I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.
I think the US is giving up control willingly and turning more isolationist. It has been building for some time but I do not thing it is forced. It is a deliberate policy shift turning away from trying to control and police the world. America is pushed in and on to other countries and societies that a retraction might be the best thing
I don't believe it's trying to give up control, the current US administration don't want to be the world police but still wants the control given by being the world police, both can't exist at the same time and some sort of reckoning will happen.
They're currently threatening to invade Venezuela!
Mind you, another consequence of the regime is that nobody knows what's real and what's keyfabe any more. They were also threatening to invade Canada, lost a colossal amount of goodwill as a result, and got bored and moved on.
The US is pulling back from NATO and simultaneously re-asserting dominance in the Americas, i.e., the Munroe Doctrine, which has suffered setbacks in recent decades.
This is so interesting. I remember as a child my family would go to S&S Cafeterias, and Piccadilly. It was like the lunch line at school. Regrettably the closest I've gotten to an automat was when I taught in a prison, the classroom had vending machines of sandwiches, desserts, etc.
I think we still have automats. Ikea cafe for example, the cafeteria in the basement of the Natural History and Science Museum in Washington, D.C., any number of places where you get food, checkout, sit, eat, leave without interacting with anyone.
Ya'll need a trip to Japan. So many versions of the automat approach. One favorite is ガスト (Gusto). Self seat, Order from the tablet at your table, food delivered by a rolling robot with "Kitty" theme, and self checkout with the reciept/ticket at an unstaffed kiosk. They put all of the human labor effort into kitchen staff and great ingredients. Better food than the best Denny's or IHOP in the heyday of the late 80s or early 90s, and breakfast for two totaling under 12 dollars. Its a winning twist on Automat, and other examples of this are around the corner in almost every town. Its the future we were promised in the 50s that never got delivered beyond some Art Deco public works buildings.
This is deeply worrisome and brings to mind when Russia attacked Chernobyl, and then their soldiers got radiation poison digging latrine trenches etc. Let us dangerously hypothesize that if Confinement begins to fail catastrophically, who will step in to fix it? Russia? Is it.. possible Russia will allow the leak as a form of weapon?
I don't think that Russians care about this. This whole invasion can be summed by 'Russians don't care about trivialities like human life or impact to nature'.
Agreed, and I am reminded that Putin once called Russia a "managed democracy." I may not always agree, but I am very glad America has the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh amendments, among others. This tactic by the British government is absurd and offensive to freedom. What I find more baffling, but perhaps I am narrowly thinking about it, is how much the British people are letting it happen. I am not political, but if anyone tried to take our rights under the Bill of Rights, or declared an emergency to cancel elections, I will be in the streets with, I hope, literally every one else.
Some things are just too critical to a free and fair nation, and jury trials are right up there.
In South Africa there are no juries, and the democracy is deemed fairly good, albeit rotten with corruption (but that's another story). The judiciary is fairly independent so far, and criminal cases are solely tried by a professional judge.
A lot of public law jurisdictions don’t have jury trials, just a judge who decides the facts based on the constitution and the case presented by the prosecutor. Finland, for example.
Right. In fact, AFAIK only a handful of countries have a jury, which are mainly ex british colonies. Almost everywhere else there is constitution and so.
>I am not political, but if anyone tried to take our rights under the Bill of Rights, or declared an emergency to cancel elections, I will be in the streets with, I hope, literally every one else.
I'm sorry but the last decade has shown how much the US really likes to mirror the UK. I have been burned so many times thinking the US is some unique snowflake. Its just a Anglo-Saxon colony that moved out on its own but is still part of that same soul and mindset. I know a large chunk of the majority white population is now of German descent, but it still seems like the Anglo-Saxon mindset rules the land. If you want to know what happens to the future of the US just look at the UK as they are always the OG hipsters.
The UK voted for Brexit on the premise of making Britain british again (or some hogwash of that nature). The US would never make a silly mistake of that nature right? Oh wait they did just months later. The UK has this obsession of having cameras everywhere so much so there have been famous books written about that culture. The US is doing the same just that they got away with it by hiding it under other excuses such as anti-terrorism, security, protecting the children, etc.
Now the U.S. is slow walking into erosion of free speech, erosion of rights. And have the population put up a fight? No. They're acting exactly like the U.K. population. Maybe even more cowardly. And would you even blame them? What is their recourse? People here like to cosplay about the second amendment, but you know what when push came to shove, they acted exactly as their British compatriots did.
It was also rejecting being part of the anti-democratic runaway train that is the EU with its unelected president. Britain has enough trouble with its own government - for many it seemed like a reasonable move to remove the government running our government.
I loathe copilot and have reverted to using an old version of Outlook desktop, which I then had to regedit to remove copilot buttons etc. It's a horrible product being shoved down our throats.
I wonder if this is a portend to an American social credit score, like where China uses facial recognition to identify criminals at concerts[1], and jaywalkers, etc. which severely impacts a person's ability to get a job, housing, etc.
I can't help but assume this is already being used at retail establishments, but now it could be tied into law enforcement databases, and .. communicate..
I think the post's argument is that we are on the way to something akin to China's social credit system (but not there yet).
> What we have aren't unified social credit systems…yet. They're fragmented behavioral scoring networks that don't directly communicate. Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems. The question isn't whether we have Chinese-style social credit now (because we don't). The question is whether we're building toward it without acknowledging what we're creating.
Those systems depend on enforcement. If a private system keeps score and gate keeps you usually have alternatives (utilities excluded), if it’s the gov and they decide to enforce it, then things get dire…
But what if Target security cooperates with the government, and they share capabilities, so that a facial recognition inside of a Target location would notify law enforcement who also has an interest in that person? In such a scenario.. Target would freely give its data but not necessarily acting an agent of the government.
People need to work to reverse the Bush and Obama initiated and then continued practice (setting precedent) of bypassing direct surveillance by buying data from data brokers. The Biden and Trump admins just continue this practice. That’s where people need to reverse the practice. I mean you had the FBI and probably others wiretapping Congress folks so… it’s like they don’t care.
Or we need to focus on making data brokers illegal, period. Taking a page from the GDPR would be a good start. As long as the surveillance databases continue to exist, they will be juicy targets for anyone attracted to the power. And not just for the de jure government, but also plenty of "private" businesses that adopt them nearly in lockstep. If you get blackballed in the one used by say Target, it's not like Walmart is going to make it a point of competition to serve the small fraction of people who would be good customers but for getting tripped up by Target. Rather they will all use the same databases, shutting you off from most commerce. That's effectively creating a de facto government, independent of any de jure government adoption.
"American" "social" credit scores were instituted long ago. Distracting from this was the whole reason the media added the word "social" to the term - to other the idea as something that happens over there, never here.
That was the carrot. This new development is the stick.
I sat through a briefing last week about quantum encryption and the threat that quantum computing poses to encryption in use today. It was stressed that nation states are hoovering up encrypted data now in order to decrypt later with quantum computing. Much the same way America decrypted old soviet encrypted data. I wonder if it will take as long and if anyone will still be alive to make use of that data.
As has been previously pointed out, the 2001 and 2012 quantum factorisation records may be easily matched with a dog trained to bark three times [33]. We verified this by taking a recently-calibrated reference dog, Scribble, depicted in Figure 6, and having him bark three times, thus simultaneously factorising both 15 and 21. This process wasn’t as simple as it first appeared because Scribble is very well behaved and almost never barks. Having him perform the quantum factorisation required having his owner play with him with a ball in order to encourage him to bark. It was a special performance just for this publication, because he understands the importance of evidence-based science.
> we also estimate that factorising at least two-digit numbers should be within most
dogs’ capabilities, assuming the neighbours don’t start complaining first
> Similarly, we refer to an abacus as “an abacus” rather than a digital computer, despite the fact that it relies on digital manipulation to effect its computations.
Like LLMs, this isn't the sort of thing where a small group would make a sudden advancement and be made secret, and I doubt that the NSA can make theirs significantly faster than any industry team today. I think more likely you would need to get worried if someone got one scalable to hundreds or thousands of logical qubits and then stopped publishing.
> I think more likely you would need to get worried if someone got one scalable to hundreds or thousands of logical qubits and then stopped publishing.
Consider the likelihood of managing that without alerting the authorities to what is going on.
This shouldn't be a major issue because of Forward Secrecy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy) principles built into modern TLS protocols, which ensure that even if the public/private key scheme is vulnerable to (for example) quantum attacks, the attacks have to be done now, as a MITM for the handshake, or otherwise the full traffic capture is useless for future decryption without getting some secrets from one of the endpoints.
That being said, it's not 100% used everywhere yet (Wikipedia mentions 92.6% of websites), and various means of tricking devices into downgrading to an older protocol would result in traffic that might be decrypted later.
No, this absolutely is not how forward secrecy works in TLS. Forward secrecy protects against a break in the signature algorithm, but not in the key agreement algorithms.
Both the FFDH and ECDH key agreement algorithms are vulnerable to quantum crypt-analysis; someone capturing traffic today could later break that agreement and then decrypt the data. An attacker would have to capture the entire session up to the "point of interest" though.
This is why FFDH/ECDH are being augmented with Post-Quantum secure KEMs.
What I want to know is how they guess which 0.001% of signals or internet traffic is actually worthwhile to keep? The biggest nation states could conceivably store about 1 year’s worth of internet traffic right now, but then they also need to store whatever other signals intelligence they’re gathering for analysis, so it will be less than a single years worth.
But almost all that data is going to turn out to be useless if or when they gain quantum ability to decrypt it, and even the stuff that could be useful now gets less useful with every month it stays encrypted. Stuff that is very useful intelligence now could be absolutely useless in five years…
If you discard all major video streaming sites (including adult entertainment) then you probably can get most of the way there; you're probably mostly interested in text communication and actual user data, not the video content which is so much larger than that.
It's an interesting little nugget of evidence in favor of the simulation hypothesis. We're currently living through the first era in humanity's history where there will be enough raw information to create a workable global level simulation once that data is decrypted. Pair that with the fact that we're living through such a huge inflection point in history (birth of the internet, humanity becoming a multiplanetary species, and more) and you have a time where people both (1) can and (2) will want to simulate/experience. It's quite interesting.
I'm still convinced that the simulation hypothesis is just religion for the atheist or agnostic, because if it turns out that it's correct and one day you 'wake up' only to find that it was all a simulation, well how do you know that isn't now also just another simulation? It's a non-theory. But I find this some quite compelling circumstantial evidence in favor of this non-theory. Because an arbitrary number of individuals may be able to experience "this" era throughout our species' future, yet only one group will be the one that gets to actually live it, and that group will ostensibly be orders of magnitude smaller than the sum total of all that will later 'experience' it. Statistically you're rather more likely to belong to the simulation group than the real, if these assumptions are correct.
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