kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

EU Galileo navigation system offers signal authentication to avoid signal spoofing attacks previously employed against GPS

https://insidegnss.com/securing-gnss-a-trip-down-cryptography-lane/

@hushroom @feld

> You can make a categorical distinction

Sure, I don't think there's any disagreement between us here! It's specifically this demonization part that I consider unfair and actually harmful.

Watch out, Chrome Safe Browsing was quite privacy aware so far, it just checked URL hashes. Now it's full blown real-time monitoring of what you actually browse... and link it to your Google account.

Not that it did anything else if you had your browsing history synced to cloud 😂

https://security.googleblog.com/2020/05/enhanced-safe-browsing-protection-now.html?m=1

@hushroom

Horses and donkeys are different species but they can reproduce and have children (mules)... but these cannot reproduce further.

Humans actually also had various species (Denisovan, Neanderthal) which most likely coexisted at the same time and there's evidence they could have sex (well, that you can always have...) and children. Right now there's just homo sapiens left.

A fascinating book on this subject - Harari "Sapiens" (2014)

https://libgen.lc/ads.php?md5=9DB80AAC6758446E18354478F0843049

@hushroom

Precisely, they are random DNA changes, that result in change of existing traits, new traits, disappearance of traits, thus leading to either a new variety within the same species (sexually compatible) or appearance of new species (sexually incompatible). Human skin colors are result of a random mutation in MC1R gene 1.2m years ago that was later reinforced by natural selection, but we are all varieties of the same species and we can reproduce regardless of skin, hair or eye color.

@hushroom

Check this book -

https://libgen.lc/ads.php?md5=3816FB871D4DF90AC879E582BAEE07AF

chapter 5 "Green Genes" as it goes into great detail about genetic engineering techniques, including origins of opposition, and including peanut allergies (screenshot). It was written by a recognized environmentalist Stewart Brand who condemned WWF, FoE and Greenpeace on their anti-scientific position, as many other environmentalists did.

@hushroom

> No matter what a classical plant breeder does with tomatoes, you can assume its safe for anyone with a peanut allergy to eat them

You cannot make this assumption due to random mutations. If prolamin protein appeared in peanut, it could appear in tomato as well.*

With CRiSPR you can be pretty certain that nobody will put peanut cupin and prolamin proteins into tomato just to cause allergy in people.

* obviously probability is close to zero due to different evolutionary paths

@hushroom

> how much genetics comes from mutations, and how much comes from breeding, selecting

But "breeding", "selecting" *is* "mutations".

@hushroom

> this capability gives me control over the outcome

But this is precisely what what it does and we've been doing for 11'000 years.

We've been waiting for a random bytes to change in firefox.exe to maybe see if it runs faster or eats less memory.

Then for 100 years we rammed firefox.exe with a fuzzer replacing not only but hundreds of bytes, and it worked very well.

Now patch a single byte, and people are suddenly marching...

@hushroom

Actually, Non-GMO Project maintains a whole list of plants that are "high risk" of being modified using CRiSPR (which they call GMO). The funniest part however that for many plants they *cannot* in any way distinguish them from non-CRiSPR (non-GMO as they call it) plants, yet they speak of "risk" and "contamination".

https://www.nongmoproject.org/gmo-facts/high-risk/

@hushroom

> mutation-induced genes are present

Back to naming confusion.

All edible plants are certainly genetically different from their natural ancestors and they were created by selecting *random* mutations by desired traits.

Many but not all edible plants were created using mutagens like dimethyl sulfate or gamma (which we usually understand by "mutation breeding").

Few edible plants were created by CRiSPR, mostly due to the legal restrictions.

@thor

This very clearly demonstrates the absurdity of the whole concept of a "nation". In reality, if someone says "we as nation were humiliated" it usually means he was a dumb dick that made a wrong decision based on his or her ego, and, well, was humiliated, but prefers to generalize this on the others.

@hushroom

So the natural state was essentially eating what grows out there. Ancient breeding was waiting for random mutations. Mutagens were like bulldozer, this is like a scalpel, safe and precise.

And... now the hell unleashes, people marching against "Frankenfood" and all this. I hope you now understand why this whole GMO war is so frustrating for anyone who really understands how this works.

@hushroom

Then we start to understand *what* we're actually doing on the molecular level - there's DNA, there are genes, genes code traits. If we change just this single gene, we get this desired trait. We don't get more toxic solanine (potato alkaloid), we just get the potato more sweet or whatever we want.

This is precisely what CRiSPR does.

@hushroom

Obviously, a mutagen is like a bulldozer - it can modify a dozen of genes. Can make the plant more sweet, or more poisonous. But we don't care as long as the result is sweeter or bigger or whatever we like.

Then we discovered gamma rays, which do the gene splicing even better. New varieties of tomatoes, apples, potatoes, wheat etc etc. All produced through 20th century using mutation breeding.

@hushroom

100 years ago we discovered that some chemical substances accelerate DNA changes in plants (and in humans, where we call them carcinogens"). That's great thing, as random mutations are slow - so we started to chemically induce mutations in thousands of seeds, breed them and select the ones with desired mutations.

@hushroom

Only 11'000 years ago we domesticated first plants. Domestication means we switched from hunter-gatherers into someone who lives along a field of specific grass, weeds it, cultivates, nourishes waters.

Some grains are larger, some are smaller as result of random mutations. You eat the smaller, and you leave the larger to grow, because someone noticed larger seeds result in more larger seeds.

Bingo, you've artificially selected a modified DNA for future breeding!

@hushroom

> we've literally been doing this for thousands of years

Because we have. The whole environmental narrative about what is "natural" is completely ahistoric.

Do you know what is truly "natural"? Well, just go out to a meadow and try to find anything edible there. Maybe a frog, maybe some grass, maybe some tiny fruits.

But this is how homo sapiens lived for the last 1.8 million years! This occasionally comes back in various "paleo" diets.

@hushroom

Now @feld and mine point was that it was not science that created this single, vague and scary "GMO" category. This term belongs now fully to the Greenpeace propaganda terminology, along with "Frankenfoods", "unnatural" etc.

@hushroom

> provide another term for specifically laboratory gene splicing

Which one? The one you probably mean is CRiSPR.

Mutation breeding is also done in laboratories, if this matters at all? But it has been done for ~100 years.