How so? Any competent intelligence service will not just depend on the goodwill of a corporation to secure access to assets and intelligence.
If they cooperate that's good and convenient, but that does not mean the intelligence service will not set in place contingencies for if the other side suddenly decides not to play ball anymore.
I said nothing about anything you stated, that’s all clearly possible, I specifically refuted the unsupported claim that Apple “eagerly cooperate with spy agencies”, where there’s ample evidence to support an opposite claim.
I consider that plausible with Google due to Google's funding history [0], but Apple is afaik way less "influenced" and the way this pwn was pulled off could also have been done by compromising Apple's hardware supply chain and not Apple itself.
Particularly considering how in the past Apple has been very willing to be on the receiving end of negative headlines for not giving US agencies decrypted access to iCloud accounts of terrorist suspects, with Google I don't remember it ever having been the target of such controversy, meaning they willingly oblige with all incoming requests.
This ignores that such a breaking up of the US would very likely be based on similar dynamics as "balkanizations" that see smaller groups put their own identidy above that of the bigger group.
Sentiments that will be reinforced during a civil war when these groups keep trading violence and atrocities with each other, that creates a lot of bad blood and tends to make people identify in ways that differentiate them from "the enemy".
Not even Americans are immune to that, it's an issue latent to this day whenever state rights vs federal government comes up.
> It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite
This is where you lost me. Wayback machine is a centralized repository.
A decentralized system would not have prevented data loss any better without burdening peers with shit they rightfully don't want to host. Nobody wants the cost of hosting anything but their own, and only their own, content.
The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
The centralization of the web through a for profit oligopoly is not the same as having a central respiratory of data by a non-profit.
One of those destroyed net neutrality and most online free speech, the other is a charity trying to be the last memorial of it.
> The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
What about the incentive of keeping a somewhat thrustworthy and complete digital historical record? Is that worth nothing outside of its sheer monetization potential?
Try doing that outside of the FAANG dominance and you have some work cut out for you because they've spent the last decades either buying up any prospective "competition" or straight up marginalizing it into irrelevance.
Which is, to state it again, the antithesis to what the web was supposed to be, it started as a scientific venture [0], it inspired a whole new way of looking at the world and our minds in it [1].
Profit incentives came only later, they were not inherint to this space, they invaded it and took it over.
Yes, I'm romanitizing a lot of idealism here, but I think it's important to remember that era and mindset of the early web.
It's important to remind people that the current web was neither the goal nor has it still much to do with the web of the old, a place of counter-culture, not of corporate mainstream pushing overwhelming government messages while keeping more tabs on you than even the Stasi could ever dream about.
Most of the pros stuck with 1.6 instead of moving to Source (and most existing tournaments stuck on 1.6 - although notably CGS went with CS:S). In Source the movement was clunky, the sound system was awful, and the shooting & spray felt bad. The overall physics was just very strange, it felt like you were walking in honey - although did get better (a long time later).
Almost a year before CSGO official launch there was a showmatch for it and it looked awful. A bunch of small things were improved by the launch, but it was not good at all (look back at 2012 CS:GO footage and you'll be shocked). Sound was inaccurate and inconsistent, molotovs and smokes were glitchy, wallbangs didn't work in a sane manner ... it was pretty atrocious. That said, 1.6 was basically ancient and Valve (who didn't develop the game) pushed for CS:GO to be used in competitions, so it was used. Over time it was increasingly improved and there was an influx of existing (1.6 & CS:S) pro players towards the end of 2012 and early 2013; and an explosion towards the end of 2013. CS:GO came out in August 2012, but only crossed over the 100k concurrent player mark (which is the all-time CS:Source record) in ~ December 2013.
Skin betting became rampant on CS:GO after the August 2013 Arms Deal update, with sites like CSGOLounge having absolutely huge overall parimutuel pots on basically ever game. This pushed up the popularity of the game - even a small local tournament could have 10k viewers if the game was listed on CSGOLounge [and the bigger matches had millions on the line].
Eventually, years later, CS:GO was improved to the point where it could stand alone without propping up by the skin gambling - and since then it's grown much further; but in reality both CSGO and CS:S had very similar and buggy first few years.
If they cooperate that's good and convenient, but that does not mean the intelligence service will not set in place contingencies for if the other side suddenly decides not to play ball anymore.