There's a disconnect between critiques of Telegram and its practical use that have made me uneasy about joining technical pile-ons around how it's not really encrypted messaging. Let me use the example of Telegram use in the Hong Kong protests
I arrived in Hong Kong with each hair standing individually on end because everyone was using Telegram, which of course stores every group chat server-side like Moxie says. It took me a while to understand why it was so popular despite this shortcoming
One reason was the ability to have three scales of chat in one app—really enormous (tens of thousands) of groups where you didn't have to share your identity, regular group chat, and one-on-one chats with people
The one-on-one chats were popular because they could be set to an ephemeral mode, so that if a cop caught you and made you unlock your phone, you wouldn't get them in trouble. The huge supergroups were useful for organizing protest events and broadcasting information.
People were trying to avoid getting recognized in the moment, caught in the moment, or having to broadcast their identity to a huge group of strangers (HELLO I AM INTERESTED IN ATTENDING YOUR PROTEST), although this later turned out to be a huge hole in Telegram and caused a fuss
So the tradeoff was a mix of the app being usable and useful, safety in numbers, basic anonymity features in large groups, the ability to have massive supergroups, and disappearing chat. Compare this to Signal, where you saw everyone's phone number and it was buggy as hell
If the Chinese government wanted to come after you individually, you were screwed no matter what app you used. People brought phones to protests and that cell tower data was stored somewhere much easier for the PRC to obtain than even hacking Telegram.
The whole thing left me feeling far more confused about the role of E2E than I had been going in. Even today, if a state actor is seriously interested in you *specifically*, it's game over. Signal can keep your messages triple secret all it wants, but it doesn't really matter
Either your device will be compromised, or the person you are having the triple-secret conversation is a government agent to begin with and even wearing a secret decoder ring on each finger is going to help
So I think the right way to think of Telegram is an "encrypted enough" messenger, and for E2E purists to take a more careful look at why it is so widely used in protests movements, and why people find using "real" encrypted apps like Signal such a pain in the ass
The broader problem of ephemeral or spur of the moment protest activity leaving a permanent data trail that can be forensically analyzed and target individuals many years after the fact is unsolved and poses a serious risk to dissent. But E2E is not the solution to it.
I feel like Moxie and a lot of end-to-end encryption purists fall into the same intellectual tarpit as the cryptocurrency people, which is that it should be possible to design technical systems that require *zero* trust, and that the benefits of these designs are self-evident
But a truly trustless system is inhuman, and you're going to get monstrous results if you try to impose it on human behavior. Homo encrypticus doesn't exist any more than homo economicus. We need to think more deeply about how to make these technologies serve people as they are
The most dangerous thing about social software systems today is that they impose consequences on everyday actions that are unbounded in severity and time. You can be fired today for a social media comment you made as a kid, you can have $100M stolen by plugging in a USB device
Reducing the blast radius of normal human mistakes, dismantling the permanent record part of the surveillance economy, and not forcing people to make irrevocable lifetime decisions every time they use a phone are the only way out of this mess. That's not solvable with software.
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Lurking the r/generator subreddit recently I learned something interesting about the situation in Texas. Quite reasonably a lot of people in the Houston area have decided to get generators installed, since there have been recent major power outages both in summer and winter...
This being Texas, what most people want to run off their generator is a five-ton whole-house air conditioner. This as you can imagine is pretty power hungry, particularly when it first powers on. To avoid storing gas/diesel, a lot of people have opted for a natural gas hookup
Natural gas distribution in Texas is not set up to support hundreds of multi-kilowatt generators running at the same time, let alone firing up at the same time. So what people have collaboratively built in Texas is a system for converting power outages into massive gas outages.
The first time I voted in a US election I was amazed that no proof of citizenship—not even photo ID—was required. From the point of view of an immigrant, you're constantly made to prove your legal residency for stuff—jobs, school, driving—but for some reason not voting.
I don't really get why positive proof of ID isn't a voting requirement, other than the fact that voting law in the US is very old and predates the modern surveillance state. I don't have strong feelings about it, but it's definitely a US oddity, like the lack of national ID
From the point of view of public faith in elections, there does seem to be something rickety about the combination of trust-me voter registration requirements, absentee ballots, and mail-in votes getting counted for weeks after election day.
Cryptocurrency and generative AI make roughly the same size claims to being transformative innovations, so it's interesting to see how many interesting things people have already found to do with the latter, while the first has mostly been an expensive tour through human folly
I like thinking of cryptocurrency as "financial string theory", but for the parallel to really work a lot more physicists would need to be in jail
With both crypto and string theory, you have domain experts in thrall to a mathematical apparatus so intellectually satisfying that they get emotionally invested into bringing it into contact with reality. But instead each failed attempt pushes them further out into la-la-land
Rising from the crypt to talk a little about how pre-wikipedia generations lived. There was a big encyclopedia in the library, but only really rich families would own one. The best that poor kids could hope for was grocery store encyclopedias, bought one volume at a time
Grocery chains really would sell the world's saddest encyclopedia, one slim volume a week, and you felt lucky to have it. Unrestricted access to a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica is the thing that felt most like having access to the world wide web in the pre-www days.
Naturally when the web came along, we all wondered how encyclopedias would work online, and for a brief while it looked like Microsoft would sell expensive access to a kind of crappy one. And then wikipedia appeared and blew everyone's mind by the fact that it worked
Early this year I went online after taking too many drugs and ordered a Mongolian yurt. Here is my yurt, and here is my story:
The great thing about yurts is you can get high, make a deposit, and forget you bought one for seven months. Then in late July I got email giving me an imminent delivery date and demanding to see a photo of the finished substructure. I tried to bluff them with a quick Lowe's run
The yurt company was totally on to me, though. Everyone lies about the substructure. Demands for photo evidence grew insistent, and I found myself having to level heavy things in the desert while getting heatstroke
This whole thread on large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is great, but the real showstopper is that global-warming induced breakdown in this flow will result in significant *cooling* for a large chunk of Eurasia, greatly complicating the politics of climate response.
The existing strategy for mitigating climate change is incoherent because:
1. It demands a total restructuring of societies worldwide 2. Most of this burden would fall on developing nations 3. It ignores imminent tipping points that (by definition) there is no coming back from
But with no politically achievable plan for capping (let alone reducing) global emissions, what will happen is we'll run into one of these tipping points, and if that happens to be AMOC collapse, then suddenly a bunch of G7 economies have much less incentive to decarbonize