Instead of rethinking whether the identity verification thing was such a good idea, after an entirely predictable data breach involving ~70,000 users, Discord doubled down and made it a requirement, globally, to use some of its core features.
Isn’t it strange that so many governments are suddenly trying to push the Online Safety Act bullshit, under different names, over the last year, and that the Corporate Media are telling us that messaging apps are to blame for what effectively are the social consequences of neoliberalism?
PGP has been around for about 35 years, more or less, and the single reason emails are rarely OpenPGP-encrypted is most people don’t know how to use OpenPGP. To get it right, we need to know what asymmetric encryption is, which algorithms and key sizes to use, how to include the correct key in our email signatures and how to make backups of our private keys. OpenPGP requires effort to use, and most of us invariably choose convenience over security.
After ensuring I didn’t misunderstand what I read, when I learned about Microsoft’s Co-Pilot Recall thing, I couldn’t help but ask myself the obvious question: ‘Just how the hell could anyone possibly believe it’s a smart idea?’. But I sort of know the answer: It’s because the obsession among corporations with pleasing investors by forcing ‘AI’ onto everything and everyone, whether we like it or not, and regardless of the ramifications.
What I’ve seen and read about the ‘Fediverse’ is quite promising, because I believe it could encourage something of a return to the kind of online communities that were common before social media, and that, I’ll argue, is objectively preferable. The ‘Fediverse’ is essentially a network of relatively small online communities, built on standards that enable the sharing of content between servers, and potentially those online communities could be designed to be superficially similar to the old phpBB-styled forums.
One of the useful little applications that’s included with Tails OS is OnionShare, which enables the sharing of things on the .onion domain and the creation of hidden services. I think these are important options to have in a Tails-like setup.
Our freedom of expression, in practice, isn’t defined by laws or constitutions. It’s instead defined by what corporations’ terms of service and whatever arbitrary extra-legal pressures they’re subject to. And, unfortunately this applies to almost everything on the conventional Web, since almost everything is dependent on third party.
Though my views aren’t as extreme as Richard Stallman’s, he does have a point: A decade ago we’d be up in arms about relatively trivial privacy-invading crap in operating systems, but it’s since become the norm, with most smartphones and laptops having things pre-installed that send personal data in the background to Google, Microsoft and whichever assortment of corporations. A state of affairs brought about by a confluence of what we collectively surrendered for convenience.
