I thought it was just me and my old iPhone, but I’ve also been having a lot of trouble connecting for the last few months. Since May, really.

Adorable.

Nope seems like you understand it perfectly. It’s completely detached from reality. It’s like saying “we know of no rigorous study showing that accurate weather forecasts produced a tangible increase in the number of people who like bagels.” Like, okay, sure, but no one thought there was.

That article really rubbed me the wrong way. It was a bunch of marketing people basically saying “privacy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be because it doesn’t make poor people rich” and “you’ll ruin the ability of small businesses to thrive if you don’t allow them to base their businesses on intrusive mass surveillance.”

The arrogance is astounding. If you can’t start a business without invading my privacy, you should rethink your business model. Just because surveillance marketing makes finding customers easier, doesn’t make it right. This part in particular is absurd:

Privacy can be, in some sense, a problem of the privileged. We know of no rigorous study showing that toughened digital marketing privacy policies produced tangible economic benefits for anyone, let alone lower-income consumers.

No, privacy is a problem for all of us, not just the privileged. To suggest otherwise is a deflection. It’s not always just about economics, even the working class have other things we value.

Wow, props to Castellucci for being a stand up person and not using their discovery to control or mess with tens of thousands of people’s power supply. And props to GivEnergy for not turning around and suing them after they reported finding the issue.

This could have gone badly in either direction, but we lucked out that this Castellucci seems to be an excellent and conscientious citizen.

Haven’t we always known this? It’s the same concept as a Stingray device, which is used to spy on people because their devices connect to it automatically, assuming it’s a normal cell tower. People don’t know what tower they’re connected to, so if you connect to a “fake” or exploited tower, you’ve basically handed over the keys. This is essentially the same thing, but on a 5g network, which is presumably made up of even more nodes/towers.

The justice system doesn’t apply to corporations, even though they’re people. And since the corporations are run by billionaires, the most peopliest people there are, the justice system definitely doesn’t apply to them. Money = speech, and these corporations have the most money, therefore they get the most speech, meaning they have more rights than us normal people, and can get away with breaking the same laws that would get any of us thrown in jail.

/s but not really…

I was in second grade when the school district started thinking about providing internet access for a few computers. You could just add a period at the end of a URL to get around the filters. No idea how or why it worked, but I told everyone. Those were the days.

You’re totally right about the SEO industry. My comment wasn’t meant as an endorsement of SEO, I agree it’s one of the internet’s most fundamental problems. I’m just so frustrated by how consistently google lies about these things. Their first impulse, in so many different situations, is to immediately tell a bald-faced lie, then double down on the lie, and then when the truth comes out, they somehow always seem to get a pass. That’s what’s despicable to me.

But it did expose all the lies google has been telling about SEO and how it works with their algorithm. Basically all the times google was asked “so are you sure you don’t do x, y, or z to prioritize certain sites?” They said no, emphatically, despite some very clever folks who had a pretty good idea of how things were working based on independent tests and experiments on SEO. So google was lying all along, while trying to convince the experts that what they were seeing wasn’t real. Pretty despicable if you ask me.

Michael indignant, Michael throw tantrum, Michael get what she wants.

Also Mutiny, Klingons, Mirror Universe, Time Signals. Think that about covers it.

Honestly, I love the show despite its issues. Think I might do a rewatch before I watch the finale too…

Pretty sure the answer will be a knock on your door, with the strong possibility that you’ll never be seen again.

The reporter’s use case actually makes a lot of sense to me. I would never buy one of these, but I wouldn’t be opposed to using something like this if I ever ended up with one.

It’s not like I stand in front of it and watch a whole movie in my kitchen. But I like to have the T2 Tennis Channel on while I scramble eggs or pop on a news show while cooking dinner. Plus, it’s nice to have a kitchen screen that doesn’t take up counter space.

Knowing people like him, he would probably take the obvious literary warnings from a book like that and use them as inspiration for how to build an even more dystopian nightmare.

Yeah I hear you, but I think that’s actually a big part of the problem. We the plebs want AI to free us from slaving away our lives. But Altman and those like him will never have the same motivations as us, so I’ll never trust them to develop the technology in a responsible way that actually benefits the majority of people, not just the tippy top of the absurdly wealthy.

I do not trust this man to do anything in my best interest. He is a disingenuous and untrustworthy messenger, and if allowed to continue unchecked will end up the overlord of a new hyper-capitalist dystopian nightmare. I’m genuinely afraid of this guy and people like him.

I’ll remind folks that this is a man with such appalling hubris that he thinks he should be able to raise trillions of dollars to make his own fantasies come true.

I don’t know much about the case beyond some very lazy peripheral searching, but it strikes me that Proton’s compliance isn’t an issue, but the requests themselves are totally unjustifiable and based on malicious prosecutions to nab some separatists on ridiculous terrorism charges for their nonviolent action and protests.

This individual is suspected of being a member of the Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalonia’s police force) and of using their internal knowledge to assist the Democratic Tsunami movement.

The requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism laws, despite the primary activities of the Democratic Tsunami involving protests and roadblocks, which raises questions about the proportionality and justification of such measures.

I do the same thing, and always wonder that too. These companies have been caught lying consistently and repeatedly about what they collect and how, so even with all the right settings I’m very skeptical that they actually respect my choices.

Yeah….methinks this site is not of the highest quality.

This is one of the more disturbing things I’ve read in a while, and there’s a genocide going on.

It strikes me that this guy and his followers simply never grew up, because they didn’t have to. Instead of being faced with everyday challenges like the rest of us, their money could insulate them from any degree of hardship or friction. When you live a life where literally everything can be solved with your money, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to never run out of it, there’s no motivation for you to empathize with or even understand other people’s points of view, and thus this scary techno-authoritarianism is born.

These are the people who will prevent us from making any socioeconomic progress. They actually want us all to wear colored shirts and be discriminated against based on our color. Their dystopian vision is genuinely the stuff of my nightmares.