Posted by Ygg2 10 hours ago
> In comparison, tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy seem to be a very rare, and maybe mythical, species.
Ever heard of Meredith Whittaker?
> We could have designed our protocols to be minimally compatible with “a nation of laws,” but the tech bros insisted that compromise was treason, and, as a result, we will lose more privacy than necessary.
This has to be a joke. There's private, and there's not private. There is nothing in between. This is not about tech bros. This is about guiding principles, about personal liberty, and about freedom from tyranny.
> It may not quite be a law of nature, but my personal guess is that the opportunities for anonymity on the Internet will shrink until mothers no longer are forced to have “the talk” when their daughters get their first mobile phone.
In addition to "the talk" guess what else they won't be forced (or allowed) to talk about? Political dissent.
This chunk of the article is both sexist and defeatist. Now to read the rest.
The point he’s trying to make, as I understand it, is that states adapt. They don’t just throw up their hands and say “guess we can’t do anything about that encrypted traffic.”
The response to distributed kinetic kill capability in the US, for example, is for police to become more militarized and treat every encounter as a potentially lethal one.
> There's private, and there's not private. There is nothing in between
It’s not an argument about privacy per se, it’s highlighting that the stronger the protections against state surveillance and intervention, the stronger the state becomes. By taking an absolutionist stance, we push our institutions to towards the same in response.
I’m not making an argument or against encryption or privacy, just pointing out the systemic effects.
The fact that you name one makes her very rare indeed.
- Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity at the EFF
- Runa Sandvik, formerly of Tor Project
- Yan Zhu, EFF Fellow and CISO at Brave
And many, many more.
It rankled me more than a bit that the author apparently looked around his bubble in Denmark and the FOSS community, saw no "tech sister" privacy advocates, and decided to paint with the widest brush possible and assume there are none anywhere.
"tech bros" in context of the article is pretty much referring to builders of software. The tech sisters who have built significant projects are indeed mythically rare.
Names like Radia Perlman might be a better choice.
Care to amend your statement? I don't see any qualification about building software there.
Face it, the author was just searching for another reason to be mad at men in the software realm.
Also, I think the intended meaning of "tech bros" in the article is more nuanced. Charitably: naive, sophomorically idealistic SV tech entrepreneurs who rode the "information wants to be free" wave to a world where WhatsApp & FB Messenger are E2EE by default. Uncharitably: anyone not in author's idealogical tribe, particularly ideologically impure programmers who have turned to entrepreneurism. And Americans.
Good to know you don't think Yan or Runa's technical work is significant, though.
Also the fact they call it “age verification” when they clearly build an identity verification and we just accept their language is crazy.
Talking isn't doing, just like word generation isn't an outcome.
At least, this is what I have come up with because this blog is mostly incoherent blabbering.
That’s why large tech companies are lobbying in favour of this!
TIL: Phil Zimmermann was a "tech bro" and had a time machine.
> So, it is not obvious to me who will be training new iterations of these models once the current bubble explodes, in particular if the returns are diminishing the way I have experienced.
It looks like he has no clue on how market equilibriums work. He really seems to think LLM's will just like.. stop existing.
So in their world, people would suddenly realise that AI is actually not that economic and we can't have Opus 4.8 quality models just with updated knowledge cutoff perpetually. So in his future, things won't just stall, they will literally go back.
He's really putting his emotional weight on this particular kind of future.
Either that or he's making nebulous emotional claims - its his blog so he can do it.
Unfortunately, no, you can't have a prophilactic that just makes you a little bit pregnant. We used to know this.