Notices by mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social), page 4

"Opinionated" is what a guy decides to call interaction design when he's also decided to be an absolute dick about the whole thing.

@grimalkina you’ve heard me go on about the simple sabotage manual and “creating a sick system” as assigned reading so people have the language to recognize when these things are being done to them - what would you put on a reading list aimed at psychological self-defense? Like, what’s the “Art Of War” for the protection of the human spirit?

@grimalkina (I say that from the perspective that “the art of war” is basically the Dr Seuss of military texts, a short guide to keeping the emperor’s slow witted nepo baby failson from throwing away the kingdom at the first sign of trouble. It’s a classic in the same way The Cat In The Hat is a classic, it’s “would you could you with a moat, would you could you with a boat”. But you’ve gotta start somewhere.)

How do you build a mental model of a system where "Wrong PIN" means "Your computer's hard drive is full because you bought a phone?"

How can _anyone_ be expected to navigate a world like this?

My friend @grimalkina wrote this a few weeks ago: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/why-i-cannot-be-technical/

... and you should read it, but I have to believe that she is, as she always is, being far too kind.

Maybe "being technical" just means, "I'm willing to act like this bullshit is normal and acceptable."

A lot of people - myself included, at times - deride "not invented here", and snark that "some people can't understand systems they haven't built themselves, but...

Look at this: https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/

Just... look at it. Look at the contortions involved. Hours of effort, by somebody deep enough in the guts of this specific stack to know Regedit and the utilman/cmd trick, just so they could log into a machine with a full drive.

How do you trust systems, or ecosystems, like this? How?

The way I first heard the expression was, you do not let the camel’s nose into the tent if you do not want the camel’s ass in the tent.

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-confirms-smart-refrigerator-ads-are-coming-3598848/

Re-upping this annually, as I must:

You need to internalize the idea that hypocrisy is not a meaningful accusation to the right. Of course they're hypocrites. That you are bound - by rules, standards, logic, human decency, some fundamental moral consistency, anything at all - and they are not? That is their conception of what power is, and why they seek it. So they can exercise power, without constraint, and you cannot.

That is the point.

Hypocrisy is the virtue-signaling of fascism.

What is the most made-up-sounding place name you know? I know they’re all made up but you know what I mean.

I still remember how surprised I was when I learned that Nantucket was a real place.

@dalias @dank @AnarchoNinaWrites I don't believe it's magical thinking. Specifically, when Schneier said "I no longer trust the constants" - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_brea.html - the references note the NSA had paid RSA to use a backdoored random number generator - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/report-nsa-paid-rsa-to-make-flawed-crypto-algorithm-the-default/ - and the timeline is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG - see also https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/767.pdf

For whatever my opinion is worth, I think that the combination of decades-ahead math and an infinite budge means this problem is real.

@AnarchoNinaWrites There are a couple of things that are publicly known about this: first, these orgs can intercept and record traffic before it reaches its destination, so there's no reason to think that it's unrecorded even if the endpoints are secure (they are not).

Second, recording means even if encryption used _today_ is good enough _today_, it's possible to break stored, encrypted communications retroactively.

Third: the NSA has _decades-old_ math that's _still_ classified.

The thing that gets me is when you know things like this are going on absolutely pervasively - https://www.404media.co/airlines-sell-5-billion-plane-ticket-records-to-the-government-for-warrantless-searching/ - and still see governments insisting that despite the fact that they can pinpoint your location at any moment and keep an archive of your life going back as far as storage capacity permits, they still need every conversation you’re a part of from cradle to grave to be legible and searchable because the data they already have is somehow not enough.

Why do the people on bluesky who say they are being censored not simply sign up for a different bluesky instance or stand up their own server?

@dalias They got bought by Bending Spoons, a company whose specialty is acquiring companies (often that seem to have plateaued) and then firing most of their staff and putting them in maintenance mode slow nosedive.

If you love anything on Vimeo, back it up now.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of the other two guys in this trenchcoat.

@kims I would like to hear more about this story.

the nine billion names of god in a rainbow table, does this get me anywhere

Ominous start to the day.

PMease take a tiakgu, sure ok I’ll do that I guess.

Magnificent.

https://alignmentalignment.ai/