The awkwardness here actually works in favour of abolishing tips and replacing them with the pay being factored into higher prices.

No one wants to be the sucker - human nature is that people are generous if they think everyone else is generous, but if they feel that others are not ‘pulling their weight’ on generosity and are instead taking advantage, that’s the fastest way to dry up other people’s generosity. Right-wing media use this fact to undermine support for social welfare - e.g. if 0.001% of welfare payments are fraudulently taken, they set editorial policy that makes it seem like beneficiaries are rorting the system instead of being truly needy.

But when it comes to tipping, the dynamic actually works the other way - people feel generous by tipping, even though it is harmful long term. If a few people ahead of someone in the line don’t tip, should they be the sucker who does tip? And for the employee, you want them to be the advocate on the inside for forcing people to pay their share instead of taking advantage - by having the displayed price be the total upfront price that includes the compensation for employees, instead of an optional tip.

There is a minimum amount of total money the employee could make before they’d go and work somewhere else instead. So if, hypothetically, everyone in a country where tipping is common even for non-exceptional service just stopped paying tips, hospitality employers would be forced to pay more to stay competitive with other non-customer-facing industries.

Of course, a drastic shock to the economy like that would probably cause a lot of upheaval, as some employers struggle to accept the new norm.

However, the same thing would work even if the change was slower - e.g. if 5% of people didn’t tip, and did it very obviously and vocally, and then the practice spread as it reached 10% and so on.

Obviously it sucks for the employees who get hit by the first few non-tippers, but over the long term it would be for the better for worker rights. So I could absolutely see it working.

That said, I say this from a country where tipping is not the norm (except maybe the occasional ‘keep the change’ for exceptional service), and the law and expectation is that the most prominent displayed price is the total price you pay - and people react very negatively towards businesses seen as trying to bring in American style tipping culture.

The FBI pressured Apple to create an encryption backdoor to bypass their security features

This was more like a hardware security device backdoor - the key was in a hardware security device, that would only release it after receiving the PIN (without too many wrong attempts). But the hardware accepts signed firmware from Apple - and the firmware decides the rules like when to release the key. So this was effectively a backdoor only for Apple, and the FBI wanted to use it.

Systems would create a public audit trail whenever a backdoor is used, allowing independent auditors to monitor and report misuse of backdoors.

This has limits. If there is a trusted central party who makes sure there is an audit log before allowing the backdoor (e.g. the vendor), they could be pressured to allow access without the audit log.

If it is a non-interactive protocol in a decentralised system, someone can create all the records to prove the audit logs have been created, use the backdoor, but then just delete the audit logs and never submit them to anyone else.

The only possibility without a trusted central party is an interactive protocol. This could work as: For a message (chat message, cryptocurrency transaction etc…) to be accepted by the other participants, they must submit a zero-knowledge proof that the transaction includes an escrow key divided into 12 parts (such that any 8 of 12 participants can combine their shares to decrypt the key), encrypted with the public keys of 12 enrolled ‘jury’ members - who would need to be selected based on something like the hash of all messages up to that point. The jury members would be secret in that the protocol could be designed so the jury keys are not publicly linked to specific users. The authority could decrypt data by broadcasting a signed audit log requesting decryption of certain data, and jury members would receive credits for submitting a share of the escrow key (encrypted so only the authority could read it) along with a zero-knowledge proof that it is a valid and non-duplicate escrow key. Of course, the person sending the message could jury shop by waiting until the next message will have the desired jury, and only sending it then. But only 8/12 jurors need to be honest. There is also a risk jurors would drop out and not care about credits, or be forced to collude with the authority.

Cryptographic Enforcement: Technical solutions could ensure that the master key is unusable if certain conditions—such as an invalid warrant or missing audit trail—are not met.

Without a trusted central party (or trusted hardware playing the same role), this seems like it would require something like Blackbox Obfuscation, which has been proven to be impossible. The best possibility would be an interactive protocol that would need enough people to collude to break it.

I believe nothing in the podman rm family worked because the container was already gone - it was just the IP allocation that was left.