☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2020

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  • The issues people bring up with Signal are very easy for anybody with a minimally functioning brain to understand, and none of these experts are able to provide a credible answer to them.

    The key issues people point out over and over is that Signal is a central server hosted in the US that harvests people’s phone numbers on sign up. The users are trusting server operators with their privacy at that point because there is no way to verify how this data is used. Since the server associates real identity with the account, it is in position to map out networks of people communicating. And if this data is shared with intelligence agencies, which they wouldn’t be allowed to disclose, then those can trivially correlate the personally identifiable information with all the other data they have access to.

    If there’s a person of interest, and you map out whom that person wants to have private conversations with, that’s very useful data. Once you know that, then you can start tracking all the activities of their associates, and map out a whole network of people. Say, people organizing unions, or coordinating labor strikes, and so on.

    This is an obvious problem with Signal, one that doesn’t take any significant expertise to understand, and one that has never been fully addressed. People talk about things like sealed sender, but that doesn’t address the problem I just outlined.

    The core issue is that you have to trust the physical infrastructure rather than just the cryptography. The protocol design for sealed sender assumes the server behaves exactly as the published open source code dictates. A malicious operator can simply run modified server software that entirely ignores those privacy protections. Even if the cryptographic payload lacks a sender ID, the server still receives the raw network request and all the metadata attached to it. Your client has to talk to the server and identify itself before any messages are even sent.

    When your device connects to send that sealed message, it inevitably reveals your IP address and connection timing to the server. The server also knows your IP address from when you initially registered your phone number or when you requested those temporary rate limiting tokens. By logging the raw incoming requests at the network level, a malicious server can easily correlate the IP address sending the sealed message with the IP address tied to the phone number.

    Since the server must know the destination to route the message, it just links your incoming IP address to the recipient ID. Over time this builds a complete social graph of who is talking to whom. The cryptographic token merely proves you are allowed to send a message without explicitly stating who you are inside the payload. It does absolutely nothing to hide the metadata of the network connection itself from the machine receiving the data.

    This once again makes it very suspicious that Signal insists on running a single centralized server.















  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml"Commie blocks"
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    2 days ago

    Liberalism is objectively a right wing ideology. Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.

    As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which directly contradicts its promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.



  • I could say that they experience negative feedback when given a thumbs down and positive feedback when given a thumbs up which is something akin to a conscious experience.

    You could also say a thermostat experiences negative feedback when you turn it down. That’s not really a meaningful definition.

    Also, the notion of philosophical zombie is indeed absurd. Dennett dismantles this idiocy in Consciousness Explained quite thoroughly. My view that consciousness requires having a system that’s capable of introspection in a sense that it is able to observe its own internal patterns and to be aware of itself. Such a system would obviously not be restricted to humans or even biology. There is absolutely no reason why a neural network implemented on a different substrate could not be conscious. You’re making quite a lot of assumptions about what I’ll say, while ignoring what I’m actually saying here.


  • There obviously is an argument to counter, which is that the way LLMs work does not appear to be in line with any definition of consciousness we have right now. If you disagree with that, then feel free to provide a definition of consciousness that would credibly account for the notion of LLMs being conscious.

    It’s also rather absurd to claim that consciousness is spiritual woohoo nonsense given that we all have an internal experience. That’s fundamental denial of the observed reality. Consciousness does not in any way presuppose that humans are special, but it is a property of the configuration of physical systems where matter is arranged in a particular way to produce patterns that constitute internal experience.





  • While we don’t have a definitive model for what consciousness is, there are definitely compelling arguments on the subject, and the book I linked earlier from the author clearly demonstrates that he has thought about this subject more than you have.

    Seems to me that the only one who’s not adding anything to the conversation here is you actually. You’ve provided no argument of your own and you’ve failed to engage with anything I said. You just keep repeating how Ted Chiang hasn’t proven his case definitively, which he has not, but you’ve provided zero counter agument of your own.