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I'm at the point where I kind of think the march of technological progress makes it inevitable. If it's trillions of dollars in 2013, how much will it cost in

by IvyMike 13y ago

I'm at the point where I kind of think the march of technological progress makes it inevitable. If it's trillions of dollars in 2013, how much will it cost in 2023? Hell, it might not even be government: What happens when someone scrapes all the screenshots from facebook, condenses it into a biometric facial recognition dataset, and posts the resulting 22 TB file to pirate bay, and 22 TB is considered small.

bad_user 13y ago
Technology has a way of also bringing balance when needed. For example, yes, it makes spying on normal people easier, however it also makes it possible to communicate in real-time with virtually unbreakable encryption, something which was not possible to do only 70 years ago. It also makes it possible to keep whatever files you want secret. My laptop's hard-drive is encrypted for example, without too much of a performance penalty. And consider that for anonymity on the Internet, you also have proxies and nascent projects like Tor. And yes, normal / uneducated people are not using technology to its fullest. But that's only because they aren't aware of imminent threats to their privacy, to their way of life. Educate them and I can assure you a significant percentage will start using encryption whenever possible. Also, make it the default, make it convenient and they'll use it - and yes, we are the ones that should be doing that, because it's our job to make life easier and safer for normal people. It's not technology you should fear. But rather those in power that can make anything they don't like illegal. And mark my words - projects such as Tor / Bitcoin will be illegal at some point, the only questions being "when?" and "for how long?"
- smackay 13y ago
  What good is all this balancing technology when you cannot step outside your own front door. You may as well put bars on the windows to save the government from the trouble of putting you in prison.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    Meh - having lived as a child in communist Romania, I can tell you that police states don't need technology to spy on people. All they need to do is to give the right incentives to people to spy on their friends and neighbours. With a good distribution of informants, all other methods are shallow, because you see - humans are still much better than machines at filtering out noise and cheaper too if you indoctrinate them that this is for the good of society, not to mention that your acquaintances do tend to know your beliefs and thoughts, which is much more than a street camera will be able to do. That's why it is my belief that it isn't the technology you should fear, but rather people and mentalities. Because if society wants to put bars on your windows, you're fucked, with or without technology.

by IvyMike 13y ago

bad_user 13y ago

Technology has a way of also bringing balance when needed. For example, yes, it makes spying on normal people easier, however it also makes it possible to communicate in real-time with virtually unbreakable encryption, something which was not possible to do only 70 years ago. It also makes it possible to keep whatever files you want secret. My laptop's hard-drive is encrypted for example, without too much of a performance penalty. And consider that for anonymity on the Internet, you also have proxies and nascent projects like Tor. And yes, normal / uneducated people are not using technology to its fullest. But that's only because they aren't aware of imminent threats to their privacy, to their way of life. Educate them and I can assure you a significant percentage will start using encryption whenever possible. Also, make it the default, make it convenient and they'll use it - and yes, we are the ones that should be doing that, because it's our job to make life easier and safer for normal people. It's not technology you should fear. But rather those in power that can make anything they don't like illegal. And mark my words - projects such as Tor / Bitcoin will be illegal at some point, the only questions being "when?" and "for how long?"

smackay 13y ago
What good is all this balancing technology when you cannot step outside your own front door. You may as well put bars on the windows to save the government from the trouble of putting you in prison.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Meh - having lived as a child in communist Romania, I can tell you that police states don't need technology to spy on people. All they need to do is to give the right incentives to people to spy on their friends and neighbours. With a good distribution of informants, all other methods are shallow, because you see - humans are still much better than machines at filtering out noise and cheaper too if you indoctrinate them that this is for the good of society, not to mention that your acquaintances do tend to know your beliefs and thoughts, which is much more than a street camera will be able to do. That's why it is my belief that it isn't the technology you should fear, but rather people and mentalities. Because if society wants to put bars on your windows, you're fucked, with or without technology.