Comment by pipermerriam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pipermerriam | Hacker News Reader

I've come to believe that "the powers that be" will never stop this progressive march towards pervasive monitoring and surveillance. If we succeed in keeping this bill from passing, we'll just be fighting another just like it or worse in a few years. We have to make it fundamentally impossible to monitor our private communications and to share our private data.

To get there, it is going to take a complete shift in how we build internet software. These problems cannot be fixed using the current status quo. I highly encourage you to start looking into projects like Ethereum, IPFS, Whisper and Swarm. The offer a way to build web applications that are completely immune to censorship, monitoring, and large scale data breaches while giving user's control over their data.

This isn't to say that there aren't battles to be fought in the legislation arena. There are and kudos to entities like the EFF for leading the charge. What I'm trying to say is that as long as it's possible to do pervasive surveillance, we're going to keep seeing the powers that be continue in that direction. If it is possible, they will try and do it.

Sources:

* https://www.ethereum.org/

* https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Swarm---distrib...

* https://ipfs.io/

* https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whisper-Overview

Please keep in mind that this person is an Ethereum developer and has a vested financial interest in seeing their Ethereum tokens appreciate in value. This may be a conflict of interest and cloud up the actual technical merits of Ethereum.

I find it a bit disingenuous that this is not being disclosed, considering that there are numerous Ethereum competitors (primary, Bitcoin with SegWit, coming 2016, and Storj, Maidsafe).

I still stand behind everything I said regardless of the technology that ends up accomplishing it. I chose to mention Ethereum because I think it has the best shot. If Ethereum fails, I'll be looking for the next best viable option for a decentralized internet.

I thought about adding the disclaimer and chose against it. Maybe I chose wrong. I sort of see your point about conflict of interest, but that line of thinking also disqualifies almost all of the people who are most intimately familiar with the technology.

If you're skeptical, lets have a conversation about it. I regularly describe my position as skeptically optimistic about Ethereum's future success.

> "I thought about adding the disclaimer and chose against it. Maybe I chose wrong."

Yes, when one is advocating for and recommending a product, it is pretty standard (and, in my opinion, an ethical requirement) for one to also disclose that he/she is heavily involved with that product. It is even more important when one stands to benefit -- especially financially! -- from the product's success.

One's credibility quickly goes right out the window when one fails to disclose these basic facts.

Quite fair and message heard and received. I hope you can take this for what it is, an oversight rather than intent to deceive.

FWIW, If this is about his character: Piper is also a known, trusted, and valued member of the Python community.

Last year, I was driving across the country and needed a place to crash. I randomly looked for someone from a PyCon list and found Piper. He was happy to let myself and a friend sleep at his home; he introduced us to his family and greeted us warmly.

So, take his words with whichever grains of salt you find most relevant.

I'm not convinced that a comment on Hacker News is going to lead to any noticeable financial benefit for the poster's company, and by proxy, the poster himself.

Furthermore, I find your comment extremely suspect, considering you also have a top-level comment [1] in this thread that basically amounts to "guys, guys... there's no reason to worry about this bill!"

If anyone's motives should be questioned, it's you.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789550

It's pretty standard around here for people to disclose their affiliations with $product when {commenting about|recommending|suggesting} $product, regardless of any (financial or other) benefit. Hardly a day goes by when I'm reading comments about some $product that I don't encounter one that includes "Disclosure: I'm a developer for $product".

The problem is that all these approaches to privacy are based on "anonymous activities" such as browsing the web without logging into any website, or participating into any social network where you connect with people you already know.

In order to make sure we don't spill private data I think we need a privacy active monitoring browser. For example, it should have a list of all the identifying attributes such as name, email, facebook page, reddit nickname and make sure they are not passed outside. The privacy browser could also identify dangerous topics and pages and send warnings before searching/posting/loading anything. It would actually enforce good data hygiene to make this process much easier for people.

Privacy is hard to maintain, requires a lot of care and a single mistake could be enough to reveal your real identity. That's why we need to create safe environments where privacy is a given.

> The privacy browser could also identify dangerous topics and pages and send warnings before searching/posting/loading anything. It would actually enforce good data hygiene to make this process much easier for people.

Isn't the point of the whole privacy thing to not be forced in to avoiding discussion of certain topics for fear of being labeled a dissident?

A more distributed internet infrastructure would also be needed i.e. mesh networks. Dragnet surveillance is too simple and easy to do when the internet infrastructure is centralized in the hands of a couple ISPs.

and we seem to have started feverishly building half-arsed workarounds too [0]

[0] "Alibi Routing" [pdf] suggests a way to avoid routing packets through certain locations (e.g. to counter dragnet surveillance) http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p611....

> "If we succeed in keeping this bill from passing ..."

We're too late. It already passed.

FTA (first sentence):

> "... President Obama signed into law last week ..."

So, tl;dr: politicians are biased toward having more power, and don't take into account how this affects the world.

We saw this coming a long way off. The best solution I can think of is requiring politicians to take comprehensive classes on whatever topic they're grying to legislate, but that in itself is a nightmare to implement.

To borrow from Robert Heinlein, we don't even require that politicians be able to read . . .

I hope that Sanders becoming president will help at least as a first step.

What is the purpose of this comment? It's a political platitude with no substance.

The president can veto bills for example. I know it might only be the first step.

It won't be, because he'd get the same intel briefs as Obama, the same advisors would tell him the same things, and they'd be generally right.

Can you be more specific?

He's deploying the argument against privacy that there is a great danger which is not being revealed to the public. It always makes me roll my eyes. Sure there is no doubt an intelligence situation that has a completely different perspective of the web, but that doesn't prevent a leader from implementing some basic protection for the public, making an effort to better secure (aka not covertly cripple) American tech or at least create an improved whistle blower system.

This has little to do with privacy, and every potential security advisor, to any president, knows this and would explain as much.

It's not that there's a great threat, it's that the public is just particularly stupid about this issue.

If this information is so compelling and worthy of such drastic action, then, in a fair and transparent society, it's also necessary to disclose it and let the public decide.

The Occam's razor explanation is that this is just politicians acting in their interests, not that there is some blockbuster intel that, if only we knew...

> and they'd be generally right

They might be persuasive. But there is little evidence from outcomes in Iraq, Syria, etc. that they are right in any way that matters.

> It won't be, because he'd get the same intel briefs as Obama, the same advisors would tell him the same things, and they'd be generally right.

Well, first, they wouldn't be the same advisors -- even same-party administrations don't tend to carry over very many of of the President's direct advisors.

Second, even with the same advisors, Sanders, while he might agree with Obama on some things, is likely to have different priorities and values, which will shape actual policy, even if he had the same advisors presenting the same facts and similar interpretations of the facts.

Sanders says Snowden should be punished. Not on the side of internet freedom.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-greer/bernie-sanders-woul...

I think it's possible that somebody can be for "internet freedom" while also believing that as the bossman they have to enforce the law. Snowden would probably agree and just ask that the trail be fair and the punishment not designed to silence future whistleblowers.

His stance is more nuanced.

> "I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American public ... he did break the law, and I think there should be a penalty to that," Sanders said. He went on to say that the role Snowden played in educating the public about violations of their civil liberties should be considered before he is sentenced, and that as president he would "absolutely" end the NSA spying programs in question.

Basically it seems to me he wants Snowden to get a fair trial, which would require some new legislation first or for him to be charged with a different crime. And aside from Rand Paul, I don't think any other candidate is as strong on Internet freedom as Sanders.

I agree. The centralized client-server model will look outdated very soon

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