Hey friends 👋,
A few months ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers. Thankfully, I still have access to my library because I saw this video by Jared Henderson warning of the change and downloaded all
I go back and forth between these positions. Not jut on IT but on infrastructure as a whole, you can’t just do like you can be independent from society and live in a totally untrustworthy world. There is a strong link between privacy and democracy. Some tools allows us to bypass temporary authoritarian restrictions, but at one point, when goons come to take your servers away, technical solutions are not enough.
Even the most self-hosted decentralized solution bases itself on legal assumption and freedoms defended by laws.
Take the dire situation of smartphones for instance. It is very hard to connect to a 5G network without giving your ID. The few ways that remain are seen as loopholes by authorities and are being plugged quickly. Same could happen for hosting. “Want to open a port on a public IP? ISPs require proof of ID for that” “Want to run an encrypted service there? You need to register your keys with the police for the port to be open”
There is no clean separation between the technical and political side there, privacy can’t hinge on a purely technical solution. I understand that trust is seen as fundamentally less solid that crypto algorithms, but it is unavoidable at a certain level.
I go back and forth between these positions. Not jut on IT but on infrastructure as a whole, you can’t just do like you can be independent from society and live in a totally untrustworthy world. There is a strong link between privacy and democracy. Some tools allows us to bypass temporary authoritarian restrictions, but at one point, when goons come to take your servers away, technical solutions are not enough.
Even the most self-hosted decentralized solution bases itself on legal assumption and freedoms defended by laws.
Take the dire situation of smartphones for instance. It is very hard to connect to a 5G network without giving your ID. The few ways that remain are seen as loopholes by authorities and are being plugged quickly. Same could happen for hosting. “Want to open a port on a public IP? ISPs require proof of ID for that” “Want to run an encrypted service there? You need to register your keys with the police for the port to be open”
There is no clean separation between the technical and political side there, privacy can’t hinge on a purely technical solution. I understand that trust is seen as fundamentally less solid that crypto algorithms, but it is unavoidable at a certain level.