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

On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

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.

The idea is good in theory, but in practice, I don't see it working since
politics is based so much on values, and reality is "plastic". You can do a lot
of things, the question is just how much are you going to sacrifice in order to
get it done.
But yes, in general, accountability is a good thing. I also like to see basic
requirements for politicians such as:
1. Knowledge of english if you are supposed to represent your country in
international situations.
2. An academic degree if you are in a country with free higher education. It
would give me comfort that you have enough intelligence to make it through a
university program.
3. Limiting terms to one term, and after that, being banned from any political
jobs. This is to limit political clans from forming, were politicial offices are
inherited across generations.
4. Limiting of salary and benefits. Your salary as a politician should be the
average of the country. If the country prospers, your salary increases, if the
country does not prosper, your salary goes down. By limiting the salary you also
filter out people who are looking for a cozy position, with a ridiculously high
salary for life. Instead you get people who are more interested in the job, than
in the salary.
5. Abolishing full-time politicians. In switzerland in olden days, politics was
a part time job. Every politician had a "day job" and they got leave from their
job one or two days per week to go to the parliament and do politics. The great
thing about this is that they were exposed to their colleagues every week, so if
they did a bad job in the parliament, they surely got told about it, when going
back to work. It was also good for their humility to go back to having a boss,
after 1-2 days in parliament. This should be re-instated to force politicians to
live among the people, as one of the people. Todays politicians isolate
themselves from the people and live like billionaires zipping around the planet
in private jets.

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.'' :)

Amen!

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.

Good question! I actually don't know, but since it is based on email as the
foundation, I would think it kind of natural that you would also be able to use
it for regular email.
It would actually be quite neat to have delta chat as a background service on my
computer, so that I could have one account/folder in my email client for "chats"
and the rest, like usual, for regular email. So when I need to chat, I just
switch over th my delta chat mail folder and type away, with all the benefits of
encryption.

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).

I think a lot of that might have something to do with openbsd graphic
capabilities. The file system is also not the most efficient one.