It sounds like this is trying to coin a new term. I hadn't heard the word forge used to mean an all-in-one git+issue tracker+project mgmt+etc. suite before.
Yeah, it is funny to read all the assertions that everyone knows what a "forge" refers to in the middle of all the threads wondering wtf a "forge" is...
Once upon a time, a lot of software was released/available through "source forge", which is pretty self-explanatory in the context of software publishing. Then a decade ago, SourceForge shit the bed and destroyed its reputation. I'd bet that most of the developers saying they've never heard of "forge" in this context have entered in the industry in that time.
This is a bad association even for people that recognize it. Presumably there were good years but most will probably remember the ugly endgame with awkward UX and weird ads masquerading as fake download links.
Yup! That clears it up. It’s the site that serves lots of ads and binary packages of some old software. At least as of the last time I looked some years ago.
Ok then, not sure I would want more things like that today to self host, but to each their own.
At first I couldn't figure out why Quill was being posted again, but now I see that a long awaited version 2.0 was released 3 days ago (see https://slab.com/blog/announcing-quill-2-0/ ). Thank you for the heads-up!
My tin-hat alter ego says the three letter agencies are creating these companies for the sole purpose of then purchasing the data and skirting the law. But that guy is crazy. ha ha.
Why would the three letter agencies need to do that? There's plenty of money to be made by private businesses doing it with fewer risks of violating the law.
And the TLAs aren't interested in selling this info to state and local agencies, while that's probably the bigger dollar for private businesses.
It doesn't even need to be nefarious or direct. Companies founded by an "ex TLA employee" have increased credibility, and might even procure investment from openly CIA-affiliated venture capital firms like In-Q-Tel. And since the founder has a security clearance (they're "in the club"), the company will have no issues procuring government contracts.
I know one prominent TLA (nominally banned from domestic surveillance) that had a contract with a data broker 25 years ago. Third party doctrine lets them ignore 4A protection.
Nope. I built one of these things years ago to control a parking gate. We did a lot of legal review due to customer concerns. There’s nothing illegal unless you facilitate certain behaviors that vary by jurisdiction.
The police have huge networks. Almost all speed and red light cameras record 7-30 days of continuous video. Typically those installations cover most entry and exit points of a city. The DEA operates interstate surveillance on drug corridors. There are LPR hits and driver/passenger pictures from Maine to Miami, for example. All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.
> All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.
"Driving is a privilege" is a slogan created by authoritarians. The word "driving" doesn't appear in the constitution one way or the other. Travel is a right.
So judges are smart enough to figure out that files on a computer are the equivalent of files on paper and the only reason they didn't spell that out is that they didn't exist at the time.
The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or some other pre-automobile mode of transport. For that to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?
Driving a car is a reasonable parallel to pulling a carriage with a horse, sure.
Driving or carriages are akin to walking? No.
Everybody might have the right to walk that no one can take away from them, but everybody doesn't automatically have the right to a horse and the land required to support and feed that horse, to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away, etc.
Some means of travel have wider social consequences, costs to the commons, that need to be addressed.
EDIT: Original versin of AnthonyMouse comment specifically mentioned a right to a horse and carriage.
The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or drawing a carriage with a horse, even if cars didn't exist 200 years ago. For this to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?
> everybody doesn't automatically have the right to a horse and the land required to support and feed that horse
No one is claiming that you have a right to have someone else buy you a car or a horse, any more than you have a right to have someone else buy you a radio station.
> to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away
Ordinances that require you to clean up after your animal or have emissions controls on your car are orthogonal to whether you have a right to operate one in general.
True. The license to do so is a voluntary contract with State which persons may or may not sign.
Alternatively, avoid "motor vehicle", and don't use words they regulate such as "operator".
Anyone in USA is free to travel in a personal conveyance for non-commercial purposes while respecting property rights of others.
> driving is a privilege
Commercial licensure of that regulated activity using those words is a privilege.
> Anyone in USA is free to travel in a personal conveyance for non-commercial purposes while respecting property rights of others.
Driving is not a privilege. Anyone with funds may purchase a vehicle and drive it on private property.
Making use of roads paved by the public (through tax dollars) is a privilege. If you've failed to support the creation and upkeep of that road (by failing to pay registration- and license-related taxes) and failed to meet the minimum requirements (license, registration, vehicle insurance or a waiver, sometimes vehicle inspections, etc....) of the body that built and upkeeps that road (a governing body: local, state, or federal), you don't have permission (and you certainly don't have a right) to drive on that road.
Even if that's not the way it "should be" (expressing no opinion here), it's the way the law enforcement and judicial branches will enforce the rules of the road on you. Sovereign citizen(-adjacent, perhaps) BS like this is only likely to escalate a traffic stop and aggravate a judge. If you don't like jail, I recommend against this line of action.
> Making use of roads paved by the public (through tax dollars) is a privilege.
But this is where we get into trouble, because then the same logic would apply to walking on public roads.
And the only ingress or egress to the vast majority of residences is a public road. Otherwise the place where nearly anybody lives is fully enclosed by someone else's private property.
At which point this claim becomes "leaving your house or going back home is a privilege" which is facially unreasonable.
It also doesn't align with the way we talk about anything else. If you fail to pay your taxes you don't lose your right to a jury trial just because juries are funded by taxes. If the jury convicts you of tax evasion and the government puts you in jail, the warden will search your cell whenever he wants, but we don't say "privacy is a privilege, not a right" or claim that the government can revoke this "privilege" without due process and conviction of a crime.
And you can't get out of this by saying "but you could just walk," because in many cases you can't. The path between many locations is accessible only via limited access highway where walking is actually prohibited. It's the rule rather than the exception for the distance to be prohibitive -- it isn't reasonable to walk from one city to another, regardless of whether or not it is physically possible.
You have no right to a car, nor shoes, nor lead-free water. You have no right to force others to work to provide those for you. If you are persuasive, maybe you can ask your county commissioners to give away stuff.
In particular, there is a difference between positive and negative rights, e.g. the right to free speech is not the right to have someone else buy you a printing press or a computer.
If you get a benefit from licensure then you should voluntarily contract with the State so you can get whatever benefits are in the licensure contract.
Traveling by personal conveyance is a right. I'm not engaged in plumbing or electrical businesses so I don't take those licenses. Same for driving. I am licensed for septic installation.
That's a distinction that's really defined by place and isn't really relevant to the problem. Perhaps your neighbor is ok with your 8 year old driving through his farm to get to another part of yours - but it quickly will fail to scale beyond that 1:1 relationship as liability is a thing. By rejecting the rules of the state, it's now your problem when your culvert fails and the 8-year old is ejected from the car and is grievously injured.
At the end of the day, because the ability to drive is a function of competence and skill, it cannot be a right. Our ancestors in the 1890-1920 period weren't wild-eyed socialists - they lived through the early days with no rules.
I’m not a lawyer or a gun enthusiast. To me, the 2nd amendment clearly articulates that the government has broad discretion to regulate firearms as part of the civil militia of the citizenry. Others disagree.
With the first amendment, competence and skill don’t apply. Anyone can express themselves, assemble, complain to the government or hand out manifestos, including ignorant or stupid people. I can go start a religion and exercise all sorts of bizarre practices without approval or reprisal.
Liability is always a thing. Your physical harm to people or property is separate from the scope of a fishing license or some other State contract such as a driver license.
The 4th amendment only applies to the government, and has only ever applied to actual tangible property. This is being in public where there is no expectation of privacy.
Eh, the case law here is less clear, principally because automated surveillance at this scale has never been possible before. But its also unclear because this is a tricky zone for the (mentioned elsewhere) "State Actor Doctrine". Since there are legitimate, non-government uses of e.g. license plate tracking, that means the product and service is not, obviously, a state actor. So should the 14th amendment cover it? My gut feeling is "yes", but case law doesn't (yet) reflect that.
Did the founding fathers anticipate a situation where everyone, everywhere, in public, was being surveilled, ceaselessly, in a fashion that allowed automated tools to pick out individuals, but at basically zero cost?
"No reasonable expectation of privacy" presupposes that the potential invaders of said privacy are actual living human beings, who have to be paid for their time, and thus have to sleep, eat, excrete, blink, etc. They cannot be on the job 100% of the time without incurring considerable cost. Previously, perfectly tailing someone 100% of the time was reserved for the most valuable of targets. Now it can be affordably used on somebody with overdue parking tickets. Or whomever the summer intern at one of these shops decides is cute and has an easy-to-remember license plate.
The fourth amendment, of course, also applies to private actors when they become essentially agents of the state, by taking in a role traditionally within the purview of the state, so long as the state knows of the activity, more or less. If you would like a more accurate definition, you can search for “state actor doctrine” and you will find some cases about railroads drug testing employees and parcel carriers searching packages for contraband.
"In the private sector everything is allowed, except those that are explicitly prohibited.
In the public sector everything is prohibited, except those that are explicitly allowed."
This is why in the EU (which is not a perfect society, but 'good enough'/'better than others' we got GDPR and EUDPR which cannot and should not be ignored.
If you allow the public sector to go rogue, then freedoms and right will be corroded and eventually taken away 'for our sake'.
Well the 4th amendment does not mention a limitation to the government. It says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" it says nothing about limitation to government actors.
It does go on to talk about Warrants which are government instruments, and I agree that taking pictures of licence plates on public roads would not be a violation anyway.
But you can't argue that because I'm a private person, or that because TransUnion is not the government, that it's legal for us to go searching through peoples houses or papers or effects.
They don't need to create the companies. They just buy from them.
Anyway, license plate info isn't considered a search because it's in public, and the SCOTUS doesn't care about how scale makes what used to be tolerable, a very different beast.
I’m sure there are more than a few instances where TLAs legal said they couldn’t do it but they could buy data so they had an employee spin off a company and became the first customer.
There are always individuals and likely groups at TLAs who don’t have what most people would consider normal morals and/or think the ends justify the means. The CIA has been found to kill, torture, defame, bribe, and work with criminal organizations and enemy states to meet their ends consistently since their inception. Starting a company or organizing parties to create a company to satisfy legal requirements is about the least controversial thing they could do.
Some enterprising individual should purchase the data for the sole purpose of publishing activity of politicians, judges, and so on. I bet you the laws would change in a hurry.
Source? That sounds like it would run afoul of the 1st amendment. Most likely it's actually implemented as something vague like "intimating a public official", and prosecutors use the threat of a charge to bully people into stopping.
Or more simply, cop car detectors that publicly share where all police are in a vicinity based on camera footage. Just need some enterprising anarchists to let us leverage their ring footage. Can even do it real time!
It wouldn’t need to be a conspiracy. An employee of a three letter agency just gets “poached” by said company. Resigns from agency. Works for company, still keeps in contact with his friends at agency. Setting up those demos and meetings for their latest product are easy now.
That’s not far from the truth. A lot of these companies are located in Northern Virginia, and the sales people are tied into the intelligence community.
One of my managers at Samsung constantly brought up this theory that google was an extension of the CIA. Back in 2012 I thought he was nuts. Not so much anymore. Killed by google dot com is my #1 red flag...
I'm in the same boat. Trying my best to de-FAANG my life. Self hosting as much as possible, with as little management overhead as possible, but I'm still stuck on Android and I don't know how to break free.
I'm self hosting Ghost for blogging, Home Assistant for smart home controller, and in the middle of setting up Vaultwarden for passwords. I also run a lot of stuff off my Synology - Synology Drive instead of Dropbox or Google Drive, Synology Photos instead of Google Photos. I don't have a great solution for email or phone - emails is paid hosting through Zoho and use Android for phone. I'd like to get off those. It's all a long drawn out process.
