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> The biggest danger is the government believing they "solved" autonomous killing machines that kill people based on the NSA's mass spying apparatus, when in fa
by PavlovsCat 11y ago
> The biggest danger is the government believing they "solved" autonomous killing machines that kill people based on the NSA's mass spying apparatus, when in fact such robots could have many false positives.
False positives only matter in so far as they can generate outrage that can threaten power. So if you find a way to make absolutely sure no powerful person gets killed, which doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve, you can pretty much start shooting fish in a barrel without any adverse consequences. E.g. when Mao had his leaders fulfill quotas of persecuting so-called dissidents, whether those people were really dissidents was rather secondary. What matters is that there is a certain percentage that is unemployed, starving, and/or hunted by killer robots; that in itself does wonders to keep people in line, and the people who aren't directly under attack have a huge capacity to rationalize and ignore things, if that's what it takes to not be attacked. If we can accept people needlessly starving we can accept people being killed by a random number generator no problem.
I wish I was being snarky, and I hope for nothing more than to be proven wrong, but absent radical changes, that's what I see in our future. "A boot stamping on a human face, forever" is not a still frame, it's a process, and unless that process is stopped for good, that human face will become infinitely thin and infinitely helpless.
- jpt4 11y agoOff Topic: I see in your profile, PavlovsCat, a link to the RetroShare Sourceforge page. Are you a contributor to the project? I see that they now have an active GitHub repository [0], when I had thought progress had slowed or ceased. [0] https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare
- PavlovsCat 11y agoOh, I kinda forgot about that... to be honest, I have used that thing once, when it was discussed here, "added" a few people, but it never even came to really talking to anyone over it. So, thanks for reminding me, I guess I'll try it again! [ https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/version-0-6-is-out/ https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/version-0-6-... ] (needless to say, I'm not a contributor, and I doubt I could provide much of substance to something like that) Are there other ways to be reachable semi-anonymously? I don't care much about encryption, since the most "dangerous" things I say in public anyway, but I also don't want to put an email or website address because I've, uhh, learned to behave better here by getting hellbanned a lot, and as such wouldn't want to be tied to an identifier like that should that happen again. Sorry for endulging, I wish HN had a simple private messaging system, maybe requiring a "message permission request" to be accepted before messaging someone; even restricting it to few short messages that get deleted after a while would be great.
- jpt4 11y agoFor asynchronous anonymous communication, I have been experimenting with Pond recently [0]. Message have perfect forward security from each previous, are anonymized through the TOR network, padded to a standard packet length and sent at randomized times (along a power-scale distribution), to prevent size and timing co-ordination attacks revealing identity. The network is client-server architectured, but as befits a replacement for e-mail one can run one's own server. Everything is open source, written in Go, and the work of Adam Langley, HTTPS security engineer at Google. The CLI is also a standard for aesthetically appealing design. You need to share a symmetric key with every contact to bootstrap trust; feel free to e-mail me (in my profile) if you would like a first contact. [0] pond.imperialviolet.org
- jpt4 11y agoEdit: Messages* have