Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

  • 32 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Probably Rust, although I’m not married to it. I’m just at the planning stage right now, though.

    One open question is if you can use a fairly standard transceiver like a Bluetooth chip, or if you need an SDR. Obviously they weren’t designed with this in mind, by maybe there’s a profile that’s close enough.

    Packets should have a few kilobytes of payload so you can fit a postquantum cryptographic artifact. Thankfully, even with a BCH code, it seems doable to fit that much in a 1-second burst in a standard amateur radio voice channel, for testing. (In actual clandestine use I’d expect you’d want to go as wide as the hardware can support)

    As envisioned there would be someone operating a hub, which might have actual network access through some means, and on which the containers run. They would send out runners to collect traffic from busy public spaces which might serve as hubs for burst activity, and dump outgoing packets, all without giving up any locations.

    Accounts with their own small container would be opened by sending in a public key, and then further communication would be by standard symmetric algorithm - except in testing, because that’s an amateur radio no-no, so just signed cleartext. ID would be derived from signature fingerprint, as I have been thinking about it. I have a lightweight hash scheme in mind that would allow awarding of credit for retransmitting packets in a way that couldn’t be cheated.

    You’d want to have some ability to detect and move around jamming, or just other people’s bursts. That’s more hardware research, basically.



  • You can do all those things while also not supporting FAANG

    Depends. If you can find another employer that’s more ethical (which is not guaranteed just because they’re smaller) and pays as much with as flexible a work schedule, yeah, you should probably do that. Otherwise it might indeed be necessary.

    I don’t know, are we doing concequentialist ethics here, or deontological? I feel like we’ve reached the level of splitting hairs where we need to decide. For the purpose of actual advice people reading might follow, I’d say just try and be a good person, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.


  • I mean, a lot of companies do stuff like that, and yet you still need money to live. Just working there doesn’t necessarily make it your fault; by that logic it would be a sin to work checkout at Walmart, because you’ll have the same blood on your hands as the Waltons.

    I don’t really like talking about capitalism as if it’s a well defined concept, but, no ethical consumption under.

    I’m not ignoring the other two things listed, I’m realistic.

    I didn’t mean you, FYI. I mean someone who does work for a FAANG and is looking for more justification to do nothing for the common good.







  • I was kind of assuming that, since FAANG are American, but I’d guess they probably have foreign employees as well.

    Canadians make pretty much the same as Europeans, I think. The Americans have a bunch of monopolies, and are characteristically weird and nationalist about who they share the spoils with. (I know, it’s not all of you guys, but it’s definitely some)





  • Yeah, I do worry someone will read the “work for a FAANG” part, and ignore the other two things listed. It’s absolutely not enough to go “welp, I’m just a little cog following orders”.

    Maybe a one-man boycott is the wrong way to put it. Multi-person boycotts are obviously built from individual people. I guess my real point is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution; you actually have to look at the world, look at how you want it to be, and figure out how you can help make that happen from your place in it.