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.
I think you can get it with a credit card through the Cake Wallet app by buying a different crypto first and then swapping for XMR, this is probably the most user friendly way, though I can’t personally confirm. You can buy it directly on Kraken, though the account setup is some effort. Here is a curated list of reputable ways to acquire, trade and use crypto without KYC, if not providing personal info is a priority for you.
I don’t think it’s actually that terrible for privacy to get it initially with KYC, because all they will know is that you purchased $X of crypto, so it’s comparable to withdrawing cash from a bank.
I use it to pay for VPN and stuff, works pretty well IMO. There’s potential scaling issues if too many people use it, but you can get around those by using XMR to privately purchase a different cryptocurrency with higher throughput. Tornado Cash was pretty cool too before they made using it a felony.
I don’t see how you can acknowledge this being relevant but also consider it whataboutism, those seem like opposite positions. If it is whataboutism, that’s a claim that it isn’t relevant. It is relevant because partisan affiliation is not a reliable predictor of how someone will approach this issue, which matters for whether considering it in this context makes sense.
The issue is that the surveillance state is actively bad, and expanding it and making it more official is a much bigger problem than the problem of ill-conceived verification systems, which could be better solved other ways. I don’t want things to be perfect, I want to prioritize moving away from a dystopian panopticon.
The failures on January 6 are particularly stunning. Anyone who has been to an anti-war or other protest at the Capitol can tell how heavily guarded the Capitol is. Anti-war protesters are arrested for merely being on the Capitol steps. There is no scenario in which people at an Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) march would have been allowed to breach the Capitol and send members of Congress into hiding.
On top of that, much of the planning for January 6 was done in plain sight. Anyone vaguely paying attention to the news had some inkling of what was afoot. It makes the police response all the more perplexing.
I feel like this would benefit from more detail. The argument seems to be that the FBI should have prevented the Jan 6 insurrectionists from gaining access to the capitol building, given its extensive surveillance powers. That their failure to do this, their failure to prevent 9/11, and their attention towards left wing protestors is evidence that the organization is misusing its powers and not doing anything useful.
Did the FBI have investigations into the Jan 6 protestors going before the event? My understanding has been that they got in because there were just so many people refusing to follow instructions, not enough guards to begin to control a crowd of that size, and they didn’t go as far as to start shooting them at first. Would they have shot left wing protestors doing the same thing before they got in the building? Would they have arrested them prior to the event on the basis of posts online talking about getting into the building? Or is maybe that just not how the FBI works? I don’t really know. I agree with the article that there should be more investigation into what they do and more oversight, and maybe not allowing the executive to have as much ability to wield it as a political weapon, and changing the law so they aren’t exercising so much unaccountable power over American citizens.
Sounds like they admit it but object to the negative tone lol