You can steal neither of those. You can copy them and in some specific cases copying bits or letters or some other human creative work might be unethical, in a lot more cases it can be illegal, but it is not theft.
> Patents function only to limit the actions of what living beings can and cannot do.
Like all other laws. I don't see how this is relevant.
> It's a place where the farmer very specifically reproduced them, not just the conditions.
Sorry to be so blunt, but the farmer is neither fucking peaches nor giving birth to them. Living beings self reproduce. Humans sometimes put a lot of work into creating the perfect conditions for that to happen, but that is irrelevant to the point. When I smash rocks together to create a tool I and only I created that. When I plant seeds for them to grow into fruits which contain many more seeds I did not create the new seeds on my own. That does not make my work any less valuable but it does change the nature of the action. The first scenario should be allowed to be restricted to the inventor for a limited time. The second scenario should not be restricted. The act of reproduction of life should never be seen as anyone's property.
> you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product
For sure, no one is arguing for stealing fruits here. However while you can steal physical fruits, you cannot steal genes.
> then why should it be available for everyone?
Why should it not be? You seem to view the right to breed a variety of some species that you created as some natural right and default. It is not. What you are arguing for here is the state going after people for creating the environment for plants to reproduce, which is a natural right.
There are inanimate objects that are manually made out of raw materials by humans. It can make sense to grant the inventor of such a thing a time limited monopoly on its production by banning anyone else from manufacturing it for sale and distribution.
Living beings are not inanimate objects that are manually made out of raw materials. They are not human-made. They reproduce and humans only create the environment for this to happen. You cannot invent a living being. You can invent a modification in the genome and thereby create a new breed, but that should not grant you the right to have a monopoly on the reproduction of those living beings.
Airpods may not be "great from an audiophile perspective", but their sound is decent and they are actually well designed headphones. They are remarkably unremarkable. They have good (the new Pros even great) ANC. Their controls are intuitive and well thought out. It's hard for me to believe that I'm promoting an Apple product here, but they are what people often claim other Apple products to be – which I found to be BS for these other products. Someone sensible actually put thought into the product.
There a plenty of hosting providers who do not care about port scanning. And as long as you don't DOS or brute force credentials, why should anyone? It's the public internet. You're just sending traffic over a public network people chose to connect to.
> You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
You bought a ticket that was advertised as a ticket for a concert and you got that. No one ever claimed or implied you were buying the musicians so they would perform the concert for you whenever you like.
When you 'buy' a movie in the way we are talking about here it is advertised and implied as buying the movie in the sense of owning a copy (or the right to access a copy) of the movie to watch whenever you want forever. What you get is more similar to an unlimited ticket to a cinema that allows you to watch that movie as long as it is shown in the cinema, but the cimema can decide to stop showing the movie any time. Unlike the concert ticket that is purposefully not clearly communicated (and the concert has a fixed service you purchase (one concert) unlike the movie ticket where the service you get is dependent entirely on the goodwill of the cinema)
> let's not pretend we aren't taking a huge amount of existing power away from governments with large scale encryption.
For sure we were. That was the whole idea of the cypherpunks. Now we are going towards the opposite. The hope that computers and the internet would empower the people ultimately turned out wrong. The technology absolutely allows this, the things we do with it is as a society is the opposite.
It is ignorant to believe that democracy is a stable, self regulating equilibrium that maintains itself purely through elections.
The people in power in a democracy do not not persecute their dissidents because they are better people or because they got to power by being elected by the people, but because good democratic systems hold the people in power accountable to the general population. A surveillance state does the opposite. It holds the people accountable to the government.
Democracies stay democratic because the people hold power over the state and have means to get informed about the state. That requires for example journalism and protection for journalists and their sources. When the state can trivially find the sources of journalists and surveil the investigations of journalists before they can even publish anything that protection is no longer given.
When the state can know exactly all the people that participated in a protest that gives the state power over the people and takes power away from the people.
When the state can know exactly where in important organizations of all kinds there are dissidents so it can replace them before they can organize...
> REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO!
That is plain wrong.
You could absolutely send a letter anonymously without showing your ID. You could use a phone booth without showing your ID. Increasingly more countries demand ID verification for such things like getting a SIM card that used to be remote privacy.
But much more importantly you are making a false differentiation between 'remote' and local privacy. Before the internet that made some amount of sense. What you do in the locality of your home is private and what you do in public is not, such as buying a book in a store.
However two things have fundamentally changed since then:
1. This difference largely does not exist anymore. Things that used to be in your home and private and are now in some way or another in internet connected computers that act as surveillance devices. Your movie and book library used to sit on a bookshelf in the privacy of your home and only you would know when you watch a movie. Today it sits on Amazon's or Netflix servers and they know exactly what and when you watch and read. In fact turning the digital library you "bought" into something you own by converting them into a format you can store locally and use without restrictions and surveillance (local privacy) is illegal and punishable with jail time under the DMCA.
Notes written in a note book used to be local privacy, now they are written on a computer that automatically, without consent uploads them to "the cloud", a server controlled by a large corporation that acts as a panopticon for the state.
I could go on forever. Our lives are increasingly digital. That in itself would not necessitate being "remote", but in reality that is what follows, because people do not control their devices. Instead these devices are surveillance appliances controlled by corporations and increasingly the state.
2. Technology did not just enable the means for more anonymity, but also for a completely new, fundamentally different level of automated, all encompassing surveillance.
Before the internet you went into a store and bought a book with cash. You were not anonymous in the strict sense, the cashier could see you and might even recognize you, but you did not have to show your ID for everything you buy. The cashier did not create a log with your legal name and all the items you bought. Sure, the cashier might know you bought that book, but no one else did. There was no central surveillance log of every purchase accessible to corporations and the state.
Today credit cards are exactly that. Many countries have begun attacking cash as part of the war on privacy. We are heading towards a world where you effectively have to show your ID for absolutely everything you buy and every purchase will be logged.
CCTV is old, but the footage used to sit on tapes in the possession of individual stores and tracking someone's movements with this was a massive amount of work that would only make sense for specific investigations like murder cases.
Now CCTV is everywhere and systems like Palantir collect them all in a central system that logs everyone's movements all the time. The government can just search for "people who met with X in the last month" and get a log of all these people, their complete movement profiles, the people they met with etc.
Letters weren't exactly well protected, but no one would read your letters because it was infeasible. Now we have the infrastructure to automatically read all messages sent by anyone and the government can just get notified of anyone who voices in private communications that they do not like strawberries or the ruling political party.
Western democracies are building the wet dream of the Stasi, something that just a few years ago was supposedly an authoritarian dystopia and our great enemy. We were supposedly so much better than the bad guys of the Stasi. Now we are building a future where we are still different from the Stasi, because we are making it outdated.
> I think a lot of people use products like LastPass because it makes storing passwords easier. Works on mobile, computer, tablet. Pretty good experience tbh.
What you are describing is a password manager. No one here is questioning why people would use a password manager. That's like asking why people would use a toothbrush. The question is why anyone would use LastPass as their password manager.
> Also, let's be real:
> > The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already.
I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but this comment strikes me as really baffling.
LastPass has a very long history of breaches, some of them very severe with a big fallout. It's at the point where the yearly LastPass breach has become a meme just like the yearly T-Mobile breach. It makes no sense whatsoever to look at this incidence without that context and to claim "it's not that bad, they only leaked xyz".
On another note, of course does a breach tell something about the security practices of a password manager company. You really want the developer of your password manager to have good security practices and any sign to the contrary is concerning even when it is not directly related to the core product. Of course security is not about absolutes and mistakes and incidents do happen – what counts is how, how is dealt with them and if they repeat. In the case of LastPass history, including this breach, shows that they have atrocious security and you do not want to let your credentials get any millimeter closer to them than you can possibly avoid.
> I'm pretty sure 99% of the people on exposed have already had their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses leaked already.
Again, I'm sorry for being so direct, but this argument annoys me greatly: This argument – that others have done similar bad already and similar harm has already been done – is beyond stupid and needs to die. It's why slippery slopes are real. It's the reason why normalization of bad things happen. It's what people with bad intentions continuously use with great success to slowly make their bad deeds socially acceptable.
When my neighbor dumps his trash on the street that does not allow me to do the same and does not make it any better if I do. I will be just as much in the wrong as him. The only difference being – when I use that excuse – that I will also be a coward.
The wrongdoing of others is never an apology to do the same; and just because something bad is normal does not make it any better and it is especially not an argument for making it even worse.
I'm not exactly an expert on Afghan politics and the reason for the failure of the western backed government are surely multifaceted, but don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?