Six Years After Ed Snowden Went Public, How Much Has Changed? (counterpunch.org) 231
Slashdot reader Nicola Hahn argues that at first, Edward Snowden's revelations six years ago "put mass surveillance and state sponsored hacking center stage," leading to other revelations like the ANT Catalogue, the Equation Group tools, and the Vault 7 leaks:
In the wake of these developments a number of high-ranking officials scrambled to justify clandestine programs. Executives likewise recalibrated their stance toward the government and lawmakers worked to defend our civil liberties. Yet despite the tumult of the post-Snowden era and the debates that ensued, has it actually changed anything? Or did society merely offer a collective shrug to the looming threat of pervasive monitoring, surrendering to the convenience of mobile devices?
One observer who has warily followed the aftermath of the Snowden affair believes that most people followed the latter path and that it does not bode well for civilization.
That observer is Bill Blunden, who asks this question in an essay at Counterpunch.
"After all the breathless headlines, Hollywood movies, book deals, Pulitzer prizes, and glossy primetime biopics. What, pray tell, has come of it?"
One observer who has warily followed the aftermath of the Snowden affair believes that most people followed the latter path and that it does not bode well for civilization.
That observer is Bill Blunden, who asks this question in an essay at Counterpunch.
"After all the breathless headlines, Hollywood movies, book deals, Pulitzer prizes, and glossy primetime biopics. What, pray tell, has come of it?"
Well, we have Trump now. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well, we have Trump now. (Score:4, Interesting)
Since that used-car salesman type is only a symptom, I would really be interested whether we are at the start of a short dark age (say, 50-100 years) or a traditional long one (500-1000 years). I would like to read a nice analysis about that after it has passed, but unfortunately, I seem to be stuck at this point in time where the tragedy is still unfolding. Observing history in the making is rarely a good thing.
Re:Well, we have Trump now. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Dark Ages were called "dark" due to a lack of historical records. In the modern age, we have and are producing an explosion of historical records. More than ever before.
Some people consider the word "dark" more akin to the intellectual deterioration during the period. Well, in the modern day, scientific knowledge is experiencing something of a "big bang," as we have more now than ever before and are gaining more at a rate unprecedented in history. The same goes for our cultural evolution (consider the unprecedented level of gender equality, cultural pluralism and awareness, philosophical dialogue, etc., that distinguishes the modern day from prior eras).
Seriously, only a complete ignoramus would consider the modern period a "dark age" by any meaningful definition at all. You think the mere fact that a buffoon is president somehow erases all the progress made by everyone else?
Your statement makes zero sense.
Re: Well, we have Trump now. (Score:3, Interesting)
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"An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." -- James A. Michener.
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Re:Well, we have Trump now. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm... 80% interesting? If I ever got a mod point to give, I think I'd be inclined towards "insightful", but perhaps it would have been moderated differently in the "Things got worse" or "It has gotten worse" branches of the discussion?
Purely serendipitous, but I just read Surveillance after Snowden , which was published just before Trump entered the political arena. I think it is interesting that almost every book I read these days has to be contextualized based on whether or not it was before Trump. I feel like pre-Trump the primary problem may have been the concealment of too much of the truth, whereas now we are drowning in a see of outrageous and self-serving lies propagated from the "highest" levels of "authority"...
Reflecting on the story, I'd say the big change since Snowden is that the level of trust is collapsing everywhere. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we have a new bifurcation? The people who trust liars like Trump are becoming ever more trusting of their fake authorities, even fanatically devoted to them, while the rest of the people (the ones I regard as the normal non-authoritarian folks) are becoming much more skeptical.
Boy, have I got a piece of historical trivia for you. Well, I thought I did, but I can't confirm it. I was able to fine references to a fact-checker (Meredith Bohen, a "research associate") working for President Obama (in the Office of Communications), but I cannot find any reference to one who worked for FDR. My memory is that he was the first president to hire someone for the specific purpose of checking his speeches for accuracy. He felt that everything the president said in public should be true. Maybe someone can find some trace of FDR's statements on this topic, but I came up dry after a bunch of searches...
Anyway, back to reading The 4th Revolution by Luciano Floridi. He's making a lot of interesting and relevant points about what the infosphere is doing to us and our human reality...
Hmm... Already 6/15 o'clock for this story. I'm increasingly convinced that the front-page cycle time on Slashdot is too rapid to sustain thoughtful discussions.
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I hate typos and Slashdot's inability to fix the ones that slip through preview...
s/fine references/find references/
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Observing history in the making is rarely a good thing.
May you live in interesting times...
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No, a dark age in that knowing things is looked down upon, and the truth is decided by whoever shouts the loudest or pays the most. People don't even care how much of a moron their leaders are as long as they're on their side of the game. Science is mocked, conspiracy theories are going mainstream, we've got a golden age of the internet and people use it for saying stupid things on Twitter. Even the president will deny saying something that is clearly heard on a recording and his followers actually believ
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It's a dark age if you, perhaps, were an artist getting most of your funding from the National Endowments. N....
It's a dark age if you think murdering people for politics is a bad thing (17 died by Right Wing Violence last year, says JDL)
It's a dark age if you think women are citizens, guaranteed freedom from involuntary servitude
It's a dark age if you think laws must be enforced on the rich and powerful as well
it's a dark age if you think children should not HAVE to learn "Cover in place" drills
It's a dark age if you think Children should grow up without fear of 140 deg. heatwaves
it's a dark age if you believe in fa
Re: Well, we have Trump now. (Score:1)
The harridan is still out there and a sizeable minority listen to what she says. She doen't have her hands on the levers of power, thankfully. Far fewer people would be watching her critically if she did. Perhaps Trump is better for that reason.
Re: Well, we have Trump now. (Score:2)
The Easy Answer is Nothing (Score:2, Informative)
Companies and governments the world over work hand in hand to find ways to spy on you. All of that initial outrage was impotent. There are databases out there that know everything about you because of the information you freely give away, or information they gleam from only "meta data". Your privacy is only an illusion.
Now for something really tin-foily, I'm on a diet and my captcha is dieter.
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If you think that's scary, my captcha is "tentacle porn".
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Re: The Easy Answer is Nothing (Score:2)
It has gotten worse (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of moronic Big Party goose steppers continues to increase and they're becoming more extreme. These fucktards actually believe that one party has all the solutions and the other party is the entire problem. It's a greatest scam of marketing since the Coke vs Pepsi taste tests... and with the same logic behind it!
Re: It has gotten worse (Score:1)
Oh, I don't know. Many 'Trump loyalists' are full aware that Trump is a bull in the china shop. We just don't care what happens to the china shop. When his 4 or 8 years are up we can sweep up the mess, and hopefully have been getting good deals in the massive surplus office furniture and equipment sales as the buildings emptied of bureacrats are liquidated.
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Come to think of it, I could use a new office chair.
Anyway, this is probably the best way I've seen it put. Most Trump supporters, me included, don't think he was the best person for the job. We think he was the best choice for the job given what our choices where.
Most of the people that I see today protesting Trump with a passion are young people that haven't lived under bad presidents before. They seem to be unaware that Trump is just a passing phase in American politics and a small one at that.
Things got worse (Score:5, Insightful)
We basically found out that Democracy is unsuitable for protecting freedoms, as people are far too easy frightened in voting for really bad agendas freedom-wise. This happens even when they have very clear warnings and explanations how bad that choice is. In a nutshell, we found out that that Democracy is no protection against Tyranny.
Overall, this is pretty much the worst outcome, because it means that the "best" political system is incapable of doing its job due to the incapability of the voters. There seems to be no fix for that and there are no better alternatives. As a group, the human race on this planet is destined to descend into darkness again and again and again.
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No. What we really found out is that an American-style republic with a first past the post two party system makes it easy for neither party to support freedom and for there thus to be almost nobody in congress fighting for it (just a handful of far left democrats and libertarian right republicans).
If we had a parliamentary system with proportional representation and ranked choice voting, things would be different. We'd likely have a
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Does not work either. Look at the Swiss system where they have that form of government. They still voted in a system of universal spying on the population, by scaring enough people.
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Does not work either. Look at the Swiss system...
And die of boredom. For real entertainment watch the UK. They might even vote to sell their NHS to Trump. That's an odd way to express the strong nationalism of Brexit. But it always was about business...
Re: Things got worse (Score:1)
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Re:Things got worse (Score:4, Interesting)
Pure democracy is the worse possible system of government devised by man. Far worse than socialism or communism could ever be. At least on paper those systems look good compared pure democracy.
Pure democracy is where everyone gets a vote on everything and all votes count the same Sure, this sounds good but it's not. Do you want to live in a system where the most popular got to dictate the laws? Many of us lived under that system once, it was called High School. Do you want to live under a system where your rights can be taken away from by a simple popular vote? A pure democracy will ALWAYS turn into a dictatorship eventually. It will always fails when the masses learn they can vote themselves stipends from the public treasury.
Then it's a good thing we don't live in a democracy isn't it? Despite what people like to brand about the United States isn't a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic, where we vote representatives into power to vote on our behalf. An if we don't like the way they vote, then we have the option to vote them out of office. All of this is guided by a frame work of laws and rights set down to protect the people from their government and themselves.
Sure its a flawed system, it was put in place by humans, which are flawed creatures. It is ripe for abuse and there are people that will game the system for themselves. That will always exist. But despite is flaws it is the best system devised by us poor naked apes to date.
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Then it's a good thing we don't live in a democracy isn't it? Despite what people like to brand about the United States isn't a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic, where we vote representatives into power to vote on our behalf.
When you see this statement, you know the person has no idea what they are talking about...
The only difference between a republic and a democracy is that the word republic comes from Latin, and the work democracy from Greek. In a republic, just like in a democracy, the population votes on issues or representatives. Even in the Athenian democracy, voters would select representatives or leaders. It would be unworkable for every voter to be polled every time an issue came up. The Greeks might've not created a
Re:Things got worse (Score:5, Insightful)
We live in a democracy and a republic, because they are essentially the same thing.
When you see this statement, then you realize the person speaking it has no clue what they are talking about or no concept of history.
Pure democracy was tried in Ancient Greece, it was a disaster. The founding fathers knew this and that is why the purposefully rejected it as the form of government for the U.S.
No, they are not the same things. Over the years the language has changed that people interchange democracy with what the U.S. really has. But the U.S. is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional republic, and it is a good thing that it is.
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Pure democracy was tried in Ancient Greece, it was a disaster.
You mean in Athens. Greece as a whole was a republic. Also, even in Athens you had to be a racially privileged landowner to have a vote, slaves and women didn't get to participate. Democracy may have been tried in other states, but if it was, it didn't last long enough anywhere to have been notable, and it was never universal even in Athens.
Re: Things got worse (Score:2)
The most important feature of Athenian democracy was sortition. Meaning, the selection of office holders by random drawing of lots. No elections. The Athenians considered elections a form of aristocratic government, not democracy.
Re:Things got worse (Score:5, Interesting)
The meanings have changed, and yes, the US is both a republic and a democracy BECAUSE the meanings of those have changed.
Definition of democracy (Merriam-Webster)
1a : government by the people especially : rule of the majority
b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
1a is direct democracy, what you're calling a pure democracy. That is indeed majority rule, like Switzerland, but we can see the attempts in the US for the same thing... when we have say states voting on whether gays have the right to marry the person they choose (this would be attempting to use Tyranny of the Majority to strip people of their rights).
(1)b is closer to the form in the US, with the added point that we have a constitution. The constitution is what keeps (or is supposed to keep) Tyranny of the Majority from being allowed to stand.
Definition of republic (Merriam-Webster)
1a(1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president
b(1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law
The founding fathers were against democracy because the only version of democracy that had existed was direct democracy. They understood that using Tyranny of the Majority, people would have their rights simply voted away (like some have been attempting to do recently). But, the meanings have changed over time. Anytime someone stresses we're a republic and not a democracy, they ALWAYS bring up direct democracy (which we're not), and ignore representative democracy (which we are).... they're lying by omission.
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Maybe the answer is to copy what they have in California (and other states) with the "Proposition" system that allows for issues the government itself refuses to act on to instead be put up for vote in a referendum. It seems to work well in those states that have it (as far as I can tell anyway, I am not an expert on the political systems of those states).
Most work is done by the government as it is now but issues where the views of the government and the views of a big enough section of the people diverge
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"Pure democracy is where everyone gets a vote on everything and all votes count the same"
Voting is important to having a functional society. Informed and thoughtful voters can make life better. But ignorant, thoughtless voters tend to screw things up. That's why voting should be restricted.
Doctors are required to qualify before they practice medicine. Lawyers must qualify. People with important responsibilities usually have to prove that they are worthy. Drivers have to pass a test. Prospective parents shou
Re: Things got worse (Score:2)
Fuck yeah! No way those deplorable proles should be allowed to vote. Only intelligent, virtuous folks - like us! - should have a say in government.
You're premise is wrong (Score:2)
The trouble we have with our Democracy is that it isn't one. The American system of Gov't was built from the ground up to dampen the power of the people. Our Senate was meant to give disproportionate voting power to rural communities where only wealthy landowners could vote. Our Electoral College exists specif
Re: Things got worse (Score:1)
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Nice, unfounded Ad Hominem. Have you understood anything I wrote?
Re: Things got worse (Score:1)
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You did no such thing. You did not even attack me, what you posted is irrelevant. Or do you see any political party with any chance of winning that is not in on the evil? I do not.
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That might be true if voting were the only factor involved in governance. As it turns out, even in most ostensible democracies, voting is not even the primary determinant, let alone the only determinant.
Most of the really important decisions are out of the voter's hands entirely. They are made by appointed offices, or by the wealthy elite. While that might not live up to the ideals of a self-governing populace, it certainly has practical value. The wealthy are keenly aware of the fact that their wealth
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Hmm... So that's the only comment in this entire discussion that shows a primary moderation of "insightful"?
My reply is that things go up and down over time. Basically doesn't matter what you are measuring, sometimes it is improving, and sometimes it is getting worse. Over the long term, things get better, but we live on the short term. In other words, evolution works, but not for you or me, because we die first. Maybe we are moving towards more truth and more democracy in society but right now this appears
The real problem we have with (Score:2)
Voter suppression is rampant in the United States. Voting machines are insecure, waits in lower middle class poor neighborhoods can exceed 4 hours and our drug policy is a tool to disenfranchise voters so obvious Florida just passed a law to give voting rights back.
Making voting a universal right, one that no crime can ever take away. Then make it mandatory. Finally make sure there's a paper trail. Vote by mail is fine. Elect
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Do that the the troubles with Democracy will go away.
Not at all. These are patches, they might improve things, but you're talking about reducing the number of voters who cheer for tyranny by a few percentage points at best. Maybe those few percentage points are really important ones, maybe they'll ward off tyranny for a little while longer, but eventually a more capable demagogue will come along.
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That did fine during the Church Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
No domestic spying and dont use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for domestic spying.
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> As a group, the human race on this planet is destined to descend into darkness again and again and again.
On the plus side, we do have the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
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we don't have a democracy in the US though... never have. The us is a republic, and it seems that in wake of the Snowden revelation, they doubled down on this rather than trying to reform.
the Obama administration was one of the biggest prosecutors of journalists in recent decades, and rather than trying to become more transparent and reform, chose to prosecute instead. Trump, though he makes a lot of threats toward journalists, hasn't prosecuted anywhere near the scale of the Obama administration, but also
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That is about the worst proposal to fix this that is possible. "Capitalism" is not a "principle". When you really look at it, it merely is the deep conviction that those that already have a lot of money are allowed to steal from everybody else, while those with little money are not allowed to do that and that society should protect that model.
But your whole approach is deeply flawed. When discussing freedom, you focus on your _possessions_? That is a prioritization so flawed, it is staggering.
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It may not be right now, but it could become that if we wanted to.
All we'd need is a book of trading laws of some sort. Something to guide our choices when buying and selling things. How does "Rules of Acquisition" sound?
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No. Please read up on what a "principle" is. Capitalism is a complex system design that takes a host of principles and combines them in a certain way.
That said, I think I understand what you mean. I don't think that can work, unless some clear limitations are put in that are foreign to capitalism. The typical mistake is to see capitalism as a system that is alive and self-regulates, when in actual reality it universally devolves to a steady-state where you have a few very rich people (that then can ignore c
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No. Please read up on what "Rules of Acquisition" is.
Re: The alternative is Capitalism. (Score:1)
When discussing freedom, the right to possess things has to be very important. Unless freedom is taken to mean that we should all be free to be impoverished and homeless. Save your stoic impoverished "freedom" for the monestary, if that's your thing; don't impose your religion on the rest of us.
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Materialism. Nice. The religion is on your side, not mine.
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And again, you are wrong. Not a surprise. I am not a fan of socialism. It sounds good on paper, but large-scale practical implementations seem to universally get corrupt even faster than capitalism. You seem to be one of those deficients that can only think in binary: Everybody that is not a capitalist is a socialist. There are a few more known alternatives, there are mixed forms and there are things that have not yet been tried or even been discovered.
Re:The alternative is Capitalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Though I agree: capitalism, whether you mean the principle or how it generally works out in practice, is a poor way to safeguard privacy and freedoms. You need laws... though I tend to lean towards laws that restrict the rights of entities like corporations or governments when it comes to dealing with individuals, and guarantees the rights of those individuals. It seems the laws we get lately are the other way around.
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It seems the laws we get lately are the other way around.
I fully agree to that.
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Capitalism is animal barter. There are no "principals" other than the laws of nature.
What people need is to learn respect!
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principles? eh...
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You think you own them? Look again. Where do most of the "fruits of your labor" go? In the typical case, certainly not to you.
Re: The alternative is Capitalism. (Score:2)
Usually your fruits go to you. But in aggregate a lot of Yous labors goes to one person. A min wage employee may only contribute $1 in profit but a million min wage employees all going to one business owner means disproportionate income.
Similarly hedge fund manager returns are very low. But 0.01% of $7Billion adds up fast. You collect the majority of the gains but they collect ya-all's gains.
Re: The alternative is Capitalism. (Score:2)
Capitalism is not voluntary trade. It is a machine for the establishment of hegemony and no free market can withstand it.
Re: The alternative is Capitalism. (Score:1)
Capitalism is not a machine. It is about machines, and the rewards that people capable of creating and maintaining them can earn from their fellow men, for the wealth of all that results. The bargain can be good for all parties who participate.
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This post was made by a Russian troll. Or and idiot. Possibly both.
Democracy is a system of representative government. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned. The two concepts are orthogonal to each other. Your post is simply nonsensical.
Re: The alternative is Capitalism. (Score:2)
+1 Insightful
Re:Things got worse (Score:5, Informative)
In the future, we won't be able to vote for baby boomers because they'll all be dead. After that, the Millennials will complain about all the problems caused by Generation X.
Re: Things got worse (Score:1)
True, but the profitable years for companies like Winnebago and the RV industries are likely over. The real estate boom on swampland in Florida should be nearly done. The excess and largess of the boomer generation represents a historical peak. There simply isn't enough left after the big bash.
There is change (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just not coming from the habits of the users.
There is an acceptance that it's real now ... but the burden of making it right is expected to be someone else's job. They don't even want to know how.
well... (Score:2)
Voting has no effect as all polticians/parties love controlling us in any way they can, so short of civil war, what can citizens actually do about it?
Nothing, that's what.
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Don't blame me! I voted for Kodos!
Re: well... (Score:1)
Civil war would be even worse. The kind of bastards who would belly up to the lectern makes the current system look good. Do you want the kind of governemt they have in Mexico, or Brazil, or Venezuela? 33-1/3 revolutions per minute is the domain of poets and musicians. The rest of us should just step back and enjoy watching the show.
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Heh, that's exactly what they want to hear from you.
Yep, it is pointless to even try, to walk through an open door
Not his fault. (Score:2)
The only thing we could've done about it is overthrow the government. Nobody wants to try.
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The only thing we could've done about it is overthrow the government.
We did. We replaced Obama with Trump.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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9. Users. are. aware. People detained at the border or unlawfully may intentionally wipe their phones to prevent incriminating evidence being sucked up by the surveillance state. Encrypted laptops are a de-facto reality in 2019 and have done wonders to thwart increasingly greedy state actors who insist they deserve access to digital devices without a warrant.
Users are aware of the possibility to state actors spying on them.
Which is why they mostly don't.
Instead, they outsource it to private companies, who give users some shiny thing in exchange for allowing them to be spied on. They'll claim it's for "advertising purposes" - and it is - but then they'll also happily give the NSA and CIA complete access.
The spying hasn't stopped. It hasn't be stymied. If anything, it's grown. It just isn't done by state actors: it's done by private companies.
And it's not just Go
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A lot of your list has more to do with and Google and other companies wanting to sell unwanted IoT spying device to everyone without anyone being able to listen in on the connection, and so know what was send.
Everything was encrypted in a way that the enduser can't access, so we can't really tell if, for example, Google Nest's undeclared microphone was really always off. That did not weaken the TLA power in the slightest - instead of spying directly they can just "ask" the relevant companies for informatio
USA is less trusted in the world (Score:3, Interesting)
One change is that the USA is less trusted by other governments and corporations around the world. It's difficult to quantify this effect, but in part the current US-China trade war is about espionage and what software, devices, and companies countries can trust from outside their borders. Many countries have started to require by law that certain infrastructure, devices, data, and software reside in-country and are sourced and maintained in-country, including US allies who were shocked to learn the US h
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A convo I had less than a month after. (Score:2, Interesting)
Less than a month after the Snowden news broke, I had variants of this conversation with several different people.
Me: I'm doing $THING now due to the Snowden revelations.
Them: Who? The What?
Me: Edward Snowden? He's the guy who just disclosed the NSAs warrantless mass surveillance programs.
Them: Never heard of that. Well, back to vomiting my entire life onto Facebook...
People don't care what happens to their civil rights, they don't care about privacy, and they sure didn't care enough to change any of thei
Re: A convo I had less than a month after. (Score:1)
Actually the sea of acquired data may overwhelm and distract the spies and surveilers. The free can perhaps hope to slip into the cracks. Which is the same as it ever was.
Use of encryption (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing that changed rapidly is that most websites started using encryption for everything. Also, messaging platforms switched to full encryption, many end-to-end. There are a lot more subtle effects but the mindset of "encryption is overkill" has gone out the window.
The effects are very real, the benefits are debatable.
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Judging by the hissy fit most law enforcement agencies are putting on, there are real benefits.
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I remember when the British signal security service (GCHQ) started moaning that people were encrypting BitTorrent traffic and suddenly their capture system was getting clogged up. Kind of a massive warning that they were actually storing everything (the so called "full take") but people didn't really believe the scale of it until Snowden gave us proof.
Everyone forgot about Vault7 (Score:1)
The Vault7 hacking tools included the ability to leave Russian "fingerprints" on any hack. Russian time zones, .EXEs compiled with Russian compilers, Russian system settings, etc. Let's all remember this going forward. Even more disturbing is what it revealed about the NSA: they use false flag attacks as a normal mode of operation. Why else would they need such tools?
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident worked spectacularly well getting the US involved in Vietnam. Never forget this. The director of national securit
technology has momentum and 6 years is short (Score:4, Interesting)
Technology has a lot of momentum and a much longer lead on development than what it is usually credited with. There are changes starting to happen now that could well be part of the long-term snowball effect of Snowden's revelations (I hesitate to use that word because he simply revealed what we always knew was behind the curtain).
For example, I am a believer in the potential of AI to improve life while simultaneously horrified at the way it has been implemented. Over all the decades I've read of the AI personal assistant in Science Fiction, it was rare for it to be implemented by a centralized all-knowing processing system. When it was implemented in that way, the story usually revolved around some horror resulting from creating a central system that knew everything. It seems that these thought experiments deliver an elementary conclusion that you just don't do that.
I always imagined my personal assistant as residing in a distributed fashion on my hardware - as being so much in my control and so well-connected to me that it is seen as an extension of me and in the eyes of the law should fall under my 5th amendment protections. And instead of one per household there would be one per person.
Luckily, I think we are starting to realize that the centralized AI isn't going to fly as it gets more powerful. Across the wide range of computing devices, the hardware coming out over the last couple of years has started to support much better local AI processing. Smartphones especially are evolving quickly to perform far more of the AI processing on-device. The next generation of Google Assistant is capable of running entirely on device. This required a lot of research into compressing the models which were tens of GBs before and are now around a half GB.
The R&D in both AI and hardware design necessary to produce this trend had to start a few years ago. I feel that without Snowden, the big players might have remained content to be collecting all AI input to their central machines and processing it there. The timing is right for the Snowden fallout to have been part of the driving forces for this current trend to localized AI processing.
DNS privacy, for starters (Score:3)
The dprive (DNS PRIVate Exchange) working group formed — https://datatracker.ietf.org/w... [ietf.org]
Thanks to that initiative, we've ended up with several different possible implementations: DNScrypt, DNS-over-TLS, and DNS-over-HTTPS.
DoH seems to have gained traction in browsers — with built-in support in Firefox — but also potentially could centralise DNS resolution in the hands of a few large cloud providers (like Mozilla's partnership with Cloudflare) https://developers.cloudflare.... [cloudflare.com]
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DoH seems to have gained traction in browsers — with built-in support in Firefox — but also potentially could centralise DNS resolution in the hands of a few large cloud providers (like Mozilla's partnership with Cloudflare)
Which solves nothing at all at the level which matters. So your connection to the DNS server is encrypted and your queries can't be sniffed off the wire. So what? Instead they just invade the handful of centralized DNS servers that result and vacuum up all the queries at the source.
Russia's interest in running their own DNS root servers may be just what we need to finally break ICANN's hold and completely and truly decentralize DNS. It may be a clusterfuck of epic proportions along the way, but it's con
How much has changed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing
All the same people are still in charge. The republic stands tall
Re: (Score:2)
One thing that changed though... Conspiracy theorists that talk about government surveillance are not considered as tin foil wearing lunatics anymore.
In New Zealand (Score:3)
Just tell me when it's time to die (Score:2)
Fox guarding the henhouse (Score:2)
Privacy is very difficult as an individual - it is a huge amount of effort, possibly impossible to avoid being tracked in multple ways.
Laws could protect privacy, but governments are one of the biggest consumers of personal data, so they do not have the motivation to fix this .
Democratic governments don't help because votes really only impact the few issues that are most important to most people. Privacy doesn't quite rise to that level for enough people.
Maybe the first really egregious misuse of a broad r
People bought into the FUD and BS (Score:2)
A lot of governments have essentially convinced people that all the "security theater" (including the spying) is the only way to keep the "bad people" (i.e. terrorists) from killing people and blowing stuff up.
Re:OF COURSE NOTHING CHANGED!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but they used to only spy on the military, political and economical facets of each other.
Now, governments can spy on each and every one of their own citizen with extreme ease while storing, cross-checking and analyzing every tiny bit of information that you may not even be aware of yourself.
That's extremely scary.
Re: Shame on you if you still have google account (Score:1)
Central Services [youtube.com] is how we all reap the benefit of heating and air contitioning.
Re: (Score:3)
What is funny, though, 6 years after Snowden's expose, the bad guy turned out to be not NSA, not GCHQ, but Huawei !
Simple misdirection. Our politicians have been using the foreign bad guys to distract from the sins at home since forever. The explosion of foreign bad guys now - so much so that they are starting to react with not just bemusement but amusement - is a clear indicator that we need to be doing some serious introspection.
Re: Pre and Post Snowden (Score:2)
Yup. Tens of thousands - perhaps even a hundred thousand - civilians with zero security clearance knew about the pervasive internet surveillance long before Snowden's revelations. Pretty much everyone who worked in network engineering or network security. I knew about it. Some of you probably did too. But no one in the general public believed us.