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Privacy and control need to be put back into the hands of the individual
- unicornporn 10y agoDomain: decentralize.today. Published on: Medium. Seriously, it isn't THAT hard to at least host your blog outside the centralized disservices. You could argue that reach is negatively affected. It probably is. But if everybody (and that includes the outlets promoting decentralization) just swallows the bait, how can things ever change? (Wo)man up!
- pjmlp 10y agoHaving been raised in a country enjoying the first winds of freedom after a dictatorship of 44 years, I wonder how serious this kind of blog posts are. Sometimes they look just doing activism from the couch.
- maglavaitss 10y agoAnything that raises a flag and makes people think and consider alternatives to FB, Google, printed money, etc, is good activism. Whether it's from the couch or the armchair, is irrelevant.
- pjc50 10y agoFB, Google, printed money One of these things is not like the others.
- iamdave 10y agoI don't think their point was to make precise and completely congruent analogues of these three topics.
- pjc50 10y agoIt's more that I don't want sensible concerns about privacy in online services diluted by monetary theory that's at best "fringe".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Hondor 10y agoThe article identifies the risk that printed money will disappear, replaced with a few large credit card companies and banks so the government can monitor everyone's use of money. Since we're clearly already heading in that direction bit by bit, I wouldn't call it a fringe theory.
- zanny 10y agoIt is only fringe / extremist / conspiracy theorist when its a problem I don't personally have (or have not exerted the mental energy to fully understand). If it is affecting my life, it is serious mainstream business we need to take seriously. That is a fundamental problem with online discourse. People put on blinders on singular crusades when reality is the combined effects of many, many forces influencing one another. Topically, the anti-encryption movement by governments is tied to broader totalitarian leanings by many traditionally republican states in the west, which has hundreds of influential aspects in all kinds of fields of business and society. And those leanings have correlations in everything from fearmongering to economic uncertainty to long running campaigns by certain interests that have lasted decades. And then we get trapped in this rat hole of arguing over what is "serious" or meaningful, when in hindsight we can historically recognize almost all of history is the combined effect of many influencing factors not apparent at that moment in the past.
- patrickaljord 10y agoYeah, one of these are being forced upon us by guns.
- GunboatDiplomat 10y agoPrinted money as opposed to what? Printed money is far better from a privacy standpoint than electronic money. And no, bitcoin or similar is not going to be a realistic replacement. Neither is money backed by gold or the element or compound of your choice.
- bogomipz 10y agoWhat do you not find serious about it?. The author is sighting actual examples of behavior that they find concerning. Do you doubt the veracity of these examples? Also Why does it matter where activism is conducted from?
- natch 10y agoMaybe they're not yet perfect, but kudos to them for at least decoupling services so they keep more flexibility to move anywhere.
- mSparks 10y agoIts not even a real article. Just some mindless repetition of some braindead cia propoganda against foreign governments being used to promote a new crypto currency called shadowcash. Yawn.
- mastazi 10y agoMaybe the author should give a look at https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/ https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/ - there are a lot of decentralised blog engines around.
- nebulon 10y agoYou could also checkout https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io we do try to make it a lot more user friendly and approachable to self-host your blog and lots of other app categories. I think once self-hosting such apps doesn't require much technical knowledge anymore, it removes a lot of friction for users.
- mastazi 10y agoYes I really like Cloudron, it's one of the best possible solutions to introduce less technical people to self hosting
- martinko 10y agoThe article mentions shadow cash. I've never heard of it, but why would someone use it over bitcoin or perhaps monero?
- jbpetersen 10y agoArticle is actually a lengthy pitch for YAC$ (yet another cryptocurrency) It's another anonymized coin that appears to have fancy chat/marketplace support in the main wallet application as a flagship feature.
- martinko 10y agoIndeed, I'm actually surprised it is on the top of the front page, given the lack of content.
- creshal 10y agoI don't understand how blockchain applications can ever be considered "anonymous", when there's a public ledger and everyone knowing your wallet address can track all your transactions.
- kqr 10y agoI guess you could own several wallets for different purposes?
- creshal 10y agoEnigma fallacy. Tracing that back to a single owner is hard for humans, but trivial to do for computers.
- pas 10y agoThere was a paper a few years ago (when the need for proper anonymous bitcoin spending came up), something about zero-knowledge proofs, and you can switch your known bitcoin (public key, basically) to this anoncoin and you can then switch that back to a bitcoin, but all outside observers will just see that your known address "bought" an anoncoin. Of course, if someone observes the whole anoncoin switcher network, all they would see is that anoncoin users together bought some bitcoins. But here is the relevant wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin
- awqrre 10y ago
- agroot12 10y agoThe first half lists lots of state actions against encryption, the second part advertises the shadow project, a blockchain based anonymous currency, communication and commerce platform: https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow
- tbarbugli 10y agoThe right title should be: how to loose all or most your money by using crypto currencies
- tomp 10y ago> Earlier this year the Brazilian government used the courts to block WhatsApp for 72 hours as it seems they did not like being unable to peer into the private communications of their citizens. This happened again just a couple of weeks ago and it seems what the government cannot control should be blocked or even banned. It's very hypocritical when an American criticises foreign "corrupt, oppressive" governments for "peering into private communications" by using public legal means against US corporations, whereas the US government has done exactly the same thing (using legal and illegal means) but you just didn't know about it (because most Internet companies are based in the US). [I'm not sure that the author is an American, but there are undoubtedly many Americans that share this attitude.]
- martinko 10y agoRemind me, was that before or after they enabled end-to-end encryption?
- kbart 10y agoSince WhatsApp is virtually a blackbox, their word for end-to-end encryption means nothing. Few 'bugs' in implementation and you have a nice backdoor.
- dnzm 10y ago> Few 'bugs' in implementation and you have a nice backdoor. Just one would be enough, methinks.
- martinko 10y agoTrue, but it would at least give them plausible deniability that they couldn't hand over plaintext messages, even if they wanted to.
- etatoby 10y agoThat's probably the entire purpose behind WhatsApp "encryption": to have their cake and eat it too.
- lsiebert 10y agoI worry about specific implementations of software for decentralisation. You can ban or block an app, arrest it's creators, but it's a lot harder to ban a protocol that has a number of different implementations. Maybe there isn't enough resources for that, maybe encryption and privacy tech is hard enough that more than one implementation isn't possible at this moment, but I think it should be a goal.
- rini17 10y agoHas anyone of these activists ever considered the appalling inability of average person to manage private keys properly? Whether it is Bitcoin, pgp, whatever else, using private keys on own hardware where noone else has access to is absolute prerequisite of successful decentralized crypto. Yet the privkeys keep getting leaked,stolen,lost(including Zimmermann's pgp key),cracked(due to generation by buggy software) without any good solution in sight.
- danieldk 10y agoYou will have a hard time stealing a private key remotely from a good hardware token. (Of course a compromised machine can be used to sign using a hardware token, but that's a different level of compromise than getting the private key.)
- rini17 10y agoObviously the token can be stolen,too. Also,people all the time voluntarily allow others to use their tokens if convenience demands it. Your comment is also a good example of how the concern 'people can't manage privkeys well' keeps getting handwaved away, with sad results.
- david-given 10y agoSounds like the obvious solution here is to provide a blessed and convenient way for one person to allow another to use their tokens in a limited fashion. What's the actual use case here? What are people wanting to do when they do this?
- david90 10y agoNot only on contents on global sites, China did lots of censorship on the local sites content.
- xyzzy4 10y agoPrinted money is decentralized and anonymous in the cash form.
- etatoby 10y agoAnonymous yes, decentralized no. The bill in your hand is printed by a central authority, is given value (or taken away, at their whim) by that same central authority, is protected by law, and is technically not even your property. It's the opposite of decentralized.
- phatfish 10y agoWell the use is decentralized any two people can (anonymously) complete a transaction. But the creation is centralized.
- GunboatDiplomat 10y agoThat's the only way to have a physical fiat currency. And the alternatives all have much more serious problems.
- xyzzy4 10y agoIt's decentralized because you don't have to communicate with a centralized authority in order to make a transaction.