Reading the website top to bottom, I’m now unsure about the trustworthiness of a project that seems so full of itself. Passage after passage about how great it is leaves a bad aftertaste. Maybe it’s just me—unsure.
I no longer trust the authors to be honest about known shortcomings, let alone be upfront, truthful, and transparent when dealing with security issues and reported vulnerabilities.
I hope I’m wrong. Does anyone know how they’ve handled disclosures in the past?
I dislike this style of documentation as well, but Caddy is a proven piece of technology. It can easily replace nginx or any other reverse proxy unless you're using a real niche configuration. Not needing to deal with certbot is also pretty nice.
Caddy's writing style isn't necessary big-enterprise-middle-management-friendly, but luckily for big enterprises that want lengthy, dry, and boring, there are plenty of alternatives.
I just had my first experience with Caddy setting it up as a reverse proxy in front of Vaultwarden. Following along with Vaultwarden's documentation it worked like a charm and I was left thinking, "What a neat little project for hobbyists who want to get going quickly with the basics."
Then I checked out the home page and it's all "The most advanced HTTPS server in the world Raaawwrrr!"
Quite the divergence, but as other comments in the thread say, it's a legit good project.
You're unsure about a product because the landing page is positive, and even go so far as to not trust the authors any more? That does sound like a strange expectation for a landing page, which is usually intended to make you want to use a project.
I agree with the GP that hyperbole on a landing page (or anywhere else in the project’s communication) makes me not want to use the project. It communicates that the project lacks confidence that a down-to-earth description would speak for itself.
I understand the attitude because there are a lot of corporate websites which similarly claim the moon and the stars and when you dig right down a lot of it is bullshit. I have worked in places like this.
Such companies tend to imply that their product can do anything and tend to have pages of verbiage rather than the brass tacks README with examples you get on a good open source project's github page.
Price for a box of pizza? Vs price for a hour of overtime?
Yeah this sounds bad. If the company stops giving “free” pizza bc/ someone takes not 1/8 of a pizza but 1 pizza, then you know how much they value, or rather do not value your time.
Removing the perk was absolutely not about the cost of the pizza which was trivial, or the extra productivity, it was about the few jerks abusing it. Of course, they could have bought 5X more pizza, and then the jerks would have walked out with 5 pizza boxes instead of one.
Same mentality is why we can't leave a basket of unattended candy outside the house on Halloween, for Trick-Or-Treaters to share: Inevitably someone will just take the whole basket. It's not about the cost of the candy, it's about not enabling jerks.
You can think about the company spending too little on pizza or you can think about people being selfish jerks to each other.
When in your local park there are no benches to sit because half of them were dismantled and sold for scrap (true story) you can think how government spends too little on park maintenance or policing, or you can think how people are being selfish jerks to each other.
You mean the telephone contacts / contact list stored in iCloud and Google cloud?
Probably it’s a hard problem to solve and this, using the sgx is signals best guess of an acceptable approach.
I think the nsa has simpler ways to access the data in question than through signal.
“Companies have always had this and that power therefore it’s justified” is a poor argument and has absolutely no justification power for the present.
Picture this, a bit further in the past, during feudalism, workers aka serfs were bound to the land owned by a lord. They were required to work the land, pay rents, and provide other services to their lord. Serfs needed permission to marry, could not leave the land without consent, and had to submit to the lord’s court for any legal disputes.
So why arbitrarily draw the line 20 years in the past and not 400 years? Only. Because something used to be in a certainty way gives us no guidance if it should be in such a way.
While there are many good answers to your question, here is mine, trying to answer as generic as possible:
Anarchy doesn't mean "everybody for themselves" in a chaotic sense. It advocates for the absence of a formal, hierarchical government, aiming for self-managed societies based on voluntary, cooperative institutions.
Here are key points:
1. Mutual Aid:
Anarchists believe in mutual aid and voluntary cooperation rather than competition and individualism.
2. Horizontal Structures:
They support horizontal organization without hierarchies, promoting collective decision-making.
3. Community Defense:
Anarchist communities often organize collective defense mechanisms to protect individuals from oppression.
The concern about groups oppressing individuals is valid, but anarchists argue that decentralized, community-based approaches can mitigate this better than centralized power structures, which often lead to greater systemic oppression.
What's important to add on here is that Chomsky wasn't a revolutionary anarchist. He talked a lot about changes within the existing framework [1] - such as increased power of labor - which were consistent with anarchist principles.
In general, it's important to generalize this. Most political philosophies are better understood and judged by the directions they demand existing societies move in rather than the final destination, which might never be achieved.
[1] EDIT: of the society he was living in, or see better comment below.
Chomsky has always been focused on pragmatic actions within the situation you are in. If that's Spain in the 1920s, he would be a Revolutionary Anarchist.
But most of the time he's speaking, it's not about Spain in the 1920s, so the specifics of actions that are pragmatic are different.
Similar to what you are saying, and I agree with some of what you're saying, but it would be incorrect to define Chomsky based on the tactics he feels are valid in a given situation.
This is where conversations about anarchism often break down.
Forgetting the language about everyone being for themselves, parent’s question boils down to “what happens when people don’t cooperate?”. The answer to that can’t be “people will cooperate”.
I think when you’re thinking about social structures of all kinds a useful perspective is to ask whether you’re creating a prisoner’s dilemma, and what the consequences of that could be.
It leaves room for non-cooperation. Although we really must define what non-cooperation means in this context.
Ending Slavery didn't leave room for the decision to non-cooperate with it, by continuing to own Slaves, or to be a Slave. Certainly depends on the specifics.
Just like Slavery was dismantled with no choice for those who wished it to continue.
This is a very difficult question to answer. Because it's a gradient.
Certainly it could tolerate it within a transition. You could imagine Worker controlled corporations entirely, however with private property still existing.
I also think it depends heavily on the definition of private property, which is a specific set of rules in every locality. Certainly some of those rules would be different.
But I think what you're getting at is, "What's the ideal?", and the answer I think would not tolerate private property.
But honestly, I'm not sure I believe that. Again, I can think of definitions I think work.
Problem is, we had these kinds of societies in the past, and they mostly got taken over and incorporated into societies with hierarchal structures, because those had militaries and were aggressive. Maybe I'm overstating that a little bit, but there was still plenty of conquest, and I don't see how a return to decentralized communities prevents that from playing out again.
Or alternatively, stops some communities from being raiders and pirates, and the eventual desire to have a stronger response that a hierarchy can bring to bear. At any rate, the current global order is very far from anarchy, and it's extremely difficult to see how it could be come about in part of the world without being taken over by countries with imperialistic ambitions. Imagine what Russia and China would do if somehow Europe and the US became anarchistic.
I mean this is great in theory, but in practice the first group that centralizes use of its resources quickly destroys each of the small groups in succession forcing the remaining groups to centralize. The centralized enemies will spend a massive amount in convincing your citizens that mutual/voluntary cooperation is bad (see Russia vs NATO).
Anarchists suffer the same problems as (actual) communists, fascist power seeking dickheads ruin reality for everyone. Power seeking behaviors have to be actively countered lest they pass an infection point they become self sustaining which requires a massive amount of coordination between parties.
This is precisely why these kinds of movements only work at small scale, or only for a short time at large scale before evolving into a power structure (by necessity).
Large scale horizontal structures simply don't work once the population exceeds the human capacity to remember everyone and their relationships to each other (approx 100-110 people). That's why ancient human foraging clans were always splitting at around 80-100 people until agrarian societies provided enough concentrated food and energy for specialization and hierarchy.
It's why horizontally organized companies start to fray after they grow beyond 100 people.
But you can separate into smaller groups, who send representatives. That's really why all this stuff ended up organized at the level of the individual shop, the individual factory.
The problem is when representatives that you send can't be recalled easily. You can think of this as a technical problem, since elections have been expensive historically to run.
There are ideas in the vein of "liquid democracy" that consider how we could arrange things with instant recall: e.g. if democracy were an app on my phone, and I could remove my support from my representative between the time they cast a vote and the time the vote is finalized, and replace them with somebody who will vote properly. This could be done completely without anger; I could restore the my support to the previous person after the vote. What it does is make my representative someone who I trust with my will for the moment not someone who owns my will.
Heh, instant recall would be great... just make some fake news and spread it around quickly and just get everyone recalled before they've had time to engage their brain.
Really at the end of this day all your voting system turns into is a popularity contest of stars and rabid attention seekers that can hold the average public attention for longer than everyone else. I'm not saying our current system is good, I'm saying yours is hilariously bad.
> your voting system turns into a popularity contest with rabid attention seekers that can hold the average public attention for longer than anyone else
What? This is of course what we already have in many western democracies. Adding the hypothetical ability to "recall representatives easily" as the parent describes doesn't cause this problem.
The root of the issue here is just representative vs direct democracy, and GP is obviously correct that technology could be allowing us to create/withdraw support closer to real-time than whatever the election cycle is. Not to mention just having more of a voice on more issues, like why do we need the representatives anyway?
Since in the limit direct democracy basically is anarchic, these types of discussions are IMO one of the best ways to ground otherwise theoretical discussions about anarchism and avoids the trigger word.
The truth is that most people on all sides of the political spectrum only want elections until their preferred king is in charge, then they become staunch royalists, supporters of dynasties/dictators/fascists, whatever you want to call it.
My paradoxical observation is that people who really believe in democracy are almost always anarchists, deep down. To test yourself, just ask whether you want the government to do things "in the interest of the public", regardless of whether the public agrees that it is desirable. If you "want to protect the public" from actually having their own preferences because "they don't know better", this paternalism is right next door to fascism. It doesn't matter much whether you're forcing them to pay for good things like education programs, or for bad things like an unjust war. When you go down the road that "representatives are necessary because the people can't make decisions" or that "term limits are necessary because the public is fickle", you're really saying you just want democracy until your preferred king is installed.
Because it is a full time job that most of us want to do for free.
I don't even have the time or resources to properly evaluate ballot propositions that come around every couple years let alone all the decisions made by people I elect and those they delegate to.
Yes, a different perspective on a subject that's somehow failed to materialize in any way (beyond 100 people for any reasonable length of time) after over a century of philosophical thought, theory, and attempts...
The reason Spain didn't work, which was on a large scale, is not do with anything you mentioned.
It was brutally crushed by all major nations in the world. You can't say how it wouldn't work otherwise, because it did work, and was crushed with violence.
Ah yes... "It only failed because of the concentrated efforts of THE ENEMY, who couldn't bear to see it succeed."
Now where have I heard that one before? Oh right, it was Putin, explaining why communism turned into a monster, and communism was in fact inflicted upon poor Russia by the west to destroy their socialist paradise...
This is how zealots speak. Their philosophy and their people are pure and innocent. Therefore any time it fails, it can only be THE ENEMY's influence.
It literally failed due to the concentrated efforts of the world. That's historical fact.
That doesn't mean it wouldn't have failed for specific reasons if allowed to continue, however we don't know what that failure would be, and stating it as was done, is a ridiculous idea.
Welcome to the world that will gladly concentrate its efforts against you, reiterating the point of the post above you.
Which may be the answer to this entire thread, anarchism isn't going to work unless the world decides to let it work (hint, people in power aren't going to let this happen).
You can make much more substantive arguments against Anarchism that are reasoned, and reasonable. Making things up instead of understanding the historical record is a choice.
And yet some like the swiss survive the whole world preparing to come down on them.it can be done .. nowadays with weapons of mass destruction more than ever.
Did the US army or its participating individuals ever get charged for killing the “collateral murder” Reuters journalists? Or for doing the same to the proximate other civilians? Or for covering it all up?
The question who is guilty by a US court does not determine the guilt of an individual in any relevant or moral way under these extreme circumstances. It just indicates if you are part of the system or if you rather are uncomfortable and need to be silenced.
Definitely whataboutism, but the crew were investigated before the leak and it was found that the reporters were with armed fighters and were not distinguishable as civilian reporters. While its unfortunate, walking around in an active warzone with armed combatants and not taking steps to clearly identify yourself as a non combatant isn't wise. These things happen in war. They were not intentionally targeted and they weren't murdered. War reporters know the risk they are taking on and this is why they usually clearly mark themselves as press.
Yes the killed journalists were in a country that was being attacked by a foreign nation. This does not make it their fault that they were murdered.
While this might be a common occurrence in war, it does not excuse anything: if wars are fought in a way that these kill innocent people then they should not be fought in the first place. Something is not morally excusable only because it is expected when done.
Thirdly, sure the crew was investigated (here i admittedly only know what wiki has to offer) but there is no known outcome of said internal investigation.
I'm sorry but this is a ridiculous and unrealistic stance. People die in wars. That's just a fact of life. I have sympathy for uninvolved civilians who don't want to be there. But war reporters know the risks and willingly enter warzones to report on them. Its just like reporting anything else dangerous. There is a risk you will die. There is a risk you will die in a tragic and preventable way too. Things could have been done differently but the footage is public now. Watch it yourself, they were walking with armed combatants and didn't look any different. There is no way the crew could have known they were reporters. The US military's ROE in GWOT was very restrictive for reasons just like this. But that doesn't mean its perfect. Arguing that nobody innocent should die is some kind of realistic standard reeks of an easy life and first world privilege.
The first paragraph is whatabouttery, the second may be accepted, but the claim I replied to was he was legally innocent until proven guilty. That is what I was addressing, not some broader notion of morality.
I no longer trust the authors to be honest about known shortcomings, let alone be upfront, truthful, and transparent when dealing with security issues and reported vulnerabilities.
I hope I’m wrong. Does anyone know how they’ve handled disclosures in the past?