S410

Well, why would banks replace the system which allows them to charge fees for every other interaction with their services? A blockain solution would allow multiple different banks (and, possibly, even regular people) to access the data with no middlemen, and, therefore, no fees. Or, well, no fees that directly end up in the bank’s pockets as profit, that is.

Getting rid of that is bad for business. So, unless something magical happens and the EU, for example, pass a law requiring the banks to switch to a more de-centralized, more fair system, it’s not going to happen.

You can lose access to regular accounts as easily as to a blockchain. In fact, losing database of your password manager is even worse, because even if you have backups, they’re not going to be complete.

With a blockchain all you have to worry is your private key. And you can write it down on a piece of paper, if you want, and put it away in a safe or a bank vault or something. Then, if you use it to restore your access years later, nothing will be lost.

“There are 2 types of people in the world: those who make backups, and those who don’t make backups yet.”

Android is sending a ton of data, though, even if you’re not doing anything internet related. It, also, kinda reacts to “okay, google”, which wouldn’t really be possible if it wasn’t listening.

Now, it obviously doesn’t keep a continuous, lossless audio stream from the phone to some google server. But, it could be sending text parsed from audio locally, or just snippets of audio when the thing detects speech. Relatively normal stuff to collect for analytics purposes, actually.

Now, data like that could “easily” get “misplaced”, of course, and end up in the ad-shoveling machine… Not necessary at Google’s hands: could be any app, really. Facebook, TickTok, random free to play Candy Crush clone, etc. But if that data gets into the interwoven clusterfuck of advertisement might, it will likely end up having an effect on the ads shown to the user.

I’ve noticed that too. Intentionally veered a conversation into a different topic and, lo and behold, I get “relevant recommendation” short time later. That was, not entirely coincidentally, the same day I unlocked the bootloader and flashed a de-googled ROM.

Simply disabling registration of new accounts using Tor/VPN should be sufficient and won’t affect existing users.

Although, requiring verification of accounts made via those would be a better approach. Require captchas to prevent automated posting. Automatically mark posts made from new accounts and/or via Tor or a VPN for moderation review.

There are way to mitigate spam that aren’t as blunt and overreaching as blanket banning entire IP ranges. This approach is the dumbest, least competent way of ensuring any kind of security, and, honestly, awfully close to being needlessly discriminating. Fuck everyone from countries with draconian internet censorship, I guess?

Meanwhile Discord misses half the features Matrix has. It’s almost as if they’re different projects with similar, but different goals.

One tries to be a flexible, interoperable, and secure protocol for communication, that’s free for anyone to implement and use…

The other is a for-profit company that cherishes its centralized nature and far reaching control, allowing them to sell you random bells and whistles, collect your data unobstructed, and lure in investors and advertisers.

“What are your thoughts about setting your hair on fire?”
“This Wikipedia article about burns covers it pretty well”
“Aha! So you’re a parrot!”

There’s a finite number of possible conclusions one can come to if they use this little thing called “logic”. If multiple people apply it to the same problem, they’re likely to come up with similar, if not identical, answers. If your conclusions about some given thing aren’t shared by anybody else, it’s more likely than not because they’re illogical nonsense. It’s even worse if your conclusions are outright nonexistent. That’s not good. Means you stoopid.

Something like a centralized financial system has some very obvious, glaring issues that should be instantly apparent to anyone. And I’m, obviously, not the first person to think about it. So, why should I write something, if people who thought about it before me already outlined all the logical concerns about this system? And, likely, in a more detailed and in-depth manner than I’d care to write in a comment on a random website.

The “Criticism and risks of the digital euro” section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.

Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn’t seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it’s going to be a new system, doesn’t really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.

If you’re in the US, it’s not very practical to try to pay for things using Turkish liras either, for example. But it’s not any less “real” because of it. There is still a market for that currency, even if you might need to look around for a bit to actually use it or exchange it for a different one. Same for WoW gold or crypto.

Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.

If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.

There isn’t a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn’t a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn’t mean they’re immune to speculation, nor does it mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are “not real”.

I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I’m an artist) and to pay my VPS’s rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.

And, honesty, it’s pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I’ve used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.

The vast majority of “real” currencies are fiat currencies and don’t have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it’s collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.

CIA can cobble together questionable evidence against an entire country, proving the US administration with more reasons to start a “preventive war”. A war which would eventually end with “whoopsie-daisy, there are no WMDs after all”.

Yet, planting evidence on a single guy who just leaked a whole bunch of their secrets? No, of course they’d never do anything questionable or immoral to him!

I merely pointed out that in the context, his statement was, most likely, not trying to claim that CSAM is a victimless crime, but that his alleged possession of it is.

Substitute CSAM for something like murder, for example: It’s one thing to have a video of someone committing murder and a very different thing to commit murder yourself and record it. One is, obviously, a violent crime; the other, not so much. It’s a similar argument here.

He might be 100% guilty, he might not be. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure, is that CIA and other alphabet agencies have a history of being… less than honest and moral. So, I exercise caution and take their statements with a fair bit of skepticism. Pardon me of that doesn’t come off as I intend it to.

The sentence previous to the one you’re quoting, the one you’ve omitted, changes the context quite a lot.

When he heard that the government was pushing to keep him detained pending trial, his stomach dropped. “The crime I am charged with is in fact a non-violent, victimless crime,”

In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it’s fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.

The wording of his statement is… questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like “you’re are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine”.

Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren’t, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users’ permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.

“Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars … by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail.”

How do you get 2.4k images on a jail computer? Manifest it out of thin air?

Considering CIA is involved, which is known for torture, human experimentation, poisonings, planted evidence, etc. I’d not be too surprised if that file was straight up planted as an extra “fuck you” to the guy.

Disclosing found exploits allows developers to patch them out and improve security of everyone, which includes all the other alphabet boys and regular citizens.
There’s no way to know that you’re the only one who found any given exploit. Letting an exploit stay unpatched opens up an attack vector for everyone, not just you.

Being able to do things to your property is one of the basic concepts of, well, property.

Let’s say your car’s manufacturer fixed the wheels using security bolts and they’re the only people who have the sockets.
With actual cars it would be, at most, annoying. You’d still be able to undo the bolts, either by buying or making a fitting socket, or just smacking a regular one until it fits.

In the digital world, however, just because it’s called a “security” socket, you’re forbidden, by law, from tampering with it. And if the licensed services stop servicing the model of your car one day… You’re fucked. Because, even though you “own” the car, you are legally forbidden from doing basic maintenance required to use it.

Whenever a game or program or goes unplayable you can not go and fix it, despite “owning it”.
Removal of any kind of DRM, even if for personal, even in products you’ve bought, is illegal.

And there’s no lower-limit on how “secure” DRM has to be: even if the client-server communication is not encrypted in any way, doesn’t include any identifying information, and you can perfectly re-implement server-side software, tricking the program into itself into talking to your server, instead of the original, is, at best, legally grey area.

When you “buy” digital content, be it music, movies, software or games, you almost never actually buy the product. What you get is a limited license to view or use the product for an undefined amount of time.

Generally, companies reserve the right to, at any moment, restrict how can access the content (e.g. force you to use a specific device and/or program) or remove your ability to use or view the product entirely.

For example, a movie or song you’ve “bought” might get removed from whatever streaming service you’re using. A game or program might stop working due to changes in the DRM system.

Actual example from less than half a year ago: Autodesk disabled people’s supposedly perpetual licenses for Autocad and other software, forcing anyone wishing to continue to use their software into a subscription.

Imagine buying a house, only for the seller to show up 10 later and state that they change their might and staring from this point in time the house is no longer yours - despite the fact that you’ve paid for it in full - and you own them rent, if you want to keep living in it.