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by perching_aix 481 days ago
I guess this is a good lesson on what the reasoning one would typically (and unfortunately) bring to a mainstream political thread results in when met with a topic from another area of life instead, particularly a technical one.

Especially this:

> where a cadre of (opinionated) people with power get to decide what's right from wrong, based on their beliefs about what might only be a subset of reality (albeit their only/full one at that).

This is always true. There's no arrangement where you can outsource reasoning and decisionmaking (by choice or by coercion) but also not. That's a contradiction.

1 comments

> This is always true. There's no arrangement where you entrust someone else with decisionmaking (by choice or not nonwithstanding) but then they're somehow not the ones performing the decisionmaking afterwards.

I'm well aware of that. On itself there isn't a problem with it, in principle at least. Right until it leads to bad decisions being pushed through, and more often in ignorance rather than malice. I personally only have a real problem with it when people or tech ends up harmed or even destroyed, just because of ignorance rather than deliberate arbitrary choices (after consideration, hopefully).

To be clear, I'm not saying that any of that is the case here. But lets just say that browser vendors in general, and Mozilla as of lately in particular, aren't on my "I trust you blindly at making the right decisions" list.

> browser vendors in general, and Mozilla as of lately in particular, aren't on my "I trust you blindly at making the right decisions" list.

That's entirely fair. But what does this have to do with Mozilla's decision to enforce Certificate Transparency in Firefox?

If you have a concrete concern, voicing it could lead to a much more productive discussion than exuding a general aura of distrust, even if warranted.

I do see pretty massive problems with it, such as those you list off, but the unfortunate truth is that one cannot know or do everything themselves. So usually it's not even a choice but a coercive scenario.

For example, say I want to ensure my food is safe to eat. That would require farmland where I can grow my own food. Say I buy some, but then do I have the knowledge and the means to figure out whether the food I grew is actually safe to eat? After all, I just bought some random plot of farmland, how would I know what was in it? Maybe it wasn't even the land that's contaminated but instead the wind brought over some chance contamination? And so on.