XPost: alt.comp.freeware   
      
   https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/schism/   
      
   This is only partial excerpts from the great article at the URL above.   
   ===================================================   
   With respect to actual, real security, most of what happened in the   
   past decade should be regarded as a mistake. I think now we realise   
   that division into large social media blocks has fomented insecurity,   
   polarisation and extremism much more than a heterogeneous, hands-off   
   Internet ever would have. It made chatter less legible, and handed an   
   audience to terrorists. It baked vanity and mental insecurity into our   
   youth. Compared to personal websites, open news (nntp) and email,   
   Facebook and Twitter are a societal setback, with far more socially   
   destructive power.   
      
   Security is built on trust an mutuality. One narrative about how the   
   digital world became so insecure focuses on growth. Perhaps a better   
   explanation is simply the breakdown of trust and fragmentation into   
   mutually hostile camps, fuelled by power-seeking greed and vanity. The   
   Internet has provided another canvas on which to paint human division.   
      
   In a nutshell, insecurity has become profitable. What Edward Snowden   
   also called the "Insecurity Industry" can be explained not solely as   
   malice in lieu of incompetence, but that both may exist side by side   
   in a world where it's often more profitable to have something be   
   broken than to fix it.   
      
   What I fear we are now seeing is a fault line between informed,   
   professional computer users with access to knowledge and secure   
   computer software - a breed educated in the 1970s who are slowly dying   
   out - and a separate low-grade "consumer" group for whom digital   
   mastery, security, privacy and autonomy have been completely   
   surrendered.   
      
   The latter have no expectation of security or correctness. They've   
   grown up in a world where the high ideals of computing that my   
   generation held, ideas that launched the Voyager probe to go into deep   
   space using 1970's technology, are gone.   
      
   They will be used as farm animals, as products by companies like   
   Apple, Google and Microsoft. For them, warm feelings, conformance and   
   assurances of safety and correctness, albeit false but comforting, are   
   the only real offering, and there will be apparently "no   
   alternatives".   
      
   These victims are becoming ever-less aware of how their cybersecurity   
   is being taken from them, as data theft, manipulation, lock-in, price   
   fixing, lost opportunity and so on. If security were a currency, we're   
   amidst the greatest invisible transfer of wealth to the powerful in   
   human history.   
      
   Despite some forces in Europe working toward greater interoperability   
   and consumer empowerment, US tech giants are doubling down on   
   locking-in customers, stripping them of rights, privacy, and mobility.   
   Europe itself is also struggling with far-right political   
   undercurrents breeding insane surveillance ideas like "Chat Control".   
      
   The issue at the centre of it all is "security". And as always we must   
   ask:   
      
       "Whose security?"   
      
   Most of what you'll hear in the media is contradictory. By some   
   accounts we are already in a full-blown cyber war. Governments are   
   scrambling desperately to shore up systems, recruit cybersecurity   
   people and announce how Britain will become the "safest place to be   
   online". Yet simultaneously governments and corporations work   
   tirelessly to make computers less secure, because monitoring and   
   selling your data is their goal. Governments shy from prosecuting   
   international cybercriminals who sell them products to spy on   
   journalists and protesters - all while squandering tens of millions on   
   petty state retaliation against whistle-blowers. An unholy Faustian   
   pact is at work that makes a mockery of civil computer security.   
      
   Rational and technical factors have little to do with this now. The   
   "technology industry" hasn't had much to do with computer scientists,   
   engineers, intelligence or technology people in about 20 years. It   
   feeds off our knowledge and advances, but is run entirely by marketing   
   people and political lobbyists.   
      
   Our problem, as experts and proponents in the civilian space, is that   
   nobody cares much about technical realities of security, so long as   
   people keep buying gadgets and posting on social media. "Consumer   
   Tech" is now mostly a make-believe world of wishful thinking and   
   leveraging "users" addiction. "AI" now sells convenience and   
   abdication of agency, creativity, imagination, human relations and   
   responsibility. When grave security gaffes are revealed, they are   
   rebranded as "features" or as "necessary".   
      
   Although there is a cultural backlash brewing, perhaps in part caused   
   by the economic and culture effects of "AI", we've still got an   
   industry that preys on the worst aspects of human greed and laziness.   
   It's backed by trillions of dollars of marketing power to paint   
   loneliness, anxiety and mental illness, not merely as "normal" but as   
   "essential for our modern life". The outcomes are plummeting education   
   and real productivity, depression, broken relationships, derelict   
   high-streets, and a mental health crisis.   
      
   Some ridiculously dangerous ideas like Microsoft Recall, and cloud   
   "AI" services are only going to amplify our problems. Nobody is   
   keeping corporations in check at the level of challenging their   
   reckless engineering and naive ideas.   
      
   Remember that cybersecurity, as practised today in a misaligned world,   
   is not a tide that raises all ships. It is a fixed sum trade in which   
   one party's security is another's insecurity. To give security back to   
   people, we have to take some away from corporations and governments.   
   That's an eternal balance we have forgotten since Aristotle, Rousseau   
   and Hobbes.   
      
   Because of the mushrooming value of data, many laws now lead to more   
   insecurity for ordinary people whilst having almost no impact on money   
   laundering, terrorism or child predators - the Four Horsemen of the   
   Infopocalypse.   
      
      
   Getting off products like Microsoft Windows, now simply an awful piece   
   of spyware, and getting away from services like Google is an important   
   priority for everyone who is conscious about personal information   
   security. Helping other people to assert digital independence is also   
   something you can achieve, because everyone who seeks digital   
   emancipation and security becomes a golden example to others that it's   
   possible! Alternatives, independence and empowerment is possible.   
      
   Habit and thoughtless conformity are much more powerful obstacles to   
   positive change than any amount of opportunity or education.   
   Psychologically, we see that in everything from dieting and quitting   
   smoking, to taking the bike instead of the car.   
      
   It's the little things that get us. Today it's not moustached   
   dictators with columns of tanks that threaten our way of life! Being   
   too lazy to walk to the counter, or too timid to insist on paying cash   
   are the little human weaknesses that add up to giant crushing defeat   
   of free society.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)