The EFF stands alone in its commitment to actually speaking truth to power. The ACLU has become just another arm of the DNC, same with the SPLC etc - repeating CNN-esque talking points. Same with the NRA - milquetoast arm of those in power.
The EFF will go after orgs that fund it, which requires true compunction.
FIRE is a good replacement for the ACLU, FYI. And John Brown Gun Club is becoming a better NRA.
JBCG doesn't really replace much of the NRA. Even if hypothetically people could join JBCG at mass scale, which they can't due to the way its structured.
The NRA-ILA is increasingly useless for 2A advocacy and legal efforts, but JBCG isn't replacing that at all. FPC, 2AF, to a lesser extent GOA do more there.
NRA courses are crufty but don't really have a replacement approaching anywhere near the same scale. Certainly not JBCG.
Maybe USCCA for just the pistol side of things, but that has its own issues since their business model is fleecing people.
NRA competition... there's no replacement for bullseye, but that's because bullseye is becoming an afterthought compared to e.g. USPSA in a lot of areas... smallbore and air as a college&younger sport notwithstanding. And nothing is close to trap/skeet/sc in popularity in the US, but that's not NRA either.
NRA club/range support and insurance.... also nothing replaces this.
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What JBCG has that the NRA doesn't, and never had, is the same thing that the black panthers had in the 60s - armed support of disenfranchised subsets of the population. It's harder for the police to shut you down, or stand and watch as an adjacent supremacist group shuts you down, if you have your own armed guards.
Same as armed guards prevented mobs from attacking schoolchildren during desegregation in the late 60s, you see JBCG in a lot of places protecting pride events, drag events, etc. 'cus the police often don't. (In the US, it's not the police's job to protect anyone, that's been tried in the Supreme Court multiple times)
> What JBCG has that the NRA doesn't, and never had,
(Corollary: maybe that makes them a "better NRA", but it's an odd statement to look at because it sounds something like "DuckDuckGo is becoming a better Nvidia". Yes both are computer-adjacent, but they do completely different things, and have roughly never had any overlap in activities)
While I agree that the ACLU has become defanged, there are many more civil liberties to protect beyond simply free speech, which seems to be the only concern of FIRE.
I agree with you, but I don't see a big attack on freedom of religion, assembly (post COVID) or movement lately. Freedom of Speech is under massive, coordinated attack by gigacorporations and https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...
that's all great but you realize a lot of readers here are not USA, eh?
"web-TPM" needs to be named-and-shamed among literate people in all nations IMHO. It is clearly political -- there are private winners and public losers in the change to locked and enforced access to digital content on the Internet. Any commercial company in any country that can successfully block the roads and check ID will make money, and they know it.
Your ability to mischaracterize it as "webtpm" makes me question your credibility entirely. It's fine to be opposed to the proposal, but it would be best to stay truthful and not exaggerate.
It is web-TPM. Yes the spec theoretically allows for any kind of attestation, but in practice it's only useful with hardware security like TPM involved.
They are not even merely similar, they are identical.
They are both someone else controlling some part of your property, to control your use of the rest of your property.
Neither is benign or honest. Neither actually does what the sales pitch claims. The sales pitch is a Sales Pitch. It is what you say when you need to convince someone to do something they normally would not want. Anyone can make up a good sounding sales pitch for anything. Quoting the good sounding sales pitch does not show that the thing is good. It just makes one wonder about the speaker.
TPM is not merely "safe secret storage", it's someone else's secret used for someone else's purposes, and one of those purposes is absolutely to "attest" that WEI is valid on this machine at this time.
I can only assume that you know all of this perfectly well and can only guess at possible reasons why anyone who knows what these things do would try to sell the bs cover story that TPM is just another bit of neutral useful handy tech that users can use like a special kind of thumb drive, without mentioning anything about Microsoft and the reality of most actual manufactured devices, and what it actually means even on a machine where it's "disabled".
Why do Linux bootloaders have to get a blessing from Microsoft? Why does even one machine exist that has a bios that lacks the supposedly spec mandated option for the user to install their own keys? Why are there keys preloaded on every machine that the user did not provide? Why do they all come from Microsoft? And why can't the user edit or remove them? Why can't the user decide that the MS keys are invalid and that things signed by them should not be allowed to run?
There are so many ways and proofs that this tech is not what it's sales pitch claims it's not even funny.
I can understand not being aware of the underhanded aspects by simply not being aware of anything about it. I can not understand being aware of what it is and how it works, and still being OK with it and defending it as reasonable, useful, not dishonest at all, and exerting no outside _and superior_ control over what is supposed to be the users own property and actions and associations.
They graciously, most of the time, allow you to also store some keys of your own in their vault they caused to be placed on your machine even if you didn't want it? How magnanimous and generous of them!
It's not a sales pitch, it's a very practical application for a TPM. Easy-to-use LUKS is nothing to scoff at for example. If you can't use it, that's your fault.
> Why do Linux bootloaders have to get a blessing from Microsoft?
Nothing to do with TPMs. The rest of the paragraph is nearly as misguided.
> They graciously, most of the time, allow you to also store some keys of your own in their vault they caused to be placed on your machine even if you didn't want it? How magnanimous and generous of them!
Yeah, it's so bad when you have extra hardware that you can utilize for your own purposes. It really is like blaming AES-NI being used for doing public key encryption with someone else's public key. Nobody should ever have anything they should want securely stored because some other technology out there is used in restrictive ways, sure. Obviously that's not true, you're simply pointing your finger at the wrong thing.
The EFF will go after orgs that fund it, which requires true compunction.
FIRE is a good replacement for the ACLU, FYI. And John Brown Gun Club is becoming a better NRA.