You realize that Bitcoin is traceable, right? You kinda picked the wrong crypto to use as an example. Unless you’re completely in the Bitcoin system and never connect to any outside system or interact with anyone who interacts with an outside system or interact with anyone who interacts with someone who interacts with an outside system or so on (it’s not quite ad infinitum), you are most likely traceable. Tools like Chainalysis have been used by governments for almost a decade.

Your other points aren’t really valid if you ever want to convert Bitcoin to something that isn’t Bitcoin. I’m not aware of complete supply chains and grids that exist solely on Bitcoin (or any combination of crypto for that matter) so things like having control of your money, needing ID, and trusting centralized entities (sure, exchanges plural) are a huge part of Bitcoin.

It doesn’t sound like you have a good grasp on the differences between this case and Ross Ulbricht.

I wasn’t aware Silk Road was taken down via FISA. I’ve read all of the long form accounts of it that I’m aware of and I don’t remember FISA being mentioned at all. Can you share a source?

The Supreme Court has already ruled the police have no duty to protect. I highly doubt there will be a ruling in favor of the kids. If there is one, there’s absolutely no fucking way it stands on appeal in the Fifth Circuit or Supreme Court.

This seems like the natural extension of Telemarketers

You very clearly did not process either one of my comments. Have fun with that!

I think that’s a fantastic description of the Israeli colonizers!

Edit: very important to note that not all Jews are Israeli, not all Israelis are Jews or colonizers, and not all Palestinians are Muslim or Hamas.

Edit edit: it’s kinda fucking stupid that I have to pull a “not all…” because that’s really fucking dumb with any discourse. It shows just how loaded this conversation is and how difficult it is to call out the problem, Zionist colonizers, without being misinterpreted eg assumed antisemitism

throwing paint and writing slogans on the homes of Jews is antisemitism

This is a very, very dangerous idea to perpetuate. Saying any act of protest against Jewish people, whether or not it’s related to their religion or heritage, is antisemitic means we cannot criticize Jewish people for valid reasons unrelated to their religion or heritage. Misguided or not, it does not seem that these protestors were attacking them because they are Jewish but rather because they are Zionist and just happen to be Jewish. A natural extension of this idea is that protesting the rampant fraud from previous Netanyahu terms would make me antisemitic which is patently false.

To quote you, I’m not sure we read the same article if you think the homes were vandalized because the occupants are Jewish.

This whole conversation is super fraught with nuance.

As soon as I read about the shoe cell modem, I thought Eudaemons. It’s rad Ars called that out too!

If you’re writing a grant illustrating its military applications I don’t really care what else you want to use it for. Looks like we disagree about intention so have fun with that.

Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.

If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
• The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
• The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link

Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.

For more color, check out Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus and her guest Behind the Bastards episode about Major League Eating.

I agree with you. I think the responses to your comment are missing a few key points

• Calling an Apple product something weird with “i” or “Apple” is Jobsian slavish devotion to branding
• Under Tim Cook, innovation has arguably stagnated (see comparisons to Ballmer
• Cook has not leveraged the value of Apple’s innovation successfully eg Apple Silicon being limited to Apple devices vs PowerPC days, the Vision Pro being horrible, the recent hilarious iPad creativity crusher ad.
• A company with Apple’s market cap can do dumb shit and still appear valuable just because they have Apple’s market cap.

I read OP as “names are dumb and this is just Apple trying to be different in the same way everyone else is.” I think all of that is true and I think it’s valid criticism of the product. My last point about Apple’s value is probably the most important. They can do a lot of dumb shit before it matters.

I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone call Kublai Khan “rock” before.

That’s just Mitnick’s over-inflated ego and constant media presence. The punishment he received was not commensurate to his crimes, giving him reasonable support. Everything else is just his hype game.