I really think you have got a point, I'd add however that reading is more cognitive effort than watching a video, at a basic level (that is, information in the text or video put aside).
Just see how hard it is to read more than a few paragraphs when tired before bed vs. how hard it is to watch something in the same state.
I think this gets added to the point you are making about reading skills declining.
That's a pretty impressive way to imagine people's motivations.
The likelihood of a non-profit outfit building open source software being driven by a warped sense of justice and the goal of making people miserable rather than, say, trying to make sure they can continue their stated mission and ensure publishers keep agreeing to digital book lending is pretty bold. But sure, why not.
>The likelihood of a non-profit outfit building open source software being driven by a warped sense of justice
Because those people are, after all, inhuman robots with no connection to humanity? In fact, I'd say that with any group of humans, each additional human makes this more likely, simply because this sort of attitude easily overrides the less-aggressive attitudes of those who don't agree with it.
You seem to disagree because it would be uncomfortable if I were correct, and you'd much rather it be true that I'm wrong.
>trying to make sure they can continue their stated mission
What person over the age of about 5 thinks that because an organization starts with a particular mission that, even a few years in, still strongly pursue it?
2. The band sold a total of $4k in tickets. If tickets were $10 then that’s 400 tickets. So roughly 10 people per show.
3. They apparently own their own van.
4. They slept on people’s floors and couches.
5. They apparently didn’t eat or drink.
6. They didn’t insure the tour or their gear.
7. There was no contingency for emergencies.
8. They presumably booked the tour themselves and self manage (which might explain why they are playing to ten people at a time)
9. According to Wikipedia the band has five members.
10. Their 37 day tour grossed $8598 with costs of $3096.
And still, their take for the tour was $5502. For a 37 day tour. For a band with five members.
That’s a grand total of $30 a day.
So in reality this tour cost them whatever their daily living costs are, less $30.
I don’t know what living costs are like in Milwaukee - nor what they were like in 2014 - but let’s assume that the band members are all single and happy to live a relatively basic life and need $30,000 each per year to cover their costs.
That’s $82 a day each. So between them to survive 37 days they need a total of $15170
So they lost $10k on this tour.
They would have been better off giving 1000 people $10 to buy their album on bandcamp.
Matrix also keeps your message on the server. Except you can run your own server. And the messages are end to end encrypted. And you can keep a proper backup of the keys.
Granted it can be clunky at times, but the properties are there and decentralised end to end encrypted messaging is quite and incredible thing. (Yes, Matrix nerds, it's not messaging per se it's really state replication, I know :))
As you alluded to, Matrix has really horrible UX. Telegram is meant to be easy for the many to use: finding content in chats or even globally across public channels for example is intuitive and snappy because their server does the heavy lifting. That's a huge sell for many, myself included.
My Matrix messages are, I presume, not encrypted, because every device I have prompts me to sign this device's keys with the keys of another device (which doesn't exist) and the option to reset the encryption keys and lose access to old messages doesn't work either (it just crashes Element).
Ah right. Yeah I keep forgetting that there are other clients beside the ones by Element because none which I initially tried were as fully featured as the Element ones.
Cryptography is nightmare magic math that cares about the color of the pencil you write it with.
It's not enough you know how to design a cipher that is actually secure, you need to know how to implement it so that the calculator you run it on consumes exactly the right amount of time, and in some cases power, per operation.
Then you need to know how to use the primitives together, their modes of operation, and then you get to business, designing protocols. And 10% of your code is calling the libraries that handle all that stuff above, 90% is key management.
There's a good amount of misuse resistant libraries available, but Nikolai was too proud to not look into how the experts do this, and he failed even with trivial stuff: He went with SHA-1 instead of SHA-256. He didn't implement proper fingerprints. His protocol wasn't IND-CCA secure. He went with weird AES-IGE instead of AES-GCM which is best practice. He used the weird nonces with the FF-DH, instead of going with more robust stuff like x25519.
One thing you learn early in academia, is that expertise is very narrow. I bet he knows a lot about geometry. Maybe even quite a bit about math in general. But it's clear he doesn't know enough to design cryptographic protocols. The cobbler should have stuck to his last.
EDIT, to add, the real work with cryptographic protocols starts with designing everyday things that seem easy on the paper, with cryptographic assurance. Take group management that the server isn't controlling.
For Telegram it's a few boolean flags for admin status and then it's down to writing the code that removes the user from the group and prevents them from fetching group's messages.
This is ultimately what separates the good from the bad, figuring out how to accomplish things with cryptography that first seem almost impossible to do.
Sure, but cryptography is its own subfield of advanced math (and also a bunch of more CS and UX based implementation challenges like avoiding side channels).
That's it. The article could be just that. You log back in and all your messages are there without you having to provide a secret or allow access to some specific backup? Your data just lives on the server. The only thing preventing anyone from accessing it is the goodwill of the people running the server.
Not true. Secret chats only live on a device where you started it. Regular people may not use them (their problem), but these are common for business-critical chats in my circles.
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.