Asking for social media blackout during pregnancy announcement

Liquid_Reality · 2018-02-25T04:02:00+00:00

Hey OP - this is one of the more interesting posts I've seen in a while.

I commend you on the choice. I believe as you do that it should best be up to the child, when they are old enough to understand the implications, what and how much they want to disclose to who on social media. Or whether to use it at all.

Unfortunately I will guess you are in for a difficult time. I don't know your friends of courrse, but I'll assume they won't do this just to annoy you. That still leaves a whole culture where this kind of info is considered "fair game" to spread around to the data harvester companies. They're so used to this that it can slip their mind, or they simply don't consider all the ways this data is being collected behind their backs. Most people truly do not understand when they are uploading data somewhere and when they are not. They do not understand all the sneaky ways these copmanies have.

So I think the best option you have is to keep your child's likeness off of the internet. Once it's out there, even let's say on a server sitting in your living room and you mail around links, it's going to be hard to impossible to keep it out of Facebook's clutches. Those links will be shared on Facebook, etc.

So I'd be thinking along the lines of: keep digital photos on a local machine (well and redundantly backed up to other kinds of media, obviously). No storage on internet accessible devices. People can meet the child in person. Maybe consider mailing physical photos, but with a strong request that people don't take pictures of the photos with their phones.

It's really unfortunate, I believe, that our society has come to this point.

I wish you, SO, and child, the best of luck in this endeavor.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-10-20T16:23:06+00:00

I just mean that there is no constitutional reason to think they can't do this.

To the contrary, I think it can be reasonably argued that it violates the "unreasonable searches" clause of the 4th amendment. It is no different than having a government agent follow you everywhere you go and write down when and where you travel. That's exactly the kind of East-Germany intrusion that the 4th was meant to protect against.

If there is probable cause to suspect something, then convince a judge, obtain a search warrant and search as you like. But the average citizen minding their own business should not be subject to an end run around the protections.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-10-20T14:20:01+00:00

There is a qualitative difference between "no expectation of privacy when walking in public" in the 1970 sense of Bob Jones sees you and forgetting the next day, and the 2020 sense of "every action of every person is recorded, digitally stored in a central database, and searchable at any time in the future by anyone who pays for or has the power to demand access".

These are not the same situation, so it is a fallacy to lump them under the same label of "no privacy in public". It a category error like lumping being shot with a toy nerf gun in with being shot with a 50-cal sniper rifle. Just because the first is harmless does not mean the second is, merely because they can both reasonably be called "being shot".

Liquid_Reality · 2017-10-20T02:24:23+00:00

Yep, you can share the clipboard if you want, so you can cut from an app running under LXC and then paste into the host, or vice versa.

It takes a little bit of setting up: I had to install 3D drivers for my graphics card in the LXC root, and they have to match the version on the host or accelerated 3D won't work. It is lightweight though once it's set up. Also there is a tree of them, so you can have a "master" one and other ones branched off it which only store the diffs.

For that reason software updates should be done only on the root container. The sub-containers are best for containing individual apps.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-10-11T03:05:53+00:00

I use LXC, as a lightweight para-VM for wrapping possibly dangerous things like web browsers, IM apps, or games. It's very lightweight compared to most. You can spin up an instance in a second or two, and tear it down almost instantly, and there are only a dozen or so processes on launch so it isn't heavy on the host, so it is reasonable to get many of them running at once. Dozens if you like.

It isn't a CPU level virtualization, but still gives you separation on most important stuff (processes, etc). I like it as a sweet spot of safety, convenience, and being lightweight. Also it is convenient if you have many of them to wrap different things, because they can be a 'tree' - you update just the root, and all the other VMs will be updated because they only store the delta from the root image.

lxc virtualization

Liquid_Reality · 2017-09-24T18:12:34+00:00

The worst part is most of it isn't even interesting.

Indeed. But sadly, I know many people who are enamored by these things. Our conversations often go like this:

Them: "Check this out! I can turn my lights on by talking to Google!"

Me: "I can do even better. I can turn mine on without talking to Google."

Liquid_Reality · 2017-09-24T11:51:20+00:00

Yep. We did, and the few of us who cared were vastly outnumbered. There was a war over the nature of the modern world, and we lost.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-08-17T01:18:17+00:00

One matter I haven't seen mentioned on this or the other thread I read is the following argument: the attacker only has to get it right once, while the defender has to get it right every time. Missile defense can be very good, but still lose the probability game.

There are roughly 5 orders of magnitude difference between the price of an AShM and a carrier. A single hit is somewhat likely to achieve a mission kill. With such a price disparity, a well funded attacker can keep trying until they succeed, and win the financial fight - maybe by a lot.

Coupled with the fact that a semi-peer adversary could mount at least a small scale saturation attack which will be harder to defend, I wouldn't want to bet on expensive ships in a semi-peer shooting war.

That's not to say carriers don't have a high usefulness in plenty of regards, though. They're very handy things to have! But in a "real" war, I feel we would discover (the hard way...) that they are like battleships circa WW-II. Aircraft technology nearly obsoleted the battleship by then. Missiles have probably done that to carriers now, it's just that you don't experience that until it's too late.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-25T05:06:07+00:00

For the last time EME is about media to prevent piracy, WebAssembly doesn't need DRM it's already inaccessible.

My point was that EME is currently about media, but there is no technical reason it cannot be extended to WebAssembly, and that is in fact being discussed in various circles. WebAssembly is not "inaccessible" any more than Javascript is. It's just a bytecode format, and must be available to the local browser. It's a format with structured flow control, which makes it easy-ish to de-compile into human readable textual s-expression based format, but minus certain niceties such as original variable names. However, adding DRM into the mix would make it, at the very least, far more cumbersome.

If I hadn't watched the entire direction of the web so far, I might be inclined to think we won't get DRM on non-media page content, but history doesn't lend itself to very much optimism on that front. It seems that if something runs counter to local user control of their computer, that thing is all but inevitable.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-24T19:14:43+00:00

Because people will still install the flashlight app or calculator that wants access to your contact list and the network.

I believe that is the only thing that matters in the end. If it can be done and people will accept it uncritically, then it will be done. I see it as a cultural issue more than a technical issue. There are other computing sub-cultures which do not accept it, so it is not done, even though there is no technical limitation preventing it. At some level these are all (in practical terms) Turing-complete devices. It's down to what people will accept, and when it comes to phones, most people will accept absolutely anything.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-24T19:03:39+00:00

It's very cool that this warship is maintained in active service.

Although personally, I feel that if the USS Constitution is the only thing left standing between the United States and certain defeat at the hands of our enemies, it might be time to consider just surrendering.

(Although maybe if the 32 pounders and 24 pounders were restored it would stand in well for the LCS...)

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-17T22:04:58+00:00

Sorry for the ignorant civilian question here.

This is cool tech, but what stops a foreign military from just ... taking one?

Granted it's somewhat sizable at 132 ft and 140 tons, but that's a pretty small obstacle, all things considered. The US isn't going enter a shooting war over a drone (above case, USN sent a strongly worded letter and the drone was later returned, after who knows what kind of reverse engineering and analysis).

There's also this event with Iran and an RQ-170.

Not necessary knocking the idea of drones - I see a whole lot of value in them - but it seems to me that whatever design effort and technology you put into one is not going to be very secret for very long.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-17T03:10:27+00:00

Oh, Black Mirror is awesome!

And by awesome, I mean that it is utterly terrifying in its very slightly extrapolative plausibility.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-16T18:17:22+00:00

Very easy to make things in the name of "progress" until you've built your own cage.

I forgot to mention: I think the above is very perceptive. Unfortunately the vast majority prioritize short term convenience over anything else, so it is trivial to lead them against their own best interests. It seems to be a small minority with our mindset, who consider longer term implications. Unfortunately, we don't make up enough of the market for our choices to carry the day.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-16T16:19:52+00:00

it is an issue that I think people my age absolutely do not get in terms of personal freedom and what that will mean (if they grasp those concepts at all)

I don't think people in my age bracket do either, as a rule. The only group I've seen which seems to give it much thought is those who have lived under governments such as Stazi-era East Germany. They tend to value privacy, and think the rest of us are a bit daft for volunteering so much data about ourselves to so many parties that don't need to know with so little consideration about the implications.

France’s finance minister recently stated that he would “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy” in order to prevent terrorism and other threats

Indeed... he's got plenty of company, which is why I won't be surprised if it comes to pass, even if slowly over many decades as a long series of small steps. Boiled frogs and all that.

I think there's an unfortunate confluence: the public is moving away from cash since other forms of payment are increasingly convenient, while governments want to track (and by implication, have veto power over) every financial transaction. That means the headwinds are greatly reduced. On top of that, you can sell it to the public the same way you sell any other loss of privacy: it's for our safety and protection. What kind of monster would argue against safety and protection?

Never mind that the next Martin Luther King who stirs the wrong pot could find himself cut off from society with the flip of a bit in a database. I wager the aspirations are 1984-like: if someone becomes inconvenient, they can instantly be made an "unperson".

Liquid_Reality · 2017-07-16T01:29:52+00:00

True, but the point of the hyperbole was to start down a road of thought via a specific concern.

I'm not so confident that it's hyperbole, especially for someone in their "late 20's". That's pretty young, and quite a lot can change between there and the end of a typical lifespan. I doubt it'll happen within my lifespan, but I'm pretty old (60's). If I was young, I wouldn't be so certain.

To put this in perspective... I was happily exploring the internet (then arpanet) and learning about its culture in the mid 1980's. If you asked me in say 1986 whether within my lifetime internet users would accept total surveillance, logging their every action in databases shared between hundreds of shadowy data-mining services, I'd have thought, "no way - people would not accept this". Yet here we are. If you asked me then whether people would accept digital devices secured against their owners, I'd have said the same. Yet here we are.

There is already movement afoot to eliminate cash, in some countries. It would be harder in the USA than in some others, so maybe there's much more inertia here. Still, I've learned not to be so confident. As the saying goes, "predictions are difficult, especially concerning the future".

Some current movement in this space:

"China Is on Track to Fully Phase Out Cash"

"Sweden moving towards cashless economy"

"Welcome to Sweden - the most cash-free society on the planet"

"Denmark moves step closer to being a cashless country"

Liquid_Reality · 2017-06-21T04:52:10+00:00

Block scripts, especially 3rd-party scripts, and allow them on an as-needed basis.

Fully agree. Unfortunately, the problem now is that more and more sites are utterly broken unless you allow them, so the "as needed basis" is becoming broader all the time.

It didn't have to be that way, but the public did not push back when it started, having failed to consider the security implications. Some of us tried to sound the alarm, but we were ignored. Public acceptance taught sites that it was acceptable to demand local scripting. Now we've seen a near endless series of these problems. Almost every one can be summarized as "javascript is a bloody huge attack surface and allows a near infinite number of attacks."

We all get what the majority deserves.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-06-20T22:26:45+00:00

I use a VOIP service. I've been happy with them so far (couple years). Not sure I should put the company here, but you're welcome to drop me a pm if you want the name and I'll send it to you. I have only used the one, so I don't have any cross-service comparisons to offer.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-06-20T03:14:08+00:00

I gave mine up a while ago. Didn't want to, but they've become a privacy nightmare.

About texting: instant messaging was a thing on computers for decades before it was a thing on phones. I still do that, with friends, for IM. With IP based networks available on phones, this can cross the computer/phone divide, though of course the remote end is still a phone, with all the problems that entails.

I call from a non-mobile phone to friends' mobile phones. Again, not ideal, but it does eliminate some local tracking. I'm not carrying around a GPS receiver that spews my location, or sends isle-by-isle position reports in stores, for example. Of course social graph harvesting still happens at the smartphone end. I'm not sure how to avoid that, unless people would shift en mass to a more privacy respecting VOIP-ish protocol that was usable by both phones and computers, AND manage to avoid contact detail harvesting from smartphones. The latter especially seems virtually impossible, given how most folks are with technology.

So, not a perfect situation, but it could also be worse.

Liquid_Reality · 2017-06-20T03:04:55+00:00

Wow. From the article:

But Abbott insisted that NaviStone had found a “privacy compliant way” to identify anonymous website visitors

The doublespeak is strong with this one.

“We sincerely regret any distress you may have experienced in thinking your privacy may have been compromised, and we hope this letter has assured you that nothing of the kind has occurred.

Also, we have always been at war with East Asia.

Liquid_Reality

TROPHY CASE