Let's say I sent up a key "foo" to get the value "bar", and I did this again and again. Will either "foo" or "bar" be encrypted to the same ciphertext again and again? Or is there some kind of nonce or salt or other mechanism that will make the ciphertext always different? Congrats on launching and thank you for any answer.
I'm adding to your comment and not trying to argue (unless you want to!): There's no distinction between the public and the government. The government is made up by the public. And corporations are usually first in line anyway. Much more "public" in the cake mix right there alone.
It's hard for me to think in terms of rights. I don't know what the word even means. Legal rights? Moral rights? God-given rights? You can say I have a right not to be murdered, but that doesn't matter very much if in fact I just got murdered. All I know is that some people feel they have a "duty" for lack of a better word, to keep all their dealings as private as possible. If I were such a person, this would mean using cash, metals, and cryptocurrencies like Monero as much as possible through decentralized services. It would even mean using things like credit/debit cards to maintain a "good person" public persona. Going grey so to speak.
Really great list. Thank you. Some of these I wasn't even aware of. I've been using Session for about a year. A year ago it definitely had some missed messages and I was about to ditch it but I held strong and haven't experienced that issue in a while. Been flawless for about half a year. The Oxen/Loki network overall https://oxen.io/ is a really interesting alternative to Monero and Tor. It's interesting how it can be both!
One solution to this is to become an oracle at your company. Any time someone (namely someone higher in the company who is responsible for your pay) has a question, no matter how many times it's been asked, how recently it's been asked, how obvious and repeated it is in the documentation, you answer quickly and thoroughly, like a machine. After a year or two of this, you'll be able to ask for any raise, or to work remote, or to even switch to contracting. They won't want to lose you.
For all the bigger companies I've worked with that have infinite war chests and rely heavily on user data and analytics, the question is always why shouldn't a specific metric be tracked, not why should it. Even if they have absolutely no reason to track how fast you're reading, it's safe to say they're tracking it anyway. At a certain point you stop reading privacy policies or listening to what a company says it's doing or not. You even stop looking at code or inspecting network traffic. You simply assume you're being tracked in every technical way it's possible for "them" to do so, and you either accept it or change it.
That's the main reason I refuse to buy DRM'd content. It gives the companies too much control and ability to track whatever I might be doing. I'll gladly pay for good books, but I am not paying Amazon or whatever to fund their data collection megaoperation
Google does some pretty surprising levels of static analysis of compiled source, particularly surrounding their API usage. There's a few examples I've run into but the first that pops to mind is when they started requiring a yes/no confirmation dialog before allowing a user to access a non-https resource through the WebView. There was no way a human was running into that on the particular app I was working on. We're not talking advanced static analysis but it's not a simple decompile and grep either.
In another case I had accidentally left some dead/debug AWS access credentials in a build and they sniffed those out too. Notable since that's not even Google-related. They had to have been looking for a particular AWS library method signature and how it was fed. I would bet on their static analysis getting more advanced, in which case it could also be used to prove that OP is using APIs/permissions in a safe manner. But of course they're not incentivized to do that.
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if their static analysis saw the contacts being fed into a native binary (which they would definitely struggle to analyse) and threw up a red flag. From that point everything is futile because no one you can actually talk to at Google is empowered to disable the flag.
Google is a vast, schizophrenic organization. They're big enough that they have different teams and internal politics fighting each other all the time. It's not a unified consciousness with consistent incentives. Even if that's a bad take, Google is constantly seen in a negative light on Hacker News. The Google hive-mind doesn't care too much.
Incentives not being present and the company being unable to act on those incentives are very different things. Intel is incentivized to beat Apple, AMD chip performance. That they’re failing to deliver right now doesn’t mean the incentives aren’t present or that they don’t care.
Well, yea. Living things and organizations have incentives. The implication I gleaned from your original comment was that Google's incentive to avoid bad press on HN for its App Store policies is enough that it should use its static analysis abilities "for good". We're not debating the existence of incentives. We're debating the existence of consistent/unified motivation/ability/will to satisfy those incentives. Or are we debating? After your second comment I'm not even sure the point you are trying to make.
Besides, I repeat that Google is big enough that different factions have contradictory incentives. There are people in Google that want bad Play Store press on HN. I'll leave that as a thought exercise as to how that could be true.
I'm not sure what kind of importance you ascribe to HN, but from here outside of SF I feel like Google doesn't give a remotest shit about this gathering, and generally has the feelings sensitivity of a triceratops. Moreover, they're actively undermining power-user workflows on Android—so the attitude can in fact be measured as negative, if only by passing chance.
Monero and other less well-known currencies solve all of that. You can say it's bad or useless for other reasons. But my direct experience with dozens of P2P transfers, outside exchanges, both paying people for products and services and being paid myself, is enough for me to know that the future involves private cryptocurrencies one way or another. It may be akin to the taboo nature of torrenting movies at some point, but it's not going anywhere. CBDCs, traditional fiat, crypto, and even precious metals (yea we used to use those too!) will all have their use cases over the next decade. Paying people (and being paid) with precious metals and private crypto feels so amazing, so freeing, I recommend everyone give it a try.
20K transactions per day currently? A single city would have more transactions than that just from people having breakfast in the morning. And these are world-wide stats.
Ah c'mon gimme something better to chew on, this argument is cake to dismantle. (1) You don't use Monero to buy breakfast. It's for large money transfers so at least compare it to bank wires. (2) Very few people know about Monero yet. Credit cards were at 20K transactions per day at some point. If you know how to look at the chart you linked, you can see the TX count growing sustainably over several years. This is healthy growth, not some SV venture-capital juiced unicorn. (3) There will be very few ultimate winners in the crypto game as far as fungible currencies. It's a more honest comparison to include transaction counts of non-fungible cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH that people are unfortunately using as a currency for now. (4) Monero is just one of a few other legitimate private cryptocurrencies, so include those transaction counts too.
Well I could go on laughing at the "nobody cares" take, but you don't care so I'll leave it there. Enjoy your CBDCs in the metaverse.
And why the hell not? It's supposed to be a currency.
> It's for large money transfers so at least compare it to bank wires.
And then what, exchange to USD? That'll bind it to an exchange rate, and create the same problems BTC has. Rather than having direct use as a currency, it's a betting mechanism.
> Very few people know about Monero yet. Credit cards were at 20K transactions per day at some point.
It's been almost a decade. That's an eternity in internet terms. If it only has 20K daily users world-wide then it's failed as a currency. People usually trade with people close to them, and if there's 20K people active in the world then that suggests either a very tight knit community somewhere nobody else cares about, or a bunch of nerds all over the world.
> If you know how to look at the chart you linked, you can see the TX count growing sustainably over several years.
I see it growing way too slowly and oddly. Yeah, there's periods of growth but there's also stalls and falls, and going back and forth. Growth also tends to start from a spike. To me that suggests Monero doesn't have that much traction of its own and in a good measure profits from the failures of other crypto systems.
I'm not sure if that's an accurate analysis on my part or not, but if there actually was interest in what monero provides I'm quite confident it should be growing a lot faster and be a lot more prominent. It's the one crypto that actually wants to be a currency, and yet near nobody seems to be interested in that, preferring to gamble with BTC and ETH.
> It's a more honest comparison to include transaction counts of non-fungible cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH that people are unfortunately using as a currency for now.
Those are heavily congested, so the transaction counts is mostly what the network is capable of, not what people would like to have.
> Enjoy your CBDCs in the metaverse.
My what? If you're talking about the project I work on, we formed specifically around the rejection of cryptocurrency and in general don't care for fiat transactions either.
I would continue easily dismantling your points but you're like a boomer railing against the Internet in the early 90s. It's bad according to your value system so other people shouldn't use it either. You don't understand it or want it or whatever. Which is totally fine. I'm not saying your position is a bad thing. In fact you have my respect. My Dad was like this with the Internet in the early 90's, and still is. He STILL doesn't use the Internet and his construction business is just fine without it. He has my respect. Both he and I ended up being "right". My only advice is to stick to your guns going forward, be like my Dad and NEVER use cryptocurrencies or metal or barter. Only use military-backed currencies and have them tracked and traced as much as possible. In fact don't even use physical cash. For your safety.
As for me, I'll continue to use Monero and precious metals and barter, and use fiat and the coming CBDCs as little as possible. If that's alright with you of course!
It takes all kinds. Though if you don't know what the Metaverse or CBDCs are you got some surprises coming!
Nah, you're barking up the wrong tree entirely. I did have a very passing interest in crypto way back, when BTC wasn't yet at full capacity. I was sure back then the situation couldn't last, because paying $50/transaction was completely ridiculous for any kind of currency. People HAD to rebel against that and at least raise the block limit to alleviate the urgent problem now, even if that wasn't the long term solution.
Oddly, that didn't happen. The big players strenuously resisted any effort to alleviate the network congestion. I was feeling very confused.
It slowly dawned on me that my type of usage was a niche. The main players were interested in speculating on the value, and held huge hoards they intended to optimally sell once. They didn't care if it took 10 hours for the transaction to go through or they had to pay a ridiculous fee, because a $100 fee is effectively nothing when you're making a profit of $millions.
So far nothing has really changed my mind. If what Monero offered was what people wanted, they'd have switched over en masse, and they really didn't.
I dismissed it all very early on but for other reasons. I took one look at the BTC whitepaper way back, saw that every transaction and wallet was completely public, and immediately wrote it off based on that, along with everything to do with the cryptocurrency space, until I found Monero then some other related currencies about 4 years ago.
You have different standards than me as far as what constitutes a "successful" currency. And that's cool! For example you generally can't buy breakfast with the currencies of silver or gold or British Pounds (in America) either. All throughout history there has been different currencies for different situations and crypto is just another one on the pile. I wish salt would make a comeback myself. ;)
I use cryptocurrencies as private replacements for bank wires. If your standard is that you must be able to buy breakfast in a city with it, then I agree with you it is not a currency by that definition and probably never will be.
As for me I get paid for my professional services in crypto and turn around and sometimes pay other people for goods and services without any conversion in between. Sometimes I convert it to precious metal directly. Sometimes I convert it to a fiat currency or another crypto. Sometimes I hold. It's all good!
Thanks for the conversation and good luck with everything you're working on.
Money is the goal of the individual Cogs in the machine. Control is the goal of the machine itself, which uses money to incentivize (power) its Cogs. If you're a Big Tech company you essentially have endless free money to leverage compared to your Cogs. The machine itself doesn't care about money. That free money train is coming to an end though over the next decade. Or at least that's the reality I'm planning for. :)
I disagree, the fewer assumptions means the simplest. I'd argue it's not worth the risk for Apple to hire people to shill for them, when there are so many who do it not just for free, but do it genuinely. Imagine if Apple hires shills, then they spill their guts to the NYTimes, that overall makes Apple look far worse.
We're both making the same number of assumptions. The difference is that yours is in the negative and mine is in the positive. Your example about the risk of someone leaking to the press shows we simply live in completely different realities, thus argument is impossible. Which is fine! In my reality people are leaking to the press all the time about such things and simply being ignored by most who don't want to confront how dark corporate and government PR and marketing has become.
Again, you're assuming they don't have surrogates. This is still an assumption. The miscommunication here is that you think I'm a conspiracy theorist or something, and I think you're naive. But so what? Sure, maybe I'm seeing phantoms where they don't exist. We've clearly had different life experiences though. To me the basic calculus of a multi-trillion dollar company perhaps throwing out a few million bucks a year to pay "surrogates" to influence opinion on popular online forums is not the claim that carries the burden of proof. I'd be absolutely shocked if they weren't doing this. But again, there's no way we can even argue if you think the burden of proof goes in the opposite direction. But at least understand that neither of our claims are "simpler" than the other. My original comment saying "more simpler" was a bit of sarcasm in case that didn't come through.
Yup. My hypothesis is unambiguously verifiable, and I've verified it to my own satisfaction through my personal experiences. Your hypothesis is not unambiguously verifiable, only statistically so (whatever that means). At least it's falsifiable, but there's a deep challenge there because falsification would unveil aspects of our society that most people don't want to know about.
