Discovery is important and a hard problem, worth making some trade-offs for. Signal published a good blog post about this, including this passage:
> In order to turn the address book on a device into a social graph for Signal, the Signal client needs to be able to determine which of the device’s contacts are Signal users. [...] The obvious problem with this method is that the hash of a user identifier can almost always be inverted. [...] This method of contact discovery isn’t ideal because of these shortcomings, but at the very least the Signal service’s design does not depend on knowledge of a user’s social graph in order to function.
When they say "social graph for Signal", afaik they don't mean 'on Signal servers' but 'social graph on your phone'. It's a personal social graph that exists on the end-user device.
I don't remember how the hash issue is dealt with, however.
> Signal is not peer-to-peer. It is a centralized, client-server architecture.
It's not a P2P mesh, but Signal's servers are involved only for certain functions. I think communication tx is P2P - to send a message via server (used to hide sender IP address from onlookers and the recipient), you need to enable relaying. Possibly finding the recipient still relies on the server - if I want to send a P2P message to Abel, to what IP address do I send it?
The official signal.org blog post I linked does actually explain how it works. They write that the client sends parts of hashed phone numbers to Signal:
> The client transmits those truncated hashes to the service. The service does a lookup from a set of hashed registered users. The service returns the intersection of registered users. The obvious problem with this method is that the hash of a user identifier can almost always be inverted. Regardless of whether the identifier is a phone number, a user name, or an email address, the “keyspace” of all possible identifiers is too small.
Also: Signal messages are currently never P2P. They always pass through Signal servers, which see (but apparently not retain) your IP and timing metadata. The Signal WebRTC calls are partially peer-to-peer, that is what the relaying in the Signal settings panel is about.
(Not to object the degoogeling, but:) To create a Signal account, you have to validate a phone number. So Signal is currently largly about privacy, not anonymity.
FWIW I wouldn't know why to message someone if I didn't know who they were. The same goes for them not knowing who I am. What would we even talk about?
The service operated by the incorporated 501c3 has full visibility into who else a user messages and when. This is not good for privacy.
What the non-low-value users are generally looking for is the option to not opt-in to discard anonymity with any potentially involved third parties such as server operators and network operators, and left at the discretion of the users solely.
Other systems have already solved this. One user can be not anonymous while another can choose to not opt-in to not be anonymous.
The users still know who the user on the other side is.
Federation between instances is nice, but it's not necessary for the Fediverse to deliver freedom from Big Tech censorship.
Even in the extreme, theoretical case of full defederation you could just browse your communities by having a sperate account on every relevant server using a multi-account client.
It also reduces the impact if you lose an account: Since they are all single-purpose, you can easily create a new one replacing the one you lost.
Federation was supposed to be the key to ActivityPub revolution until Mastodon blew up and got flooded by legitimate non-Western contents. Then everything became "optional" and "discretion" became important. That also caused stats fetch from Misskey instances to mysteriously stop functioning, despite the main Misskey.io instance now having 4.25x more posts from just 15% less users compared to the official mastodon.social instance and therefore must be a very important part of the Fediverse.
(or 20x more statuses and 2.5x more users relative to baraag, FWIW)
Or you could use Nostr, where there is no “account” and you simply republish all your content at whatever relays allow it. If your identity is banned from one relay, people can still get your content from others, and the identity never needs to change.
Yeah but communities tend to have a majority shared opinion. And that majority shared sentiment has been embarrassingly wrong about AI.
There are polarized viewpoints... but look at this thread, everyone is taking a shit on anthropic. It is definitely not a fair and balanced diverse set of viewpoints.
I don't give a shit about anthropic nor am I taking any sides here. It's just HN commenters have literally been delusional calling AI stochastic parrots at a time where it was solving problems and talking to you like a human in front of our very eyes. When I see people consistently trash dario for being wrong on this topic... I'm seriously asking how do you guys know? And how do you expect me to believe you when practically all of HN has been wrong about AI on everything.
That’s a convenient fallacy and I agree it may be true.
But group think and majority opinions and mob mentality are real phenomena too. The problem is you nor I can’t prove it either way. So from a technical standpoint we are at a stalemate in terms of who is right and who is wrong.
I will say this, any reasonable person who’s been around HN threads can know through vibes that the majority opinions on AI among HN commenters has been violently wrong. The reasoning behind why is easy. It’s because HN is made up of software engineers and AI is poised to eat software engineers alive first. It’s eating up our identities in front of our eyes and the only was forward for most people is to lie to themselves and side with the more rosy future prediction which is also the less probable outcome.
It is a standard corporate register. If you are an employee responsible for communication at an organization, you must either write like this or take ownership of your work and accept some creative risk.
... However, you often don't receive anything in return for taking that risk, so you end up producing standard corporate PR content.
> ... a project devoted to free speech as such shouldn't be associated with a political, ideological group that favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another
Just think this through: Since its beginning, the Tor Project has heavily relied on US government funds.
The U.S. government trivially favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another. That is not a bad thing. Just ask them about Al-Qaeda.
It would be an unlikely luxury if all of one's donors were ideologically aligned with one's project. Now, some people want every important employee of every donor organization (or just Mullvad?) to be ideologically aligned as well.
This becomes more complex the further down the relationship tree you go.
The whole current PR campaign (it at least feels like a campaign) against Mullvad rests on absurd double standards as a method.
Problematic opinions at the top of Apple, Google, Microsoft? That's all fine. Problematic opinions at the top of some dissident tool? Sin! If they are not heaven they are hell! We must never stop pushing.
You don't deny that if a donor is ideologically oriented, then there is a danger that it will pressure Tor to engage in censorship. I assume that is because you know you don't have any good arguments that this would not happen, just that it is difficult to avoid having ideologically-oriented donors.
I am curious: Why would you assume that I am intellectually dishonest? Why not assume good faith?
As for the actual argument: There are no ideology-free actors. Therefore, the best way for an organization to become more independent is to reduce its reliance on a single source (or cluster) of funding by diversifying its financial backing.
The more backers who are not closely aligned between each other, the more independent the organization is. Conversely, the more the backers share the same alignment, the more they tend to act similarly, reducing the benefit of the split.
I do not know that person, but her views in the linked video seem great and vastly underrepresented in the current media landscape.
She lists many valid AI risks, discounts the doomsday PR and instead talks about the accountability gap that current AI frontier companies profit from.
I'm sure her Twitter timeline is awful, as you noted. But do you have thoughts on the arguments she presents in the linked video?
edit: I think she is absolutely right about the percentage risk numbers. Apparently, those numbers are not particularly meaningful beyond their functional use of communicating a sense of urgency. I think p(doom) is very similar to the Cold War doomsday clock. An instrument of irresponsible, fearbased PR.
> Does announcing a spying operation mean that it is no longer spying?
Well, kind of, yeah; the dictionary definition of spying requires secrecy and lack of consent.
> to secretly collect and report information about the activities of another country or organization[0]
The only real debate is whether or not having a clause tucked away in a EULA that few people read makes it a secret. If Anthropic had a big flashing red banner that said "FYI we automatically flag and review any conversations about illegal things!!" on the front page nobody would call it spying.
Eh. Both Superpowers knew that they were spying on each other all the time, and that was still considered to be spying. But feel free to replace the word "spying" with the phrase "clandestine largely-automated mass surveillance" if it makes you more comfortable.
> ...and lack of consent.
Given
* the fact that the contracts one is required to "agree" to in order to use most services are often novella-length or longer, and frequently include by reference other contracts of similar length
* that nearly all contracts like this have a clause where not only does the powerful party reserve the -very frequently-exercised- right to change the terms of the contract without any prior notice, but said party presumes that you automatically accept the rewritten contract and gives you no option to negotiate
I'd argue that the real situation on the ground -in the US, at least- is that "consumers" have consented to approximately zero of the contracts that -despite that lack of consent- legally bind them.
I would call it spying in this sense at a minimum if individual people don't know whether their conversations were stored or disclosed in a way they don't want. For example, suppose someone said "we will monitor the activities of 10% of people". You don't know if you're in that 10% or not, but I would still want to call that spying.
A less central case would be when you clearly do know about the activity but you can't quite see the details, like with behavioral ad targeting or something. It feels pretty normal to me to call that spying even if it's disclosed to everyone and certainly happens to everyone, but it's also a less central example of the concept.
Anthropic could put a big flashing warning text at the top of every chat that says “We are spying on you and will report anything scary to the police!” and it would not make any difference in this case.
You can call it anything you like, but only the legal definitions matter for the legal case.
After working on several court cases about surveillance activities, I'm definitely aware that whether I call something spying or not has little relationship to whether courts will think it's legal.
> If Anthropic had a big flashing red banner that said "FYI we automatically flag and review any conversations about illegal things!!" on the front page nobody would call it spying.
If you change the situation then yes you can in fact change our responses. The problem is you then are no longer talking about the original situation.
It also bears mentioning that providing a dictionary link to “spying” is pretty patronizing/passive aggressive. On par with sending a basic Wikipedia page. You didn’t even bother to post the definition you want to apply.
No one claimed any case would be "thrown out for spying." The legal definition of spying is also not particularly relevant to the argument in the initial comment.
The initial comment instead questioned how someone could be accused of making a threat if they did not realize anyone would read their private content. You probably also can not insult someone with a statement you never expected anyone but you will ever read.
> Presumably, Anthropic did the spying and the reporting.
You don’t need to presume. Anthropic reported it.
“Spying” as a legal concept has a definition that does not apply here. You could say they were “spying” in the sense that they read someone’s input, but that’s literally what they said they were going to do in the agreement when the person signed up.
So I responded to the question about the case being thrown out for “spying” by trying to show that the word doesn’t apply in the legal sense. If you sign up for a service that says “Hey we’re going to monitor your chats and might report things to the authorities” and then they monitor your chats and report things to the authorities, you should not expect the case to be thrown out for “spying”.
There is no spying by any definition. It's a chatbot, not a diary. Anthropic is expected to read the message and respond to it in some way. If you sent an email to a colleague threatening violence, you would not be surprised to find out it was reported.
"Anthropic" does not read messages, it's an abstract entity involving many humans and computers, so let's be specific wherever possible.
> and respond to it in some way.
The computer is supposed to respond in a specific way that doesn't involve humans. Any reading/actions by humans is entirely separate and not expected.
> If you sent an email to a colleague threatening violence, you would not be surprised to find out it was reported.
Yeah it’s like someone going through your email drafts. I keep seeing people using examples that are clearly not analogous. If I send something to a person or say it out loud knowingly to a person it changes the situation entirely. I am aware of others, I am aware I sent it to be received and read. That is clearly not what happened here.
> In order to turn the address book on a device into a social graph for Signal, the Signal client needs to be able to determine which of the device’s contacts are Signal users. [...] The obvious problem with this method is that the hash of a user identifier can almost always be inverted. [...] This method of contact discovery isn’t ideal because of these shortcomings, but at the very least the Signal service’s design does not depend on knowledge of a user’s social graph in order to function.
Src.: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
edit: Also, Signal is not peer-to-peer. It is a centralized, client-server architecture.
reply