It won't but luckily no government is powerful enough to govern math and therefore cryptography. Mathematics is more of a liberator than the second amendment in this respect.
Physical hardware can be controlled, yes. Decentralization and obfuscation similar to TOR is probably needed here.
If running a mesh network is illegal, does it matter that the traffic is just math? Without a network, there's no data transmission of that math. The government controls the airwaves. It doesn't matter if you're broadcasting Top40 or encrypted messages, if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your transmitting, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your forgetting to scan the case of water on the bottom of your cart, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your hacked cable box, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your speeding, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your weed, you're going nowhere.
> if they say no to your growing a mushroom and mailing it to your friend, you're going nowhere.
There's a whole spectrum of how illegal something is to consider. People break the law every day for a range of reasons from accident, to ignorance, to convenience, to want, to need, etc.
In the hypothetical world that you've set out, where surveillance is so extreme and overreaching as to help finish off the entirety of the internet for good, there's no way it would stop at the internet. The goal isn't controlling this set of standards and protocols that defines just the internet, the goal is controlling communication and the internet is the #1 way of communicating between people at the moment.
If people all started talking through letter mail, you'd get Letter Control, they wouldn't just forget about it because it's not the internet. If the people somehow become smart and coordinated enough to move to some cryptographically-secure method of communication, your government will probably outlaw the equipment and actions associated with using it in the first place instead of trying to decrypt all communications.
The goal is control of information, and the way of doing that is to force everyone to use unsecured communication with no feasible alternatives. I wouldn't expect kid glove treatment with that, unlike speeding or minor shoplifting.
> to force everyone to use unsecured communication
Treat social media as any other unsecured channel. You can do e2e on Facebook, you'll just have to do it yourself. I'm only half joking, I'm sure somebody has done this already, they just keep quiet about it.
Lot of probably's and maybes moving at the speed of government in your comment, look how many decades this has been in the works.
Circumventing the Great Firewall in China is against the rules, comes with some risk for vpn operators and users, yet we know it happens regularly.
Buying and selling drugs online is illegal, yet there's always a Silk Road or Empire Market with enough buyers and sellers to make the risk worth it. We already have "letter control" for drugs, but it doesn't stop me from buying a QP of weed and a federal employee delivering it conveniently to my house.
Good luck outlawing the parts and software, maybe they'll get to them when they finally gather up all the fentanyl.
Even if chat control doesn't happen, the social internet is fucked. Just look at Quora for a preview.
running an actively transmitting network is an easy thing for them to come and shut down. you doing any of the other things can easily be done without them knowing about it. you can be flippant about it all you want, but you don't look intelligent by doing so
More than anything, this is a good lesson in information theory. A blank sheet of paper isn't devoid of information just because it doesn't contain ink - rather, it is the context of the current situation that defines the information being conveyed. This is true in all forms of communication.
This reminds me of a story I read once about when Victor Hugo had just published Les Miserables. Just after publication, he went to his vacation home due to the controversy he was sure was going to follow the publication of the book. Wanting to know how the reception was going, he mailed his publisher a letter simply containing a question mark. The publisher responded with only an exclamation mark, and Hugo immediately understood - he had written an eternal classic.
(BTW, I read this in the book The User Illusion - a fantastic read)
you missed the reference. as a history lesson, the deCSS code was written on a t-shirt and was deemed acceptable. having the deCSS compiled as an executable was deemed not acceptable.
I got the reference. Seems like it worked out quite nicely for the government/court though, given that deCSS isn't much use printed on a t-shirt, compared to in a binary on a computer?
you can't share the compiled binary, but you can share a shirt. if you have the shirt, you can compile on your own. the t-shirt became the sharing network
That’s the thing about speech: It’s very hard for governments to physically prevent it, but attaching consequences to making use of that capability usually works just as well.
I happen to be one of the Danes who partially grew up in Greenland that he talks about in the article. I even recognize the places from the article.
Some of my cordial childhood memories are from there and it is a place I will forever love. One of the most visceral memories I have is looking across the ice fjord listening to the thunderous breaking of the ice bergs - you can hear the sounds on videos, but combined with the enormity of what is in front of you and actually being able to feel the sound in your body it can only be experienced by being there.
I can see that the author was initially worried that Greenland would be devoid of anything to do, which is of course not true, as is written in the article. Especially the people are one of a kind in what I can only describe as directness or pragmatism.
One time a local from the place I lived was driving his car as it broke down and - rather than having it regularly towed to the mechanic - actually decided to tow it with a group of sled dogs. We just watched him sticking his head out the window shouting commands to the dogs while driving by. The dogs there can distinguish left and right, so it was surprisingly trivial to get the car to the mechanic. The Greenlanders see nothing extraordinary about this.
In other words, it is really valuable to have local connections if you want a great vacation in Greenland. I can also recommend the small, mini village settlements that are spread across the coast of the grand county. Some of them have hotels also.
> the enormity of what is in front of you and actually being able to feel the sound in your body it can only be experienced by being there.
I have a video of the coolest moment of my life and it looks like maybe the magnitude of a firefly on film. An asteroid impact was predicted and I heard of it in time, so I went to observe it. No sound (or body feel) in my case, but knowing how crazy big and distant the fireball that you're observing is, lighting up the sky from the far side of France...
People whom I showed didn't really have a big reaction. I didn't really understand that, but by now I have enough distance to the event to look back at the video more objectively and realize that, indeed, it's cool but it's just another video. This, too, seems like it can only be experienced in real life
Eleven have been predicted ever (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Lis...), none yet in 2025. If you see the notice and you're within, say, 750 km, share the news with a friend and go see it! Of course, it objectively really is just what it is: bigger version of a shooting star. Idk if everyone would have my reaction, but I did ^^
Thank you for sharing iceberg cracking. I love 'cold vacations' anyway (two months in Finland were some of the best months), so this is a new entry on my bucket list :)
I feel like telling you where the picture is taken would spoil a potentially fun experience, so I will not disclose that :)
Anyway, making connections is hard, though not impossible. I would recommend the local pubs (which are surprisingly busy given how small settlements are) and finding friends through e.g. work settings.
>You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.
One of the awful things about this proposed legislation is that what I quoted you saying is not true. Software like PGP is easy to use, and criminals already do. The government has absolutely no possibility of breaking RSA the way things are now, and as such scanning all messages will do nothing other than prove more definitively that criminals are still beyond their gavel. In reality, the only individuals who will get spied on are regular people who don't open their terminal just to send a text; exactly the people who should not be spied on in the first place.
When the government realizes this invasive legislature is ineffective, they will probably crack down even harder. After all, what we are willing to accept from rulers has by the looks of it already increased dramatically. I wonder if it at some point it becomes illegal simply to posses encryption software on your personal devices, perhaps even possession of prime numbers that could theoretically be used in modern encryption. How far will the government go to take this illegal math from you?
Criminalize encryption. Oh you're using cryptograhy? Well then clearly you are a child molesting, money laundering, drug trafficking terrorist. No need to actually decrypt anything when cryptography is incriminating evidence unto itself.
Computers are subversive. Cryptography alone can defeat police, judges, governments and militaries, and computers have democratized access to cryptography to the point even common citizens have it. They cannot tolerate it.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their silly laws. We make technologies that completely nullify those laws. They need to increase their overall tyranny just to maintain the exact same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable, ungovernable, unpoliceable population, or a totalitarian state that surveils, monitors and controls everything. There is no middle ground.
We are rapidly advancing towards this totalitarianism, and we are eventually going to find out if the people have what it takes to resist and become ungovernable.
One day we will need government signatures to run software on "our" computers. All the free software in the world won't help if we can't run it. The only way to resist that is to somehow develop the means to fabricate our own chips at home. Computer hardware fabrication must be made as easy as 3D printing random objects. Anything short of this and we're done for. Everything the word "hacker" stands for will be destroyed. Our privacy will be destroyed. Our freedom will be destroyed. It's over.
How do you define cryptography? Let's say my files are written in a format that only my software can read. Is it then illegal to distribute said files?
I define it as anything that even slightly inconveniences the so called "authorities".
I've seen local judges give interviews to television networks about high profile cases where they were nearly foaming at the mouth with rage over end-to-end encryption. Cryptography is whatever causes that.
Both apple and android are teeing their infra up to support deleting apps they don’t like. Windows is moving towards e2e attestation, and Mac is basically already there. Once that’s all done, you just need to enforce hardware manufacturers boot only into ‘trusted’ operating systems. No more Linux. No more unsigned execution. No more encryption.
This is what I think too. There's a huge push around the world for 3 things right now; verified IDs, trusted or attested signatures for software distribution, and monitoring efforts like the one in the article.
The thing people don't seem to realize about the recent Android announcement that they're going to require digital signing for distribution is that it's not about moderating apps. The objective is to make sure developers are forced to disclose their identity when publishing apps because that allows rich companies and individuals to wield the justice system like a weapon. They won't ban something like ReVanced because all they need to do is make sure the system allows others to take legal action against the developers.
The other thing that people don't realize, like some of the sibling comments here, is that using older hardware and tools can only go so far. Normal people aren't going to do that and people that go out of their way to do it are going to be making themselves a target.
There's already a chilling effect in place. All of my teenage relatives were given a mini lecture to absolutely not post about the Charlie Kirk incident on social media and to avoid talking about it in private chat. I still haven't seen an explanation for how the messages in this incident [1] ended up in the hands of authorities.
But he said he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress".
The only way to "protect the children" is through education, not by forcing them to have a digital paper trail for their whole life.
There is way too much existing deployed systems depending on alternative open source systems, and a mn incentive to use them to keep using old hardware.
And way too strong a strategic incentive not to depend on US tech alone.
Plausible, but then people will use old computers and/or fab their own and/or import from adversarial governments and accept the risk of hardware backdoors.
If all of your messages can be read in plaintext, your going to have to transfer you keys some other way and it will be very detectable that you are sending encrypted messages which will be next on the chopping block.
How difficult a language is to learn is very subjective. My mother language is Danish and therefore learning German was relatively easy for me (relatively because it is always difficult to learn a new language!)
Manchmal, wenn ich ein Wort noch nie gesehen habe, kann ich die Bedeutung herausfinden, weil ich das entsprechende Wort auf Dänisch kenne.
Åh, du skriver en rigtig god tysk!
Du hast Recht mit der Ähnlichkeit der Wörter im Dänischen und Deutschen. Sind ja auch beides germanische Sprachen. Man muss aber aufpassen, es gibt einige "falsche Freunde". :-)
Z.B. Bier/bier, Kind/kind, Tag/tag, osv..
Har det godt!
This post was made from a refurbished Pixel 5 I scored for ~$250. Just like you, this is easily the best phone I have ever had. I really like the 2020 design philosophy as is it doesn't include features meant to be technologically impressive rather than practical (eg. under-screen finger print reader). Here is to many more years of 2-3 days of use on a charge and good-but-not-great pictures
Looks like you can get a pixel 5 used for like $100-150 now? A quick look yields that most are in poor condition. Would be nice to find one barely used or even new/refurbished these days.. is it possible?
I should probably have specified that I bought the phone in northern Europe where prices are generally higher due to companies' selective pricing and VAT. If I had to guess, those $250 would probably correspond to around $180 to $190 if the device was bought in America during the time of my purchase - you guys don't know how good you have it when it comes to the price of consumer electronics!
Personally, I cringe at paying more than 100-150 for a phone. Never spent more than that in my life! I've had a couple refurb iPhone 7's over the last 5-7 years, lol. My main phone currently is a 2024 Moto G Play, but it's a little lacking even for me (as I couldn't give two shits about even beginning to care about having a "nice" phone), so a decent shape Pixel 5 for cheap sounds kinda cool
Physical hardware can be controlled, yes. Decentralization and obfuscation similar to TOR is probably needed here.