Let's not be unduly pessimistic. Some basic rules continue to apply. By its nature, open-source software is always going to be a pretty solid guarantee against mass surveillance. If a lot of users are affected, the backdoor is going to be discovered and closed pretty quickly. That leaves the problem of individualized surveillance, where exploits are used against high-value targets. But these are by definition expensive. This fact constitutes a kind of protection for everybody else. That's the way I see it.
JubilantJaguar
joined 2 years ago
Yes, a rail tunnel seems more logical and Seikan would seem to prove that earthquakes are not a deal-breaker.
With another (much shorter) tunnel at Banyuwangi, Indonesia's rail network could run from Palembang to Bali. Very logical in a such a densely populated place. The Japanese would have done it already! Maybe this would have been a better use of all that money being spent on building a new capital city in the jungle.
The digital euro, as a digital central-bank currency, is the last thing we want from the perspective of privacy.
About time. When I was there last year, I did what I usually do in such places: stay near the train station and walk everywhere. Greece is getting better but it can't go fast enough. Mediterranean cities often have amazing potential for livability because they tend to be super dense. But alas only a few of them are actually livable, because of the car scourge.
Thessaloniki was also suffering from the second-city problem. Emerging countries will splash out on a prestige metro for their capital, which is invariably a huge success and thus makes their other cities seem car-choked and horrible. Istanbul and Taipei spring to mind. In Athens the metro still needs a few more lines but it has already made such a difference.
The Inca would probably use a similar qualifier to describe your heresy.
Yes yes, all good points.
It really isn’t strictly necessary for our nutrition but we’ve evolved and optimized for it’s consumption to the point where whole species exist only for that purpose, e.g. cows and chickens and so much culture has developed around it. That’s a lot of back tracking.
Sure but if Beyond Meat can make a delicious bit of fake cow or chicken with 1/10 of the land and water, then we have a drop-in replacement that requires no cultural change. As for the actual cows and chickens, personally I would have no problem letting them go extinct. Along with domestic dogs and cats (both of which I love) and indeed humans too, if necessary - but possibly this is getting offtopic! The point is that the objective should be a rich ecosystem without mass cruelty.
I leave large strips as pathways for beneficials.
Ah, now things become clearer - you're an actual farmer! Well done for thinking so deeply about these questions.
Yes the washer wastewater should be easy in theory. But to filter the really small particles you'd need an expensive HEPA-equivalent filter that has to be regularly changed. Needless to say, none of this is happening in practice.
Filtering tyre dust is always going to be a haphazard proposition. This interesting contraption notwithstanding.
ive heard people say
So, literal hearsay.
its not perfect against if the signal servers where malicious (btw said servers are not open source).
The server is centralized so it's irrelevant whether it's open source or not, we have no means of checking.
$1 from the cia funding it is $1 too much.
Seems you're referring to initial funding from the Open Technology Fund. That's a US government body that promotes technologies that undermine authoritarian regimes. Signal fits the bill perfectly. In any case that was a decade ago. Since then there has been far more money from various do-gooding individuals and foundations. In particular the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which (I just checked) is vouched for by various whistleblowers including Edward Snowden. So, hardly a stooge of US imperialism.
Yes but the difference with every other messenger is that they can't even see who your message is going to. Due to E2E encryption of contact data.
What remains is the phone number issue. Verifying a phone number is by far the simplest and most effective way to prevent abuse, which is obviously a major issue with any messenger. There's no reason to disbelieve them when they this is the reason for it.
So: yes, they know who their users are individually. But they cannot know who is talking to who, let alone what is being said.
This is consipiracism-adjacent.
It's E2E encryption and the source code is public. Uniquely, the E2EE includes the social graph.
They've got money from a bunch of people and organizations, That's also all public. As for any organization, to have a wide variety of stakeholders with different interests is the best possible guarantee of independent.
But I agree that the ideal destination is to fully federate the protocol.
The same French of whom more than a third want an authoritarian strongman in power? Personally I would prefer to copy the handful of boring countries where people actually trust their leaders and so don't feel they need to resort to bloody revolution at the drop of a hat.