Then came 9/11. It’s the single point in history where just about everything to do with American society can be defined to be before and after.
Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described, the fact of the matter is that America as a country has been locked in this sort of country wide PTSD since and have changed completely. Along with it went peace, calmness, secularism, egalitarianism and altruism. We’re constantly the hunted now, the ones who need security, everything needs to be dumbed down, so called common sense rules and it better be mine common sense and not yours. And on and on it goes. We’re operating like a demented, schizophrenic who has woken up from a nightmare every day of their lives and have lost the fact they are living in their head instead of in the real world.
The rising pessimism and negativity since 2008/09 is a global phenomenon. I think it's wrong and very US-centric to attribute that to 9/11.
The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media has probably more to do with the rise of millennial pessimism and negativity.
> American
Yes, except the world is large and frankly in most parts of the world 9/11 doesn't factor very large in memory. As such, I doubt it was the single most important factor in changing this feeling of world peace which again, definitely didn't exist outside of the US. All you need to think about to see that is look at why 9/11 happened and think of all the murdered people those folks must have seen to get that angry.
Interesting small mention. Is it common in America to disbelieve in the mainstream history of 9/11? I’m just getting glimpses from the new world via the internet and have no ear to the ground there
Population wise, that was the case for a number of years after 9/11. In terms of government policy, it's still the case. But in terms of the former, it's fading away as more time passes. People who were born in 2001 are or will turn 20 this year. Just like events like the attack on pearl harbor and the Cuban missle crises, 9/11 will also become an event that's just known by reading history rather than a first hand experience.
Think you might need to qualify that. The mid-90s saw the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides.
Once most people discovered their well thought-out blogpost got only 100 page views while a meme with a cat got 10 million, many just gave up. But what's missing in those numbers is, of those 100 page views, perhaps 10 were people you actually respect, have influence in your field, were actually using your Open Source project etc.
By optimising metric like page views we lost sight of the genuine impact we might have had with good writing.
You can read statements/watch videos by Chamath Palihapitiya or Sean Parker admitting to this being an explicit strategy at Facebook. "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport is also a nice book that covers some of the same ground.
If you ask me, our current way of managing society is a failure. You have large, well-coordinated organizations basically selling cocaine (fast food, youtube, social media, cigarettes) on end, but the other end (consumers) are necessarily less coordinated and informed because they don't operate within an organizational hierarchy with centralized decision making, shared knowledge and people dedicating 8 hours a day to maintaining those systems. Theoretically, companies live and die by how much value they create for their their customers. Practically, many companies resemble organized militia waging asymmetric warfare on unorganized masses in an increasingly zero-sum world.
I think we need to focus a lot on organizing as people outside of the structure of a for-profit corporation. Theoretically the government plays this role but it's not enough.
(inb4 omg you hate capitalism stupid commie)
I don't understand this part - what do you mean by that? Why would the world be increasingly zero-sum?
Another might be called moral clarity. Unfortunately, it's usually an illusion. We have much more experience with technologies invented under optimistic assumptions turning out to be a moral gray area at best, when you look at how they're used.
I found this paper interesting:
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf
Now it's all about that SaaS money.I don't mind the money part, but sadly, tech has become a gold mine for predators who smell the money and are out for blood.
'Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine'[1] another HN favorite comes to my mind. It was originally written for Physics Today magazine.
I don't think it's limited to only long form content, Even today printed news papers which have been in existence for >=~100 years does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.
But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.
I've noticed when I give interviews to online news the writer often has to work with their web-admin to fix errors in my statements after publishing(when it's different from what I actually said)and often it takes several hours if it even happens. Where as in printed news papers had the habit of error correction in the next issue.
[1] https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
"HTML 1" wasn't really a standard anyway and I don't remember what html2 actually brought - I remember not every browser in the mid 90s did tables, client side image maps etc but they were later additions to html2.
Javascript (which came in with html 3.2) was far more of a step change than html2
There's good and bad in this, but it does clearly change things. When there's that much money on the line, ironically the stakes become higher and there's less genuine creativity and risk taking. The flip side is of course true -- too little money is a problem (I mean, I'm not about to trade my SWE gig for working in an Amazon warehouse as a means of spurring personal creativity), but given enough money past a certain baseline, things do change. There's a sweet spot at "enough money that people can feel free to be creative and take risks" and "so much money people are scared to take too many risks".
If a culture is popular, it tends to saturate. The old internet simply couldn't compete with the new one.
I'd add Columbine as another event, which occurred in 1999 [1]. That seemed to have a lasting affect on that cohort, which was also the group that got hit hard in the 2008 downturn.
But maybe a better line is the rise of Facebook, which shifted the story from the promise of tech to the promise of social connections.
Of course, technology will never be able to safe us, and the human condition is what it is. So, really, while a small passionate group seemed excited back in the mid 90s, it was always false gold.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
The modern internet is almost entirely clashes of abstract concepts. It also shows up in the slight breakdown on the internet of basic, verifiable facts. Nobody is relying on real-world stimulus to form opinions. It is a bit draining to keep up with.
That and there is less optimism because it is clear how slowly the world changes. Consider the "The government has a track record that does not inspire confidence..." paragraph. Written 30 years ago, part of it could credibly be talking about Assange, have names swapped for Trump, etc. At some point intelligent people are going to get jaded pretending that this is new based on the overwhelming evidence that the internet gives us access to.
I think it mostly comes down to that.
People rightfully realised that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system. That a 'Plan B' may be in order.
Unfortunately, today it's 90% people trying to get rich quick.
Key signing parties[1] and porting the "international" version[2] to run on the Amiga. And the very real threat that the Clipper Chip[3] would lead to the outlawing of all other encryption methods.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party
[2] https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~conrad/krypto/pgp263.features...
I'm still blown away at how hard it is to get people to use any encryption, even people who work in infosec/etc. If nothing else, 2020 was a great year for the uptick in using crypto to communicate with non-technical fam and friends.
There is actually encryption technology[1] available that would solve this or at least make it traceable and blockable. But here we are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
Edit: Also the political situation at the time was that if Clipper was adopted, all other encryption technology would be outlawed. It was a very scary time.
Anyway, we're getting shaken/stir or whatever RealSoonNow(TM), so we'll probably have better CallerID. I don't think it'll be enough to solve the problem, without a reporting mechanism, but I guess we'll see in the next couple years.
I live in the EU and have literally never gotten a robo call in my life. It's a political problem, not a technical one.
Yes, if the internet community had acceded to their demands to use the clipper chip, that would have been one route to them lowering the barriers they had put in place to encryption. They also could have just recognized that widespread encryption was in the national interest without the clipper chip, instead of deciding it was opposed to it.
So now we have easy, strong encryption and the keys are controlled by...someone. Definitely not the user, though.
Funny story - even Phil Zimmerman can't use PGP: https://twitter.com/josephbonneau/status/638772283713060864 So maybe it is just a hard problem.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...
To put this in perspective, it's a little like someone invented a bad balanced binary tree before anybody else came up with a hash table or a radix tree or a heap, and then a weird subculture formed around that balanced binary tree based on the idea that you should only ever use that tree algorithm, even though someone subsequently came up with red-black trees that were superior in every way to the original.
It's a little like that culturally but it's almost entirely unlike that technically - a suboptimal data structure or algo tend to be just suboptimal-but-functional whereas bad cryptography and bad cryptography engineering often fail catastrophically. I know you know this, of course! But for one thing, someone used an iffy analogy on the internet, etc. For another, PGP people love misusing exactly this sort of analogy.
I deeply respect Philip Zimmermann for creating "pretty good privacy" rather than trying for "perfect privacy". PGP is exactly that: pretty good. Not great, not perfect, but pretty good indeed. And it's there. And it works. It's a compromise, which works well for many people's requirements. Oh, and did I mention that it EXISTS?
I use PGP every day. My private keys are stored on Yubikeys, which is supported. I have offline backups of those, which is supported, too. I can encrypt my backups for multiple keys, sign lists of hashes of files to verify integrity, and people can send me private E-mail.
None of this works perfectly, but it does work, and (not being a teenager anymore) I appreciate the fact that PGP has worked since 1991 or so, and I can reasonably expect it to work for the rest of my lifetime, unlike much modern software, which while being incredibly fashionable, seems to flare out a couple of years later.
The user should hold the keys, not a government or company.
Technical aspects are generally secondary, and should improve, but we shouldn’t dismiss good approaches due to implementation details.
I think U2F/WebAuthn dongles actually could solve this problem but there are all sorts of new problems now like "how do I use this with my iPhone and also with my PC" or "what happens when lose my (physical) keychain with my dongle".
Having obscure arguments about the underlying cryptography is fun and all, but doesn't really make the world a better place.
https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1]
1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration.
On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001.
At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.”
He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down.
“We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?"
And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes.
And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen
The loss of freedom has only accelerated since 2012, when Moglen gave this speech. I wish he would give them more often. He’s truly a voice for freedom, and there are not that many.
Does it? Dragnet surveillance might not easily inspect all Tor traffic, but it can easily see who is using it, flag those identities, and put them on a list for increased scrutiny. Unless a major web browser has it enabled by default, I don’t see it delivering on its promise.
If they've not come at you when you're using Tor then it's that they don't care to find you. It's not that they can't find you.
By comparison I have very little trust in modern IM software.
I am aware that "there are solutions", but are they (really) enough? Isn't "breaking in" required at some point?
Another endgame for Bitcoin is that all Bitcoin are stolen through the one tool which helps with ("unbreakable") encryption: Hacking / social engineering.
Besides that we hab substantial discussions about why PGP isn't really cutting it for use with email (to cumbersome, at one point you lose your private key, recipient struggles to decrypt, etc.).
Would be great every time a "I don't care if the NSA watch my dick picks, bro" naive person bring this to my face again.
Children will experiment when they think their parents aren't watching. Freedom to experiment and explore their interaction with the world is obviously very important for children, but this use of privacy never really goes away. Consider if you wanted to learn an instrument but have never played music before (or any other difficult skill). You probably want the freedom to practice badly for a while. If you had to practice knowing people were watching you, would you feel as free to experiment learning this type of skill?
Problems of abuse and power are obviously very important concerns. However, I believe the chilling effect surveillance has on people will cause a major shift away from people experimenting with learning new things and exploring their hobbies will become an insidious, system damage to culture and social liberty.
A) Abuse. The assumption that only true, evil crimes mean surveilance technology will be used is wrong. It will be used to harass partners, exes, famous people, activists, journalists, people with the wrong skin tone etc. In fact all of this happened already.
B) Power. Giving a government global surveilance capabilities also increases it's power into a realm where the government's nature will change. It will declare things being its business that were formely none of its business. It will go good for a while because our aystems change slowly, but at one point authotarians will take power and then you provided them with the perfect tool to target, assassinate, control and enforce.
C) Vulnerable groups. There are certain professions and groups that enjoy protection from government spying for a good reason. If you accept surveilance for yourself, you are also accepting it for them. And the next time you might really need your client-attorny-priviledge or your doctor-patient communication to stay private, it might be too late.
These are mostly "systemical" perspectives, but they are much stronger for me than "It is gross, they should not watch it".
[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
"It is not about what the government can to today with it, it is what the government will be able to do in the future"
You may believe that your dick picks are OK now and laugh at the thought of some FBI/NSA official having to comb those on a friday afternoon. But in 10/15 years time you may be in a situation where, said official will bring your dick-picks as evidence of how since so long ago you were a crazy sex maniac.
The encryption mechanisms have been tested many times by many people.
And the tooling exists for just about platform and language.
"Sorry, but I cannot decrypt this message. I don't have a version of PGP that runs on any of my devices"
Trayvon (not Trevor) Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Phil Zimmermann (different last name than George 'nn' vs 'n') wrote PGP.
Prescient.
(Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1971)
We know that today, encryption isn't the final solution when there are hackers and social engineering.
Why I Wrote PGP (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10581971 - Nov 2015 (47 comments)
Why I Wrote PGP (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823668 - Nov 2013 (109 comments)
If I remember correctly, digital copies of the binaries and source code were prohibited for export as a munition, but publishing the source code in a book, made it a book, and thus eligible for export.
