> Until recently, only spies and criminals had to worry this obsessively about their private statements being picked up by electronic equipment.
> But soon, the average person might need to deploy surveillance countermeasures.
Already there. If you want privacy and anonymity online, you're looking at literal terrorist cell tier tradecraft. That means pulling up documents written by people from the "counterterrorism community" and "intelligence community" and learning how all of these "clandestines" operate.
Unlinking one's identity from one's actions and speech requires some serious OPSEC now. It requires constant, never ending effort. It requires perfect execution and discipline.
Since the courts decided you have to use your fingerprint to unlock your phone (because they decided that's not giving up your password and they can't compel you to give up your password), what if you use your fingerprint to wipe your phone? But you don't tell anyone ahead of time when they force you to use it. I'm sure you'd be arrested at the least.
I can't be the only person who has thought of this.
That happened because he chose to give the duress PIN. Cops are allowed to just grab your finger and scan it against your protest. You can say "don't do that, it'll wipe my phone" and they'll do it anyway and it'll wipe your phone, and now it certainly isn't your fault.
IANAL, but I would bet that's still destruction of evidence. Judges are human, for better or worse, and can see the intention behind cute tricks like this.
It might work if your fingerprint was used while you were unconscious, but any solution that starts with "setup a trigger that wipes a device" is already on shaky grounds.
AFAIK it's legal to set up a trigger that wipes a device. It isn't legal to choose to wipe your device after you know the government wants the data. Tricking the government into wiping it is still allowed, especially if you tell them not to do that.
That matches my understanding too. Unfortunately it sounds like the poster was suggesting to wipe the device after the government requests access, and was probably not planning on telling the officers about the trigger.
With fingerprint unlock it's not your choice. That's what makes it clever. The cop can grab your finger and hold it to the scanner while you tell him not to do that.
Best approach is to shadow-ban the user when they do a secret gesture before logging in. No wiping necessary. Easiest implementation is to just log them into a shadow account.
Statements like this are a stretch. This was not the fact of using the OS, but specifically the fact of wiping it. The situation is atrocious enough as is, no need to make up additions.
Own a general purpose computer you can run arbitrary software on, not just corporation and government approved software? You're clearly a money laundering drug trafficking child molesting terrorist.
There would be a need to think first a bit more abstract about what you're protecting and from who, but even that is more difficult when huge varieties of data is being collected and archived long term. Details that seem insignificant now may be hostile to yourself later. Similarly I wonder about how the long-game played out for privacy conscious users of browsers like Firefox who changed/hid their user agent identifier, and then a proportion of websites aren't designing a good experience for it, also for disabling telemetry in other software.
Is it better to blend into the crowd, hide outside the crowd, or do what you can to have other groups take your desires into account
I met the parent comment downvoted: I don't know why, given e.g. the rule from the current administration in the USA that, for visitors, the absence of social network profiles is to be taken as cause for suspicion.
Friend of a friend retired several years ago from Intel. He'll go into detail about all the ways you're being spied on. He won't let you into his house with a smartphone; you have to turn it off and leave it in your car.
Not as easy as one may think. If you put a phone in a generic waterproof metal box (metal junction or biscuit box for instance) and call it with another one, most of the time it will still ring...
The fun part about this comment is that we don't know if "Intel" is the company, or the term for the IC. I'm pretty sure it's equally likely to be either meaning, and no surprise based on whichever is correct.
To be fair, most phones have invasive Google/Apple/Chinese OEM services that work with high privileges and are invasive on their own, without apps. The share of people using degoogled OSes is small enough to assume it isn't the case. And, to be fair, if someone has a degoogled phone, you'd probably know that by now (I say as also a degoogled user XD)
A visitor who wants to record will just have a second recording device. Asking nicely to leave the phone behind could only protect from spying the phone owner never intended.
Thanks, very interesting. Basically the authors blast high-power (~92 dBA) ultrasound around 25kHz and hope that microphone non-linearities will overwhelm the audible signal.
This will sure make all the dogs in 20m radius mad. Hence the solution for the stealth recorder -- bring a dog, then complain about the ultrasound jammer (or at least to be aware of a jammer)
From the paper, it looks like the authors did not consider safety of animals, only human hearing safety.
As someone frequently annoyed by those stupid bird/deer/insect ultrasound emitters I hope this doesn't become common, with my luck I'll be able to hear them.
My neighborhood is full of these anti-social devices which are entirely designed to try to prevent dogs from shitting on their lawns. The noise they make is always at a pitch I can hear and my dog always ignores them.
My dog has no problem shitting on their lawns, and even sometimes pees on the devices.
So I'd like to find any actual devices which work on dogs (well I have no use for it but just to be sure they actually exist), because circa the original iphone I remember that there were apps which could reliably make its microphones do it (and impact dogs as expected).
Which country are you in? Here in GB it is expected that dogs will be under control, and in any case their owners are responsible for any damage they do. Cats on the other hand ... people have devices to scare away cats, though I'm not sure how well they work. Interestingly, cat owners have them in some cases ... to keep their own cat away from certain areas?
I feel like sooner or later we all hollow out a little more. All this data is either used to prevent crime or to influence your thoughts and what you do in the world. Outsourcing your thinking to something else leads to digital dementia. What is the point of all of this technology?
We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability unless they have explicit consent[1] and a legit reason to house it.
A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.
We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.
[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.
> We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability
This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment.
There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc.
Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service.
Explicit consent will be everywhere, like you won't be admitted to a grocery store without it. Take any modern TV -- there's a privacy policy you have to accept the first time you turn it on. Or California Prop 65 notice on every product.
So no, requiring explicit consent won't fix anything.
The government needs regulation to allow access without granting consent in certain cases. Not quite as far as declaring something a utility, but better than almost completely unregulated.
Most of the videos talk about reducing burden on clinicians. Specifically: sharing, accessing, updating patient history. Providing clinicians and patients guidance through the medical process through AI agents (that have access to your PII). the kaiser permanente guy highlighted ai's use in guiding billing codes. Dr. Oz spoke about getting pre-authorizations near instantaneously
I'm not sure how that gets accomplished without reducing liability or loosing restrictions. I wouldnt be surprised to see a continued attack on our healthcare privacy
Weren’t electronic health records supposed to solve this problem almost 20 years ago?
I would have figured there would have been a massive financial interest in providers not having to waste time dealing with tedious Q&A and data entry with new patients…
Pretty difficult when a lot of government people are in it looking for any opportunity to get into bed with private sector for their own individual gain, and when corporations have far more spending power and far less bureaucratic lag than governments. Governments are also just as hungry for data as corporations are.
And if you think a government has any interest in protecting their people, well, that is simply inaccurate in practice.
The government exists to organise and pacify its people, to prevent unpredictable or counter-productive behaviour. Primarily to protect the government from its people.
Regulation doesn't protect people, it protects the government, corporations, or both, in the same way HR protects the company from its employees. The people benefit coincidentally, if at all.
> we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us
Please don't. The entire civilized world for all of history and before has been built on the uncomfortable alliance between power/capability and governance/legitimacy. Protection-seeking is the primary support system for tyranny which is happy to induce the chaos they protect you from.
We just need enough negative feedback for any kind of abuse that it stops, because regulations have to be slow to be accurate and thus invite abuse innovation. The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition so people can vote with their feet.
So, ask not for antagonism but for real alternatives.
The second paragraph by itself is enough, the first is a tad hubristic and vague. The good things that got us here are not necessarily the things that will get us there, there being wherever we ideally want to end up...
>The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition
The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem.
> You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem
Yeah, sorry. Yes, corporate activities that reduce competition or corrupt regulators should have their agents and causes ripped out branch to root; they're like diseases which attack the immune system, doubly bad.
But the premise that a corporation or a country that does bad things means you are justified in antagonizing or destroying the entire company or the people is typically enlistment and leverage for protection rackets.
Warring with others is a cycle that doesn't end, and mainly elevates military resource providers. Warring with yourself - attacking your own organs - is self-destructive (which is why enemies stimulate it).
As for here vs there, 20th-century totalitarian systems all stemmed from people wanting to believe promises of a better world, and the promotors being unbound by facts of the present. "Here" is a much more tractable problem, where our medicine (or immune systems) could get better at stemming the diseases we have, like the lack of negative feedback for abusing people (more generally for exporting costs, esp. to the future), or the corruption of discourse that mediates agreements about governance. My goal would be to leave the world more free, peaceful, nature-healthy than I found it. Antagonism doesn't help for that, and side-tracks people into regressive emotions.
your inventing a concept of universal power dynamics and history with no basis.
Humans have created a myriad of sociatal structures, and with the current luxury of our post scarcity techno industrial manufacturing capabilities there is no reason to have all of the forever wars and suffering from lack.
What you describe is slavery, not civilisation.
That would be child abuse, as corporations are born out of the state as statutory entities. Corporations used to be chartered to do specific jobs like build a bridge or whatever. Charter max was 20 years. This is why the first and second national banks ran for only 20 years each.
"The bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. "
"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital."
I would be fine with the NSA recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup. I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
However, corporations - for some reason - are given a pass.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life.
I was watching a documentary about the first food regulations in the US today, lobbyists are as old as the state here, good luck getting them out, the entire system was designed by and for them
I would be fine with the NSA[1] recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup.
I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. Like, it is only after I have been arrested that the data is accessible to the court in which I will have been presented to face accusations of a crime.
I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
And there's the corporations who - for some reason - are given a pass. If governments can steal your data, so can Mr. FatCat and his team of merry department heads.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life, for review. This kind of super-wide view of things would be quite enlightening, I'm pretty sure.
[1] - just for the record, I think the problems that the NSA are trying to solve are obsolete; that there are far greater solutions to fallacies which support the utility of it as an organ of government; I am in the camp that this is a massive human rights issue, also.
> Apple is rumored to be developing an AI pin or pendant that would serve as an iPhone’s constant eyes and ears; many other products of this type are on the way. AI accessories could one day be as widespread as AirPods.
But why? Don't we already have phones, watches, glasses, tags, and airpods? If they were making a siri version of alexa/echo, then maybe that would make sense, but do we really need a specific apple device just to ai?
One of the few reasons to use iPhone is that it doesn't constantly surveil you. If Apple would just pivot and say "next iPhone will constantly record everything it hears and sees to process for our AI (Apple Intelligence(tm))" a lot of people would drop iPhone.
Apple Watch is just extension of screen and notifications from the phone, so there is no overlap.
AirTags have nothing to do with AI stuff.
AirPods apparently now have some translation stuff, but again no constant monitoring.
Apple does not produce glasses and seeing the backlash to Meta's glasses I don't think they will. A pin or pendant might be more acceptable, although hiding it will be just as big of an issue as with the creepy Meta glasses, but any AI thing Apple makes should be a separate product if they want to maximize profits.
> Meanwhile, only a few academics and small companies are defending us from these technologies. “The thing about cat-and-mouse games is that we know how they usually end up for the mouse,” Hartzog said. “And in this case, the cat includes some of the most powerful corporations to ever exist.”
This again points to how these problems have less to do with tech than with our socioeconomic system. The obvious solution (or step towards a solution) is to just shatter all such large tech companies. There should not be any companies powerful enough to do things like this.
Looking at this from a perspective of someone who's searching for a job, I can promise you that even if you are recorded, there's next to zero chance your recording is being analyzed in any meaningful way.
You'd imagine that if this global surveillance was so ubiquitous, finding a match between an employee and employer would've been an... easier problem. However, even though supply is only a little larger than demand, the nature of this supply is to oversaturate the matching system, which then defaults to... I don't even know what, perhaps dropping 99% of all applications at random? Only taking 1% of those who applied sooner? Must be something like that.
Anyways, recording everything is a way to overwhelm the system with useless data. It would be much scarier if recording was selective.
Obama was promoting The Age of Surveillance Capitalism over seven years ago now. Industry insiders have known all this since 1999. Yet almost every single person I know carries a cellphone and drives a car with telemetry, things that are entirely optional. Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.
PS: Something in this vein that many people are unaware of is that the 6G standard for cell towers is planned to include ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication). I haven’t heard a single AFK person talk about this.
I don't think people want this. I think people want the other benefits that those things bring, and increasingly feel that it's impossible to escape being surveilled anyway so do their best to ignore the whole issue.
Being resigned to something is not the same as wanting that thing.
There was a comment made here a month or two ago, about someone from a SE Asia country (I forget which; maybe Bangladesh?) talking about how their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over, and they went from one of the deadliest, most chaotic road systems in the world to Singapore-level rule-following in the space of just a couple months.
As a result, the cameras have become quite popular because there's less traffic, travelling is easier and more predictable, and road deaths have plummeted.
I imagine there are a number of similar situations in every country, where the deployment of AI surveillance has a sufficiently measurably positive impact that it becomes popular.
> their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over
What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something? What actual enforcement actions were taken as a result, and against how many drivers before it stopped?
One might wonder how much of the effect was placebo (i.e., people conforming simply due to the belief of being surveilled).
> What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something?
Yes, exactly. It identifies cars and drivers who are committing traffic violations, and issues citations.
I don't have the specific numbers you ask for, seeing as I can't even remember the country, but it's not difficult to imagine that if sufficiently many such cameras are installed that most moving violations on major roadways are caught and punished, then yes, people will come to (reasonably) believe that the cost of committing the violation is close to the price of the fine, rather than close to zero.
It's one thing to blow by a pedestrian crossing the street, it's another to do so knowing you'll probably be charged $150 (or whatever) for having done it.
If you see someone stating something as being "a good thing to have", you accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
If you read "one can see how someone might not object to this" and understand "this is a good thing to have" then I'm afraid the issue is you contributing the stats that news agencies like to publish about American reading comprehension trends.
The outrageous prices of used (low telemetry) cars make them a poor value proposition, for example. Depending on the model, a used car can be a decade old with half of its lifetime miles on it already and the seller will still want $14k or something crazy like that. When you factor in the parts of its history that carfax doesn’t cover and the stream of repairs you’re likely to be saddled with, finding a 0%-2% financing deal on something new at ~$20-24k begins to look a lot more attractive.
It’s enticing to believe we coulda gone another way. Such as having a paid versions of these services. But free is just Soooo enticing. It hacks peoples brains.
Alas this is the structure of power. Either you have to do a total rejection of its benefits or you end up being sucked into the system as others practically force people into it for fear of being left behind.
The really obnoxious part is that with the possible exception of maps all of the other "services" touted as vital parts of a digitally connected existence are so enshittified at this point that the original value proposition for all of them is absent. So we're left with this zombie rhetoric around being disconnected while "connecting" means you spend hours every day staring at bot content and ads.
I'm not sure that's really true. The two that come immediately to mind are Facebook or Discord for organizing with friends and language translation while traveling.
I mean I might give it to you for Discord but Facebook is an easy win here. There's so much bot crap on Facebook Meta keeps getting dragged in front of congress over it.
Fuck no, I stopped using my phone for anything besides maps and phone stuff before the pandemic. You peddling the idea that that isn't what all of the social platforms are these days?
By leveraging mobile network infrastructure – towers, spectrum, antennas, and some hardware – ISAC can detect, locate, and track objects (including passive ones with no electronics). This will enable a wide range of use cases such as UAV airspace monitoring, autonomous vehicle safety, industrial automation, and immersive AR experiences. Commercial deployment is expected alongside 6G rollouts in the 2030 timeframe
I wonder how precise this will be? A flying object sounds reasonable but could it actually track say individual people walking on a street further down the line?
From the hardware side, extremely precise. Most discussions assume the sweet spot for ISAC is in "Frequency Range 3" (7 - 24 GHz, decent penetration and range, very good resolution), and in that range you can pin down objects with millimeter precision (both position and velocity). So, not only can you detect people walking down the street, you can detect them breathing when they stand perfectly still.
This, of course, requires 6G base stations to be spaced pretty tightly (hundreds of meters apart) and to feature sophisticated phased array antennas. But both can be assumed in cities (they're planning to completely replace WIFI with 6G, so every current WIFI access point will become a 6G micro cell). Walking humans can be detected much easier, but radar SNR is funny, that only gives you 4x-6x the detection range.
Software (signals processing) for all that will be... a lot of difficult work. Object separation/tracking, multipath reflections, clutter suppression, ect.
- Consumers largely do not know these things. They are either not disclosed, or buried within a TOS that they cannot read. This is all done on purpose. The reason the TOS is obtuse, long, inaccurate, and updated weekly is so you won't read or understand it.
- In most markets there is no choice. For smartphones you do not have a choice, both Apple and Google do extensive surveillance. If you want to bank, get a job, and all around be successful, you have to swallow the surveillance cost. If you want a new car, again, no choice. If you work a job, again, no choice on the computer or software.
- It is not reasonable to expect consumers to do extensive research on everything they buy. Consumers have lives, children, jobs. They're not going to sit and spend 10+ hours researching every thing they buy, especially when most of that research is fruitless.
- There are tradeoffs with everything. Yes we can use Linux, I sure do. But for other consumers, now they need to spend a lot of time understanding that. Yes we can use Graphene OS, but certain apps won't work.
Traversing life without a cell phone is a fun experiment. Here and there I forget mine and spend a day without the distraction - glorious way to spend time.
As someone who regularly attempts to give up a cell phone, it is not optional. A not insignificant number of things require it. It is the expectation society is now built around and therefore it is not an option. A car without telemetry is for the time being still optional. I take very good care of my old vehicles hoping I never need a new one.
> Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.
This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The use of providers like Meta does not reflect a well-informed, freely chosen preference. Meta spends a ton of money to squash competition, remove viable alternatives, and to make their products addictive.
> This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy.
The fallacy here is that you think people should have difference preferences than they actually do. "People disagree with me? They must be ill-informed."
It is sometimes true that a large group of people hold a preference due to being misinformed, though. I don’t think a kneejerk assertion that GP is assuming their opinion is true and anyone who disagrees is an idiot is merited here.
Meta has done a lot of shitty things to acquire and addict users, and is analogous to a massive regional monopoly in the U.S. Both of those indicate that users of Facebook might be less than rational (in the economic sense) about their choice of social media product.
This is something Richard Stallman has pointed out many times before. You need to tell people about these things, most of them simply do not know the extent of the issues but once they do know it, most are at least sympathetic to the cause.
I don't think they are optional in today's world. There's a lot of places where it would be prohibitive to try to live without a smartphone and what does it even cost to remove telemetry from a car?
It's hard for me to take this perspective seriously when you describe a cellphone as "entirely optional". Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone. Without acknowledging that, how can we have a realistic discussion? Many businesses require you to use a smartphone in some way. Some government services also require one.
Before cellphones, there were payphones everywhere for people to use when they needed to get into contact. Now there are hardly any left in most countries, so your ability to communicate would actually be worse than in the pre-cellphone era. Sure you could ask someone to use their phone, but if a stranger asked me that these days I would likely refuse.
The only reason I take my cell phone with me is in the event my truck breaks down. I have lost count of how many times I forgot it at home. I've had business tell me to install some app but I just tell them no or make them do the work for me. If they want money they will fill in the information. Over the years I have been parting ways from businesses that I can not walk in and talk face-to-face with someone and for good reason as it is getting harder and harder to reach a real person in customer support for online businesses. People are getting accounts disabled or deleted with no recourse.
I don’t carry a cell phone, although I technically own one (it usually stays at home). For a while I had to tell a cashier that I don’t have a phone on occasion, but I’ve noticed that many places seem to be backing off on pushing their apps or requiring a phone for some part of the transaction.
I used to carry a legit dumbphone (not one of the new Android/AOSP “dumbphones”) and that worked just as well. It’s even trendy now!
I do not carry a cellphone. I am employed and live in a major city. I never think about not having one. I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones.
Less and less though and you need to go through quite a bit of trouble sometimes already. Banking, gov apps, I know more and more companies you cannot enter nor clock in without smartphone etc. Sure, you can just resign, move country, try to find another bank; in the end you will run out of options as they are all moving there.
> I am employed and live in a major city. ... . I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones.
This doesn't mean much. I know multiple people who fit this description, live in the US, and can't speak or read English. However, speaking English isn't meaningfully optional. You will face constant limitations and problems in every aspect of life. There are people who don't use electricity, so I guess by your definition that's optional too?
Genuinely. Thinking back on it now, the only times I notice it is in some restaurants that don’t have paper menus out by default. I need to ask for one, which feels very odd and kind of awkward. This is the only instance I can think of.
What happens when you're meeting up with someone? With the folks I know who don't have a phone, this is always a real pain point because they don't have a way to communicate or receive changes of plans, "I'm going to be late", etc...
We agree on when to meet and where, and then we both actually show up. The whole last-minute plan changing thing is a pretty recent phenomenon, I believe.
Do you never have problems with transportation like breakdowns or accidents stopping the traffic for a while or having some sort of emergency where you need to drop everything an take care of it?
For sure, but you still do retain the option to leave it at work, unless you have some kind of 24/7 sales job. I do think privacy at work is not an option for most people.
I do not carry a cellphone, but I own an old one with no data plan that remains off and in a drawer except for when used for things like this. I am not sure I have run into any stores that require 2 factor. Mostly just official stuff like banks.
My work has multiple systems that require 2fa on a regular basis. It's actually quite annoying, and the alternative options to 2fa don't work for every system.
The glorious day in the future when Oauth is confined to the dust bin of history and logging in to anything doesn't require a web browser redirecting 10 times.
"Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone."
Except it really isn't, it just seems that way when you spend a bunch of time on your phone. As part of an utterly graceless transition to middle age I bailed on social media and have aggressively refused to engage with service-related apps of any kind (fuck mychart, drive-thru mobile apps, and the horse they rode in on). To the extent that I use my phone at all these days it's to check text messages, field calls, and (rarely) navigate via maps. I've reverted to the Old Ways (mailing paper checks, calling ahead to get live humans to explain shit, etc) and it's been pretty frictionless. I've yet to encounter a situation where I was prevented from doing anything because I didn't phone.
Actually compared to signing in to a website, 2FA, dismissing the popups to explore new features, entering payment info, then confirming---writing a check and putting it in an envelope takes less time.
consider what GP complained about - everyone carrying phones that data is collected from/by, and useing Meta products
making easier the alternatives to phone tracking means promoting life outside phones, promoting cellphones/OSes that don't spy on you and explaining ways to minimize tracking (like disabling apps' access to the internet)
making easier the alternatives to Meta means promoting competitors, promoting communication/image/information channels outside Meta, promoting life outside Meta products
defeatism is even worse than grumbles - it fulfills neither of the goals
Offering ‘just don’t use modern communication’ as a solution when ‘ban data collection and retention’ is right there feels like a way to derail the conversation rather than an honest proposal.
So much this. When my son turned 12, I told him how some of the various social media sites and smart technologies work, and he’s avoided social media altogether ever since (he’s now an adult). He always uses ad blockers and content filters, and he generally made good decisions around phone use, and other tech use from a privacy respecting perspective.
Prior to this discussion, he was eager to be on social media apps because other kids his age were on them. People respond to knowledge about these topics, but there isn’t a mainstream popular individual talking about it. Everyone is so silo’d, it would be quite difficult to reach people, and depending upon the political leanings of such a person, half the population would reactively go the opposite direction… on what really shouldn’t be partisan.
No, this is not the way to go. Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over, and even if they could, it is entirely likely that there are no good choices because consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.
And one wonders why there is a large amount of rhetoric toward anti-government is being thrown around nowadays. Cannot have the money train being controlled.
Now with super sized data centers (touted as primarily for 'AI'), you don't even need to choose between privacy violation and environmental destruction!!! So efficient!
> Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over
In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing. Since they ostensibly do not understand all of the potential ways in which they can be screwed over, how is calling themselves government going to magically change that? Maybe you are imagining a dictatorship instead, where the government is only a subset of all consumers, but even then the dictators are still just feeble consumers themselves remaining within the subset of all consumers. Being a dictator doesn't make you omniscient; still only human like all the others.
Government exists to clean up the outliers who are not behaving in line with the wishes of the consumers, but that cleanup can only occur when their undesirable behaviour is out there for all to plainly see. You cannot enforce what you don't recognize.
> consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.
Temporarily, perhaps, but in a functioning market one of those consumers feeling underserved will rise up to offer what's missing, eventually satisfying consumers again. However, ironically, consumers often consider that undesirable behaviour and use government to block that rising from occurring. For some reason consumers prefer to protect the market incumbents even when they claim to not like what the incumbents are doing.
> In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing.
This is a straw man. Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind, e.g the consumer votes for someone who in turn votes for outcomes. This means that there can absolutely be a difference in knowledge between the government and its citizens, and so no, they are not the exact same thing. One group is trying to do their job of being a citizen, while the other group should be doing their job of representing the interests of the citizens that voted on them in whatever is relevant. One job clearly should not involve making sure your privacy isn't constantly and covertly violated by foreign nationals, and one job clearly should. Which is which is an exercise for the reader.
> Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind
Exactly. Representatives are merely messengers, so they can only represent the consumers when sharing the message of the consumers to the extent that the consumers have already recognized. Furthermore, representatives are only consumers themselves, so even if you imagine them not as representatives but dictators who step up and act for the people based on how they believe the people want to be overseen rather than from working with citizens they still have all the same blind spots.
> Great! Where can I find me one of those?
Where consumers don't like protecting the market incumbents. But, make no mistake, consumers love nothing more than protecting market incumbents. It gives them something to complain about when idly chatting with each other. Great? Something tells me you wouldn't find it great at all.
5G edge devices already have support for mmWave and beamforming. The ability to track the micromovements of a person’s trachea as they think in words (”internal monologue”) and reconstruct their thoughts from movement data reduces to a software problem: the hardware is there and the algorithms have been established in literature.
That is very interesting. I wasn’t aware of their ability to act as acoustic sensors. It makes sense, but it’s not my field so I hadn’t thought about it.
Any link to the trachea vibrations to reproduce inner monologue source?
I think the major shift with the 6g standard is that general purpose sensing is now explicit to the design and intended use of the system.
I have seen enough instances of government authorities abusing their power (or even civilians using the courts against another civilian) to know that the best defense you have in a situation where you are the victim is to have your own recording.
Easiest example is having your own dash cam (don’t know why all auto manufacturers don’t have Tesla style camera recordings, especially given that all new cars come with cameras anyway).
Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done.
It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc...
> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference
There's a pretty substantial legal difference between the contested opinion of two people in court versus deliberately fabricating evidence to try and deceive a judge.
> For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.
My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying.
> If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted.
The spying may have started with free products, but it has metastasized into every aspect of life, free or not. It always does.
> choose to be willfully blind to the spying
Many don't. They also, by and large, don't have a choice. Data brokers, Flock cameras, WiFi-based radar[1]. You really can only do so much as an individual before the only escape is being a hermit in a cave.
> The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance
Which then gets distilled into the only drivers of corporations. Corporations that then destroy all moral options for individuals.
Funnily enough I've found for the most part the counter to all this spying also tends to be free products. Signal, pi-hole, ublock origin, graphene OS, Opnsense, Linux, etc. I have yet to find paid-for apps that are superior to the free ones in this regard. If I want an image editor I'm using Gimp, not Photoshop. Libreoffice is better than Microsoft Office if you don't want to be spied on. Most of the cost is learning about the alternatives and how to use them.
Almost every person installs security cameras hoping that one day they will "catch the criminal" unaware that the footage probably is used in all possible ways all the time, yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof.
> yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof.
Or there is simply not enough staff available to carry out the procedures needed to apprehend and charge the individual. Or a myriad of other things. People think law enforcement is easy.
If a right or affluent person is a victim of crime the resources will be available, funny is that people who think they are outsmarting someone with their security cameras are rarely among them.
No I install security cameras as a deterrent measure to keep people at my door front measured in their interactions, particularly when it may just be my wife at home alone.
They are mounted extremely obviously for this purpose.
I greatly hope they never catch anyone doing anything.
It's delightful to have paranoid neighbours who install cameras to enforce appropriate behavior in the neighbourhood. They always assure the camera doesn't record anything outside of their property and that they never check the recordings. Given the reason why they installed camera one can absolutely believe them. It's very calming.
The EFF or some other watchdog should put out some public ads that depict corporations as a creepy person stalking someone:
It's a lot more disgusting and universally hated when you hear about a peeping tom, or a pervert, or a jealous ex hounding someone,
but when faceless corporations and governments do it to EVERYBODY 24/7, everyone's like, ehh.
I mean, right now, just think about me, clicking on your HN profile, googling your name, going through all your public photos.. Don't you find me repulsive just talking about that?
It's about intention. I don't want someone threatening or evil going through my info but don't mind stuff being public in general, like this comment for example.
Right? There are 8 billion humans on those planet. You are 0.0000000125% of humanity. No one outside your family and friends even knows you, nevermind gives a shit about you, unless you stick out in some way. If GP wants to take a tour of my GitHub or my blog and send me a thoughtful email, I'd be delighted!
How about when that thoughtful email becomes a visit from law enforcement because your projects don’t align with the current administration’s views? When something you said offers support for anyone other than The Party’s chosen ethnic group?
How about it? I am not that interesting or powerful at all. Yes, there's a worst case scenario where the government raids my house and I get shot, and I wouldn't like that, but I refuse to live in fear of the bogeyman.
"what if the government becomes a dictatorship" is a stupid question: you either stood up and opposed it, or you let it happen.
My privacy is important as a matter of consent.
But I should not have to hide my sexuality or identity, nor my politics and if my support of a marginalized group exists then what is the point of hiding it while they are oppressed? What benefit does that bring?
Encouraging people to be private in their views and anymore and anonymous in their "support" is exactly how fascists crush their opposition.
>But I should not have to hide my sexuality or identity, nor my politics
You shouldn't but you can't and will never be able to know what the future looks like. You could be in libertine Berlin of the 1920s and be hunted down by fascists a decade later because of your ancestry or sexuality.
And don't think that can't happen quickly again, it's not much of a hyperbole given the way the world is going. And nowadays, once you put something on the internet, good luck getting rid of it. So I'd be very careful with what I disclose, it's not paranoia any more. I'm European and flew to the US earlier this year and got asked to disclose my social media profiles. I have none, deleted them a decade ago. Is that sane or moral? No but if that's how the US rolls these days imagine where else your data can end up.
You might find something I wrote interesting. Then whatever public info there is on me helps you to get to know me a bit better. You may stop there and forget about me, or you may try to reach out.
> Just because it's all public doesn't mean you want the cashier from the supermarket following you around to your family picnic.
This has never happened to me. Out of the space of “bad things that can happen to me” I don’t have time to worry about things with such a small probability of occurring.
I think if you're a fat middle aged man, it's not likely to happen to you personally. But you must have daughters, nieces, a mother, or some sort of female presence in your life. It happens to people like them.
An estimated 2.7 million Australian adults have experienced stalking since the age of 15, according to new results from the 2021-22 Personal Safety Survey (PSS) released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
William Milne, ABS head of crime and justice statistics, said “We found one in five women and one in 15 men have been stalked.
“Women were almost eight times more likely to be stalked by a male than by a female, while men were stalked by a male and by a female at a similar rate.”
Oh boy. It's NOT about whether something's "public" or not:
It's about someone "connecting the dots" between ALL your public activities.
Someone following you OUTSIDE their "space" that you visited and then invading your other spaces.
People don't usually want to mix their social circles. e.g. nobody likes a snoopy overprotective parent following their [teen] kids around wherever the children go with their friends.
Nobody likes their spouse coming uninvited on a night out with the guys/gals.
Or, when you reply to someone on HN or Reddit, and they don't like what you say about 1 specific topic, then they go and downvote ALL your comments about everything else you said!
That's perfectly legal. It's allowed. Nothing's stopping it. And hey, you commented publicly so you were "asking for it", right?
You can easily find my home address by starting with my HN profile.
I do understand what you are getting at. I just don’t find people repulsive by being curious of me; even if they find materials I myself did not make public.
As an aside, I sometimes stumble upon websites of people who write and show pictures of themselves and their family. I find them beautiful[0] to visit and hope more people would do that, as was more common 20 years ago.
> I just don’t find people repulsive by being curious of me; even if they find materials I myself did not make public.
If they do it just to reach out to you with good intentions then it's fine. But if they do it to dox you or harm you in any other way, then it's not fine.
Someone would only be able to connect the dots based on what you publicly put out there. If you don't put anything out, there's nothing to connect the dots, unless you buy some sort of dark web leaked dataset. None of your analogies are comparable to online public information because you decide what to put out online, and I never said anything about legality so not sure why you bring that up.
You don’t necessarily decide what to put online. Friends may upload photos of you, data brokers make your information available to “people search” websites, if you buy a house your information is available unless you put it in a blind trust, etc. If you go beyond the web to private services then you have companies like Flock and retailers who use facial recognition, who make their data available to subscribers and partners.
Disturbed people with access to this data can use it to harm people, like the Ebay exec who stalked a critic or the occasional police officer who stalks a romantic interest.
I think people's idea of privacy is very simplistic and personal and relies on the disgust of a human peering over your files. Most laypeople don't have the same disgust of machines peering over their personal files that is why the weirdo video recording elicits a negative response but Meta or Alphabet doing it doesn't. Plus the fact that they "depend" on Meta and Alphabet tech makes it easier to give them a pass not unlike fans of [insert your favourite celebrity] who happily look away or justify the celebrity's bad actions.
I think people would find it disgusting, it's just very hard to know what data is being used and how and sold to whom by these companies. It's a very opaque by design.
It might be worth revisiting the definition of the term "Banana Republic" and the history of the United Fruit Company[1].
Corporations have toppled democratic governments, run dodgy drug trials and given breast feeding mothers just enough free powdered milk to stop being able to feed their babies.
We have large online retailers, Temu and Shein, accused of using forced labour aka slavery.
Even a well known SaaS operation like eBay was caught sending live spiders to woman who criticised them[2].
Corporations are entities with legal rights but are motivated solely by profit. Without laws to regulate them they would unemotionally run right over you.
Corporation are, and I choose my words carefully, absolute cunts.
They can 100% can present a threat to you. We wouldn't have the concept of corporate manslaughter if they didn't.
We don't make a gift link the primary URL because we always want that to be the canonical URL for the article. But it's good to have a variety of options for paywall workarounds.
I clicked that link and I don't see anything wrong with that. It's not like I donate money by doing that. And they still are very useful resource, even if they're not good enough for Wikipedia (if they indeed tampered with some old archives, it's pretty obvious why)
Thank you for the heads up! DDOS attacks are pretty concerning, but even more concerning is the potential alteration of content. Diabolical. That said, journalism needs funding more than ever, please if you can, try your best to pay for it.
I think that archive links should be made to include a cryptographic hash of the file; this can prevent alteration of content (including of the original file that it is copied from) but also can allow alternative sources of the file to be found (or verified to be correct) according to the hash. (If someone is concerned they want their username removed, they could perhaps edit their copy of the file first and then archive it, although they should have someone to trust if it matches the original one or not, if it has been modified in this way (or any other way, e.g. removing some scripts and CSS etc).)
> On 20 February 2026, the English Wikipedia banned all links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with: Discussion had discovered that instances of Nora's name were replaced with Patokallio's and that "Nora" was likely an appropriated identity—the name belonged to a real person, whose only connection to archive.today had been a prior content takedown request.[18][17][19] The community's decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability—partly undermined by the discovery of the alterations— while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[18][20] Patokallio expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.[3]
> Specifically, AT's maintainers reportedly tweaked snapshots of a third-party blog post that Patokallio referred to in his February 2026 article about the DDoS attack. AT changed the name of a "Nora" person in said post to Jani Patokallio, making it look as if he had written some comments there. Eagle-eyed Wikipedia editors spotted the alterations, which have since then been reverted, but the action made it easy for them reach a final decision.
A DDoS against a blog that iirc was attempting to dox the archive.today maintainer.
The bit about tampering with archived pages is news to me though. Wish the wiki discussion included receipts. Is "two users report they were redirected to tehrantimes.com" what is being referred to when they say archived pages are being tampered with?
It looks like the "tampering" was mostly just removing the username of the person submitting the links, so they wouldn't get banned by paywall sites, and archive.today has always done this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
And it looks like in some instances they changed their own alias to the name of the blogger they're in dispute with, in a fit of pique.
You have to scroll down to get hints because the conversation has been redacted, and the evidence is not provided with side-by-side comparisons.
I understand the ethical concerns about linking to the site but the blanket accusations of "tampering" seem a bit disingenuous, since no article content was ever changed afaik.
In addition to that kind of “benign” tampering, there was also tampering other webpages to insert the name of the person who was doing the exposé on archive.is. Either to slander that person further (in addition to the DDOS archive.is was already attempting) or to dox the person.
Thanks I had edited my post once I saw that - buried deep in the discussion.
I don't get why they couldn't just say what they did instead of disingenuously implying that article content had been "tampered".
Given the breadth of misinformation out there today, shoddy evidence and misleading language makes people give archive.today the benefit of the doubt, and actually hurts the case against them.
Browsers use OPTIONS preflight request to do CORS validation. Servers shouldn't do too much work in an OPTIONS request. Should be a simple if statement, no db operations, which is usually where the bottleneck is.
If you would open the second link provided you would get an answer.
>This decision was agreed on after a request for comment with more than 200 participants concluded in February 2026, and is due to multiple concerns, including the site using editors' and readers' computers to run a denial-of-service attack and evidence that the website has tampered with some archived pages
They recommend archive.org instead but archive.org's version of that article gets masked by an error page preventing you from reading it where the archive.is link works fine.
So there isn't a choice here if you actually want to see the article (without subscribing to the atlantic).
copy the original link then go to archive .is then paste the link into the second field than choose any result. not a rocket science. the article is not interesting tbh.
Honestly I can live with it because I know that my country will never turn into a theocracy or a dictatorship. That would require people to bow to a higher power than themselves and develop actual beliefs lol.
A government with total control over the population can turn into whatever it pleases, whenever it pleases. A catalyzing crisis can always be manufactured.
> Until recently, only spies and criminals had to worry this obsessively about their private statements being picked up by electronic equipment.
> But soon, the average person might need to deploy surveillance countermeasures.
Already there. If you want privacy and anonymity online, you're looking at literal terrorist cell tier tradecraft. That means pulling up documents written by people from the "counterterrorism community" and "intelligence community" and learning how all of these "clandestines" operate.
Unlinking one's identity from one's actions and speech requires some serious OPSEC now. It requires constant, never ending effort. It requires perfect execution and discipline.
Using GrapheneOS makes you a terrorist now. I'm a terrorist.
Since the courts decided you have to use your fingerprint to unlock your phone (because they decided that's not giving up your password and they can't compel you to give up your password), what if you use your fingerprint to wipe your phone? But you don't tell anyone ahead of time when they force you to use it. I'm sure you'd be arrested at the least.
I can't be the only person who has thought of this.
This would still be destruction of evidence - virtually your only defense against that would be if it was not triggered by you.
Fingerprint and PIN unlock, but only PIN unlocks it and fingerprint is always duress? That's a good idea.
Well, guess what happens:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/duress-password-phone-...
That happened because he chose to give the duress PIN. Cops are allowed to just grab your finger and scan it against your protest. You can say "don't do that, it'll wipe my phone" and they'll do it anyway and it'll wipe your phone, and now it certainly isn't your fault.
IANAL, but I would bet that's still destruction of evidence. Judges are human, for better or worse, and can see the intention behind cute tricks like this.
It might work if your fingerprint was used while you were unconscious, but any solution that starts with "setup a trigger that wipes a device" is already on shaky grounds.
AFAIK it's legal to set up a trigger that wipes a device. It isn't legal to choose to wipe your device after you know the government wants the data. Tricking the government into wiping it is still allowed, especially if you tell them not to do that.
That matches my understanding too. Unfortunately it sounds like the poster was suggesting to wipe the device after the government requests access, and was probably not planning on telling the officers about the trigger.
With fingerprint unlock it's not your choice. That's what makes it clever. The cop can grab your finger and hold it to the scanner while you tell him not to do that.
Best approach is to shadow-ban the user when they do a secret gesture before logging in. No wiping necessary. Easiest implementation is to just log them into a shadow account.
GrapheneOS rejected the shadow account idea because it would be very obvious to everyone that it was a shadow account.
But it wouldn't be illegal, I suppose. That's what counts, in the end.
The threat model of GrapheneOS is that the law is irrelevant and the attacker will do anything to get your data.
> Using GrapheneOS makes you a
According to?
https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063022
Statements like this are a stretch. This was not the fact of using the OS, but specifically the fact of wiping it. The situation is atrocious enough as is, no need to make up additions.
We're all terrorists here.
Own a general purpose computer you can run arbitrary software on, not just corporation and government approved software? You're clearly a money laundering drug trafficking child molesting terrorist.
Don't worry, the arbitrary software is probably running under Intel's ME or AMD's PSP.
Let’s be real, it’s an important topic.
“Chief, we got a citizen here with a suspiciously small online footprint. Investigate further?”
IIRC ICE has detained people trying to enter America without social media apps.
And this is what I worry about. Seriously. My online footprint is minimal. I just hope gov will be still incompetent and lazy...
There would be a need to think first a bit more abstract about what you're protecting and from who, but even that is more difficult when huge varieties of data is being collected and archived long term. Details that seem insignificant now may be hostile to yourself later. Similarly I wonder about how the long-game played out for privacy conscious users of browsers like Firefox who changed/hid their user agent identifier, and then a proportion of websites aren't designing a good experience for it, also for disabling telemetry in other software.
Is it better to blend into the crowd, hide outside the crowd, or do what you can to have other groups take your desires into account
I met the parent comment downvoted: I don't know why, given e.g. the rule from the current administration in the USA that, for visitors, the absence of social network profiles is to be taken as cause for suspicion.
Friend of a friend retired several years ago from Intel. He'll go into detail about all the ways you're being spied on. He won't let you into his house with a smartphone; you have to turn it off and leave it in your car.
I used to think he was just paranoid...
How about a Faraday box, by the door? Take to the next level with acoustic insulation, just in case there's a record-now, upload-later mode.
> How about a Faraday box, by the door?
Not as easy as one may think. If you put a phone in a generic waterproof metal box (metal junction or biscuit box for instance) and call it with another one, most of the time it will still ring...
A Faraday box that doesn't block signals is just a box.
The point is how do you know it's a Faraday box?
> He'll go into detail about all the ways you're being spied on.
Don't doubt it for even a second.
The fun part about this comment is that we don't know if "Intel" is the company, or the term for the IC. I'm pretty sure it's equally likely to be either meaning, and no surprise based on whichever is correct.
The likelihood is 100% that it is the company.
Not likely.
> He won't let you into his house with a smartphone
His mistrust might be about the phone's owner and the recording apps they might use, more than the smartphone itself.
Socially it's much safer to direct suspicion at "the smartphone" rather than the people invited to your house.
To be fair, most phones have invasive Google/Apple/Chinese OEM services that work with high privileges and are invasive on their own, without apps. The share of people using degoogled OSes is small enough to assume it isn't the case. And, to be fair, if someone has a degoogled phone, you'd probably know that by now (I say as also a degoogled user XD)
A visitor who wants to record will just have a second recording device. Asking nicely to leave the phone behind could only protect from spying the phone owner never intended.
>We and our 1255 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store and access personal data on your device
you don't say...
The original research project this company looks based on was very cool and way early: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/jammer/
Thanks, very interesting. Basically the authors blast high-power (~92 dBA) ultrasound around 25kHz and hope that microphone non-linearities will overwhelm the audible signal.
This will sure make all the dogs in 20m radius mad. Hence the solution for the stealth recorder -- bring a dog, then complain about the ultrasound jammer (or at least to be aware of a jammer)
From the paper, it looks like the authors did not consider safety of animals, only human hearing safety.
As someone frequently annoyed by those stupid bird/deer/insect ultrasound emitters I hope this doesn't become common, with my luck I'll be able to hear them.
My neighborhood is full of these anti-social devices which are entirely designed to try to prevent dogs from shitting on their lawns. The noise they make is always at a pitch I can hear and my dog always ignores them.
My dog has no problem shitting on their lawns, and even sometimes pees on the devices.
So I'd like to find any actual devices which work on dogs (well I have no use for it but just to be sure they actually exist), because circa the original iphone I remember that there were apps which could reliably make its microphones do it (and impact dogs as expected).
Which country are you in? Here in GB it is expected that dogs will be under control, and in any case their owners are responsible for any damage they do. Cats on the other hand ... people have devices to scare away cats, though I'm not sure how well they work. Interestingly, cat owners have them in some cases ... to keep their own cat away from certain areas?
"My dog has no problem shitting on their lawns, and even sometimes pees on the devices."
Give him a treat from me, that made me smile. (I also hate those devices)
How would this affect people with cochlear implants?
I feel like sooner or later we all hollow out a little more. All this data is either used to prevent crime or to influence your thoughts and what you do in the world. Outsourcing your thinking to something else leads to digital dementia. What is the point of all of this technology?
It gets it wrong a lot and is automated. How would you feel about being falsely accused or misunderstood ?
Also, it lays the groundwork to absolutely crush dissent in the future .
Somebody makes a lot of money and generates a lot of power with it.
> What is the point of all of this technology?
When I look at something these days I ask the question "On the whole does this benefit society?"
Society here been scale specific, so local community, wider community, population of my country, population of the world.
I.e. bin policies changes by my local council aren't going to affect someone in Africa and so on.
Depressingly the answer is almost always in aggregate... No.
We seem to be determined to allow the worst of us to make things worse for us to their own benefit.
we desperately need a separation of corporations and state the same way we have a separation of church and state.
we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us.
it’s wild how much influence they have and how little pushback the government ever gives them when they clearly abuse us from every direction.
We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability unless they have explicit consent[1] and a legit reason to house it.
A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.
We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.
[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.
> We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability
This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment.
There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc.
Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service.
I avoid all that by avoiding the corporate health care system.
lol, what
If you are healthy and kid free, you can just not go to the doctor.
I like to avoid the risks of processed foods by simply not being hungry.
"if you are in the air and not descending, you can just not care about gravity"
Explicit consent will be everywhere, like you won't be admitted to a grocery store without it. Take any modern TV -- there's a privacy policy you have to accept the first time you turn it on. Or California Prop 65 notice on every product.
So no, requiring explicit consent won't fix anything.
The government needs regulation to allow access without granting consent in certain cases. Not quite as far as declaring something a utility, but better than almost completely unregulated.
so I've been watching the CMS symposium about "Burden Reduction". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYyK0Hc43UE&list=PLaV7m2-zFK...
Most of the videos talk about reducing burden on clinicians. Specifically: sharing, accessing, updating patient history. Providing clinicians and patients guidance through the medical process through AI agents (that have access to your PII). the kaiser permanente guy highlighted ai's use in guiding billing codes. Dr. Oz spoke about getting pre-authorizations near instantaneously
I'm not sure how that gets accomplished without reducing liability or loosing restrictions. I wouldnt be surprised to see a continued attack on our healthcare privacy
Weren’t electronic health records supposed to solve this problem almost 20 years ago?
I would have figured there would have been a massive financial interest in providers not having to waste time dealing with tedious Q&A and data entry with new patients…
Pretty difficult when a lot of government people are in it looking for any opportunity to get into bed with private sector for their own individual gain, and when corporations have far more spending power and far less bureaucratic lag than governments. Governments are also just as hungry for data as corporations are.
And if you think a government has any interest in protecting their people, well, that is simply inaccurate in practice.
The government exists to organise and pacify its people, to prevent unpredictable or counter-productive behaviour. Primarily to protect the government from its people.
Regulation doesn't protect people, it protects the government, corporations, or both, in the same way HR protects the company from its employees. The people benefit coincidentally, if at all.
> we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us
Please don't. The entire civilized world for all of history and before has been built on the uncomfortable alliance between power/capability and governance/legitimacy. Protection-seeking is the primary support system for tyranny which is happy to induce the chaos they protect you from.
We just need enough negative feedback for any kind of abuse that it stops, because regulations have to be slow to be accurate and thus invite abuse innovation. The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition so people can vote with their feet.
So, ask not for antagonism but for real alternatives.
The second paragraph by itself is enough, the first is a tad hubristic and vague. The good things that got us here are not necessarily the things that will get us there, there being wherever we ideally want to end up...
>The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition
The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem.
> You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem
Yeah, sorry. Yes, corporate activities that reduce competition or corrupt regulators should have their agents and causes ripped out branch to root; they're like diseases which attack the immune system, doubly bad.
But the premise that a corporation or a country that does bad things means you are justified in antagonizing or destroying the entire company or the people is typically enlistment and leverage for protection rackets.
Warring with others is a cycle that doesn't end, and mainly elevates military resource providers. Warring with yourself - attacking your own organs - is self-destructive (which is why enemies stimulate it).
As for here vs there, 20th-century totalitarian systems all stemmed from people wanting to believe promises of a better world, and the promotors being unbound by facts of the present. "Here" is a much more tractable problem, where our medicine (or immune systems) could get better at stemming the diseases we have, like the lack of negative feedback for abusing people (more generally for exporting costs, esp. to the future), or the corruption of discourse that mediates agreements about governance. My goal would be to leave the world more free, peaceful, nature-healthy than I found it. Antagonism doesn't help for that, and side-tracks people into regressive emotions.
Still better than being at the mercy of the corporations.
Considering the state of the federal government under the current regime it's a challenge to identify safe government and business relationships.
your inventing a concept of universal power dynamics and history with no basis. Humans have created a myriad of sociatal structures, and with the current luxury of our post scarcity techno industrial manufacturing capabilities there is no reason to have all of the forever wars and suffering from lack. What you describe is slavery, not civilisation.
Weellll...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpRIRxwmrU
That would be child abuse, as corporations are born out of the state as statutory entities. Corporations used to be chartered to do specific jobs like build a bridge or whatever. Charter max was 20 years. This is why the first and second national banks ran for only 20 years each.
"The bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. "
"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital."
It’s not that wild: governments are made of self-serving people, and money from the industry finds its way into their pockets.
but you don't have separation of church and state... thats a poor comparison. religious dogma eats into nearly all public discourse.
The separation is not total but its more than used to exist.
I would be fine with the NSA recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup. I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
However, corporations - for some reason - are given a pass.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life.
I wish that I could upvote this twice.
Huh, almost as if the governments get something out of allowing the companies to abuse us...
I was watching a documentary about the first food regulations in the US today, lobbyists are as old as the state here, good luck getting them out, the entire system was designed by and for them
I would be fine with the NSA[1] recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup.
I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. Like, it is only after I have been arrested that the data is accessible to the court in which I will have been presented to face accusations of a crime.
I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
And there's the corporations who - for some reason - are given a pass. If governments can steal your data, so can Mr. FatCat and his team of merry department heads.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life, for review. This kind of super-wide view of things would be quite enlightening, I'm pretty sure.
[1] - just for the record, I think the problems that the NSA are trying to solve are obsolete; that there are far greater solutions to fallacies which support the utility of it as an organ of government; I am in the camp that this is a massive human rights issue, also.
> Apple is rumored to be developing an AI pin or pendant that would serve as an iPhone’s constant eyes and ears; many other products of this type are on the way. AI accessories could one day be as widespread as AirPods.
But why? Don't we already have phones, watches, glasses, tags, and airpods? If they were making a siri version of alexa/echo, then maybe that would make sense, but do we really need a specific apple device just to ai?
One of the few reasons to use iPhone is that it doesn't constantly surveil you. If Apple would just pivot and say "next iPhone will constantly record everything it hears and sees to process for our AI (Apple Intelligence(tm))" a lot of people would drop iPhone.
Apple Watch is just extension of screen and notifications from the phone, so there is no overlap.
AirTags have nothing to do with AI stuff.
AirPods apparently now have some translation stuff, but again no constant monitoring.
Apple does not produce glasses and seeing the backlash to Meta's glasses I don't think they will. A pin or pendant might be more acceptable, although hiding it will be just as big of an issue as with the creepy Meta glasses, but any AI thing Apple makes should be a separate product if they want to maximize profits.
> Apple Watch is just extension of screen and notifications from the phone, so there is no overlap.
Where did you got that impression?
Apple Watch have lots of apps. It can make phone call and do voice recording without the phone nearby.
Some models have built in cellular as well, so it's possible to use one without your phone entirely.
> One of the few reasons to use iPhone is that it doesn't constantly surveil you.
Curious, do you have a source for this apart from Apple's marketing?
> Apple does not produce glasses and seeing the backlash to Meta's glasses I don't think they will
Word has it that they're working on them, but no idea until wwdc 2027.
commenting for digital footprint
> Meanwhile, only a few academics and small companies are defending us from these technologies. “The thing about cat-and-mouse games is that we know how they usually end up for the mouse,” Hartzog said. “And in this case, the cat includes some of the most powerful corporations to ever exist.”
This again points to how these problems have less to do with tech than with our socioeconomic system. The obvious solution (or step towards a solution) is to just shatter all such large tech companies. There should not be any companies powerful enough to do things like this.
Looking at this from a perspective of someone who's searching for a job, I can promise you that even if you are recorded, there's next to zero chance your recording is being analyzed in any meaningful way.
You'd imagine that if this global surveillance was so ubiquitous, finding a match between an employee and employer would've been an... easier problem. However, even though supply is only a little larger than demand, the nature of this supply is to oversaturate the matching system, which then defaults to... I don't even know what, perhaps dropping 99% of all applications at random? Only taking 1% of those who applied sooner? Must be something like that.
Anyways, recording everything is a way to overwhelm the system with useless data. It would be much scarier if recording was selective.
> Some historians have argued that the ensuing radar arms race was more consequential to the war’s outcome than the Manhattan Project.
No kidding?
There's gotta be a record of you someplace
You gotta be on somebody's books
The lowdown a picture of your face
Your injured looks The sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
Song lyrics for those curious: https://genius.com/Dire-straits-on-every-street-lyrics
Obama was promoting The Age of Surveillance Capitalism over seven years ago now. Industry insiders have known all this since 1999. Yet almost every single person I know carries a cellphone and drives a car with telemetry, things that are entirely optional. Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.
PS: Something in this vein that many people are unaware of is that the 6G standard for cell towers is planned to include ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication). I haven’t heard a single AFK person talk about this.
I don't think people want this. I think people want the other benefits that those things bring, and increasingly feel that it's impossible to escape being surveilled anyway so do their best to ignore the whole issue.
Being resigned to something is not the same as wanting that thing.
> I don't think people want this
There was a comment made here a month or two ago, about someone from a SE Asia country (I forget which; maybe Bangladesh?) talking about how their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over, and they went from one of the deadliest, most chaotic road systems in the world to Singapore-level rule-following in the space of just a couple months.
As a result, the cameras have become quite popular because there's less traffic, travelling is easier and more predictable, and road deaths have plummeted.
I imagine there are a number of similar situations in every country, where the deployment of AI surveillance has a sufficiently measurably positive impact that it becomes popular.
Vietnam?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/world/asia/vietnam-traffi...
> their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over
What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something? What actual enforcement actions were taken as a result, and against how many drivers before it stopped?
One might wonder how much of the effect was placebo (i.e., people conforming simply due to the belief of being surveilled).
> What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something?
Yes, exactly. It identifies cars and drivers who are committing traffic violations, and issues citations.
I don't have the specific numbers you ask for, seeing as I can't even remember the country, but it's not difficult to imagine that if sufficiently many such cameras are installed that most moving violations on major roadways are caught and punished, then yes, people will come to (reasonably) believe that the cost of committing the violation is close to the price of the fine, rather than close to zero.
It's one thing to blow by a pedestrian crossing the street, it's another to do so knowing you'll probably be charged $150 (or whatever) for having done it.
There was an article on the front page today titled something like "incentives are for schmucks", which I didn't like very much.
In this case, incentives are for people who'd like to reduce traffic deaths.
So it's something AI, somewhere, you cant verify it, nevermind us. But you feel comfortable stating it both as a fact and a good thing to have.
If you see someone stating something as being "a good thing to have", you accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
If you read "one can see how someone might not object to this" and understand "this is a good thing to have" then I'm afraid the issue is you contributing the stats that news agencies like to publish about American reading comprehension trends.
Please don't call license plate scanners AI
Why not? If they use a machine learning approach. AI is more than LLMs.
It's a trained model, just like Claude.
Using the broader label to imply good things about the narrow thing sucks. Like being pro "technology" means nothing
aaand that's enough internet for today
Sometimes it’s also a pain to opt out.
The outrageous prices of used (low telemetry) cars make them a poor value proposition, for example. Depending on the model, a used car can be a decade old with half of its lifetime miles on it already and the seller will still want $14k or something crazy like that. When you factor in the parts of its history that carfax doesn’t cover and the stream of repairs you’re likely to be saddled with, finding a 0%-2% financing deal on something new at ~$20-24k begins to look a lot more attractive.
All successful negative things have a claim to virtue that they hide behind.
Agree, you’re either a digital hermit or you’re part of the problem / system
It’s enticing to believe we coulda gone another way. Such as having a paid versions of these services. But free is just Soooo enticing. It hacks peoples brains.
That cellphone and car and television and most other things that spy on you were most certainly not free.
Alas this is the structure of power. Either you have to do a total rejection of its benefits or you end up being sucked into the system as others practically force people into it for fear of being left behind.
The really obnoxious part is that with the possible exception of maps all of the other "services" touted as vital parts of a digitally connected existence are so enshittified at this point that the original value proposition for all of them is absent. So we're left with this zombie rhetoric around being disconnected while "connecting" means you spend hours every day staring at bot content and ads.
I'm not sure that's really true. The two that come immediately to mind are Facebook or Discord for organizing with friends and language translation while traveling.
I mean I might give it to you for Discord but Facebook is an easy win here. There's so much bot crap on Facebook Meta keeps getting dragged in front of congress over it.
You really spend hours a day staring at bots and ads?
Most do.
Fuck no, I stopped using my phone for anything besides maps and phone stuff before the pandemic. You peddling the idea that that isn't what all of the social platforms are these days?
By leveraging mobile network infrastructure – towers, spectrum, antennas, and some hardware – ISAC can detect, locate, and track objects (including passive ones with no electronics). This will enable a wide range of use cases such as UAV airspace monitoring, autonomous vehicle safety, industrial automation, and immersive AR experiences. Commercial deployment is expected alongside 6G rollouts in the 2030 timeframe
https://www.ericsson.com/en/6g/isac
I wonder how precise this will be? A flying object sounds reasonable but could it actually track say individual people walking on a street further down the line?
From the hardware side, extremely precise. Most discussions assume the sweet spot for ISAC is in "Frequency Range 3" (7 - 24 GHz, decent penetration and range, very good resolution), and in that range you can pin down objects with millimeter precision (both position and velocity). So, not only can you detect people walking down the street, you can detect them breathing when they stand perfectly still.
This, of course, requires 6G base stations to be spaced pretty tightly (hundreds of meters apart) and to feature sophisticated phased array antennas. But both can be assumed in cities (they're planning to completely replace WIFI with 6G, so every current WIFI access point will become a 6G micro cell). Walking humans can be detected much easier, but radar SNR is funny, that only gives you 4x-6x the detection range.
Software (signals processing) for all that will be... a lot of difficult work. Object separation/tracking, multipath reflections, clutter suppression, ect.
Although this is a preprint it shares some discussion and ideas on how to mitigate potential privacy challenges of ISAC.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069
I suspect while not individually, it will provide another data point that can be collaborated.
One should never underestimate the power of combining data sets.
Thank you, this deserved a link. I was being lazy.
There are multiple things we need to acknowledge:
- Consumers largely do not know these things. They are either not disclosed, or buried within a TOS that they cannot read. This is all done on purpose. The reason the TOS is obtuse, long, inaccurate, and updated weekly is so you won't read or understand it.
- In most markets there is no choice. For smartphones you do not have a choice, both Apple and Google do extensive surveillance. If you want to bank, get a job, and all around be successful, you have to swallow the surveillance cost. If you want a new car, again, no choice. If you work a job, again, no choice on the computer or software.
- It is not reasonable to expect consumers to do extensive research on everything they buy. Consumers have lives, children, jobs. They're not going to sit and spend 10+ hours researching every thing they buy, especially when most of that research is fruitless.
- There are tradeoffs with everything. Yes we can use Linux, I sure do. But for other consumers, now they need to spend a lot of time understanding that. Yes we can use Graphene OS, but certain apps won't work.
Traversing life without a cell phone is a fun experiment. Here and there I forget mine and spend a day without the distraction - glorious way to spend time.
As someone who regularly attempts to give up a cell phone, it is not optional. A not insignificant number of things require it. It is the expectation society is now built around and therefore it is not an option. A car without telemetry is for the time being still optional. I take very good care of my old vehicles hoping I never need a new one.
> Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.
This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The use of providers like Meta does not reflect a well-informed, freely chosen preference. Meta spends a ton of money to squash competition, remove viable alternatives, and to make their products addictive.
> This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy.
The fallacy here is that you think people should have difference preferences than they actually do. "People disagree with me? They must be ill-informed."
It is sometimes true that a large group of people hold a preference due to being misinformed, though. I don’t think a kneejerk assertion that GP is assuming their opinion is true and anyone who disagrees is an idiot is merited here.
Meta has done a lot of shitty things to acquire and addict users, and is analogous to a massive regional monopoly in the U.S. Both of those indicate that users of Facebook might be less than rational (in the economic sense) about their choice of social media product.
The outrage isn't feigned; it just comes from a minority of people. The masses aren't established to "want this"; they may just not care.
They care to the degree they become aware of it and it's potential misuses.
This is something Richard Stallman has pointed out many times before. You need to tell people about these things, most of them simply do not know the extent of the issues but once they do know it, most are at least sympathetic to the cause.
I don't think they are optional in today's world. There's a lot of places where it would be prohibitive to try to live without a smartphone and what does it even cost to remove telemetry from a car?
It's hard for me to take this perspective seriously when you describe a cellphone as "entirely optional". Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone. Without acknowledging that, how can we have a realistic discussion? Many businesses require you to use a smartphone in some way. Some government services also require one.
Before cellphones, there were payphones everywhere for people to use when they needed to get into contact. Now there are hardly any left in most countries, so your ability to communicate would actually be worse than in the pre-cellphone era. Sure you could ask someone to use their phone, but if a stranger asked me that these days I would likely refuse.
The only reason I take my cell phone with me is in the event my truck breaks down. I have lost count of how many times I forgot it at home. I've had business tell me to install some app but I just tell them no or make them do the work for me. If they want money they will fill in the information. Over the years I have been parting ways from businesses that I can not walk in and talk face-to-face with someone and for good reason as it is getting harder and harder to reach a real person in customer support for online businesses. People are getting accounts disabled or deleted with no recourse.
I don’t carry a cell phone, although I technically own one (it usually stays at home). For a while I had to tell a cashier that I don’t have a phone on occasion, but I’ve noticed that many places seem to be backing off on pushing their apps or requiring a phone for some part of the transaction.
I used to carry a legit dumbphone (not one of the new Android/AOSP “dumbphones”) and that worked just as well. It’s even trendy now!
I do not carry a cellphone. I am employed and live in a major city. I never think about not having one. I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones.
It is entirely optional.
Less and less though and you need to go through quite a bit of trouble sometimes already. Banking, gov apps, I know more and more companies you cannot enter nor clock in without smartphone etc. Sure, you can just resign, move country, try to find another bank; in the end you will run out of options as they are all moving there.
> I am employed and live in a major city. ... . I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones.
This doesn't mean much. I know multiple people who fit this description, live in the US, and can't speak or read English. However, speaking English isn't meaningfully optional. You will face constant limitations and problems in every aspect of life. There are people who don't use electricity, so I guess by your definition that's optional too?
> I never think about not having one.
Sure you don't.
Genuinely. Thinking back on it now, the only times I notice it is in some restaurants that don’t have paper menus out by default. I need to ask for one, which feels very odd and kind of awkward. This is the only instance I can think of.
What happens when you're meeting up with someone? With the folks I know who don't have a phone, this is always a real pain point because they don't have a way to communicate or receive changes of plans, "I'm going to be late", etc...
We agree on when to meet and where, and then we both actually show up. The whole last-minute plan changing thing is a pretty recent phenomenon, I believe.
Do you never have problems with transportation like breakdowns or accidents stopping the traffic for a while or having some sort of emergency where you need to drop everything an take care of it?
Counterpoint: I could not do my job without one. Clients expect support over WhatsApp.
For sure, but you still do retain the option to leave it at work, unless you have some kind of 24/7 sales job. I do think privacy at work is not an option for most people.
> Clients expect support over WhatsApp
Seems very country / region specific?
So many stores and (all?) banks require two-factor login now, where an SMS sent to a phone is the second factor. How do you cope with this?
I do not carry a cellphone, but I own an old one with no data plan that remains off and in a drawer except for when used for things like this. I am not sure I have run into any stores that require 2 factor. Mostly just official stuff like banks.
My work has multiple systems that require 2fa on a regular basis. It's actually quite annoying, and the alternative options to 2fa don't work for every system.
The glorious day in the future when Oauth is confined to the dust bin of history and logging in to anything doesn't require a web browser redirecting 10 times.
"Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone."
Except it really isn't, it just seems that way when you spend a bunch of time on your phone. As part of an utterly graceless transition to middle age I bailed on social media and have aggressively refused to engage with service-related apps of any kind (fuck mychart, drive-thru mobile apps, and the horse they rode in on). To the extent that I use my phone at all these days it's to check text messages, field calls, and (rarely) navigate via maps. I've reverted to the Old Ways (mailing paper checks, calling ahead to get live humans to explain shit, etc) and it's been pretty frictionless. I've yet to encounter a situation where I was prevented from doing anything because I didn't phone.
> mailing paper checks
Actually compared to signing in to a website, 2FA, dismissing the popups to explore new features, entering payment info, then confirming---writing a check and putting it in an envelope takes less time.
Depends on how long it takes me to find my checkbook but yeah pretty much, and it's a lot less irritating.
the main solution is the same as with many other problems - education on what's wrong + making the right way as easy as possible
it's easy to fall into complain hole, as that seems to fulfill the 1st part
but 2nd part is as much or even more valuable
> making the right way as easy as possible
I wish I knew what you were talking about here.
It seems like the easy way would be to forbid the collection of this data… but that is obviously not happening, so I need a different part 2.
consider what GP complained about - everyone carrying phones that data is collected from/by, and useing Meta products
making easier the alternatives to phone tracking means promoting life outside phones, promoting cellphones/OSes that don't spy on you and explaining ways to minimize tracking (like disabling apps' access to the internet)
making easier the alternatives to Meta means promoting competitors, promoting communication/image/information channels outside Meta, promoting life outside Meta products
defeatism is even worse than grumbles - it fulfills neither of the goals
Offering ‘just don’t use modern communication’ as a solution when ‘ban data collection and retention’ is right there feels like a way to derail the conversation rather than an honest proposal.
People wouldn't want this if they were adequately educated.
So much this. When my son turned 12, I told him how some of the various social media sites and smart technologies work, and he’s avoided social media altogether ever since (he’s now an adult). He always uses ad blockers and content filters, and he generally made good decisions around phone use, and other tech use from a privacy respecting perspective.
Prior to this discussion, he was eager to be on social media apps because other kids his age were on them. People respond to knowledge about these topics, but there isn’t a mainstream popular individual talking about it. Everyone is so silo’d, it would be quite difficult to reach people, and depending upon the political leanings of such a person, half the population would reactively go the opposite direction… on what really shouldn’t be partisan.
No, this is not the way to go. Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over, and even if they could, it is entirely likely that there are no good choices because consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.
This is why governments exist.
And one wonders why there is a large amount of rhetoric toward anti-government is being thrown around nowadays. Cannot have the money train being controlled.
Now with super sized data centers (touted as primarily for 'AI'), you don't even need to choose between privacy violation and environmental destruction!!! So efficient!
> Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over
In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing. Since they ostensibly do not understand all of the potential ways in which they can be screwed over, how is calling themselves government going to magically change that? Maybe you are imagining a dictatorship instead, where the government is only a subset of all consumers, but even then the dictators are still just feeble consumers themselves remaining within the subset of all consumers. Being a dictator doesn't make you omniscient; still only human like all the others.
Government exists to clean up the outliers who are not behaving in line with the wishes of the consumers, but that cleanup can only occur when their undesirable behaviour is out there for all to plainly see. You cannot enforce what you don't recognize.
> consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.
Temporarily, perhaps, but in a functioning market one of those consumers feeling underserved will rise up to offer what's missing, eventually satisfying consumers again. However, ironically, consumers often consider that undesirable behaviour and use government to block that rising from occurring. For some reason consumers prefer to protect the market incumbents even when they claim to not like what the incumbents are doing.
> In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing.
This is a straw man. Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind, e.g the consumer votes for someone who in turn votes for outcomes. This means that there can absolutely be a difference in knowledge between the government and its citizens, and so no, they are not the exact same thing. One group is trying to do their job of being a citizen, while the other group should be doing their job of representing the interests of the citizens that voted on them in whatever is relevant. One job clearly should not involve making sure your privacy isn't constantly and covertly violated by foreign nationals, and one job clearly should. Which is which is an exercise for the reader.
> but in a functioning market
Great! Where can I find me one of those?
> Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind
Exactly. Representatives are merely messengers, so they can only represent the consumers when sharing the message of the consumers to the extent that the consumers have already recognized. Furthermore, representatives are only consumers themselves, so even if you imagine them not as representatives but dictators who step up and act for the people based on how they believe the people want to be overseen rather than from working with citizens they still have all the same blind spots.
> Great! Where can I find me one of those?
Where consumers don't like protecting the market incumbents. But, make no mistake, consumers love nothing more than protecting market incumbents. It gives them something to complain about when idly chatting with each other. Great? Something tells me you wouldn't find it great at all.
5G edge devices already have support for mmWave and beamforming. The ability to track the micromovements of a person’s trachea as they think in words (”internal monologue”) and reconstruct their thoughts from movement data reduces to a software problem: the hardware is there and the algorithms have been established in literature.
That is very interesting. I wasn’t aware of their ability to act as acoustic sensors. It makes sense, but it’s not my field so I hadn’t thought about it.
Any link to the trachea vibrations to reproduce inner monologue source?
I think the major shift with the 6g standard is that general purpose sensing is now explicit to the design and intended use of the system.
For anyone that didn't read that book, I can't recommend it highly enough.
I have seen enough instances of government authorities abusing their power (or even civilians using the courts against another civilian) to know that the best defense you have in a situation where you are the victim is to have your own recording.
Easiest example is having your own dash cam (don’t know why all auto manufacturers don’t have Tesla style camera recordings, especially given that all new cars come with cameras anyway).
Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done.
It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc...
> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference
There's a pretty substantial legal difference between the contested opinion of two people in court versus deliberately fabricating evidence to try and deceive a judge.
Suddenly your civil matter is now a criminal one.
hey i just want to be able to install graphene os on my iphone hardware. if only.
> For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.
My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying.
> If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted.
The spying may have started with free products, but it has metastasized into every aspect of life, free or not. It always does.
> choose to be willfully blind to the spying
Many don't. They also, by and large, don't have a choice. Data brokers, Flock cameras, WiFi-based radar[1]. You really can only do so much as an individual before the only escape is being a hermit in a cave.
> The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance
Which then gets distilled into the only drivers of corporations. Corporations that then destroy all moral options for individuals.
[1]https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-...
Funnily enough I've found for the most part the counter to all this spying also tends to be free products. Signal, pi-hole, ublock origin, graphene OS, Opnsense, Linux, etc. I have yet to find paid-for apps that are superior to the free ones in this regard. If I want an image editor I'm using Gimp, not Photoshop. Libreoffice is better than Microsoft Office if you don't want to be spied on. Most of the cost is learning about the alternatives and how to use them.
Almost every person installs security cameras hoping that one day they will "catch the criminal" unaware that the footage probably is used in all possible ways all the time, yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof.
> yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof.
Or there is simply not enough staff available to carry out the procedures needed to apprehend and charge the individual. Or a myriad of other things. People think law enforcement is easy.
If a right or affluent person is a victim of crime the resources will be available, funny is that people who think they are outsmarting someone with their security cameras are rarely among them.
No I install security cameras as a deterrent measure to keep people at my door front measured in their interactions, particularly when it may just be my wife at home alone.
They are mounted extremely obviously for this purpose.
I greatly hope they never catch anyone doing anything.
It's delightful to have paranoid neighbours who install cameras to enforce appropriate behavior in the neighbourhood. They always assure the camera doesn't record anything outside of their property and that they never check the recordings. Given the reason why they installed camera one can absolutely believe them. It's very calming.
What a wild, victim blaming take.
Zero people want to be surveilled. They want the other benefits that come with technology and reluctantly accept, as a cost, some lower of privacy.
The German CDU (basically their Republican party) is currently campaigning with the slogan "More mass surveillance!"
so obama was doing what in 2019? are you an LLM trained in 2023?
I see no 2019. They changed it to 1999. So, six years before he was a senator. Could be, but seems implausible.
The EFF or some other watchdog should put out some public ads that depict corporations as a creepy person stalking someone:
It's a lot more disgusting and universally hated when you hear about a peeping tom, or a pervert, or a jealous ex hounding someone,
but when faceless corporations and governments do it to EVERYBODY 24/7, everyone's like, ehh.
I mean, right now, just think about me, clicking on your HN profile, googling your name, going through all your public photos.. Don't you find me repulsive just talking about that?
This puts me in mind of the infamous GMail Man commercial that Microsoft put out:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oR4jTvxPruw
It's about intention. I don't want someone threatening or evil going through my info but don't mind stuff being public in general, like this comment for example.
Yes, but when the surveillance is sweeping, global and total, you can’t really be sure about “intent”, current or future.
i get a little thrill knowing im that important to someone :)
You are important to me, please send your whole photo album to me so i can appreciate it.
Right? There are 8 billion humans on those planet. You are 0.0000000125% of humanity. No one outside your family and friends even knows you, nevermind gives a shit about you, unless you stick out in some way. If GP wants to take a tour of my GitHub or my blog and send me a thoughtful email, I'd be delighted!
How about when that thoughtful email becomes a visit from law enforcement because your projects don’t align with the current administration’s views? When something you said offers support for anyone other than The Party’s chosen ethnic group?
How about it? I am not that interesting or powerful at all. Yes, there's a worst case scenario where the government raids my house and I get shot, and I wouldn't like that, but I refuse to live in fear of the bogeyman.
"what if the government becomes a dictatorship" is a stupid question: you either stood up and opposed it, or you let it happen.
My privacy is important as a matter of consent.
But I should not have to hide my sexuality or identity, nor my politics and if my support of a marginalized group exists then what is the point of hiding it while they are oppressed? What benefit does that bring?
Encouraging people to be private in their views and anymore and anonymous in their "support" is exactly how fascists crush their opposition.
>But I should not have to hide my sexuality or identity, nor my politics
You shouldn't but you can't and will never be able to know what the future looks like. You could be in libertine Berlin of the 1920s and be hunted down by fascists a decade later because of your ancestry or sexuality.
And don't think that can't happen quickly again, it's not much of a hyperbole given the way the world is going. And nowadays, once you put something on the internet, good luck getting rid of it. So I'd be very careful with what I disclose, it's not paranoia any more. I'm European and flew to the US earlier this year and got asked to disclose my social media profiles. I have none, deleted them a decade ago. Is that sane or moral? No but if that's how the US rolls these days imagine where else your data can end up.
No. Why should I find you repulsive?
You might find something I wrote interesting. Then whatever public info there is on me helps you to get to know me a bit better. You may stop there and forget about me, or you may try to reach out.
There is nothing wrong about that.
>Why should I find you repulsive?
There could be a number of reasons. Am I not trying hard enough?
> Why should I find you repulsive?
Me googling your shit might lead to your real name, your family photos etc
Just because it's all public doesn't mean you want the cashier from the supermarket following you around to your family picnic
or just because you like to let the sunlight in doesn't mean you want random pedestrians peering in through your windows..
I can't believe this needs to be spelled out here: "Public" life is compartmentalized.
> Just because it's all public doesn't mean you want the cashier from the supermarket following you around to your family picnic.
This has never happened to me. Out of the space of “bad things that can happen to me” I don’t have time to worry about things with such a small probability of occurring.
But it has happened to other people. A stalker in Japan geo-located victim location from the reflection in the eye from public picture
I think if you're a fat middle aged man, it's not likely to happen to you personally. But you must have daughters, nieces, a mother, or some sort of female presence in your life. It happens to people like them.
It's more likely to happen a woman than to a man, but it's still very unlikely to happen to a woman.
Very unlikely?
~ https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/1-7-austr...At about 1 in 5, it's probably happened to somebody in your family.
Don't put on the Internet what you don't want found as it's always and forever public, I thought everyone knew the first rule.
Oh boy. It's NOT about whether something's "public" or not:
It's about someone "connecting the dots" between ALL your public activities.
Someone following you OUTSIDE their "space" that you visited and then invading your other spaces.
People don't usually want to mix their social circles. e.g. nobody likes a snoopy overprotective parent following their [teen] kids around wherever the children go with their friends.
Nobody likes their spouse coming uninvited on a night out with the guys/gals.
Or, when you reply to someone on HN or Reddit, and they don't like what you say about 1 specific topic, then they go and downvote ALL your comments about everything else you said!
That's perfectly legal. It's allowed. Nothing's stopping it. And hey, you commented publicly so you were "asking for it", right?
BUT IT'S A FUCKING DICK MOVE
You can easily find my home address by starting with my HN profile.
I do understand what you are getting at. I just don’t find people repulsive by being curious of me; even if they find materials I myself did not make public.
As an aside, I sometimes stumble upon websites of people who write and show pictures of themselves and their family. I find them beautiful[0] to visit and hope more people would do that, as was more common 20 years ago.
[0] https://www.pement.org/
> I just don’t find people repulsive by being curious of me; even if they find materials I myself did not make public.
If they do it just to reach out to you with good intentions then it's fine. But if they do it to dox you or harm you in any other way, then it's not fine.
Or extracting financial gain from my data without my consent.
Someone would only be able to connect the dots based on what you publicly put out there. If you don't put anything out, there's nothing to connect the dots, unless you buy some sort of dark web leaked dataset. None of your analogies are comparable to online public information because you decide what to put out online, and I never said anything about legality so not sure why you bring that up.
You don’t necessarily decide what to put online. Friends may upload photos of you, data brokers make your information available to “people search” websites, if you buy a house your information is available unless you put it in a blind trust, etc. If you go beyond the web to private services then you have companies like Flock and retailers who use facial recognition, who make their data available to subscribers and partners.
Disturbed people with access to this data can use it to harm people, like the Ebay exec who stalked a critic or the occasional police officer who stalks a romantic interest.
> unless you buy some sort of dark web leaked dataset
Customers of such datasets: banks, insurance companies, HR companies, marketing firms, governments, etc.
I think people's idea of privacy is very simplistic and personal and relies on the disgust of a human peering over your files. Most laypeople don't have the same disgust of machines peering over their personal files that is why the weirdo video recording elicits a negative response but Meta or Alphabet doing it doesn't. Plus the fact that they "depend" on Meta and Alphabet tech makes it easier to give them a pass not unlike fans of [insert your favourite celebrity] who happily look away or justify the celebrity's bad actions.
Or people naively assume that the machine is wayyyy more impartial and privacy-isolated than it really is.
I think people would find it disgusting, it's just very hard to know what data is being used and how and sold to whom by these companies. It's a very opaque by design.
You've tripped right over the difference though.
Corporations aren't people. They do not and cannot present a personal threat to you.
Even your trailing example falls flat on this: for the activity to be distressing you had to recontextualize it back to the individual level.
It might be worth revisiting the definition of the term "Banana Republic" and the history of the United Fruit Company[1].
Corporations have toppled democratic governments, run dodgy drug trials and given breast feeding mothers just enough free powdered milk to stop being able to feed their babies.
We have large online retailers, Temu and Shein, accused of using forced labour aka slavery.
Even a well known SaaS operation like eBay was caught sending live spiders to woman who criticised them[2].
Corporations are entities with legal rights but are motivated solely by profit. Without laws to regulate them they would unemotionally run right over you.
Corporation are, and I choose my words carefully, absolute cunts.
They can 100% can present a threat to you. We wouldn't have the concept of corporate manslaughter if they didn't.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company
2. https://apnews.com/article/786117108cdfefb40e691b1b3420c689
There were literal wars started and people murdered over corporate interests.
> Corporations ... do not and cannot present a personal threat to you.
...is this for real
Holy fucking hell. Someone please, I can't
Partial list of alternatives to archive.is
No CAPTCHA, no geo-blocking, no archive.today annoyances
No Javascript, text-only
Option 1
Option 2 Option 3 Option 4This is what we should have put on the golden record sent on Voyager so the aliens don't get paywalled when they try to check out our content.
They might be trying to make contact, but they're shadowbanned. Neither party knows the message is being blocked.
Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-s...
@dang, please consider updating.
We've added that URL to the thread header.
We don't make a gift link the primary URL because we always want that to be the canonical URL for the article. But it's good to have a variety of options for paywall workarounds.
https://archive.is/JxaZ7
How about Archive Buttons? [0]
I don't know what's going on behind those 5 buttons, but this was the first, and who knows?
[0] https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www....
Don’t click that link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
I clicked that link and I don't see anything wrong with that. It's not like I donate money by doing that. And they still are very useful resource, even if they're not good enough for Wikipedia (if they indeed tampered with some old archives, it's pretty obvious why)
Thank you for the heads up! DDOS attacks are pretty concerning, but even more concerning is the potential alteration of content. Diabolical. That said, journalism needs funding more than ever, please if you can, try your best to pay for it.
I think that archive links should be made to include a cryptographic hash of the file; this can prevent alteration of content (including of the original file that it is copied from) but also can allow alternative sources of the file to be found (or verified to be correct) according to the hash. (If someone is concerned they want their username removed, they could perhaps edit their copy of the file first and then archive it, although they should have someone to trust if it matches the original one or not, if it has been modified in this way (or any other way, e.g. removing some scripts and CSS etc).)
Why is it obvious why they tampered with old archives? Why did they tamper with old archives?
> Why is it obvious why they tampered with old archives? Why did they tamper with old archives?
See section "Blog capture tampered with":
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
Also:
> On 20 February 2026, the English Wikipedia banned all links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with: Discussion had discovered that instances of Nora's name were replaced with Patokallio's and that "Nora" was likely an appropriated identity—the name belonged to a real person, whose only connection to archive.today had been a prior content takedown request.[18][17][19] The community's decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability—partly undermined by the discovery of the alterations— while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[18][20] Patokallio expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Attack_on_Gyrova...
> Specifically, AT's maintainers reportedly tweaked snapshots of a third-party blog post that Patokallio referred to in his February 2026 article about the DDoS attack. AT changed the name of a "Nora" person in said post to Jani Patokallio, making it look as if he had written some comments there. Eagle-eyed Wikipedia editors spotted the alterations, which have since then been reverted, but the action made it easy for them reach a final decision.
* https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/wikiped...
"it's pretty obvious why" here refers to why Wikipedia would reject them as a source.
Looking for the answer to this myself as well. Seems like a bit of conjecture
Maybe not, but it could be using your browser as a part of a DDoS network. The admins have also been tampering with archived articles.
A DDoS against a blog that iirc was attempting to dox the archive.today maintainer.
The bit about tampering with archived pages is news to me though. Wish the wiki discussion included receipts. Is "two users report they were redirected to tehrantimes.com" what is being referred to when they say archived pages are being tampered with?
It looks like the "tampering" was mostly just removing the username of the person submitting the links, so they wouldn't get banned by paywall sites, and archive.today has always done this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
And it looks like in some instances they changed their own alias to the name of the blogger they're in dispute with, in a fit of pique.
You have to scroll down to get hints because the conversation has been redacted, and the evidence is not provided with side-by-side comparisons.
I understand the ethical concerns about linking to the site but the blanket accusations of "tampering" seem a bit disingenuous, since no article content was ever changed afaik.
In addition to that kind of “benign” tampering, there was also tampering other webpages to insert the name of the person who was doing the exposé on archive.is. Either to slander that person further (in addition to the DDOS archive.is was already attempting) or to dox the person.
Thanks I had edited my post once I saw that - buried deep in the discussion.
I don't get why they couldn't just say what they did instead of disingenuously implying that article content had been "tampered".
Given the breadth of misinformation out there today, shoddy evidence and misleading language makes people give archive.today the benefit of the doubt, and actually hurts the case against them.
Nobody really knows who runs the site. One concern I have after reading this thread is that they start pulling a 1984 at some point.
Not mine, UBlock has blocked that since day one, thankfully
DDoSing who? Doesn't CORS help here?
cors stops the browser from reading the response but the request still gets processed by the server
Browsers use OPTIONS preflight request to do CORS validation. Servers shouldn't do too much work in an OPTIONS request. Should be a simple if statement, no db operations, which is usually where the bottleneck is.
If you would open the second link provided you would get an answer.
>This decision was agreed on after a request for comment with more than 200 participants concluded in February 2026, and is due to multiple concerns, including the site using editors' and readers' computers to run a denial-of-service attack and evidence that the website has tampered with some archived pages
Alternate take: you can click that link. We are not on Wikipedia and the OP isn't a link to Wikipedia.
They recommend archive.org instead but archive.org's version of that article gets masked by an error page preventing you from reading it where the archive.is link works fine.
So there isn't a choice here if you actually want to see the article (without subscribing to the atlantic).
I was wondering what was the angle of thede sites.
where's archive link when it's needed the most...
copy the original link then go to archive .is then paste the link into the second field than choose any result. not a rocket science. the article is not interesting tbh.
Why does the Atlantic get shade?
It's not shade the article is just paywalled
Honestly I can live with it because I know that my country will never turn into a theocracy or a dictatorship. That would require people to bow to a higher power than themselves and develop actual beliefs lol.
You don’t need the country to become a dictatorship. Private companies will gladly do the job of surveillance and selling your data.
But also, lower your guard long enough and it might be taken over by any of two or three religious groups that only seem to be growing.
Theocrats have not been known to believe in a power higher than themselves. They just believe that you believe.
I do believe people still vote for dictatorship if they think it will fuck over others much harder, then themselves, and "they deserve it".
The Germans voted for Hitler because the economy was shit and Hitler was the only one daring to say he'd fix it.
A government with total control over the population can turn into whatever it pleases, whenever it pleases. A catalyzing crisis can always be manufactured.
An autocracy or illiberal democracy is perfectly possible. It's happened to several countries recently. And Russia at this point is a dictatorship.
Everything you think will be recorded via neural decoding from your meta smart glasses and apple neural headsets in the near future.
I’d imagine some people would actually find that useful if they offered a backup and restore feature.
No more “why did I come in this room again?” moments.
Don't fucking encourage this lol
Don’t look at me. I won’t even put a TV online because they want to watch me back.
What I do know, however, is that most people seem to be willing to give up everything for a little convenience.
We are literally in the golden age of privacy with AI generated private apps, so I wouldn't worry too much about this.