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Comment by logisticseh | Hacker News Reader

> What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are?

LOL. I've been working on distributed systems for... a while. I've even had a few conversations with Lamport, pre-Turing award.

Apparently today BFT is a buzzword used by alt-suits to hawk unnecessary solutions to fake problems.

> With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on?

1. That's... not what byzantine fault tolerance gives you.

2. Fault tolerance was a huge problem in the 90s and 00s but today is in most practical cases a solved problem (and without any use of "crypto").

> For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf

Lots of nudity AFAICT.

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I know that BFT doesnt automatically imply the data has redundancies built in, which is why I mentioned it separately.

As for fault tolerance being “solved”, how’s Google Reader treating you? Are you able to control your Facebook or Instagram experience? I hear they know their new changes will irk people but will do them anyway. You think trusting others and giving them all the control to change something under you at any time is good because they trust themselves? That’s cute. Maybe they’ll even call their offering “the cloud” and you’ll believe it is like the Internet. Put all your photos there and don’t make any backups. Heck, put all your legal agreements there too! Who needs multiple distrusting parties to secure a ledger?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagr...

Don’t worry, though. You’ll own nothing and be happy. Software as a service. DRM books that can be removed. Centralizing all the data in one place can attract all kinds of government agencies and advertisers hungry for cheap data. Heck, if government agents want, they can even impersonate you, and all they have to do is send one letter to people you never met! How nice:

https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill

How can Hackers support these “anti Hacking bills” that let the governments and police hack your accounts and impersonate you… I guess I should come out with several flavors of ice cream for many in the HN crowd — it’s bootlickin good!

> how’s Google Reader treating you? Are you able to control your Facebook or Instagram experience?

LOL you started by asking me if I know what BFT even is and now you're going on a rant about totally unrelated things.

BFT is a mathematical property about models of distributed computer systems. A property I'm now willing to bet you don't understand. and which you are now also invoking, vaguely, as part of a sweeping social critiques. This is such a silly pitch. I genuinely can't believe people fall for it.

Why do you drag no less than half a dozen vaguely related hot-button emotional topics with your sales pitch? The only thing they have in common is the constituency you're trying to exploit. People reading this for whom the parent post resonated: you're the fucking mark.

What's the point of this rhetoric? What are you trying to sell? To whom?

The solution to the Social Media Problem is really very simple:

Step 1: log off.

Step 2: Lobby for better privacy laws.

Step 3: Avoid repeating the original mistake; the crypto bros make the tech bros look like saints.

The problem with social media not primarily that it's centralized, so the fact that anything other than "log off and pass privacy laws" is pitched as a solution to FB/Instagram is probably the most astounding "Emporer Has No Clothes" situation I've ever seen.

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