Uriel238 [all pronouns]

He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.

This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.

I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I’ll say this:

When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.

Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.

No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.

Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.

Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.

We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.

77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.

Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.

You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?

When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.

1978 US Automotive Companies: If we make a product that locks our customers in, they’ll be our customers forever!

1978 Japanese Automotive Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works then customers will keep buying our stuff.

2025 US Tech Companies: If we make our products contingent on proprietary software and hardware, we’ll lock them in.

2025 Chinese Tech Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works and they can utilize freely, they’ll keep buying our stuff.

Not our first rodeo.

Yes! That was a vast improvement. It’s not the only way that Americans are felons if the state needs to decide they are, or if they need to add charges / sentencing considerations if the prosecutors really want to throw away the key, such as embarrassing VIPs or killing rich people.

Still, you don’t want the police looking at your entire internet history, even if you believe you have nothing to hide, they will find things that they find objectionable enough to justify treating you roughly.

All Americans who have ever used the internet have violations of the CFAA, since website TOS violations are legally as criminal as hacking NORAD (the CFAA was passed after Reagan saw wargames ) normally letting your twelve-year-old start a Facebook account gets you 25 years, if some prosecutor wanted to enforce it. And they think that’s ridiculous and don’t.

However, if that prosecutor wants to turn a five month sentence into a ten year sentence, then the suspect’s CFAA violation history might be useful after all.

And that is just one of the laws that overreaches and is easily broken and not usually enforced.

Suddenly you may have something to hide after all, say if they’re rounding up gay felons and any petty felony would make your gay ass qualify. (The German SD and US ICE both ignore violent felon requirements when they’re rounding up folk to be detained and deported)

FBI is not a monolith right now and has multiple conflicting opinions.

The part that wants to save democracy says you should encrypt your communications by using an e2e provider, and they recommend Signal.

The part that wants to serve the country (by serving the current administration — the J. Edgar Hoover part of FBI) is terrified of going dark and has been nagging encryption experts for over a decade now to nerd harder and invent a backdoor only good guys can use.

The nerds know this is mathematically impossible. And in fact bad guys (industrial spies, black hats, other nations, etc.) have leaks readily available to uncover the backdoors.

And right now a lot of FBI is scared the new admin is the bad guys.

Can Graphene add a feature to run in emulation mode to allow apps to believe it’s on an unrestricted OS?

Remember if US FBI (who is commonly anti-encryption) is suddenly afraid of Chinese state spies, Haxxorz in China and Trump sectarian vigilantes then maybe EU should be as well.

They may already have your data today but as soon as you can cut off pipelines that data starts getting stale.

With accounts that are less data-miney, you can replace all your account details (name, email addy, region, etc.) with gibberish and wait for it all to update, and then replace your password so not even you can get into it.

If it’s more data-miney and you are willing to put in a few months / years of maintenance, you can trickle in the gibberish and false data until it’s thoroughly poisoned.

Once again the ownership class pirates freely while disparaging the common folk for violating copyright.

It’s almost if it’s not a real law, rather something by which to disparage the proletariat.

Can the doxxing tech be used to ID law enforcement officers? A lot of them are assholes and bullies knowing their IDs will [be] protected by state and corporate interests.

And police in the US are more than eager to use facial recognition and ALPR services to bypass our fourth amendment protections.

I’m sure AGI is far off and AGI is impossible is exactly what AGI wants us to think.

Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.

These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.

The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

Kids figure out how to provide false positives in 3… 2… 1…