The study talks about giving money to people after prison. It doesn’t give any evidence that the prison method can be skipped. It might make prison cheaper, since lowering recidivism means less inmates which means less cost. But it doesn’t replace prison.

Yes but I’m saying the tech could get more advanced and locked down, like all DRM tech has been progressing

They care about privacy and security, not marketing. They probably hate that they have to do marketing in the first place. It’s honestly relatable.

what’s a left wing mistake that they might get called out for?

Can’t tell if your talking about the (human) Proton marketer responding on reddit, or the (AI) Claude and Opus 🙃

why is this comment so buried. An official response should be the top comment, and as of writing this only has 2 upvotes

Afaik under the current system, rehabilitation is already one of the goals of prison (akin to parents giving their kids time out or grounding them in their room). I’m sure it’s questionable how effective it is. Sure is cheaper than other rehabilitation methods though.

I’m sure in the future they’ll have a firmware update system for rotating their keys if they’ve been leaked. And if you try to keep your TV offline to prevent the key rotation, they’ll still rotate the encryption key for the stream (maybe wait a year for most people to receive the firmware update), and your offline TV won’t be able to decode the stream anymore

I guess I should have specified “guilty” prisoners to be more in line with the quote

monkey paw curls

due to the injustice stated in the post, 10 random prisoners will be released

afaik you can’t screen record DRM content, it’s encrypted all the way to the TV or monitor. The OS never sees a decrypted stream. This is why if you try to screenshot Netflix the window just appears as a black frame.

they’re not controlling her, they’re trying to provide an alternative that she’ll stick with

What a lot of people are forgetting to mention here, is that the reason why maintaining a browser is so hard is because Google keeps updating the standards, and has the resources to do so, while Firefox struggles to keep up.

Remember, Google Chrome is Google’s OS. Like Microsoft has Windows, and Apple has MacOS. This is why web standards include support for USB, GPU, and other esoteric use cases. It’s in Google’s best interest for users to use web apps to do things instead of desktop apps, since that means they are likely using Chrome, within Google’s control. And Google has a perverse incentive to keep evolving these standards so that other browsers struggle to keep up, and their browsers feel outdated and feature lacking relative to Chrome.

Most issues are complex enough that we have to delegate trust. It’s not feasible to verify every claim yourself. And trust vs “blind trust” is an arbitrary line.

It sounds like you assume that if offline access was a fundamental right, the government would not only respect it, but the offline access would also be private by default. I think that is a bold assumption, but I think we’ll just have to disagree because it’s impossible to know what the government would actually do. I just know that society tends towards efficiency, and offline methods are simply inefficient, so I expect it to go away in the future, unless there was some fundamental reason why offline access was necessary (and not indirect reasons, like the right to privacy).

I think at this point it’s also good to revisit your original comment at the root of this thread so we can clarify what exactly you are asking for. It sounds like you are asking for two things: for offline methods to interact with government services and utilities (in other words, things necessary for survival), and for offline methods to use commercial services, like games.

What is the reason you want offline access to government services? Surely it’s not privacy, since you usually have to provide your government ID to interact with the service. My guess is that you want to avoid giving data to commercial entities, and also avoid interaction with commercial entities, like Microsoft. Your primary concerns are third-party data collection and boycott rights. So it sounds like you don’t necessarily want offline access, you want to be able to interact with government services without any other dependencies.

But the postal service is just one example I brought up. There are tons of other dependencies in the background. I’m positive most governments use Microsoft Word. They’ll be using it to draft the paperwork that they send to you. They probably scan and OCR your letters for archival, and their scanning software is probably commercial and collects data. If your goal is elimination of external dependencies, then offline access is just the tip of the iceberg. And just because these dependencies are hidden, doesn’t mean one can ignore them. If that was the case you could just send your documents to a friend and ask them to send it to the government for you, and ask them not to tell you how they did it. That way you wouldn’t know if a commercial service was involved!

OK and as for offline methods to use commercial services, like games, I think in this case your goal is privacy. However I think this demand is fairly unreasonable as well. Obviously there are certain services that require online access, like real-time chat applications. The problem is that any company can construct artificial reasons for why they need online access, or even data collection. Youtube can say that they require personal data to curate your feed. You already mentioned that data minimization laws were ineffective. I don’t see how you can reasonable expect companies bend over backwards to provide offline access, when it’s far simpler for them to just make up a reason for why they need online access, or why they need your personal data.

I should clarify since I realize I got a bit mixed up in earlier comments: when I argue that privacy should be a fundamental right, I don’t expect to force all companies to follow some vague definition of “data minimization”. I just want to make sure the government can’t ban encryption and anonymizing services like Tor. In other words I’m not forcing companies to perform certain actions, I’m preventing certain consumer actions from being criminalized. I think this is much more realistic of a goal. And I believe that as long as encryption and anonymization is possible, then certain individuals will want it, and certain companies and groups will provide it. Anti-trust is important here too.

Of course the market for privacy is tiny, but that’s simply the reality. Not many people care unfortunately, and it’s unrealistic to force companies to care about something few people care about. However, the good news is that some people do still care. There are FOSS re-writes of some of the games you mentioned. For Age of Empires theres 0.A.D and OpenAge. I think this is the best one can hope for.

Interesting, I didn’t realize still gif was lossless, I was thinking in comparison to lossy formats like jpg.

still gifs have good compression? I recall that motion gifs are notorious for large file sizes, but are still gifs the opposite?

I think you should at least donate if you can. It’s not about whether you are forced to use it, but whether you appreciated the service (which you probably did if you used it over all the other services available). If the service goes away due to lack of funding, you’re still forced to use email, but you’ll just be forced to use a worse email service.

I would argue that your examples are about manipulation of people, not of the currency. Similar to the craziness of the GME (Gamestop) era, where it felt like everybody and their dog started buying GME stock. Or, say, a news outlet causing panic and a bank run. Though you’re right that since crypto still doesn’t have broad adoption, it’s easier to manipulate the smaller userbase.

Manipulation of the currency would be more like the government printing more money. This is not possible in crypto, where power is decentralized.

The instability is definitely unfortunate though. It’s a chicken and egg problem. If crypto had wider adoption, and was accepted in many stores, then it would become more stable. Just look at how much more stable the big crypto coins (bitcoin, eth) are compared to smaller altcoins. However, due to low adoption it’s still quite unstable, and that instability hurts adoption 🙃

Nope, I considered this as well.

GNU Taler is built on top of existing payment systems. It’s just a token you exchange money for, like those arcades you go to where you exchange money for arcade tokens. So it’s only as decentralized as the system it’s built on top of.

It does provide some privacy, but only for buyers, so this doesn’t prevent censorship. If the banks want to ban porn sites from accepting money, or block Steam from accepting transactions for porn games, they can. Censoring sales is the same as censoring purchases.

On top of that, if GNU Taler is built on top of centralized banking like it’s currently pushing for, then it inherits the same problems. The government can say “Poor people can’t be trusted, so we won’t let poor people get tokens, they’ll just have to use trackable methods like Paypal.” Or they can have a social credit system and say “Only people with 5000 credit or above can use Taler.”

And the government and banks still control the value and supply of the currency. They can print money however they want.

GNU Taler also doesn’t try to solve the distributed consensus problem. Afaik, it offloads the problem to the implementation. I have no idea how current implementations deal with multiple servers disagreeing on the ledger of transactions (say, due to network issues or server crashes), but it sounds like it trusts that servers will cooperate, and uses government audits to verify compliance. Again, centralized, and vulnerable to corruption, coercion, and collusion. GNU Taler could technically be built on top of bitcoin and blockchain, it even says so in the official FAQ, but that’s not their current vision