• 4 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Google, Apple, and rest of big tech are pregnable despite their access to vast amounts of capital, and labor resources.

    I used to be a big supporter of using their “social sign on” (or more generally speaking, single sign on) as a federated authentication mechanism. They have access to brilliant engineers thus naively thought - "well these companies are well funded, and security focused. What could go wrong having them handle a critical entry point for services?”

    Well as this position continues to age poorly, many fucking aspects can go wrong!

    1. These authentication services owned by big tech are much more attractive to attack. Finding that one vulnerability in their massive attack vector is difficult but not impossible.
    2. If you use big tech to authenticate to services, you are now subject to the vague terms of service of big tech. Oh you forgot to pay Google store bill because card on file expired? Now your Google account is locked out and now lose access to hundreds of services that have no direct relation to Google/Apple
    3. Using third party auth mechanisms like Google often complicate the relationship between service provider and consumer. Support costs increase because when a 80 yr old forgot password or 2FA method to Google account. They will go to the service provider instead of Google to fix it. Then you spend inordinate amounts of time/resources trying to fix issue. These costs eventually passed on to customer in some form or another

    Which is why my new position is for federated authentication protocols. Similar to how Lemmy and the fediverse work but for authentication and authorization.

    Having your own IdP won’t fix the 3rd issue, but at least it will alleviate 1st and 2nd concerns



  • Peter Thiel is one of the many money men that want to privatize everything, dismantle federal government, hand keys to “network states” (company towns but somehow worse).

    Goal is none or self regulation. Maximize profits. They want to shape the world into this hyper capitalistic society and surveillance state. Palantir is just one of those companies in a massive portfolio to fulfill this stupid dream shared by many industrialists.






  • I for one ascribe the blame to at least 40 years of pseudoscience – neoclassical economic theory [1] – pushed by neoliberal economists. These same neoliberal economists are often backed by the rich (fuck you “Chicago School of Economics” [2]) . For decades they have pushed this narrative of “government bad” and “private sector” good. Taxing the rich only means you punish the people you want to help (middle and lower socioeconomic classes). This pseudoscience gave birth to the godawful economic policy of “trickle down economics”.

    Decades of:

    • defunding public services (by both parties, by the way) to make way for tax cuts for the wealthy
    • middle class wage stagnation (ie, take for example the minimum wage and sub-minimum wage for tipped employees)
    • decimation of union participation and subsequently power to labor
    • cheap money backed by the faith of the US govt and given to the ultra wealthy as a means of extracting wealth from the people – see private equity

    Want to know why many people are easily manipulated? They can’t afford the same lifestyle as their parents. Drowning in debt to greedy capitalist pigs. Years of this cycle and once the algorithms detect this, you can be easily turned into cannon fodder for the ultra wealthy.

    “hey bro, your life is shit because immigrants took yer job!! Govt trying to inject microchips into you! Join the FrEEdOm CoNvOy!”

    Get us into fighting a culture war against each other, when we should be banding together and fighting a class war.

    Fuck the billionaire class.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics