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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent. I have a dongle that plugs into my phone that can decode aircraft transponders, or tune any station on a wide spectrum, that cost less than a fancy coffee. Tech has brought many wonderful tools to those of us willing to learn.

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> Let the sheep have their facebook apps.

Those "sheep" (i.e. people who aren't crypto-nerds) are the people I mainly want to communicate with.

> Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent.

And those pathways are almost never used, except by people who have an unusual interest in the pathways themselves and people who want to use them to do ignoble and illegal things.

Also, those technologies aren't as powerful as you think they are. Any major government that cares to detect and block them can, and if they want to find out what you sent they can always hack your endpoint or beat you until you tell them. China is the proof of concept for that.

>> And those pathways are almost never used

I used signal this morning to talk to a team of 100+ people on a big project. I sent an encrypted email to my parents last night. A month ago I used Tor to bypass a hotel's silly DNS block on "Torrentfreak.com". My laptop is running a linux distro that I downloaded as a torrent. These are all everyday non-cryptonerd activities that leverage very powerful security products.

n=1 and all. I think "almost never used" isn't far off the mark. All of this sounds like hardcore nerd territory to me, with the possible exception of Signal, which still has strong nerdy vibes and is very tiny compared to its competitors. Sending encrypted e-mail from Linux definitely seems to be something that's almost never done, at population scale. If that isn't crypto nerd territory, what is?

If you were looking for everyday things lots of people do that make use of powerful security technology, Whatsapp's e2e encryption or https would be much better examples I guess; people actually use these en masse and can do so all by themselves, without support or nagging by experienced hardcore nerds.

I had the same sort of attitude to the parent comment until I remembered that maybe you and I don't live in the same culture that the parent does. I mean culture here as group of networked individuals with overlapping interested. Maybe there's a significant portion of people out there that do use those tools on the regular, and you and I just haven't been exposed to them. The earth is huge, and it's very possible that while we think his n=1, from his perspective n->100%.

Sending encrypted email and using Tor to bypass WiFi is restrictions are very, very crypto-nerd things to do, and running Linux is non-mainstream at best.

Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to any strongman who promises bold action, no matter how nightmarish that would be for most people.

That is the US story. It has less to do with facebook and more to do with the US political system. There are plenty of countries who have very different systems that have not followed the same path in recent years. Tech companies are part of the problem but should not be made scapegoat to avoid the deeper issues within the American political system, issues that existed long before the internet was a thing.

UK Brit here. Countries like the UK and the US certainly have their flaws, but I'd take them before nearly everything else that's on offer.

China's system seems terrible. The whole of Africa seems like a corrupt system. The EU seems mostly woke, and I'm not sure I particularly want that. Canada seems to have bought a first class ticket on the Progressivist crazy train from what I've been hearing. What's left? Not much, by the looks of it. Singapore, maybe?

Brazil.

>>The EU seems mostly woke

Can you please elaborate more on that? I thought US is going more woke and France in the EU is pushing back on wokeism.

The whole of Africa is a host of very different systems. It's rather annoying fielding this stuff that appears quite ignorant.

Down from, like, two at the best of times. It's always either them or us, which is likely part of the problem

I’m by no means an expert in US political history but all books and papers I’ve read indicate that this polarisation between the parties did not always exist. Members were allowed to vote according to their own principals instead of just the party line which is basically always opposing the other party.

Senators and other politicians would have bbq on Saturday at each other’s place. It appears that this no longer happens.

Too much transparency. If thousands of eyes of gatekeepers are at you at all times, and immediately start screaming that you are a DINO or a RINO if you do not hold the party line at all times, you have all the incentives to be strictly partisan.

We generally consider transparency in politics a good thing, especially because it may reduce corruption. But it comes with significant downsides. Only very resilient personalities are able to ignore the psychopathic monkey cesspool that is the political Twitter. The rest will submit to Moloch.

(Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" are a good read; I was lucky enough to meet the author two days ago at a meetup in Prague.)

Oh. What meetup, what did I miss?

Prague-Karlín, Sunday Oct the 3rd.

>Only very resilient personalities are able to ignore the psychopathic monkey cesspool that is the political Twitter.

Then don't visit twitter and post on an obscure nntp newsgroup instead.

I am talking about career politicians here, who usually use social networks to keep in touch with their electorate. Though they often have staff to do the lowly comment/response work.

Maybe it is a bad idea and a NNTP newsgroup would be better. Should be tried.

Deregulation of lobbying seems to have been the trigger, but any two party state with silly electoral systems like the U.K. and US is vulnerable to such polarisation.

Also "winner take all" election system combined with gerrymandering. The gerrymandering works short-term by helping you win the election, but it also makes you hostage to the more excitable and active of your party's members.

Will it be better if we destroy FB and the sheep is back at TVs?

It would be better if we didn't keep referring to people as sheep, TBH.

Sheep are interesting animals. I was in the Rockies last week, read a newspaper article about a female sheep who killed a bear who was threatening her children.

I think that was a goat...

Calling people sheep in this context is uncalled for.

Temporarily shrouding oneself in Tor, DDG, VPNs, etc doesn't address the root problem: the commoditization of data. The next generations will have fewer and fewer tools to subvert the system. Real change will come from addressing the root problem rather than finding individualistic, temporary solutions.

curious, what is this dongle called and where would I get one to give it a try?

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/

Don't go for the 15$ bare-bones options. Buy one of the 50-100$ kits so you have at least some basic antennas and necessary cables.

If you're spending $50-$100 on equipment, maybe it's worth buying a better dongle too with more than 2-3 MHz of bandwidth.

When it comes to radio-related gear, there is always a slightly better model for a few dollars more.

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