Telegram is notoriously insecure and routinely cooperates with govs behind the scenes while talking a big game about speech and privacy. Even their limited opt-in (roll their own) encryption is sus. The more you know 🌈
It's not possible to understand the state of BigTech, or its pathologies at the moment, without understanding these companies' transformation into defense contractors, in addition to their central role as surveillance providers to the state. 👇
(Yes, gentlemen, I know about ARPA and the US-military origins of networked computation. But I'm sure there's someone else out there who'd love an explanation.)
This is a historic tech action in a long proud tradition.
From Polaroid workers rejecting their work contributing to S Africa's passbooks, to the MIT research strike where scientists refused to work for warfare; to Geoff Hinton relocating to Canada to avoid building US weapons.
There is almost no way the large cloud companies providing massive compute services, AI surveillance & data processing APIs aren't implicated in the system of 'ad targeting for death' being used to facilitate mass murder in Gaza.
This is a nightmare. And it's going to take significant pressure to prevent this from becoming business as usual--a selling point for oppressive regimes, as opposed to a cautionary tale.
On how we lost the crypto wars, why surveillance advertising must be understood as the foundation of "AI", & why the tactics of the past won't serve us in defending privacy today.
I keep brooding on the way the xz backdoor was enabled in significant part via weaponizing the FOSS culture of shitty behavior and abuse.
Yes, there're other pathologies at work here (the big tech capitalist pillaging of the commons, etc).
But what is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, & that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.
On the TikTok ban, the danger of abandoning defense of speech to extremists, & how the liberal tendency to assume a just state "outside the scope of this paper" leads to confused law/policy that can exacerbate the problems platforms pose.
@alexhammy@researchfairy@signalapp We are aware, and working on new features to help address. In the meantime, we provide information in groups and profile details that enable you to see whether you have groups in common w/someone, whether you've ever chatted 1:1, etc. This will work to distinguish a new "Mike" from the "Mike" you speak with frequently. See more here, in the "How do I know this person is who they say they are?" section https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/6712070553754-Phone-Number-Privacy-and-Usernames
About 2yrs post-COVID I still get an instant headache from a tiny amount of alcohol. A full drink makes me violently ill for ~3 days. Posting b/c this's the first media I've seen on this symptom, and it would've been helpful to me 2 yrs ago.
Govs hire consultants daily to write whatever. Often, they produce trash. Here, a v small consultancy wrote a report for USG amplifying discredited X-risk ideologies + prescribing bad policy. AFAICT it's based based on ~5 ppl's hunches?
I'm sure a future where "workers push the buttons we give them, and only we know how they work" is good for incumbents and "button making companies."
But it's not something we should celebrate as progress!
Also v rich given Nvidia's success is in part attributable to having tons of low-level programmers mid-2000s--ppl who understand the mechanisms abstracted away for most--and were thus able to focus on creating the CUDA ecosystem way ahead of competitors. ANYWAY...