[yason]

My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."

This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.

[Zak]

Somebody had to work on it before it was how the world is. When Microsoft proposed a scheme involving remote attestation and DRM in 2003, the New York Times published a critical article. Google SafetyNet a decade later barely got a whimper out of major tech outlets, much less the mainstream press.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-saf...

[coldtea]

>Somebody had to work on it before it was how the world is.

The mindset the parent described extends to what they're asked to do. They don't challenge it. It doesn't have to already be law for them to accept it and build it. It's enough that the ask comes from authority (a boss, a government) and pays.

[jjav]

> The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

Indeed. I can't understand the people who blindly believe any law is good just because. Stop, think. Is the law good? What's good about it? What's bad about it? Can it be abused? Then maybe it should be changed?

I advocate that every law should have an annual review to catalog every case where it has been applied. How many were sensible positive outcomes? How many were unintended consequences? How many were clear abuses of the letter of the law? Every legislator should vote on the record based on that annual review to either renew or cancel the law.

[yason]

> I can't understand the people who blindly believe any law is good just because. Stop, think. Is the law good? What's good about it? What's bad about it? Can it be abused? Then maybe it should be changed?

I think many people have an expectation that (all) laws are just and needed because... somehow they're the law.

In reality, laws can be unjust, unnecessary, biased, and completely arm-wrestled together by people strictly following an agency of their own. Other laws are put together by sheer ignorance and lack of thinking beyond mere good intentions. The first question shouldn't even be "is this law fair" but "was this law made fairly".

It creeps me that people treat laws as axioms whereas they're just polished and reinforced opinions. Sure, many laws we can agree on, and many others that don't agree on aren't worth changing, but you should always question the law and question where it came from before choosing to accept it.

I can see the same pattern with technology such as the various digital restrictions management (DRM) schemes.

[Ajedi32]

There are so many laws on the books that reviewing all of them every year is completely impossible. Doing what you propose would require the government to be greatly shrunk and simplified (which, to be fair, I'm not necessarily against).

Personally I would put myself somewhere between your two "kinds of people". Many individual laws are bad and should be changed, but the rule of law itself is a good, stabilizing force that should generally be respected. If people only followed laws they 100% agree with then that would be chaos, therefore even bad laws deserve at least a modicum of respect.

[jjav]

> There are so many laws on the books that reviewing all of them every year is completely impossible.

Oh well, so maybe there are too many laws, let's simplify.

That is only partially tongue in cheek.

I'd say if there is no time to review and vote to keep or cancel a law, it is automatically cancelled. If it was important maybe someone will reintroduce the legislation later. Fewer laws are better, we should consolidate around laws with the most bipartisan support and scrap the rest.

But also in how I envision the system, if a law is repeatedely affirmed year after year, it should receive an increasing TTL. The formula should also have some modifier for which party controls legislature at the time. So if some law is reaffirmed multiple times under legislatures controlled by different parties, it's probably a fairly uncontroversial law, so we can increase the refresh rate to 3 or 5 years (avoid multiples of 4 since that is election cycle). Over time, the TTL can increase and perhaps there should be a way to eventually promote it to a permanent law, but that should have a very very high bar.

One can dream.. of course it won't happen, so back to your country controlled by a few oligarchs grifting for their personal profit.

[solenoid0937]

Most people live such sheltered lives that they haven't seen injustice or engaged with the subject matter seriously if they have not seen it.

[abustamam]

> I advocate that every law should have an annual review to catalog every case where it has been applied.

I like this idea but frankly I don't trust our lawmakers to do a fair assessment of this. Maybe there's an independent, non-partisan committee that does this.

[jjav]

> I like this idea but frankly I don't trust our lawmakers to do a fair assessment of this.

Absolutely true. But at least it would force every legislator to put their name yay or nay on every law every year. There are few things that politicians hate more than having to be on the record for supporting or rejecting something.

Then we all could review the full list of laws they voted for or against and vote accordingly.

[HiPhish]

> My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."

I like to call those people "ventablackpilled". Being blackpilled is all about gloom and doom, but being ventablackpilled is beyond being blackpilled. It is when you actively want the world to be a worse place because you believe that that is how the world works.

[dgroshev]

Ironically, the very OP statement is exactly that: trying to make the world a worse place because they believe that that is how the world works.

The solution to avoiding dictatorship is engaging in politics and preventing dictatorship directly through that. Trying to retreat into the (perceived) wilderness and build barriers to dictatorship doesn't really work. But since people drafting that statement don't believe that politics work and it is, in fact, possible to both have a vibrant political scene (we have what, five viable political parties vs the American two?) and not let kids send nudes, they try to drag everyone into the same mind frame.

[arthurcolle]

I think it's vantablack unless you mean like a Starbucks Venti cup of black

[metalman]

much much worse are the ones taking the biege pills, who of course will drag anyone who notices into there world of where which one of 59 shades of biege constitutes the true way into non confrontational , we will escalate and swat you for any hint of agitation while we decide not to decide to not provide the very function they are in charge of,passivity and conformity to bieng childless and into flabby sad kinky stuff. legions of them.

[okanat]

You're giving too much thought into the issue or trying to construct something like a conspiracy out of it.

I sometimes work with people who worked on or at least worked with DRM-like stuff (Trustzone etc.). The people who make those systems and the structures that allow it falls squarely on banality of evil. It is not a big evil org or people with their own evil agendas (unlike Palantir, i think they are the true "ventablackpilled" ones). They are thousands of developers who push JIRA tickets like everyone. Many of them live in the developing world and they just pray to keep their jobs. The reason that big tech attracts developers despite their obvious and much bigger (IMO) evils is the same reason that attracts developers who make systems that can be completely closed down.

Many of the developers are not outright evil either. They sometimes voice their opinion. Their opinion doesn't matter in comparison to the business goals.

Sometimes it is understandable to write blocking software. Not all equipment is sold. Many industrial equipment is leased. So the actual owners want guarantees that their devices cannot be modified by renters.

The amount of info you can extract from an Apple phone or Graphene OS is limited due to same restrictions working in your favor too.

Similarly phones can be locked down due to radio restrictions. Nobody wants infinitely exploitable SDNs in peoples hands. It makes such SDNs a juicy target for enemies like Russia to exploit and turn into scalable attack vector as spoofing and jamming devices.

The reason those are attack vectors is also banal. We made our bed as engineers, voters, governments and business leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made shitty chips and shitty software with no care for security or safety. We sold millions of them and nobody wanted to pay to "do it right way". Worse is better. Silicon Valley style scaling up is the goal. Competition is for suckers. All those and every single one of us ate the fruits of shitty hardware and software that are protected by closed down systems. We engineers got the cushy jobs, our business leaders made 10x 100x gains from our work. We either had little voice (because making a big noise is guaranteeing that your cushy job no longer exists) or whatever we had is ignored in the hubris of shipping shit to billions of people.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

<< We made our bed as engineers, voters, governments and business leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made shitty chips and shitty software with no care for security or safety. We sold millions of them and nobody wanted to pay to "do it right way".

I dunno. By that I mean, I am sure it happens, but I am not sure this is the reason for it. FWIW, I am not an engineer, but I have a window into that world.

In my little corner of the universe, we are going through belt tightening exercises already. So it is an interesting game of less meetings, shoving as much as you can onto others and the classic 'doing more with less'. In other words, even for internal customer's 'doing it the right way' is imply not a priority. On the other hand, getting more people, bigger budgets and somehow money saved is. 'Doing it the right way' is a distant ideal.

All that said, I don't think you are that wrong with the 'banality of evil' thought.

[aleph_minus_one]

> This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

There exist more kinds:

- the "rebel": "this is a law/rule, so I have to trespass it". This often holds for people who are either annoyed by rules or red tape or for people who see no hope of changing the law. An example are the "blade runners" in London who organize to destroy lots of surveillance cameras at once, in particular those that are used to enforce low-emission laws. [1]

- the "evil": "this is law, so I will (ab)use it for my personal gain".

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...

[cortic]

The rebel is just a subset of the second type, and an effective subset if you look at history.

The evil is just a subset of the first type, abuse and use are functionally the same action within a poorly or properly constructed law/policy.

[dspillett]

> My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted.

Some are also doing it for the technical challenge, especially those working on new tech rather than refining what already exists. Like the people who try to solve the great problems of mathematics/physics (or find interesting new ones) for the challenge of it (and sometimes refuse prizes & recognition if they do solve or otherwise discover something vital).

This sort of person is often blinkered to the possible extreme long-term outcomes, or are able to mentally separate themselves from them (“I just made the discovery, I didn't use it to do anything bad” or “I was paid for it, follow the money source and blame them”). Of course once a genie is out of the bottle, other sorts of people are more than eager to ask it for wishes…

[try_the_bass]

> This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

What? I don't understand how this is a "two kinds of people" generalization, when the two categories aren't even mutually-exclusive?

One can think a law is bad and should change, while simultaneously recognizing the rule of law and following it.

It's pretty weird to try to pit those two perspectives against each other

[trumpdong]

Then you are the first kind. Since the law will not change, you will continue to follow it.

[socalgal2]

> "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

There's zero point in changing the law if you don't expect it to be obeyed and enforced. Those positions are not opposites.

[AnthonyMouse]

If there is a stupid law, there are several things you can do:

You can follow it anyway and make no attempt to improve the situation, allowing the stupid consequences to follow indefinitely. (Notice that anyone who follows the law while doing nothing because they've been convinced reform efforts will be ineffective are in this group.)

You can follow it anyway while trying to change it, attempting to limit the time the stupid consequences exist.

Or you can refuse to follow it.

But the people in the last group should still be trying to reform the law, both so that they don't have to risk being prosecuted for doing the right thing, and in order to get the people in the first and second groups to stop doing the stupid thing the people in the third group are already refusing to do.

[FpUser]

There are laws in existence that no one even "law addicts" would follow unless brain damaged. On top of that sheer amount of laws makes on "following those" simply impossible. there are also conflicting laws. Some laws are even refused to be enforced by the police.

It is a dynamic world where respect for law, trying to change law and plainly saying: "go fuck yourself, not gonna do it" should and do coexist.

Absolutely all laws followed strictly to the letter would kill a society.

[LadyCailin]

If you don’t expect it to be obeyed or enforced, then I would say that means it should be fast tracked to be changed. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

[account42]

The point is that if you don't follow the law as is then what expectation can you have that anyone follows your changed law - and if no one does then what's the point.

[trumpdong]

You say "should be", I say "won't". One of those is a statement about material reality.

[Caracas288]

The critical mass of people who don’t use critical thinking as their main means of decision-making.

[cucumber3732842]

>People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.

Don't forget the selfish jerks who simply ask for whatever class of traffic that isn't them to be punitively regulated to their benefit.

(both literally and transferrable to other issues as a metaphor)

[AnthonyMouse]

That doesn't really answer the question.

Suppose there is some peon at Microsoft who is ordered to write code for Pluton and then does it because they don't want to be fired, expecting to hide behind the Nuremberg defense. The people in your second group will naturally disapprove of this.

But regardless of that, we can ask the same question of the person giving the orders. Someone in these companies initiated these programs, so are they merely fools who couldn't predict the obvious consequences that others did, or are they truly malicious?

[aleph_minus_one]

> Suppose there is some pe[rs]on at Microsoft who is ordered to write code for Pluton and then does it because they don't want to be fired, expecting to hide behind the Nuremberg defense. The people in your second group will naturally disapprove of this.

I would rather say: people who are too "rebellious"/"non-obedient" don't get into a position where they are ordered to write code for Pluton.

[abustamam]

This is spot on. My wife will walk to the ends of the earth to find a crosswalk because she doesn't want to jaywalk. I use my eyes to see if there are any cars and will cross when I deem it safe.

That said, I'm not going to pretend I'm one of those people who say "this law doesn't make sense, we must change it." it's more like "this law is not convenient to me right now and I am willing to suffer the consequences of breaking it" but frankly I'm not going to start a grassroots effort to try to change it.

[nuc1e0n]

Replying to this comment so I can refer to it later.