I agree. Disclosure of A.I. use should be mandatory.

My main concern with A.I. use is its ability to hide incompetence. If a new agent introduces code that was entirely written by illegal-software that violates copyright law–A.I.–then that should be made clear, even if competent-programmers review the new inclusion and approve of it. Otherwise people are left with the impression that this new agent is a competent programmer. A.I. use–undisclosed–creates false reputations.

The disclosure being encouraged and not mandatory is purely to protect the egos of programmers currently utilizing A.I. products.

However I do respect their decision and I maintain projects should be self governing.

The American intelligence apparatuses had been using this line of reasoning to legalize their illegal operations from the start: computers collecting data on citizens are not committing ‘surveillance’. If a human needs to assess that data then they apply for a rubber stamp from the state to allow surveillance of a human, but for the computer to collect and asses? There was never a need to seek authorization: it’s not surveillance. Computers collecting data and autonomously acting on that data–even to kill–can never be illegal. Welcome to the United State of Ammerikkka.

That’s to say: it never mattered. The verbal affluent to legitimize what they’re doing is just that. To people ignorant of computers it may have sounded reasonable back then, given it was dressed up enough, but in the day of computer-controlled economies and warfare I don’t think it can stand anymore even to a moron.

It can’t change though as changing would necessitate all the current political and economic structures to change: to voluntary put in excruciating effort to give up power. Not only are you asking those in power to debase themselves, but to also debase all those around them. It cannot happen.

What can happen and what should happen is that you should act. You are in control of you: liberate your computers. Not only is this something that is possible, but you are also empowering yourself. When you do this you inversely disempower the polities and economic controls that are superstructures built on this foundation of computer-surveillance and -manipulation.

matlag

Actually yes. I did not know they released this. I still think my point stands: it’s a self imposed burden that is not relieved by spending loaned capital. That only has increased their burdens, because not only do they have to continuously pay for a large quantity of computer resources they have to repay debts and find a way of financing all of it sustainably.

I don’t know a lot about signal. My understanding was open-source clients existed, but the server’s software was proprietary. I’ve since read the Wikipedia page and Signal’s servers were once federated: “Signal’s server architecture was federated between December 2013 and February 2016.” That later date is when they ceased federation, claiming it held back the project.

I don’t like Signal. The people behind it are the benefactors of looters that reside in Silicon Valley. The project purports to be a non-profit, but burns capital that was accrued in and by Silicon Valley. It could not exist without surveillance-capitalism. Though that’s a critique of, perhaps, the entire software economy. Its members are too closely related to its major players though, being ex-employees.

For encrypted communications I would like to direct readers to GNUnet. The entire internet is incompatible with the ideals of privacy and security. You can mount applications on top of it, but the underlying framework is not appropriate. GNUnet is an attempt at creating a secure, decentralized internet. It’s a worthwhile project.

A self-inflicted burden because they refuse to liberate the server side code. Besides, they can’t be burning through that reserve as they need to pay it back and how on earth are they going to do that?

Hang on… that’s not a gift. The hard work is making money from free software. You’ve indebted a foundation to the sum of $100,000,000.00 and you’re telling them:

A) pay it back

B) via commercializing free software

How the fuck do you do that? You can’t. What the fuck does a piece of software need that exorbitant amount for anyway? I guess that’s why Signal never really was libre software. There’s too much money to be made in spyware.

The thing that has struck me the most is the complete lack of opposition. Not of the incessant quibbles online, but real opposition in the streets by everyday people.

Users are never given an option in capitalist-American-spyware & -malware–suspicious ‘software’. You either accept unfair terms or… no. There is no option to decline. There’s always just an “ok” button. The fact that governments (the supreme body that is supposed to… well, um… govern) have just left this space, completely vacant… is very fucking odd. There are no governing bodies for software or for consumers of software. It’s a pure capitalist hellscape of no-choice. One giant monopoly that offers you not convenience, because there’s no choice. How can something be convenient when there’s no choices? I bring up convenience because it’s the term most brought up by users in their complicit use of totalitarian software. It’s the same as being dictated to by a communist-thug and mentally deluding yourself that you comply out of an overwhelming sense of it being convenient. You don’t get a choice.

The jab at communism isn’t out of place, because the cold war rhetoric stays in living memory and were we not told the communist states–even those too shy to admit it, but just brave enough to self-subscribe as socialist–were we not told they had the secret police? They had no consumer choices–only one brand of toothpaste; only one brand of shoe; only one brand of car: all brandishing the state’s logo. Yet look around you and it’s a global duopoly of America’s Apple & Google. You don’t get a choice. You have to comply, as any freedom loving capitalist would. You will accept American-spyware. The American-spyware-corps will look after you. You just need to comply, because it’s convenient. You don’t have a choice.

Yes, use libre mobile-computers, but the need for public governance of technology is now. Countries need to have software sovereignty. It’s embarrassing for a non-American state to publish their ‘apps’ only via American spyware companies. It’s ludicrous. To give them an exclusive contract in distribution and to pay Apple or Google to supply, whilst they turn around and tighten the hatch: making it harder for users to install packages that do not originate from their monopolistic ‘market places’. It’s a joke.

If you’re a developer do not publish on American spyware platforms. Do not do it. Do not compromise. Fight these duopolies.

I urge users to become participants and contributors. As Kongar has written, we have access to sophisticated hardware, but we’re not deploying it. If mobile-computer operators contributed to a mesh-network we’d be in a position to discard subscriptions for telecommunications access. Before this can happen the expectations of users needs to shift from contributing capital (paying for a mobile plan for instance) to contributing resources: running voluntary software on their machines.

The requirements needed to participate in mesh-networks are not just technical knowledge. If a user deployed a program like Briar they’d notice something rather swiftly: participating in mesh-networks demands more resources than not participating. The most obvious effect of this is that the mobile-computer’s battery will drain faster. Carrying a spare battery seems to be common already and that’s without participating in a voluntary mesh-network. The users’ expectations would need to shift before they could adopt such software.

I’ll refrain from commentary on Apple’s iOS (though I expect it to be similar), but Google’s Android is hostile towards user-software that needs to run constantly in the background. It will terminate those programs, even if the user has granted it ‘permission’ to run in the background.

Desktop and laptops provide a much more fertile environment in comparison. It is the norm to have long running user-programs. Even commercial operating-systems do not find anything amiss because it is the norm here. For the user in such an environment I do not see any possible objection to running such programs other than an increase in data usage, but even then these programs often allow for deployments that have a fixed quota.

Why then do we not see mass adoption of software like i2p, hyphanet, GNUnet and so forth? I exclude tor because it reinforces the status quo that must be changed. It allows its users to exit the tor-network and access the web. It’s a good technical precaution against network surveillance, but the majority of that network’s userbase want to exit the network. To contribute to the tor-network is to run an exit-node and that is not financially feasible for the vast majority of internet users. It is not democratic, but exclusionary and elitist. User-contributed nodes that run on the hardware they have, with the data connections they have, will see their nodes deprioritized in routing if not outright dropped. The other projects I’ve listed do prioritize peer-to-peer communication whilst tor’s network has just become a way to access the web anonymously. I2p is technically superior to tor’s for in-network communication; it supports tcp and udp. You can torrent within i2p’s network. You can not torrent in tor’s: you lose udp.

In my eyes the major issue of the current ‘web’ is the rent-seeking economy that upholds it. Technically we all have the tools to self-host a blog, e-mail, lemmy instance or whatever it is you want to share. We have a glut of cpu-capacity, storage and bandwidth. The hindrance isn’t in the property we own, but in the capital expenditure demanded from a perpetual rent-seeking economy that’s evolved around the ‘web’. Users are behind cgnats and need to rent whitelisted servers. Users aren’t allocated a static ipv4 address and need to rent one. Users then need to rent domain names and before Let’s Encrypt they had to pay for a SSL certificate that had an expiration date–a perpetual expense. Completely arbitrary, artificial scarcity to create an economic system of rents. It’s all absurd.

Software like lemmy isn’t revolutionary either. It’s retroactive. It wants to shift conditions back to when web-masters had privileges. Privileges that were taken away by the new-style of business that superseded them. If you want to run lemmy you need to pay your dues to the domain registrars and whitelisted server admins. The revolutionary act is to run i2p or gnunet and do whatever the fuck you want, but once you realize Alice and Bob can communicate with one another without paying tolls to DNS registrars or whitelisted server-admins nor subjugate themselves to that third-line–the forum administrators–lemmy becomes superfluous.

Users shift responsibility to the server-admins that run the lemmy instances they interact with. In exchange they give them all their content. That content has value. Lemmy is still a value extraction mechanism because everything on the ‘web’ has devolved into economic rent-seeking. To exist on the web is to participate in that system. It is the ‘web’ that needs to be ditched. Of the alternatives GNUnet is the design that makes the most sense, though it is still juvenile.

Build the alternative and use it.

You’re either the dictator of your computer or you’re not. A government ‘forcing’ companies to hand over logs describing what happened on their commercial platform means you have not even begun the fight. It’s a complete farce.

It’s a distraction from the fact all these companies are rolling in capital by manipulating their users–oh, but I want to be manipulated by daddy Apple or daddy Discord, just not daddy national-government. What?

It’s a fucking larp. How many of you will agitate against this, but you will still use your fucking Discord/Apple/Google/Meta whatever?

Oh, the government is going to hunt you down for using different software that is non-compliant with legislation? What? In what fantasy land? Wake me up when there’s boots on the ground invading people’s homes by authorities to check what software I’m running on my computer. It’s never going to happen.

EDIT: Sorry, the more I look at this cartoon the more this pisses me off. It’s painting Apple as an innocent. It’s fucking not. Come on, dear artist, labour more to paint mega-corp dictatorships as benign, aloof, white, middle-class targets. Get fuckt.