Free speech for the individuals is needed, in terms of people should not be punished for what they say. But social media platforms owned by foreign countries is a danger for any democracy. There's a reason the US wants to capture Tiktok, Iran is shutting down the internet, and China has The Great Firewall.
Since the US is turning away from Europe's interests, it's just logical that American platforms will be restricted in one way or another. I don't see any way around it.
There is a big difference between danger for democracy because of these addiction farming Social media platforms with propaganda and something like piracy as well though.
I tried to find something in the article that bothered me, but I don’t find it very convincing. Points like "someone can forward your email unencrypted after they decrypt it" are just... well, yeah - that can happen no matter what method you choose. It feels like GPG gets hate for reasons other than what’s actually mentioned, and I'm completely oblivious to what those reasons might be.
It's not that someone can forward your mail unencrypted. It's that in the normal operation of the system, someone taking the natural next step in a conversation (replying) can --- and, in the experience of everyone I've talked to who has used PGP in anger for any extended period of time, inevitably does --- destroy the security of the entire conversation by accidentally replying in plaintext.
That can't happen in any modern encrypted messenger. It does happen routinely with encrypted email.
pgp as a tool could integrate with that, but in practice fails for... many reasons, the above included. All the other key exchange / etc issues as well.
well that's fair, but sounds more like a email client issue than an actual issue with gpg/pgp. My client shows pretty clearly when it gets encrypted. But maybe I am oblivious.
I agree that it's an email problem, which is why I wrote a whole article about why email can't be made secure with any reasonable client. But email is overwhelmingly the messaging channel PGP users use; in fact, it's a common-cited reason why people continue to use PGP (because it allows them to encrypt email).
A protocol that doesn’t enforce security and relies on clients to choose to implement it is a broken protocol, from a security standpoint.
Even if secure email clients exist that always make right choices, because you can’t know what client all your recipients are using, all it takes is one person with a “bad” client (which, keep in mind, is a client that accurately implements the protocol but doesn’t enforce additional security rules on top) to ruin things.
Some Ukrainians may regret that the followed the Signal marketing. I have never heard of a real world exploit that has actually been used like that against gpg.
Those people shouldn't be, and thankfully aren't, using PGP. Nobody is suppressing this report on phishing attacks against Signal users; it's just not as big a deal as what's wrong with PGP.
Accidentally replying in plaintext is a user error, scanning a QR code is a user error.
Yet one system is declared secure (Signal), the other is declared insecure. Despite the fact that the QR code issue happened in a war zone, whereas I have not heard of a similar PGP fail in the real world.
First of all, accidentally replying in plaintext is hardly the only problem with PGP, just the most obvious one. Secondly, it's not user error: modern messaging cryptography is designed not to allow it to happen.
Modern cryptography should also not allow users to activate a sketchy linked device feature by scanning a QR code:
"Because linking an additional device typically requires scanning a quick-response (QR) code, threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim's account to an actor-controlled Signal instance."
This is a complete failure of the cryptosystem, worse than the issue of responding in plaintext. You can at least design an email client that simply refuses to send plaintext messages because PGP is modular.
there are at least two reasons trump is pushing for oil:
1) the US has lots of oil reserves, which would lose lots of value if everybody was using renewables
2) oil is the main driver for dollar demand, as oil is paid in dollar, allowing the US to have lots of debt relatively cheaply
That's also the reason why he wants to tell Europe to stop using renewables, and that's the reason why he is threatening Venezuela - because they have the biggest oil reserve and started selling it in different currencies.
Now whether that whole genius strategy to gain wealth through geopolitics is worth an extinction event is a different story.
> That's also the reason why he wants to tell Europe to stop using renewables, and that's the reason why he is threatening Venezuela - because they have the biggest oil reserve and started selling them not in USD.
What's interesting is that the strategy you suggest (tell Europe to stop using renewables, attack nations that compete with US oil sales) only motivates other nations to move away from oil. It's a terrible strategy if the intent is to sell more US oil. Renewables are far more sustainable in many regards, and bolster national energy security while remaining on fossil fuels leaves them weak wrt energy security.
it could very well be that it backfires. I guess time will tell. A lot of his actions seem to be trimmed into this direction, and it's not a new one. He left the paris climate agreement quite a while back as far as I remember. blocking offshore wind construction just fits this agenda, as supporting companies to manufacture these windmills would just make everything cheaper (more demand, rising production capacity etc.) and demonstrate actual use of it.
It's kind of hard to see the strategy you outlined as doing anything other than backfiring. Oil and other fossil fuels are consumables. Once burned, they're gone. For strategic reasons, most nations with any sense and the economic ability to do so are turning away from fossil fuels precisely due to this fact. European nations are not exceptional here, the US is actually the outlier.
Your suggested strategy is that the US wants European nations to buy more US oil, and in order to motivate them the US is demonstrating how bad oil dependence is. See Cuba (they depend on Venezuelan oil there).
How could a demonstration of the flaws of oil dependency possibly motivate the sale of US oil rather than hasten the move towards solar, wind, and other power sources?
This is why I said it's a terrible strategy. Only the non-thinking would go for it.
You could be right. I try to abstain from making any predictions, because I see the world is such a complicated mess where even stupid decisions could get a positive outcome due to unforeseeable events. (a new pandemic? a war breaks out? someone decided to retaliate? the suez canal gets occupied? a volcano erupts?)
That being said, he is obviously aware that Europe is planning on greener energy. This administration also tries to break down the EU by pulling out countries like Italy and Poland. They are clearly promoting right wing parties all over Europe which align more with his agenda and are more EU sceptic. They might try to use social media for propaganda. The goal is divide and conquer. Europe has to pay attention to this and be aware of the risk. The strategy may seem stupid, but it would be even more stupid to ignore it and not make sure it fails.
I know plenty of people personally who can rant about energy prices being high while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy and even namedrop whichever foul devil bogeyman it is this week that is said to be the cause of this disjointed trauma that they find so overwhelming.
In the next breath, they pick something else from the deck to be upset about: These days, that's usually brown people, emails, laptops, the American cities that people in frog costumes burn to the ground every night, brown people, guns, laptops, and Hillary.
Sometimes, they then take a break to hear themselves talk about baseball, praise the president for getting so much done that he doesn't even have time to sleep, or to complain about the plot from the episode of The Dukes of Hazard -- from 1983 -- that they watched for the 14th time last night on Pluto.
After the break, it's time for them to complain about how they can't afford visit a doctor or buy eyeglasses, but they sure as hell don't want them any of those librawls to take any of their hard-earned money so everyone can go to the doctor.
Then things shift back to being weirder again: Schools turning boys into girls, kids using litter boxes in the classroom, men wearing dresses, God's Perfect Plan, guns, brown people, groceries, brown people, and blue hair dye.
This tiresome process repeats until I manage to escape, or I tell them very pointedly to shut the fuck up (hints don't work).
None of the people I know who act this way seem to be particularly bright, but I know them anyway.
"while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy "
Did you ever consider that all the money spent on expensive renewables is money not spent on cheaper forms of power? Did you ever consider that they are correct and that spending on renewables drives up power costs? Because that's what the data says is happening. Now, I am aware that the amount of FUD on this topic is very different to get through. But if you learn about the differences between capacity and utilization costs and the other accounting games that are played with energy costs, you will learn how to see through the FUD. But I'm sure it is more psychologically comforting to just look down on them which is what you are actually doing.
I consider that I'm intertwined in the evolution of a very different friend's very local efforts, with their own hybrid battery-backed grid-tied offline-capable solar power system.
That rig is pretty sweet.
It pays for itself, and in present form and with their present use (wherein: they're not trying to live particularly-efficiently) it is almost entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period.
But, sure: We can talk about games, instead, if what you want to chat about is just games.
"entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period."
You do know that batteries have a capacity right? And powerplants have something called a capacity factor. That means for a given amount of capacity, you generate on average a certain amount of power. For nuclear that factor is .9. For renewables its .1. So 1 watt of nuclear provides the same power as 9 watts of renewables. That's why when you say that renewables have 1/3 the capacity cost, it really means its 3x more expensive than nuclear. That means higher bills for people, which is what we mean when we say utilization cost. That's the real cost that people pay and actually counts. And all this is before we talk about siting issues with renewables. Fun fact, most PV is sites (located) somewhere with an albino factor of less than .25. But since you connected a battery terminal to a PV panel, you must know what that means. Seriously, you are just spreading misinformation that transfers cost from the rich to the poor, such a hero you are.
Most grown men are influenced by this. The patriachy is strongggg.
Just like you can manipulate women en-masse by appealing to patriarchal attitudes around femininity and beauty, maybe by talking about weight or hair, you can influence men by appealing to patriachal attitudes around masculinity.
I mean, you can convince the average American man to drop an extra 20K on a truck he doesn't need and a multiply his gas cost by 2x just by convincing him it's manly. You can discourage men from drinking cosmopolitans and instead have them drink the equivalent of cat piss by telling him it's unmanly.
“Last week, Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social that is majority-owned by the president, said it was getting into the energy business, announcing a merger with a fusion firm TAE Technologies.”
I am quite convinced a lot of open source is not open for ideology reasons but rather are a result of competition and the market itself.
When the competition publishes its software for no price, the next way to make it even better is by improving the license. And if thats not enough you can even pay users to use your software, just like brave does (or did) through ads.
Now theres software which has less competition. Usually this is software that requires large amounts of investments, often coupled with hardware. Smartphones are the perfect example for this.
Also, software which is tied to hardware that you have to buy has less pressure, because there's a price anyway for the hardware. So you wont suddenly have some competition offering the same thing for free.
I genuinely don't like the concept of the keyboard interaction in helix and kakoune, selecting things to modify them. I don't know what it is, but it somehow just feels much less satisfactory to me personally compared to the vim way.
The biggest benefit is multiple cursors. The helix and kakoune multiple cursor implementation are probably the best in any editor. It just goes hand in hand with selection first.
The problem with that editing model for me is that it makes text objects much more cumbersome.
In Vim you can for example do "dap" to delete around a paragraph, but you cannot easily invert it ("pad") because 'p' is too common and is already bound.
You can also easily do the "select first" in Vim by first pressing 'v' to start a visual selection, so I just don't see the point.
This bugged me for reasons I can’t quite explain. I think it’s that I can write and edit the command before making the modification and the ease of going back and reusing a historic search and replace relatively easily.
I spent about a month trying to get used to Kakoune. It never clicked with me and I went back to vim.
My biggest beef with Kakoune’s editing philosophy is that it seems to emphasize “editing in the large” as its preferred mode of interaction. This is totally backwards to me. Editing in the large (making multiple identical edits throughout a buffer) is a rarity. Most edits in day to day use are single edits. So the fact that Kakoune likes to leave a bunch of extra cursors in your wake (like a trail of breadcrumbs) as you jump around a file to make single edits is extremely infuriating to me, like it’s trying too hard to be helpful.
The irony of Kakoune using a clippy-style contextual help window is not lost on me!
I voted no in this, but I was on the fence. In my experience people are smarter than they get credit for and the decisions made in these votes are often quite good. There was more to consider than privacy, it's also about the fact that most countries will implement something like this as it is pushed by the UN. So it might become required for some things in the future. Then we currently don't have a whole lot of ways to distinguish AI from people anymore, which will only get worse. Propaganda bots are real and we don't know how that will evolve. It will make a lot of the processes easier as you can do them from home, which is especially useful for disabled people that can not easily appear physically. Plus, it's more or less optional to have one for now.
And yet, I am still kinda disappointed it passed. We will see how it evolves.
Unfortunately they also passed a law for age checks in order "to protect children", which is supposed to block porn unless you show your E-ID. While a referendum was initialized it sadly didn't gain enough media attention to actually make it to a vote.
It's only partially open source. Some server-side code remains proprietary, and the client-side will depend on proprietary code of Google and Apple and they do not plan to support platforms that are actually Free Software. The law overall is badly written. For example, articles 12 and 26 effectively say that "The source is shared with public, except if it is proprietary or insecure." Or take Article 4: "The government may operate systems that protect the privacy of the identity subjects."
The Swiyu team dropped the Play Integrity requirement on Android: https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch/eidch-android-wallet/issue... This means that the E-ID will be officially supported on AOSP based secure ROMs like GrapheneOS, without any requirement for Google services.
I'm guessing you'd want to separate age verification from identity verification. A hash of your name is as good as your name since you don't change name and you provide both to certain providers, or it can be bruteforced.
Define optional? There will be new checks introduced online where you can only enter if you have an E-ID.
Companies do have to accept a physical card as well, but only if you appear physically at the companies doors. Otherwise, that statement was kind of deceptive in my opinion because there will be a lot of pressure to get one. They also decided to make it free, which shows they probably want to achieve a high adoption.
“Les personnes habitant en Suisse et les Suisses de l'étranger pourront demander une e-ID. L'utilisation de cette dernière ne sera toutefois pas obligatoire. En effet, la Confédération continuera à offrir toutes ses prestations dans le monde réel. Il faudra modifier la loi si l'on veut un jour déclarer obligatoire l'utilisation de l'e-ID dans certains cas. Un référendum pourra alors être lancé contre la modification décidée par le Parlement.”
Automatic translation: “People living in Switzerland and Swiss abroad will be able to apply for an e-ID. However, the use of the latter will not be mandatory. Indeed, the Confederation will continue to offer all its services in the real world.
It will be necessary to amend the law if one day we want to declare the use of e-ID mandatory in certain cases. A referendum can then be launched against the amendment decided by Parliament.”
Optional meaning you have the choice of using the existing physical ID. I don't see how this is deceptive. "A lot of pressure" is not the same as being unable to legally work without the digital ID.
Because they did advertise it in a way to make people believe they could still do their things online without an E-ID, which will not be the case. It's not optional online.
Companies can already request and will still be able to request a PDF scan of your ID. Or worse, video ident through a private third party.
This is the status quo for ordering alcohol online, or if you want to open a bank account.
The new E-ID based on SSI (self-sovereign identity) is so much better than the status quo from a real-world privacy perspective towards companies that must verify your identity or age.
> This is the status quo for ordering alcohol online, or if you want to open a bank account.
I just ordered alcohol yesterday and they only checked it up on delivery. There's no obligation to check it online.
> The new E-ID based on SSI (self-sovereign identity) is so much better than the status quo from a real-world privacy perspective towards companies that must verify your identity or age.
While I agree it's better than scanning your documents, it probably will become more popular since it's easier to check and integrate. That will in my opinion become a net negative for privacy
Fair, this may be a legal option for ordering alcohol. I really don't see the pure cryptographic hash "is older than 18y" as a big privacy issue though, as long as it is properly salted, does not provide other information on my identity and is unlinkable (i.e. multiple such signed claims are different).
The last time I opened an account for a financial service, as well as when creating an account with a service for digital document signatures, I had to do a video ident process with a private third party company. There was no other option, and I felt quite uneasy about it. I would have preferred the E-ID by far in both cases.
Both companies will inevitably store information about me to provide their service, independently of the identity verification. That is legitimate and inevitable for their service. That other, third party company storing a video of me holding my ID and my face into the camera is now not inevitable anymore.
Since the US is turning away from Europe's interests, it's just logical that American platforms will be restricted in one way or another. I don't see any way around it.