When Automation Becomes Enforcement

What we talk about when we talk about interoperable end-to-end encryption

I was wrong about Snapchat, but I was also kinda right.

When I first encountered the idea of disappearing messages, I was both skeptical and alarmed.

Skeptical because disappearing messages have an obvious defect as a security measure: If I send you a message (or a photo) that I don’t want you to have, I lose. You can remember the contents of the message, or take a screenshot, or use a separate device to photograph your screen. If I don’t trust you with some information, I shouldn’t send you that information.

I was wrong.

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Pluralistic: 02 Apr 2022


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Marc Laidlaw’s “Underneath the Oversea”

A wondrous fairytale, wondrously read, from the storyteller of Half-Life.

The cover of Skyboat Media’s audio edition of Underneath the Oversea.

I have been a Marc Laidlaw fan since his debut novel, Dad’s Nuke — an apocalyptic, madcap dark comedy/road-trip novel that anticipated Snow Crash and its motif of an America dominated by paranoid, fortresslike gated communities.

I avidly consumed all of his subsequent novels and short stories — especially “400 Boys,” his contribution to Bruce Sterling’s seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades.

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