Do you have any sources on this? This kind of retroactive censorship seems to be the latest fashion in the English-speaking world [1][2][3], and it's reasonable to expect such fashion to spread in Russia, but I haven't heard of any examples.
[1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/zmdwk3/here-are-the-homo...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/01/10/everton-defe...
[3] http://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/23138/conor-dalys-nascar...
I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies.
I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.
Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish.
If you want privacy, you must first have security, and no system is secure.
I mean, just for starters, there are a constant stream of zero day exploits in OSes and Browsers that would allow me to install a keylogger on your computer, completely undetected.
So why are you so anti-cynical?
The situation is dire.
I highly recommend "Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez, who was a Security Consultant.
Privacy is literally life and death for people. I think trying to minimize the dangers is reckless.
Cheers.
This is what loses most people, because they don't think it's a big deal if someone reads their Facebook messages.
Privacy is what prevents gay people from getting purged in Chechnya[1]. Privacy is what keeps political dissidents and religious minorities out of concentration camps[2]. Privacy is what keeps our spies from being executed.
And for those who scoff at the idea of a state-level actor coming after them: privacy is what prevents someone's abusive partner from murdering them when they choose to leave the relationship[3].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/14/685192372/https://www.npr.org...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/oct/20/...
Oh wait, that's happened again, and again, and again.
Which specific kinds of people were the targets has changed repeatedly over the years. Literally no one has an absolute guarantee that either they, or their family or children, are without a shadow of doubt free from this concern ever happening to them.
We thought we were anonymous. We thought we were secure. We underestimated how easy it would be to track, correlate, and analyze us.
None of us are safe. None of us have the privacy or security we should.
> If you're pretty obscure and conservative you're secure enough in practice.
You're ignoring the black swans of politics, hackers, militias, etc.
Yes, sure, we're probably all 99.99% safe. But 3 billion people are online. That math alone says 300,000 of the people online are not safe.
Do you really think we're 99.99% safe?
I think we're already tagged and manipulated like cattle. I already think that mega-corporations know entirely too much. I think we're already not safe. Equifax leaks alone prove that to me.
Heck, later down the HN front page today:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/wifi-firmware-bug-affects-lapt...
The idea that conservatives are a disenfranchised or endangered group is absolutely ludicrous.
Being conservative is the new taboo.
The former group is the ruling class in the US. The latter group is criminalized, shamed, and sometimes murdered.
Further, being gay can't harm someone else, while being conservative in a (theoretical) democracy certainly can hurt people.
> Are you suggesting that being conservative in the United States is somehow equivalent to being gay in Russia?
>> Yep. Assuming you live in SV, would you like to disprove me by putting a TRUMP 2020 sign on your lawn?[1]
In West Coast US a few people might refuse to date you.
These don't seem like the same thing.
Pretty sure I don't need to link to the California Republican Party website.