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>Its proponents are ambitiously unlikeable, relishing their distastefulness to burnish outsider credentials. and that was the perfect opportunity to use it as

>Its proponents are ambitiously unlikeable, relishing their distastefulness to burnish outsider credentials. and that was the perfect opportunity to use it as a stepping stone to dictate what consenting adults can and can't do in the privacy of their own computing devices. now encrypted communications ("think of the children!") and local AI ("think of the environment!", which is exactly the same angle they've been using with crypto) are next, and within a few decades - general purpose computers. a few years of propaganda in the media, a cyberpandemic or two, and I'll be reading essayesque comments around here about why is it actually a good idea to ban those unethical, unsafe, environmentally-unfriendly machines and let us all subscribe to a cloud offering instead.

EGreg 2y ago
Exactly. If web browsers weren’t as big of an ecosystem as they were, they’d have pushed for OS makers long ago to ban them. After all, they can load abitrary content including copyrighted information and CSAM! And they can circumvent the 30% that Apple charges in the app store. The Web was the one anomaly in the Matrix. Where it’s just too big for more countries (except China, North Korea, and soon Rusia) to bring to heel. Browser makers are really your last line of defense. And rather than making MORE decentralized ecosystems, the geeks on HN spent a decade fighting against anything that smelled of decentralized encryption and digital signatures. Which is sad! We could have had far more innovation and reached critical mass same as the Web did. Instead, small teams working on Freenet or MaidSafe (Autonomi) are our best hope for a privacy future. And it can be banned at the protocol level. I guess Matrix and Tor might be considered the only successful projects for privacy, and Tor kinda sucks for real privacy because it’s basically still a web host.

EGreg 2y ago

Exactly. If web browsers weren’t as big of an ecosystem as they were, they’d have pushed for OS makers long ago to ban them. After all, they can load abitrary content including copyrighted information and CSAM! And they can circumvent the 30% that Apple charges in the app store. The Web was the one anomaly in the Matrix. Where it’s just too big for more countries (except China, North Korea, and soon Rusia) to bring to heel. Browser makers are really your last line of defense. And rather than making MORE decentralized ecosystems, the geeks on HN spent a decade fighting against anything that smelled of decentralized encryption and digital signatures. Which is sad! We could have had far more innovation and reached critical mass same as the Web did. Instead, small teams working on Freenet or MaidSafe (Autonomi) are our best hope for a privacy future. And it can be banned at the protocol level. I guess Matrix and Tor might be considered the only successful projects for privacy, and Tor kinda sucks for real privacy because it’s basically still a web host.