I agree that "the internet will always be filled with real people: looking for each other". The question is will they be able to successfully find each other, and how can they be sure they have?
This ties in well with the Dark Forest theory of the Internet: that the public Internet becomes dead while humans flee to hidden, invite-only, private spaces.
Presumably, the value in finding each other will be the key to determining you have found someone real. If you literally can't tell the difference, then what does it matter? But many of us believe that there are important differences, that do matter, and that the dead internet can never truly provide.
If the connection is real, one would think the people would eventually want to meet. We've all seen the stories of people being catfished and how devastating it is for some people. How long is an acceptable amount of time for someone to engage in an online relationship (of any kind, not necessarily romantic), before finding out it's been a chatbot the whole time?
I just met someone, I think last year, who I've known via forums and chat for over 20 years now. I was looking for a place to watch the eclipse and totality was going right through his backyard. Imagine if I drove down there it was just some random address that an AI gave me after 20 years of talking. I'd lose my mind.
Some people's only friends are people they know online, through games or forums. Imagine finding out your only friend in the world isn't even real. That's very dark.
This seems like something the bots should have to disclose upfront. I hate not knowing if I'm talking to a real person or not. Imagine spending hours in an online debate with what is ultimately a chatbot... what a waste. If I want to talk to a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot. There is a reason we are here in the comments instead of just pasting the link into ChatGPT and going back and forth with it.
by using the internet or by using a website? if we included digital telephone would the answer be getting their phone number? i wish hosting a website was as easy as hosting a phone call.
The author recommends using "Do Not Track", but this has been deprecated for some time. Safari and Firefox have both removed the option completely. Perhaps the author meant GPC?
For all of the security suggestions in this article I was also surprised to see the author recommending ungoogle-chromium, which has a number of security issues. See: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
The primary issue I take with the article is the chosen tone. I think there are ways that these points could have been made without being overly cynical and negative. I think speaking authoritatively throughout the article has the effect of equating the importance of subjective preferences (like the choice of which terminal emulator to include), with legitimate security concerns (bash shortcomings, migrations, firewall misconfiguration, piping curl | sh to install software).
I wouldn't use Omarchy, but I am glad it exists. It's bringing more people into the desktop Linux ecosystem, which should be positive sum. Omarchy comes off to me as a little hacky and immature, but at this stage that seems.. mostly fine? Perhaps they should be more clear about that in their marketing, but I understand the goals and I admire the enthusiasm from DHH.
I suspect the scope and scale of these operations are at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most people think. I also strongly suspect such operations are not limited only to the governments you listed here. If the public was able to quantify the scope then maybe they would be more outraged.
Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.
No one wants to look into it because everybody is doing it. After Trump lost to Biden in 2020 there was a chance to analyse mass use of Big Data, targeting and psychometrics to influence the electorate. They didn’t do it because that’s how they won 2020.
I'm equally confused at just how bad Reddit is at identifying and removing bad actors to the point that I'm convinced it must be an intentional.
I'm not sure if the reason may be as simple as the desire to pump their user numbers for earnings, or if it's something more egregious than that. It's not clear to me how a company owned by the public which relies on advertisers for revenue has been able to carry on for so long being a propaganda farm for foreign agents and marketing bots.
Oh it’s deliberate. It’s been THE online platform for far left radicalization and extremist views for at least a decade now. It’s by far the most intolerant social media platform relative to the mainstream platforms.
I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.
Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.
OpenSea is very nearly "entirely on-chain" if I'm understanding your point correctly. It's powered by smart contracts. It's not custodial like Coinbase or Robinhood. Users custody their assets in their own wallets. They trade by submitting transactions directly from their wallet to a smart contract address on-chain which facilitates fulfillment of the trade. The code for these smart contracts is open source and verifiable.
It may not be obvious to more casual observers, but there is a lot of trading volume happening on on-chain exchanges these days (as in easily 10B+ in trading volume per day with most of this coming from futures).
I would disagree with that characterization. There are dozens of NFT marketplaces which all have access to the same underlying data. An NFT is denoted by its address on chain, which is trivial to find. Similarly anyone can create a website that looks like Google, but the "real" google is the DNS entry at "google.com".
In my experience H1-Bs know that the consequence of losing their job could mean being forced to leave the country. Management knows that too. Obviously this affects the incentives and behavior of both the manager and the employee.
This is also my impression. Containers aren't full-proof. There are ways to escape from them I guess? But surely it's more secure practically than not using them? Your project looks interesting I will take a look.
This is a huge issue and it's the result of many legacy decisions on the desktop that were made 30+ years ago. Newer operating systems for mobile like iOS really get this right by sandboxing each app and requiring explicit permission from the user for various privileges.
There are solutions on the desktop like Qubes (but it uses virtualization and is slow, also very complex for the average user). There are also user-space solutions like Firejail, bubblewrap, AppArmor, which all have their own quirks and varying levels of compatibility and support. You also have things like OpenSnitch which are helpful only for isolating networking capabilities of programs. One problem is that most users don't want to spend days configuring the capabilities for each program on their system. So any such solution needs profiles for common apps which are constantly maintained and updated.
I'm somewhat surprised that the current state of the world on the desktop is just _so_ bad, but I think the problem at its core is very hard and the financial incentives to solve it are not there.
While I agree that cryptocurrency can make the process much easier for scammers, I am wondering what exactly is the proposed solution? Something like 28% of adults in the US own cryptocurrency, and that number increases every year. A few years ago I could see path to some kind of global crackdown on crypto by governments around the world, but it now seems to me that cryptocurrency has reached terminal velocity and it's now too late for something like that to happen. Coinbase is in the S&P500, Circle is floating an IPO, and there are dozens of ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum sitting in the 401ks of average Americans.
Perhaps the solution is trying to better understand how victims are acquiring and transferring their funds? Perhaps we need to regulate centralized exchanges to better protect their customers. In the U.S. it's necessary to pass some simple online questionnaire before trading advanced financial products like options/futures. Perhaps we need something like this for cryptocurrency? I'm just throwing out ideas, because I don't know the solution. But even if you think regulating it out of existence is the ideal outcome, that is simply not going to be possible at this point.
In China, cryptocurrency is effectively banned -- mining machines are confiscated, banks are not allowed to do any transaction with crypto exchanges. Effectively you cannot turn money into crypto or the other way via normal means in China. Of course some people still find ways, and pig butchering exists in China, but it is much harder via the crypto route.
I don't know if there will ever be a global crackdown, but I know it's definitely not going to happen in the US, because, well, freedom, and the man in charge is all-in in crypto.
But at least some governments in the world see clearly that crypto does more harm than good and take action accordingly -- surprisingly China in this case.
It may not be the best solution, but it is a solution.
I believe China's cryptocurrency ban is more about fighting capital flight than scammers. There are restrictions in China on everything from foreign exchange, overseas investments, domestic property, and cross-border payments. They have two separate currencies in part to prevent money from leaving the country.
That said, China is one of the most authoritarian countries in the world. It has some of the most effective controls in place around media, speech, technology, and capital of any country. I'm not sure whether that model could be easily copied, and whether it should be copied is maybe a different conversation altogether.
