Was he "wrong" or was he lying? I'd say that's secondary, in some way.
The first thing that matters is the result. And it continues
a) to be unacceptable, and
b) to not be addressed
1,135 karma · joined July 27, 2013
The first thing that matters is the result. And it continues
a) to be unacceptable, and
b) to not be addressed
The real issue that must be resolved and is still not being addressed is:
As long as these NSA activities are not dismantled and the People do not have transparency over what the NSA/government does, everyone of us can still be "eliminated" by the push of a few buttons and democracy therefor no longer exists.
Even if its decline happens slowly and behind our backs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog).
...because we thought life would be easier for us if we didn't even try.
Why should one start to "eat" in a way that our body was never made for?
For how long has humanity been eating natural and solid things again?
It happens all the time, though, if you look at the financial, banking, insurance and oil industry - even without the slightest (moral) excuse. And nobody goes to jail, just some ridiculous fines to pay.
This time, there is a very serious moral imperative.
Will they? They're of course competitors, they could be played off against each other by the government. Anyways, such talks would have to remain ultra-secret.
It kind of really sucks that we're still discussing that we should be discussing solutions.
Also, know that the rest of the main stream media don't seem to like the idea of discussing this mess and any possible solutions - probably b/c they're ultimately controlled by influential politicians or other moneyed interests.
I can only speak for myself, but my only sin is to still have an iPhone (soon to be replaced by an Ubuntu phone).
Apart from this, I have left all of the NSA partner companies' products/services in favor of open-source products (or else nothing). It's really not that difficult, much more of psychological "hurdle".
For those who missed it: https://prism-break.org/ is a good start.
> Around this same time I became aware of the problem of observation in quantum mechanics. At it’s basic level the issue is that you can affect particles by simply observing them.
That's simply because you can only measure by adding energy to the system, which obviously changes the state of the system.
Sure, that's true and the advantage of Freenet and GNUnet. The flip side of the caching is of course that this comes at a cost: It takes a lot more resources to have this kind of redundancy.
RetroShare btw does let you download files anonymously from friends-of-friends etc. if the "owner" agrees to it. (You only have to know your immediate friends.)
And then of course, this only "solves" the email problem, unlike darknet solutions.
The most complete one seems to be http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
For me any discussion has the ultimate goal of improving things. Even if it takes a long time.
I tried to explain that here, regarding only 1 specific topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935
Maybe one answer is "because we don't feel enough pain yet". In this case, don't worry, the pendulum will swing back soon enough.
The concept of real democracy is still the best one we can get.
No.
It's just that we haven't gotten through to eliminating the corrupting elements and anchoring this legally, yet.
Why? Because corruption (= ultimately money) protects itself.
We definitely should encrypt everything, whenever possible.
The issue goes a lot further: We have a technology monoculture.
Technology has this annoying property to trend towards a monoculture. You can also see this when you count the tech giants who hold 80% of whatever product/service market. Every tech company attempts to lock you in, sometimes using the network effect (i.e. social networks), sometimes using tech integration (i.e. Apple).
> "Hushmail has a fairly secure email service. [...]"
Pretty surprising, coming from a guy like him. A little reminder: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/