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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • One of the problems with online forums for organizing is that it’s hard to naturally build an organizational structure. It’s possible, but I think it requires experienced organizers to start choosing collaborators from the userbase.

    • in online forums, people get upvoted based on how much users agree with the comment. They are rewarded for being popular, not for having a direct impact on the problem being discussed.
    • IRL people who commit effort to the cause get a certain amount of social capital, and the satisfaction of having an effect. They also form social bonds with other people in the group. Participants are rewarded for having an effect.

    We haven’t seen a lot of organizing boiling out of the existing forums (Reddit, Facebook, blogs) and microblogging (Twitter) platforms. There have been a bunch of leaderless movements, like #metoo and BLM, but those have had a moment and then faded out. If they were effective tools for organizing, I would expect to see more organizations come out of them and persist.

    Conversely, volunteer community organizations form all the time - people are physically situated near people experiencing similar problems who are invested in solutions they think will work for their community. In-person organization is self perpetuating in the sense that there is an inherent reward for having an effect.

    I think it’s possible to use online tools to create a movement, but like the author of the article says, most of us spend our time posting and upvoting rather than doing something that will change policy.



  • When you run httptap – <command>, httptap runs <command> in an isolated network namespace, injecting a certificate authority created on-the-fly in order to decrypt HTTPS traffic. Here is the process in detail:

    In linux, there is a kernel API for creating and configuring network interfaces. Conventionally, a network interface would be a physical ethernet or WiFi controller in your computer, but it is possible to create a special kind of network interface called a TUN device. A TUN device shows up to the system in the way that any network interface shows up, but any traffic written to it will be delivered to a file descriptor held by the process that created it. Httptap creates a TUN device and runs the subprocess in an environment in which all network traffic is routed through that device.









  • it will be followed by a giant swing in the opposite direction after

    I worry that billionaires who are profiting from these policy changes will be able to cement them.

    The US and Canadian population is incredibly docile, so I don’t expect revolt unless things become terrible. We’ve seen our share of wealth shrink over the past few decades, and the cost of living skyrocket, but our reaction is to elect more of the same.