The solution is apps and protocols that put the privacy in the hands of the user, not the hands of another entity which must be "regulated" by legislative bodies that have been subject to regulatory capture. Decentralize and distribute power. Use P2P/decentralized platforms like lemmy, mastodon, nostr, freenet, etc.
I wrote an article about how using lightning works and some common misconceptions if you are interested: https://lemmy.ml/post/16397590
What if your relay goes down, are your locked coins committed into the blockchain?
Essentially yes. Basically you have a on-chain tx which opens a lightning channel. All your "transactions" occur off-chain and update that channel. The "state" of that channel is stored by you and your relay. All of this happens automatically, of course. You start a channel with 50 BTC with another user and over time the "balance" of that channel changes. When you start it, you are "putting 50 BTC into lightning" so all 50 BTC belong to you. Once you've sent some to another user, now 49 belong to you and 1 to them and you can receive up to 1 BTC since you have 1 BTC of space free. And you can continually update that forever, off-chain, for next to nothing in fees. When you close the channel, the BTC returns to you on-chain in the appropriate amount. So if your "relay"/lightning node/etc whatever goes down you can always close out the channel for the cost of an on-chain tx.
Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.
Don’t disclose all their big donors
Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.
Many orgs don't disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you're seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to... give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.
The article states that "Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.", yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that's just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can't get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/
"Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez"
Hmm.. I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.
Believe it or not, people on the "far right" can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that's ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn't have somebody "far right" or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn't be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they're actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.
It's organized by the human rights foundation, which is an intl non-profit organization headquartered in New York. The freedom forum is not only hosted in but also donated to by the City of Oslo. It's all about resisting dictators and autocracy. Ask wikipedia if you doubt
Eth has been centralized ever since their pre-mine sold the majority of the coins on the network before anybody had a chance to mine them. And then they moved away from proof-of-work to proof-of-ownership where you need 16 whole ETH to even solo stake. And now you need multiple TB of SSD space to even run a full node. A brought us the ICO craze which moved crypto from "A weird, interesting idea" to "an unholy mess of pump-and-dump scams" in the mind of the average person. Ethereum gets more and more centralized every year. And to solve the problem of gas fees they have like 100 different L2s each of which don't talk to each other and have their own problems. Last I checked, polygon, which is one of their top L2s, has the entire network being secured by 15 validators. Yikes.
Contrast that with Bitcoin. You can run a full node on a laptop from 10 years ago. With lightning, you can send a transaction across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees without even touching the chain. And it uses a decentralized network of nodes to route your transaction, you can run your own node on a Raspberry i. In that same lightning channel, you can make a functionally infinite amount of transactions back and forth between you and any other parties. The chain secures lightning transactions like the existence of a court secures contracts. Unless anything goes unexpectedly bad (and I know of no instance of anybody actually needing to do this in the wild), you never need to go to the chain to enforce the contract. And if you enforce the contract (which happens automatically, by the way), your funds will never end up in the wrong hands.
Sure, I haven't heard of hamachi. It's ok to have multiple tools that do the same thing
My guess is that this works similar to a Tor hidden service, where you can't even access the open port without a key of some kind and then you can only access that specific port. It's not the same as having a port open on your IPv4 address since from the router's perspective it's only an outgoing connection. Somebody portscanning you wouldn't find that port open. Though I could be wrong.
In a time of rising political instability and distrust of institutions, institutions will turn more and more to censorship and surveillance. We need decentralized, censorship resistant networks to fight back. #nostr is one such network, so is #tor, #freenet, #i2p, etc. And yes, #lemmy #mastodon and #activitypub too.
I'd love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it's safer than even renewables and doesn't have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It's very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say "renewables are currently cheaper so let's focus there" but they're not like "Nuclear is bad".
In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It's not green liquid that can spill, it's pieces of glass.
Bitcoin is one of the most successful open source projects to have ever been created, and it gets downvoted to hell anywhere it gets brought up. 15 years of growth in network size, usage, and capability. Surviving attacks and attempted bans from nation-states. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single hack, reliably transferring money across the globe to anybody with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in seconds to minutes for pennies to dollars in fees. 100% open source and decentralized, uncorruptible, open to whoever wants to use it, the way currency should be. It's got a market cap bigger than Sweden's GDP and is already more reliable and widely accepted than most national currencies. Nobody can make it print money it isn't meant to print or move money it isn't supposed to move.