> This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.
This is the reason privacy is needed.
> Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
Yes, we should try this. Zero-knowledge proofs and other modern technology allows for this. Even the first step of not selling or using student data for commerce is an easy step.
Those who think that we should not try to improve because our privacy is already compromised, should step aside.
The 90's was people worried they'd be treated as nothing more than a number. 2020's is people wishing they could be known only by a number (an opaque identifier).
If everyone doing a 'bad thing' stepped off the hamster wheel today, the world economy would collapse before markets closed. The biggest companies have built an attention and surveillance nightmare machine that funnels all the money to a relatively small number of shareholders.
Are you suggesting that since "everyone does the right thing now" would have bad consequences, we shouldn't bother with "everyone does the right thing in a normally distributed way"? (Which is the less artificial scenario.)
These kinds of discussions very quickly arrive at the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” line of thinking. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, some activity or product you engage with will have been the result of some kind of exploitation.
Yes, this is one of the central theses of the TV show "The Good Place". In simpler societies, it's easier to determine what is right and wrong, since actions are often local and can be judged on their immediate effects. But when everything is globalized and there's so many connections, determining right and wrong becomes much more difficult.
"no ethical consumption under capitalism" is true, explains why we can't just stop bad things (everything is bad, so you'd starve) and is a jumping off point for a discussion of what we can actually do about it without starving.
My journey went from downloading movies and TV shows to paying for Netflix, Apple, and Prime. Then back to torrents to avoid all the trailers and ads and curated feed. It's so peaceful now.
I was a young child when I learned chess by reading a short book, then practicing with a friend. That is not how LLMs learn. I'm no expert on LLMs, but if you showed a human all chess games and books in all history and then said 'play chess' and they still kept making illegal moves, they would have to have a brain injury.
but maybe... the said human has also read every other piece of text ever written, including ones about other (similar?) board games, which in aggregate vastly dwarfs whatever he has read on chess, that non-chess reading could have corrupted whatever he's learned about chess?
Yes, this is essentially how AlphaGo and AlphaZero algorithms work to train superhuman Go/chess/shogi agents. It’s an elegant algorithm that is analogous to how humans learn games.
Well except AlphaZero played 44 million chess games in that time (and actually played with a 44 core computer). So I'd like to point out that the human is still just a few orders of magnitude more efficient.
Yes, we all know that biological systems are more efficient than machines through billions of years of evolution and natural selection but the overall process is largely the same (interacting with an environment, learning from results, improving underlying architecture, etc); efficiencies will come with more time and improvements.
Well if we make AI that learns at the rates humans do, it'll fundamentally undermine and destroy the relevance of all existing AI. It sounds to me like you're saying "we basically are there it's just a matter of degree" and I'm saying "No it's orders of magnitude off and probably won't be using LLMs at all and maybe a very fundamentally different type of neural net technology that hasn't been invented yet."
I like this idea. There's at least one system I know of in competition with your business model. In trading desks, the data of traders is analyzed ato reveal the better traders. Almost always it's because they have some kind of 'inside' information. Can be a small thing like a friend that works somewhere keeps giving them tidbits. Legal or not, this is reality. The finance companies take this internal trading data and build models based around those traders, and sell the trade advantage to their own customers.
I think your site needs to compete with that, and other existing systems for adding value to 'better traders'.
My thinking is that this would work for long term investing rather than short term trading. You're right that there's competition for trading, I read that Robinhood is getting active in rating traders based on their actual trades as well, but haven't confirmed it.
1 - How are people torrenting and not using a VPN? 2 - How are judges still allowing this business model of sharing files then trying to shake down people that download them?
What cases are you talking about?
My general understanding is that if the VPN provider does not keep any logs, all that is left is timing / bandwidth correlation. If the endpoint you are connecting to isn't compromised and you connect to a high traffic node wouldn't this be essentially impossible?
Unless you do some user error stuff like logging into accounts tied to your public persona?
but basically the point is, you are indellibly linking your machine to a service.
The difference between that an normal internet is because of NAT, you can argue that at home it wasn't your machine, it was someone else on the network.
When I use the VPN, I am connecting to an endpoint that 40 other people are also connected to. Did I download that file, or did one of the other 39 download it? Even the VPN provider can't tell... they keep no logs. I wouldn't want to use the VPN to phone in some bomb threat, that wouldn't even hide me 5 minutes from the feebs, but it's like an impenetrable shield for copyright troll lawyers. Smooth sailing for the last 13 or 14 years, for $3/month.
I'd be shocked if anyone in the United States is still downloading stuff without a VPN. There are entire countries that don't have to worry about it, but none in Europe or North America where that is the case.
And what do you think the Hollywood lawyers would have to offer in return for such favors? Looks pretty low-value from both sides. Maybe I need to dial up my narcissism a few notches to understand you, I'm just not that important enough to the folks who have the anti-vpn superpowers.
yeah everyone knows the losses they argue for are bullshit, I really think people should see how many times lawyers and other legal professionals give each other jobs by creating a world in which they are more and more needed.
Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
Company I work for got sued because someone filled out a form to get contacted, got a phone call as is expected after filling out said form, then sued because they're on the do not call list. Why did you fill out the form then?
Sure, that's plausible... a facebook exec so dumb that they're using their personal ISP connection to run a VPN for others, and even dumber that they don't notice or don't care about a massive amount of torrent traffic through that VPN.
It's not really a VPN for piracy purposes unless it's a commercial, no-log VPN. Since when a VPN is used to move the point at which traffic enters the internet, the owner of the VPN exit will be held to account.
They can try to claim they were running a "private" VPN and gave random people (from reddit and discord) internet access through it. They can try to claim they don't keep logs. Meanwhile, for a facebook VP with suspected activity tied to facebook corporate, the rightsholder will subpoena every digital device in the person's home, depose all their family and close friends, subpoena their facebook email...
Are you confusing Tor with a VPN? With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider, and there's usually just one hop (you run an encrypted connection between yourself and the VPN provider that all your traffic is routed over, then the VPN provider makes outgoing connections on your behalf). You're relying on the VPN provider's promise to not log customer connections, but if they are honest, all connections seem like they're coming from the VPN provider and aren't traceable beyond that.
With Tor, you connect to a random Tor node (which may be another residential computer), which connects to a node in the middle, which connects to an exit node, which forwards your requests on to their final destination. All connections look like they come from the exit node, which might be someone's residential IP.
> With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider
That is not a requirement... anyone can run VPN server software on a computer they control, whether it's on a personal/residential connection or a VPS/VM you rent, or something else. Many privacy-conscious people do this regularly whether or not a commercial VPN provider is involved.
Dyson seem to be the champion of turning a cheap effective device that's well understood into the same device but an order of magnitude more expensive. Are people still buying it?
Of course they will. People buy rubbish like this all the time.
Here I am in a hotel room with a Dyson fan, which simultaneously moves less air, and is more noisy, with a much more piercing tone, than my home fan with blades that I bought for £30 from screwfix.
I'll be turning it off before I sleep... unlike the one at home.
And if you wait a few months, you will find several other alternatives in the market at a more reasonable price. I learned not to jump on the Dyson bandwagon with their vacuum cleaners.
My wife, upon seeing the pictures of this ridiculous contraption I gleefully waved in her face, described it as "a Sonicare on a steampunk bender", so arguably there are already pretty good options.,
It's horrifying to see that our browsers give up anything at all. I feel like we need a new model where we just get served the content, and we don't serve up anything to the content provider. I feel ill.
How would you prevent that? If you want to use a feature, you need to know if that feature is available. So you add methods/functions to ensure that you can fail gracefully when something is not available. That availability is the fingerprint. I don't blame the browsers as much as asshats using the tool for malicious purposes. We're not going to ban hammers because someone uses them for things other than driving nails.
Another one is "draw text, read back pixels" which is simultaneously a really effective fingerprint, and also cuts to the core of what we want a web browser to do. We can't refuse to draw text.
And what about SWE from outside whatever jurisdiction that body issues those licenses? You cannot regulate your way out of tech problem if everyone is not subject to said regulations. Why people keep making comments like this is beyond me.
In the old days, we just sent the content and let the client figure out what to do with it. If you navigated to homestarrunner.com and you didn't have flash installed, you just got a message saying to install it, or worst case, a broken icon in a frame.
Right, but the client side did a query to see what was available and gracefully displayed a message. People are now sending the truthy response of the feature's availability back. You could be doing that as a legit bit of logging, or you could be doing that to be an asshat and deanonymize the user. The browser doesn't know the intent of being asked about a feature. And yes, it has been figured out just fine as a way for making someone money by selling information about you
This is the reason privacy is needed.
> Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
Yes, we should try this. Zero-knowledge proofs and other modern technology allows for this. Even the first step of not selling or using student data for commerce is an easy step.
Those who think that we should not try to improve because our privacy is already compromised, should step aside.
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