This page contains some interesting advice I didn't know, useful for traveling in general. Traveling without a luggage is a staple of mine, but I am not at this pro level yet.
For other commenters, overcoming materialism means not being attached to objects. Not necessarily living on a backpack. The idea is to have objects if you can, but don't suffer for their loss, or their gain. Seneca, the stoic thinker, might be a great read to start.
> “What the development of true renunciation implies is that we no longer rely on sensory pleasures
for our ultimate happiness; we see the futility of expecting deep satisfaction from such limited,
transitory phenomena. It is important to understand this point clearly.
Renunciation is not the same as giving up pleasure or denying ourselves happiness. It
means giving up our unreal expectations about ordinary pleasures. These expectations
themselves are what turn pleasure into pain. It cannot be said too often that there is
nothing wrong with pleasure. It is our grasping, exaggerating, distorting, and polluting
attitude toward pleasure that must be abandoned.”
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
Matthew 6:19. He was talking about backing up to the cloud ;)
if those people don't need passwords and accounts, they probably want to do very little with their phone. hence they don't need an iPhone.
Otherwise, if they want to use email, whatsapp, etc., they also want passwords and accounts, hence security measures must be there. Someone has to help them.
You'll find old folk think they just need phone calls but then they want to see their kids photos on insta etc and access their bank if it switches to app only and the like.
it's not that without digital ID you didn't need verification. At least in Italy, digital identities means don't having to go attending lengthy queues in public offices, where paper identities where usually checked. Sometimes you still have to do it.
What I agree with, is that some system is needed to help those without an identity, or at the border of the system. Digital stuff can help there too.
what's most interesting to me about this research is that it is an online collaborative one. I wonder how many more project such as this there are, and if it could be more widespread, maybe as a platform.
This comment reminded me to check whether https://www.distributed.net/ was still in existence. I hadn't thought about the site for probably two decades, I ran the client for this back in the late 1990s back when they were cracking RC5-64, but they still appear to be going as a platform that could be used for this kind of thing.
I was also excited about those projects and ran DESchall as well as distributed.net clients. Later on I was running the EFF Cooperative Computing Award (https://www.eff.org/awards/coop), as in administering the contest, not as in running software to search for solutions!
The original cryptographic challenges like the DES challenge and the RSA challenges had a goal to demonstrate something about the strength of cryptosystems (roughly, that DES and, a fortiori, 40-bit "export" ciphers were pretty bad, and that RSA-1024 or RSA-2048 were pretty good). The EFF Cooperative Computing Award had a further goal -- from the 1990s -- to show that Internet collaboration is powerful and useful.
Today I would say that all of these things have outlived their original goals, because the strength of DES, 40-bit ciphers, or RSA moduli are now relatively apparent; we can get better data about the cost of brute-force cryptanalytic attacks from the Bitcoin network hashrate (which obviously didn't exist at all in the 1990s), and the power and effectiveness of Internet collaboration, including among people who don't know each other offline and don't have any prior affiliation, has, um, been demonstrated very strongly over and over and over again. (It might be hard to appreciate nowadays how at one time some people dismissed the Internet as potentially not that important.)
This Busy Beaver collaboration and Terence Tao's equational theories project (also cited in this paper) show that Internet collaboration among far-flung strangers for substantive mathematics research, not just brute force computation, is also a reality (specifically now including formalized, machine-checked proofs).
There's still a phenomenon of "grid computing" (often with volunteer resources), working on a whole bunch of computational tasks:
It's really just the specific "establish the empirical strength of cryptosystems" and "show that the Internet is useful and important" 1990s goals that are kind of done by this point. :-)
For other commenters, overcoming materialism means not being attached to objects. Not necessarily living on a backpack. The idea is to have objects if you can, but don't suffer for their loss, or their gain. Seneca, the stoic thinker, might be a great read to start.