Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

    And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

    And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

    States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.



  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzMultiverse
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    6 months ago

    Aargh! Okay, I’m going to fix this and the fine tuned universe argument all at once.

    Nature does not care about your silly numbers and hypotheses. All of our scientific mechanics are models of the observed universe. The ones we call theories are just models good enough to be usefully predictive as to forecast outcomes, allowing us to safely land airplanes, build bridges, make safe pharmaceuticals (or super addictive ones, if we want), split atoms safely to produce power (or unsafely to level cities) and so on.

    We care about the math and the numbers because they give us results that are consistent with nature. But nature is doing what it’s doing because it’s behaving as a giant causal engine (ever-smaller forces that drive observable phenomena, at least until we get to Planck scale). So when it comes to the fine tuned hypothesis, to quote a Texas physicist whose name I can’t remember These numbers ain’t for fiddlin’

    If there are any storm gods at all, anywhere in the world, to the last, they are content to allow lightning to behave strictly according to static-electricity electrodynamics. And ball lightning happens whether or not we have a model that explains it. (Presently, we don’t.)

    If one or more of the many-worlds hypotheses are true, no given universe cares what its science-savvy inhabitants have determined and whether their mathematical models allow for models that are factual. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Facts don’t care about your science either. It’s more that the science does is best to describe what’s going on in the facts.

    Irreducible complexity is solved.

    PS: This also stabilizes the cosmic horror scenario of Azathoth’s dream, that Azathoth gibbers in the center of the universe dreaming its whole, and each and every one of us is a mere figment, who will vanish to oblivion when eventually he awakes: From what we can observe Azathoth has been dreaming consistently for thirteen billion years, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to wake up, and his dream is profoundly consistent so that the mathematics we use to send probes from planet to planet, eventually into the outer solar system always works. Azathoth has our back!


  • It is always morally preferrable to pirate things made by giant corporations

    Fixed It For You.

    Regardless of what is regarded as a crime against the state, it is wrongdoing against the public to support corporations that seek to extract more wealth than value they produce.

    Intellectual property rights were a (very) temporary monopoly to give creators an incentive to create in order to build a robust public domain.

    Copyrights, patents and trademarks no longer do that. So charging for content is now rent-seeking

    Corporations, their share holders and the plutocrats who own them pull wealth out of the economy by hoarding it. The whenever you buy from anything but directly from the creator, you are reducing the wealth in the economy since your money goes straight into Scrooge McDuck’s swimming coffers.

    And our public domain only contains stuff from a century ago. Steamboat Willie became public domain just a year or two ago. Copyright holders and courts even assert all content should be owned and licensed, including SCOTUS. (Though the US Supreme Court is a traitor to the United States and its constitution.)

    Pirate everything. Steal from companies for they have already stolen from you.



  • All Americans who have ever used the internet have violations of the CFAA, since website TOS violations are legally as criminal as hacking NORAD (the CFAA was passed after Reagan saw wargames ) normally letting your twelve-year-old start a Facebook account gets you 25 years, if some prosecutor wanted to enforce it. And they think that’s ridiculous and don’t.

    However, if that prosecutor wants to turn a five month sentence into a ten year sentence, then the suspect’s CFAA violation history might be useful after all.

    And that is just one of the laws that overreaches and is easily broken and not usually enforced.

    Suddenly you may have something to hide after all, say if they’re rounding up gay felons and any petty felony would make your gay ass qualify. (The German SD and US ICE both ignore violent felon requirements when they’re rounding up folk to be detained and deported)


  • Remember that in the US (whose laws have been extended by trade agreement through most of the world), intellectual property laws are To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts according to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or the Copyright Clause of the Constitution of the United States

    (Europe has older stuff based on guild secrets and has had literal wars waged over things like cloth buttons vs. brass buttons)

    Since we have a long list of instances now in which Science and useful Arts have been inhibited or simply robbed from their developers (case in point Charles Goodyear) within the current system, we might get better art and science without any IP law at all rather than trying to reform the system we have, which is used entirely to control and inhibit progress.

    And the efforts by software publishers to inhibit the archival of old games, and the effort of book publishers to eliminate libraries are only the latest examples of how IP is only an instrument of oppression in the 21st century, and has been pretty much since Disney.

    When you pirate, you’re not stealing from the developers or authors or creators. You’re stealing from the shareholders, and they are already fat and marbled.

    So fuck intellectual property rights.












  • Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

    The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

    (They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

    We have nothing to lose but our chains!