Posts by DeKrow 130 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2011
My main concern with this kind of politcial posturing on both sides is that the, obvious to us (but not necessarily obvious to average news consumer), hypocrisy of the argument means that there's another purpose behind airing this dirty laundry: Fomenting anti-China sentiment.
The only reason for which is to make an upcoming war with China justified or at least somewhat more palatable amongst the populace.
... which isn't very user-friendly.
The longer the time since I banned Windows from my desktop, the better a decision it becomes. The amount of effort to change my workflow from Windows to Linux feels about the same as the amount of effort required to make Windows 11 'worth trying'. Which makes it not worth trying at all.
"What benefit does society gain from government issued debit cards"
You're looking at this the wrong way. Society isn't creating CBDCs, the CBs are creating them, therefore you need to look at what they will gain: Control. Censorship, limitations, restrictions, seizure. Society loses when viewing CBDCs from all angles.
The potential benefit of Bitcoin (specifically not most other cryptocurrencies) is the lack of centralised control; the lack of censorship and restriction.
Feel free to make other arguments against Bitcoin - all of which I've heard before, some with which I disagree and some with which I agree - but I won't be wasting my time re-reading them.
Shutdown "The Laundromat" before shutting down cryptocurrency. The Laundromat has been facilitating criminal activity for decades and has been ignored by the powers that be for just as long.
For those who don't know, London is referred to as The Laundromat because of it's friendliness in facilitating money laundering for any and all with resources enough to need to conduct it.
... has an inverse relationship to what the world needs.
My conspiracy voice is saying that Meta's needs, however, will be quietly supported by various federal US entities in their attempt to wrest some attention back from "China's" TikTok in their on-going game of my surveillance is better than your surveillance.
"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers"
Fuck meta, Fuck tiktok. Capitalisation intentional.
Recent article about how seriously "the system" takes child abuse:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-18/did-alex-jones-use-dhhs-database-crissp-to-groom-a-teenager/13301262
Securing existing systems that contain sensitive data just doesn't have the political sound-bite potential (or hidden, alternate narrative that benefits the status quo) of "end-to-end encryption enables pedophiles and terrorists!"
I'm not sure how any of the Murdoch media empire is going to get their hands on any of the money from this. I thought the Murdoch press was a pedlar of entertainment in a way that, fairly specifically, doesn't cross into anything resembling news. Any news content is generally accidentally stumbled into on those rare occasions when entertainment and current events converge.
For example, Andrew Bolt authors one of the funniest dead-pan, conservative-on-steroids impressions I've ever come across. It's entertaining as all hell, but there ain't a skerrick of news.
Only this morning a little-known state agency called the Children's Commissioner published a report demanding end-to-end encryption be backdoored to keep children safe.
I can only speak for my own experiences here, but I've never been violated or threatened with violation by end-to-end encryption. And if I ever was, I'm not sure I'd even notice.
What I do know is that Child Protection Agencies, those old-school organisations that use humans to go and visit at-risk children to assess their situations and safety, are so woefully under-funded that any agent of Government purporting to want to "keep children safe" without massively increasing funding to these actual real-world-action agencies, is actively working against the protection and safety of children. They're distracting from the real problem, trying to divert funding and resources into something other than that which will, measurably, keep children safer. It's grossly disturbing.
You know that Google News (in Australia at least) just shows a headline and maybe a picture, and then links to the actual article on the actual website on which the article was originally published?
The content of the article is not scraped and presented as if Google were the author.
I've got a similar set up to you, but already using pfSense as my gateway, Pi-Hole for blocking and plugs into Cloudflare's DoH service, and with outbound regular DNS queries all redirected to my Pi-Hole, I also share the same concern for the near future where potentially malicious IoT devices or phone apps start using their own in-built DoH, preventing visibility of what my own devices are doing (disclaimer re: "my own devices: that word may not mean what you think it means, yeah yeah).
Will be looking into later commenters suggestion of blocking DoH traffic to anywhere other than Cloudflare, or limiting DoH traffic to only be allowed to come from the Pi-Hole.
Very long bow to draw saying that the US destroyed Nokia and Blackberry. Do you have any citations for this claim?
My understanding has been, for a long while, that Blackberry and Nokia failed because they didn't adapt to the Android / iPhone generation. They were leaders for their time, but failed to see the big new wave coming and wiped out.
Accounting. "I do not think it means what you think it means"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
The more big companies are exposed for their creative accounting practices, the more I wonder about the motivations of politicians chipping away at individual privacy and promoting ever-expanding surveillance.
The governments of "The West" are playing catch-up to China. The big, smart, corporates are level pegging with China.
I was going to mention in my earlier comment that this decision could lead to further fracturing of the Internet due to the potential to spur along custom DNS projects.
What are the chances that the operators of the root Domain Servers can protest this decision via disobedience by refusing to update .org records?
If this situation is one of the "pure suits / non-technical / boardroom-only" decisions, is there a critical mess of techy-resistance to it such that disobedience / resistance is possible?
I've tended to mostly ignore and down-play any announcements of "The Internet ain't what it used to be", mainly because the 'old internet' still exists for those willing to spend the time to search for it; the "new" Internet is in addition to the internet of old, it didn't replace it despite the fact it shouts more loudly for our attention. "New Internet" is the tourist magnets, whilst the "Old Internet" is the still-present hinterland.
This decision, however, is a much more fundamental change. The combination of 'removal of price caps' and 'sale to a private company' for one of the three original TLD's is market / regulatory capture that has the potential to be more effectively damaging and lucrative than domain-squatting.
An organisation's domain name is synonymous with their reputation, and for .org being generally non-profits, they're less likely to enjoy being squeezed to maintain their reputable domain. It also has the potential for harm in that bad actors may outbid (or wait out) a non-profit for their domain name, then run profitable scams on the back of the domain names reputation (eventually destroying the domain's reputation and potentially the reputation of the organization that once owned it).
I wonder if copyright or some other "brand protection" strategy could mitigate this but, again, not-for-profits aren't generally the litigious type.
No, you're not being pessimistic. You're bang on the money. Literally.
I'm moving to them as well, later than I would have hoped since I only just (accidentally auto-)paid for another two years of Dyn (bad reminder and credential management on my part).
FreeDNS looks like the sort of operation that is ideologically opposed to selling out, and will continue operations as-is for as long as possible.
He was allowed to leave Sweden. He was questioned initially and it was found there was no case to answer. It wasn't until AFTER he left the country that investigations were re-opened and further interviews with Assange were deemed necessary.
This is something a lot of people seem to get wrong in the timeline.
This article has a decent run-down of the timeline and events:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2019-05-27/abuses-show-assange-case-was-never-about-law/
What can they do about self-hosted systems? Something like this:
https://blog.cryptoaustralia.org.au/run-your-end-to-end-encrypted-chat-server-matrix-riot/
Sure, there's a chain to follow to find who's running them, or to just get them shutdown or legislate against them so that causal folk are scared off, but "casual folk" aren't the target. There's also "self-hosted as a Tor service" to further obfuscate the trail such that any action by law enforcement will likely be after-the-fact, which appears to be what these new laws are trying to prevent.
Maybe it's just a whittling away of the less technically savvy terrorists. At the very cheap price of the privacy of casual folks online conversations.
Funnily enough, I think the most tech savvy and intelligent terrorists probably moved into "legitimate business" many years ago and are happy with all these draconian new laws that will only work to cement their established positions.
Is there any reason, other than not wanting to REALLY piss off Google and FB, that Apple don't create their own ad-blocking system within Safari?
It'd be a huge end-user-privacy marketing win for them. But then would they also piss off all the marketing execs that make bank from online stalking to the extent that they'd turf their iDevices in protest?
Another side-effect, I suppose, would be that if they can do it in Safari then they can do it system-wide and therefore potentially torpedo all ad-supported apps in the process and decimate their developer base.
How much do Apple, Google and FB depend on each other? Probably just as complex as the US-China relationship. Maybe Apple system-wide ad-blocking would be equivalent to a declaration of war.
Fact:
The US is threatening to stop information sharing if <5-eyes country> (Germany in this instance) uses Huawei kit.
Inference:
If <5-eyes country> doesn't already know what the US knows in order to be making such threatening statements, then there's already a certain amount of information sharing that ISN'T taking place.
Conclusion:
The information sharing that the US is threatening to prevent isn't worth keeping in the first place if it hasn't flagged giant Chinese network hardware vendor as a threat.
Disclaimer:
The above is assuming that everything being said in public is wholly truthful and transparent. Which it never is. However, this doesn't make it any more forgivable that they're saying such illogical things in public. That, in itself, means they're already caught in a lie.
So, US companies started the whole globalization thing by using cheap labor in China to manufacture their wares and see them for US-scale prices and make gigantic profits off the backs of, effectively, slave labor in other countries. Over the years this has resulted in the decline of manufacturing in any country with higher-than-the-lowest wage rates, giving these low wage countries both control of manufacturing and possession of the best knowledge of the everything to do with manufacturing processes.
When it comes to consumers trying to do the same thing as the cheap-labor companies, purchasing in markets cheaper than the US, we get region-locked DVDs , laws against counterfeiting (even when the clothing comes off the same line), and excess branded stock being burnt / shredded to "protect brand integrity".
When it comes to these countries that have been, for years, doing the manufacturing of goods for companies based in other countries actually manufacturing goods for companies based in their own country, and therefore not needing the profit margins of high-wage countries, the US Government goes straight to "National Security".
I mean, technically, I think it is a National Security risk, but for reasons of the future economic stability of the US, not for "hack the planet" reasons.
The US acts in its own economic interests. Everything else is secondary. What the US is saying, however, is to give the impression that their motives are more honorable than "give us money, not them". This isn't necessarily "wrong", as most countries probably act in the same way, it just happens that the US are the ones shouting from the rooftops at the moment.
I was going to post the same thing.
"Sites need revenue, and the threat of ad-blockers in some cases actually makes the situation worse for the rest of users by triggering convoluted workaround logic and complex disguising of ads that increase script execution time."
Hulce has his argument all arse about face in many ways. Assuming a site needs revenue, assuming that ads are a decent source of revenue, assuming javascript is necessary for ads, ignoring the issue of tracking and user-privacy and the well-documented issue of ads having been used as malware vectors (even outside of the tracking and privacy invasion issue).
Maybe, even as an ex-Google employee, those assumptions just come naturally.
Not blocking ads on the Internet is like unsafe sex in the 80's.
With more and more of these large companies and high level politicians being exposed (Panama, Paradise Papers) as using as many techniques as possible to avoid paying appropriate taxes and shifting money through various offshore tax havens, there are two things that bother me:
1. These are people and companies held up to be respected and act as examples to the general populace as to how to behave. Unlike economics, this WILL have an actual trickle down effect.
2. This leads towards an "if you can, then do" attitude, no matter the legality or morality. It basically justifies outright thievery. You failed to secure it, so you lose ownership of it.
Failure to bring world leadership to heel is encouragement to the rest of the populace to seek their own methods of advantage.
For me, the thing that's most obviously concerning about "their" rush to get this thing through, is that it's unprecedented.
Australia, that doesn't want to lead the world by implementing a country-wide fiber to the home network infrastructure.
Australia, that doesn't want to lead the world in renewable energy despite it's abundance of wide-open spaces and sunshine.
Australia, that hasn't had terror attacks anywhere near the scale of those in the US, UK, or Europe, wants to implement unprecedented legislation "in a hurry".
Something's fishy. Be it copyright, or setting precedent in lil' ol' Australia so that other western countries can follow the lead, or creating Australia as the funnel through which the rest of the 5-eyes can siphon their requests, or as some WW3 anti-China / Russia preparation, I don't know. But it ain't the safety of Australia's citizens that's the concern of this Government.
Given the corruption inherent in US politics, it's almost comical that they're trying to blame Russia for influence. So much more anti-social influence comes from the biggest, most successful, economy-supporting companies within the country itself because there are no rules to make campaign donations and lobbying more transparent. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to change because it's the people who would be able to make these rules that are benefitting from their absence.
On my to-watch list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(film)
And the anti-encryption proposal is currently following precisely the same path.
Short time for public comment, plenty of expert commentary arguing against it, zero acknowledgement of said expert commentary. The next and last stage is for it to be passed.
The Green's will object, but Labor, oh-so-disappointingly and confusingly, will not. Although it's not confusing because Labor are just another "big political party" full of power-hungry control-freaks that WANT this, as per the current government.
What reasons do people have for purchasing expensive Apple hardware to then go and install Linux on it?
One of the reasons I've heard for the justification of the inflated Apple pricing is that it buys you into the convenient, interoperable Apple ecosystem.
Surely, if you want to run Linux, and have a budget that stretches to an Apple laptop, it would also cover a range of both more powerful and at least nearly-as-stylish non-Apple laptops.
Dual-booting is the only option that makes sense to me. Needing the Apple ecosystem on one hand, but also the flexibility of Linux on the other.
So, how far away from the tipping point where 'allow' lists will overtake 'deny' lists in their maintainability?
For my individual purposes an 'allow' list would be perfect and contain very few domains. I think the 'state of decay' of the Internet means it's time to impose this upon the rest of the household. One member, however, will NOT give up their Facebook. Already, there are two very difficult conversations in the pipeline.
I get your point, which is the real "big picture".
However, in the "small picture" in which most proles live, there's no reason, in a world of digital streaming and bandwidth enough to for smooth 1080p video, that digital entertainment be delayed into any market other than profit maximisation strategies due to artificial scarcity - or just the complete lack of consideration for a market so small as Australia.
Both of the above options invite copyright infringement in a connected world where even a few days' delay means you're late to a global conversation.
To reiterate, however, the big picture view is: who gives a fuck? Do something more worthwhile than watching the latest episode of <won't learn anything new about life, but will pass the otherwise excruciating time in which I'd be wondering what to do with myself>.
> I don't think the US REALLY cares about 3D printing of guns though
Think about it as precedent. The ultra-powerful NRA manages to maintain the status quo even against mass shootings in schools. The NRA maintains it's power due to LOTS AND LOTS of guns being sold in the US. Once 3D printing matures a bit, and more reliable, bigger, more powerful handguns and rifles can be 3D-printed, then LOTS AND LOTS of guns will be getting 3D-printed rather than sold. A gun itself can't be downloaded from the internet, but blueprints can, and blueprints can be copyright-infringed.
This will eat at the heart of the happy marriage of capitalism and gun ownership that forms a part of US culture.
I think the US cares about the 3D printing of guns more than it may seem. They'll try to contain it as long as they can, but restricting the 3D printing of guns at the same time as not changing any other gun laws is hypocrisy that won't stand up to the Constitution (rightly or wrongly).
"adverts continuing to stealthily make their way into the operating system"
Stealthily like a fart in an elevator populated by two people.
So, I'm running Windows 10 unlicensed. I wasn't sure if the "stealthy" advertising was their way of monetising an unlicensed installation. Seems not. Makes me glad I haven't paid for the privilege of receiving unsolicited advertising at least.
I see Desktop Linux has moved closer than the horizon it occupied for a couple of decades.
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