and yet, without the camera this woman would not have been arrested.
The problem is the police-camera system, of which the camera is an instrumental component
82 karma · joined May 31, 2026
The problem is the police-camera system, of which the camera is an instrumental component
Edit: I realize this sounds very conspiratorial and hand-wavey but this is my just my personal anecdote from University of Florida, that the cameras showed up with the protests. There is probably more to university poltics than I am aware of, but my impression is that there is signifigant corruption and adminstrative bloat. A major aspect of college protests was funding wrt Israel. Not that all of my experiences with college have been negative, but I leave with the impression there is something strange in the university system at large.
1) it requires you to open a lightning channel. So you need some amount of initial investment (which usually means you need a credit card and an account on a bitcoin exchange), not just any computer which is the issue that using mining shares solves. The initial investment is my main grudge, as it is way too much friction for 402 Payment Required applications. Also as bitcoiners like sztorc note, this isn't feasible for most of the world's population due to bitcoin's small block size.
2) It's not private. People are going to be linking these things to their identities on crypto exchanges. So now feds can basicially track everything you do on the internet that way. LN is only private in the sense that not every transaction is broadcast to everyone else on the network, which is a very low bar. Chainalysis is possible with the right connections.
To a lesser extent, 3) Centralization in the lightning routing protocol which contributes to the effect of #2.
The status quo with those js PoW pages doesn't really benefit the server owner at all, it's wasted energy.
I mean proof of work is always wasted energy, but I figure it's better to kill two birds with one stone.
CoinHive was one example of this. (I think this is a correct link? https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive). Although I think ideally you would want to have some sort of browser plugin or app that runs on bare metal instead of a proof-of-work in the browser, because RandomX is designed such that it's slow when implemented in JS (https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md)
Another option I was thinking of would be a pretty inflationary (or demurrage) cryptocurrency in which you have some sort of RandomX or other CPU-bound PoW. A web server could act as a mining pool and use mining shares interchangibly with micropayments.
You could do this mining-share method with Monero right now, it's just that you have higher transaction size in Monero and no real analogue to Bitcoin's LN-based microtransactions. Also you would want the cryptocurrency to be more inflationary (or demurrage-based) to promote usage.
Monero's FCMP++ lays some groundwork for payment channels, but it still lacks the nessisary timelocks. Also there was DLSAG which could have enabled payment channels I think, but it's no longer relevant. I also insist that you would need to change the tokenomics to favor greater inflation (maybe you could make coinbase scale linearly with hashrate?), otherwise the miner reward would be economicially insufficient.
I'm actually working on this right now. I made a case for the module + antennas if you want.
EDIT: oops I hadn't read the article yet LOL. But the wisdom about the USB module still applies. There are also adapters for mpcie or m.2 or whatever modules to convert them to USB modules. Also you probably want to have a module or adapter with a sim card tray.
I bought mine off of aliexpress and also bought the LTE antennas. You need a separate antenna for GPS as well.
Lastly, with some of these adapters, the sim card goes in backwards relative to how you normally think it goes in. This had me stuck for a couple hours.
It works for the same reason locks on houses work against cops or criminals, despite the existence of lockpicking and locksmiths. There are various layers of physical security, and while no layer can prevent an attack absolutely they each increase the cost of an attack.
The system is only as secure as it's weakest layer.
So in a mixed information/physical system like a smartphone why should we allow the weak point to be the information system? To improve the information system we need only to rewrite the software, so the per-unit cost is nothing in the large.
In the wrench attack you are aware that you have been attacked, and you're aware of what data the attacker gains.
Additionally there are schemes like deniable encryption which can mitigate the outcomes of such an attack or serve as a red herring.
Furthermore it's dependent on physical intimidation which is expensive to scale and can be met with your own physical intimidation. In order for a wrench attack to scale to an entire society you have to send the gestapo to everyone's house whereas push-button attacks scale by default unbenownst to the victims and enable more nefarious systems to be built on top of them. In the USA this would mean interrogating some well armed citizens.
Lastly, you aren't forced to give up the key by any means. They can torture you to death and there is nothing they can do if you don't want to give up the key. There are some secrets in the game of love and war that are worth taking to - it's why spies are equipped with cyanide pills.
Plus it just takes too much time to go to starbucks, especially with all the starbucks job applications I will need to fill out if I want a chance of getting a job.
Can you prove that there is no hash function that is not vulnerable? If anything man-made is vulnerable, then there cannot any invulnerable system. That is what you need to prove to win the argument. And if we can prove that any system is unbreakable, you are wrong.
Maybe we should campaign to ban all left-wing aligned projects from all major git hosting services. No big deal right? After all they can just go somewhere else. No, clearly this is not reasonable. But I say this to demonstrate that your ability operate in society at large depends on the same principle of free speech that you do not extend to others.
Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
Let's say I offhandedly mention your email in this comment, for example, like we had an out of band conversation somewhere else. Then, someone takes that email and links it to another forum where they find your phone number. Then another person looks up that phone number in a phone book. Then another person finds your github account from the email associated with your PGP and finds where you work etc. Let's say a comment you wrote 7 months ago vaguely mentions something about where you live, which in combination with the previous information narrows it down to a single place.
At what point does that become doxxing and who is responsible? Pseudonymous people nessisarially, slowly leak small amounts of information about themselves when on the internet in order to engage in communication.
It is only when you collect "enough" bits of information that it becomes threatening doxx.
You could say publishing this collection of facts is the doxx. But the point of the article is that stylometry and AI tools can do this investigation for you. Anyone can trivially assemble the collection themselves.
I think ultimately, it's a matter of personal responsibility. It has to be. If you have perfect opsec, I can't touch you AI tools or not. And if I have perfect opsec and I'm doxxing you, then no laws will be able to catch up to me.
The proposal that seems to infringe on free speech, but mostly I take issue because there just isn't really a precedent for what such a thing would look like. What constitutes doxxing? It is easy to accidentally doxx someone by mentioning some offhand fact in conversation, because you may not know what series of facts can be connected to form a doxx. Typicially, people doxx themselves by accident, and someone else is merely pointing it out. I know I have many times. You live and learn.
There isn't really a right to privacy in the way that there's a right to free speech. Free speech is important to processes of public transparency and justice which I think this would interfere with. But it's also true that justice is blind and doxxing can interfere with a judicial process.
Also, if everyone is going to have access to super-stylometry tools in the future, which is the premise of the article that GP reacts to, it will be fruitless to uphold such a right because anyone can just run doxxyou.exe themselves. There's no need to spread doxx because it can be reproduced individually.
The term doxxing came from a certain hacker culture where it was implied that you connected some real-life identity to a criminal pseudonym. It essentially meant "snitching". So the idea that doxxing itself would be a crime is interesting. It's a reversal of the original meaning.
But it's also true that the public has discovered sybil-suseptible techniques (like swatting) where you can screw with ordinary people's lives by knowing their identity. Which is interesting because we live in a new culture of "share everything online" vs old the hacker ethos of "don't use your real name online". The attackers have become stronger and the defenders weaker.
It makes me wonder if we could use non-instruct LLMs to slightly alter the wording of text while keeping the meaning the same meaning. Perhaps by using perplexity or some other metric. I don't know, maybe you compare the distance of the "meaning" vectors.
You might also want to have some "style" vector associated with each pseudonym. For example, I might want it to produce british english under a certain pseudonym, and simulate an ESL speaker under another.
Essentially, you would want some way of re-styling text. The basic way to do this would be to run the same sylometry tools the hunter uses and manually make synonym word/phrase subsitutions to lower your similarity.
It's a cat and mouse game, but I think the mouse eventually wins. Consider a program that translates your english writing programmaticially into a low-entropy symbolic form and then translates them back to english in a procedural manner. Basicially you design an intermediary language that cannot contain style. It would be boring to read but it would remove all the style.
At the same time, I do kind of want more bandwidth just so I can download massive files like model weights quickly, host a web service out of my own house, seed torrents, etc. What might cryptocurrency look like if typical residential internet speeds were measured in gb/s? Perhaps bitcoin might be capable of more than 7 tps!
But to be fair, I am a nobody.