4 ms·

We're going to fight hard so our grandchildren have really secure email in a world where everything they do and every word they say is uploaded to the internet,

by thom 11y ago

We're going to fight hard so our grandchildren have really secure email in a world where everything they do and every word they say is uploaded to the internet, transcribed and annotated in realtime by swarms of drones controlled by other kids that, only 50 years earlier, would have been at home doxxing people on Twitter. Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so. What's more, those people will be hard to catch - after all, the drones will be communicating over very strongly encrypted channels. [Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]

beeboop 11y ago
I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very popular (100 million users) where the opportunity for surveillance is massively reduced. Platforms are going to slowly transition towards encrypted content and data that not even service providers can decrypt (SpiderOak is a good example). The biggest holdout will be operating systems - Google and Microsoft very much do not want to lose their backdoors (or front doors) into everyone's data. But within ten years, we will finally have a "year of Linux on desktops" in which both grandma and the young university student can both buy an Ubuntu computer and have it work how they need it to. And phones will run an OS that can't be maliciously updated remotely, and doesn't leak user data to apps and OS providers. The final step will be near anonymous internet usage, which we are currently in the infancy of. There will be a shift to a more decentralized availability (but not necessarily storage) of data in most of the applications we use most often. Essentially Freenet, but without all the usability problems. The Facebook of the future will have open source (and encrypted) data where your info is only viewable to you and your friends. There are currently platforms that exist like this, but they are mostly in "testing" stages and are not ready for widespread use.
- thom 11y ago
  I'm not talking about the state exclusively, nor am I talking about your online activities. I'm saying you will have a camera and microphone trained on you, always. My personal AI assistant - smart but not nearly sentient - knows to highlight the most titillating segments, which I have just captioned and published for all to see (anonymously, over an encrypted connection). It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, but 4chan are nevertheless streaming a video of one in the act. I fail to see how this technology - small, cheap, highly capable and connected drones - will fail to come about in the next 50-100 years. And because of that, I seriously think we need to mentally prepare for living much more publicly than we do now.
  - newjersey 11y ago
    This is why I strongly oppose the drone strikes. Nobody should be killed by the state (except I guess by soldiers in self defense). I especially so not like the idea of killing someone probably at home in pajamas eating Cheerios at five pm in the evening local time. I don't think there is any justification for that even if the person in question is a flight risk and has been the mastermind behind millions of death. Such a killing with no attempt to detain runs afoul of my morals. This is worse than capital punishment which I also strongly oppose for any situation.
    - beeboop 11y ago
      I think your concern about lack of due process should be more focused on the tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian bystanders the US has killed since 2001. We are killing dozens of women and children overseas every week and chalk them up as collateral damage.
      - newjersey 11y ago
        I am honestly not worried about collateral damage. If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem. When we talk about collateral damage in case of unprovoked attacks, we are minimizing the issue. If we are not willing to risk our soldiers to capture people who are not firing at us, then we should not try to capture or kill those people. I think it is pretty simple. If they are worth killing with a drone, they are worth sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in an attempt to catch them dead or alive. Whether there is any collateral damage is not the issue.
        beeboop 11y ago
        > If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem. You very well might be a sociopath.
Grishnakh 11y ago
>Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so. >[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future] Um, this is pretty easy to refute: we've been complaining about copyright and DRM for ages now, and not only are they not waning, they're at least as strong now as they've ever been. There's no indication whatsoever that copyright law is going anywhere or being relaxed in any way, in fact it's the opposite. Sure, it's generally easy to copy digital stuff (absent DRM), but that doesn't make it legal, nor has the internet become a free-for-all (quite the opposite in fact; it's more dangerous to commit copyright violations now than ever I think). Same goes for DRM: despite all the complaints, DRM is still present in many places, and you still need to use it for things like watching Netflix. It is possible to defeat it (I'm not going to say technically easy though, because a lot of it is unbroken), but what the DRM-users have proven to us is that it's non-trivial now, and more importantly it only has to be "good enough": as long as it prevents most users from doing something the copyright holder doesn't want, that's all they really care about.
- thom 11y ago
  I don't really recognise any of what you're describing here - it's trivial to download almost any copyrighted work in seconds, for free, and basically nobody suffers any consequences for doing so. Even so, it was just an analogy. There's very little stopping people just following you round recording you on their smartphone as it is. When it's semi-autonomous flying robots the size of a grain of rice, I don't believe you are going to have much legal recourse.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    You're not talking about downloading copyright works, you were talking about "the death of copyright". Copyright isn't dead, it's alive and well, regardless of how easy it is to download stuff. Not only that, while it may be easy to download stuff, it's also easy to be sued for it, and this has happened countless times. There's been a whole industry of suing downloaders and getting them to settle for $3k. So your assertion that "nobody suffers any consequences for doing so" is quite false. Ask Jammie Thomas. Yes, you can largely avoid this by using a VPN, but not that many people do.

by thom 11y ago

beeboop 11y ago

I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very popular (100 million users) where the opportunity for surveillance is massively reduced. Platforms are going to slowly transition towards encrypted content and data that not even service providers can decrypt (SpiderOak is a good example). The biggest holdout will be operating systems - Google and Microsoft very much do not want to lose their backdoors (or front doors) into everyone's data. But within ten years, we will finally have a "year of Linux on desktops" in which both grandma and the young university student can both buy an Ubuntu computer and have it work how they need it to. And phones will run an OS that can't be maliciously updated remotely, and doesn't leak user data to apps and OS providers. The final step will be near anonymous internet usage, which we are currently in the infancy of. There will be a shift to a more decentralized availability (but not necessarily storage) of data in most of the applications we use most often. Essentially Freenet, but without all the usability problems. The Facebook of the future will have open source (and encrypted) data where your info is only viewable to you and your friends. There are currently platforms that exist like this, but they are mostly in "testing" stages and are not ready for widespread use.

thom 11y ago
I'm not talking about the state exclusively, nor am I talking about your online activities. I'm saying you will have a camera and microphone trained on you, always. My personal AI assistant - smart but not nearly sentient - knows to highlight the most titillating segments, which I have just captioned and published for all to see (anonymously, over an encrypted connection). It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, but 4chan are nevertheless streaming a video of one in the act. I fail to see how this technology - small, cheap, highly capable and connected drones - will fail to come about in the next 50-100 years. And because of that, I seriously think we need to mentally prepare for living much more publicly than we do now.
- newjersey 11y ago
  This is why I strongly oppose the drone strikes. Nobody should be killed by the state (except I guess by soldiers in self defense). I especially so not like the idea of killing someone probably at home in pajamas eating Cheerios at five pm in the evening local time. I don't think there is any justification for that even if the person in question is a flight risk and has been the mastermind behind millions of death. Such a killing with no attempt to detain runs afoul of my morals. This is worse than capital punishment which I also strongly oppose for any situation.
  - beeboop 11y ago
    I think your concern about lack of due process should be more focused on the tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian bystanders the US has killed since 2001. We are killing dozens of women and children overseas every week and chalk them up as collateral damage.
    - newjersey 11y ago
      I am honestly not worried about collateral damage. If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem. When we talk about collateral damage in case of unprovoked attacks, we are minimizing the issue. If we are not willing to risk our soldiers to capture people who are not firing at us, then we should not try to capture or kill those people. I think it is pretty simple. If they are worth killing with a drone, they are worth sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in an attempt to catch them dead or alive. Whether there is any collateral damage is not the issue.
      - beeboop 11y ago
        > If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem. You very well might be a sociopath.

Grishnakh 11y ago

>Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so. >[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future] Um, this is pretty easy to refute: we've been complaining about copyright and DRM for ages now, and not only are they not waning, they're at least as strong now as they've ever been. There's no indication whatsoever that copyright law is going anywhere or being relaxed in any way, in fact it's the opposite. Sure, it's generally easy to copy digital stuff (absent DRM), but that doesn't make it legal, nor has the internet become a free-for-all (quite the opposite in fact; it's more dangerous to commit copyright violations now than ever I think). Same goes for DRM: despite all the complaints, DRM is still present in many places, and you still need to use it for things like watching Netflix. It is possible to defeat it (I'm not going to say technically easy though, because a lot of it is unbroken), but what the DRM-users have proven to us is that it's non-trivial now, and more importantly it only has to be "good enough": as long as it prevents most users from doing something the copyright holder doesn't want, that's all they really care about.

thom 11y ago
I don't really recognise any of what you're describing here - it's trivial to download almost any copyrighted work in seconds, for free, and basically nobody suffers any consequences for doing so. Even so, it was just an analogy. There's very little stopping people just following you round recording you on their smartphone as it is. When it's semi-autonomous flying robots the size of a grain of rice, I don't believe you are going to have much legal recourse.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  You're not talking about downloading copyright works, you were talking about "the death of copyright". Copyright isn't dead, it's alive and well, regardless of how easy it is to download stuff. Not only that, while it may be easy to download stuff, it's also easy to be sued for it, and this has happened countless times. There's been a whole industry of suing downloaders and getting them to settle for $3k. So your assertion that "nobody suffers any consequences for doing so" is quite false. Ask Jammie Thomas. Yes, you can largely avoid this by using a VPN, but not that many people do.