It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…)
I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the headman’s axe of the game theory and brinksmanship of everyone else.
While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
> Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.
>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.
This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.
Ive noticed that when people say we need more education or we need to teach critical thinking or something like that often what they really mean is
"It is obvious my position is the intelligent one and those who have a different position are ignorant and foolish and if they just knew more, or were smarter they'd obviously really then superiority of what I advocate for over whatever they believe now."
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
I'm not gonna make any point about actual politics, but It's a fact that political beliefs heavily correlate with education so there's at least some truth in his point
Canada is so lucky to have someone like Michael Geist. He's been reporting on and doing in depth investigations on privacy invasions for about 2 decades now.
>As of May 2026, the following 76 participants have signed the treaty: Algeria, Angola, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Columbia, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Czechia, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, European Union, Fiji, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Ireland, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Sweden, Thailand, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.
Some wonderful countries here: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China. Thankfully the US hasn't signed it and probably won't because it thinks itself too above international law.
>The State of Qatar does not consider itself bound by the provisions of Articles (16), (15), and (14) of the Convention, as they contradict the provisions of Islamic Sharia, national legislation, and the social and cultural values of the State of Qatar.
These provisions [being](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/co...) Article 14: Offences related to online child sexual abuse or child sexual exploitation material, Article 15: Solicitation or grooming for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child, Article 16: Non-consensual dissemination of intimate images.
I am trying to figure out what this means, as I am aware the Prophet married a 9 year old, but Google assures me the minimum age of marriage in Qatar is 16 with parental approval, and it's rare, and I thought Islam required no images of really anything at all, much less females of any age who are to be in burqas when in public.
About "cybercrime" in general my feeling is there is a status quo between the criminals and countries. Something like we do not take down your economy and you do not go after us.
I know for a fact that even the most powerful organizations are powerless to have some relatively unsophisticated group caught and put behind bar.
The idea we would need conventions to start acting is a joke.
At this point what does Canada really have to offer? It's GDP barely exceeds the poorest state in America. Anybody who is decent or talented have left it for America. It has a 3~4x more importation of demographic from third world countries without the economy and public funds to support them all without raising taxes on middle class Canadians already tapped out from previous wave of real estate speculation. It's trying to latch on to a crumbling bureaucracy across the ocean with its own wave of illegal migration/problematic demographics while facing an adversary determined to reclaim its own lands and without a united front or America behind it. It's leaders and political party have squandered public funds brazenly ranging from ridiculous ideological to pure corruption. It's pissed off it's largest trading partner literally across the border.
What's left for Canada, I'm curious to hear from Canadians.
This post is inaccurate at its face but for those who are curious, Canada's GDP is in the low trillions of USD and its growth stagnated (but remained positive) the past several months.
By contrast, several US states like Vermont and Alaska have GDP in the double digit billions, while others like South Dakota and Nebraska shrunk.
Have you ever actually been to Canada? It's quite nice, pretty clean and safe, feels fairly functional, people are totally different to Americans (in a very good way).
Hard to judge based on short trips/holidays and not living there but my immediate impression coming from south east England was how pleasant everyone was and that everyone seemed pretty happy instead of being depressed, so that was nice
I'm not sure whether your "adversary determined to reclaim its own lands" is Europe's adversary (Russia, wanting to take Ukraine) or Canada's adversary (the United States, wanting to take Canada) but in neither case does "its own lands" seem like a reasonable description of what it is they want.
And from where I'm sitting (in the UK, so I don't have a front-seat view of any of this) it seems as if "it's pissed off its largest trading partner" is pretty inaccurate too: isn't it much more the case (1) that the US picked pretty much all the fights here and (2) that it's largely Donald Trump who's pissed off with Canada, and most US individuals and institutions think Canada is perfectly OK? Mr Trump isn't dictator of the United States yet, and pissing him off is not the same thing as pissing off the US.
When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them?
For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks.
With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Thomas Massie introduced the best privacy bill I have seen. I know nothing about political strategy but i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor. Will it even get voted on if the house speaker doesn't want it?
It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Perhaps something like a mandatory "Do not track" option for all data supported services, where you can "buyout" your data (at market rate) to prevent it from being sold.
>It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
Okay, but what's so bad about getting something positive done? It doesn't have to be comprehensive to apply to data brokers to be an improvement. That would bring in the data broker lobby and big tech. This bill would cement protections for Americans from their government.
>It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Does it ban data brokers and selling data? From the website it seems to be focused on government privacy invasions. Its not a GDPR although we need that too (hopefully a better version).
The same way we dont want smart people on juries, smart people in government is haram. especially people with technical educations who care about privacy. very haram!
Objectively, the left has this very strong ideology of “education will fix everything, and until then we know what’s best for the masses”
This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree.
Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s best” isn’t the answer, doge wasn’t the answer, starting random wars isn’t the answer.
Maybe by process of elimination we can find the answers. I am
Hopeful that if the left gets a foothold again in the coming midterms they do not repeat their past mistakes.
Hopeful != optimistic. Lot of angry people out for blood.
The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance.
An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.
I think it's because there hasn't been a widespread reckoning moment for the privacy apathetic yet.
For the average person, 20 years of data profiles and tracking has given them tons of services that they have never paid a penny for. Something totally non-existent 30 years ago when you needed to pay money for everything.
So to them, they are getting free services, and the worst that has come of it is seeing the same Dawn ad four times a day.
The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc.
When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.
Some left libertarian positions support collective action to dismantle hierarchical power systems. It’s just difficult (impossible?) to maintain this sort of group orientation at scale; it inevitably devolves into factional power seeking/domination politics.
You're referring to various strains of anarcho-libertarianism, correct? I'm more familiar with geolibertarianism as a left-leaning libertarian faction, which doesn't have these stability problems, but does have a huge initial-conditions problem (it's nearly impossible to institute a land value tax in a society that doesn't already have one because of the effect it has on land prices, which are a primary storage form of wealth).
And yet the company can afford to spend an extra $0.10 per sale on marketing, which quickly drives the free option to the fringes because marketing drives almost all purchasing decisions.
Sad but true. Many libertarian options are comfortable being on the fringes, though, and just build for other libertarians. They lack economies of scale, but software's natural economies of scale (zero cost of reproduction, combined with diminishing returns to complexity) can often make this economical anyway as long as your audience doesn't mind not having the absolute highest level of UX polish possible.
As a Canadian user of HN it's really frustrating to see a rare post about a Canadian subject be immediately dominated by a thread about American politics.
Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.
What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?
One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed.
Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?)
I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible legislation?
It’s a multiparty system that was recently in a minority configuration but through a fairly interesting series of floor crossings and by elections to fill open seats the Liberal party under PM Mark Carney has obtained a majority which more or less allows them complete dominance over the legislative process.
An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the overarching reason comes down to the demographic distribution of Canada and dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence in such a densely populated part of the country.
As for the subject at hand, I wish it would be so easy as to just call an elected official, but as I said above, with the Liberal control of parliament for the remainder of their term and their high support in the polls there’s nothing that will
Make them backtrack.
And this speaks to what Waterluvian mentioned in another thread. Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
Our prime minister pretty much has full and complete control of the legislative and executive branches and even the appointment of judges. If you vote against your party then you can be kicked out. The whip is pretty absolute.
>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence
So the social democrats won't play nice with the social democrats who want to secede, to grossly oversimplify? :-)
Here in the states (and sorry to do the thing parent was complaining about), I've seen the same people who used to vilify Ralph Nader for splitting the vote melt down they're getting primaried by "extremists" -- the generation that brought us South Park and the Iraq War has grown up to be fragile as fuck.
> Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
Too often we refuse to listen to victims and pretend there is a technical issue preventing the prosecution of serious violations of the non aggression principle.
>With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)
I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.
The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)
> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley
They're fake libertarians, actually better described as crypto-authoritarians. So called "right" libertarianism is fertile ground for this, as it's based on an axiomatic/reductionist framing of rights whereby when someone violates a precondition, their rights then become irrelevant. So the philosophy is supremely attractive to authoritarians who go down its rabbit hole - finding a whole bunch of reasons to reject appeals to other people's rights while convincing themselves they are advocating freedom.
Whereas in reality, the "freedom" they believe in is merely the freedom for themselves to oppress others - witness how these billionaires have chiefly made their money with centralized proprietary web apps/services based around removing choice away from users (at the edge) in favor of "take it or leave it" top-down monolithic offerings, slowly made worse over time (ie enshittification) to extract value after sticky network effects have been achieved.
There are of course exceptions - some use their wealth to attempt to pivot to making libre software. And I'm sure there are many more who become disillusioned with the "freedom" they thought they were making, and merely check out. But as the general rule this is why you don't see much actual support for freedom from the rich Surveillance Valley types.
The only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context.
And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for.
In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that person is. Not hearsay, not postulated, but validated "who this is". So you need to lock down anonymous access to the internet, in order to ensure you can easily and always prosecute such crimes.
And one of the issues right now, is that if someone in the UK does "bad thing" in Canada via the internet? It's doubly hard to track. So creating frameworks which will (on the backend) require some form of identity verification to work effectively, well... that tracks from where I sit and have seen in the last 2 years.
Frankly, from a government's perspective, this is no different than all the changes with KYC, for example 50 years ago the Government of Canada knew pretty much nothing about its citizenry. Certainly, it had no clue about bank account balances, transactions, investment holdings, a person's wealth and more. Now it knows enormous amounts of data, perhaps an arbitrary example is that your RRSP and TFSA(like American 501k) information, balances, and more are now yearly sent to the GoC. I believe also all information on trades made are, too, even in non-registered accounts. This absolutely wasn't the case, not to this degree, even a decade or two ago.
Some of these obligations are via ratified international treaties. The degree of surveillance, fiscally, is astonishing now. Americans know of this of course, after 9/11 they gave their government enormous data, and keep giving it, eg credit card transactions.
I remember when I was young, my parents arguing about having to get SIN cards (social insurance number). While it as introduced in the 60s, something happened which made it more of a requirement. Its only purpose at the time was for Revenue Canada to track info. Everyone argued about it, discussed it, was upset! It was the first time people needed "a number" to open certain bank accounts.
Yet we come from that, to this in really one generation's lifetime.
One of the problems is that, there is a massive, immense, enormous problem here right now, in terms of bots/foreign actors/asshats spreading immense disinformation for profit or state actor based goals. And with LLMs, it's going to get so much worse. People on HN at least are capable of some filtering, but the average Joe just sees video and 100% believes it is factual and true.
I wish I could see another path to locking out the asshattery, whilst keeping the internet anonymous. But I don't really. And unless a grass roots movement comes around, to ensure that every crime on the internet has a very high degree of success for prosecution? Then we'll be getting an identity managed internet.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "We can force companies to filter!", well, can you? For every forum out there? For torrents? For everything? And even if you think the "big boys" can be the main filter points, well, do you want a private company to decide what you post or not? And they'll need some way to ensure people don't just create a new account when banned! So they'll want ID too, if they're legislated to filter.
And if they're legislated to filter, can you fight decisions in court? Do you have the presumption on innocence? Do you have the right to face your accusers? A jury of your peers? With Google, Facebook, anyone these days, you get banned and it's nigh impossible to even find out why.
While there are exceptions, our governments are required to have criminal courts, and things prosecuted there.
I really don't want private, fiscally motivated companies to be the gatekeepers, if gatekeepers there must be.
this is insightful.. From a behavioral psychology point of view, there is an assumption among many law and order adherents that "we just need more control-info-courts-punishment" and we will have this done. However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.
Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.
It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…)
I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the headman’s axe of the game theory and brinksmanship of everyone else.
While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
> Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.
>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.
The more I learn, and the more versed I become with society, the harder and harder it becomes to see what is "good" and what is "bad".
The most confident I ever was that I was "obviously correct" was when I was 20.
This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.
>I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
Entropy. Things will dissolve enough that eventually someone will make changes. It takes a long time though, this is likely a feature.
Ive noticed that when people say we need more education or we need to teach critical thinking or something like that often what they really mean is "It is obvious my position is the intelligent one and those who have a different position are ignorant and foolish and if they just knew more, or were smarter they'd obviously really then superiority of what I advocate for over whatever they believe now."
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
I'm not gonna make any point about actual politics, but It's a fact that political beliefs heavily correlate with education so there's at least some truth in his point
Isn’t it very ironic to post this under a pseudonym?
Which by definition contains some signalling that deviates from WYSIWYG.
Is GP running for political office here on HN or something?
Otherwise I can't really see your point.
Well, without a public identity we cannot know, they could be running for their local elections
Canada is so lucky to have someone like Michael Geist. He's been reporting on and doing in depth investigations on privacy invasions for about 2 decades now.
Democracies want data from their slaves, I mean, ... citizens.
>As of May 2026, the following 76 participants have signed the treaty: Algeria, Angola, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Columbia, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Czechia, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, European Union, Fiji, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Ireland, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Sweden, Thailand, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.
Some wonderful countries here: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China. Thankfully the US hasn't signed it and probably won't because it thinks itself too above international law.
Interestingly, Qatar signed it with [the reservation](https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...) that
>The State of Qatar does not consider itself bound by the provisions of Articles (16), (15), and (14) of the Convention, as they contradict the provisions of Islamic Sharia, national legislation, and the social and cultural values of the State of Qatar.
These provisions [being](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/co...) Article 14: Offences related to online child sexual abuse or child sexual exploitation material, Article 15: Solicitation or grooming for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child, Article 16: Non-consensual dissemination of intimate images.
I am trying to figure out what this means, as I am aware the Prophet married a 9 year old, but Google assures me the minimum age of marriage in Qatar is 16 with parental approval, and it's rare, and I thought Islam required no images of really anything at all, much less females of any age who are to be in burqas when in public.
So has Australia, the EU, and the UK [0].
That said, being a signatory has limited impact as long as it isn't ratified.
[0] - https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...
Yeah, but normally when you sign something its because you intend to ratify it in short order.
Not true. Plenty of UN treaties have been signed but stalled on ratification.
> the EU, and the UK
The EU has their own cybercrime treaty: https://commission.europa.eu/law/cross-border-cases/judicial...
But you'll never hear a peep from "no logs at all costs" VPN companies based in the EU.
> But you'll never hear a peep from "no logs at all costs" VPN companies based in the EU
It’s actually a fairly common topic discussed by privacy advocates, including VPN companies
E-Evidence sharing is just a subset of the broader UN Cybercrime treaty which has been signed.
About "cybercrime" in general my feeling is there is a status quo between the criminals and countries. Something like we do not take down your economy and you do not go after us.
I know for a fact that even the most powerful organizations are powerless to have some relatively unsophisticated group caught and put behind bar.
The idea we would need conventions to start acting is a joke.
[delayed]
Wrong. The government cares.
At this point what does Canada really have to offer? It's GDP barely exceeds the poorest state in America. Anybody who is decent or talented have left it for America. It has a 3~4x more importation of demographic from third world countries without the economy and public funds to support them all without raising taxes on middle class Canadians already tapped out from previous wave of real estate speculation. It's trying to latch on to a crumbling bureaucracy across the ocean with its own wave of illegal migration/problematic demographics while facing an adversary determined to reclaim its own lands and without a united front or America behind it. It's leaders and political party have squandered public funds brazenly ranging from ridiculous ideological to pure corruption. It's pissed off it's largest trading partner literally across the border.
What's left for Canada, I'm curious to hear from Canadians.
This post is inaccurate at its face but for those who are curious, Canada's GDP is in the low trillions of USD and its growth stagnated (but remained positive) the past several months.
By contrast, several US states like Vermont and Alaska have GDP in the double digit billions, while others like South Dakota and Nebraska shrunk.
Have you ever actually been to Canada? It's quite nice, pretty clean and safe, feels fairly functional, people are totally different to Americans (in a very good way).
Hard to judge based on short trips/holidays and not living there but my immediate impression coming from south east England was how pleasant everyone was and that everyone seemed pretty happy instead of being depressed, so that was nice
You can keep a house really warm and cozy while burning furniture
I'm not sure whether your "adversary determined to reclaim its own lands" is Europe's adversary (Russia, wanting to take Ukraine) or Canada's adversary (the United States, wanting to take Canada) but in neither case does "its own lands" seem like a reasonable description of what it is they want.
And from where I'm sitting (in the UK, so I don't have a front-seat view of any of this) it seems as if "it's pissed off its largest trading partner" is pretty inaccurate too: isn't it much more the case (1) that the US picked pretty much all the fights here and (2) that it's largely Donald Trump who's pissed off with Canada, and most US individuals and institutions think Canada is perfectly OK? Mr Trump isn't dictator of the United States yet, and pissing him off is not the same thing as pissing off the US.
Canada's GDP per capita is low, not its GDP.
The GDP per capita is just low compared to the US. It's roughly the same as the UK.
And I do think there are some ridiculous inter-provincial bureaucracy issues in Canada, it's hard to take OP's generalized rant seriously.
When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them?
For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks.
With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Thomas Massie introduced the best privacy bill I have seen. I know nothing about political strategy but i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor. Will it even get voted on if the house speaker doesn't want it?
https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/
>Warrant required Government must go before a judge to access your metadata, location, or financial records — just like searching your home.
>No Data Shopping Agencies can no longer simply purchase data from brokers to bypass the warrant process.
>Face recognition banned Warrantless facial recognition and AI biometric surveillance in public spaces is prohibited.
>You Can Sue Private right of action means if the government violates your rights, you have legal recourse.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8470...
It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Perhaps something like a mandatory "Do not track" option for all data supported services, where you can "buyout" your data (at market rate) to prevent it from being sold.
>It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
Okay, but what's so bad about getting something positive done? It doesn't have to be comprehensive to apply to data brokers to be an improvement. That would bring in the data broker lobby and big tech. This bill would cement protections for Americans from their government.
>It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Does it ban data brokers and selling data? From the website it seems to be focused on government privacy invasions. Its not a GDPR although we need that too (hopefully a better version).
>i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor
Why? Where is any equivalent measures coming from the US left?
It is because that’s how people identify as Democrats want them to behave? There seems to be a rift there.
Massie and Wyden are both anomalies in their respective parties. There’s not really any “privacy caucus” at a national level right now, to my dismay.
There were more people willing to stand up for privacy after 9/11 during the “with us or against us” GWOT, which really says something.
And Massie was kicked out after the most money was spent in any house primary and Trump heavily campaigned for the puppet candidate.
It's a super Trump-loving district with mostly elderly turnout, kind of crazy they had Massie for so long, him being a good guy and smart and all.
The same way we dont want smart people on juries, smart people in government is haram. especially people with technical educations who care about privacy. very haram!
Because Congress doesn't work if an issue becomes partisan.
Objectively, the left has this very strong ideology of “education will fix everything, and until then we know what’s best for the masses”
This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree.
Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s best” isn’t the answer, doge wasn’t the answer, starting random wars isn’t the answer.
Maybe by process of elimination we can find the answers. I am Hopeful that if the left gets a foothold again in the coming midterms they do not repeat their past mistakes.
Hopeful != optimistic. Lot of angry people out for blood.
Nah, gonna be populist idiots from the other side.
The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance.
An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.
I think it's because there hasn't been a widespread reckoning moment for the privacy apathetic yet.
For the average person, 20 years of data profiles and tracking has given them tons of services that they have never paid a penny for. Something totally non-existent 30 years ago when you needed to pay money for everything.
So to them, they are getting free services, and the worst that has come of it is seeing the same Dawn ad four times a day.
The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc.
When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.
Some left libertarian positions support collective action to dismantle hierarchical power systems. It’s just difficult (impossible?) to maintain this sort of group orientation at scale; it inevitably devolves into factional power seeking/domination politics.
You're referring to various strains of anarcho-libertarianism, correct? I'm more familiar with geolibertarianism as a left-leaning libertarian faction, which doesn't have these stability problems, but does have a huge initial-conditions problem (it's nearly impossible to institute a land value tax in a society that doesn't already have one because of the effect it has on land prices, which are a primary storage form of wealth).
And yet the company can afford to spend an extra $0.10 per sale on marketing, which quickly drives the free option to the fringes because marketing drives almost all purchasing decisions.
Sad but true. Many libertarian options are comfortable being on the fringes, though, and just build for other libertarians. They lack economies of scale, but software's natural economies of scale (zero cost of reproduction, combined with diminishing returns to complexity) can often make this economical anyway as long as your audience doesn't mind not having the absolute highest level of UX polish possible.
As a Canadian user of HN it's really frustrating to see a rare post about a Canadian subject be immediately dominated by a thread about American politics.
Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.
What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?
Do you have any thoughts on the bill?
One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed.
Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?)
I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible legislation?
>given you have a multiparty system [... why you struggle so hard to...
Multiparty yes, but also first-past-the-post, which favours 2 dominant parties.
Aha, thanks for this.
It’s a multiparty system that was recently in a minority configuration but through a fairly interesting series of floor crossings and by elections to fill open seats the Liberal party under PM Mark Carney has obtained a majority which more or less allows them complete dominance over the legislative process.
An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the overarching reason comes down to the demographic distribution of Canada and dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence in such a densely populated part of the country.
As for the subject at hand, I wish it would be so easy as to just call an elected official, but as I said above, with the Liberal control of parliament for the remainder of their term and their high support in the polls there’s nothing that will Make them backtrack.
And this speaks to what Waterluvian mentioned in another thread. Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
For the Americans and others:
Our prime minister pretty much has full and complete control of the legislative and executive branches and even the appointment of judges. If you vote against your party then you can be kicked out. The whip is pretty absolute.
>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence
So the social democrats won't play nice with the social democrats who want to secede, to grossly oversimplify? :-)
Here in the states (and sorry to do the thing parent was complaining about), I've seen the same people who used to vilify Ralph Nader for splitting the vote melt down they're getting primaried by "extremists" -- the generation that brought us South Park and the Iraq War has grown up to be fragile as fuck.
> Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
Too often we refuse to listen to victims and pretend there is a technical issue preventing the prosecution of serious violations of the non aggression principle.
>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec
It's "Bloc". The NDP did well in Québec not long ago, when they had a candidate that the electorate liked.
> … why can't we make that happen?
Greed. More money to provide the tools of oppression via government contracts.
Because libertarians generally want fewer laws, not more.
And there are far too few of them elected to have any real impact.
that doesn't mean they don't want some of the 'right laws'. otherwise they would be anarchists and communists not libertarians.
>With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)
I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.
The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)
Because they're not libertarians. They're greedy narcissists who what to do whatever they want to anybody and just say that it's libertarian.
> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley
They're fake libertarians, actually better described as crypto-authoritarians. So called "right" libertarianism is fertile ground for this, as it's based on an axiomatic/reductionist framing of rights whereby when someone violates a precondition, their rights then become irrelevant. So the philosophy is supremely attractive to authoritarians who go down its rabbit hole - finding a whole bunch of reasons to reject appeals to other people's rights while convincing themselves they are advocating freedom.
Whereas in reality, the "freedom" they believe in is merely the freedom for themselves to oppress others - witness how these billionaires have chiefly made their money with centralized proprietary web apps/services based around removing choice away from users (at the edge) in favor of "take it or leave it" top-down monolithic offerings, slowly made worse over time (ie enshittification) to extract value after sticky network effects have been achieved.
There are of course exceptions - some use their wealth to attempt to pivot to making libre software. And I'm sure there are many more who become disillusioned with the "freedom" they thought they were making, and merely check out. But as the general rule this is why you don't see much actual support for freedom from the rich Surveillance Valley types.
> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley
Those are pro-surveillance, pro-repair-prevention, pro-fascism.
Libertarianism is about your freedom to restrict others, if you are rich and powerful.
Whereas traditional Democrats and Republicans are all protecting privacy?
Thomas Massie is a wealthy libertarian and introduced a bill to protect privacy.
Freedom to put whatever you want in the EULA.
The only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context.
And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for.
In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that person is. Not hearsay, not postulated, but validated "who this is". So you need to lock down anonymous access to the internet, in order to ensure you can easily and always prosecute such crimes.
And one of the issues right now, is that if someone in the UK does "bad thing" in Canada via the internet? It's doubly hard to track. So creating frameworks which will (on the backend) require some form of identity verification to work effectively, well... that tracks from where I sit and have seen in the last 2 years.
Frankly, from a government's perspective, this is no different than all the changes with KYC, for example 50 years ago the Government of Canada knew pretty much nothing about its citizenry. Certainly, it had no clue about bank account balances, transactions, investment holdings, a person's wealth and more. Now it knows enormous amounts of data, perhaps an arbitrary example is that your RRSP and TFSA(like American 501k) information, balances, and more are now yearly sent to the GoC. I believe also all information on trades made are, too, even in non-registered accounts. This absolutely wasn't the case, not to this degree, even a decade or two ago.
Some of these obligations are via ratified international treaties. The degree of surveillance, fiscally, is astonishing now. Americans know of this of course, after 9/11 they gave their government enormous data, and keep giving it, eg credit card transactions.
I remember when I was young, my parents arguing about having to get SIN cards (social insurance number). While it as introduced in the 60s, something happened which made it more of a requirement. Its only purpose at the time was for Revenue Canada to track info. Everyone argued about it, discussed it, was upset! It was the first time people needed "a number" to open certain bank accounts.
Yet we come from that, to this in really one generation's lifetime.
One of the problems is that, there is a massive, immense, enormous problem here right now, in terms of bots/foreign actors/asshats spreading immense disinformation for profit or state actor based goals. And with LLMs, it's going to get so much worse. People on HN at least are capable of some filtering, but the average Joe just sees video and 100% believes it is factual and true.
I wish I could see another path to locking out the asshattery, whilst keeping the internet anonymous. But I don't really. And unless a grass roots movement comes around, to ensure that every crime on the internet has a very high degree of success for prosecution? Then we'll be getting an identity managed internet.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "We can force companies to filter!", well, can you? For every forum out there? For torrents? For everything? And even if you think the "big boys" can be the main filter points, well, do you want a private company to decide what you post or not? And they'll need some way to ensure people don't just create a new account when banned! So they'll want ID too, if they're legislated to filter.
And if they're legislated to filter, can you fight decisions in court? Do you have the presumption on innocence? Do you have the right to face your accusers? A jury of your peers? With Google, Facebook, anyone these days, you get banned and it's nigh impossible to even find out why.
While there are exceptions, our governments are required to have criminal courts, and things prosecuted there.
I really don't want private, fiscally motivated companies to be the gatekeepers, if gatekeepers there must be.
Ah well. This is all a very unpleasant path.
this is insightful.. From a behavioral psychology point of view, there is an assumption among many law and order adherents that "we just need more control-info-courts-punishment" and we will have this done. However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.
Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.