And any really unscrupulous actors will just setup their own encryption…

I learned the basics of CS from this course online 7 years ago and it lead to a great career as a software dev. Hat’s off to the whole CS50 team for creating such an incredible resource and making it available for free!

He didn’t sell most of the drugs, he just provided a platform that allowed anyone to sell anything anonymously. Drug dealers used it because it was useful to them.

Drug dealers use private messaging apps like Signal as well. Should Signal be held responsible for drug deals facilitated by their app? (I know it’s not a perfect analogy, what he made was more blatant, but it’s an important distinction to make)

This is a very hard problem to solve, and people have tried.

Let’s say you do as you said: hash the data (screenshot, date, etc) and upload it to a trusted server. Nothing can stop me from generating fake data, hashing that and uploading it instead.

Ok, so maybe you decide to add a cryptographic signature to prove that it was the web browser that made this hash, not an unauthorized one. That might work for a while, but the private key needs to be shipped with the browser software, so a sophisticated person could extract that key and then generate fake data. Especially is the browser is open source (like most are).

Alright, what about if we add a special chip on the device that is hard to tamper with and keep the private key on there and do all the signing on that chip. Those do exist somewhat already, but hackers have found ways to break them.

Ok then you move everything to the cloud. Have the entire web browser running on a cloud machine by a trusted authority. Maybe then you can do what you’re discussing, but you’ve also entered a privacy nightmare where everything you’re doing can be monitored in real time.

What would be a better situation (and where I think we’re going eventually with Gen-AI) would be to put the responsibility on the website publisher to provide cryptographic proof of their content. For example, the NYTimes could create a digital signature of a photo and publish it on a blockchain or other trusted tamper-proof ledger as they publish the photo. Then anyone can verify that the photo is from the NYTimes and the date it was created.

Picking words at random from a dictionary would not be very compute intensive, the content doesn’t need to be sensical

Honestly, this one I can understand. They threw the book at this guy because he showed how privacy technologies can circumvent government control. He got 2 life sentences without possibility of parole for a non-violent crime.

What he did was illegal, but he’s been in prison for 10 years. He’s served his time

No true Scotsman fallacy

I’m progressive, but we should not deny the failure modes of progressivism

There are many examples of the left pushing blind faith in the leader (see Mao, Kim Il Sung, Stalin)

To be fair, it’s just a crossword puzzle. He probably fit “farleft” in there and needed a hint for it

I joined lemmy back in June but slowly returned to reddit. Now I’m back on lemmy because I’ve noticed the huge surge in political rage baiting (likely by bad actors) on reddit. Lemmy is just nicer!

This is not worth our time to keep arguing. I hope you have a nice day! :)

Obviously if the state doesn’t enforce the titles they’re useless. Sure if the president of a corrupt country decided he wants your house he’s gonna get it. But a DLT would prevent lower level corruption that relies on the benefit of the doubt.

If a corrupt official uses their access to change the PDF title of your house to be in his name, he could take that to court to take your house from you. A ledger would prevent that change from happening, or at least leave a permanent record of the change

Tor is not built in

Source? I’ve used Tor with Brave

AFAIK if you don’t trust the server and want to know exactly what code was run by it, there are only two options: a smart contract blockchain, or ZK Proofs (which came out of blockchain research)

It’s a social technology. It allows outsiders to validate that the election tally code was run correctly. Elections are run every day on the Ethereum blockchain often that has financial implications for the voters. It doesn’t mean they never get hacked, but it certainly gives the users more visibility and trust in their vote than a centralized black box

I don’t think running an election on a centralized database is a great idea

We agree something! :)

I think you should re-evaluate your thinking on the second part. I know it’s popular to bash on blockchains here, but blockchain isn’t all ponzi schemes and libertatians, just like the internet isn’t all phishing emails and troll farms

The research wing of the blockchain world is very interesting, at least from a nerdy, theoretical perspective

Not a fair comparison. Bank databases have been running since the 70s on code that has barely changed in that time. They’ve been battle tested for decades, so it’s unlikely a new exploit is going to be easy to find.

On the other hand, if you wanted to run an election on a centralized database, think about what that means. All the votes need to go to 1 server somewhere, which will tell us all who won the election. A server that is run by an IT team who will have root access and could be phished, or bribed, or threatened. A server that only gets a real-world test once every few years.

Users have no idea if their vote is in the database, if it’s correct, if it got counted in the final vote or not.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t trust the current crop of DLT tech more than the pen and paper method, but at least it’s more transparent than a centralized system

There are lots of knee-jerk reactions because people saw the word “blockchain” in the title. It’s as intellectually lazy as the shills who refuse to criticize the crypto industry for its shady parts

This just sounds like a decentralized Slack, with a blockchain to ensure all nodes have the same data. The details are sparse, but this sounds like a proof of authority system to achieve consensus between authorized nodes in the network. No cryptocurrency involved. It’s just using blockchain as a consensus algorithm between decentralized nodes(which is what it was designed for).

It doesn’t say, but since their target demo seems to be enterprises, my guess is that the idea would be companies run their own node in the network, which would allow a high degree of security and be interoperable with other enterprises.

“But you could use a federated system…”

I’m all for the growth of the fediverse, but it still has many problems. If you’re running a large enterprise that needs a guarantee that all your messages are synced, in the right order, and nothing has been removed later, a proof-of-authority blockchain is a better system than something federated

A well financed actor would find it much easier to hack a centralized database than to hack a modern blockchain

Someone gains access to your private key and you just… don’t own your house anymore?

Under the current system you don’t even have a private key. In some countries it’s fairly common for someone to lose their home because someone bribed the official to change the title records.

I think that key management is blockchain’s Achilles Heel, but there are some interesting potential solutions

Yeah this article is not very convincing

Brave is great! No ads, Tor built in, and can install Chrome extensions. I don’t use their crypto wallet and it’s never bothered me