- 1 Post
- 6 Comments
10·16 days agoAttacking a military ship is generally not a war crime (as defined by international law such as the Geneva treaties, Rome Statute etc…). It is an act of war (same as invasion or bombardment of another country), and is likely to see retaliation by the attacked country.
Aggression (i.e. unprovoked acts of war) is against the Charter of the United Nations, which also includes the International Court of Justice as a dispute resolution mechanism. It is up to the United Nations Security Council (at which the US has a veto) to authorise enforcement of ICJ rulings.
If a nation is acting to protect another nation facing aggression from the US, it would be legal for the attack US military ships. The reason why they wouldn’t would more be that it would likely bring counter-retaliation from the US.
51·22 days agoLiberal by itself is an ambiguous term, so it’s generally best to prefix it with another word / prefix to clarify.
e.g. Neoliberal / Classical liberal - aligned to what I think parent post is saying. Implies economic right. Socially liberal - probably what the GP post means, meaning in favour of social liberties. Can be associated with economic left (usually coupled with positive protection of social liberties) or the economic right (e.g. libertarianism - usually believe government shouldn’t trample social liberties, but businesses can). Liberal is also a political party in many countries - e.g. in Australia it is a (declining, but formerly in power) right-wing party.
That said, I believe most wars are started for reasons of cronyism / crony capitalism, to distract from issues or project an image for the leader and/or for reasons of nationalism, and politicians from all sides will give an insincere pretext aligned to the politics people expect them to have.
So back in 1994 my neighbours and I agreed that I’d give them my anti-theft fog cannons, as long as they promise not to steal my stuff.
Then in 2014 they sent some buddies in to burgle my place, and got away with a chunk of my stuff - and I know it was said neighbour behind it, because they now openly claim what was taken is theirs (of course, I never agreed with them on that).
Then since February 2022 they’ve started regularly burgling my place - in the first few weeks, they tried to take literally everything, but fortunately I hired good security guards and they only got away with about 20% of my stuff (including what they stole in 2014).
I’ve been trying to make arrangements for a monitored alarm system that will bring in a large external response if more burglaries happen, but the security company doesn’t want to take it on the contract while a burglary is in progress - but they did sell me some gear. I’m still working on getting the contract.
They say they’ll stop trying to burgle my place as long as I promise not to ever get a monitored burglar alarm, to officially sign over the property they’ve already stolen and to stop trying to get it back, stop buying stuff to protect my property from the monitored security company, and that I fire most of my security guards.
Do you think this is really their end game, or if I agree, do you think they’ll just be back burgling more as soon as I make those promises, with fewer security guards and stuff to protect my house? After all, I did have an agreement with them back in 1994 and they didn’t follow that.
I suspect anything about heaven was likely to manipulate religious voters into voting for him.
Most likely, he is envious of other US presidents like Obama who were given a Nobel Peace Prize. For the whole ‘Board of Peace’ thing, he likely also sees it as a way to manipulate into becoming something of a world dictator who sits above world leaders.
There is a thing called the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits, consisting of Psychopathy (lack of empathy for others / celebration of others suffering / impulsive), Narcissism (thinking of oneself as superior) and Machiavellianism (manipulating others, seeking revenge etc…) - and they often occur together in the same person. The dark triad is correlated positively with jealousy - and dark triad people consider themselves superior to peers (even when evidence points the other way) and deserving of recognition. They are vindictive towards people who get in the way of what they think they deserve.
0·2 years agoMaybe technically in Florida and Texas, given that they passed a law to try to stop sites deplatforming Trump.
https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess125_2023-2024/bills/3102.htm
“The owner or operator of a social media website who contracts with a social media website user in this State is subject to a private right of action by a user if the social media website purposely: … (2) uses an algorithm to disfavor, shadowban, or censure the user’s religious speech or political speech”.
In May 2022, the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled to strike the law (and similarly there was a 5th Circuit judgement), but just this month the US Supreme Court vacated the Court of Appeals judgement (i.e. reinstated the law) and remanded it back to the respective Court of Appeals. That said, the grounds for doing that were the court had not done the proper analysis, and after they do that it might be struck down again. But for now, the laws are technically not struck down.
It would be ironic if after conservatives passed this law, and stacked the supreme court and got the challenge to it vacated, the first major use of it was used against Xitter for censoring Harris!
With your constraints yes, but there are open questions as to whether that would actually be enough.
Suppose there was a well-known government public key P_g, and a well protected corresponding government private key p_g, and every person i (i being their national identity number) had their own keypair p_i / P_i. The government would issue a certificate C_i including the date of birth and national identity number attesting that the owner of P_i has date of birth d.
Now when the person who knows p_i wants to access an age restricted site s, they generate a second site (or session) specific keypair P_s_i / p_s_i. They use ZK-STARKs to create a zero-knowledge proof that they have a C_i (secret parameter) that has a valid signature by P_g (public parameter), with a date of birth before some cutoff (DOB secret parameter, cutoff public parameter), and which includes key P_i (secret parameter), that they know p_i (secret parameter) corresponding to P_i, and that they know a hash h (secret parameter) such that
h = H(s | P_s_i | p_i | t), where t is an issue time (public parameter, and s and P_s_i are also public parameters. They send the proof transcript to the site, and authenticate to the site using their site / session specific P_s_i key.Know as to how this fits your constraints:
Yep - the service verifies the ZK-STARK proof to ensure the required properties hold.
Due to the use of a ZKP, the service can only see the public parameters (plus network metadata). They’ll see P_s_i (session specific), the DOB cutoff (so they’ll know the user is born before the cutoff, but otherwise have no information about date of birth), and the site for which the session exists (which they’d know anyway).
Generating a ZK-STARK proof of a complexity similar to this (depending on the choice of hash, signing algorithm etc…) could potentially take about a minute on a fast desktop computer, and longer on slower mobile devices - so users might want to re-use the same proof across sessions, in which case this could let the service track users across sessions (although naive users probably allow this anyway through cookies, and privacy conscious users could pay the compute cost to generate a new session key every time).
Sites would likely want to limit how long proofs are valid for.
In the above scheme, even if the government and the site collude, the zero-knowledge proof doesn’t reveal the linkage between the session key and the ID of the user.
An adult could share / leak their P_s_i and p_s_i keypair anonymously, along with the proof. If sites had a limited validity period, this would limit the impact of a one-off-leak.
If the adult leaks the p_i and C_i, they would identify themselves.
However, if there were adults willing to circumvent the system in a more online way, they could set up an online system which allows anyone to generate a proof of age and generates keypairs on demand for a requested site. It would be impossible to defend against such online attacks in general, and by the anonymity properties (your second and third constraints), there would never be accountability for it (apart from tracking down the server generating the keypairs if it’s a public offering, which would be quite difficult but not strictly impossible if it’s say a Tor hidden service). What would be possible would be to limit the number of sessions per user per day (by including a hash of s, p_i and the day as a public parameter), and perhaps for sites to limit the amount of content per session.
ZK-STARK proof generation can run on a CPU or GPU, and could be packaged up as say, a browser addon. The biggest frustration would be the proof generation time. It could be offloaded to cloud for users who trust the cloud provider but not the government or service provider.
Governments already store people’s date of birth (think birth certificates, passports, etc…), and would need to continue to do so to generate such certificates. They shouldn’t need to store extra information.