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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • It’s up to us as voters to elect governments that do not abuse surveillance technology.

    Surveillance technology is only feedback.

    There’s also the regulator which uses that feedback. It’s means of regulation are bots, properly formed news, law policies, and raw action. Probably even targeted murders.

    That system together affects whom “we as voters” elect. Because we are too many to organize, while for regulation our numbers and diversity are actually favorable, to treat us all as one object.

    Which means that electoral democracy is dead. Direct democracy with nationwide mandatory participation and rotational sortitioned filling of state roles requiring a working individual (like conscription where you can’t refuse or it’s a process requiring some proof of good reasons) may work.

    To increase as much as possible the technical complexity of influencing a society like an object.

    One can also (with reservations and limitations and very careful design) look at the Soviet system (one that really functioned in early 20s and late 80s).

    The key is nationwide participation. Electing someone else to represent you is just too risky with such crowd control means as available today.

    While the technology can be made public-controlled in the widest sense, so that not only a certain JD Vance could see where you are at every moment, but that you could see where he is as well. All state surveillance should be public. And there should be no state secrets.



  • I was, but the comparison of the Latin language in Europe to China is in some sense correct.

    And, eh, a lot of the general population knew enough Latin for prayers, and those somehow educated would use it as the language of anything cultured.

    I mean, you might, from this comparison, not understand well enough how big is the Chinese influence on the early history of Korea and Japan. It’s probably more like some Iranian influences on Armenia, the Armenian language was considered Iranian when linguistics as a science wasn’t big. Probably bigger than French influences on modern England, keeping in mind that a significant part of of its population spoke Anglo-Norman at various points in history.

    It was more like the first language for most of these countries’ nobility (not just ruling class, the difference between an aristocrat and a noble, - a duke is the former, a count is the former, a baron is the latter).

    And that influence lasted for like a thousand years longer, and ended later.

    OK. Just the nuance is important.







  • Signal doesn’t suffer anything worse than DoS if a hostile party controls the central service. That’s its point and role. It’s based on the assumption that such hostile parties as governments don’t like DoS’ing central services, they prefer to be invisible.

    For other points and roles other solutions exist. One can’t make an application covering them all, that never happens.

    Briar again (I’ve finally read on it and installed it, and I love how it works and also the authors’ plans on the future possibilities based on the same protocols, but not for IM, say, there’s an article discussing possibility of RPC over those, which, for example, can give us something like the Web ; I mean, those plans are ambitious and if I want them to succeed so much, I should look for ways to defeat my executive dysfunction and distractions and learn Java). Except it would be cool if it allowed to toss data over untrusted parties, say, now if two Briar users in the same group are not in each other’s range, but there’s a third Briar user not in that group between them, their group won’t synchronize (provided they don’t have Internet connectivity). If one could allow allocating some space for such piggybacked data, or create some mesh routing functionality, then it would become a bit cooler.


  • Yes, so like 12 years ago I was thinking - maybe they won’t do such bad things, maybe it’s a purely hypothetical possibility, surely someone will catch them outright spying.

    Yet suppose that back then Zuck rolled out an update with hidden functionality to spy at some underage girl, and then rolled it back. Who would check every FB application update? And if the hidden functionality looked enough like a bug (matching only a handful of device IDs of millions), then who’d become suspicious? There have been many updates with many bugs.

    And Zuck surely behaves as if such thing happened many times.

    I just hope more people in Russia will switch to Briar, it IMHO seems to have all the necessary Telegram-like functionality other than channels, votes, video uploading … But that’s probably intended, too much data to synchronize. Text and pics are a lot.







  • So did Japan before they became an independent country.

    Wha-ha-ha? If you mean their archaic dead Chinese variant that was mostly used for poetry and feudal prestigious stuff, it may not be a good comparison to mandarin as the main language. Actually many of the kanji pronunciations are how it would sound, or even whole phrases. I speak neither of the three (third being Japanese), just repeating what my sister would say (she studied lost of languages).

    So did South Korea.

    I think the situation is similar to Japan, except much of their vocabulary is Chinese in origin. But, ahem, the variant is too a very specific dead idiom.

    So your argument is flawed.

    But not in what you say. Their argument is flawed in the sense that one country is somehow obligated to all be under one state.

    (Has a bit of reminiscence with Kremlin goblins thinking that every Russian-speaking area is their slaves and belongs to them.)



  • They also say and substantiate that the casino always wins, but people still go to casinos. More than half would go to casinos if they had enough money and a casino in convenient proximity, probably.

    (Yeah, about Bitcoin - that’s the genial idea of using casino tokens as means of normal exchange and as an investment asset. The value attributed to Bitcoin grows faster for those with bigger sums and transfers and in bigger pools and with better information for prediction of its fluctuations. That would be the founders with their sleeper coins, and also not sleeping coins long ago mixed out of possibility to trace them. The result stands.)

    So. The computer industry has been turned into a casino. The visitors were first upset, then suspicious, then kinda disoriented, and then got used to it.

    Addiction is the source of enormous profits in our world, between drugs, prostitution and gambling. Now the Internet has become part of it.

    Which is not an unprecedented change. There were times when drugs (in the form of maryjane and other weeds and various mushrooms and alcohol) were possible to make for anyone and not prosecuted on most of the planet, and not an industry. There were times when prostitution was not an industry, but just a normal situation. There were also times when it didn’t make sense for gambling itself to be an industry (making gambling cards and such was, though).

    To good or to ill.

    One can clearly see that when these industries are transparent and competitive and legal, they are not harmful. One can also see that it’s very hard to make them transparent and competitive and legal. Transparency hurts cheaters. Competition hurts abusers. Legality hurts people like the competent structures in most countries getting their share.

    So, IRL there are “haven” countries with laws legalized for certain things and with proper regulation in place, and the rest where such things serve the previously listed trio.

    For the Internet this would be a really sad situation.

    So honestly Briar and other multi-transport offline-ready delay-tolerant systems are the future IMHO. But it’s a long evolutionary process.