It's a fantastic way to see what gets memory-holed and where the gas-lighting efforts are spent.
Maybe one of us ends up as required reading for whatever civilization emerges from the ashes.
Compared to today. Even the major majority of the population can’t do a thing about the force propaganda, and the ones who protest see a million AI-generated flame pieces in newspapers.
I've never felt more politically empowered than during that time, it's been a steady slide downwards since. I now feel helpless and neutered. I just wish that time would return.
I'll continue to be political though. My survival and those I care about depend on it, as we are not the status quo. Hopefully you understand.
Political dissent was never tolerated. Some generations just claimed their right to it a bit harder than others, and even then it was always a minority doing it - most people (including me, more often than not) will just trade political cowardice for a quiet life. That's all there is. Just don't pretend that it's the result of some fine analysis - it's just plain cowardice.
Government has even banned the right to protest. Given the cost of living crisis and economy going down the pan, nobody wants to risk their job and roof over their heads to protest something that is going to happen anyway.
Everyone I know will be voting against Conservative party and that is currently the only way to stop them.
If Brexit hadn't happened, I would've tried to keep campaigning against the Investigatory Powers Act (that lets the Welsh Ambulance Service see which domains you've visited without a warrant).
I figured Brexit would make it impossible to undo; I think in retrospect I was right for the wrong reasons — I thought the rhetoric of Brexit would only be satisfied by also taking the UK out of all international human rights courts and treaties, rather than it would require 150% of all available political focus from basically everyone in the country.
"The government knows what a pivotal role cryptography is destined to play in the power relationship with its people. In April 1993, the Clinton administration unveiled a bold new encryption policy initiative, which had been under development at the National Security Agency (NSA) since the start of the Bush administration. The centerpiece of this initiative was a government-built encryption device, called the Clipper chip, containing a new classified NSA encryption algorithm. The government tried to encourage private industry to design it into all their secure communication products, such as secure phones, secure faxes, and so on. AT&T put Clipper into its secure voice products. The catch: At the time of manufacture, each Clipper chip is loaded with its own unique key, and the government gets to keep a copy, placed in escrow. Not to worry, though–the government promises that they will use these keys to read your traffic only "when duly authorized by law." Of course, to make Clipper completely effective, the next logical step would be to outlaw other forms of cryptography." -Phil Zimmerman, Why I Wrote PGP [0]
The worst part of it is that I'm not even convinced the Tories are going to lose the next election. People have such short memories or choose to forget the scandals come election time.
Dude - time to start your journey, out of Plato’s Cave! The lefty/righty paradigm, is old and dusty. Just one axis of thought, out of three.
It was David Blunkett, who wanted us all to show our: “papers, please!” - so don’t think for one moment, that the desire to renew, and transplant, a Stasi esque surveillance borg, stops at the Conservative corridors of power.
We are boiling the frog!
Iggy Pop ('Main Street Eyes'):
Boy, I feel so outgunned today
But I'll get up and fight back, anywayHacker News is incredibly fickle with what gets traction here; some days you'll have the site chock full of "US government trying to ban E2E" stories and other days they'll be sleeping on the exact same thing. I have a suspicion that HN is split into two audiences:
- Hobbyists, that use the website at random times of the day and get very worried about legal compliance and governance changes
- Businesspeople, that use the website when they're off work and don't care about any of that because they know they can just lobby away the things that hurt them specifically
Depending on which group is using the site at the time, HN's systemic biases change dramatically.
[0] Not the official name anymore but I'm the kind of person who specifically mods the CSS on their instance to bring back "Toot"
It's clearly the best name, and (if I wasn't keeping away from all similar products for my own sanity) I would be sad that they changed away from it.
In the UK, you could consider joining Liberty [0] who have had some significant wins. Here's an example [1] where EFF, Liberty and others were (and still are) defending privacy.
[0] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/issue/a-surveillance-n...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/02/civil-society-organiza...
It's ironic that people use that Nazi phrase when it comes to actions of Tory government (and their faction called National Conservatives often use moniker Nat-C - try to say it loud...).
Your friends and colleages concern themselves with their next paycheck, the mortgage and which pub they'll have a pint at after work. If the government wants to bother with these details they should suit themselves. I'm not saying I support this line of thinking but it is what it is.
That's the problem, the overhead of living is difficult and distracting enough that the average person hasn't the time or commitment. In the past, there were fewer issues and lines were less blurred which helped waivers make up their minds.
Remember, distracting the masses isn't new, Emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum to distract Rome's population from troubles—grain shortages, etc.
That's never worked and generally made things worse. We don't need to go back to Fawkes, the recriminations in the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich says it all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Reinhard_He...
Apart from niche online communities no one gives a damn about privacy here. These stories don't get reported on by the BBC or any mainstream media outlet in the UK. The only people who care are those not from the UK (like people on HN) or the odd privacy centric community / organisation within the UK.
None of our major political parties give a damn about privacy, and both labour and tories dislike privacy for different reasons. It really is hopeless. It's nice to vent about it on here with people who care every once in a while though.
The criminals will always find a way - but everyone else will be screwed. Apart from the polticians and the rich, of course.
This said I believe it needs to start with education. However there's not enough focused effort.
Powerful AI coupled with weak privacy can have dire consequences. Privacy must, and I hope it will become a top priority.
A basic site with a manifesto or RFC (like 12 factor, semver, etc.) that can easily be shared and evolved would do it. It should be backed by EFF, Bruce Schneier etc. Maybe it already exists. If so, let's learn about it.
Can they only see which servers / domains / ips I interact with or can they actually see the paths / endpoints / request-params I use when interacting with exhentai.org?