A week after I started doing OSINT research, I realized how much very personal data I had online. Much more than I wanted. Years ago I went down the privacy rabbit hole and realized how bad all of this was. And that was before it took off around 2019 and really ramped up a year ago.
It's not uncommon, but always disappointing to me, to see how out of touch most HN folks are when it comes to privacy and data. Usually privacy is dismissed as hyperbole, or tinfoil hat stuff, or only for people selling drugs on the darknet. It's not anymore. The minimum barrier to entry for simply not having your every thought and whim and search catalogued is high: Masking your IP address, masking your browser fingerprint, and simply not participating in a lot of parts of the internet.
These are your thoughts, your personal life, being dissected and catalogued and sold in an attempt to, at BEST, shape your behavior. At worst, see exactly when you cross the line into becoming "an agitator." It's the step you need before getting to "thoughtcrime." Why is this acceptable to anyone??? In exchange for free email?
We're all in the pot and the water is already starting to bubble. And I'm sure that the only replies I might get will be "Oh, but no, it's not anything like that." Sure.
We're at a place where browser fingerprinting is what you have to defeat in order to not be tracked online, it goes a lot further than signing up for DeleteMe.
All DeleteMe does is save you the time of manually making takedown requests, which is not that onerous in the first place. I've done plenty of my own. But that doesn't prevent online advertising databases from profiling me or you. And it's been happening for years - this isn't new at all.
This is immensely counter-intuitive to many Americans. They wrongly assume that digital IDs are some Biblical apocalyptic level invasion of privacy, when every state ID database is already 1) linked to Federal ones, and 2) full of the same data on your driver's license anyway.
I've tried to explain this to people, that a digital ID done well is better than the fraud-enabling 1960's hodgepodge in use that has served fraudsters better than citizens for 30 years. They set their teeth and refuse based on use of the word "digital" in the title alone.
It will take generational change for the US to get something as banal as a digital ID already in use in dozens of countries, for no other reason than mindless panic over misunderstanding everything about digital ID systems, how IDs even work, and how governments work.
Oh, that's not the half of it. In my own country, digital ID adoption was a political hot topic for a long time after the Orthodox Church realized that the new chips contain 12-digit long IDs that might contain the sequence 666. This despite everyone in the country having a legal ID with a number code that can also happen to contain this same sequence - but somehow the mere possibility of this happening in the digital IDs sparked a huge outrage and made politicians avoid the topic for quite a while.
I agree that there's a lack of awareness of what happens in other countries with ID, but I think it is also a different situation in the US.
States in the US in a lot of ways are more comparable to countries in the EU. It's not exactly like that but in many ways it is. So it would be like requiring an EU ID on top of a national ID.
I also don't think privacy per se is the real issue of concern, it's concern about consolidation of federalized power. Privacy is one criterion by which you judge the extent to which power has been consolidated or can be consolidated.
The question isn't "can this be federalized safely in theory", it's "is it necessary to federalize this" or "what is the worse possible outcome of this if abused?"
As we are seeing recently, whatever can be abused in terms of consolidated power will be eventually, given enough time.
I guess discussions of whether or not you can have cryptographic verification with anonymity kind of miss the point at some level. It's good to be mindful of in case we go down the dystopian surveillance route, but it ignores the bigger picture issues about freedom of speech, government control over access (cryptographic guarantees of credential verfication don't guarantee issuance of the id appropriately, nor do they guarantee that the card will be issued with that cryptographic system implemented in good faith), and so forth.
I'm not who you asked, but the niche for Georgian wine is orange wine, which is white wine left to sit on the grape skins for a couple days, so it pulls more tannins. It's not exclusive to them alone, but the more distinct niche is orange wine aged in clay pots that gives it a distinct earthiness. If you appreciate understanding food anthropology, this is more similar to how wine was produced in ancient times, as opposed to a cabernet or modern varieties aged in oak or stainless steel.
You can usually find maybe one variety of orange wine in the US at larger wine stores with a substantial international selection.
You can also find orange (or skin contact) wine in the US at smaller boutique natural wine shops, which are becoming more common. Orange wines are cultivated in Sonoma and other wine regions in the US as well.
Seconding all of this. The food is truly fantastic, and the Georgian people are awesome, but the way they've let Putin slide in to just the right places is holding back the country.
I've never been so invested in a puppet show as the puppet theater in Tblisi.
Also can confirm. From the first moment I started an IG account (at my wife's request), the default algorithm was to give me almost exclusively thirst trap posts with zero geographic or other relevance to me. I had to weed through thirst trap accounts that were brought up before hers - when searching by user name.
I took a few minutes a day to search for cat pictures and cooking videos, and sharing cat videos with my spouse (her reason for using IG). It was a fight, but after a few days the thirst trap suggestions immediately flipped to giving me stuff I can look at in public and not feel like a massive creep. There was a long tail, with occasional "....are you sure?" suggestions, but at this point a couple years of carefully reinforcing the same stuff seems to have overwhelmed the thirst trap suggestions.
I use it maybe twice a week. My wife maybe every day or two, and will go through things if they make her laugh. Apparently she never got thirst trap hunky dudes non-stop when she first signed up.
I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way.
Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means:
Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."
100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.
Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.
Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.
Helicentrism has a storied past.
Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.
And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.
So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
> Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
The main rejection of the impact hypothesis was that the dinosaurs had already died off by the time of the impact, the idea that the iridium in the layer came from an impact was reasonably well received. In 1984 a survey found 62% of paleontologists accepted the impact occurred, but only 24% believed it caused the extinction. The Alvarez duo, who proposed the impact hypothesis, were proposing to redefine where the cretaceous ended based on a new dating method (at the time the end of the cretaceous was believed to be a layer of coal a few meters off from the now accepted boundary), and fossil evidence at the time seemed to show gradual decline. A big part of the acceptance of the theory was the development of new analysis methods that showed the evidence for a gradual extinction prior to the impact to be illusory. By the time the impact crater was identified, it was already the dominant theory. Actually in the early 90s major journals were accused of being unfairly biased in favor of the impact hypothesis, with many more papers published in favor than against.
Completely coincidentally, the theory that the chixulub structure was an impact crater was initially rejected and it wasn't until 1990 that cores sampled from the site proved it was.
Dinosaurs being warm blooded was well accepted by the late 70s.
You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?
Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.
> how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:
>Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process?
I do, and the process is exactly the point. That human emotions affect the process far more often than we like to admit. Not always, but it's not completely removed from the process by any means.
In each of those cases, it's that no one says, "Oh, new theory, new evidence. Cool, let's test the hell out of it!"
People in positions of relative power sometimes say, "New theory? Nope. Not even going to look at it. No, in fact, you're crazy and you're wrong and get outta here!"
In each of those examples, to some degree the eventual more accurate theory met emotional resistance by people adhering to the status quo, not resistance because of questionable data or poor research methods or non-reproducibility.
>So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
I like how the word “overwhelming” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Imagine if those 100 scientists had gotten their way and Einstein had retracted his Relativity paper. It would have taken decades of observations of gravitational lensing before someone else proposed gravity affects light and why, and then said "huh.... yeah, I guess this other guy had a similar theory a while back."
Imagine if 100 scientists had gotten together to refute the theory of Yakub. Yet many just dismiss it out of hand. Guess it’s a valid theory until such a time comes that science devotes sufficient attention to it that an overwhelming amount of scientists spend their time specifically proving it wrong or right
>Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
I mean that's how science works. Things can be dismissed until they're proven true. If there's a valid path to finding out it's true then you can try to get funding, it just takes work and convincing people as you're competing for sparse resources. And getting egg on your face is also part of the process.
So you're saying it's a good thing to dismiss potential new discoveries because of feels? Not investigate further, not look for additional data to refute the theory or not. Just dismiss as crackpot BS? IIRC, that's not how science works.
Yes you can dismiss things when a theory doesn't have any evidence and also doesn't work with current evidence. Like you can dismiss my theory of the moon being made of cheese, there might be some under the crust, we haven't looked.
It's funny how 3 or 4 similar BLE systems each are slightly different, and yet no one wants to just merge all the features for an obviously superior product. Everyone seems fine squabbling about which incomplete app/system is better.
Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps:
- Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow)
- Store and hold encrypted messages, as noted above.
- Ability to route through the internet, prioritize routing methods, disable internet routing, etc.
- Ability to self-host server for online relays (similar to Matrix)
Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may require turning off Internet for Bitchat -- haven't dug on that one.
I do like the store and forward idea, though a thought on that is that while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short. It makes good sense for forum like content though. I think so far Bitchat has treated this as a bit out of scope, at least at this stage of development, and it is a reason that indeed, Briar is still quite relevant.
Bitchat only just recently even added ad hoc wifi support, so it's still very early days.
> while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short.
Neither are real time once you introduce delayed communication. Not sure I see the distinction.
Actually, I'd argue that unreliable transport breaks the real-time assumption even without introducing delayed communication. Is there immediate feedback if your message can't reach it's destination?
It's not uncommon, but always disappointing to me, to see how out of touch most HN folks are when it comes to privacy and data. Usually privacy is dismissed as hyperbole, or tinfoil hat stuff, or only for people selling drugs on the darknet. It's not anymore. The minimum barrier to entry for simply not having your every thought and whim and search catalogued is high: Masking your IP address, masking your browser fingerprint, and simply not participating in a lot of parts of the internet.
These are your thoughts, your personal life, being dissected and catalogued and sold in an attempt to, at BEST, shape your behavior. At worst, see exactly when you cross the line into becoming "an agitator." It's the step you need before getting to "thoughtcrime." Why is this acceptable to anyone??? In exchange for free email?
We're all in the pot and the water is already starting to bubble. And I'm sure that the only replies I might get will be "Oh, but no, it's not anything like that." Sure.
This is simply the first time you're seeing it on US soil. https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad...
Yet two years ago, look how many people were incredulous, doubtful, or simply didn't care. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540738
Maybe now is a good time to bring up KOSA? Or maybe we should discuss that two years from now when it's too late to change anything.
https://www.eff.org/document/kids-online-safety-act-kosa https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/kids-online-safety-act...