I can’t help wondering what is up with all those people fighting in comments about encryption. You make the point time and again that having encrypted media is somehow suspicious. I see where you are coming from.

• There are cases where people have gotten in trouble for using TOR/Signal, because it was presented to the court that “this is what criminals use”.
• There are those Wall Street companies that got in trouble for using encrypted messengers with trading partners.

We know about these, because it makes headlines when it happens.

Yet, there are people here, in any similar discussion, not just this one, that keep telling us that encryption is useless because authorities can more easily break your bones than brute force your private key, and you are going to be in trouble just for having encrypted media.

Is that so? Remember the fuss when federal regulators wanted Apple to install backdoors to encrypted i-Phones? Why so? No no, bear with me, if you people are correct, then every person with an encrypted i-Phone should be in a watchlist? What about all these Linux laptops all with LUKS on the main hard drive, flying around?

How come we don’t hear about those people being prosecuted and brutalized every other day in all of these alternative media we are following?

Regarding encryption, I have a right to my fucking privacy and if you want to know what is in my hard drive, then you are the weird one. Now let’s discuss criminal prosecution. If the authorities have something on you and they need whatever is in your encrypted drive to convict you, then they do not have anything on you unless they break the encryption. The more people practicing encryption the less fruitful their efforts will be. Your argument amounts to little more than the very authorities slogan “if you don’t have something to hide”. More people using encryption should make it sink that not only people with something to hide will use encryption, and indeed, all these everyday, non-criminal people are already using Encryption in i-Phones and Linux without having their bones broken.

Yet you keep repeating this rhetoric, which seems to have no other purpose than deter people from using encryption.

Now let’s discuss brutality. If you live in a police state that can kidnap you and rough you up to forgo your protected right to privacy, then you don’t have a problem with encryption, but a huge political problem. In that case encryption won’t liberate you, but at the same time you have much bigger problems, and an entirely different threat model.

So the only thing you people could, in good faith, add to the discussion is “If you live in a police state, don’t rely solely on encryption, and update your threat model”. The other things you keep going on and on about are essentially a rebranded “if you don’t have something to hide” and they only seem designed to discourage people from adopting encryption altogether, and the fact you don’t let go can only mean one fucking thing.

This is a story from August 2023, and was covered in many outlets (I quote here NYT for reference only)

Federal regulators continued their crackdown against employees of Wall Street firms using private messaging apps to communicate, with 11 brokerage firms and investment advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines.

Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Bank of Montreal were hit with the biggest penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together, the brokerage and investment advisory arms of those four financial institutions accounted for nearly 90 percent of the fines, according to statements released by the regulators.

Original NYT

Archived version

You might have a different type of person in mind than other commenters. Most commenters had such people in mind who won’t install a password manager or an ad-blocker, or won’t hard reboot their Windows unless supervised. Having said that, I don’t think that even if you had technical people in mind this fits the question. They tend to take substantial more effort to learn and use effectively than the scope set by the original question. I thought this question was for little things that have a quick, lasting, and substantial effect. Learning awk and sed is a different thing entirely, I think of those more as productivity tools you can invest in mastering, and pay off in the long run.

I see. Do you think it is a honeypot?

I share your sentiment. But from a technical point of view, I can’t fathom interactive maps without javascript, which is typically blocked by hardened browsers. TBF I think their cause would be better served if they open sourced their data so that people could explore them with arbitrary clients.

Some US bank got in trouble for using it internally.

I can’t fathom any reluctance coming from the left with respect to unionizing and providing necessary health services to any worker. If people do need to resort to sex work to make a living, then what are they supposed to do when they get older? Do you have to do a “respectable” job just to have the right to …retire? I feel some arguments come from a cruel place.

Add universal heath care including addiction treatment. This might or might not include de-penalization of addiction, depending on the jurisdiction. Breakdown this more to make clear what I mean. Besides the obvious complementarity between UBI and universal health care, people get to do this because they are also addicted, not just poor. Some are also manipulated by means of being addicted. The current approach that punishes the addicted instead of treating them only makes this worse. Countries that have made addiction a healthcare issue rather than a criminal one have seen results.

In Reddit, many subs sprouted out of successful AskReddit questions. Just saying. For people who want more traffic in Lemmy, everyone should feel welcome to suggest their interests, zero fucks given. Or what exactly, ban questions about …fries?

I don’t think anyone took those seriously as private messengers. On another note, I think Maduro cracked down on WhatsApp as well, and called Venezuelans to cancel Meta altogether. Or something.

About the technical side of my response. I have difficulty understanding your concern, because from what I have seen so far, NOSTR is a protocol and has different implementations. As a protocol it is very liberal since it mostly goes on to specify the structure of the “event” data type. In the specification I saw that it specifies signing and verifying notes with private/public key pairs, but I haven’t seen yet where on the protocol level it requires Bitcoin Lightning. Is it possible that you have looked into a specific implementation which elected to use such cryptographic keys as to make it interoperate with the Bitcoin blockchain to start with? In that case, the articles linked by the project mention that the protocol is simple and can be implemented “in a weekend”. That means that instead of even forking it at all you can roll your own in your chosen framework?

I have had a look into Nostr. My remarks perhaps will start a whole other thread but I will express them. For one thing, I had a quick look at odysh some time ago, and I have left with a sour taste about the connotations of ‘censorship resistant’. Don’t get me wrong I am of course against state censorship, but I (unironically-please say otherwise) wonder if there is more to this phrase than nazi dogwhistling. Within censorship resistant social networks is there a) the possibility to mass block, mitigate harassment brigades, tag nazis, and combat other types of toxic trolling and brigading? b) is there absolutely any level of moderation possible, including and going beyond the possibility to go back and delete stuff posted by trolls, or even illegal stuff like slander, hate speech, revenge porn and worse? I can’t start a discussion about censorship resistant networks if these conditions are not met, because so much dogwhistling has, well, “smuggled” these meanings into the term, and I am reluctant towards it.

If that is the case, then it arguably be an extra step for new people to join. I fear that not many will unless already familiar with Bitcoin etc.

orm of authentication, I’d be very interested. I’m obviously not going to roll my own auth from scratch….but as I see it, tying BTC to it could prevent MANY people from giving an otherwise very promising tech a chance.

I am not quite familiar with the overlap between Bitcoin and authentication. In fact it seems I assume they are totally separate things. If you care to explain further or point me to the right resources?

Sure, I understand Matrix fine. On the contrary, I don’t get why people find it harder to switch to than Discord?

Sure, the use case is remote to say the least, but the decentralized thing is appealing. I will have to wrap my head around the bitcoin registration thing, since I am not familiar with crypto. But I did imagine something like decentralized exchange or shops as part of community organizing. In that manner you can, for instance, support web creators within a given community etc. So, perhaps the use case not that far as it initially seems.

add much richer functionality here to turn a poll into a proper group decision-making tool

This wording shapes my thought better than I did in the post.

Um, does community organizing have to be secret to be immune to trolls and bad actors?

I really did not mean to be insulting. I am just saying chart makers can choose to make a zoom in, and it is not automatically propaganda or something. All this has led people astray of the real issues, like WTF is measuring ‘happiness’ on a 1-10 scale, and what are the metric properties of this 1-10 scale. Then there are all the sampling issues and what have you. I just expected more people discussing this stuff rather than the Y-axis.

Oh sport, and I thought I was the one beating on a dead horse here. I understand why people claim to take issue with the Y-axis range. I am just saying chart makers can zoom in to make a point, and it is not automatically misleading. That is all. Anyway, thanks for writing this. Looks like a lot of effort, and some of it will make sense in my stats coursework, thanks!