war against youtube

[NOOBY93]

While this argument obviously ended in shubla's favour, I'd like to go on a tangent here, with which an anology could be created to the matter of the discussion:

Is a murder commited by gun the fault of gun manufacturer or the employee that sold the gun? I think not.

People with no tools for murder are less likely to murder than those with tools for murder (see my forum signature). The resistance in the path of least resistance has to be low enough for a person to act on their potential (in this case being anger), not everyone can stab a motherfucker, for example, but most people can shoot. Just like when you're hungry, the food has to be tasty enough for you to eat it (the tastiness requirement lowering the hungrier you are)

To draw an analogy to this - if a person is connected to a system that, when you remove a huge resistor and short circuit it, the person gets electrocuted - is it the fault of the voltage, or the person who short circuited the system, enabling the current to run wild? The voltage is what, in the end, created the current that electrocuted the person, but the enabler is at fault.



To expand onto the murder part: If you gave a 6 year old a button that says "kill mom", he would press it when he gets really angry. That doesn't mean he's a sociopathic murderer - it's just that there was no resistence, so the little anger he had against his mom was channeled through the no resistence. The gun is the button that says "kill", and the 6 year old are the people. Anger is natural, guns are bad.

[MagicManICT]

I just wish my employer didn't require me to have a smartphone, there's no safe options left

Well, anyone good with OS design around? Might create the Linux of smartphones... problem would be getting the connections to the carriers.

[Granger]

For anyone still not having a problem with (whoever may be doing it) amassing huge amounts of data I suggest to watch this talk from the 33C3.

There David Kriesel demonstrates the basics of what is possible on the example of data gathererd from simply trawling the homepage of spiegel.de (biggest news site in germany), downloading new articles as they become available and processing just the metadata contained in them (completely ignoring the content).

Then project the possibilities onto datasets like that from Google, Facebook, ... (or combined ones like NSA or a next fascist regime that takes over) and you should also be able to come to the conclusion that this technology is highly dangerous as it'll eventually be exploited and abused, either by serving your targeted information (of whatever kind, be it advertising in special or other alternate facts) that is as effective as the brain worms in Inside in subverting your decision making against your personal interest, detecting suversive mindsets (1984 being fully automated running 24/7 in real time) or whatever dystopy you could ever imagine.

Basically such datasets are a WMMD (weapon of mass mind destruction).

Regarding the 'you are able not to use them (google, facebook, ...)' note that most pages you view pull in stuff from other sites unless you actively do something aginst that. Google sees a good part of what you surf in realtime (every page that pulls any kind of google stuff), as does Facebook (everywhere a classical like button is, as it's loaded from facebook servers). Advertising networks have the same ability (to a lesser extend), stuff lie disqus spreads like cancer.
All these are able (and do) track your way through the net, quite some better than you can yourself.

Keep in mind that private data protection laws (especially in the US, but many other places too) are purely aimed toward what someone is allowed to do with data collected but sets no limits at all on the kind or amount of data to gather or store. So the data is collected and, as indefinitely storing it being cheaper than to expunge it, kept eternally - ready to be processed by any new algorythms that come available.

[MagicManICT]

Like I keep saying... "Fuck Facebook." Well, it's said that ever piece of mail sent in certain parts of Europe was read by someone other than the intended target during its transit, which is why trusted couriers were worth so much. Is modern times any different than before? Just more efficient? Back then, 10% of the population could read and write, and the population in all of Europe was only 10% of what it is today. Now, it's more like 90-95%+ can read and write, and it takes machines to do it for us, and the machines have an eternal memory (or at least as long as someone is paying the bills to maintain that store of data).

Problem is that how many of us out there use Facebook or Google+ to stay in touch with our friends and families? How many use private, secure email only? We need to all start using the dark web. https://www.torproject.org/