Btw, you don't seem to understand how "the surveillance economy" actually warmed the pot of frogs, which is already scorching hot. Privacy was a given, almost religiously protected. It was common sense. It was our right. How did we lose the war against cookies, supercookies, cellphone trilateration, cellphone gps, cars with gps, from private smtp and pop servers to everything at google, yahoo and outlook? From federated networks like Jabber to giving every bit of behavioral data plus phone numbers, addresses, credit card data, banking information to a freaking single company. Would you have ever imagined that people would willingly PURCHASE a 24/7 listening device to install at home, just because it can mimic a human voice? And then willingly purchase a 24/7 surveillance camera for your front door, streaming to a corporation where you have no control over it? Why the decentralized internet devolved into a bunch of centralized wallgarden that has so many behavioral and personal data that can build a forensically accurate psychological profile that can be used to predict your real sexual orientation, religion and political affiliation by analyzing your facebook posts, likes and the chronemics on the swipe, even if you dont ever mention any of those those topics, which has been already weaponized to allow Trump win the first presidency by Cambridge Analytica. Why this dystopian scenario has became *already* a reality, was it forced upon us? No. We adopted it willingly. Why? Because it was "convenient", and because SaaS with an advertising business model was the only business model that enabled frictionless customer acquisition. We, humanity, sold our soul to save some pennies, and in the process we destroyed what made the internet great. And you really think that reading brainwaves will be a step too far? You lack imagination. Apple's AR goggles are already tracking eye movements with the internal cameras, and thats already so convenient because it replaces a cursor, a joystick, a virtual wand or your freaking fingers. It knows were you are looking and it selects it, it is the closest thing to reading your mind without electrodes in your brain. There has been many robust studies on tracking involuntary microsaccadic movements to extract covert attention, cognitive shifts and access our working memory, understanding where the subject's internal attention is focused *before they consciously move or act*. (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2235533100) We already had a startup called Emotiv that promised a neural interface, in the form of a cool EEG helmet to interact with the computers, the founder had a Ted Talk long time ago. She was ahead of her time, she demoed a game that detected the users emotion, and the sky changed color to match its emotion. Eventually EEG helmets will be also packaged as a "convenient" way to interface with VR, games or social interaction or for "empathetic communication", while secretly monitoring the microsaccades and the eeg of our frontal and temporal lobes to the product placement, or the success of an ad, changing colors in real time until they detect we liked it, and to order us a pizza before we were even conscious that we wanted one. We are royally fked. It has 100% chance of success, because we already drank the coolaid.

"Who would be carrying listening and tracking devices willingly, let alone purchasing them so the government can track us 24/7, of course it is nonsense." - probably you in 1990, holding a pager.

You should check out Autonomi (formerly known as SafeNetwork) by Maidsafe. They launched their stable version not long ago, which was quite an achievement considering the project has been developing since 2006. It is an original project that was probably the source of inspiration for ipfs and filecoin. Autonomi is blockchain-less (it has its own consensus system based on "close groups"), self-encryption, anonymous (on the overlay data network), permanent file storage (pay once to upload, without recurrent fees to keep them online), and natively quantum resistant (adopted ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA-65 in the transport layer, and for data ChaCha20-Poly1305 for self-encryption and Blake3 for the hashing) The community is quite active and several server-less apps and websites are beginning to pop up right now, the most recent one being a movie streaming site on it. The network is quite young, but I think that if adoption grows, it could replace the need of AWS or any cloud service.

Well, that doesn't seem to be practical does it? A P2P network that can't take 30TB is just a toy, not infrastructure

The network in Silicon Valley was directly inspired by a real world project by MaidSafe (the network is called "Autonomi"), Mike Judge said so in a conference. David Irvine, the founder of Maidsafe was a technical advisor of the series.

Hey I wouldn't be complaining, I would see this as a great opportunity to jailbreak the boss and get myself a raise.

So I guess we will see more tentacles from now on...

The "network" you get from the phones you are mentioning are to the national *intranet*, not the internet. Only the highest hierarchies have access to the real internet via a monitored official Chinese proxy. People who are close to the Chinese border sometimes get some Chinese phone as a contraband with a Chinese SIM card, but those can only be used next to the borders where Chinese towers seep through North Korea. But it is extremely dangerous, if you are caught, you are dead.

You are missing the main fact: North Korea doesn't have internet already. It is self-imposed. It is not just "censored" internet like in China. It is no internet connectivity at all. Only their privileged citizens have access to a nationwide intranet, with curated national sites that looks like it is from the 90s or if you want to watch a soprano singing the national anthem, that type of stuff. But no internet at all.

What an ignorant comment. I hope you are a clueless teenager without any knowledge about history and the state of affairs about North Korea, because if you are an adult it is serious... It means you must be American lol Well, joking aside, let me tell you: North Korea doesn't have internet, period. NOBODY in the hermit state (why do you think it is called "hermit"?) can access the internet, with the exception of *very few* ultra elites (and even them don't have freedom to browse anything they like, their proxies block almost everything.) So what you propose, cutting all access to internet to the whole country, it is something they have been already doing it for themselves to avoid any kind of western influence to NK citizens. Their main worry are that their citizens would learn that other countries actually have a better standard of living that NK or get their heads contaminated with dangerous ideas such as "freedoms" or "democracies", which could sparkle discontent and ultimately a revolution. BTW these cyberwarfare operations are not done from North Korea, but from China. Not with an network connection to China, but geographically from China. The best CS graduates from the university are shipped to a specific hotel in China which functions as the base of training and operations for the North Korea intelligence unit, training NK graduates to become hackers with the assistance of seasoned Chinese hackers. That specific hotel is the base of operations for all the hacking, ransomware, cryptocurrency heists, and these IT workers fraud, etc... These "remote IT jobs" aren't from individuals in North Korea trying to get a freelance job, these are all intelligence officers trying to have a two pronged objective: siphon out money and gather information of targets as an insider. So what's gonna be your next genius idea? Cutting the internet to China? Haha

"Do you think copyright work?" Yes, it works wonderfully. You are looking at the trees, not the forest. They are using copyright laws to undermine privacy and security. Especially in Europe, but also in America. They are pushing ISPs into censor and persecute their own customers it is a case being fought right now in the supreme court, they also succeeded in implementing a "tax" on all physical storage media in Spain under the presumption that all storage media are gonna be used for piracy, for example. They are pushing DRMs that are basically rootkits for every "legal media" you download. Dude, this is being so pervasive that you haven't realized how much privacy an security we have given up already, like the frog in the casserole. We are freaking boiling and yet you think Copyright law is ineffectual?

Yeah, making money while stifling creativity. You know what Big Pharma could have lobbied to extend patent law to expire 200 years, destroying all generics, in the same way that Disney did. Also the irony is that Disney freaking plagiarized and used stories in the PUBLIC DOMAIN, and then they freaking closed the door behind them with this absurd law. They were the primary beneficiaries of using other people's work to create something, admittedly, beautiful and original. This is the very thing they are impeding with this hyperextension of the copyright law: new creative and derivative work, reinterpretation and expansion of the creative universe. Freaking hypocrites.

Almost every should be already in public domain. The same ethos for patents was supposed to cover for Copyrights: a temporary monopoly for the creator so they can live of it for a while, and then becoming public for the benefit of the invention/creation for the rest of humanity. The way that this got distorted so despairingly between patents and copyright is really an embarrassment. How makes any ethical sense for copyright to persist 150 years AFTER the death of it's author, while parents expire 20 years after it's invention? How is it that a freaking mouse drawn in a piece of paper can keep their exclusive exploitation right while medicine design patent expires in 15 years? Something is really wrong here. The law should be reformed so copyright become sane again, 15 to 20 years tops, and automatic extinction after the death of it's author.

Español is like saying "Chinese", and castellano is like saying "mandarin". Castellano is the actual name for the Spanish language, and Español is a very ambiguous way of referring to Castellano, which defaults to Castellano as it is the official language of the Kingdom of Spain (but there are more Spanish languages in the Iberian peninsula, like Catalan, Gallego, Basque, Asturloense, etc...) So for all practical purposes, in everyday parlance, Español AND Castillan are referring to the same language. Some Latin American speakers think that their latin American version of Spanish is called Castilian, and that the Iberian Spanish is called "Español", but that is some ignorant hypercorrection.

Clearly the planet is run by republicans gone wild! hehe