Hi, On Thursday, 27 March 2025 13:10:42 CET Peter 'PMc' Much wrote: > Finally got back to this one. Thank You, both of You!
Not to worry, these emails are still as relevant now as they were back then :) > A mixture of both is very much what we already have. In Brussels, > for instance, 90% of the personel are not politicians, but lobbyists. > They are the vast majority, and their job is to make sure that the > government does what big tech wants. > > We must consider that government people, i.e. politicians, are not > engineers. Unlike most of us here, they are just as overwhelmed by the > vast amount of technological innovation as ordinary people nowadays are. > > Then, what makes things worse is: the ordinary people, being overwhelmed > by all the new things, look up to the governments with the expectation > that these should make things "somehow safe" for the people. And the > politicians, having no more clue than the ordinary people, now have to > /pose/ as being competent in order to get elected and stay in power. > > So the only chance they have is to listen to their consultants - and > these consist almost entirely of lobbyists who have their own agenda; > for the simple reason that even if you are competent, there is no way > to get into these circles unless you are backed by a powerful sponsor. Once I attended a lobby in Brussels, organized by the Free Software Foundation Europe. It was held in response to GitHub being acquired by Microsoft. I went there because for me, it's really just a single train ride away (Antwerp to Brussels). Meeting these various European politicians face-to-face was a surreal experience, but also equally fascinating. I didn't like that Microsoft acquired GitHub, and made sure to mention it there as such. I also mentioned that I was operating in the capacity of an individual GitHub user, which they had no issue with. Eventually, the acquisition happened regardless, and Microsoft made some rather interesting choices like adding a snapshot of all GitHub repositories into their Arctic Code Vault. That's when I left GitHub and deployed my own Gitea instance. It's unfortunate, because GitHub is ultimately where all the eyeballs are. But issue trackers aside, I do not intend to return. > The sad thing is: we knew all this before. In the aftermath of > the 1968 student revolts and due to the rising popularity of social > sciences, we had excellent analysis of the inherent problems of > /power/. > Only, nowadays nobody seems to care for these materials anymore. :( > > So, while I am not strictly against regulation, the bottomline question > appears to be: how do we manage to get /unbiased skill/ into the > decision making process? When I sent an e-mail to the EU Commission (if memory serves) about the Chips Act, I was told that my correspondence traversed several of their departments before being added to their internal memos. They also mentioned that I should join their "Expert Group", which presumably would've involved representatives of various chips manufacturers (ASML and TSMC come to mind). I didn't join and consider my email to be somewhat inaccurate in retrospect, but.. oh well. Benefit of hindsight I guess. It worked at the time, so back then it should've been good enough. Either way, I'm glad that such Expert Groups exist. If they can offer advisory to the politicians themselves and bicker among each other to level the playing field, all the better. > Now having a look at Michael's comment: > > On Sat, Feb 01, 2025 at 08:54:32PM +0100, Michael De Roover wrote: > ! Now, to be fair, when actual safety is involved, that's perhaps a case > where ! regulation is justified. > > Certainly. Now, with more and more things moved to the Internet, it > will be not far into the future that safety-critical material ends > up there - probably unnoticed until some accident happens. And after > the accident the outcry for regulations will be imminent. Fascinating. Just the other day, I did experience a denial of service attack, that turned out to be performed by none other than OpenAI. It was against my Gitea server, with OpenAI's crawlers requesting an unreasonable amount of zip and bundle archives from it. Those were generated, (presumably) transferred and saved to disk. This took down my Gitea instance twice so far, in both cases due to storage being depleted. What I find interesting about it, is that until now, I had an overall positive sentiment towards AI. Not entirely glazed from its drawbacks either, mind you, artists in particular have been very vocal about their disdain towards the technology threatening their livelihood. But that seemed like a foreign concept to me, until it literally came to my doorstep now. I won't claim to hate AI at this point, even after this incident. But I do want to take a more proactive approach to keeping them the fuck away from my lawn. The proverbial guard dogs are to be deployed, and they will bite. Going back to your comment, this may well be how accidents and incidents cause different groups of people to act. Direct exposure to a problem is a powerful precedent. > ! It's more or less like that with the radios in mobile > ! devices too. Not sure if that firmware should be proprietary, but allowing > ! everyone to have an SDR in their pockets might not be a great idea > either. > > That's funny, because that is what originally brought me onto this > train of thought: two years ago I got myself a new laptop. And I put > FreeBSD onto it. It's a Fujitsu laptop (and it works fine, btw), and > what came as a surprize; it does /not/ have a radio kill switch. > > Instead, for cost-saving, the radio-kill function was put onto a > certain keyboard-key. So effectively there is no such function, > unless you install the manufacturer's specific device driver (which > certainly does not exist for unix). > > We can see where this leads: FreeBSD provides ready-to-install > OS packages - they even have a funded initiative to simplify > installation on laptops for non-technical people. In the end, the > user may not even know whether the OS has found and powered on the > radio (unless they read the debug logs) - and anyway, they cannot > switch it off. > > Then, if you want to make a case that this is unsafe, it shouldn't be > too difficult. The case of radio kill switches is interesting to me. Unlike smartphone radios and their proprietary drivers (which I don't think will ever be open source, with very few exceptions), radio kill switches are easier to argue for. Not only does the technology already exist, it's also easy to make a privacy argument here. No matter how technical people are, we want privacy and control over who gets to see what. Everyone wants to be able to close their proverbial curtains. I think that many people have been desensitized over time, into an idea that they can't change this status quo and should therefore simply accept it. But that doesn't make the desire go away, it just buries it. If you can convince politicians to make a hardware radio kill switch (which already has surrounding technology like rfkill) mandatory, that would be the angle I'd consider most effective. Whether tech companies like it or not, they have to follow the law of the jurisdictions they have offices and/or conduct trade in. Just like you and I can take or leave Terms of Service, they also have to take or leave local law. They can always move their offices elsewhere, and that's just as hard for them as moving accounts is for us. > Compare this to the situation for mobile-phones. No such problem > does exist with these: there is only one provider for the OS, and it > is (officially) impossible to modify it, therefore the hardware > manufacturer can be held responsible to properly design the device. > > From here onwards you can easily argue to politicians that there are > safety issues, and private people should only be allowed to use > computer OS software as provided by Google or Apple, on those devices > that are designed for such software (as most of the people do already, > anyway). In this aspect, we have a matter of source code provision and the requirement of GPLv2 (Linux' license) to distribute source code. Not every manufacturer does it, nor does every manufacturer (notably Apple, who built their own OS) have to. But manufacturers like Mediatek often ignore this license requirement, because it's easier to obsolete the older and sell new devices that way. And politicians, limited in their power by jurisdiction, approval of their constituents, disapproval from corporate players and opposing parties alike... Make no mistake, their position may seem omnipotent from afar, but it is more like a house of cards. If you ever have the chance to attend a lobby, do take it. It's a very enriching experience. > And, closing the circle: from there onwards the governments will make > sure that big tech indeed has the authority to fuck you, thanks to > regulation. > > > cheerio, > PMc -- Met vriendelijke groet, Michael De Roover Mail: i...@nixmagic.com Web: michael.de.roover.eu.org -- Visit https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users to unsubscribe from this list ISC funds the development of this software with paid support subscriptions. Contact us at https://www.isc.org/contact/ for more information. bind-users mailing list bind-users@lists.isc.org https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users
