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From an old comment of mine on the topic: https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1] 1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard
by arminiusreturns 4y ago
From an old comment of mine on the topic:
https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1]
1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration.
On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001.
At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.”
He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down.
“We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?"
And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes.
And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen
Given how prevalent quiet aquisence is in the tech community about mass surveillance, I think the mistake is going to be anonymity, and other user rights and freedoms foundations, including crypto. We already see it happening with crypto, but please remember the real war is on computing freedom. These other things are a subset.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago> We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in I'd say the Internet is pretty dang anonymous compared to, say, X.25 or PSTN. I'm curious what kind of anonymity Eben Moglen had in mind. > but please remember the real war is on computing freedom. Excepting the MPAA and their fixation on encrypted HDMI, what computing freedoms are at risk of being lost, and to whom, exactly? (well, within the OECD - yes, things are bad in the PRC and in other autocratic regimes - but those are hardly new threats).
- bitexploder 4y agoThe number of people on iOS and iPadOS with no other computing devices is high. Walled gardens. Lack of ability to easily install any apps you want. Pushes for remote attestation. Hypervisors beneath OSes. The darker parts of “trusted computing”. I could go on with many more examples.
- swatcoder 4y agoWell, for one, it's getting increasingly hard to run arbitrary code on any kind of manufactured computing device. Riding the current of valid security concerns, all platforms are moving towards all code being signed and attributable and most code operating only within abstract/virtual environments that only provide mediated access to the hardware or the host system.
- game-of-throws 4y agoTPMs and remote attestation on all platforms. For example, there's no reasonable way to run an adblocker on Android without rooting, and if you do root, many apps e.g. banking apps will refuse to run. The feature is called SafetyNet.
- jcynix 4y agoI find the firewall app Netguard "quite reasonable" as an adblocker on unrooted Android. The default for all apps I use is 'block access' and right now most apps continue to work. Those that won't work get deleted unless I really have a need for them on mobile.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dang 4y agoCan you please not copy-paste old posts like this? You've copied this one more than once! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105138 (Aug 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25098136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25098136 (Nov 2020) If you want to refer to something you posted before, that's great, but please use the tool for the job: a link. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20copy%20paste&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- fsflover 4y agoWhat is a problem with (modest and appreciated/upvoted) copy-pasting old, relevant posts? A strict policy against that could turn into a conversation consisting solely of links...
- teddyh 4y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2d1j2e/a_man_is_spending_his_first_night_in_prison/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2d1j2e/a_man_is_spen...
- bsedlm 4y agoit does not make it as easy/simple to remove or otherwise modify the links.
- krageon 4y agoIf an entire conversation consists solely of callbacks to the past, you're not having a conversation. You're writing a history book.
- pvg 4y agoThe linked moderator comments explain it in detail and it's not really conversation if you're just recycling a stash of prepared commentary, linked or pasted. If you don't have much new to say, link it or let it be.
- 4y ago
- bsedlm 4y agothe choice taken, because it's both easier and worse, is to put a marketplace of apps as an interface to the very large amount of things that a computer can do. I'm saying that in the future (given this trend), in order to get "the computer" to do anything at all, the interface won't be a CLI or a programming language, but a giant searchable marketplace where you can buy (pay for) each specific action that you want your computer to do. this sounds a bit ridiculous now, but it's not. it's a super appstore. it's the API economy taken to an extreme level. its all the functionality of your computer as a service with a small transactional fee for every meaningful action. instead of teaching more people to program (and making an effort to keep computing simple), we have been collectively making computers easier to use and harder to understand. It's only a matter of time before opening browser developer tools requires a cyrptographically signed government issued authorization (to give a crude example of my worry); of course this could be promised to keep children safe (or whatever convenient political excuse). More realistically, I don't think it would work to straight up enforce this; instead I suppose making it unfeasible or otherwise really annoying to open browser dev tools is the way to do it. I have reasonable suspicions that this is the main driving impulse behind WASM.
- teddyh 4y ago> It's only a matter of time before opening browser developer tools requires a cyrptographically signed government issued authorization “debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.” — https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html