Chris Berg is a professor of economics at the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub.
Worthless opinion piece is worthless.
So source available. Not open source. Got it!
The system was built by sociopaths.
Maybe the difference is that the signal developers aren’t rich people flying around the EU on private jets? Maybe there’s no value in targeting the signal devs because they can’t legally be expected to moderate chats they literally can not access? Maybe it’s not worth backdooring because it’s open source?
For real. We already know Microsoft is a leader in data collection, economic espionage, and surveillance capitalism. We know for a fact they gave secret police real-time backdoors into their systems and all data they hold the encryption keys to.
Don’t do this. It’s illegal in most countries and could result in criminal charges.
Instead, DM them and ask “Hey, is your password for x still y”? That’s usually enough for people to feel vulnerable and start to take this shit seriously.
I actually did something similar to this before. After a breach I torrented the data to query my own creds (old passwords were leaked, from my pre random gen password manager days). I then searched my friend’s emails and messaged them asking them if their password was still “xyz”. I got a lot of “bro, wtf!?!” that day!
If they agree that Trump/Republicans are fascist, ask them why they think it’s an acceptable risk to allow the government to construct the most pervasive and advanced surveillance state that has ever existed for fascism — a system so advanced it would make Himmler cream his pants — why build big brother so all they have to do is simply take over, turn a key, and use it against the world?
If they’re insane and think Trump/Republicans are the good guys, repeat the above but swap out the perpetrator for liberals/trans/immigrants, or whatever “other” is the flavor of the week.
If they’re not American, ask them what they think will happen if the world’s strongest ever superpower — a kleptocratic failed state, straddling the knifes edge of fascism — with a secret police who have backdoor access to the tracking device in their pocket, all their data, and all their historic communications — became a fascist dictatorship? … Point out how “woke” they are (sex before marriage, gay marriage, whatever) … and ask them how comfortable they would be if the tens of thousands of people working at the NSA/CIA were converted into fascist “troll farms”, and started using AI and analytics of all their personal data, to unilaterally wage a cyber war on everyone they deem “woke”? Do they think their government or military could defend them from a bad actor that has the ability to hack anyone on Earth… A bad actor who, if they want you out of the picture, just has to remote into your machine, download some child porn, and tip off the local police… Good luck trying to prove your innocence. You don’t even know what most of those words mean! You weren’t even aware that this was a possibility 30 seconds ago!
There is 1 way to stop login attempts. Use an alias provider (e.g. simplelogin.io), and change the account emails to a randomly generated alias.
Even if you used the same password everywhere, as long as the email/username for the account is randomly generated the password is essentially useless.
Html is as private as any language — only private when secret (encrypted) — so your comment is a worthless “vacuous truth”.
If you only included projects created in the last 2 or 5 years rust would be ahead of C/C++, possibly ahead of all other strongly typed langs. Kotlin is usually chosen explicitly for modern Android and Java lib interoperability.
I would be willing to wager that within the next 1-2 decades, LLM transpilation will be used to replace most C/C++ code, too. LLM’s can’t be trusted to write code, but they can be trusted to transpile in combination with TDD. If a codebase is already well tested then transpilation is many orders of magnitude easier.
FYI, as someone who has only seen good work from the ACLU, If you don’t explain what they did that you consider wrong, I’m gonna assume you’re potentially a mentally ill lunatic, rather than having rational grievances.
This is why privacy policies are a virtue signaling joke. They all start with “we respect your privacy” which is so objectively, categorically, false 99% of the time that it should be considered illegal (e.g. false advertising) for the org to even associate those words with their business, in any capacity. Every evilcorp has one policy that is hundreds of pages long and covers everything they ever have done, and ever will do, across every subsidiary and product of the entire umbrella organization. The whole privacy policy system is designed so every consumer rubber stamps them and legally absolves the corporation for everything they will ever do, because it’s impossible for any human to read or understand them. By impossible I mean literally impossible – you would need more than a lifetime to read them, let alone comprehend them…
If we didn’t live in a capitalist dystopia, privacy policies wouldn’t be needed most of the time, because data laws qould be so comprehensive they explicitly apply for 99% of interactions, and every system would be designed from the ground up for zero trust (e.g. all data is E2EE). But in the 1% of cases where they are needed they’re dynamically generated from templates, based on a users current preferences/settings. The “use X app” policy would be different from the “integrate all of my other various PII linked services to my account” policy. In the case of a completely offline calculator, with no API, and no telemetry/analytics (or them all disabled by default) the policy would not even be a link; just a one-liner that says “App can be used with zero data collection”. If you download the app and choose to enable a data collection setting, that’s when you would be shown the policy related to the specific data points that setting relates to.
So, every “intelligence agency” should release all information that exists about their entire surveillance apparatus, all of their spies, and activities? I’m on board!
Also, post a link to a 24/7 stream of your bathroom. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear… right?
They can always go shittier. Nothing will stop them until the entire human population is strapped into a matrix style ad network, 24/7… paid for by you, renting your neurons as compute for AI to generate more ads and supporting analytics for yourself… until your profitability quotient falls below average and they liquify your corpse to feed a more profitable gen of the attention crop.
I consider this post as more of a thought experiment. If this sounds extreme to you, then the mass surveillance of society is even more extreme.
The fact governments almost always exempt themselves should be all that’s needed to prove the measures violate a democratic societies rule of law and civil liberties, and that their promotion should be considered treason — an attack on the civil liberties of the entire population is an attack on democracy itself.
It was never a reasonable timeline. Modern history is essentially the present population waking up to the crimes of past (and present) generations, including their direct ancestors.
Israel was created by colonial states committing colonial-minded crimes, during the near-total collapse of colonialism immediately following WW2. England had assumed control of “Mandatory Palestine” after the Ottoman Empire fell with WW1. Through the League of Nations — dominated by colonial powers, like the UN is to this day — they essentially annexed land they had no legitimate ownership of, denying the population of Palestine their basic human rights to democracy and self determination, and gifted it to millions of refugees who were not even born in that location, and held no reasonable claim to that land (beyond ancestry from hundreds/thousands of years ago, that never made up more than a minority of the people who lived there).
It would make more sense, and be more logically and legally justifiable, to give the USA, Canada, and Australia to their indigenous populations in 2024 — who 100% owned those lands up until the last few hundred years — than to give Palestine to the Jewish population in 1946.
Similar crimes happened in South East Asia and Africa post-WW2. For example France trying to militarily reclaim Laos and Vietnam (backed by the USA). Both the Vietnam war and Cambodian genocide may have never occurred if those countries were allowed to implement legitimate democracy.
You mean the one where no CEO’s, or any senior leadership, faced criminal prosecution for their coordinated, premeditated, systematic fraud? I member!