How do we know intelligence agencies are not in collusion with certificate authorities though? What if they actually have access to ROOT CA private keys and can just automatically strip https from most of the traffic in their mass surveillance software? This is something I found with a very quick search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar

They tried to push it to the point of stripping encryption from internet altogether and when that didn’t work they tried demanding chat apps to be able to scan people messages before they send them. Maybe I’m confusing multiple entirely different things here, but I kinda heard that mostly with the abbreviation DSA flying around so I assumed it was sorta umbrella for all those things.

It’s mind-blowing how at the same time some EU government guys pushing stuff like DSA while other do something like this (which is nice, and a complete opposite, if it’s not honeypot anyways).

So this is the lore for kids safety act?

I’ve been working remote ever since COVID. Also, if we’re going this far, I think this whole culture of absent personal space at work isn’t something to defend. If anything, it’s kind of nice to punish this system by having something shocking or insulting on your screen. But we all need money and people don’t want to get fired so I can understand that. We’re all going to get fired and replaced by AI anyway though.

I personally don’t consider this NSFW.

Most people don’t care whether AI is intelligent, can it think or reason or understand concepts. What matters is that it can give helpful replies, and it does that a lot. In my experience maybe 1 reply out of 10 is seriously flawed, others are either mostly helpful or just tell me something I already knew until I reprompt for more, which, again, also works well most of the time (especially when you allow it to search for more information online). So if you wanted to say it’s dangerous in some ways, this is definitely not the proper way to say it, since neither it being dangerous nor it being right or wrong or helpful or useless has anything to do with intelligence, ability to think, reason, feel, comprehend or whatever.

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Also accessible via peertube.wtf

I prefer Steam because I like having achievements, gallery of screenshots (I take hundreds/thousands of them for games I enjoy), backlog with notifications when items go on sale, all the forum/groups/review stuff, etc. If I were to pick purely politically, I would definitely choose GOG though. I wouldn’t ever consider Key Cards as that’s just the worst of both worlds (physical vs digital). Physical rarely makes sense, but I’d consider it for some super unique releases, for example a box release with usb of Morrowind + OpenMW + bunch of modpacks preinstalled including stuff like Tamriel Rebuilt etc + some nice physical stuff in the box like artworks or huge worldmap to put on your wall. But I can’t imagine a release like this being even remotely close to legally possible (because it’s a huge salad of licensed properietary paid content and opensource free content under a variety of licenses).

I think 4 of those games (including Postal) look very decent/promising, others either not my style or looking too generic/slop.

No I mean, it’s easy to have interests, but hard to find people with similar interests, and 100x more hard in hookup context. But if you mean getting new hobbies based on what is available in some local circles just for the sake of socializing there, that could work I guess, but it does feel off somehow. I mean, you’re probably not genuinely interested in that and you have enough of your own interests and only pretending just for the sake of socializing/hookups.

And then how do you convert back to the dollar?

Maybe they can withdraw it to their bank accounts and pay taxes as IT enterpreneurs. Exchanges don’t have access to tax records and have no ways of finding out if they are linked to certain companies. Those people can probably declare it fully open in the taxes that they work on Steam’s behalf for example, how exchange gonna find that out?

There are countless payment processors and digital wallets, and new ones open regularly. You just don’t hear about them (esspecially in North America) because unregulated capitalism has allowed Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to monopolize the market.

So the only problem is that we don’t hear about them? But we can use them? If that is the case, why don’t Steam and Itch abandon Visa and Mastercard and switch to something else entirely? In crypto, switching to another exchange is as easy as sending your crypto to an address. There are fixed withdraw fees. So you can send for example $100 billion worth of crypto for a fixed small fee (numbers for popular exchanges: $0.17-10 for BTC, $0.4-6 for ETH), no questions asked where you send and why.

What stops that from happening again?

The endgame of all this is that you don’t need to convert crypto to fiat at all. But it’s nowhere close so far.

What stops the company to maintain a team of people whose work is to register new wallets and accounts on exchanges all day every day? How exchange going to figure out that a certain person’s account is linked to the company? Even if they will hire detectives, what will they do if there is a whole team with rotating people? Also, exchanges don’t ask you to pay taxes or declare where you got money from, that happens after you take money from them to your fiat bank accounts. Also, you can go to another exchange. There are countless exchanges, more than 2, and new ones can open every day (a big difference compared to payment processors, where just 2 basically monopolized the market).

Easier said than done.

But how do you use KYC to gatekeep anything regarding crypto? For example, how the thing which happened to Steam and Itch could happen in crypto world?

which have the ability to act as gatekeepers

How do you imagine any crypto-exchange acting as a gatekeeper? You can send your crypto from exchange to whatever address and pay for anything from there. To my knowledge, there are no exchanges that ask you to provide any details about addresses you’re sending your crypto to.

Crypto currency isn’t backed by a nation’s GDP

Stablecoins? USDT is the most traded crypto globally since 2019.

I personally think what they do for general audience is way too niche and it all starts to make sense when you massively decentralize and switch to crypto for everything regarding money. Now do we see a massive surge in big P2P decentralized systems for end-users? I don’t see it. There are few alternatives for some chat apps here and there and that’s it. So maybe it’s just too early. Prime time of this tech is yet to come. If someone builds a huge P2P cryptopowered platform level of Steam or YouTube that’s when you should expect to hear about all this stuff solving real problems.

I think the point this article is trying to make is that while individualistic consumer-level ways to sidestep enshittification do work for those who follow them, they don’t fight the bad actors back efficiently and to achieve that it needs to be done collectively.