People really don't realize how utterly dependent modern surveillance is on the idea that everybody is carrying a phone — which is always tracked. Their car has a cellular modem in it — which is always tracked. 99% of investigation is one guy and a search box. If you're not low-hanging fruit, you aren't gonna merit the Eye of Sauron of manual, well-resourced, focused team attention—and if you did, you probably planned ahead for it, right? Because it's not a mystery what would get you on Santa's Naughty List.
Anyway, the point is that even in a big city, the phoneless guy in a "covid" mask is going to be invisible to anything less than that exhaustive manual investigation — at least for a few more years. That may go away once they start networking all the cameras and having AI start trying to match up clothing sets moving from camera to camera, butthat capability is hard to hide, so it'll be in the news. And it won't work that well in places with less camera density and, perhaps, for people who wear the most-common outfits (the visual equivalent of a "shared fingerprint").
Remember: Phones are useful, but dangerous. And the people who will still wear covid masks to the beach are helping to normalize facial obscurity—regardless of their intention. Don't be mean to them. Encourage them to wear them everywhere. For passport photos. In police booking photos. At the customs desk. Family portraits! The sky is the limit—let them push the boundaries so that you don't have to.
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GrapheneOS is good if you've got to carry one. The point is never to forget that if you're carrying a phone, you're still being tracked, even if you're limiting the damage from app-based threats. It is baked into the design oftheinfrastructure: if you can see the network, the network can see you. And it takes notes.
If you take your phone between even just your home and work —doxxed locations— it is trivial to associate it with your true-name identity even if all of the hardware and services are perfectly anonymous. Even journalists have managed these kind of investigations. "Anonymized" location data is unfortunely not anonymous — it *can never* be anonymous. And yet it is sold like any other product.
Your phone's movements through physical space are unique. Even if you live in a building of 400 people, the movements of 399 of them are not going to match the tower records of your phone's movements. Even if you work in the same office. People's geographic movements are unique—and identifying.
I'm not trying to make you guys wrap yourself in tinfoil— almost nobody needs to be as paranoid as I am, and even I am tremendously lazy about opsec these days. The key is *awareness*: to simply be cognizant of what kind of records you're generating as you go about your life, so you can make informed, reasoned judgments about how much of it you can leave hanging out, and what parts of it you'd rather pay an effort-tax to shield from appearing in somebody's (or everybody's) database.
People really don't realize how utterly dependent modern surveillance is on the idea that everybody is carrying a phone — which is always tracked. Their car has a cellular modem in it — which is always tracked. 99% of investigation is one guy and a search box. If you're not low-hanging fruit, you aren't gonna merit the Eye of Sauron of manual, well-resourced, focused team attention—and if you did, you probably planned ahead for it, right? Because it's not a mystery what would get you on Santa's Naughty List.
Anyway, the point is that even in a big city, the phoneless guy in a "covid" mask is going to be invisible to anything less than that exhaustive manual investigation — at least for a few more years. That may go away once they start networking all the cameras and having AI start trying to match up clothing sets moving from camera to camera, butthat capability is hard to hide, so it'll be in the news. And it won't work that well in places with less camera density and, perhaps, for people who wear the most-common outfits (the visual equivalent of a "shared fingerprint").
Remember: Phones are useful, but dangerous. And the people who will still wear covid masks to the beach are helping to normalize facial obscurity—regardless of their intention. Don't be mean to them. Encourage them to wear them everywhere. For passport photos. In police booking photos. At the customs desk. Family portraits! The sky is the limit—let them push the boundaries so that you don't have to.
nostr:note1dufu3sutqcu4er2pj9k7zmxdf7k23qxn3eskwdr8tp3ffvg7g9qqsv4lrc
Read just the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (free via Project Gutenberg etc) and tell me that he didn't have his finger precisely on the pulse — in the 1850s — of the root cause of the authoritarian war for majoritarian supremacy that we're witnessing today. Censorship, the compelled worship of an ever-shifting orthodoxy, the construction and desecration of idols before the temple of consensus— it's all the same thing, arising from the same source, and awaiting a similar solution. In times of trouble, we should look more to our history.
Read your Mill, brothers.
I'm suddenly getting traffic from damus now. Thank you both! Other relay operators should take a look at this:
nostr:nevent1qqszpcp9zv6lary5r7d5qfr2t6dqn8sfcv2qk5ymzukqmc75qlxewlspzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsygpjuxp8vd29p6ancknaztql3eajk52y8xkppfn7au7elkw9c68zg5psgqqqqqqs8tq5fq
Looks like I was able to get this working again, sort of. It says I'm connected to 9-11 relays, but only shows that I have 100 followers (and even Jack only about 40, so it has to be a data gap), and very few notes on timelines (with obvious gaps even for hugely active accounts). Relay.damus.io never seems to pass me any data (0kb both up and down) to me, which j assume is due to my connection coming via Tor, but honestly I don't know. I'm connecting using Amethyst, if anybody sees this and has any ideas—what's the best, biggest relay for Tor users right now?
Secondly, and most importantly for anyone who sees this note, please make some noise to try and stop the passage of RISAA (the FISA 702 reauthorization) that's about to hit law as soon as this Friday. Please read about it and push it out on all of your socials, if you agree it's a problem. It's going to be hard to stop this thing, even with all hands.
Whoever sees this, thank you for hearing me. https://image.nostr.build/b5731965f417b631e9ea74c27ce4d5f9bb91f9e2a96fefb1547146266ab89fb5.jpg
OK, so you guys showed me McDonald's jacked prices at least 130% on the core budget item: the mcchicken. Mentally recalculating McDs as "literally more than twice as expensive is a doozy, sure but what I really wanna know: did they do any shrinkflation on top of that to really wring out the margin? Smaller patties, cups, fries, cheese or something? Or was it all just pure price action?
Oh man, that's insightful. I overlooked entirely the possibility that they could keep a patty the same size and weight, but change the gruelpaste/additive/filler ratios on anything not advertising-locked as "100% real beef" or whatever. Hell, even the definition of "beef" these days may have loopholes.
It was a long time ago, but when I lived in JP, the McD's were always top shelf compared to the standard suburban ones back home. And they had a local specialty — Shaka Shaka Chicken — that was great
The replies here are crazy. Mom, Pop, and two kids getting hit by McDonald's for $30. You used to be able to get McChickens and Double Cheeseburgers off the dollar menu. I remember it being a lifeline for broke teens. We need a burgers-per-labor-hour inflation metric.
nostr:nevent1qqs9ppdxaf5k86zahw09n4wlrzckmakgqzxzwemfqwc25y6xp8zdxtcpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet5qgs03ekxgdp0rczjfqrrpcn7zqtdec6lcwnpfesyxnl0f239qvege2grqsqqqqqp2ay7w2
The Year is 2023. Micky D issues a harder currency than Uncle Sam. A young woman goes about her day without taking notice. Within the locket she wears, the soul of her Austrian grandmother cries out in warning.
130% inflation on the mcchicken. Fortunately, of course, I'm sure the all-wages index is up at least 130%. Average schoolteacher is probably pulling down $150k post tax, right? It's just a banana, Michael.
The replies here are crazy. Mom, Pop, and two kids getting hit by McDonald's for $30. You used to be able to get McChickens and Double Cheeseburgers off the dollar menu. I remember it being a lifeline for broke teens. We need a burgers-per-labor-hour inflation metric.
nostr:nevent1qqs9ppdxaf5k86zahw09n4wlrzckmakgqzxzwemfqwc25y6xp8zdxtcpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet5qgs03ekxgdp0rczjfqrrpcn7zqtdec6lcwnpfesyxnl0f239qvege2grqsqqqqqp2ay7w2
It just occurred to me, due to a nostr bug, that it might actually be pretty cool to have social media hide *who authored* the posts on your TL to force a kind of double-blind perspective. You'd know the post or reply is (or probably is) from one of the people you follow, but you wouldn't be so quick to agree (and perhaps might even be more willing to disagree) if you aren't just smashing the heart button as a reflex because you like the guy. It might make discussions more communal and disagreements less personal if you knew that you're still talking to someone you generally like and respect, but you don't know whether it's "that one guy on the internet" or, like, your actual Mom.
(Nostr, due to ramshackle Tor support, often displays notes from people without correctly fetching their profiles for me, so I find myself liking or replying or following people without having any idea as to their nym or avatar)
I think inertia is leading us toward a quantified state, in which the costs of tracking and categorizing objects — primarily people, phones, cars, and money — as they move from place to place becomes so low that most institutions are doing it by reflex, without either considering or caring for consequences. Eventually, somebody is going to exploit the gap in information (between what is available to ordinary people, and what is available to organizations) in a way that causes enormous, historic harm, as happened in WWII when a particular state realized that IBM had compiled a database that was perfect for populating a list of names of those who would soon be marched off to camps. And that was just census data. Now they know what you read, where you go, who you're with, and how you'll vote.
The unfortunate reality of contemporary political thought is that consequences do not exist until they are felt. Rare is the chicken that fears the farmer. That means we've got two options: we either wait for the pain, or we stop waiting for political consensus.
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"Stop resisting, Stop resisting!" is one of the most instantly recognizable phrases of the new American century. When you read the words, you can probably still hear them shouted in your head, the echoing memory of a generational trauma, the indelible recollection of the moment that the citizen became subordinate to the state.
I'm never going to take a "recovered alien body" photo seriously if it looks humanoid. We flatter ourselves thinking they'd look like us. You want my attention, you need to show me a cuttlefish adapted for space. It better not be cute, either. It needs that "long-distance trucker estranged from his family" energy. I need to feel so sorry looking at that poor bastard that I get jet lag by proxy.
People still really haven't appreciated how bad the car thing is. Or the phone thing. They think they do, but they don't. The full range of capabilities has yet to be used routinely — companies and states are both trying to keep it beneath the waterline. The public is intended to be unsure what it is that they're looking at, and why it matters. It is the news report playing in the background of a disaster movie. It is the half-glimpsed monster from a horror reel — implied, but never fully shown.
History is still going to look back at this period with enormous bewilderment that we did not do more to stop what is coming. The signs were there.
nostr:nevent1qqsq6m0f306aeph5s7xdndz77gcfr3cwyztnvh67g436mc09j429rtgpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqygqmcu9qzj9n7vtd5vl78jyly037wxkyl7vcqflvwy4eqhxjfa4yzypsgqqqqqqswc2w8f
Sure! I'll get in touch.
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"The power to tax is the power to destroy."
Ten seconds later: "So anyway, here's a federal income tax."
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I know everybody is dunking on the random governor who decided that she could just wave her hand and unilaterally suspend any right she dislikes simply by hissing the word "emergency," but the problem is that she's only wrong if another political force — the courts, politics, disobedience, or Locke's old Appeal to Heaven — proves her wrong. Enforcing the limits of official power isn't some American $currentYear problem, it's a recurring issue throughout history.
The question is why we're suddenly seeing the authoritarian instinct activating so much more openly — and frequently. In prior decades, they had to be cute in how they went about it, often requiring laws and lies. Now they're remarkably comfortable simply stating "because of the 'emergency,' you can no longer {travel | donate | engage in commerce | read | communicate | carry}," and that's the whole of it.
The next question is what you're going to do about it.
This really is the worst. Instagram started the trend with their hideous "log in or else" flow. Then Twitter and reddit went to insanely privacy-hostile API changes instead of simply requiring a proof of work or anon payment. Even some major nostr relays seem to be doing Tor blocking now (damus? Not sure, but I get a ton of errors connecting to certain relays via Tor.)
Platforms have become so fearful of bots/spam/scraping (or rather pretend to be fearful, so as to justify blatantly commercial and anti-social decision-making) that they've totally destroyed the open access model that a functioning freenet depends on.
This is the main reason I want to see "unowned" protocols succeed. Jack has it right: we're at a turning point.
nostr:nevent1qqsd0vg2qvd63qsrlravfujy5ret8pzeke59hxlwhzx4v0n0r0paa3qpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsyg8h9rv7decysdvwwzfs7h9xfvyhwuxe38xds6z5lescak5u3gupqcpsgqqqqqqs9pjua5
The fact that Bitcoin isn't yet accepted everywheree and for everything really underlines for me how few people have actually used Lightning. Whenever I show somebody how it works, there's always that "wow" moment. But why was it a surprise?
The problem is that normal people still understand BTC from the one half-remembered opinion piece they read in 2017, and are operating under the belief that transactions still take an hour to settle, rather than being instantaneous and irreversible — money transmission without the Paypal Problem. The public mind needs a cache refresh.
I will be glad to see the legacy VISA/MC card system go. They've indoctrinated multiple generations into thinking it's normal to have somebody else decide whether or not you can spend your money — and then charge you for the privilege.
Same problem with privacy: contrary to clichés, most people do in fact care, and care deeply; but they care late — only once the costs become clear. When they lose a job, when the cousin gets arrested, when the neighbor disappears.
I don't care what's official. I care if I can spend it. It has been pretty well recognized as an asset basically everywhere, but there is enormous resistance to recognizing it as currency — driven chiefly by banks and their states.
Last hot take for the night: the live-action version of One Piece has some of the worst lines I've ever heard delivered. The sort dialogue that can cause physical discomfort even to someone watching alone and unwitnessed — just as the perfect crime cannot erase the awareness of guilt. They tried so hard, too. A shame.
Sometimes I wonder if we're not focused enough on developing meaningful (and free) social spaces in VR. At times it feels like there is a fabric of "permissioning" being lowered over what were nominally public spaces, for previous generations. I worry that one day we will wake in a world where if you don't have the right face, the right politics, the right cash — or more likely, card — there will be no place to go. Access denied.
I should be clear that I don't see "living in VR" as a desirable alternative for touching grass. I just struggle to see how else people will be able to build trust and organize in a fractured world.
Ghost in the Shell also predicted the invention of "sustainable war" as an economic model, though, so it's not exactly an optimistic vision. I preferred Stand Alone Complex.
As to your point out being divided and isolated, I think it's a universal problem now, not just Japan. Most human interactions today seem to be mediated by a pane of glass. When I lived in Japan, I remembered that on the train to Tachikawa, it felt like every face was looking down towards a phone. But it's the same in Moscow. It's the same everywhere.
Even in restaurants, you witness couples that aren't looking at each other — they're both looking at different apps. Sharing distance.
Hard not to feel disappointed in the media these days. Harder still as you age, having read certain bylines for years; having seen them develop; having witnessed them decline.
I know everybody's excited about the SEC losing in court, and it is indeed an important victory, but it's worth bearing in mind that Gensler knew he was acting outside the law long before the verdict. The largest institutions care less about what is legal than what they can get away with.
Given how long it takes the courts to rule, it is a reminder that in the context of the government's own misconduct, there are limits to the utility of law.
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by Snowden | export
I know everybody is dunking on the random governor who decided that she could just wave her hand and unilaterally suspend any right she dislikes simply by hissing the word "emergency," but the problem is that she's only wrong if another political force — the courts, politics, disobedience, or Locke's old Appeal to Heaven — proves her wrong. Enforcing the limits of official power isn't some American $currentYear problem, it's a recurring issue throughout history. The question is why we're suddenly seeing the authoritarian instinct activating so much more openly — and frequently. In prior decades, they had to be cute in how they went about it, often requiring laws and lies. Now they're remarkably comfortable simply stating "because of the 'emergency,' you can no longer {travel | donate | engage in commerce | read | communicate | carry}," and that's the whole of it. The next question is what you're going to do about it.