If they cooperate that's good and convenient, but that does not mean the intelligence service will not set in place contingencies for if the other side suddenly decides not to play ball anymore.

Particularly considering how in the past Apple has been very willing to be on the receiving end of negative headlines for not giving US agencies decrypted access to iCloud accounts of terrorist suspects, with Google I don't remember it ever having been the target of such controversy, meaning they willingly oblige with all incoming requests.

[0] https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

One of those destroyed net neutrality and most online free speech, the other is a charity trying to be the last memorial of it.

> The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.

What about the incentive of keeping a somewhat thrustworthy and complete digital historical record? Is that worth nothing outside of its sheer monetization potential?

Try doing that outside of the FAANG dominance and you have some work cut out for you because they've spent the last decades either buying up any prospective "competition" or straight up marginalizing it into irrelevance.

Which is, to state it again, the antithesis to what the web was supposed to be, it started as a scientific venture [0], it inspired a whole new way of looking at the world and our minds in it [1].

Profit incentives came only later, they were not inherint to this space, they invaded it and took it over.

Yes, I'm romanitizing a lot of idealism here, but I think it's important to remember that era and mindset of the early web.

It's important to remind people that the current web was neither the goal nor has it still much to do with the web of the old, a place of counter-culture, not of corporate mainstream pushing overwhelming government messages while keeping more tabs on you than even the Stasi could ever dream about.

[0] https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

[1] https://www.eff.org/de/cyberspace-independence

Sentiments that will be reinforced during a civil war when these groups keep trading violence and atrocities with each other, that creates a lot of bad blood and tends to make people identify in ways that differentiate them from "the enemy".

Not even Americans are immune to that, it's an issue latent to this day whenever state rights vs federal government comes up.

So much more would already be lost without the Wayback Machine.

It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite [0]

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

The person wearing them could be on a call, and the caller on the other side would hear what you say.

The person wearing them could be streaming to twitch, and everybody watching that stream would hear what you say.

All while you assume that you are having a private conversation with earbud person.

This is not an endorsement of these products, I have no idea if they are actually any good.

I just let it generate a random woman with no prompt, and it gave me a pretty good result, except there is a mask on the face and literally bloody nude boobs; https://generated.photos/human-generator/64d67874568faa0007a...

edit; I just realized it put in a default prompt

The impact of Steam, as the first digital distribution platform for video games, is probably magnitudes bigger again.

Valve was so far ahead of the competition, and still remains there to this day.

Which is kind of a miracle, in some alternate timeline we could have ended with EA as the patron of PC gaming.

Or MS could simply share the keys with those government institutions there have been literally asking for it, to see wether Windows is actually sending home privacy relevant data.

But the matter of fact is it's a very real issue and still on-going problem.

Just because investing a lot of effort could shed some further light on it does not really change anything about that or the non-compliant behavior MS engages in.

Security only being as good as the effort lobbed at it to break it, is not really a novel or useful insight in this scenario.

Such an analysis does not exist because that traffic is encrypted. Which is also the reason why using Windows 10/11 is not fully compliant with EU privacy laws in places like Germany, as there is no telling what Windows is actually phoning home.

Officially Windows 10/11 can be used but only after jumping through a lot of hoops that involve turning off the telemtry and phoning home, but even then only with an "acceptable residual risk" [0]

The only reason this isn't a bigger topic is because there is no realistic alternative; Everything is tailored to MS, and MS spends absurd amounts of money and effort to prevent anything from changing that.

So the majority just goes with the "easiest" and most convenient solution, even when it might actullay be an "illegal" solution that enables a ton of industrial espionage.

[0] https://www.heise.de/news/Datenschutzkonferenz-Hohe-Huerden-...

It's part of VPN that most users these days don't even understand, as VPN providers are heavily advertised on the claim of improving privacy.

When in reality the VPN only shifts the party you have to trust from one to another, but the problem still remains the same.

Or it would require compromising the server [0]

[0] https://www.csoonline.com/article/3137065/shadow-brokers-lea...

This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem.

As the fossil fuel reliance doesn't only extend to the energy sector, but also manufacturing industries, where hydrocarbons, as a resource, are responsible for pretty much everything that defines modern life. [0]

> Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise

The infrastructure is expensive, but it's also the only existing energy infrastructure which can realistically be retooled for renewable replacement through green hydrogen.

Now you can point out how hydrogen has also expensive infrastructure and even worse storage problems, which is true. But as of right now, green hydrogen is the only plausible way to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence as a manufacturing resource [1].

It's a dimension to this way too few people have on their radar, as most of the public debate is solely centered on electricity generation from fossil fuels, when that's actually the easiest problem to fix with renewables.

But the dependencies on fossil fuels as manufacturing resource, fixing those is a much bigger and involved task than making electricity grids green and renewable.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/11/f68/Products...

[1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/ueber-fraunhofer...

It also has the added bonus that gas infrastructure can realistically be retooled for green hydrogen, and related products.

[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-gas-in-todays-energy...

[0] https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15243.doc.htm

[0] https://status.openai.com/