On Sat, Aug 11, 2012, at 23:11, Mike Perry wrote: > Thus spake [email protected] ([email protected]): > > The non technical, non freak population doesn't really see the use in > > the developed World as Facebook marketing is way past advertisments and > > into the actual news. Just the other day I have read a fascinating > > article in one national newspaper about how the parents who have teens > > should advise their children to check up on FB the people they meet > > on line as (and that is an proximate quote) only freaks and weirdos > > won't have a public profile. They went even further as how to check on > > their FB activity for the sake of „safety”. In short they really bought > > the if you don't have anything to hide... > > Yeah, I know. I saw that. Pretty amazing, especially given that it came > out right around when Face book's user's numbers declined by 1%. > Someone saw their portfolio about take a pretty big hit I guess.
From that standpoint is easier day by day to inject publicity once you figgure out how to phrase your article such it would catch the editors' attention. > I bet I can also guess why the article was written towards making kids > get accounts, too. I think Facebook is losing cool among the Young's. > > The good news is that parents telling teenagers they *have* to do > something is the /fastest/ way to make it uncool. Let's hope it starts > an epidemic. I hate being the only weirdo without a Facebook account ;) It's funny how you put it. One paragraph points to the cliché approach. The following just contradicts the previous pointing out that it could be an attack to profit from the news that membership is already going down. In the past years have been quite a lot of these examples. In a dream world where every programmer was an agent of propaganda for Google some entity took the time to prove to the World Google is evil in the conventional view. And it's not the press. Those are good at rephrasing ready made PR articles and pretty much nothing else. In another light the tango between Apple and Samsung is wonderful. The two are partners and do almost identical products for different price ranges and expectations. Yet they get so much publicity with their legal cha–cha they can peddle the same old hardware by just putting an extra letter to the name. And people would take a job they don't like to have one of their gadgets they don't need. > > Also, to generate a .onion is not trivial. And it's not a one click plus > > a form like getting a hot-mail account. Make it as easy as getting a > > Wordpress account and the numbers will rise. But I'm not sure the > > quality will rise. > > Yeah, but it's not like wordpress blogs are the bastion of great > Internet content, either. The thing that makes published Internet > content useful is the search index, and that thing *could* just > memory-hole all the scum, and maybe even the stuff that links to the > scum, too. Of course not. I put it as a benchmark of the ease of use. Compared to MySpace, Hi5, FB, whatever, is as is to use. And it's Open Source. It can probably called free software. As for the content, the nature of Internet is pushing to low quality. Low attention span. The ease of repost. While the password can be checked as weak or strong, a newly posted article can't even be checked to show other articles just like it, if not identical. > But I'm also not even talking about self-publishing. These things are > arbitrary communications endpoints. What if you could call them and use > voice? Ok, that's a bit far off. But chat and email could work today, if > someone built the software to support it and people used it. But how? Email is hard to secure. Say you even get two tormail accounts or two gmail accounts via Tor. Now you have to exchange keys and be careful as encrypted stuff is quite obvious in a sea of plain text spam. You have to develop ways of making sure the other one is who he is. See the weasel that told on Bradley Manning. In the former SU those scoundrels were the cornerstones of a good population surveillance. So why reinvent the wheel when there are so many who still don't own an iPhone? What abut chat? Jabber over SSL with OTR. Is there something more secure? But what can protect an audio stream? Or video? I just have read a bunch of papers about analysing Tor. One from 2008 was pointing out how little of the trafic was over SSL. One interesting thing was they were putting downloads -- identified as over 1Mb files over HTTP -- in the same league as torrents. Sure, the interactive use of the web should be important. But how about uploading a movie documenting a meeting that never happened officialy? That should be more important. Yet, how do people know how to document such a meeting beyond the silly: see, Mr. A and Mr. B were together in the same room? Here, people are quite helpful and tolerant even with repetitive silly questions. And that goes for the Tor blog where guys like Runa do a wonderful job. But most of the mailing lists and forums are filled with geeks who can't explain the basics: HOW. Sure, this thread has gone quite far with WHY. But how about HOW? Ask some question of cryptography and the gist of the answers is: you can harm yourself doing that. To structure the above mess: 1. People (myself included) need to know in a clear way how to secure email trafic. 2. How about IMs? What to use? 3. Can voice and video be secured with something like OTR? 4. How can one extract the relevant information in order to blow the wistle? Press is the obvious counter example. > It would be costly and our current network and protocols might need > several upgrades first, but we could build out a whole platform on this > technology. Steve Jobs built the most valuable company in the world > around a computer that has adoption rates smaller than the 10% of people > who probably *really* want private personal communications at least > sometimes. The secret sauce is in how the integration works between > devices and technologies, and how much is sucks to use versus > centralized and non-private solutions. I admire the guy. While the Gates dude had a powerful family that pushed him, Jobs did something original. Just to make any non technical guy want an expensive gadget, now, that was a special trick! > It wouldn't be easy or quick to get there and existing players may be > sorely tempted to manipulate the legal system to keep new decentralized > technologies out. That would be depressing for a while, but ultimately I > think the space aliens would probably think of something to handle that > scenario. They appear to be pretty smart and strangely determined, for > some reason... Because privacy is losing them money. Wistleblowing is losing their clients money. Eradication of government corruption pushes their costs higher and thus lowers the profits. And skeptical thinking might put them out of business. In shot it would be stupid not to have the foresight and do this. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
