Uriel238 [all pronouns]
- 0 Posts
- 61 Comments
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.
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.
We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.
But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.
And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.
Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).
Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.
Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.
(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)
What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.
So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.
Exactly as per the label in 2016, the biblical themes and involvement of children were too spicy for the App Store, and the folks in Apple weren’t allowed to think outside their box, so it was rejected.
Even now, Apple is fighting gunpower and gelatine to sabotage all efforts to allow side-loads and stores they cannot control.
LLMs are less magical than upper management wants them to be, which is to say they won’t replace the creative staff that makes art and copy and movie scripts, but they are useful as a tool for those creatives to do their thing. The scary thing was not that LLMs can take tons of examples and create a Simpsons version of Cortana, but that our business leaders are super eager to replace their work staff with the slightest promise of automation.
But yes, LLMs are figuring in advancements of science and engineering, including treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So it’s not just a parlor trick, rather one that has different useful applications that were originally sold to us.
The power problem (LLMs take a lot of power) remains an issue.
Due to its mode of operation, the court considered the software to be “specifically intended for criminals”
Crime is an action a state doesn’t like, not necessarily wrong or evil, but serves interests other than the state. If the state has to authorize everything, then the state is favoring dominance over governance.
When the state has to monitor all transactions it is tyranny.
I know you can get ID deets here, but I don’t know any service that turns it into a facsimile of a state ID card.
This may be the first time a federal ruling has been made but I don’t know if it applies to state crimes. Many counties across the nation have ruled one way or another.
SCOTUS once ruled law enforcemeny cannot compel you to unlock a device at all and cannot access your phone without a warrant, but I don’t know if that is current. Police can legally lie to you (and beat you with a $5 wrench and pronably get away with it in court).
They also have strong phone cracking packages despite FBI’s lament about evidence locked away in seized devices.
Generally, do not consent to searches or cooperate without a lawyer present. Expect everything an officer tells you is intended to mislead. They will even lie in court to the judge.
In the early 2010s, If you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear had already been resurfacing as a common thought-stopping cliché here in the states, since SCOTUS had been adding carve-outs by the dozens to the fourth amendment to the Constitution to the United States (the one about protections from unreasonable searches and seizures). At first, if you didn’t speak english, or are within 100 miles of a US border or coast (that’s most of the US), the police got free probable cause. Eventually SCOTUS ruled that if you were searched illegally and evidence for a crime was found, that evidence could not be suppressed if the crime was significant enough (e.g. the clothes of a missing child no wait, simple drug possession was enough.)
We were already aware of the FISC, FBI National Security Letters (the origins of the NSL canary statements) and the disposition matrix, by which even US citizens could be sentenced to execution by secret trial; the right to face one’s accuser was long forfeit.
But then, it was also a period in which US citizens averaged about three crimes a day, mostly violations of the CFAA (which Reagan signed into law after watching Wargames 1983. Violation of the TOS of a website was a federal felony, which meant every tween that got a Facebook Friendster or Myspace account was committing a crime that could be sentenced up to 25 years (what is the upper limit for murder one in some states). It wasn’t enforced… unless some official needed you to go away, say because he wanted your wife, or your property, or for you to shut up about his crimes.
And this is one example, and why telephone encryption is such a problem. Today, it’s illegal in most states for law enforcement to search your phone once you’re in custody without a warrant. They do anyway, and might or might not be able to crack the encryption with current tech (it’s an ongoing race between exploits and fixes). If they find something worth prosecuting, or assets worth seizing or extorting you over, or if they just don’t like you, then yes, expect to lose all your valuable property and assets, and become their informant. Sexual favors may also be necessary if you’re attractive.
And that’s why we need privacy, even as SCOTUS continues to strip it away from us.
In the 2020s, though, it’s all the other technologies: IMSI spoofing, camera drones, ALPRs, Facial Recognition (which is a good way to get falsely convicted), Ring doorbell camera botnets, reverse warrants based on location or websearches, and so on. Big Brother is left holding the beer of IRL 2024.
Some nazis were given high ranking jobs in the US, typically those who were good at science and math (although we got a lot more of our big science brains from refugees fleeing the German Reich. Brain drain in autocratic and fascist movements is a very real thing, and has happened in multiple fields here in the states).
When it came to NSDAP Idealogues, we didn’t really need to import any, as all of our big industrialists were pro-NSDAP and believed in the ideology independently (which is to say they agreed with them, and still do, even if they don’t regard themselves as aligned with the NSDAP political party). Those that did come here were friends of gazillionaires (who would be billionaires today, though the dollar was stronger then. J. P. Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller all were 100-millionaires.
Plenty of escaping Nazi officers fled across the world. South American nations are notorious because they weren’t actively hunting them down (yet) so they required less subversion getting through customs, and then could work out identity changes and fade into seclusion later. Plenty did come to the United States, pretending to be someone else, since they didn’t have rocket science cred.
Okay back in the Don’t Be Evil days, the business model expressed that no human should ever see private data except its owner. Google’s business clients could ask Google questions about data analyses involving cross sections of thousands of users, but couldn’t ask about individuals. Also you could tell Google to send ads to car owners (though normal Google advertising channels) and they would, and report how many users saw your ads.
Then two things became a problem.
One was internal affairs. Not just Google techs stalking their exes but people stealing databases of names and selling them to information collection orgs. So if you were a debt collector, it was good to have a friend in Google.
Also the PATRIOT act, FBI, DHS, NSA and eventually all of US law enforcement. Judges let them look at the raw Google data, which Google actually resisted with a high-powered legal team, but eventually the judges let law enforcement have at, which is how we have reverse warrants fulfilled by Google today.
In the aughts, Google was supposed to figure out a technological solution, so that the police could tap at the computer or look at the (salted) data all they want and without end user keys which no-one could access, they’d be SOL.
But they did too little too late, and nowadays, enough info on one person could narrow then down to a single human being, which John Oliver demonstrated a couple of years ago by building info kits on everyone in the US Senate, including acts of fraud and illicit affairs.
It was a good idea, and still may be if it’s started locked down like Crystal Palace, but Google can’t do it anymore.
If I were the devil and this world was mine to see Well, I’d witness all the atrocities and it’d probably frighten me So I’d run back home with a story to tell I’d tell all my demon friends that I always preferred Hell — Colby Acuff
One of the existential terrors of deconstruction is realizing the human species is plenty capable of evil and atrocity, that no demons are needed
Then when we’ve seen the absolute worst humans could imagine, Sir David Attenborough comes along holding Nature’s beer.
It’s headed in that direction, but we’re not quite there yet.
There are two ways to fight the autocratic takeover. One is opportunistic: The US is immense and has a lot of interlocking and often conflicting systems in place, which makes for a lot of chaotic complexity. So the way that dinosaur clones were able to breed, escape Isla Nublar and survive despite a lysine addiction (all contrived to contain them) we need to find opportunities to impede their takeover or creatively disobey.
The other is in creating local mutual aid organizations. Make sure that your marginalized and outcast locals are getting fed, keeping warm and otherwise having needs met, and the police will find it harder to push them out. Whatever you can do to allow strikes and protests to last longer will tax the goons of the plutocrats, and tax them until either they retreat and rally elsewhere or ratchet up the violence so that it becomes too atrocious for the neoliberal public to ignore.
Three in four, according to Guttmacher. Half are due to failure to implant, and go by undetected.
But part of the problem is women who miscarry often suffer from mental illness, including an unreasonable belief that somehow they are at fault. (Selection is part of the gestation process. Many, many conceptions are incompatible with life even in perfect conditions.) So law enforcement may be capitalizing on a demographic that already feels guilty.
The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects:
- The right to speak, specifically the right to political speech and to be critical of the administration or its officers
- The right to practice religion (right now this is being used to override other rights and duties)
- The right to publish, as per above
- The right to assemble with others
- The right to petition your representatives in office for redress of grievances.
When Justice Amy Coney Barrett was being reviewed for her bench position, she couldn’t remember the last one.
But Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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.