Machine Identification Code | Hacker News Reader

Machine Identification Code

en.wikipedia.org

62 pointsvishnuharidas15 comments

I've posted this recently before: I believe that your gear should be "loyal" to you, and do whatever you want, without spying on you or betraying you. In my opinion, this should be a basic right.

You might counter: yes but why shouldn't we add this, if we can easily stop people from counterfeiting money, leaking documents, flying drones in restricted areas and so on. It's so convenient that we can stop this with a bit of technology. We'll, it would be convenient if we could compell people to testify against themselves or their families, or if we would open and scan all mail, or require priests to report confessions to law enforcement. Yes, we could reduce some crimes this way, but we deliberately chose not to. It's a matter of weighting the interests of law enforcement against a basic feeling of "trust" that you have inside a society.

Fundamentally it's about the commitment to individual liberty as the highest good. Something that's fallen by the wayside in recent years.

I don't think it ever was the _highest_ good. It may be argued that it has moved around the hierarchy, and it may in fact not be at an all time high, but there were always things which we (society) put above liberty.

early American history strikes me as being punctuated by periods where individual liberty was the highest value. The frontier/westward expansion, for example. The constitution itself seems hinged on optimising for personal liberty by balancing "freedom to" and "freedom from" liberties.

I always thought of personal liberty as the value from which other values derive. For example, the law exists to protect our rights (the right to life and the right to property being the most obvious examples) from bad actors. Social welfare and socialised healthcare restrict the damage that personal catastrophe and random chance can do to our freedoms.

Whose commitment, exactly? The more I watch current events unfold, the more I realize they are the culmination of a very long game played by very powerful people, over the course of at least a generation.

the commitment of the predominant culture.

I'm always less inclined to believe that it's a few powerful people, and more inclined to think it's a cultural war between memes (in the Dawkins sense). People are driven by ideas. If powerful people are contributing to a cause it's probably because they are under the influence of a meme. That, or a more Machiavellian reasoning like trying to purchase social capital.

The war between memes is fostered by these few and powerful.

There was a plot point in the film, "The Lives of Others," where the East German police keep a registration and fingerprint of all typewriters, and find a document written on an unregistered typewriter.

The precedents for machine identity go way back. The only difference is at least here, you don't need a license or registration for a printer, albeit you do in effect for a mobile device.

Remember to act surprised.

Any competent bad guy knows to create messages composed of cut out letters from various magazine headlines.