I did try phoneless for a few years, except for a dumbphone that I kept at home for the rare call or SMS 2FA.
The biggest factor that forced upgrading was poor call quality on the dumbphones I tried. (And this was really forced by bombing a particular important phone call because I couldn't be understood well.)
Then, once I found a smartphone that I kinda liked (GrapheneOS, after Apple sold out on surveillance), there were reasons to start carrying it. Rather than simply keeping it in a drawer at home.
But fortunately not sufficient reason so far to go full Google Play.
Email, Web, maps, authenticator, camera, and calls are all things I sometimes could use when out.
Though I normally don't have to have any of those, but I've been experimenting with it for a year or so, and seeing whether it's worthwhile.
What’s the endgame here, with porn, chat control and age verification occurring globally, when will this end and where will we end up? What are the realistic outcomes?
The end game is politically controlled speech. First you can't share porn, then you can't share violence, then you can't share police abuse, until it starts to creep into the world of anything unflattering to those in power.
And of course, it will all be under the guise of safety and harm reduction, but the veil will keep getting thinner and the amount of things covered more comprehensive
Last month, a Finnish court judged that using derogatory words in an email sent privately to the offended person counts as defamation.[1] When this was discussed in the Finnish Reddit [2], some found it unjust that it counts as defamation even though the message wasn't sent to third parties, but it is indeed how the law was written.
Not the person you are asking but it is getting worse by the day [1][2]. Speech policing is becoming a higher priority than dealing with violent crime. Protests are also increasing in number and frequency.
These reports both seem to refer to the UK, not several European countries.
I personally also think this should mostly not be a matter for the police to take care of, but then again do (should) dick picks and harassment really constitute the free speech you want to protect? I cannot speak for the UK, but Germany for example has had laws against gross insults since decades that have not threatened democracy; I would expect police to enforce laws, whether in real or virtual life just the same.
On the other hand, it gets murky with unwanted political opinions. Due to historic reasons, there are some things very specific things you're forbidden from voicing publicly here, because they're incompatible with our constitution, and thus don't enjoy the protection of that constitution. But in recent years, things unrelated to our fascist past have also seen litigation, which I find problematic, regardless of my personal opinions.
But given that Germany is probably the most strict European country when it comes to freedom of speech restrictions, I'm really opposed to announcing any kind of "free speech crisis in Europe".
I'm not seeing the connection to censorship at all with the skincare and diet products. It's illegal to sell certain things to children because they've been deemed harmful. Same with legal (for adults) drugs. If you don't check ID before giving it to a child, that's a crime, and I expect you to be prosecuted, yes.
Actually the California bill seems absurdly weak, and it seems to be enough to just ask if they're 18.
The Washington bill is stupid for restricting creatine supplements, which the evidence indicates provides physical and cognitive benefits with no real drawbacks. It's the one muscle building supplement that's actually known to work, and should be excluded like protein powder. But otherwise restricting people from selling dubious dietary supplements to children doesn't seem terribly wrong on its face.
Not often mentioned but violence is the greatest enemy of people in power.
They always say stuff like "violence doesn't belong in politics", "violence is always wrong". But look at the French revolution, they had to cut the dictator's ("king's") head off to stop him from trying to get back into power. Look at the US for for independence, how many redcoats had to get shot before the UK decided it's not longer economical to keep oppressing the colony. Look at the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a public execution of a mass murderer.
And for now we're allowed to celebrate those events. Some are even national holidays. But we can not publicly discuss current events in the same manner. Those supporting recent assassinations or attempts usually get banned and many don't even dare voice their support. But there is some line where the fourth box of liberty _should_ come out. And I don't think we have enough freedom of speech currently to discuss where exactly the line lies. (Note to mods, I don't have an opinion on the recent shooting and this message is not related to it. I would have posted the exact same thing even if it didn't happen and have posted similar messages in the past.)
BTW this is funny: Brandon Herrera posted a video reconstructing the headshot by Gary Plauché where it's obvious both him and the commenters support the killing. He also reconstructed the, well, earshot by Thomas Matthew Crooks and denounced it. I wonder if he would support an assassination if it turned out Trump got, say, a massage with a happy ending from an underage girl trafficked by his friend. That would imply being a pedophile is worse than being a fascist[0] in his mind.
Anyway, violence should be used carefully as a last resort but people in power are afraid of it because ultimately, no matter how much power they have, they still need a continuous supply of oxygen to their brain, which can be interrupted in a number of ways and the probability of such an event increases proportionally to the number of people they exploit.
Without the ability for people to have private conversations and organize politically in private, democracy is impossible. It wasn’t as much of a problem in the times when everything happened IRL, but now online is the default.
So the endgame is that an anti-democratic government eventually wins an election and uses its new tools to crush dissent and make opposition parties impossible.
Or a small set of supranational entities that are responsible for creating the illusion of national entities are taking advantage of the headless blunder that are nation-states to execute their master plan in lockstep.
Residential ISPs will only transmit packets that have a valid device attestation signature from one of the well-known device vendors. "Unsafe" software won't get access to the devices' secure enclave to sign their packets, so their packets will either have to be transmitted in plaintext, or they'll be dropped by the ISP.
A political party that is free from lobbyists and actually care for its citizens would be a good thing though. Number one reason of the decline in the west.
I think that decentralized solutions to the Web mostly suck because they're worse to use for the majority of people. But if the Web becomes useless for things people actually care about, decentralized solutions will creep in. People won't simply give up, the things that work will become better in the ways that serve prospective users.
That's kind of the worst case scenario, though, where bad politicians don't get removed from office. We can hope that most people will decide that enough is enough, or politicians will quietly back down when they realize they're dooming their own careers.
The worst case is when only approved hardware and software will be legal, and every level of infrastructure will be enforcing that. You can say good bye to decentralized solutions then.
Note how Apple is already a bit like that, banning certain torrenting apps even from alternative app stores [0]. I’m just mentioning that as a demonstration of the feasibility of such closed and controlled ecosystems. Now restrict ISP network traffic to packets signed by approved hardware, and there aren’t that many practical loopholes left.
Brazil's senate has already approved a bill, PL 2628, which is broadly similar to the UK's Online Safety Act, but also requires sistemas operacionais de terminais ("terminal operating systems") to implement age checks in a secure, auditable fashion.
The days where you could run whatever OS you want on hardware you own will soon be over. And you know what? There's not a damn thing any of us can do, so may as well just buy Apple gear.
IMO, the endgame is tyranny that we cannot escape. Something like stasi on hi-tech steroids. Such a tyranny can only be possible if there are no places on earth we can escape to and if domestic survelliance is so comprehensive that potential threats are eliminated before those threats realise what they are up to. In such a state, when there is neither external no internal pressure, the tyrant can rule for centuries. The thing is, there is a nontrivial number of those among us who prefer this way of life, and they are very capable in achieving their goals.
The realistic outcome, most likely, is mDL (mobile driver's license) automatically being passed through from your OS, to your browser, to the website. This will make compliance with age verification requirements easy, in addition to making ban enforcement and blocking crawlers/robots/spam much easier.
There's already a W3C browser standard in development - The Digital Credentials API. Apple is adding support for "Verify with Wallet on the Web" in iOS/macOS 26. Chrome is currently rolling out Origin Trials.
On the flip side, there's no anonymity. Welcome to the real Web 3.0 - an internet which has been finally put in a box, for better and worse. An internet which is finally forced to respect national laws, for better and worse. An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.
> The privacy considerations for digital credentials are not static. They will evolve over time as the ecosystem matures, and may be informed by the behavior of other actors in the ecosystem, improvements in other layers of the stack, new threats to user privacy, as well as changing societal norms and regulations.
Boil the frog slowly and carefully, and look out for opportune moments that could help to speed up the process.
> An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.
It's 1984. Surveillance in your home so you only speak the government speak. If you criticize the government or the genocides commited by them you're "doing hate speech/wrong think" and you'll receive the cops at your door to be disappeared without recourse
The populace will be told you were evil and no one dares question too much or they will be next.
Or we can tell them to fuck off and stop buying into every little crisis and fake right v left fight they try to sell.
The goal is always to suppress the ability to dissent political.
It was trialed during covid and people absolutely cheered for this type of control.
Now it's only a matter of time unless people accept that it's never acceptable. Not even with "perceived threats". Covid passes and social scores to do activities where absolutely a wet dream for govs and corporations alike. The corporations that benefit from government mandated tools love getting free money and governments love control. They know the tools never spy on them, and that's why everytime they're the ones committing crimes or ignoring their rules it's "a mistake or nothing to see here".
On sufficiently long time scales, there is only one realistic outcome: the internet will not tolerate censorship and will not abide state control. It is bigger than people and computers; it's an evolutionary force.
Revolution simply rolls the dice again. In states which used to have functional institutions and the organizational memory is still present, they can lead to good outcomes. In states which never had them, they cannot be created out of thin air.
A historian called Sarah Paine explained this nicely with examples of how the occupation of Afghanistan failed to create democracy but the occupation of post-WW2 Germany succeeded because Germany used to have a democracy whereas Afghanistan never did.
In this particular context, the recent Nepalese revolution succeeded in overturning attempts to limit citizens' communications, i.e the Nepalese equivalent of "Chat Control".
Since this is EU level legistlation and blocking minority is already ignored (e.g. going in to the streets does not matter in there), it is much more difficult.
Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
If an equivalent % of the population got in their cars, drove to Brussels and started setting EU government buildings on fire like in Nepal, things would change pretty quickly. The EU can only do soft totalitarianism because it doesn't have the kind of police force that a full-blown totalitarian state has.
Don't worry, they're working on that. Give it a few decades and generations to get personal locomotion automated and legislated out of the commoner's reach and they'll start ruling from highly secured ivory towers partitioned off from the public transit grid. Then resistance won't even be practicable in the numbers sufficient enough to cause disruption to the edifi of power.
and what if a system of mediation can pick up the encrypted messages sent by dissidents and formulate a plan to crush the resistance? To government-for-hire companies, it's a service problem, not a systemic one.
While that may be true, it’s less true for things like cobalt strike. I’m not saying that banning tooling would be a good thing, but it’s a bad argument to compare Nmap to remote access tools.
I don't disagree, but GP is asking about all offensive tools, not just Cobalt strike. IMHO a platform like GitHub should not be picking and choosing which projects are offensive enough to remove. Yes, there are some tools that are pretty clearly more offensive than others, but creating a policy would not be clear-cut
Cobalt strike is just an automated script kiddie really. It's a way for red teamers to catch low hanging fruit. And because of that, there's not so much low hanging fruit anyway.
Nothing to stop you setting that up on the secondary device to trigger the listen/wake scripts, but if someone malicious is on your local network and has permission to trigger WOL, chances are you have bigger issues.
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