7 ms·

This is madness. Oh, of course, it's much easier to put a wrench into some gears to show that you are actually working at "solving the terrorism problem" than s

This is madness. Oh, of course, it's much easier to put a wrench into some gears to show that you are actually working at "solving the terrorism problem" than shaving the yaks, but that machine is actually important for other things. We live in a dangerous world. We cannot control everything. I don't mind a slight risk of terrorist attack on myself or my family (caveat lector: I am young), if that means greater freedom. In my book this is the first step towards authoritarianism: ensure that the state survives at all costs. And being able to spy on the whole population to track outlaws and dissidents is part of this. There is an invisible barrier between what's legal and what's not. Crossing it isn't hard, look at extinction rebellion and other civil disobedience protestors. Yet, on the other side, your trusted options are very limited, and encryption is one of those. I'd argue that letting citizens communicate and organize privately is a vital component of democracy, even allowing citizens to seize control of the state if they deem it necessary. More so than U.S.A.'s "Second amendment", encryption is an arm citizens should legally be able to bear. Now, it is obviously hypocritical to offer such a thing, as politicians certainly wouldn't want their texts to be snooped on, would they? Any bill that requests backdoors should request them from everyone. And don't get me started on how governments recommend their own to use Matrix and Signal, the very apps they aim to backdoor, because they are secure. You can't both have your cake and eat it, too. A useful thing to explain encryption backdoors is the TSA master keys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12177079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12177079 Their very existence made locks less secure (possibility of a key leak), and those are worthless against thieves now that master keys have leaked (you can 3D print them).

nix23 6y ago
>We live in a dangerous world. No we don't, but that's what the Politicians try to implement in our brains.
- modzu 6y ago
  exactly; the terror... stop being afraid and we avoid the collective need to sell our souls and those of our children for the protection of the state
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Yeah - it is goddamn tiring can't the professional emotional manipulators that call themselves politicians play on any other emotion than fear to get elected?
    - ab-dm 6y ago
      They do, but they don't get elected.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      The vast bulk of the fear mongering I see is coming from the mass media, in an attempt to drive clicks and sell newspapers, and get their preferred candidate elected. For example, in the weeks leading up to the election, CNN ran a sidebar on the screen to continuously show current statistics on covid deaths, all day. The sidebar vanished on election day, and has not returned, even though covid death rates are worse than ever.
      - throwawaylolx 6y ago
        >covid deaths You mean cases? They usually go for the biggest number they can display rather than the most informative.
- Zak 6y ago
  It's easy for people to lose sight of this with all the bad news we're seeing in 2020, but the present is the safest time in history when zoomed out to a scale of decades. The decline in violence since the 1900s to today is essentially global and scales from bar fights to wars.
  - pilsetnieks 6y ago
    Is it safer than 2015?
    - Zak 6y ago
      2020 may not be safer than 2015, but 2010-2020 is safer than 2000-2010. You might be able to find a recent 10 year period that beats the exact past 10 years by a slim margin. On any scale between a human lifespan and the whole of human history, now is a pretty safe time to be alive.
  - keithnz 6y ago
    Easy to lose sight that whatever safety we have is because we are actively trying to make it safe. We are at a point of development where if it wasn't safe, it would be the polar opposite and be the most unsafe time in history, everything happens on a global scale. What levers we need to maintain safety as technology moves forward is a tough thing to work out. Mucking with encryption doesn't seem like a good way to go though.
- damnencryption 6y ago
  You are wrong. We live in such a dangerous world that the biggest reason for cause of death in many developed countries is suicide, obesity, diseases, etc.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    The world is so safe that instead of dying from war, famine or untreatable infectious disease, those in developed countries are dying from diseases of wealth and comfort.
    - tsar_bomba 6y ago
      Suicide is not a disease of comfort. Obesity is not a disease of wealth, for food (and junk food) is incredibly inexpensive in the developed world today, likely no more expensive than heavy smoking, alcohol, cocaine or opiates. These are diseases of overpopulation, loss of freedom and control over one's life and general lack of anything to live for in the future. Mouse utopia comes to mind.
      - dleslie 6y ago
        I vouched you up; I appreciate good discussion. It's true that obesity is an affliction related to poverty; but it is related to poverty in nations of relative wealth and comfort. Access to that cheap and terrible food relies upon a logistics system that is heavily resistent to famine and blight. Those in poverty who are dying from obesity related diseases are not dying in work place accidents, and are not dying in war or from untreatible infections. They didn't die in a pandemic. The opportunity to die of obesity related diseases is tied to the relative safety and comfort of the nations in which the late individuals were impoverished.
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      Obesity does not imply over-use of food with high nutritional value. In other words, obesity comes from worse diets. The working classes are bombarded with corporate foods that contain way too much sugar, etc.
- supportlocal4h 6y ago
  We do live in a dangerous world. Pretty much everybody loses their life somehow. It's amazing to me that so many of my peers survived childhood. It is pretty stupid to try to jump a car on your bicycle without a landing ramp. Or play catch with lit M80s. And those weren't our dumbest ideas. When I was a kid every 8-year-old pushed a lawn mower around once a week. And rode in the back of a pickup truck. Today I don't let my kids ride in the back of pickup trucks, and I'm nervous about the lawn mower. Or rather, I'm nervous about trusting my kid not to be careless with the mower. But when I see the metal detector at the door of my kid's school I wince. Some dangers and some fears need to be met head on. For some people, those include riding in the back of pickup trucks. For some it is the school's metal detector. If only we could make those choices for ourselves and our children without forcing our fears onto our neighbors. Edit: clarity
  - nix23 6y ago
    >Pretty much everybody loses their life somehow. Yeah that's called life. >Today I don't let my kids ride in the back of pickup trucks, and I'm nervous about the lawn mower. That's because you already infected with fear. It's not your Children's fault that you don't trust them with a lawn mower..it's you and probably your society that is the problem. >Some dangers and some fears need to be met head on. Yes like wear a helmet on a Motorbike, but you need to dig much deeper, that a society needs a metal detector in schools. And again the World IS much safer today...but remember the more you have the more you fear loosing it...it's the perfect setup to give up your freedom because you think you "win" some safety.
    - supportlocal4h 6y ago
      Perhaps you missed my point. Lawn mowers didn't get more dangerous. The level of danger hasn't gotten worse in that one respect. The level of trust might have changed. The acceptance of risk might have changed. I don't think that keeping my kid away from the lawn mower in order to protect them makes their life overall better or even safer. Lawn mowers are dangerous. But that doesn't mean they should be banned. As you wrote, that's life. The solution isn't to think they aren't dangerous. The solution is to recognize the danger, then act appropriately. We just all have different ideas of what's appropriate.
- MinusGix 6y ago
  We do. Even though the world has become safer and more prosperous it is still dangerous to our health and sanity. That doesn't mean we should avoid all risk. What you are more talking about is the Politicians overstate the chance of dangers and they do it on the most evocative of topics (ex: terrorism, CP, etc). A high danger we're in is from the potential for our governments to entrench their own powers and encourage potential future totalitarianism for small benefits here and now.
  - IanSanders 6y ago
    Politicians are part of the danger. Judging from the history, greater danger than the dangers we are allegedly being saved from
    - nix23 6y ago
      War is young men dying and old men talking by Franklin D. Roosevelt
    - MinusGix 6y ago
      I certainly agree, and that is somewhat part of what I was saying.
tasogare 6y ago
> We live in a dangerous world. No, West Europe used to be really safe. Then it changed because of unrestricted immigration policies. East Europe countries are still pretty safe with no terrorism.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Western Europe is still incredibly safe, and in my quick overview safer than eastern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... My home country is Norway, it looks safer than all of Eastern Europe, sometimes by an order of magnitude.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Huh? I'm seeing a 0.5 murders per 100K in Norway which is exceptionally safe no doubt but meanwhile Poland has 0.7 murders per 100K. Bulgaria is 1.3, Czech 0.6...the two most dangerous are Ukraine and Russia. Belgium's 1.7, France is 1.2, Germany 0.95... Real mix it seems. But no, it's not safer by an order of magnitude for all of it, mainly just Ukraine and Russia.
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      I guess Norway was just really safe, anyway Eastern Europe is not safer on average than Western Europe from what I could see?
    - tsar_bomba 6y ago
      The tragic thing is that those Western countries likely used to be on the same or even better level a few decades ago as Scandinavia and Central Europe today, but they are no more. By the way, I wouldn't necessarily mention South-Eastern Europe in the same sentence as Central Europe; the Balkans have quite a tradition of being a hotbed of conflict. And let's not just reduce safety to murders. There is the petty crime too, which I hear is becoming widespread in some problematic areas of big cities in Western Europe. There are social tensions, there are protests with occasional deaths and property damage, there is the radicalization of politics which may lead to all sorts of "interesting" things down the line. There is the "reasonable" restrictions on freedom of speech to counter the former, and yeah, it seems we are now talking about restricting privacy in the name of war on terror, which guarantees further increase in tensions and may enable a slide into totalitarianism in the future. Remember that when Stalin started, he didn't intend to kill millions of people for fun, he just wanted social justice. The terror "happened" along the way.
raxxorrax 6y ago
> This is madness It is by definition. Their ambitions haven't changed the last 30 years.
einpoklum 6y ago
> You can't both have your cake and eat it, too. Actually you can have your cake and eat it. What you can't do is eat your cake and have it :-P
- MayeulC 6y ago
  My bad :) Well, you got the point. In french, we'd say: "You can't both have butter and money for it" -- greedy butter sellers.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    In Romanian, it's something like "you can't reconcile the lamb and the cabbage" (because the lamb eats the cabbage if they're together). And in Hebrew it's "You can't eat the cake and leave it whole" or "you can't hold the rope from both edges".

nix23 6y ago

>We live in a dangerous world. No we don't, but that's what the Politicians try to implement in our brains.

modzu 6y ago
exactly; the terror... stop being afraid and we avoid the collective need to sell our souls and those of our children for the protection of the state
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Yeah - it is goddamn tiring can't the professional emotional manipulators that call themselves politicians play on any other emotion than fear to get elected?
  - ab-dm 6y ago
    They do, but they don't get elected.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    The vast bulk of the fear mongering I see is coming from the mass media, in an attempt to drive clicks and sell newspapers, and get their preferred candidate elected. For example, in the weeks leading up to the election, CNN ran a sidebar on the screen to continuously show current statistics on covid deaths, all day. The sidebar vanished on election day, and has not returned, even though covid death rates are worse than ever.
    - throwawaylolx 6y ago
      >covid deaths You mean cases? They usually go for the biggest number they can display rather than the most informative.
Zak 6y ago
It's easy for people to lose sight of this with all the bad news we're seeing in 2020, but the present is the safest time in history when zoomed out to a scale of decades. The decline in violence since the 1900s to today is essentially global and scales from bar fights to wars.
- pilsetnieks 6y ago
  Is it safer than 2015?
  - Zak 6y ago
    2020 may not be safer than 2015, but 2010-2020 is safer than 2000-2010. You might be able to find a recent 10 year period that beats the exact past 10 years by a slim margin. On any scale between a human lifespan and the whole of human history, now is a pretty safe time to be alive.
- keithnz 6y ago
  Easy to lose sight that whatever safety we have is because we are actively trying to make it safe. We are at a point of development where if it wasn't safe, it would be the polar opposite and be the most unsafe time in history, everything happens on a global scale. What levers we need to maintain safety as technology moves forward is a tough thing to work out. Mucking with encryption doesn't seem like a good way to go though.
damnencryption 6y ago
You are wrong. We live in such a dangerous world that the biggest reason for cause of death in many developed countries is suicide, obesity, diseases, etc.
- dleslie 6y ago
  The world is so safe that instead of dying from war, famine or untreatable infectious disease, those in developed countries are dying from diseases of wealth and comfort.
  - tsar_bomba 6y ago
    Suicide is not a disease of comfort. Obesity is not a disease of wealth, for food (and junk food) is incredibly inexpensive in the developed world today, likely no more expensive than heavy smoking, alcohol, cocaine or opiates. These are diseases of overpopulation, loss of freedom and control over one's life and general lack of anything to live for in the future. Mouse utopia comes to mind.
    - dleslie 6y ago
      I vouched you up; I appreciate good discussion. It's true that obesity is an affliction related to poverty; but it is related to poverty in nations of relative wealth and comfort. Access to that cheap and terrible food relies upon a logistics system that is heavily resistent to famine and blight. Those in poverty who are dying from obesity related diseases are not dying in work place accidents, and are not dying in war or from untreatible infections. They didn't die in a pandemic. The opportunity to die of obesity related diseases is tied to the relative safety and comfort of the nations in which the late individuals were impoverished.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    Obesity does not imply over-use of food with high nutritional value. In other words, obesity comes from worse diets. The working classes are bombarded with corporate foods that contain way too much sugar, etc.
supportlocal4h 6y ago
We do live in a dangerous world. Pretty much everybody loses their life somehow. It's amazing to me that so many of my peers survived childhood. It is pretty stupid to try to jump a car on your bicycle without a landing ramp. Or play catch with lit M80s. And those weren't our dumbest ideas. When I was a kid every 8-year-old pushed a lawn mower around once a week. And rode in the back of a pickup truck. Today I don't let my kids ride in the back of pickup trucks, and I'm nervous about the lawn mower. Or rather, I'm nervous about trusting my kid not to be careless with the mower. But when I see the metal detector at the door of my kid's school I wince. Some dangers and some fears need to be met head on. For some people, those include riding in the back of pickup trucks. For some it is the school's metal detector. If only we could make those choices for ourselves and our children without forcing our fears onto our neighbors. Edit: clarity
- nix23 6y ago
  >Pretty much everybody loses their life somehow. Yeah that's called life. >Today I don't let my kids ride in the back of pickup trucks, and I'm nervous about the lawn mower. That's because you already infected with fear. It's not your Children's fault that you don't trust them with a lawn mower..it's you and probably your society that is the problem. >Some dangers and some fears need to be met head on. Yes like wear a helmet on a Motorbike, but you need to dig much deeper, that a society needs a metal detector in schools. And again the World IS much safer today...but remember the more you have the more you fear loosing it...it's the perfect setup to give up your freedom because you think you "win" some safety.
  - supportlocal4h 6y ago
    Perhaps you missed my point. Lawn mowers didn't get more dangerous. The level of danger hasn't gotten worse in that one respect. The level of trust might have changed. The acceptance of risk might have changed. I don't think that keeping my kid away from the lawn mower in order to protect them makes their life overall better or even safer. Lawn mowers are dangerous. But that doesn't mean they should be banned. As you wrote, that's life. The solution isn't to think they aren't dangerous. The solution is to recognize the danger, then act appropriately. We just all have different ideas of what's appropriate.
MinusGix 6y ago
We do. Even though the world has become safer and more prosperous it is still dangerous to our health and sanity. That doesn't mean we should avoid all risk. What you are more talking about is the Politicians overstate the chance of dangers and they do it on the most evocative of topics (ex: terrorism, CP, etc). A high danger we're in is from the potential for our governments to entrench their own powers and encourage potential future totalitarianism for small benefits here and now.
- IanSanders 6y ago
  Politicians are part of the danger. Judging from the history, greater danger than the dangers we are allegedly being saved from
  - nix23 6y ago
    War is young men dying and old men talking by Franklin D. Roosevelt
  - MinusGix 6y ago
    I certainly agree, and that is somewhat part of what I was saying.

tasogare 6y ago

> We live in a dangerous world. No, West Europe used to be really safe. Then it changed because of unrestricted immigration policies. East Europe countries are still pretty safe with no terrorism.

kmonsen 6y ago
Western Europe is still incredibly safe, and in my quick overview safer than eastern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... My home country is Norway, it looks safer than all of Eastern Europe, sometimes by an order of magnitude.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Huh? I'm seeing a 0.5 murders per 100K in Norway which is exceptionally safe no doubt but meanwhile Poland has 0.7 murders per 100K. Bulgaria is 1.3, Czech 0.6...the two most dangerous are Ukraine and Russia. Belgium's 1.7, France is 1.2, Germany 0.95... Real mix it seems. But no, it's not safer by an order of magnitude for all of it, mainly just Ukraine and Russia.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    I guess Norway was just really safe, anyway Eastern Europe is not safer on average than Western Europe from what I could see?
  - tsar_bomba 6y ago
    The tragic thing is that those Western countries likely used to be on the same or even better level a few decades ago as Scandinavia and Central Europe today, but they are no more. By the way, I wouldn't necessarily mention South-Eastern Europe in the same sentence as Central Europe; the Balkans have quite a tradition of being a hotbed of conflict. And let's not just reduce safety to murders. There is the petty crime too, which I hear is becoming widespread in some problematic areas of big cities in Western Europe. There are social tensions, there are protests with occasional deaths and property damage, there is the radicalization of politics which may lead to all sorts of "interesting" things down the line. There is the "reasonable" restrictions on freedom of speech to counter the former, and yeah, it seems we are now talking about restricting privacy in the name of war on terror, which guarantees further increase in tensions and may enable a slide into totalitarianism in the future. Remember that when Stalin started, he didn't intend to kill millions of people for fun, he just wanted social justice. The terror "happened" along the way.

raxxorrax 6y ago

> This is madness It is by definition. Their ambitions haven't changed the last 30 years.

einpoklum 6y ago

> You can't both have your cake and eat it, too. Actually you can have your cake and eat it. What you can't do is eat your cake and have it :-P

MayeulC 6y ago
My bad :) Well, you got the point. In french, we'd say: "You can't both have butter and money for it" -- greedy butter sellers.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  In Romanian, it's something like "you can't reconcile the lamb and the cabbage" (because the lamb eats the cabbage if they're together). And in Hebrew it's "You can't eat the cake and leave it whole" or "you can't hold the rope from both edges".