If we follow your assertion to it's most extreme, "doxing" would never be a crime, privacy would be unobtainable by almost everyone, and all kinds of identity crimes (which might no longer be crimes) would probably be rampant.

So where would YOU draw the line? What rights to privacy do you think should be protected by law (or infrastructure, because Lawrence Lessig pointed out that computer code, in the way it can limit someone's options, is effectively law)?

Under the law of most countries, it's true that we don't have complete control of data collected about us. (In a couple of countries though, a person who didn't want their photo taken has the right to confiscate your camera.)

However, I would advocate any legislation that grants me more control over my data, and more power over those who would gather data on me and use it to my disadvantage. (And I wrote an essay about this which was posted to Slashdot at least 25 years ago but is now long lost.)

It will always be the goal of oligarchs to move us from an ownership society toward serfdom--that's where the real profit is. If you look at many of the technological developments of the past decade, that's where we're headed:

The oligarchs sell you convenience with a "devil's bargain": Why buy books, music, movies, and other cultural artifacts when you can rent them, leaving a data trail of your every cultural experience for marketing manipulators to analyze? Why keep your own anonymous money in the form of cash when you can pay with bits in your phone, making every purchase, no matter how trivial, analyzable by marketeers, auditable by law enforcement, and available to political actors seeking to hamper their enemies? Why store your memories and secrets in your own possession when "the cloud" will let you access it from anywhere, all the while never promising that nobody else can access it from anywhere? Why own property with your own rights to it when the job market keeps you moving from place to place, never really developing a community and connections close enough to stand with you, and you with them, when your collective will is challenged?

You should own your data. You should own your story—you should should have exclusive power over who gets to keep it, who gets to tell it, and who you choose to tell it to.

Tom's body of work is definitely an irreproducible result. His comedic brilliance and dedication to multi-level humor extended to his serious mathematical research. He was a dedicated comedian who could quietly tell a joke and wait more than SIXTY YEARS for the payoff. The joke explained below wasn't discovered by anyone in the NSA until 2017.

In 1957, while working for the National Security Agency, Lehrer coauthored a paper in which he snuck his song's line "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" into the reference section as an uncited and unpublished paper by Lobachevsky. ("Lobachevsky", of course, being a fictional character who blatantly advocated plagiarism in a song Lehrer wrote in 1953.) [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ]

That's all fine and good.

But how will the person feeding the old code to the A.I. explain the point of the business process (without writing more code)?

Will this A.I. also translate all of the comments? Indeed, can explain the context behind all of the nuances in a references in code comments to a long-dead CIO's peccadillos, or the quote of programmer's favorite novel/movie/song, when it explains the function of the code?

(Because I've seen all of that in code that's just ten years old, forget about code that has been maintained for fifty years.)

I know that I'm always charged >25% over the advertised price for any connectivity service, and the itemization on the bill is, I only have to assume, deliberately obfuscated.

Get back to us about that after you've lived for a year or so where your fastest Internet is 6Mbps over LTE with data overage charges.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a cargo-version 747 full of shiny disks!

In the 1990's, before a lot of people even knew what the Internet was, and only a small minority had personal computers or (analog) cell phones, getting a bad mark on one's credit report was a much larger deal, and portended a much more formidable fight to correct.

Many companies have engaged in this kind of sleazery for many years.

I remember that after I rented a place a couple of decades ago, I got a call from a Comcast telemarketer offering me cable service even before some family members knew my new address. I still don't know how they knew.

As I was preparing to move away to town where Comcast didn't provide service, I tried to cancel their service. At that time, to cancel an account, one had to return the cable box in-person during their deliberately inconvenient limited business hours. After turning-in their box to an individual in their office, who refused to give me any kind of receipt, I moved 350 miles away. Seven weeks later, when I called about an unexpected bill, which was late because of USPS forwarding, Comcast demanded that I return to their office to sign a cancellation order. No, I couldn't do it by by phone and I couldn't even cancel by mail, even with a notary.

I wound up paying for 3 months of cable service for whatever new tenant rented the place until I drove back there, sat through a sales pitch, paid "delinquent" fees, threatened a small claims case, and eventually signed their paperwork.

Can we also prohibit service providers from refusing to sign you up for a service unless you agree to their "autopay" plan?

The last thing I want is for some financial vampire to get their fangs into my cash arteries to feed at will.

I've argued for around three decades that everyone's number should be allowed to work like a 900 number (pay-per-call). That is, make the caller give permission to be billed an arbitrary, pre-set, but fully disclosed amount to be paid to the recipient, before the recipient's phone even rings. The recipient should also be able to create whitelists of callers who can bypass the charge, and allow the recipients to refund the charge while the call is in-progress.

"Thank you for calling me. To complete this call, please press 1 to authorize a payment of $34.99 US to [caller's name or number]."

If the phone companies were required to set this up for everyone, you can bet they would deploy adequate authentication to make sure they got paid. If you hit the cold-callers and telemarketers where they hurt, in cost-per-attempted sale, most of them would fold.

This is not (just) about Apple. It's about the new form of serfdom we have accepted by moving some of our most valuable possessions to "the cloud".

That magical cloud is a "place" where you store your valuable data on some computer you couldn't find in physical space if your tried, in a tenant-landlord relationship from hell governed by a ridiculously one-sided agreement you haven't read. Your home is no longer your castle when it belongs to someone else, who can evict you and confiscate your possessions when you aren't expecting it.

The question is, is there a better solution than building your own server you own, and running your own central storage? Or are we all doomed to digital serfdom?

I've been with AT&T since ISDN was their only option for "high speed" Internet. Their support, while not always quite as competent at tier-1 as I would hope, has always been conscientious. I even talked to Scott Adams (of "Dilbert" fame) once as a Tier-2 support tech.

So I still have 30mb-up/6mb-down AT&T FTTN for a busy, multi-user home network.

AT&T sucks less.

I don't think any wireless service would be an adequate replacement for a well-engineered wired service. Latency for interactive things like voice and video conferencing is horrible on any wireless device or service I've used (I find the delay on ordinary cell phone voice calls nearly unusable compared to classic land lines), and that delay would be inherently worse on satellites. Interference and propagation problems on wireless links will always be worse than wired infrastructure; bandwidth is limited, while compression and error correction processing causes considerable delay.

Mr. Epstein should have crowd-sourced the funding for his ad. He probably could have filled half the newspaper with names of many thousands of fellow signers, in very fine print. That would have made a splash.

Just a few miles from "downtown Silicon Valley", my only wired connectivity providers AT&T and Comcast, along with a few other companies who re-sell AT&T DSL (if I'm only willing to pay consumer prices). Both AT&T and Comcast are rapacious monopolists, but my experience is that Comcast is more ethically challenged, less responsive with customer services, and requires signing of contacts that are far more one-sided in their favor. I had their cable service years ago, and the nightmare of unordered services being added, trying to get them removed and refunded, and then their refusal to let me cancel the service cost me more in time and money than just continuing to pay them for 8 months. I got harassing calls from them for months telling me my service was about to be cancelled for non-payment, even though I had requested it to be cancelled, and threatening me with a bad credit report and lawsuits for failure to pay for a service I had cancelled.

I've been with AT&T since ISDN was their only option for "high speed" Internet. Their support, while not always quite as competent at tier-1 as I would hope, has always been conscientious. So I still have 30mb-up/6mb-down AT&T FTTN for a busy, multi-user home network. AT&T sucks less.

I don't think any wireless service would be an adequate replacement. Latency for interactive things like voice and video conferencing is horrible on wireless (I fine the delay on ordinary cell phone nearly unusable compared to classic land lines), and even worse on satellites. Interference and propagation problems on wireless links will always be worse than wired infrastructure; bandwidth is limited, while compression and error correction processing causes considerable delay.