Comment by _aavaa_
2 days ago
> People keep repeating this defeatist drivel but it's just not true.
It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
> We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal
In the USA free speech rights defeated that law.
> Encryption is just maths.
But nothing in those maths guarantee you the ability to use them legally.
> It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
I'd say it's actually worse than defeatist drivel, since it actively discourages an entirely feasible strategy of making bad laws difficult/impossible to enforce, and instead encourages people to squander their efforts and resources on fighting all-or-nothing political battles in the context of utterly dysfunctional institutions riddled with perverse incentives that no one at all in the modern world seems to be able to overcome.
The "political, not technical" argument is equivalent to telling people concerned about possible flooding that instead of building levees, they should focus all their efforts on trying to drain the ocean.
> entirely feasible strategy
Who will host the code? What App Store will you publish in?
The developers and the FOSS community generally; F-Droid is a good app store for FOSS, but there's no inherent need for app stores in the first place.
Duplicating the tremendous success of the Linux ecosystem is a worthy goal, but even at the outset, the idea is to reach the 1% of users who want such a solution and are willing to invest thought and effort into it, and let it gradually become viable for incrementally wider adoption. Trying to target the 99% who don't care in the first place wouldn't make much sense.
Right, you need an end-to-end ecosystem. Delivery, ease of use, trustable code and audit, good math, community, financial incentives. Still much more enduring solution than an eternal political battle, IMO.