Corporate government is pretty much a staple of. all cyberpunk franchises though.
With diamonds, there is still a push to source “the real thing” kept alive by De Beers, and other cartels like that. But for a lot of poaching, we found replacements. I think that’s how plastic got started too btw!
Also PETA has approved fake lab-grown meat, perhaps it can reduce demand for torturing so many animals in factory farms.
PS: Japan has a culture of infantile hentai or something in its animation - which may alleviate a lot of demand for actual cp — how much cp is in Japan? (There seems to be a lot of unusual/unnatural sexual norms in Japan… from Hikkikomori to dating vending machines to total celibacy for a large proportion of the population.) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/11/japan-child-po...
Illegal in Canada (even animated/cartoons):
* https://windsor.ctvnews.ca/man-facing-child-porn-charges-aft...
It's not illegal to write a fanfic that you keep to yourself about all the weird ways that you want to torture and kill someone.
Just like the cases for decriminalizing prostitution and drugs: https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...
And btw -- it's not just about thoughtcrime, it's a major double standard, seems to me. In the West it's perfectly normal for Hollywood to put out "Rated R" horror movies that feature gore and torture, ripping off limbs, mass murders, etc. Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
False.
The final performance by the young girls was also discussed. You can find it if you want to watch something disgusting, but it was very sexual and OBVIOUSLY inappropriate for children.
That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK. Look at the media response to the film "Sound of Freedom", where it's "QAnon adjacent" to oppose child sex trafficking.
"Sexual" is relative so people will just be talking past each other in regards to that. There's no real discussion to be had there.
>The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK
FWIW, I only heard about the poster and nothing about the full release. I'm sure some people still argued in the same way people argue about anything for months/years on end, but there was definitely a lot more controversy about the poster. Be it because it was the first look/awareness of the film, or because the film was simply nothing to write about can be left to people who actually watched the movie. I have no interest to.
These guys did:
As for Netflix, how can the company possibly reconcile a “coming-of-age” film, and one that centers entirely on 11-year-old girls, with a TV-MA rating? This is not a random decision – it has become corporate practice.
We have frequently called on Netflix to stop hosting content that sexualizes children, such as Baby, Big Mouth, Sex Education, or that glamorizes rape and sexual assault such as 365 Days.
And Netflix habitually markets adult content to young audiences. Parents Television Council research of Netflix programming designated as “Teen” reveals that nearly half was rated either TV-MA (104 titles, or 40.8%) or R (23 titles, or 9.0%); and every single program that carried a TV-14 moniker included harsh profanities.
While we may not always see eye-to-eye with film critics, the criticism of the critics is telling. Cuties is not the first time Netflix has blatantly promoted programming that sexualizes children, but we’re calling on them for this to be the last.
> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.
The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.
There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.
Yet no one gave a shit. This is the new Satanic panic, a scapegoat to avoid focusing ourselves on important shit.
Paranoia sells, and it's the main fuel of the US style Capitalism, getting a full panic state almost monthly in order to be a mindless consumer.
OFC satanic panic was the same crap, in order to keep the children and teens away to non-consumit (read: TV and mainstream toys, music and movies) so the industry didn't collapse in a few years. And, yet, thanks to internet, years later, they did.
Guess what? between the show sections, (and shows themselves) they are trying to sell home alarms with lots of ads in the morning to the viewers. Bingo.
* https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/djls/vol25/iss1/2/
And as my updated/edited comment mention, Canada is not unique in this regard:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_child_pornography
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
Going back to Canada, some cases:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_Cana...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Sharpe
Perhaps the thinking is that it could create a positive feedback loop that may help the desires grow to the point 'actual' action is taken.
I understand that it can be illegal at the State level, and that its a grey area at the federal level. What I don't get is the disconnect between these rulings and whatever is available on the clearnet.
We're not talking onion sites. Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, pixv, tumblr, Patreon whatever sites that you can just go to that shows up the front page of Google. They all contain similar content and almost none of it is taken down for illegality, at most because someone thought it was too ick and Ad money, or posted in a non-r18 area.
Even fucking 4chan is incredibly strict about ban hammering/deleting anything that is close to CP
Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
Simple, the internet is huge and some currently contended US law means that (past illegal content) a web host isn't responsible for content users upload. Copyright means that corporations can DMCA certain content off, but otherwise, there's not much to do. Companies don't WANT to have to look through every single post on a site that big, so if they can automate or simply ignore it, they will.
The legality in Canada is questionable, but Canada isn't looking through Reddit with a fine tooth comb (P.S. it technically is against reddit TOS to upload lol manga stuff. But it's hard to enforce on small subreddits). Canada may not even know what Pixiv is, and Patreon is often behind paywalls. It would just take a good (well, bad) mainstream awareness to answer your question, and the answer would turn out to mostly be "because politicians didn't know until CNN/Fox News blasted it".
That much was obvious during the U.S. controversy on Rapelay, a Japanese 3d eroge simulator that was not even sold in the US (nor ever has been), simply mislabeled by Amazon and visible in American's store for a while.
>Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
well we're getting very off topic but this is still an odd angle. There's no one reason why these games are popular and talking about fan art vs. game quality is arguing a chicken vs. the egg. Let's just agree that fan engagement in this day and age can be a force multiplier in terms of advertising something and spreading the brand. But 10,000 x 0 is still zero. Just ask how F-Zero is doing.
pedantic, but it depends on many factors that can make that goal realistic. You probably wouldn't get flack about how you'd kill Trump or any public figure you're far away from, but some specific individual can be seen as a threat in some countries. Even the US isn't fully lenient on that.
>If no harm is being done, not even indirectly to anyone else, why is it a crime?
politics, mostly. For example, in Japan uncensored genetalia is still illegal, animated or otherwise. Despite some of the most explicit pornography hailing from it. These come from WW2 times where the US imposed a bunch of sanctions, but have long since been irrelevant. So why not just repeal that law?
Well, what politician wants to be the one to fall on that sword and get the buck rolling? It's political suicide to the voter base (mostly older people) even if most people wouldn't be strongly affected by it. That's one among many many other factors, of course.
And that's a relatively uncontroversial aspect of society. Can you imagine trying to go to bat about the above topic?
Why do you think so? Maybe you just haven't seen a good CP before.
Similar on how people got Starship Troopers wrong. Is not about cheering fascism, but to ridicule it.
I know what you mean. But at the same time society bans historical literature constantly.
Well - the film also had a disconnect with the book on the topic of fascism. The book was more on the pro-fascism side.
The same director did Robocop, and if you don't get the genius satire of that, then I can't help you.
The book isn't exactly fascist though. Verhoeven said he didn't read the book and does not plan to, so he is satirising somewhat superficially.
Heinlein did explore a lot of various political systems in his books, and I think Starship Troopers is focusing most on voter engagement - how people who vote should know something about what they vote on, and that is why only those who served (which includes military but also other "national service" like being a worker colonising planets or postman or whatever) get vote.
Is that fascist? I don't think so. Is it a good political system? I don't think so either but it is a good enough idea for a book.
* persons can choose whether or not to do government service
* Rico's parents are quite rich even though neither are citizens
* the Moral Philosophy class tries to _discourage_ individuals from government service
* the instructor for Moral Philosophy explicitly tries to get the students to think for themselves
In the book but not the film:
* the only benefit of government service is the right to vote
* only veterans (i.e. no active service members) can vote
All of these (and more) are contrary to fascism. The book is not fascist. Verhoeven never read the book and didn't satirize fascism -- he satirized a _caricature_ of fascism.
Also minor detail but in the book there's a few jobs that are reserved for veterans, like IIRC the police.
In those cases, for fictional CSAM to be legal, it has to be completely fictional such that any resemblances can be shown to be completely coincidence.
On a side note, there was a very good film about this last year called The Artifice Girl.
Think indie, very theatrical with only three settings and three very clear acts, but thought-provoking and with some unstated implications. I would recommend watching it without checking IMDB or any review site first.
I went to Grenada in 2014 and used offline maps to drive around the island. In 2015 the tablet suffered an accident and I powered it off to deal with it later. 5 years later I power it back on without internet connectivity. Turns out the maps expired. So much for many years
Google Maps also doesn't support offline contour lines / hillshading (what Google calls "terrain"), which is a big deal for hiking and other outdoor activities. Whereas with OsmAnd, you can literally have e.g. the entire North America in your pocket, with contour lines, offline navigation, and offline Wikipedia articles for every POI.
Isn't that, like, a map? lol we've had maps long before the internet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Streets_%26_Trips
https://winworldpc.com/product/softkey-key-master-maps/10
And then that's also completely ignoring the hundreds of portable GPS devices sold before Google Maps was a thing which had offline road databases.
I can navigate anonymously without cell signal easily. My car has a GPS in the dashboard which, at least for the maps and routing, doesn't go online at all.
I agree that this is indeed possible. The problem is with the propaganda that says that you should not agree to such a low standard of only being able to see the map and route your trip based on road connectivity and nothing else. Modern route planning takes into account inherently real-time information such as accidents and other roadblocks, which is only available online.
I'd note that while real time traffic updates are nice, they are just a convenience, not a necessity.
In fact, GPS (unless you're in a war zone and need to direct munitions or out in the middle of nowhere) is also a convenience and not a necessity. What's that? It is a necessity? Tell that to Ferdinand Magellan -- hell he didn't even have a paper map.
That's not to say GPS/online traffic updates and the like aren't useful. They absolutely are. But they aren't necessary and at least for me, if the choice is to use such tools and be tracked or use another method that doesn't track me, I'll choose the latter every. single. time.
Not because I have anything to hide, but because my business is my business and no one else's.
in mid 2000s very offline igo could pull traffic information via RDS-TMC and adjust route according to it. navigation systems in modern cars can use traffic information from satellite via sirius-xm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator
https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-features/ph-origins-navi...
I'm in the UK, and you can walk into any Post Office, WHSmith, bookshop, most newsagents, etc., and pick up maps of the local area or country, usually Ordnance Survey[0] maps.
And (at least when I was in secondary school, about a decade ago) map reading was still taught as a valuable skill, using OS maps.
Routing doesn't really work offline, but that's a different/harder problem.
Google will probably work ok for the most popular trails, and I guess you can use it as a supercharged compass. But at least in Europe, if you actually plan a route in any mountains based on Google, you're in for an adventure :)
Bit focused on eastern Europe, but has a hiking mode with very good coverage of the official routes (not only in eastern Europe ;)). And everything is free, including offline maps. Terrific value for casual trips.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bergfex.to...
This one is not free (there is a free tier though) but seems to have more details in some areas, so the pro tier may be worth it if you hike a lot.
No, economics predicts that _use_ will explode if the cost is zero, but that's not a comment on production.
Pocket cameras have reduced the cost to record sexual abuse, but that's dwarfed by the ability to reproduce/ distribute those copies.
I don't think that means sexual abuse is more common. On every other metric we have, it appears sexual abuse is _less_ common.
Child porn is just leverage to pry. We used to care as much about sending information about birth control through the mail. And with the modern movement to sexualize children as soon as possible, they might have to use another excuse in 20 years. "Terrorism" will always work, because it doesn't mean anything.
The loudness of their voices in "protecting the children" when politicians are introducing new communications surveillance measures, with no mention of local, boots-on-the-ground, child protection services funding increases, just screams to me that they care about surveillance a lot and about protecting children not at all.
As a teen around 2003 I hosted a freenet-node (freenetproject.org). It generated 1TByte/month which I believe was a lot for the time. I shot it down and never came back, because the only things that ever loaded was cp and Chechnya rape and torture videos. Its not a network for "dissidents"... I gave up on humanity.
Plus: There was a eDonkey like file sharing program that worked on top of freenet. (As well as a Usenet clone and a "Instant" Messenger.) You could share files without uploading them first. Like Gnutella it had passive search. (It shows you the files and search terms of other users going through your system.) So you could see what the demand was for. Edit: The demand was not for Hollywod movies.
I turned that sniffer off soon after, and never ever looked again. Even the (likely) legal things people were looking for were hard to unsee.
I don't believe there is any evidence to back this up whatsoever. People are compelled to be "good" by society and laws, nothing more. Humanity is fundamentally bad, but reined in by a handful of powerful people and organizations.
If the mainstream Internet banned "dissidents" I believe such things would have more uptake by other types of users.
Of course, there are some servers catering to 'dissidents' (e.g. Lemmygrad, Exploding Heads), but it's easy enough to avoid those communities.
Isn't it more, "This is why the original cyberpunk dream was always a naive and bad idea"?
Like, it appealed to me too when I was young, but then I learned more about humans and our history and ...
How is this appealing? It's a warning, not a cosy idea to aspire to!
The "punk" in the genre is the rebellion against or rejection of a corrupt and oppressive system that chews people up and spits them out as either defeated or criminals. If you're reading something else, it's not cyberpunk by definition.
Remember, it's hi-tech and low lives.
Solarpunk, I would guess. "The street finds uses for things" doesn't end up being hardscrabble against dystopia.
In the early days of the internet it kind of was. Corporations haven’t waken up to the full commercial potential of the internet. Governments/law enforcement hasn’t quite figured out how this new at-the-time Internet thing worked - “series of tubes” or something.
Then as he noted, there is a significant downside to such a refuge.
transhumanism is how technology will reshape what we think it is to be human, how we view life, death, love, family, success, fear, etc. Cyberpunk is how it won't.
</tinfoil-hat>
It’s a little puzzling to me still why this is. Physical attraction to almost-adults isn’t some big mystery, but most cp is something else entirely.
I contend that human sexuality is not easy to compartmentalize and that it does not exist in any particular way as an obvious evolutionary benefit except for adult-adult-heterosexual.
Of course rapists (including child molesters) should be kept from offending and otherwise punished for offenses because of the harm that it causes, but nothing about any sexual orientations seems strange to me that it exists.
Of course I am not able to understand on an innate level since I don't feel the same way. I'm not sure anyone could really understand what it is like to be of a different orientation because it is so intertwined with the self that it is just incomprehensible. One can understand in the sense that one can acknowledge it, but I don't think one can understand in the sense that they actually 'get' it.
I'm interested in other people's perspectives on this thougjh.
This shows a profound misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection on your part. "Evolutionary benefit" is impossible to divorce from circumstances. It doesn't exist as some right/wrong answer, or something you can divine through logic.
For instance, same-sex attraction could absolutely be advantageous to a species that is nearing the peak of sustainable population numbers. All species (who can fuck) wanna fuck, and will do so no matter their surrounding circumstances. The difference between one species keeping sustainable numbers, versus another species seeing runaway population numbers causing food source exhaustion and population collapse, could come down to lower procreation rates, in which circumstance strict heterosexuality may not be advantageous.
Point being, stop trying to use bad, dime-store "science" to justify your bad opinions about homosexuality.
Personally I suspect the issue here is that incest is the only form of sexual activity that we have a natural proclivity against, probably because of evolutionary pressure (as in, hard-wired into our DNA) against fucking blood relatives. Because a consistently-inbred population will breed itself into oblivion. People who fuck kids can still successfully reproduce and society trundles on.
There's a traditional view of sexuality that men are only sexually attracted to women, and vice versa, and that's normal and everything else is not normal (kinky). The more we learn about sex (and gender) the more we learn that there are very few completely "normal" people out there, and a lot of people who are a bit kinky in one respect or another. I think it's now accepted that the hetero-homo thing is a spectrum rather than a binary state, and the primary reason people of the same sex don't have sex with each other is societal pressure rather than biological attraction. e.g. women tend to experiment more with this because society has a more lenient view of "girl-on-girl" than male homosexual sex.
My personal opinion is that evolution "wants" everything to fuck everything as much as possible, just to see what happens. The best reproducers are the ones who did the most fucking, after all. But we're getting into Oglaf territory here.
It's a term rooted in the conditions that make sex a reproductive act and not just something that feels good
Why are you projecting your own biases into my statement? Call a spade a spade. What you take away beyond that is on you.
You grouped all sexual activity into two groups: "normal" and "not normal". I think if anyone is projecting bias, it's that.
it's not unique to nature. You're in heat, you want to mate with anything that looks attractive. What's attractive will vary immensely based on societal and personal experience, for reasons we still cannot fully understand as the human mind is still a huge secret to unlock. It's not perfect in the same way that few parts of nature are perfectly optimized. Remants of old patterns or general heuristics on "what is good enough" will remain and they can persist for very long times.
The only unique-ish thing about humans is that we have no "mating period". We are continuously in heat compared to most of nature, so that urge remains around consistently. Virtually every form of society has evolved some sort of culture to control these urges (as well as ways to control sexual conflict, which is another topic entirely) in order to advance as a civilization otherwise it'd be non-stop mating
Is it generally accepted that someone may not be born either straight or gay?
I can somewhat sidestep that issue and say that societal factors can make you think you are exclusively heterosexual, even if we agreed that sexuality is an internal factor and you were infact born bi/homosexual. Similar to how you can force a left handed person to become right handed.
Hence, paedophilia is classified as a mental illness, but homosexuality no longer is (in most Western countries, at least, I believe).
So, how much of the “chain of abuse” thing is just genetic confounding? I don’t know, which is vexing. As far as I can tell, very few of the chain-of-abuse theorists even think of genetics, even though it’s the elephant in the room, and many are hard-line blank slate believers. (I don’t have citations at the moment, but last time I looked at the relevant academic literature it was, broadly speaking, an absolute dumpster fire.)
Just like being attracted to women doesn't mean you're a rapist.
You can be, though.
Also consumption of any kind of distrubing porn doesn't mean you actually want to do things you see in it in the real life. This is about the same principle like when people are watching action movies (which is an accepted kind of often very disturbing cinematography), most don't want to go around and shoot/stab people.
Some very tiny percentage will, of course.
No, but it does mean you support the abuse necessary to produce it.
No. If I download old files through I2PSnark - this does not mean that CP will be produced in greater quantities.
Anyway, my point was that pedophilia being mostly caused by child abuse doesn't make much sense. Pedophilia is not child abuse by itself, and thus there's no cycle.
Cycle of abuse would just make you abuse someone in the similar way you were abused. (regardless of any attraction to the victim)
Because there's a power imbalance that predators are all-too-eager to exploit.
Sometimes in the literal definition in terms of raw strength, but just as much in terms of social manipulation and life experience that can take advantage of their often more naive victims. There's also a layer of assumed authority and deference at play.
IBM is moving to passwordless auth on their server access. Preferring biometrics. Their youtube channel tells you directly.
The "mainstream" culture has been pushing that idea for five years now, Philomena Cunk said we shouldn't follow the anonymous guy in 2018, golly gosh.
My iphone plainly face scans me and my shopping malls and sports stadiums do the same.
Frankly the last place left to BE anonymous is Tor and on soap-box websites like this where the admin can decipher my ID but you don't know who I am.
Obiwan has the realistic attitude. "The war's over. We lost."
It's impossible to completely eliminate secrets, but the liberty of the 1990s is deader than a dodo. Anonymity, the unknown citizen, staying off the map is basically reserved for martians now.
If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a pedophile. If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a child abuser.
Sharing CP != child abuse. Viewing CP != child abuse. Storing CP != child abuse.
I wasn't, but it would be reasonable to accuse you of being a pedophile based on this.
Please read the diagnostic criteria: https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int... -- there is no mention of CP.
If I have porn with men on my computer, it does not mean that I am gay or have raped men. Your reasoning is absurd.
... so what are you in the other scenario?
Says the person posting under the name "sillysaurusx."
> Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service
Here's an idea, maybe he should print those maps out, bind them together into a larger map, and then find a really complicated way to fold them up so he can keep them handy when needed.
> In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught.
And yet.. it is still produced in the physical world where none of these constraints actually exist. It's only promulgated and marketed through anonymous means.
> Says the person posting under the name "sillysaurusx."
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. I recognize that username as someone who has been posting here for a long time. Not to encourage doxxing or making his identity the focus, but he has lots of contact details on his user profile. Tons of people are identifiable on here, even if the usernames are whimsical.
This was 1991 or early 1992. Kinda shocked me that a tax dollar supported server would have cp. I probably should have reported it to the Uni's sysadmins, but I was young & clueless.
That was 2007. I had maps of the entire US loaded on my pocket pc circa 2005.
How much did that cost? How many folks had it? When did it stop getting updates?
Most folks (likely including GP) didn't have easy access to offline electronic maps in their pocket in 2007 and didn't know anyone who had offline electronic maps in their pocket.
Does that make them stupid?
$100 for the maps, available to anyone with a pocket pc and access to Google.
Handheld gps's with offline maps go back even further. I was using them from '03 to '08. Garmin made a bunch of ones that were no bigger than a early-gen blackberry. Back then it was relatively easy to get pirated updated maps for them.
it was always strange that google maps was accepted as some kind of magic while turn by turn navigation with voice directions was available from mid 2000s
those days i always have sygic installed on my phone. came handy when google maps decided to freak out while i was driving through death valley to gas station.
Did those turn by turn systems allow you to just drag the map onscreen anywhere to change location to anyplace on earth? To drop pins and send links to anyone in an email? To be updated instantly and for free when the data was refreshed?
as long as you had maps installed for this area - yes
>To drop pins and send links to anyone in an email? yea. multi-point navigation with ability to search along the route/in the area/specific city/etc. all without breaking route. you could also save route iirc. i had 2 weeks road trip pre-planned.
there was some ability to share route/coordinates. don't remember details
> To be updated instantly and for free when the data was refreshed? back than maps weren't updated that frequently. in general.
on the other side, it gave you ability to go anywhere without having a data connection. google offline maps are still very limited. igo was showing on screen next two maneuvers back than. google still didn't figure it out. or ability to show real 3D landscape and 3D landmarks/buildings. or ability to mark street as blocked so navigation will route around. getting traffic information from radio in case there is no internet.
There have been secretive child predators ever since statutory rape was invented. The reason that you didn't have to "rub elbows" with them is because our governments hadn't begun systematically closing off all avenues for anonymity other than the one that they built and maintain for their own spying. If there's only one way to be anonymous, you get to "rub elbows" with everyone who needs to be anonymous for any reason.
It has nothing to do with child porn or crypto. Neither were responsible for the size of the distributed files kept on each of us to grow in orders of magnitude.
Speaking of "maps at our fingertips," good luck finding one that doesn't result in a record of the lookup and any GPS data submitted with it being inserted into a half-dozen databases, all freely accessible by the government, or by anybody buying in bulk.
My handheld non-networked GPS unit with map tiles downloaded in bulk from OpenStreetMaps meets this criteria. Not very obscure.
Et voila! Maps at your fingertips[0] with no logging/tracking. It's amazing what those ancient (ca. 1995) humans could do. Perhaps they had help from aliens -- as we couldn't possibly do any of that stuff by ourselves. /s
[0] https://wwp.randmcnally.com/product/rand-mcnally-road-atlas
Sure, emphasis on secretive. I'd hope that 'secretive' on the internet would mean more secretive than mistyping a query on a popular site's search engine. Or simply wandering into a linked, public website. But alas.
Offline map databases were commom then; it wasn't uncommon for car navigation systems to come with them (expensive to update, though), as well as handheld devices
In fact, while they were not common before the 2000s, first-party navigation systems with offline digital maps for cars have been around at least since the 1980s, as have other forms of consumer offline digital maps. Online maps are newer than offline.
> This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps
The last of many critical errors before the car got stuck might have been avoided by using a map, but they had and used a paper map shortly before, when choosing the alternate route that was, in fact, closed; it wasn't a problem caused by maps not being available (and there is a reason keeping paper road maps, especially of unfamiliar areas, when driving in them was a widespread practice until digital maps with automatic offline downloads tied to GPS became ubiquitous.
doesn't sound like the best idea depending on what industry we are talking about. medicine, yes. Art, no (we're kinda going through that right now actually).
>In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
This quote constantly rings in my head about topics like this:
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It's the real downside of apathy when you see complaints about those big sites out there and how they screw up. You advertising a new site means the most interested are going to mostly include the worst actors, who eventually put off the best actors. Or at least disproportionately include them.
As a simple example: say Twitter has 10 million users and 1000 nazis (utopic, I know). Now your new no BS alternative attracts 0.1% of users but 10% Nazis. Still far from a majority. But by the way these forums work, your site will be 1% nazis, and those nazis will be some of your loudest actors if left unchecked. 100x more concentrated and it will feel some 1000x more nazi.
I think we should allow heterodox beliefs in public forums since at least this reduces the effect of echo chambers. The other alternative is to ban certain ideas from the mainstream, but I think this leads to groups like Nazis just moving to dedicated sites where their ideas are reinforced.
Like I’d rather see a Nazi subreddit where those ideas are likely to see more challenges, than some random Nazi site where bad ideas metasticize in the shadows. Maybe the spooks prefer it this way since different sites makes it easier to categorise people.
If they somehow weren't able to control that, then I suspect they'd move to another platform organically, because why would they put up with a constant flow of opposing viewpoints that these groups believe, with absolute certainty, to be wrong?
They would stay there because there's a huge userbase to convert and they probably enjoy being challenged and justifying their horrible views because they want lurkers to read it.
If you ever meet an actual Nazi you should ask them if they want to discuss Jews with you. I'm willing to bet they won't shy away from accepting the invitation even if you were offering it because you wanted to challenge their views.
It takes a very special kind of person to openly be a Nazi and they don't think like your typical Joe.
Authority figures and scientists don't share the expensive info.
Statistically there is quite a large number of criminals in my city, and since I visit shops and other parts of the city, I am bound to unknowingly to me been rubbing elbows with those criminals. We are all anonymous to each other, and what can I really know about the person in front of me in the store. Go past a few hundred people and someone will be a person I would not associate myself with, and yet here I am living in the same city as them using the same infrastructure, and in some way enabling the activity by contributing taxes.
Not to say I don't understand the emotional reaction people have. I have relatives in the countryside that refuse to visit the city because of all the criminals that they hear about. It is also fairly common to hear people moving out of the city to the calmer suburbs in order to get out of all the shootings and crime. I also do know first hand that if you go and look for it, finding drug dealers and shady activity is not exactly a big secret. Go to specific streets or part of the city and it's operated in plain sight.
I've always seen the original cyberpunk dream as being analogous to a city, with all its benefits and drawbacks.
One in a few hundred is the city. 19 out of 20 is the coffee shop.
Before smartphones this was common. Standalone gps units had maps locally stored. Some of the ones mounted in car dashboards stored them on an internal DVD. I used to have to drive a lot for work long before they were commonly built in to cars and I had an aftermarket one mounted on my dashboard, a little 2” monochrome display. Storage was tight, and I’d have to hook it up to my computer to swap out map sets if I was traveling further than usual.
It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.
I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.
Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.