RE: 28th Feb 2025 - Diabolical Tools For Freedom
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This ICP thing is interesting, although I have some trouble understanding how it works. The ICP feels my pain.
IMG source - tenor.com - Shaggy 2 Dope of the Insane Clown Posse (ICP) has always shared my lack of understanding
"i am using it daily..."
I didn't see any specific apps or platforms cited, although they didn't mention AI markets. Is that how you're using it?
I appreciate you pinging me in. The idea of sovereign data, having AI cans that can be out there being paid to provide services, whether that's a game, access to media, or other content, is attractive. I was concerned that Dominic in the first video seemed unaware of the surveillance that phones and etc. conduct, and he seemed cavalier about using biometric data to access ICP when that data has been intercepted by spooks, which means they could spoof as him and gain access to his ICP accounts and assets, of which he seemed oblivious. The last video claims ICP doesn't need cybersecurity. Such claims make me check my wallet is still in my pocket, TBH.
I like that they intend to integrate access to other blockchain assets. I am dubious of the claim that they're creating a 'sovereign' internet. They can make nodes, and they can make software, but they don't actually have the wires, the cables, the satellites that transmit the data, and this oversight is a security risk, because the owners of those cables and satellites can decide to not permit encrypted data to be transmitted on their property at any time.
ICP does not have a sovereign internet because it relies on that permission, and it appears to not acknowledge this fact, which is concerning. These security issues are not my imagination, and the fact that our devices are NSA keyloggers needs to be addressed if we're going to be able to have sovereignty online. If I'm missing something I'd appreciate being set straight.
thanks for your take and first impressions. your brain never fails!
the way authenticating works on icp is that the passkey is saved in that ominous security chip in modern smartphones and computers. what's it called again? TPM?
you authenticate your access to icp the same way you authenticate for using your phone or computer. whether you use biometrics is up to you. a pin works fine. this means it is the combination of your saved passkey inside the TPM and your unlocking of it that gives you access. which in effect means somebody would need to steal your physical machine and know your pin to get into your icp. there is also the seed phrase. if it is not locked you could theoretically use it to log in from a new device, override the old seed phrase and lock the original owner out.
i really "like" your point about the infrastructure. i merely thouht about the internet service providers, but i guess the cables are part of that. were we to somehow build a paralellel internet infrastructure in a decentralized manner in the future this problem would be solved right? haven't people already started developing a peer to peer internet architecture? i thought i remembered hearing something like that many years ago.
let me be naive for a bit here: what about sovereign hardware? i am with you in that everything is backdoor-ed anyway, but wouldn't non backdoored devices be conceivable by more "independent" companies? things like fairphone, etc.? would just be another reason to ditch big tech and use hard and software that is audited and open source.
you make some real great points here. but then replacing the centralized cloud as step one would already be a massive gain, seeing that all points you mentioned also apply to the very platform we are using right now?
as for using it daily, there are dexes completely onchain that work like a charm. openchat is a private messaging app like telegram but cannot be turned off by a single point of central authority, it is a dao and therefore community owned. theoretically only he network majority could vote to discontinue it, which again seems to be the same problem like on here: if enough money gets together to collude, any decision can be overwritten.
it's funny how decentralization demands decentralization to keep on being decentralized.
you can check out dapps on internetcomputer.org
i will keep your points in mind and am thinking of starting a community on openchat or even build a forum on icp where more geeks get together trying to find the dirt on it. your points have been the best and only logical counter icp arguments i have come across this far. as usual all the rest of the contra points are propaganda and disingenuous garbage.
thanks man, i appreciate your take immensely.
blessings!
Yes, if we could secure it. Qortal and Beechat have been working to create such mechanisms, and I recall back in the 90's Cult of the Dead Cow made some noise about using obsolete satellite TV dishes to transmit tight band microwave comms, but ran into line of sight limitations they never mentioned overcoming, and then they sorta quit posting.
Absolutely. OSH is what we need. I have long noted that for my purposes I don't need 7nm architecture, but would be happy with chips the size of toasters if I could be confident they were secure. Tools like Pinephone, Abovephone, and Brax3 phone, that all either repurpose commercial hardware with non-commercial OS and software (which I don't trust), or open source hardware altogether (which is the minimum I find trustworthy) all seek to create secure comms, and there are ARM and other proprietary protocols and hardware that claim to not be backdoored.
They do. I don't invest in crypto, don't use Hive for money, and don't have online accounts that can't be hacked because they don't exist. Can't steal my login data if there isn't any to steal. I consider my devices keyloggers, and all my comms compromised, and don't bother with encryption because if my device is hardware backdoored the encryption will be compromised before I can even apply it. Lesser threats than state actors, script kiddies and the like, exist, but there isn't much to take from me so I'm not an attractive target. They'll spend their time social engineering access to rich people's accounts - or that's what I would do if I was them.
I am always interested in free speech and comms. I suspect when things are shut down, it won't necessarily be everything at once. (((They))) don't seem to work that way, although that's not a statistically rigorous statement, but more of a hunch or suspicion.
I'm happy to provide useful criticism. Keep me in the loop please!
you "prompted" me to look into TPMs yesterday. which is funny cause i hardly know anything about coding.
did learn a few things though, namely that both hackers and Stallmann approve of them. and they generally are the most paranoid about being hacked.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NFQ22SBlejk&pp=ygUHY2NjIHRwbQ%3D%3D
skip the demo, just the beginning and later parts are relevant.
i really do not tend to be on the paranoid side because it shifts my spiritual balance towards what i fear, which in essence may be all these backdoors are supposed to sow: fear and insecurity.
i am quite happy to be on the lookout for open source hard- and software you mentioned, as well as that internet infrastructure. knowing now there are still points of failure in the communications pathways make me better equipped to use things like icp.
iam mighty excited to see how they have overcome tremendous technical obstacles in 10 years r&d. but while we're at it,many of the large team have backgrounds in ibm, google and cryptography companies.
will it be the new cage? if so i see it way more friendly than a world where centralized ai runs on some cloud we have neither control nor certainty over. on blockchain at least we can confirm when our model has been accessed, changed or otherwise messed with.
so in that sense it is like hive, only extended to the full data stack of the internet.
blessings!
Insecurity is a consequence of being alive. Security is always going to be a need we have to address. Being helpless is never the right option. I don't fear things I have taken steps to mitigate. Before I mitigated the threats, I had reason to fear. Now, I don't.
When I lived innawoods in Alaska, the nights were very dark. Twigs snapping in the night would threaten to unleash my bladder, because there were more bears than people and they could go >1000 lbs. I have had bears snuffling at my camp, and believe me when I tell you that is utterly terrifying in the darkness. Pumping up a Coleman white gas lantern and lighting it takes an eternity under those conditions. Eventually I learned that fear was my best buddy, because it convinced me to take action to provide security against actual threats, like hungry bears sniffing at dirty dishes.
Do the dishes. Have a very powerful weapon IN YOUR HAND while you sleep. After I took some reasonable steps to enable me to survive the utterly pitch black nights in hungry bear country, I was able to sleep at night. I didn't sleep like a baby. I slept on a hair trigger, but that was what was reasonable in those circumstances. I never did piss myself, so I consider that a great victory. Fear is good and healthy, as long as you listen carefully to what it has to teach you, and take reasonable actions to secure yourself from the dangers fears inform us about.
It isn't a lack of fear that makes men brave. That's being foolhardy. What makes men brave is doing what has to be done despite being afraid.
i see what you are saying. that was quite the amazing read, thanks for sharing.
just comparing the two situations seems a bit off to me. in your scenario you are dealing with tangible and immediate situations you are in and where you see your life endangered, prompting you to take necessary measures against the bears you encounter daily. totally with you on that. if you are not a zen master you have to deal with this situation the old fashioned way - amping up your defenses and being ready at all times.
what the power structure will and can and could do with the tools they allegedly have reminds me more of the covid madness. something non-tangible and non-immediate used to scare people to herd them around. while many things about it could be real and life impacting, i don't go around worrying about it or going out of my way to somehow evade it because it is counterproductive. the notion that fear is something to be cherished comes from a paradigm we have all grown up in and is the main topic of this transitioning era to whatever ahhaa. but in the meantime it binds our energy and immobilizes us the more we fall for it.
preparation yes, but
paranoia of mind viruses breeds and attracts the exact thing we want to try to avoid. it is best to be at peace with what is and work in our fear emotions rather than leveraging them to an extreme degree. i know that sounds hippy, but there is something to be found there.
consider this:
whether you believe his story about the snake is of course up to you.
if i can come back to your bear example, i don't know about bears but dogs can smell and sense when you are afraid, instantly turning a neutral situation into a potentially dangerous one. not because of the dog but because of the stance we have chosen or become accustomed to take.
ahaha what an exchange of minds this comment section has turned ito. thanks for your input man i shall consider it thoroughly. we would do well to always check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.
blessings!
My point about fear is that it exists for a reason. If we feel fear about some thing, our subconscious mind has realized there is a threat.
When I call fear my best friend, that doesn't mean I'm some kind of adrenaline junky and enjoy being afraid. It means I appreciate the warning, because it enables me to act so mitigate the threat. If where I sleep makes me vulnerable to hungry bears, I can move my camp to where I am not vulnerable to hungry bears, and this mitigates the threat.
That's my point about the dick pics. The security of our devices is not a barrier to spooks. That's the point of the comments on dick pics. Nothing we are doing today secures our devices. They are not secure. If you have your wealth secured by such mechanisms, you are leaving it for spooks to take from you like a little girl leaves cookies for Santa.
Now, Dr. Hawkins points out that we can be overwhelmed by fear, because there are things we can't do anything about. He's wrong. There isn't anything that threatens me I can't secure myself from. The US government has tanks and planes and nukes, but it can't force me to make my possessions as easy to steal as dick pics on a phone.
There isn't any threat I can't mitigate. When I act reasonably to mitigate threats, my unreasonable fear of them goes away. I can't eliminate all threats. Some level of fear is reasonable. This is the fact of being alive, and I can rationally understand threats and security to attain to a level of fear that is optimal for me. This is clearly not a level of fear that causes me to hide in darkness and soak my pants, but neither is it utter nonchalance.
Hawkins says "We have survived despite our fear, but not because of it." and that is absolutely false. Fearless things are food that die without reproducing. We survive because of our good friend fear, and our reasonable action based on it's warnings.
I actually have a pretty good relationship with bears. I am a hunter. As you said, dogs smell your fear. Bears smell even better than do dogs, and when they encounter me they don't smell fear. They smell the excitement of the predator that sees his prey. When bears, cougars, and such physical threats encounter me innawoods, they run for their lives, because they are rightly afraid of me, because I am the alpha predator innawoods.
Their terror of me is entirely reasonable, and they take the exactly appropriate action to secure themselves from the threat I am.
That is what we should do when it comes to similar threats, like spooks. We should consider the threats and take action to secure ourselves from those threats. Logging in is not security from the threat or there would not be a penis enthusiast with >16M dick pics.
The spooks having access to our devices and all our financial information is a threat. It is the reaction of a cow in a pasture to be utterly unfearless in the presence of alpha predators. That cow is going to be eaten. It's evolved to fear wolves, and has learned to trust the farmer that takes care of it and feeds it every day, but it is the farmer that will kill it, not wolves.
We need to not be tax cattle or we will be harvested for our tasty flesh - our wealth and property - if we put our trust in the spooks. I don't have online accounts and that completely secures me from spooks stealing money from my online accounts. I don't have any tasty flesh for them to eat.
If we are going to have confidence in our security, we have to have security to be confident in, and not be tax cattle fattening up for the farmers. It is demonstrable that the extant security mechanisms and communications are no impediment to spooks. That's what the dick pics prove. So the ICP devs using those mechanisms to secure their network shows that they are tax cattle, fattening for the farmers.
I don't want to invest in sating the hunger of my predators. Let's make something that is actually secure. Let's become the alpha predators in our habitat, so the spooks run from us.
Edit: I listened to Hawkins' description of his encounter with a rattlesnake, and I don't think his love for the snake was quite what he thought it was for the snake. Snakes are predators. If a mouse feels love for them the snake will kill and eat the mouse. What the snake wanted from Hawkins was to not be stepped on, and when Hawkins retreated from the snake without stepping on it, that was what saved them both from violence that was a threat to both of them.
The snake will not want to bite you if you are retreating from stepping on them because then you will do everything in your power to kill that damn snake! It could give a rat's ass whether you are retreating from stepping on it out of love or out of fear, as long as you retreat. If you love the snake and try to pet it, it will bite you, even though it can't swallow you, because your rotting corpse will draw vermin it can swallow.
It isn't woo that secures us from threats. Blackberry brambles are vicious tangles that kill animals that get tangled up in them. Even though blackberry brambles don't have teeth and swallow those dead animals, they feed on them when they rot into the soil. Fear isn't the enemy. It is our friend. We need to listen to our friend's warnings and take reasonable actions, like retreating from the snake, or staying out of the blackberry bramble. We can also eliminate the threats, by killing the snake in our cabin, and cutting the bramble in our garden, and when we are in those circumstances, that's what is reasonable to do.
What is the right thing to do about spooks hacking our devices? It is to have devices they do not have hardware backdoors into, use them on networks they do not own and cannot censor at their sole option and whim, and to transact in currency they cannot steal. What ICP is doing is fattening up for their farmers.
we really seem to have a different outlook on what life is and on its workings behind the scenes, which i cherish. is it fair to state you believe that you control your own life and destiny? that you have a free will? I am really not so sure anymore. I came from that mindset but I have long started to doubt we can make and shove things around, rather it seems the intellect's way of taking credit for things that turned out in our favor. I am leaning towards riding energetic waves rather than paddling upstream with force.
The hallucination of separation lies at the core of it all, but it looks oh so reasonable to mostly everyone in our society. Guess that is why psychedelics have shaken me up immensely 2 decades ago - they made experiential the unthinkable. And I draw much of my wisdom from those states where it became glaringly obvious that we are not in control of anything but rather observing ourselves doing things, thinking in our rational mind afterwards that we decided. The universe shuffles and adapts constantly and perfectly to what we see ourselves doing, nothing is ever out of place. But we cannot see that in our regular mode of existence because of all the mythology programming we grew up under.
Not sure that makes sense to you but it seemed relevant to state it ahahah. Do you draw from other states of consciousness also? Maybe from a time in the woods, doesn't have to involve psychedelics. I am curious if you ever stepped outside the "problem solving" mode of the mind our society runs on. It would help me better grasp your take.
The main issue I have seen in all my years of crypto is that money buys influence, and a lot of money buys lots of influence. Larger influence consolidates more rapidly, leading to centralization and the fattening as you have called it.
It would therefore be wise to build something where merit counts, not initial investment. Something where money cannot be used to acquire more artificial stake.
The promise of Hive was that in a way, because it allows people to blog and earn by proof-of-brain, but then the whole thing is set in an environment of centralized influence of few rich players it seems, like everywhere else in crypto. Any big player can slowly buy up all the influence and the whole network suffers from it.
Are networks you idealize in existence already? Do you even see a way to take part in online communications if you say that the infrastructure itself can be used to cancel any transaction and interaction? If you say there is no point to anything of the sort today, then that comes back to a worldview that may dress in reasonableness while overlooking fundamental relationships of who we think we are, where we are and with whom we are.
I don't like your ICP take and I thank you for it ahahahaha. I was after the catch and you have given a good case I can use to further my understanding, thanks man!
That is my experience of my existence. While I can speculate - I cannot know - of gods or God that can move me like a pawn, such does not inform my experience of my life. My experience is that I turn left when I choose to turn left, help little old ladies cross the street when I choose to help little old ladies cross the street, and hoard my treasure when I choose to hoard my treasure.
The environment in which I act is not me, and I do not control that environment, except by means I am able to employ to affect my environment. Such means as I have available to me are limited by a myriad variety of factors, and my capacity to resolve such factors is limited as well, but the reasonable attainment of quality of life is a reasonable goal, and spending every waking moment feverishly learning about every one of the factors affecting me isn't the prospect of a life well lived.
I have chosen to serve the community I am in and enjoy the gratitude of my community, and this seems to be nominal to my needs and provide me a higher quality of life than is acceptable to me. Therefore I seem to be performing reasonably well at attaining reasonable goals, and seek to continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
Certainly that is potential to us, but because we know it is potential to us, we can also choose not to do it. We do not control anything but us. Keeping that in mind informs our ability to reasonably act. We must react to our environment we do not control, and unreasonably believing we control things we do not causes us to misunderstand ourselves and our world. What often causes us to believe things that are not factually correct is hubris, and humility is the source of factual understanding.
Humility is not as simple as it appears, because as Ben Franklin once wrote in a letter to his son, 'should I believe I have achieved humility, I would be proud of it.' Therefore, we must accommodate ourselves to a level of failure to achieve what we intend, because we are imperfect even at knowing we are imperfect, at humbly accepting who and what we really are.
I do not say this. I do say we should understand the flaws of extant mechanisms and undertake to not incorporate them into systems we adopt. I do adopt the mechanism of goodwill in my local community and this seems to me to be the best mechanism available for a variety of reasons. I am not without a need for other mechanisms, and that may be because other mechanisms are necessary, or because I am imperfect at adopting goodwill, or both, or more reasons I have not ascertained. I can only do the best I can.
But goodwill is indeed merit. It cannot be purchased by fraudulent means, but can be purchased at fair value. If I give someone $100 I may receive equal or greater value of goodwill in return, depending on the character of the person I give the money to. Therefore goodwill isn't merely mathematical reciprocity, but requires judgment and depends on character, and this fact has been very useful to me, because I have learned to seek to interact with people of good character, which has greatly improved my quality of life by enabling me to enjoy good company.
I am interested in extending my interactions with people afield, but only folks of nominal character to be worthy of goodwill. Some people do not merit entering into community with, and Woelfchen has demonstrated utterly unreasonable behaviour when confronted with failure to simply comply with their demands, and I will maintain my security as informed by such experience as I have. Insofar as they are members of a community, I will refrain from joining that community, until and unless they change their behaviour, which does not look likely at this time. I would recommend that folks gain familiarity with the reasons for this before entering into such community, but I am no one's mother and will not tell anyone what to do. I only control me, and will do so while I live, granting to others that same sovereignty, and the ability to learn from their mistakes if they do not listen to advice of those with experience.
I am glad you can avail reason, and that reason enables you to consider whether to invest in a particular community or refrain. ICP has some good features, but it also has endemic susceptibility to seizure by it's enemies, and this suggests that simply adopting it as is will not be a profitable endeavor beyond the fattening. Since I cannot predict when the harvest is going to happen, I can only choose not to grow fat in the fields of farmers.
that makes your view on life and yourself in the world plain and clearly understandable to me.
you have my gratitude for the time and energy you spent to relay your perspective.
may goodwill people and circumstances cross your path man!
man you keep me on my toes, need to do more research now.
how about "the dark web"? how is it things like that are allowed to pass? isn't it all using the same infrastructure right now?
First, there's a clause in most contracts it's good to keep in mind, that failure to enforce something isn't a guarantee it won't be enforced in the future. Second, when you want to get prey to be in position to easily take them, hunters often use delicious bait. Finally, while the extant relatively sovereign polities exist and some competition is undertaken between them, many despicable means are employed by criminal spooks. These criminal organizations have uses for decentralized communications, cryptography, and all manner of privacy enhancing tools, such as Tor, and all of these things are products of government research. When it's time to end these tools' availability to the public, that availability will end. Little is easier than censoring data, and nothing harder needs to be done to end it.
Yes, it is the same physical infrastructure that transmits data on the dark web that transmits data on the clear net.
it always comes down to living with the world somehow and what we consent to. there is always the route of an isolated hut in the forest :)
so, put proactively: we would be wise to double check where and how we give consent. anyone who "applies" for a universal basic income by the "state" has zero grounds to reject their imposing of the conditions they then formulate.
my trust in the universe exceeds all manner of manmade scares, if "god" decides to open the floodgates again i will take it as it is and be ok with it even if this body dies. but being paranoid of all potential scenarios is not helpful, it freezes us where we are right now.
if i were still an atheist, i would be scared shitless in these manic times.
thanks dude!!!
That is at best a temporary refuge. I have some caches innawoods. They are only temporary, not permanent, because I will die alone without issue or being survived by my posterity if I live innawoods alone.
We must have society, a community that is secure, to win. I live in a community today that I serve because that community serves me. I can hardly choke down my coffee this morning because I am still so full from the delicious meal a neighbor fed me last night. This local community is my security from all threats that face me. There are limits to that security and I need to be aware of them, and reasonably fear them at all times.
My goal is not to live without fear, but to live with reasonable fear a reasonable life, and die a reasonable death, leaving behind a reasonable posterity with a reasonable chance at reproducing successfully themselves. More than that is not a reasonable goal, and neither is less.
A reasonable store of wealth and means of transacting should be able to be adopted by such local community, because that is real and a primary source of security and the blessings of civilization on the ground. I transact in goodwill today. It can't be factory backdoored by spooks, rot into the ground to feed them, and they can't swallow it without swallowing the local community. In consideration of a mechanism capable of expanding from our locales, and extending these local transactions, we must be reasonable in considering the threats the wider world presents, and seek only reasonable benefits from such mechanism.
If you are fearless, you are food. You should have some reasonable level of fear, but being scared shitless means you have not applied reasonable mitigations to threats you face.
i love your take on community, THAT is indeed something real and tangible. "reasonable" is the way to go, As I am continually learning this life: Balance is everything.
thanks