Those Dell systems are "not for the general public, and had found their way to the website only inadvertently. The laptops are available only by custom order and only to military, government and intelligence agencies", and the other two have to hack the Management Engine, fighting Intel every step of the way.
That's basically an admission that the ME is a backdoor, and calling ME-free systems something any individual can purchase is farcical or malicious.
I have, right now, in my lab, multiple systems with ME disabled. I do not work for the government, military, or any intelligence agency.
Dell systems that have ME disabled come with a sticker of the number "3" on them, and linux tools exist that can verify the fact that it has been disabled.
As much as I appreciate the article trying to stem the tide of racism by pointing out the El Paso shooting, I don't think such arguments are fruitful.
Firstly, that shooting doesn't mean immigration is good for the US (or, let's be blunt, for whites in the US), just as the lack of such a shooting wouldn't mean immigration is bad.
Secondly, an opponent could simply point to (anecdotal) murders perpetrated by immigrants as a counter-argument (well, counter-ad-hominem, since the El Paso shooting isn't really an argument for or against immigration). And in fact many publications do just that - the Daily Mail, NY Post, and Fox News to a lesser extent.
In the end it boils down to who can shout the loudest, regardless of the underlying truth. This might not be the case if they used statistics, but they prefer emotionally-resonating anecdotes, which, in a country of 330 million, are meaningless - you can find anecdotes to fit any preconception.
So what I would suggest is using arguments where truth, not just volume, provides an advantage. Instead of merely calling replacement theory "false", substantiate that with demographic statistics, showing that nobody is being "replaced". Anything less is simply yelling "nu-uh" - completely unpersuasive, and much more ineffective than manipulating people with cherry-picked crimes.
Unfortunately journalists are notoriously allergic to statistics, so we have little hope of laying this "debate" to rest.
The rise could be due to the bar for "hate crime" being so low that leaving tire marks on graffiti on a public road qualifies [1] (and an even lower standard is used in Canada [2]). Regardless, two things are lacking in the article.
One is the population covered by the police departments submitting the data [3]. Without normalizing for that, we have no idea if hate crimes increased, or if we are simply counting hate crimes among a larger population. The article heavily implies that the rise would be even worse if the "thousands of agencies" that did not submit data in 2020 had submitted it. But it doesn't actually tell us whether more or fewer agencies submitted data in 2020 than in 2019, 18, 17... The honest thing to do would have been to give us normalized values to begin with.
The second issue is that, despite how granular the statistics are for the victims, not one word is spent on the perpetrators. I wonder why... [4]
> Back then there was no concept of nations and nation-states, which only evolved a couple of centuries later.
Just because the power structures didn't perfectly reflect nations, doesn't mean nations didn't exist. Look at, for example, Catalonia, that still has a concept of its own nationhood despite being ruled by Spain.
Or look at the British Raj, for that matter. Britain and India were both ruled by the same royal family, yet no-one pretends their people's identities weren't distinct.
Or Ancient Egypt, which had all the necessary attributes in place over 4 thousand years ago... not quite the case with feudal societies in medieval Europe.
I am only speaking about medieval Europe, btw. And British colonial rule over India is clearly out of scope here. Besides, monarchy by then was a VERY different construct.
Keep going. What makes "colonial rule" different from rule by an aristocrat that inherited lands, if people have no concept of nationhood, and one aristocrat is as good as another?
> Its pretty explicit in the agreement terms that you need to separately click to agree on every purchase:
It's okay to lie everywhere else, as long as they tell the truth somewhere inside the small print nobody reads? And we are supposed to know which parts are lies and which the truth?
According to the article, the main problem of a financial police state where you cannot so much as buy a loaf of bread without permission and surveillance from the payment system, is that not everyone is included.
But that's the point: people will not be able to buy a loaf of bread if they don't meet with the system's approval.
Look, I switched to completely contactless payment through my phone since Covid, and it's so convenient I'm not going back. And it's hard for me to imagine people who don't have access to a bank account or smartphone, but those people do exist, and they may eventually become unable to buy a loaf of bread, and that's a problem.
Due to government tactics, a lot of australians are now deliberately using cash a) for the privacy b) as a statement against orwellian mechanisms.
I find it really sad when people are blaise about something that once gone, can't be put back. A social credit system, & everyone talking about it as an inevitable thing, have already bought into the propaganda.
I find it inevitable that with sentiments like that, that i'll be forced to live in a car & eventually the gutter & arrested regularly because of my nuisance factor. All because of the convenience.
Is this meant as a joke? Because almost the whole world is working on outlawing or "regulating" these and they aren't even anonymous most of the time. Not being controlled and centralized is threatening enough.
Could you please expand? In this area, the only ones available I found have a surcharge of ~5..10% (you buy a 100€ card through 105€..110€). Note: I am not certain of the amount, it has been a while since I used one.
And in Europe electronic payments cannot by law be anonymous over 150€.
>But that's the point: people will not be able to buy a loaf of bread if they don't meet with the system's approval.
...
Seriously, your argument is that privacy violations will cause people to starve? not the fact that there is a currency monopoly and you can't issue your own currency and start your own regional economy from scratch if the currency is concentrated in the hands of rich people and hence cannot be used and you must constantly borrow new money into the system which eventually gets saved by the rich forcing you to go to the bank and ask them permission over and over again? The dystopia you are imagining is already there. The only thing you're losing is privacy which is solved by GNU Taler.
That is not that they're arguing at all, they are arguing that those who are locked out of the system by the government or banks or corporations will be starved by a cashless system.
They would either be locked out by not having a bank account or device to participate in the system with, or by having their accounts suspended.
Local alternative currency systems[0] have existed for a long time in many cities. They're small and fringe, but they exist. Amsterdam, for example, has NOPPES[1]. But these systems are not threatened by electronic payment systems.
That's not a real choice because governments will abuse it. If you don't have private, permissionless payments, you face the risk that the government will stop you from buying bread.
Don't believe it? Here are some other programs governments have abused: The US put people on the no fly list for refusing to become FBI informants [1]. Canada froze bank accounts of protestors. China abused their COVID tracking app to stop protests. [2]
It's important to remember past government abuses so we don't give them more tools for future abuses.
If you give me the choice between a government that tries to force me to cede my autonomy and my privacy in order to buy a loaf of bread or go hungry, I'm sharpening my pitchfork and lighting my torch ten times out of ten.
Governments don't even have to get involved, we are heading in the direction fo functional cashlessness by the influence of corporations and the market alone. Hope you like incinerating fat cats to doom music, my friend.
but you missed a crucial part -- the post says "pitchforks" but is made by a ninety-nine percent civilized person with manners and education, who is unlikely to actually do the physical act mentioned -- but in the modern day, will Very Likely remember this topic at voting time. Take-no-prisoners politics means that the losing candidate, really actually loses and is therefore out of a job right now. So these are high stakes for political types and they do know it.
Sadly most American politicians on both sides of the aisle would probably vote for cashless right now, but, not all of them... and things do change.
Russians are a slavic people. There are ethnic subgroups of other backgrounds that live largely within the borders of Russian and have Russian nationality like the Tatars, the Chechens, the Kalmyks etc.
Though I don't think that would help. Let's say we go cashless some day, then people get oppressed and manage to put together an uprising. Will the result be the return of cash, or just putting another despot in charge? So many times it's the latter. Perhaps the only real answer is smashing the datacentres, like modern-day luddites..
You must be really naive if you think that isn't the case already.
Imagine a bitcoin standard where the rich own all the Bitcoin and governments force you to use Bitcoin. The rich have no reason to lend you Bitcoin for free, you don't need the Bitcoin, you need the loaf of bread and you are willing to trade your time for that loaf of bread but since the middleman Bitcoin was inserted, you are forced to borrow in the hope that you can pay the money back. Nobody lends out money for free, you are going to have to pay interest. The best part is that you are going to default as the interest payments end up in the wallet of the rich guy you just borrowed money from, due to the magic of compound interest he is going to lend his money out again. This means your debt is unpayable because interest payments must recirculate in the economy and somehow end up with you again but in this case they are just being lent out again. The only thing you can do is outcompete some other guy and take the money he borrowed into the economy to pay your own debt. Since someone is going to lose this competition there are going to be destitute and poor people in your society. The only known way out of this mess that is commonly practiced is to force the economy to grow faster which degrades the environment and results in ever inequality. The obvious solution and actually working solution is to make liquidity have a cost so that withholding money from the economy is impossible over the long term.
Money is power and control for those who have it and their power extends beyond what they can buy with it, it also extends to those who don't have it.
If you want total financial control over people, you sure want it over the whole population, and not just those who already have too much to lose to actually protest or do something against the government.
Since the "two missed meals" that are between today and a revolution are most probable for the poor, skipping them would be bad for the overlords.
It does seem to be a more clear and present danger to health and wellbeing for a chunk of society than the usual HN paranoia about loss of some imagined supreme personal autonomy and the government stopping you from buying what you want.
It's an exceptionally flexible and convenient method of control.
Earlier this year, donors to the truck convey protest in Canada had their bank accounts frozen. This wasn't a targeted list of "these 37 people have broken a law"--rather, it was a broad mandate to freeze accounts assocated with the protests, operationalized a bit differently by each bank.
In a society where most businesses don't take cash anymore, this turnkey coercive capability becomes more airtight.
The frog will boil slowly. A few years ago, all US payment processors blocked donations to Wikileaks, after they reported on war crimes in Iraq. Today, most people still think of digital money in the same way as physical cash; in reality, every transaction is a request for permission, with fraud heuristics and blocklists that might say yes or no.
Soon, a guy gets DUI, loses the ability to buy alcohol for six months--who would oppose that? Over time, the scope and frequency of financial deplatforminig will expand. Twitter does one-week suspensions for violating their terms of service. Why not your credit card?
Few stores keep video recordings indefinitely. A fair number don't even bother with recording at all, they just make sure cameras are visible to act as a deterrent.
Financial transaction records at banks might as well be forever, though.
One of those is far more powerful than the other, and far more dangerous if it gets leaked to malicious actors.
There are anonynous digital payment services. It is very difficult to surveil your loaf of bread transaction history if it isn't recorded and the customer is unknown.
One of the key selling-points of Central Bank Digital Currencies for governments is that they will be able to provide extensive insights into citizens' behavior (how demand and consumption patterns change according to various factors) as well as a variety of levers that they will be able to use adjust that behavior in subtle and opaque ways. I'm not sure how much parallel privacy-focused systems will be tolerated under such future regimes.
Shoplift? No big deal. Have the theoretical potential to avoid even 1 penny in taxes? The only option is a financial panopticon that tracks the flow of all money!
On the other hand, those US laws, if they carry comparable sentences as she is facing, are equally unjust. If this case is what it takes to realize how disproportionately cruel the US laws are, and to get them changed, then so be it.
I will also speculate that most of the people agitating for her release are also opposed to those US laws you mentioned, so it's not hypocritical for them to lobby for her release, even if it may be hypocritical for the US as a whole to focus on her, without releasing the many non-violent low-level drug offenders they imprison.
I side with her, as I would if this had happened to her in the US, but the OP has a point. It could've happened to her in the US, especially because she is black. Not all people that defend her are hypocrites, but a large portion needs to look in the mirror. The ACLU says: "Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana"
That's basically an admission that the ME is a backdoor, and calling ME-free systems something any individual can purchase is farcical or malicious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Commer...