Google Contributor looks neat, and probably something I'll try out...but, I don't see any indication that privacy will be respected with their plan. Seems like I still need an ad blocker and a privacy-respecting web browser.
It's unfortunate that something like Contributor can't be done in a peer-to-peer fashion. It requires a huge player with a visible impact on their entire web to be able to "sell" a different sort of web experience. That's actually kinda scary; it reminds me how much power Google has. While I have vaguely positive feelings about Google (and use gmail, Android, etc.), it's not great that one entity owns such a big chunk of the web.
I already have a couple of subscriptions to services that provide music. I don't know if I'll switch to Red; might try it out at some point. I should read up on it; I do watch a lot of tech videos and such on YouTube, and if Red actually supports the people who make them, that'd be great.
The problem is not the kind of democracy, those are just definitions. Is that people don't care (not about their privacy, not about earth, not about anything). And sincerely why should I care? I'm going to die in 50/60 years. I exploit others as much as I can then farewell.
So you say, if they behave like cattle, I shall behave like the wolf. Fair enough, there may be some justice in that, but the predator behaviour is the one that brough us where we are in the first place. It's true that it' also the one that gave us our intelligence.
The thing is that one may expect that intelligence would change things, but apparently it doesn't. It's just another tool on the predator's toolbelt. But somehow I just can't settle with this, it seams there should be a middle way..
There is a lot of hype over encrypted chat programs.
Telegram's encryption is not end-to-end unless you opt into "Secret Chats"[1] and many claim their crypto is not secure[2,3] as they rolled their own[4].
The latest Google chat app Allo also backed away from defaulting to end-to-end encryption for all messages as it lessens the quality of their auto-assistant[5].
The Axolotl protocol (developed by Moxie and Trevor[6]) is available in Signal and was later adopted by WhatsApp. Signal has far fewer features than other chat applications, and people aren't clamoring much about it; I would guess because many people place features > crypto.
Wire (wire.com) uses this protocol as well[7].
WhatsApp being part of Facebook has already called into question their handling of privacy[8], the feature they were originally advertising as their main strength.
And in case @m0xie complains that we should call it the "Signal Protocol":
No one will call it that as long as you claim that Signal is trademarked, and threaten legal action against projects using that name.
The LibreSignal issue, where you behaved worse than a kindergarten child (and I know, I volunteered to work some weeks in a kindergarten a few years ago) is still in memory for most people.
Given that it's not multiplatform it's kind of irrelevant. It's not a replacement for any of the others. I mean, yay for better encryption, but it's not going to help anyone on Whatsapp today.
It isn't about securely sharing highly sensitive material, but enabling verifiable privacy of typical communications. For example (hypothetically) me discussing cancer with a family member, or financial information, or (in countries where there is government oversight) organizing protests.
If not using a secure end-to-end encryption method such as chat, what do you recommend?
Email providers such as ProtonMail provide the same but in the form of email. Telephone calls are not secure, and neither are text messages.
For the things I post on Telegram I don't care about crypto but rather about a good desktop client, features months ahead of Whatsapp, nice niche communities, bots (including the hn bot which is really nice to see all things that have been voted above a configurable threshold during the day.)
Now that I think of it a lot of what I use it for is as a RSS and twitter replacement: subscribing to channels and groups, occasionally posting harmless stuff.
Wire[1] is also an excellent option. Unlike Open Whisper Systems they wont hang you from a tree for building a third party app. Signal wont work without Gapps or Google Play Services on your Android phone and Google Chrome for desktop.
Signal is pseudo-open-source but will not allow you to use it except via the closed-source google play services, so I still wouldn't have confidence in it.
And wherefrom can you get Signal except for the Google Play store? I was looking for it a while ago to install on my phone but only found two other projects which were threatened by moxie and then shut down.
If you've used Telegram for a while you will notice that in practice no one uses secret chats because these chats don't sync between devices. Your "non-secret" chats are readable by Pavel and anyone he wishes to share them with. I guess it's fine if you trust Pavel's good intentions. I don't[1].
I'm not. I test a lot of ideas but don't have much money. I have already to pay for hosting and DNS. SSL is optional. I'm very thankful to let's encrypt for the opportunity to use SSL on my sites.
Also SSL (and the web) is a broken technology, I'm not going to pay for something broken.
there is nothing really that is free beer in the world, the money has to come somewhere, either some "rich" guys donate the fund, so the rest gets a free ride, or everybody pays a little, say, $5 per year, what's wrong with that? I'm not a rich guy per se, but I want to pay reasonable fee for what I got.
You can still do so by donating 5$ per year or any other amount you'd like - which is awesome! More things should come around in this way. Talk about being inclusive.
yes but if you do the math since not everybody is paying whoever donates need pay more to take care of those who does not, which is really what the whole topic is about.
Snowden has a well-argued moral case for what he did. He demonstrably tried to minimize harm and maximize the positive impact of his disclosures.
You give literally no reason for your condemnation (though in all fairness, your comment is likely to be rhetorical).
More to the point, you will likely argue that he broke laws and cite some unspecified damage to the intelligence community that can neither be qualified nor quantified. Importantly, you will likely do this -- as every condemning voice has -- without offering a cogent rebuttal to Snowden's case. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, you will fail to address the the clear and present danger of allowing a government to perform dragnet surveillance on its citizens without suspecting them of criminal activity.
If that's not intellectual laziness, then I honestly don't know what is.
If that's not going to be your line of argumentation, then congratulations! You are literally the first person I have encountered who condemns Snowden without being intellectually lazy or dishonest. I'll believe it when I see it.
(I feel compelled to mention, once more, that I mean no disrespect. I think your comment is rhetorical in nature, so I beg of you not to take anything personally.)
> Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, you will fail to address the the clear and present danger of allowing a government to perform dragnet surveillance on its citizens without suspecting them of criminal activity.
"Most incidents are self-reported", which says to me that they do not have effective monitoring - there are doubtless abuses that have gone undetected.
How come proven collateral damage such as innocent deaths caused by US military interventionism is widely considered reasonable and acceptable. So, tenuous upside/blatant downside = no outrage.
But the unproven collateral damage of Snowden's leaks, which had the giant upside of revealing democracy-chilling surveillance techniques, leads to mass reaction from the government. So, undeniable upside/debatable downside = Enemy of the State, threats to nations that offer him asylum.
But they are wide awake and outraged when Snowden's ostensible act of espionage has caused an enormous amount of public good and technological innovation.
It's not really the American's fault. We hear few of their real voices. It's the media that speaks the loudest.
Don't sell Americans short on their ability to withold empathy for non-Americans though. They know that the men who stole control of four planes on 9/11 were civilians too, and they still generally trust that their government is ID'ing threats to national security correctly.
Whether the government is actually doing that (and whether---even if it were---that's sufficient for completely extrajudicial killing that would be called "waging warfare" in any other context) may not be things an average American is asking before going to sleep at night.
Who are these generic Americans that think that Snowden should be condemned? Everyone American I know is very grateful for what he did. And I know quite a few.
I've only ever heard official policy statements condemning him. I am not even really sure those stating such policy agree with what they are saying (at a personal level).
I live near a military base, views against him are quite common here. The defense culture, in general, and those who view "security" [0] as the primary role of our government also condemn him.
[0] This is a non-partisan view. I hear it from Democrats, Republicans, and some Libertarians (who hold more to the fiscal sense of modern libertarianism than the civil liberties sense, which is a shame). There's a large group of people in the US who seem to believe that security for-its-own-sake cannot be evil, in an ends-justify-the-means version of morality.
Thanks for explaining. As jacalata pointed out I don't have much interaction with people with that point of view, hence why I have such a strong aversion to comments saying Americans feel that way.
This reminds me of my friend who was convinced John Kerry would win the election because "I don't know anybody who will vote for Bush!" In other words, I suspect you have a strong selection bias informing your view of Americans.
Of course not. I understood your comment to be questioning whether there exist any individual Americans who condemn Snowden and proposing as evidence for their non-existence "Everyone American I know". If you were just saying that you don't think the majority of Americans condemn Snowden then I have no disagreement.
I was disagreeing with the premise that all Americans think exactly the same thing by presenting any example of Americans who disagree. Since I know quite a few, it's at least enough that you can't say "Americans think X," which is what the post I replied to said.
> Everyone American I know is very grateful for what he did. And I know quite a few.
This is an enormously basic fallacy. I was born and raised in the US and have spent a quarter century of life here, so I think it's fair to say "I know quite a few" Americans. But I would think it beyond insane to claim that my sample is useful for statements like "I know a lot of Americans and none feel this way. Who are they?". I also don't know any Trump supporters, any single parents, any heroin addicts, any cardiosurgeons, any farmers...is it really that difficult to believe that your sample of Americans isn't typical (despite its impressive size of "quite a few")?
(The comment I was replying to said that Americans are ok with one thing but not ok with another. It was implying that all Americans think the same way and I disagree)
He leaked classified information beyond what he needed to expose illegal programs. Most of his purpose was to expose programs he had an ideological problem with. I don't believe that is a good enough reason to leak classified information.
Edward Snowden isn't an elected official. It wasn't his job to decide which US policies he agrees with. Government can't function if low level employees take it upon themselves to rule.
Snowden did not expose the documents, the journalists did... It was their journalistic duty to reveal a minimal yet sufficient amount of evidence to inform the public, not his.
I roughly agree with you in that I think the "Snowden is in the wrong" perspective is overrepresented in the media. That's what I meant by "it's not their fault." I'd bet the public on average is less extreme in judging Snowden.
You're obviously hanging around only certain groups of people, and not reading message boards filled with pro-authoritarian people. Go to any message board with right-wingers and you'll see him denounced as a traitor. HN is simply not the place where you're going to see this.
Fair enough, but pro-authoritarian boards do not represent all Americans. I was replying to a post that said "Americans think..." implying that all or most Americans think the same thing, so I was presenting a counter-point that not all or even most Americans think like that.
HN denizens and tech-heads do not represent all Americans either.
Seriously, there are very few traits that I can think of which really represent all Americans; we're much too diverse for that, and we're growing farther and farther apart. The lifestyles and attitudes in rural areas are extremely different from those in urban centers, and it's becoming more and more divergent (for instance, Millennials are abandoning car ownership).
So any time you see someone say something like "Americans think..." you have to take it with a grain of salt, and at best realize that they're talking about some sizeable demographic, which probably is not an absolute majority, but is large enough to make it a valid statement, unless you want to quibble about what qualifies such a statement, as if you demand that it apply to a clear majority (say, over 60%), then no such statement will probably ever be true of Americans, except things that are also true of people in many other places (for instance: "Americans like smartphones" -- not at all unique to Americans).
Pro-authoritarian boards do indeed represent a sizeable swath of Americans, like it or not. Just look at how popular the alt-right is these days.
>Yeah, Americans sleep when they hear 90% of drone attack deaths are civilians:
No, 90% of the drone deaths weren't known indented targets. If you bomb a Taliban camp to kill a known Taliban leader, you are going to kill a lot of people, but they aren't going to be mostly civilians.
Sure some of them are civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that's legal under international law and essentially unavoidable in war.
You could argue that maybe America is aiming at targets without any regard for who surrounds them, but that you can't use that 90% figure to do it. And I also believe that you'd be wrong.
I don't think it's acceptable, but at least "collateral damage" has the virtue of having been approved by elected officials and is something considered before we go to war or order attacks somewhere. Snowden's leaks weren't approved of by anyone but Snowden, and if they had managed to get people killed even if that wasn't Snowden's intention they would still be enough to consider as Treason.
In counter point, if we start allowing anyone who feels like they can leak this stuff on their own authority, and it starts costing lives of Americans, how many would you consider "worth it"? At what point does it move from whistle-blowing so it's okay to treason?
No, its their fault as executives. Secure systems are expensive and they take time to build properly, which is fully at odds with, "I need this done yesterday". Unfortunately (for them), since they cut the checks, the also get what they pay for.
