• 0 Posts
  • 251 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

help-circle



  • other given statements

    Perhaps this is our fundamental misunderstanding! I am operating under these statements

    P: I have nothing to hide Q: I should not be concerned about surveillance

    In my opinion, everything after this is OP’s proof, ie we have no given statements ergo you calling out modus ponens is meaningless because, from our foundations, we could theoretically have ~P^Q, P^~Q, P^Q, and P^Q. Our foundation provides no context on how P and Q interact, and, as both of us state, albeit for different reasons, we cannot conclude anything about their interaction.


  • Sure! Let’s go back to foundations. The foundation of modus ponens is, quoting your source,

    If P -> Q and P, then Q

    In order for this to work, we must have both P -> Q and P. Will you please quote OP that shows we have P -> Q, as I have asked from the beginning, instead of making personal attacks? Alternatively, if I’m missing something in my foundations, such as “P -> Q can always be assumed in any basic symbolic context without proof,” educate me. As you have bolded, we can use modus ponens if and only if (necessary and sufficient) we have its requirements. If we don’t, per your source, we cannot use it to prove anything.


  • From your source, we must first have P -> Q. You have not demonstrated that. Sure, if we assume that P -> Q, then P -> Q. That’s a tautology. OP’s goal is to prove P -> Q. I’ve said this multiple times as did OP. Your consistent sharing of a truth table is a necessary condition for P -> Q but it is not sufficient. If P -> Q, then the truth table is valid. That’s modus ponens. You still gotta show (or assume like you have been) that P -> Q.

    To quote OP,

    P -> Q

    I will be providing a proof by counterexample

    In other words, P -> Q is an unproven hypothesis. If P -> Q, then your truth table is correct. If we assume P -> Q, then your truth table is correct. But propositional calculus unfortunately requires we prove things, not just show things that will be true if our original assumption is true.


  • You didn’t read OP, regularly refused back anything up, and came in with ad hominem. When others vote in a way that disagrees with you, you claim a conspiracy. I think the only person here acting in bad faith is you. I have tried to expand OP’s understanding of their proposal and you have only attacked people. You have attempted to insult me multiple times. Granted, I did take a swipe at you begging the question, so you could argue some bad faith was merited, but you saying I’ve never done logic while missing me explaining to you the point you’re suddenly trying to make (“necessary but not sufficient”) continues the poor student metaphor.

    I’m sorry you found “good luck” to be patronizing. Does “have fun” work?



  • How so?

    OP said that, given A and B, they would prove A -> B via negation, meaning the truth table you built does not yet exist and must be proved.

    It is rather…

    OP is not trying to use language, OP is trying to use propositional calculus. Using language unattached to propositional calculus is meaningless in this context.

    This is textbook modus ponens

    No, it’s not. Textbook modus ponens is when you are given A -> B. We are given A and B and are trying to prove A -> B. Never in any of my reading have I ever seen someone say “We want to prove A -> B ergo given A and B, A -> B.” I mean, had I graded symbolic logic papers, I probably would have because it’s a textbook mistake to write a proof that just has the conclusion with none of the work. As the in group, we may assume A -> B in this situation; OP was taking some new tools they’ve picked up and applying them to something OP appears passionate about to prove our assumptions.

    how dare you

    I was responding to OP. Why are you getting mad at me instead of getting mad at OP? OP brought propositional logic to a relativistic conversation. My goal was show why that’s a bad idea. You have proven my point incredibly well.


  • You made the same leap that OP did.

    [I]t is logically accepted that there might be other reasons, even unknown.

    No, it’s not. That’s what I’m calling out. This doesn’t follow from A or B and requires further definition. While you’re using to explain case b, OP tried to use it to explain case c. In both cases, you are assuming some sort of framework that allows you to build these truth tables from real life. That’s where my ask for a consistent formal system comes from.

    In your case b, we have not(I have something to hide) and (I am not concerned about surveillance). Since OP is not saying that the two are necessary and sufficient, we don’t really care. However, in your case c, where we have I have nothing to hide and not(I am not concerned about surveillance), both of you say we are logically allowed to force that to make sense. It’s now an axiom that A and not B cannot be; it has not come from within our proof or our formal system. We waved our hands and said there’s no way for that to happen. Remember, we started with the assumption we could prove A -> B by negation, not that A -> B was guaranteed.

    If you’ll notice my last paragraph in my first post basically says the same thing your last paragraph says.



  • Some may have nothing to hide, but still be concerned about the state of surveillance

    This is where your proof falls apart. It follows from nothing you’ve established and relies on context outside of our proof, which does not work with propositional logic. Another commenter goes into a bit more detail with some pre-defined axioms; with the right axioms you can wave away anything. However you have to agree on your axioms to begin with (this is the foundation of things like non-Euclidean geometry; choose to accept normally unacceptable axioms).

    A rigorous proof using propositional calculus would have to start with the definitions of what things are, what hiding means, what surveillance is, how it relates to hiding, and slowly work your way to showing, based on the definitions and lemmas you’ve built along the way, how this actually works. Understanding how to build arithmetic from the Peano Axioms is a good foundation.

    However, by attempting to represent this conversation in formal logic, we fall prey to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, which means something beyond the axioms in our system has to be based on faith. This arguably leads us back to the beginning, where “nothing to hide” and “state surveillance” fall under personal preference.

    Please note that I think “nothing to hide” is bullshit always and do not support heavy surveillance. I like the discussion you’ve started.




  • Did we read the same article? DNS-01 challenges require updates to DNS. This means you need an API for your DNS. This means you now have to worry about DNS permissions in your application cert workflow. We’ve just massively increased blast radius! Or you could do it manually but that’s already failed.

    All of this is straightforward with infrastructure-as-code. While I don’t struggle with that, I’ve watched devs and sysadmins both stare blankly at this kind of thing for days at a time.


  • If you’re using any work-related anything to post “anonymously” or talk to journalists, don’t. That Blind redirection is chilling yet it’s well within the capabilities of employers. The right way to talk to journalists like 404 is to find their anonymous contact details eg Signal using your own internet connection and your own device. Work computers can be monitored. Traffic on work computers or work VPNs can be monitored. Company email usage can be monitored. Company phone usage can be monitored. You don’t need to be incredibly private with a VPN over tor and anonymous services; you just need to not use company resources. Whether or not this should be legal is a different story; you just gotta know you have fuck all for privacy on company resources.

    I’ve only heard of Blind in passing; that corp email makes it too close to Glassdoor for comfort and it’s very clearly not private with that requirement.



  • AWS makes this impossible in a few places such as a fair number of ACM use-cases.

    I think your cert-per-session idea is interesting. We’d need significant throughput and processing boosts to make that happen, probably at least on the order of 10X computing speeds and 10X transmission speeds across the board minimum. These operations are computationally intense and add data to the wire so, for example, a simple Lemmy server with hundreds of users slows to a crawl and a larger site eg Mastodon goes to dialup speeds or worse. You can test at home by trying to generate an x509 self-signed cert before connecting to a website every time.


  • I read the Wires article for the first time just now to try and understand this article. I don’t really think it attacks SimpleX at all. I think it states the fact that nazis have moved to the platform, the fact that SimpleX is a very private platform, the fact that SimpleX claims to prevent extremist content and growth, the fact that extremist content is being spread and growing, and the fact that SimpleX is unaware of claims. As someone who has been following this discourse for decades, this is the kind of thing that gets published. There is a balance between privacy and extremism. Privacy-focused individuals like myself will always focus on the privacy provided there are tools to combat the extremism (where applicable).

    I feel like SimpleX is being defensive because their claims are not panning out. Their response calls out all of the things I feel were said in support of them while ignoring the actual critiques of their system. Not adding a backdoor? Great! That’s law and smart! Supporting groups of over a thousand posting extremist content?

    We never designed groups to be usable for more than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the current sizes despite limited usability and performance

    SimpleX will remove such content if it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal in the UK, Canada, and Europe.

    This is the stuff that needs response, not the privacy stuff Gilbert is arguably a fan of.