It’s curious that you claim privacy and anonymity are clearly differentiable but didn’t bother to define either of them. Is your claim accurate? We have no idea, because we don’t know what you’re talking about.

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Corey Doctorow already covered the basics, and two of those authors did so decades ago. Why are you asking this question now? What is it that you want to hear that they didn’t already say? Or are you asking us whether we’ve read those authors?

You’re the one who brought in a personal political view, and basic history realize your claim, which is why you didn’t actually cite any.

I mean, what’s a good example of cancer culture? If some white guy says something horribly racist, and then he loses an election, he complains about cancel culture. But that’s a good thing, because we don’t want racist bastards in office. Of course he doesn’t see it that way. So he looks for some new term to describe the phenomenon, some way to make himself a victim.

The term itself was created by right wing people who decided to deploy it against those they didn’t favor, as an excuse to justify their own bigotry, but the idea of public shaming and goes back centuries if not millennia. Quite naturally, the establishment has a strong interest in public shaming if it will keep them around longer.

You can do DNS in multiple ways. The question is what you try to do, or what your software tries to do.

Joke’s on you. Many of us stopped buying TVs years ago.

Of course he keeps his credit card number and such private. So he cares about privacy.

What you are talking about is related to privacy, but about others’ actions. How can companies and governments abuse us by spying on us? That is where we see interesting things. If I wanna fix my car with a $50 part but it’s off brand so I gotta pay $500 instead, that’s not cool. If McDonald’s charges me more for a Big Mac right after pay day, that’s messed up. If the grocery store charges more for a box of eggs because their ID system knows the customer is poor, that’s messed up. And this is the present and future. These examples are all about privacy, control, and equality.

You know corruption is there somehow. Revolving doors, friends of friends, that kinda stuff is unavoidable. We can try to limit the effects, but it will never totally go away.

It sounds like you have isolated yourself. That is a choice you made, that you can change in the future.

Also, words matter. Meaning matters. You might die alone many decades from now, but almost certainly you won’t be executed. When you’re feeling down and you intentionally choose words that are false, you’re feeling your own state of mind.

I think we should be precise. The badness began before generative AI. Generative AI makes things worse because now you are less sure when you’re looking at total junk, but the junk ratio itself doesn’t depend on that.

What you talking about as apathy, that’s not what’s happening. Google has 90% or more of the search market because it’s the default, because it pays to be the default, even when it’s worse than alternatives. The only people who are actually apathetic are the ones who know that alternative exist, are relatively easy to switch to, are superior, and still don’t. That’s not the majority of users.

I used to enjoy watching, but after you take a few years off, it’s not something you’d casually pick back up.

I think that’s a matter of perspective. IMO it didn’t work, it was broken, that’s why we’re even talking about it.

Nope, sorry. That technical hurdle is easily solved. In reality, this is about advertising and snooping.

They can do that anyway. It’s called credit.

Because cash doesn’t solve the problem. If the stores themselves rely on computers, and they do, it doesn’t matter what’s in your wallet. (In other words, you need more than just cash to have a reliable alternative. It’s certainly possible to do so.)

Also, some of the big problems were in airports and hospitals where payment was not the serious concern.

Sometimes people in OP’s situation don’t say too much information because they don’t want to jeopardize their professional relationship with the other party.

There’s only a reasonable expectation of privacy in private. As the courts have ruled many times, it’s something is visible from the street or from the air, it’s probably not private.

I think you were doing all right until you got to the end, where you went into hardcore conspiracy theory mode. But even at the beginning, you were oversimplifying, which made your analysis weak. In reality, there are many different attackers willing to spend different amounts of time and money. When we take steps to improve security, we discourage some of those attackers even if we don’t stop them all.

That all depends on your setup. If your website is on a VPS, why are you adding the extra security? Are you adding extra security? I think one of the points is that you’re taking away security.

And if you need firewall rules, maybe you should put the firewall rules on your firewall. Why would you rely on someone else’s firewall?

Prosody claims to support Message Archive Management and HTTP file sharing, sounds like the feature you want, or at least it is close.

Yes, precisely. They built a useful feature and are now trying to wall off the garden. Enshittification.