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Fredkin

151 karmajoined 3 года назад

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Fredkin
·позавчера·discuss
If they can't distinguish traffic containing hidden encrypted messages from humdrum non-encrypted traffic then they'd have to ban the whole thing for everyone.
Fredkin
·позавчера·discuss
Maybe a dumb question, but what's to stop people from communicating e2e encrypted over totally insecure channels using steganography techniques?

You don't need a special app to do this, or maybe you just need a companion app that you type your message into and it gives you the thing you just paste into whatever messaging app / social media you use. The steganography makes it hard for the operator to determine that you're "abusing" the service by not transmitting your message in the clear so they can read it.

1) Alice uses steganography to embed her public key in an otherwise innocent or mundane looking image e.g their profile picture.

2) Bob uses the public key to encrypt a short message to send her.

3) Bob embeds the encrypted message in his own mundane looking image (could generate these from a pool of images or on the fly using stable diffusion)

4) Bob sends the image to Alice.

5) Alice recovers the encrypted message and decrypts using her private key.

(Could also use the process to do key encapsulation too, instead of using the raw key pair)
Fredkin
·19 дней назад·discuss
Really?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v...

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/reform-pledges-to-scra...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage...

Zia Yusuf : "... criticised sections of the legislation that allow ministers to direct regulator Ofcom to modify its rules setting out how companies can comply with requirements to crack down on illegal or harmful content, saying it was “the sort of thing that I think (Chinese president) Xi Jinping himself would blush at the concept of”."

And the more radical Restore say this:

https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties
Fredkin
·21 день назад·discuss
Conservatives drafted the OSA in 2021.

Reform are against it https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v...

Even the more extreme Restore are against it, and against Digital ID https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties

The Greens are ... well they wanted to amend it in 2024 to include a ban on fake news, but that could turn into a mechanism for censorship.

And Lib/Lab/Con were all for building even more on top of it in 2024: https://www.handleygill.co.uk/handley-gill-blog/general-elec...

There are no 'liberal' parties in the UK.
Fredkin
·21 день назад·discuss
Where is the evidence for that? Though I grant they may get into power and suddenly change their mind, at the moment those parties are against digital dystopia, most likely because the centrist parties are most interested in using those tools to silence criticism of current immigration policy and other failings.

-Reform UK vows to repeal ‘borderline dystopian’ Online Safety Act https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v...

"Block the Introduction of Digital ID." "Repeal the Online Safety Act." https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties

And the left are also being surveilled and censored, e.g pro-palestine / anti-war / anti-capitalist groups, though the strategy used there is less censorship and more often bogging those groups down with infighting about identity issues. What seems more dangerous is letting the increasingly tyrannical centrist establishment, dead set on stagnation and "managed decline", give legitimacy to censorship tools (which will be available to future extreme governments!) rather than fixing things properly.
Fredkin
·4 месяца назад·discuss
"Commissioning the battery requires a device capable of running the BYD Be Connect App - available for the Apple App Store and Google Play Store." - No thanks. Just have a control panel on a lcd screen ffs. They also do an inverter "Fronius Primo GEN24 Plus" that requires an internet connection. Completely unnecessary.
Fredkin
·8 месяцев назад·discuss
Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...

They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.

Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.

Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.

Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.