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

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
>

Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
>

>
Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some
legal limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and
look what happened there.
>
So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your
question is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)

>
Lol.  When you want to say you're not a lawyer, you should say IANAL,
which is one of these ridiculous USENET acronyms. :) But what I really
think is that nobody should say IANAL.  Lol.  First, who cares?  Lol.
Second, it's almost never illegal to give your opinion on anything.

>
I was thinking about it, but in the end, didn't go all "acronym". ;)
>

But, yeah.  You gave us a great example.  Open AI was a non-profit
organization later turned for-profit.  So, the same nonsense could
happen to Signal unless it has made any sort of unusual special
arrangements.
>
Companies and political parties (which are the same thing) should
formalize for-life commitments.  For example, a Senate candidate, a
Republic president and so on should register in writing some principles
and promises that they actually must live up to, lest they be impeached.

>
I don't see how that could ever be done? I mean there are trusts and
foundations, but I assume they can be broken or dismantled.
>
On the other hand... there are active companies who are several 100s
of years old, and the catholic church has been going strong for
what... 1980 years or so? So clearly it is possible to build
organizations centred around an ideology, business plan or other
concept, that has been working for 100s if not 1000s of years.

I got carried away with the wording.  A Senate candidate should keep his
promises when in office.  Let's erase the ``for-life''.  When you vote
for someone, you should vote because that person will do something that
they promised.  The system would not let them promise soemthing they can
do; for example, a president cannot promise something that Congress must
approve, say.

When someone is running for office, they make a bunch of promises.  They
should be obliged to do what they said they would.  So there should be a
formal process of writing it down and then hold them accountable later.
In some cases, they'll be excused; in other cases, they'll just be
removed from office.

Campaigns should be held more accountable.

Take a look at YouTube.  The world has invested 15 billion videos in it
and now it needs to pay for viewing them by lack of privacy and ad
viewing.  I can't recall when the world actually agreed to this deal.
Deals should be clear from the very start.

>
I find it very fascinating that you can find all kinds of copyrighted material
on youtube, and that is fine, and no one cares. But when the piratebay guys
built a web site that links to movies (not hosting it themselves) it was prison
+ fines for them. Different rules for google and private persons. This is very
sad.

``This is the truth.'' :)

For me to use Signal, say, I'd need a for-life promise that it would
never be taken over from me.  But, actually, I wouldn't use it either
way because I just prefer a decentralized system.  Signal should
redesign itself in a decentralized manner so that perhaps I could host
my own server (for my own communication), say.  Just like e-mail and
news are.

>
I don't use anything to chat with family since they would not be interested, but
one project I do like, and which would probably be my choice if I tried to get
my family to use it is delta chat. I like the concept behind it. I also think,
but don't remember at the moment, that it is possible to use it on iphones,
android and for me, on regular computers and they all work together.

Wow---I had not heard of delta chat.  I really liked the idea!  Can
someone use delta chat and another just plain e-mail?  That would likely
be neat.  I, for one, don't like chat interfaces and prefer e-mail.  I
wouldn't mind replying chat messages by e-mail, for example.

For audio/video I use jitsi. I don't host it myself, but my companys cloud
provider sells their own version of hosted jitsi. It works really well!

Cool.  I've been using Jitsi on meet.jit.si.  I've used it while on
Windows.  Now I've been running OpenBSD and I've noticed that Jitsi
spins up my CPU a bit more than I was expecting.  I then tried Google
Meet using Chrome and it didn't spin that much.  I'm gonna try Jitsi on
Chrome and see what happens (next).