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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

"If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy"

This is still techno-optimism. The architecture of your code will not to that. We are long past the limits of what you can fix with code.

The only action that matters is political and I don't think voting cuts it.

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Yeah, reminds me of the "Security" xkcd (https://xkcd.com/538/) - a threat from a good ol' 5-dollar wrench defeating state-of-the-art encryption.

Never estimate how state actors can use violence (or merely the threat of it) to force people to do things. The only way to respond to that is not through code or algorithms or protocols, but through political action (whether it be violent or non-violent)

can we align that code, algorithm, code to be forms and important forms of political action?

Soatok Dreamseeker is working on a more xkcd-538-proof system: https://soatok.blog/2025/08/09/improving-geographical-resili... https://github.com/soatok/freeon. Fundamentally, though, it's built on the assumption that geographical resilience is possible – that a group can be distributed such that no one organisation can perform $5-wrench attacks against enough of them to break the cryptography. (Given that the attack's impossible, a sensible attacker would avoid tipping their hand by attempting it, thus sparing contributors from violence.)

I should be clear:

Nothing is xkcd-538-proof, in absolute terms. Violence is always possible.

But having a tool that is more resistant to authoritarian overreach by being geographically distributed does make it harder to pull these attacks off.

> We are long past the limits of what you can fix with code.

example of what is not possible to fix with code?

Picture wrench attacks. What use is your Monero's security, for example, as I turn a screw into you until you give it up?

Shamir's secret sharing. In that scenario, capturing me alone isn't going to get you anything even if I divulge my piece of the secret. You'd still need to find out who has the other pieces, find them, and convince them to divulge as well.

Maybe there's 3 of us, and the 4th part of the password/secret/private key is on a server of mine somewhere. If I don't check in for x duration, it wipes itself.

Yeah it means my Monero is gone now, but at least my attacker didn't get it.

The threat of the state tossing you in jail until you divulge your password/permit backdooring/etc.

You can design in ways such that there isn't a password to give up in the first place. Maybe the key is distributed and you need all x number of people to decrypt. Sure, maybe the state can capture everyone but it becomes significantly harder than targeting a single person and threatening them with torture.

Combine that with rate limiting and a dead man's switch.

Hard power still matters. It gets access to things like fiber closets, upstream dependencies, subtle flaws in encryption schemes that take years to figure out, information linking your networks, and more than I can think of.

Cute tech can slow them down until they go through the effort of controlling most of TOR's exit nodes and point the Eye of Sauron at you.

slows down = raises costs.

allows small person to be more free by giving assymetric power to heshe.

Hardware? The real world? Pretty much everything?

Power. Real power. The power to kill you, take your property, harm your family, tell lies about you on the news, etc.

I've always been surprised by the naivety of tech people with respect to this question. The only possible solution to power is power itself. Software can be a small part of that, but the main part of it is human organization: credible power to be used against other organized holders of power. No amount of technology will let you go it alone safely. At best, you may hope to hide away from power with the expectation that its abuse will just skip over you. That is the best you could hope for if all you want are software solutions.

seems we little bit narrowed general statement into good direction for discussion. so example seems need to be more concrete.

some exact piece of hardware or some exact activity of power?

think of it as tdd. we check few simple exact cases before generalising.

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