My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."

This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.

Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.

That was nicely put.

I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.

So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.

Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents...

Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.

I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this passage while pushing their agenda for control:

    ...and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
    Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,
    so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand.

The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a different purpose... seems relevant somehow..

AKA The Witness in Nick Harkaway's novel Gnomon.

>Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices.

They won't have to.

Instead, they'll just make some new essentially mandatory tech which older devices cannot run – update or stop existing, societally.

----

Phones and email already seem this way (i.e. "required") – from my perspective as an internet user whom doesn't use phone/email, personally. Nobody believes me when answering "no phone, no email" – free-est man alive - their loss is disbelief.

This isn’t just your photos. This is all content displayed on the device, all content captured by the camera - everything. Full take. GCHQ must be wetting themselves.

With just enough fascistic pressure maybe Usenet can be great again. Just have to figure out how to filter known good content from the spam which I think can be solved with OpenPGP identities. Otherwise Tor and download managers for the patient people. Static generated galleries of pictures and videos spread across thousands of small sites. Some downsides of pushing people into dark corners is that all regulation goes out the window along with some tax revenue. Loss of tax revenue may be one way to get their attention.

Probably because its leadership seems to have been taken over by more politically and less technically inclined people (for better and/or worse) who don't understand why it matters.

The trade is we get (hopefully) people very dedicated to keeping the org developing the stuff alive and well-funded, and gaining mainstream acceptance/attention.

Does the average person think this? Perception of what other people think doesn't always line up with what they actually think.

If only the average person had tools and access to all such information.

It's a great meme, though. Use it more.

https://xkcd.com/610/

isn't more as long as the average billionair thinks it is.

It's not like it's the average person pushing it.

The average person doesn't have any knowledge on this system.

>>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.

I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort of overreach

However, I do think that “the choir” need to rethink what is and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which is going to happen) can be lost if we don’t allow epidemiology to follow our digital selves.

Detecting one’s word use is slipping might signal a trip to the doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital searches for terrorism, at least let’s get the benefits too.

Looks proprietary. Need fully open source to guarantee that right long term.

We'll see. I can't be the only voter fed up with how Labour are handling this.

I find they way that Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have dismissed privacy concerns about online surveillance particularly condescending.

Come the next general election they are going to be paid back for this.

(Oh, and I appreciate Signal speaking up and have just donated to them again for doing so).

Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous acts. See the Epstein files.

Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.

> Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed

"Yet you participate in society. Curious!"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Personally, I only have authenticator apps because my job requires them. I don't see any contradiction in being opposed to things you're forced into.

Beyond the fact that this isn't true, it's even less credible coming from a new, anonymous account. If privacy is really so dangerous and has no value, you should have no issue making comments like these under a publicly identifiable account.

Being pro-surveillance is the same thing as being pro-authoritarian unless you provide an alternate solution to prevent abuse of power.

This assumes surveillance prevents crime, or even that crime is worth preventing if surveillance is the cost.

In terms of everyday threats to my life, billionaires are a bigger one than criminals.