do they need to? I don’t think so.
Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren’t copy pastes of each other. There’s no documented ‘best practices’ that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.
they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws
I can’t speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:
A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.
To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.
In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.
Big Tobacco did the same thing.
Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.
A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn’t on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.
To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn’t apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.
Privacy means personal agency and freedom from people, whether individuals, companies, or the government, controlling you with direct or implied threats, or more subtle manipulation, which they can do because they have your dox and because information is power.
A lack of privacy adds fuel to the polycrisis because if we can’t act in relative secrecy that basically means we can’t act freely at all, and nothing can challenge whoever runs the panopticon.
I did all my transportation and shopping with a mountain bike for a year and it’s kind of difficult on snow and ice, fell over some. The trick is to never turn at all when on that stuff, but it’s still hard. The cold makes the oil for the mechanisms work worse too, you need special oil. My hands got very cold holding on to the handlebars, you need to find some balance between gloves that hold warmth and resist the wind and gloves that let you have enough dexterity for the brakes and shifters.
The police believe that the motive behind this hacking was to reduce network-related costs, as torrent transfers can be costly for internet service providers. KT, however, claims that it was merely trying to manage traffic on its network to ensure a smooth user experience.
Sounds like they admit it but object to the negative tone lol
When articles were published about the EU Commission’s horrifyingly undemocratic approach, Ylva Johansson’s office at the European Commission responded by advertising on the platform X (formerly Twitter). They targeted advertisements (pro Chat Control) so that decision-makers in different countries would see them, but also so that they would not be seen by people suspected to be strongly against the proposal. The advertising was also targeted on the basis of religious and political affiliation and thus violated the EU’s own laws regarding micro-targeting. …
There was no technology that could scan communication without looking at it. Parts of the Council of Ministers therefore proposed that scanning should be excluded for politicians, the police and intelligence services, as well as anything classified as ‘professional secrets.’ Obviously, there were politicians who were afraid that their secrets would leak, but who had nothing against mass surveillance of the broader population.
Sounds very slimy all around
Most of the screenshots I see of Twitter posts aren’t from right wing extremists, but are still ignorant opinions and put-downs presented in an obnoxiously snarky way. The core of toxicity in Twitter isn’t about political affiliation, it’s about mean spirited anti-intellectual tribalism and people using ideals as a pretense to verbally abuse others.
I buy the centralization/trust criticism, if not the idea that government id would be an acceptable or functioning alternative (it’s not the case that every government is trustworthy or that everyone in the world has id or that those ids are easily verifiable). There’s also the problem of people being able to just sell their credentials. But it still seems misleading to focus on the idea that there is a big danger here of biometric data being collected when it likely isn’t and when it already is used and collected in many other contexts.
I thought the orbs were supposedly open source and not actually transmitting/collecting any biometric data, just using it to create unique ids? But these quotes and articles seem to be taking it as a given that the scans are in fact collected. It feels like a really crucial part of this story is completely missing here; if there’s some evidence that they are in fact collecting the data despite claiming not to, that should be worth mentioning. It would also be something to mention if there is no such evidence and the Spanish regulators here are implying risks that aren’t actually there, but expect it to be a popular move regardless because the public generally hates cryptocurrency, AI, and Sam Altman.
I’m also wondering how they feel about all the various phones and other devices that use fingerprint and face scans for authentication, public facing cameras transmitting to the cloud that can have face or gait recognition algorithms attached, the scanning done in airports, etc. There’s a bunch of reasons to dislike WorldCoin but this seems maybe not well thought out.
The browser had a built-in RSS button that would display in the browser location bar when any website you’re on had an RSS feed available. Clicking the button would then take you to the RSS feed for that web page
How would this work? Do websites with rss feeds normally publish the url to that feed in some standard place? Are there any third party extensions that do it?
I remember a little while ago a thread with someone from kbin gloating that they could see what everyone was voting, and accusing the people upvoting comments they disagreed with of being bigots in a vaguely threatening way obviously intended to produce a chilling effect, and people found this surprising because that information is not public on most instances.
I basically agree with the people saying open info is just the nature of posting on a public forum and of federation, but there could be improvements, even just in awareness of what is and isn’t private.
This is more of an argument against EM than free speech absolutism, since your point is that he doesn’t actually believe in it. But anyway it seems like there should be some possible middle ground between a truly absolutist position on free speech, and the overt disdain for free speech implied by a vague prohibition like the OP law. Isn’t it valuable for people to generally be able to speak their minds? That can be the case even if the loudest people hiding behind the idea are disingenuous, or if the furthest interpretations of it go too far.
It’s not recoverable and permanently compromised if ever it is.
But that is necessarily the case given what they are trying to do to begin with. Why don’t you want to acknowledge that? What you’re saying is not an argument that blockchain would not accomplish the goal set out here, it’s an argument against using public key cryptography for email where the users hold the private keys.
Also, even if someone was trying to impersonate you, you wouldn’t know it unless the recipient told you
What makes you think that? If an impersonator published an association between your name/email and their public key to a blockchain, everyone can necessarily see it, including you. You have the opportunity to let people know through various channels which records are or are not legitimate.
As for DMARC,
These policies are published in the public Domain Name System (DNS) as text TXT records.
I’ll admit I don’t know a ton about the inner workings of DNS, but I know that DNS hijacking is very common in high stakes scenarios like cryotocurrency application frontend websites, and essentially out of the hands of the victim to be able to protect their control of a domain. With a system strictly requiring access to private keys, no hijacking is happening without stealing those keys from the user.
What are the tradeoffs, assuming an email encryption scheme based on self custodied private keys and publicly published public keys? I don’t see any major disadvantages to using blockchain for this, and significant advantages. It’s a big deal if no one can selectively remove/conceal previously published info. If associating a key with an email, and someone is trying to impersonate you, you’ll know it, it’s not going to be hidden from you and specifically shown to someone else. It just makes sense to do it that way. Yes, you have to trust something at some point, but this is a way to minimize how much trust you have to give.
I understand why you’d want one
It’s an email that’s unrecoverable so not usable in many companies.
It doesn’t sound like you understand why someone would want to do email with public key cryptography, it sounds like rather you do not like the idea of doing email with public key cryptography. Being unrecoverable is just the tradeoff there. Again, what do you think the problem described even is? For reference,
The issue, Yen said, is ensuring that the public key actually belongs to the intended recipient. “Maybe it’s the NSA that has created a fake public key linked to you, and I’m somehow tricked into encrypting data with that public key,” he told Fortune. In the security space, the tactic is known as a “man-in-the-middle attack,” like a postal worker opening your bank statement to get your social security number and then resealing the envelope.
I think if you actually acknowledge the problem of trust for propagating public keys as a real one that is worth being solved, it would be hard to argue that blockchain is a bad fit for that problem, because it is not. Trustless, verifiable propagation of data is one of the things it actually offers unique benefits for.
I’m sure there are other reasons to not like the idea, but that’s what I can think off the top of my head.
It might be useful to start by considering the idea itself and what it is saying, instead of looking for arguments to make against it.
There’s no telling how much it would be worth since there’s no active market for it, the NFT has been owned by the same wallet since its purchase in 2021 and has not been transferred or resold. That wallet currently has minimal value in Ethereum or tokens, and around 2k different NFTs, most of which don’t seem to be very valuable. They are still active, with a transaction from a month ago moving 264k in stablecoins to a crypto exchange.
https://etherscan.io/nft/0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405/25046
https://opensea.io/3FMusic/collected