Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

At the moment, everything essential in society has to be able to be
done on paper, so it really is not a problem, and costs about 20-40
minutes per year in extra writing on actual paper.
>
This scares me though! I fear the day when a smartphone is mandatory
in order to participate in society. This will be a sad day indeed. Add
to that, centralbank managed electronic currencies, that can be clawed
back from you, or where you are blocked from spending them in an
instant, if you go against the government, and we have a very
dystopian situation indeed. =/

>
I would think that there are so many poor people in the world that
governments could never really ask anyone to always have a phone.
However, I think it's already real that without such tools, the
alternative way will be so painful that a person like you or I will
likely not choose not to use a phone.

True!
It seems that god was listening in on this and sent me this article on the same
theme:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/feb/22/the-tyranny-of-apps-those-without-smartphones-are-unfairly-penalised-say-campaigners
I think they have a good point! One business idea I have is hosting "virtual
phones" in the cloud. So people who do not want a smartphone or who can not
afford one, can rent a small VM in the cloud for 4-8 EUR per month or so, and
use that to run their apps.
The provlem is that not all apps work on a VM, since app developers can do some
kind of magic that blocks them from running on an emulator. The governments
national ID has this, so refuses to run on an emulator.
But I think that the majority of apps might run in that configuration. So if I
need an app, I get start my VM, do what I need to do, and then shut it down.

I think that's already more or less true in commerce.  For instance,
I've been at times confronted with the situation that without using
Whatsapp, I could not get service.
>
During the pandemics, for example, so many people could not find a way
out of following protocols they did not want to follow and even taking
chemical substances they did not want to take.  So many people I know
did not want to do it and did it anyway because it was a hassle
otherwise.

Oh that was a pain. My wife got vaccinated once against her will because of it.
I did not, and I spent many 100s of hours avoiding the unethical restrictions. I
printed my own corona vaccination qr codes for a while, until that didn't work,
I found a medical loop hole to allow me to travel without a mask, towards the
end, I copied other peoples foreign qr codes, which would get me into stores,
despite being unvaccinated, since the system in the stores only checked if the
qr was valid, and nothing else like last country of use, or matching it with id
checks.

As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have an
extremely low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents
got the same diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the
doctor said it was not possible according to science, so who knows? ;)

>
I am sorry for hearing the news, but I also feel that we should hope for
the best here.  I think nobody should trust doctor's predictions.  I
certainly don't know the reasons you might have low chance of having
children and let's remember this is a public forum.  The subject does me
remind me of a conversation with epidemiologist Shanna Swan, which I
have been slowly rewatching again---it's a 2h conversation.  The entire
conversation is very interesting.  In this conversation, we can learn
that male fertility is decreasing by 1% *per year*.
>
 Shanna Swan on male fertility (et cetera)
 https://youtu.be/C9aqGqjC1kE

I've actually seen the video before, when my wife was the most crazy about our
problem. In my case, it is just a chance mutation that resulted in low quality
sperm. That's all. It is not impossible, but but very, very low probability of
fertilizing eggs.