And the dog brought every camera. He even set them up; installed them and connected them to his internet-connection that he pays for. The dog payed for all of it. The dog did all this because he wanted… well, because the ads told him he wanted to.

I wouldn’t blame fiat at all. It’s an issue of governance, classes and growing poverty. Capital has been shrinking labour’s share, year on year. Your inability to afford a nominal price has nothing to do with fiat. The capitalist class have just grown more brazen and they’ve realised no one will say “no”.

https://fortune.com/2026/01/13/us-workers-smallest-labor-share-gdp-on-record/

If you want to quip about AI being mentioned in the above article do note that labour’s share of GDP had been on the decline before ‘AI’ was a twinkle in your father’s eye. It’s been a set trend, with politician’s endlessly arguing with the working class: you’ll get your share soon™, but not now. It never came and it never will. The political promises are the same, but they increasingly sound ever hollower.

It’s just more capitalists doing what capitalists do.

I’d argue it’s the government’s fault. In the computer-age government’s failed to educate their populations on what and how to use computers. They instead taught their students how to use X, Y and Z software. Ignorance here is the root of the problem. A symptom of ignorance could be stupidity I suppose… but users are lazy too. Governments also failed to regulate the nascent software-industries whilst pouring billions into that market. It’s too harsh to just criticize the individual.

Computers are machines for war; if your computers aren’t liberated they’re working for someone else. You pay for the hardware. You pay for the software. You pay for the electricity. You pay for the data-connection. You create content/data. They take it all. They keep the profits. They don’t even pay nominally for the labour.

Shoshana Zuboff will claim it’s surveillance-capitalism. I claim she’s a reactionary reacting to a new domain of exploitation under capitalism that the intelligentsia were previously protected from. It’s not new; it does not need a clunky prefix: it’s still just capitalism. Only now this particular type of exploitation can be done invisibly, silently and on an industrial scale that spans the globe.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et al kills. If you use these technology companies you contribute to sophisticated targeting-software used by militaries to kill. You’re not a goofy innocent, just wanting to post ‘selfies’ to Facebook on a Google-Android mobile-computer. You’re willfully ignorant at this point.

Putting aside ideals of privacy: economically you’re being exploited with no nominal compensation at all. You’ve been trained to grovel and you wonder why tech-bros have a god-complex as you use their software obeying them absolutely.

You’re either free or a slave. Maybe drone is more apt: computer says go here; computer says take photo; computer says input real-name of person photographed; computer says buy this; computer says don’t think–just accept–just agree–obey! The computer will set you free!

Addendum: the frustrating thing is this is a matter of consent. It can be halted entirely, but it requires users to make a choice: reject proprietary software. Think about what the software is actually doing with those CPU cycles you pay for. Stop donating data, capital and other resources to these surveillance networks.

Good to have you back in the corpo., kid. Stay blind as we shunt you into a new era of authoritarianism. You’re absolutely right. Freedom is inconsequential compared to framedrops. Framedrops should never happen. Linux is far too buggy to be used. It’s little more than a toy at this stage. Check back in ten years. Until then your trusty Windoz3 eleben with enhancements from Givbidia will distract you! No, don’t look there! Ad!

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He blew the whistle because the surveillance apparatus was surveilling Americans; everyone else was fair game. The complete rejection he suffered from the Americans might’ve morphed into “mass surveillance is generically bad”, which now catches non-Americans too, but he’s an American dog who got a fright when he saw the reality outside propaganda reels. The system continues unabated. ACAB.

The state of Isreal is committing genocide and is scared of retaliation.

Most of the world is capitalist and poor.

Sports coverage is not news; there’s always a sports segment in every ‘news’ program. Entertainment masquerading as news. Kill Rupert Murdoch and his progeny.

Yes; complete it. Only partial-revolutions are illegal.

Kill all those who hold obscene wealth whilst depriving their sisters and brothers their human rights. Vanquish the landlords, the economic speculators & the remote-owners who make profit in leisure. You should not even miss them for you do not even know who they are.

The vast majority will never see those they labour for or those they support through legalised exploitation in the paying of rents. This anonymity and remoteness of the owning class allows them to be cruel and vicious in their actions. It’s also a one way mirror: for the working class must be surveilled in ever more obscene detail. Through technical innovation you will be deprived another fundamental human right! The right to privacy. Every moment of your life becomes their data.

For the working class there is no loss. Until we are all free there is work to be done. Those that shirk that responsibility can be thrown to the wayside.

If your murder a CEO the state will provide you with free housing & food. Something to think about…

It appears that China is offering a bold future, whilst Western democracies are decaying and squabbling amongst themselves; their political class espousing nothing but the projected degradation of living conditions for the masses. Social spending cut back! No money for that. Wages declining! Too burdensome on business. Collapsing population demographics! Import foreign labour from previously ravished and plundered colonies.

Housing crisis! What housing crisis? I have fifty properties! Cost of living crisis! Shut up! More of the same! More of the same! Continue doing the same thing! Plunder! Exploit! Profit! War!

Even if you want to spin it all as ambitious rhetoric then China is the only ambitious nation. It has no peers. The future is truly China’s to take.

The future is built in China.

I’m also in favor of hardware passkeys & 2FA. They help alleviate vendor-lock in and are more secure.

Usually only YubiKey is mentioned. I do prefer NitroKey’s aims of transparency. If other users know of other vendors please list them.

From what you’ve written you’ve conflated separate things. Passkeys are not related to biometrics. Google wants your biometrics. Full stop. Google is a surveillance mega-corp. Full stop. Why are you still using Google? or Microsoft, which you clearly are uncomfortable with? That’s rhetorical. Don’t answer that. No one’s interested in your pissing and moaning for why you can’t leave this abusive relationship. Passkeys say nothing about biometrics. They’re unrelated.

The surveillance corps implementation of passkeys will always be in their interest. Hardware passkeys are superior to device-locked passkeys that are stored in a TPM. Such schemes are nothing but vendor-lock ins. Oh, I don’t want to buy a new phone; all my logins are stored on this phone. It’s too much hassle. I can’t leave Google’s Android, it contains all my credentials securely. Hardware passkeys have no such friction. I can use them on any hardware.

The surveillance corps software-implementation is dodgy too. They’ve opted not to use some of the spec, which objectively weakens security. They’ll claim it’s for user-ease and whatever else they want to spout. The ease of silently using passkeys to access data they shouldn’t, or to migrate the users passkeys to their new Google android phone–only Google android can migrate you to a new Google android device. You need Google android. Hit me harder daddy.

I mean, really, what are you trying to ask? You clearly don’t trust these surveillance-companies. Passkeys are a good. Just like cryptography is just maths. There’s no issue with the maths or passkeys. The issue lies in these mega-surveillance-corps that parasitically extract value from your computers–whether that’s a desktop, laptop, server, smartphone or some other mobile-computer. You pay for the hardware, electricity, data-connection and you labour on them and these corps take everything from you. That’s why Alphabet, Facebook and whatever other shit software-company has valuations in the billions or trillions.

Security is something they want. They want to be the sole holder of your information. They want a market monopoly. Strong cryptography helps them do that. Much like how a serial rapist and the police both like steel bars: one to keep their victims locked up in, the other to keep their victims locked up in too… huh… point is everyone likes strong cryptography.

Is no one going to point out the irony? of asking complete strangers, via the internet, for personal advice? The chatbot is completely divorced from reality, but internet-strangers are completely divorced from your reality too. They don’t know anything about you or your partner, except for that which you disclose and who lies on the internet?

Plot twist: the internet strangers are chatbots.

I’m not clicking the links, but writing to a well-known publisher isn’t different: one’s asking remote strangers to comment on a local issue. They’re completely blind to the reality on the ground. All three scenarios are probably a product of an increasing social-isolation, of which technology might be to blame… (or capitalism, cough, cough)

Everyone has their heads bowed, staring at their phones. I’ve seen joggers with their head up, looking straight ahead: at their phone. A critique of remoteness and technology’s ability to fool the human-psyche into believing a remote thing is actually a local thing would not be amiss.

I would like to direct the reader to Yacy. It’s a free-software, self-hosted search-engine. Users have the option to peer with other users, creating a larger decentralised search engine.

Build it. Use it. Promote it. Finance it. Bupf it, for short. Build the future you want or piss and moan endlessly.

That’s romanticizing history. When communication via post became economically feasible for a large number of citizens its surveillance began–in the 19th century. I’ll make a more contentious point: religion played the role of what modern-states now call domestic intelligence. The state’s desire to control (that’s what surveillance is about) has always been there. It’s an intrinsic aspect of a state. Technology only allows what would have been economically unfeasible to now enter the realm of feasibility.

What one should take away from this article is that: Signal is a central point that can be compromised silently; Signal has the power to revoke your access to its software at any time (leaving the Canadian ‘market’). Both point to Signal’s users being rubes. They are not in control of the software and are subjugated by a private dictatorship branded ‘Signal’. Users should not be concerned about the government’s will here (it’s the same; it has not changed). Users should be concerned that the private dictatorship–that they paradoxically hold dear–is a private dictatorship.

Signal users yearn to be subjugated and told sweet lies.

Ah yes, the classic: I want privacy, but I actually don’t, because it’s too inconvenient. There’s technical reasons why any network that prioritizes privacy will be slower than those that don’t. i2p has a technically superior model to tor’s onion network. It’s good software.