.
Manned checkpoints allow local state actors to make decisions in near-real time relative to immediately present information. The classic example is someone with a stale warrant or notice on their record. The sheer volume of delinquents makes pursuing every individual troublesome, but as soon as a known offender steps across a checkpoint the police can pounce on the individual offender in that instance. If you’ve got a five year old traffic ticket, a police officer can be in your face about it as soon as they run your ID.
I doubt a hotel receptionist would make use of a pubkey cryptography.
If you’re just flashing an ID like a badge, maybe not. But as soon as the hotel tries to use the information to do anything (even as trivial as adding it to their local systems) there’s a good chance it’ll get bounced or hung up. A fake digital id is worse than none at all. Its a big red flag saying “Look harder at this person, they’re suspicious!”
That means if I used the digital version, they would had unlimited access to all my digital life. Photos, emails, chats, from decades ago.
Bare minimum, it would take a substantial amount of time and resources to harvest data from every phone of every driver passing through a particular checkpoint. Not that I’d ever recommend handing over my phone to a cop, but this kind of data transfer isn’t trivial. And its not clear what a street cop is going to do with 10 GB of accumulated vacation photos.
On the flip side, if you have an Automatic Backup feature on your phone, its going to a cloud computer somewhere. And that cloud computer is almost certainly compromised by the state digital security agency (and probably a number of foreign security agencies). At that point, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a physical id or a digital one, just knowing who you are is enough to tie you back to that digital archive.
But… again, what is it that front-line state agents are planning to do with all this data? That’s never been made particularly clear.
Why do people buy stuff from a creepy company like that?
Because its the biggest and most visible one that everyone uses. And because so many Amazon shoppers are Prime Members anyway, as the cost of not being a Prime Member makes it functionally a requirement.
Couldn’t you just stop by at the local whatever shop on your way home?
How much would I pay not to spend an extra 30-60min fighting traffic and waiting in long lines? In that sense, Prime is a steal.
He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.
That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.
For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.
a famous part of the prohibition was the organized crime which was both kind of naturally occurring at the time and was created specifically to traffic booze
Quite a few political families profited handsomely from alcohol prohibition. The Kennedys are probably the most famous, but the political system was rife with corruption. If you’ve ever watched Boardwalk Empire, the story was based on the notorious Atlantic City sheriff Enoch Johnson.
So, turning to black market cartels is a form of resisting policing, it’s a form of anti-institutional action, I’d say, as it gives more economic power to anti-institutional organizations.
The ability to selectively enforce prohibition gives you ample opportunity to profit from the gaps in the system. Sex work has long had a relationship with local politicians and police, and I have no doubt that criminalization of porn would create an huge market for kickbacks to enforcement organizations.
I guarantee that the government would collapse within about three weeks if less.
Oh sure. Famously, whenever a worksite implements a blacklist on pornographic websites, the workers immediately begin screaming and flailing and eating each others faces.
Do not underestimate the power of the gooners
Generally speaking, the power of the gooner is to compile 500 TB of questionably legal pornographic data on a PLEX server in their basements and ride out the porn-pocolypse as a bunch of horny hermits.
But the theory that this is going to be the last straw and hordes of angry horny dudes are going to take to the streets in a mass labor action is about as likely as the one where Tech Bros were going to take to the streets over Net Neutrality or women were going to have a sex boycott over the Abortion Ban or the hippies were going to tear down Wall Street over the drug war.
Americans are shockingly pliant and far more prone to simply turn to black market cartels than actively resist policing.
Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished.
Typically by being accused of acting as foreign agents. Assange was a Radical Islamist under Bush, a nefarious Russia/China double agent under Obama, and an insidious Hispanic cartel boss under Trump.
Quite a few of the current crop of deputized ICE agents are MAGA goons from four years ago. So long as you’re actively doing the gruesome work of ethnic cleansing, you’ll be given a pass.