Depending on the number of devices you have, your threat model, it can be helpful to set up a security hierarchy. So you only need to worry about securing the devices at the top of the hierarchy, and can play loose and careless with the devices lower down. That way it’s less likely to lose everything due to one mistake
Interesting, I didn’t realize still gif was lossless, I was thinking in comparison to lossy formats like jpg.
Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.
My point is that SSH access is very powerful, and effectively means that the security of the SSH server is reduced to the security of the SSH client. If your SSH client is pwned, so is your server. If you have 10 devices each with ssh access to each other, then if any one device is pwned, all devices are pwned as well.
This is not the case for systems designed for file sharing only. For example with syncthing, if one device gets pwned, all it can do is send files to the other devices.
Authoritarianism is the more efficient governing model.
The hard part is picking the right authority. That’s what the other models factor in. But yeah authoritarianism can be more efficient if we pick the perfect authority
Some people have done such horrible things beyond a shadow of a doubt that even death is too much of a mercy. They should be kept alive and tortured mentally and physically every day until they die of natural disease processes.
but…why? What good does this serve? It just wastes time and resources on the torture
still gifs have good compression? I recall that motion gifs are notorious for large file sizes, but are still gifs the opposite?
Most people probably don’t care but it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices. For my main devices I don’t give them SSH access to each other, but I do give them SSH access to my secondary devices (like a Pi-Hole)
I would argue that your examples are about manipulation of people, not of the currency. Similar to the craziness of the GME (Gamestop) era, where it felt like everybody and their dog started buying GME stock. Or, say, a news outlet causing panic and a bank run. Though you’re right that since crypto still doesn’t have broad adoption, it’s easier to manipulate the smaller userbase.
Manipulation of the currency would be more like the government printing more money. This is not possible in crypto, where power is decentralized.
The instability is definitely unfortunate though. It’s a chicken and egg problem. If crypto had wider adoption, and was accepted in many stores, then it would become more stable. Just look at how much more stable the big crypto coins (bitcoin, eth) are compared to smaller altcoins. However, due to low adoption it’s still quite unstable, and that instability hurts adoption 🙃
Nope, I considered this as well.
GNU Taler is built on top of existing payment systems. It’s just a token you exchange money for, like those arcades you go to where you exchange money for arcade tokens. So it’s only as decentralized as the system it’s built on top of.
It does provide some privacy, but only for buyers, so this doesn’t prevent censorship. If the banks want to ban porn sites from accepting money, or block Steam from accepting transactions for porn games, they can. Censoring sales is the same as censoring purchases.
On top of that, if GNU Taler is built on top of centralized banking like it’s currently pushing for, then it inherits the same problems. The government can say “Poor people can’t be trusted, so we won’t let poor people get tokens, they’ll just have to use trackable methods like Paypal.” Or they can have a social credit system and say “Only people with 5000 credit or above can use Taler.”
And the government and banks still control the value and supply of the currency. They can print money however they want.
GNU Taler also doesn’t try to solve the distributed consensus problem. Afaik, it offloads the problem to the implementation. I have no idea how current implementations deal with multiple servers disagreeing on the ledger of transactions (say, due to network issues or server crashes), but it sounds like it trusts that servers will cooperate, and uses government audits to verify compliance. Again, centralized, and vulnerable to corruption, coercion, and collusion. GNU Taler could technically be built on top of bitcoin and blockchain, it even says so in the official FAQ, but that’s not their current vision
What problems? And crypto gets associated with crime because the currency is harder to control, which is precisely the point. Governments love being able to control their payments systems, just like they love to define what a “crime” is.
Nobody expects things to never break, but stability is a spectrum and clearly hyprland is less stable than the average. That’s the main conclusion I got from the post at least. And less stability means more time needed to fix. Nothing you can do about that aside from switching to a different DE
manipulated by whales? are you talking about 51% attacks? censorship? Can you link some concrete examples of major crypto coins getting manipulated? I think there was a potential 51% attack on Monero but IIRC nothing actually happened.
I only put “if it’s big” to help readers imagine a large pile and how it would become more inconvenient the larger the pile. Language is not as precise as math or programming. If you’d like you can imagine the sentence as saying something like “imagine a big pile. It’s definitely not O(1)”
That is an incredibly detailed reply. Thanks.
Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.
The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient. I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available. Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.
Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.
I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service. For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service. But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme. If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries? I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.
An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design.
Analog systems need to be designed too. And they can be just as tyrannical, inconvenient, and invasive.
The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.
Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services? Of course, they have incentive for the opposite. Tracking users gives them power, and makes their job easier.
Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.
Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy. It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.
In the meantime, I haven’t seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion
This is just decentralization. This is literally what I alluded to in my root comment. Crypto solves these problems
Governments are centralized control. Just take a look at the current US administration, and the economic sanctions they pushed left and right. You trust them to keep their hands off transactions happening within their own country?
yes but the problem is having to spend time to fix it in the first place. On a more stable de/compositor like Plasma or Sway, you won’t have these problems
The bigger the pile, the longer it takes to find an individual item (worst case). How is that O(1)?
how is this related to NixOS? Once you upgrade your hyprland version on NixOS (which you’ll have to do eventually, at least for security fixes), you have to worry about the config breaking just the same
It sounds like you assume that if offline access was a fundamental right, the government would not only respect it, but the offline access would also be private by default. I think that is a bold assumption, but I think we’ll just have to disagree because it’s impossible to know what the government would actually do. I just know that society tends towards efficiency, and offline methods are simply inefficient, so I expect it to go away in the future, unless there was some fundamental reason why offline access was necessary (and not indirect reasons, like the right to privacy).
I think at this point it’s also good to revisit your original comment at the root of this thread so we can clarify what exactly you are asking for. It sounds like you are asking for two things: for offline methods to interact with government services and utilities (in other words, things necessary for survival), and for offline methods to use commercial services, like games.
What is the reason you want offline access to government services? Surely it’s not privacy, since you usually have to provide your government ID to interact with the service. My guess is that you want to avoid giving data to commercial entities, and also avoid interaction with commercial entities, like Microsoft. Your primary concerns are third-party data collection and boycott rights. So it sounds like you don’t necessarily want offline access, you want to be able to interact with government services without any other dependencies.
But the postal service is just one example I brought up. There are tons of other dependencies in the background. I’m positive most governments use Microsoft Word. They’ll be using it to draft the paperwork that they send to you. They probably scan and OCR your letters for archival, and their scanning software is probably commercial and collects data. If your goal is elimination of external dependencies, then offline access is just the tip of the iceberg. And just because these dependencies are hidden, doesn’t mean one can ignore them. If that was the case you could just send your documents to a friend and ask them to send it to the government for you, and ask them not to tell you how they did it. That way you wouldn’t know if a commercial service was involved!
OK and as for offline methods to use commercial services, like games, I think in this case your goal is privacy. However I think this demand is fairly unreasonable as well. Obviously there are certain services that require online access, like real-time chat applications. The problem is that any company can construct artificial reasons for why they need online access, or even data collection. Youtube can say that they require personal data to curate your feed. You already mentioned that data minimization laws were ineffective. I don’t see how you can reasonable expect companies bend over backwards to provide offline access, when it’s far simpler for them to just make up a reason for why they need online access, or why they need your personal data.
I should clarify since I realize I got a bit mixed up in earlier comments: when I argue that privacy should be a fundamental right, I don’t expect to force all companies to follow some vague definition of “data minimization”. I just want to make sure the government can’t ban encryption and anonymizing services like Tor. In other words I’m not forcing companies to perform certain actions, I’m preventing certain consumer actions from being criminalized. I think this is much more realistic of a goal. And I believe that as long as encryption and anonymization is possible, then certain individuals will want it, and certain companies and groups will provide it. Anti-trust is important here too.
Of course the market for privacy is tiny, but that’s simply the reality. Not many people care unfortunately, and it’s unrealistic to force companies to care about something few people care about. However, the good news is that some people do still care. There are FOSS re-writes of some of the games you mentioned. For Age of Empires theres 0.A.D and OpenAge. I think this is the best one can hope for.