blogjou
It seems like at least the European CORONA crisis is coming to an end, so I need another socially accepted excuse for never being around anywhere. A blog!Bud-an-Terence...
Bud an Terence:
Ich freue mich, dich kennengelernt zu haben, und ich glaube, dass man unsere Freundschaft, auch wenn unsere Begegnungen nicht so häufig waren, auf dem Bildschirm sieht, und das ist möglicherweise das, was viele junge Menschen anspricht, die die Freude an einem guten Gefühl verloren haben und ihr Leben mit unerfüllbaren Wünschen verkomplizieren. Wir repräsentieren die Einfachheit des Lebens, und vielleicht lieben sie uns deshalb - und wir lieben sie.
This is the result of two decades of unckecked innovation...
This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation - the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.
Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanism...
Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanism by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science, if fact, is anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Haydn isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of sublte coercion.
She cheerfully shared her opinion that...
She cheerfully shared her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the public and the truth.
Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind...
Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.
A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve...
A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve than a change in technological standard, and as long as legal innovation lags behind technological innovation institutions will seek to abuse this disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to independent, open-source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.
In my current situation, I’m constantly reminded that the law is country-specific, whereas technology is not. Every nation has its own legal code but the same computer code. Technology crosses borders and carries almost every passport. As the years go by, it has become increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming the surveillancce regime of the country of my birth won’n necessarily help a journalist or dissident in the country of my exile, but an encrypted smartphone might.
I think everybody has had this kind of experience...
I think averybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the latter is now difficult for everyone.
That was how you knew you could trust each other...
That is how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crime.
I took along a cheap laptop running TAILS...
I took along a chep laptop running TAILS, which is a LINUX-based “amnesiac” operating system - meaning it forgets everything when you turn it off, and starts fresh when you boot it up again, with no logs or memory traces of anything ever done on it. TAILS allowed me to easily “spoof”, or disguise, the laptop’s MAC: whenever it connected to a network it left behind the record of some other machine, in no way associable with mine. Useful enough, TAILS also had built-in support for connecting to the anonymizing Tor network.
It as in fact slightly better...
It was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.
Remark: This is NOT about what Edward Snowden did. This is what he experienced what intelligence agencies do.