fiat_lux

Legal advice given to me by an employer treated all citizens as eligible. Their advice tends to err on the side of caution at the best of times, but I have no reason to disagree that it’s at the very least legally contentious even if not yet officially contested.

Tl;dr I wouldn’t want to rely on it in court, whether everyone else is happy to risk that is whatever.

To be frank with you, humans are the weakest security point in any system. Even if you did somehow (impossibly) 100% secure your device… you’re literally sending everything to X other family members who don’t care about security anyway and take zero preventative measures. That’s sort of the point of a chat app. All they would need to do is target your family instead of you to get the exact same info - this is how Facebook has everyone’s telephone number and profile photo, even if they don’t have an account. And if it’s a WhatsApp data breach… well. Your family is just one in a sea of millions of potentially better/easier targets.

If there’s anything interesting about your family chats that is actually secret info, it probably shouldn’t be put into text anywhere except maybe a password manager. Just tell them not to send passwords or illegal stuff or security question info via whatsapp. It’s all you can realistically do in situations like this.

We literally cannot keep all information private from everyone all the time, you have to pick and choose your battles. And even then, you’ll still lose some, even if you’re perfect.

Because they were making Reddit 2.0, with all the same flaws.

It relies on slow legal mechanisms that vary widely by jurisdiction. It also highlights the huge problem with forcing users to find workarounds for legal manipulation. Instead of employing an “economies of scale” approach and having authorities crack down on obvious bullshit, you have to go through this process or pay someone to do it for you and pay companies for their credit reports on you and pay to file the lawsuit etc. etc.

Additionally, any of these companies can close down and then open back with with a new name at any time and force you to start the process all over again. It’s called a “phoenix company” where I am.

I also consider it pretty likely that trying to remove your information just verifies your information and therefore makes it more valuable for brokers. There’s no reason to assume they handle information ethically and are doing anything more than providing the opt-out for plausible deniability.

Excellent, thankyou! I was just going to throw ubuntu at it unless I really needed something else because of the potato specs, so hopefully drivers are already sorted.

especially the WiFi/Bluetooth chipset

Noted. I would be pissed to not have that working.

Don’t try anything fancy

No chance, I’ve been burnt by my unix arrogance enough times to not want to try it on proprietary hardware. Until now I assumed even getting Linux on there was too fancy, I still remember other people fighting for weeks with their hackintosh a decade ago.

Thanks, I appreciate it! I’m happy for a dual boot and for no camera, so here’s hoping for the rest.

I have a late 2011 that I might be interested in doing this to. Any practical advice on avoiding your suffering?

Slack is a wild journey of bizarre state management issues, for a program that relies heavily on rapidly updating information. You’d think that’s the one thing they’d nail.

[2 mins 15 sec] Yaccarino: “I work at X, he worked at Twitter, X is a new company.”
…
[3 mins 16 sec] Yaccarino: “The team at Twitter is fantastic”

At least she lasted 1 whole minute before that embarassing contradiction. I can’t do another 38 minutes of watching that mess though, too painful right from the start.

Poor little baby, I’m so glad you were able to help out. Long live Mr. Nutley!

Same. This pic has been helpfully living in my memory for probably a decade.

This is even worse when we factor that many accessibility issues are addressed through simple measures that many times must be accomplished when basic maintenance is done, like rewiring or fittings renewal.

I completely agree. I would love to have the option to use non-networked solutions. But for multiple reasons, tinkering with the electricity supply and residence is outside my control.

I can still control my networks and lightbulbs though. So here I am, somewhere I never anticipated, looking at networkable lightbulbs and foss repos. Like I said, I’m just happy to have an option.

I’m glad your relatives were able to make permanent modifications to their living spaces that sufficiently accommodated their accessibility needs! Many of us do not share those circumstances, and the number of people with a huge variety of different medical problems is steadily increasing. I, for one, am very happy to have some implementation options to choose from.

If you’re really old, odds are you have experienced physical pains that have made “forgetting to turn off the light/appliance/device” a difficult experience rather than just inconvenient. I never liked the idea of IoT devices until chronic pain fucked up the whole mobility thing for me, now I realise it’s a total necessity. Especially for societies with rapidly growing older demographics, increased rates of chronic illness, and inadequate social and medical systems.

It’s not possible to remove bias from training datasets at all. You can maybe try to measure it and attempt to influence it with your own chosen set of biases, but that’s as good as it can get for the foreseeable future. And even that requires a world of (possibly immediately unprofitable) work to implement.

Even if your dataset is “the entirety of the internet and written history”, there will always be biases towards the people privileged enough to be able to go online or publish books and talk vast quantities of shit over the past 30 years.

Having said that, this is also true for every other form of human information transfer in history. “The history is written by the victors” is an age-old problem when it comes to truth and reality.

In some ways i’m glad that LLMs are highlighting this problem.

Even as someone who declines all cookies where possible on every site, I have to ask. How do you think they are going to be able to improve their language based services without using language learning models or other algorithmic evaluation of user data?

I get that the combo of AI and privacy have huge consequences, and that grammarly’s opt-out limits are genuinely shit. But it seems like everyone is so scared of the concept of AI that we’re harming research on tools that can help us while the tools which hurt us are developed with no consequence, because they don’t bother with any transparency or announcement.

Not that I’m any fan of grammarly, I don’t use it. I think that might be self-evident though.

Can’t or won’t? It’s won’t. Elon could pump a couple of million in to supplement shortfalls within a day maximum, if he wanted to.

Because nobody makes them.

Part of this is a symptom of support demands from users. There has been an expectation in software development historically, back from when software was always hideously expensive and limited to companies as users, that errors would be fixed by someone on demand ASAP. We’re all familiar with the IT guy “file a ticket first” signs on offices, or the idiot executive’s demands for a new computer because they filled theirs with malware somehow.

But now a lot of what software did is web-based and frequently free/freemium. But the customer’s expectations of having their issue fixed ASAP remains. Despite the internet being far from a standardised system of completely intercompatible components. So updates and fixes need to continually be deployed.

And that’s great for most people, until that expectation extends to the creation of new features, from management and end users alike. Then things start getting pumped out half-finished-at-best because you can just fix the MVP later, right?

We’re going to get to the backlog sometime… right? We don’t need to keep launching new features every quarter… right?

Honestly, I’m not sure. Privacy has always been a spectrum, but we’re now living in a world where it’s near impossible to get close to 100% privacy for any action from the start. I suspect the current possible remedies are “ensuring the people and organisations which use/abuse surveillance are heavily regulated and compliance heavily enforced” which ironically requires transparency.

Realistically there needs to be lengthy legal procedures to grant authorities and companies use of such techniques. Legislation like that is complicated and slow to develop though. It also risks pinning the core privacy concepts to specific versions of specific tech, which complicates its enforcement over time.

Even if it is very illegal to do this to someone though, there will always be people who use it for whatever purposes. Obviously making it illegal under wiretapping laws without explicit opt-in consent to do it is something that would need to happen. I’d also like to see mandatory source attribution laws.

That won’t stop everyone though. Which means we maybe need to start looking into comstruction legislation to ensure RF blocking materials are used in external wall construction. If that is an effective remedy to Van Eck phreaking at all. I have no idea what resolution information can be determined from devices that aren’t purpose built broadcasting and receiving devices.

And all of that requires good-will and sensible decisions from the existing legal systems and legislators. Which can’t be completely achieved, and in many cases is… currently very poor.

Tl;dr A very hard problem which will need work from a bunch of different parts of society and likely cannot be completely solved for all people. The only solution for this specific technique right now I think is to go fully off-grid with no electricity. Even then though you’ll still have satellites and drones to intrude.