Readit NewsI see this argument repeated over and over on HN, with 0 evidence for it. Any "evidence" people cite is usually of the "politicians are evil, so this should be obvious by definition" kind, sometimes of the "they tried x in the past, so surely some unrelated y they're trying to pass in the future is also about x" kind.
I haven't seen a single leak, a single admission from somebody trying to pass a law like this, that surveillance is actually the goal here. There are far too many politicians trying to pass laws like these, in very different countries across the world, for some kind of giant global conspiracy to stay undetected.
Plain ignorance seems far easier to believe.
The state always thinks of self-preservation. Any bureaucrat is aligned to this goal by getting the benefits from the state. So, the more power it has over its citizens, which is the first threat it, the more safe it is and the less opinions of citizens matter.
Understanding this, every citizen must think carefully about giving away more power to the state.
No, it's just background internet scanning noise
If it was engineered right, it would take:
- transfer model weights from NVMe drive/RAM to GPU via PCIe
- upload tiny precompiled code to GPU
- run it with tiny CPU host code
But what you get instead is gigabytes of PyTorch + Nvidia docker container bloatware (hi Nvidia NeMo) that takes forever to start.
You can sideload apps on non-google-certified android builds/installs just fine right? If you're going to publish an app that literally be installed on billions of devices, is this not a sensible measure? Long overdue even? Why isn't Windows and Linux distros enforcing this as well is my question!
Do you guys understand that people's lives are being ruined by malware? and the most popular way of deploying malware on the most popular platform (android) is sideloading apps!
This is a similar situation as "Freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach". You can publish any android app you want, that doesn't give you the right to anonymously deploy those apps on everyone's personal tracking devices (phones).
I get a petition to allow alternative attestation and verification authorities. and honestly, I don't think Alphabet has much choice on that given EU and US anti-trust policies. I can't image the EU being ok with a US company collecting the IDs of all its developers.
For about a decade now, on Windows, you are required to have an ID-verified code signing certificate so sign drivers for example. And that has dramatically reduced rootkit abuse on the platform. Don't get me wrong, I also don't want to submit my ID to anyone. But this is a very sensible measure, one that will improve security in measurable and significant ways to millions of regular people.
Often bank scams rely on sending money to another account (obviously registered with an ID), and then being drained at ATM. The account is going to be registered on a drop or another victim. Sure, it's burned after that, but as long as it's an insignificant cost, scamming is still profitable.
The same situation with malware, bad actors are incentivized to put effort into bypassing this, so dev accounts will be registered on random homeless people, stolen IDs, or just fake IDs. While normal developers will choose to give away IDs.
And as always, it starts with 'protect the children/elderly/vulnerable', then that authoritarian country requires Google to give away info on every developer to operate legally, then it's UK and other 'democracies', then you can't run your code on your device without the government approval.
Do people like you deserve to be protected by society? If a predatory company tries to scam you, should we say "sxp was old; they had it coming!"?
With all the labels and disclaimers, there can always be this one person that will get confused. It's unreasonable to demand protection from long tail of accidents that can happen.
Do you:
- Buy open devices?
- Sponsor development of open devices?
- Start open device companies?
- Develop open software that competes with walled gardens in quality and ease of use?
- Sponsor open software?
- Use open software?
- Engage in lobbying?
- Drop exploits (that would be worth a pile of gold) to let people jailbreak devices?
- ...
- Fake-care or real-care?
I have a script that generates an html file, sorting posts to tiers based on domain or keywords. Just as an example the shitty tier posts are now: bbc, wsj, vox, arstechnica; the top tier: itch.io, twitter, arxiv, github. Any posts from rare domains get into top tier, posts from frequent domains to middle tier. So it's mostly sorted to my preferences.
Twitter algorithm is much worse for example and has bugs, you'll need to grind for some time to get rid of popular trash and politics. Any engagement with bad content will only bring you more of it in the feed, and there's tons of baits to engage with something stupid. So mute any accounts and words you don't like, click "not interested" on posts, but it's really slow to update.