I wasn't outraged until ICE kidnapped two US citizens at gunpoint from their jobs at target, refused to verify citizenship, dragged them away in unmarked vans, beat the shit out of them and dumped them in the snow.
the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it purports to do. doubly so, if it does what it purports to do poorly but does something else very well. this system purports to protect children from adult content online but what it does is offer a legal justification for eliminating any and all anonymity.
can they compel testimony? keys, passcodes and the like are usually considered testimony. did they try? the usual story here is that they don't have to, that the big corporations will turn over any info they have on request because they can and the government makes a better friend than a single user. the article mentions 20 "requests" per year on average but doesn't say anything about the government using force.
I agree with your conclusion though: data you share with anyone is data you've shared with everyone and that includes your encryption keys. if that matters to you, then you need to take active steps to ensure your own security because compelled or not, the cloud providers aren't here to help keep you safe.
when i took stats in high school our final had one set of data and two questions. one was to use that set of data to prove a hypothesis, and the other to use that same set of data to disprove it. the trick was manipulating confidence, and the real trick was realizing that this was almost certainly happening any time we allow someone else to make the critical decisions for how to crunch any particular dataset. there seems to be an unspoken translation layer: you ask a question in english, then use statistics as the process of translating that question from english to math, then apply the translated question to the dataset and get an answer. if translation were mechanical that would be fine, but often the english has to go through interpretation. How confident do we have to be in a "yes" answer? 99%? 95%? 50/50? What constitutes an outlier? Sometimes a very slight shift in the line between good and bad data will include or exclude a single data point that can shift the calculations. The problem seems to be standardization of this translation layer as much as anything else, which is to say that everyone is ostensibly trying to answer the same question but under the hood they're asking very different questions of the data.
you're absolutely right, they're not positioned for expansion or growth. you're very close to seeing the private capital dark pattern that's become a huge part of our economics lately. let me illustrate for you how they make money by decoupling the company's success from the investors' success
1) borrow a bunch of money to buy the company - this is called a leveraged buyout
2) once you're in control, have the company assume the debt you took on in order to buy it. you as the buyer are now free and clear, and the company is now responsible for paying back the money you borrowed to buy it. the end result of this transaction is that the company now owns stock that is less desirable because the company is more leveraged
3) make huge cuts everywhere and use the money "saved" by divesting from your own future to pay yourself as a consultant
The company is now in the extremely fragile position of not being able to spend to respond to the market because all of their income is going to servicing debt and paying the members of the private capital group. the "investors" aren't actually invested at all because even if the stock they hold becomes worthless they didn't pay anything for it in the first place, the company did. the thing limps along for as long as it can keep bringing in some small amount of income for the "investors" to skim off the top of, then it inevitably dies like anything riddled with parasites will, the company declares bankruptcy and they sell the copper out of the walls in order to pay back the loan used to take the company private in the first place
there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat various diseases.
you're thinking systemically. chaosh ish a ladder, shansha. this will lead to overall downturns in everything but pockets of extreme windfall for people well positioned to either sell the US the supplies it needs to engage in war all the time against everyone or to distribute looted assets, and those are the people influencing the decision the most.
"They" don't exist. There are no Russians who replied to me in any manner when I said "You need to just overthrow your government" because I never said such a thing to anyone. Nothing I said was sarcastic, it was all meant to be taken extremely literally. You're trying to catch me out as a hypocrite but I didn't do what you said I did.
It's not, it's supposed to make you come up with your own answers, because sometimes the answer is more obvious to see when you see someone else with the same problem, and pretend you're helping them, instead of helping yourself.
Ironically the original intent of the second amendment was closer to "the states should have a lot of people used to using guns so they can raise militias if necessary".
ICE has recruited a lot of those people - you don't see as many weird paramilitary militia groups as you did back in 2020. So I guess it technically worked as intended here. Unfortunately that means more jackboots with "don't tread on me" flags on their unmarked vans.
perpetual war is great for neoliberalism because it forces public spending on private, consumable goods. no matter how many bombs you buy today you're gonna need more tomorrow, it's in the nature of bombs. then later if there's ever a break in the destruction the bombmakers can invest their windfall profits in construction companies, thus winning in both directions.
reply