Ender’s Game came out before the Web. But like many science fiction authors of the time, Card was a very early Internet user and would have been familiar with Usenet newsgroups.

With a little bit of Hellboy.

A lot of folks in Ireland have an Aunt Aoife.

That new mix tape was the bomb. Or did it bomb? I’m confused.

1. Backdoors in consumer software cannot in fact be restricted to “legitimate” use. All it takes is one “bad apple” to leak the keys – say, a radicalized police officer leaking them to a fascist group for use in harassing political opponents – and those keys show up on the darknet and are directly available to abusers. This is a much larger threat than (e.g.) traditional landline telephone wiretapping.
2. If secure communication systems are made illegal, the organizations that build those systems (e.g. Signal) will shut down so as not to be prosecuted for “enabling child abuse”. This deprives their current users, including children, of the secure communication systems they are already using today.
3. Sadly, law enforcement officers abuse their power quite often. They also have a higher rate of domestic abuse than the general population. Giving them power to spy on children’s communication is directly enabling abusers.

Taking away privacy makes it easier for children to be abused.

Remember, the most likely abusers of children are not strangers off the Internet; they’re people who have authority over those children: parents, church leaders, teachers, coaches, police, etc.

Private online communication makes it easier for abused children to get help.

In other words, these laws are not “fighting pedophilia”. They are enabling child abuse.

Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.

Fascists aren’t morally healthy humans. Authoritarians can’t cope with social reality, where different people can have different opinions and loyalties and yet support each other. They always seem to end up succumbing to patriarchal cults, where Lenin-Hitler-Mao-Trump gets to do whatever he wants to your sons and your daughters, and you and your working class have no recourse.

One problem with cryptocurrency is that instead of being coupled with mainstream banks (where workers get their pay deposited) it is instead coupled with speculative assets employed by criminals. As such, choosing to work on accepting cryptocurrency instead of working on accepting real-money donations ties the service to a crime economy instead of a mainstream economy.

Ruud who runs lemmy.world and mastodon.world publishes financial information on his blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update