dacodanelson

Folks aren't worried burglers will steal their photos because the photos are objectively precious, they are worried that the photos will be stolen because burglers steal things which are precious, and since family photos are considered precious to most people they make a faulty connection. It's irrational, but so is most everything we do as a society when you look at it closely.

Webcams being hackable means people can begin to irrationally fear for their privacy in their own homes. Rather than be free to move about and do as they wish, they second-guess whether someone would be watching, and even though they have no logical obligation to appease this unknown third-party's desires for propriety, they're going to be concerned about breaking norms. "I hope I don't look like a slob, or pick my nose, or start whacking it or ... " anything, because we all have a nervousness about being a particular way when others are around, even when we don't know those people or, as in this case, those people have no right to be there in the first place.

It's dumb and irrational and you can dissect it a million different ways and wax poetic about what it "says about society" or human psychology, but in the end it's just another expectation most people have - that their privacy in certain places will not be invaded and they are free to let their guard down - and as engineers and developers and everything else, it's our job to work within those constraints if we want user adoption, or at least if we want good-will.

Is it rational that people want privacy but they also want to post their thoughts and photos and videos online where anybody can see them forever? Nope. That's humans for you though, and the people who capitalized on letting them do it are now wealthier than most of us can imagine. Finding a way to reliably both actually make a webcam free from being useful to hijackers, and to prove to and convince the public that it is so, is a lucrative opportunity - I would say especially so in this new pandemic age.

My first reaction was to scoff at this, but you might be on to something! I discussed the idea of "not wanting to hurt vendors' feelings" being a driver behind choosing 100% ratings versus more accurate reflections from consumers, but I hadn't considered that maybe people's feelings in that regard were influenced by the fact that every app and product begs to be rated that way. "Did we fulfill the basic requirements? Please rate us five stars!" Is that anywhere in the ballpark of what you mean?

Regretted the title about 20 minutes after "publishing". Mistakes were made. I do remember directories and personal pages though. I still stumble across them from time to time and it's such a pleasure. This was my latest discovery: http://www.macdougallelect.com

I am actually working on a follow-up about Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu. I know it never really came to anything, but it's really fascinating the way this brilliant, Memex-like system was what all the visionaries were talking about, and what we got was a giant directory of pseudo-printed pages.

If anyone's looking for the meat of this one, it's the second half, in relation to the App Library feature. As it turns out, all the things the App Library is supposed to improve, it just reinforces.

Must be wonderful having the entire "third world" for researchers to test out their pet hypotheses, or at least to trial medications that might not otherwise be worth paying to have put through FDA scrutiny until you've dosed several thousands of innocent children. And who says colonialism is dead?

I haven't had time to go over this as more than a cursory glance, but I'm intrigued. Swift holds a weird place in my estimation between making coding more accessible and making programming an exercise in futility; oversimplifying to the point of being incorrect, essentially. I look forward to enjoying this with my morning coffee.

I'm going to have to look into Click then, I've stumbled on this article while doing some research (actually, I did some research about 2 days before and then Google Now or whatever it's called recommended it to me in my feed, but same diff) and will be giving it a try, but I'll try Click as well.

As far as Nubia, I have to say I'm probably a bit biased but I will refuse to use any tools built by Facebook. I would want to do a full source audit beforehand because I trust them not to put some analytics in there about as far as I could throw one of their datacenters.

Frankly he should sue. Nothing major, just legal fees and whatever the fifteen minutes wasted by the cop amounts to in terms of reasonable wages. The cops need to remember we're not here to be pulled over to fill quotas or satisfy their curiosity: every pointless traffic stop is a nuisance to a citizen and should be compensated the same as we're expected to compensate the state for encroaching on their rules.

I agree about Signal for sure, actually I love it. Double Ratchet is especially intriguing to me as forward-secrecy is something that's often overlooked, as well as "exploding' messages. My only problem with Signal is that while it's nice to have a more reliably verified endpoint like a phone number for many contacts, it can't be used for communication between random people very easily. If I want to start an encrypted conversation with someone online I don't have to distrust them in order to be uncomfortable sharing my phone number with them. I get enough spam calls as it is, not to mention maybe I don't want this other person to be able to pay $10 or whatever it costs these days to reverse trace my number. It'd be great if there could be an ephemeral key you could generate for your profile for each new conversation you didn't want to have with someone that shares your phone number. That's really my only gripe with Signal.

However, Signal also is only for one thing essentially: chat. If I want to communicate via email or even just sign this message to verify it's me, I can't request Signal perform a signing function and generate some output so that others can verify I sent this precise message. Well, at least they can't verify that someone who claims in their public key declaration to be me didn't send this precise, unaltered message, haha.

Regarding linking identities together I agree entirely. I suppose in theory you could add subkey identities to your public PGP identity and then push those to keyservers. Something like [MyProfileName]@[ServiceDomain].[ServiceDomainTLD].Service or something (where it's not a real email address or domain) but it signifies that you're claiming that specific username at that specific service and then manually posting a verifiable proof publicly on that service. The only downsides there are that revocation is ... yeah. And everyone would have to agree on a standard for how to name identities for subkeys for services and that's honestly never going to happen.

Keybase messaging is pretty cool, I just wish it could be run from the terminal because I'm with you on the UI. Like chat history would still be in the GUI for review and stuff but you could spin up "keybase chat [username]" or something in a terminal and that just runs and let's you chat IRC style or something.

Surprisingly though I've found that teaching people how to use GnuPG for Mac is remarkably easy because it's well integrated with Mail and things like that. With Time Machine people really don't even have to migrate their keys properly. Only downside is that if someone loses their private key they'll have no idea what to do about it and again, revocation. The upshot though is that if they're using GnuPG you get, at very least, signed emails and then you're not outsourcing your identity to a third party like Keybase. I trust Keybase more or less ultimately because I can't see any reason for them to do anything annoying and they've got a great track record but trust is always violable.

I can see this being surprisingly useful in a variety of cases. Unfortunately I'm still in the "Aww, wish I didn't have to learn this to code for iOS" phase, as well as the "Pssh, Swift is for kids" phase. Neither of which is endearing or productive I'm sure ... Thanks for the link!