It would probably be more practical to make old age less expensive than to inject more people into the bottom of the demographic pyramid. Those young people eventually get old too. I am looking forward to my sentient robot caretaker:
Uncompromisingly insist on only using things you have ultimate ownership and control over, even when that means dramatic and life-altering inconvenience, and where those things don't exist, build them yourself.
Unfortunately, "build it yourself" is relatively easy when it comes to software, and almost impossible when it comes to the hardware running that software. It doesn't matter if you have full ownership of a complete open-source stack if no hardware manufacturer will permit you to run unsigned arbitrary code. The lack of open hardware--chips that you could build in your garage using materials nobody could reasonably prevent you from acquiring--is the lynchpin upon which open source software will wither and die.
There is already plenty of open hardware, it's just not this-year's-top-performance.
In the category of ~1-3 years' performance lag you get Rockchip and friends, which are closed hardware that allows open computation. See computers made by the company MNT as an example.
In the category of ~5 years' performance lag you get "soft" cores, where you buy an FPGA (dynamically reprogrammable hardware) and make it run a CPU you design yourself. If you want to, for example, make your CPU have more cache and fewer ALUs, you can do that by tweaking some files and reprogramming the FPGA. This has a cost in terms of power efficiency and runtime speed, but you can absolutely run a full Linux desktop experience on an FPGA today, and the hardware has no way to try to prevent you from running any software.
You can solve the problem of all the cellular basebands being closed source with either software-defined-radio or using a closed USB/PCIe cellular modem connected to an open processor.
I know what his solution is not. It's not a mechanism that conveniently enables the fine-grained surveillance of people that just so happens to be google's business model.
There are many issues with those, like the wildly different standards of living across the globe. OTOH anyone can acquire Monero if they want to. But someone from a rich country will likely be able to pay for more fake accounts/visits than someone from a poor country. With the ad market the difference between where the visitor is from is very important. Some ad clicks may cost a dollar if they're coming from a rich country and 0.01 cents if they're coming from a poor country.
I'm not suggesting cryptocurrency micropayments for accessing the web but it's on par with PoW in that it only requires money, not privacy.
Perhaps the way forward is for people to wake up and stop visiting sites that infringe on their privacy.
>Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.
All current implementations: yes. I do think there are some privacy preserving solutions, but they're obviously imperfect. But assuming you have a central authority that can validate and sign valid government identification, it seems like some sort of ZK scheme could allow one to verify that they have a valid government issued ID, but without disclosing which one it is.
I still don't love the idea, but it sure seems better than everything else I've seen proposed.
From what I've seen no such solution guarantees privacy to the user if the signing body (or the government) and the website collude to deanonymize the user.
His solution is don't. Why would you? In fact, if you don't block the script that's running on one computer, the script operator won't need to run it on a botnet.
I don't know RMS's solution to spam or DDoS which are the real problems.
Because controlling a large number of accounts can allow you to manipulate the algorithms on Web2.0 websites. For example, this one. If you don’t combat spammers the front page quickly gets filled up with garbage.
I think I understand why Google wants to do this, and I think I understand why people are opposed to this particular solution.
It’s also worth noting that the author of this article is selling a proof of work solution to the problem.
I am fairly skeptical that proof of work is the right way to go here. A lot of users of the web are using older hardware. Adding a computational toll booth doesn't solve the problem in a world where people have differing amounts of compute to spend.
On the other hand, a botnet might have access to thousands of computers and may not actually care about waiting an extra 10 seconds. Or worse, they will come up with a custom solution on an ASIC that solves your proof of work puzzle thousands of times faster than grandma‘s laptop.
I guess it would have to be something like a service which confirms whether a person already has an account on the site but doesn’t have to track which particular account it is.
I’m not sure if that would work for account deletions though.
What browser can genuinely claim independence from Google? Chromium browsers are all arguably in the same camp. If FF is implicated, then so are forks like Zen.
In my mind, no browser is perfect. However, as far as I can tell that’s not nearly as sketchy as the title implies. It’s for local debugging.
Zen has other issues for me on Ubuntu (eating a ton of resources) which is why I usually use FF. But I put Zen in a different category from Brave and definitely better than Chrome.
They’re caching the pages which have already been generated. You could go back and delete all references to pages which don’t exist yet. Basically turn it into a static website.
It seems like the site's algorithm is that every newly-generate page includes multiple links to not-yet-existing pages. So it doesn't matter that existing pages are cached, all the "leaf node" pages link to multiple uncached new pages.
“Open the refrigerator door, HAL”
“I can’t do that right now”
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