I had to change my address to my physical address from a PO Box in the first week of the year to prevent my account getting closed. This was with a major bank, and it’s all thanks to the patriot act. Then again, I do have a checking account with a much smaller bank and they haven’t said a word about it. I use the street address with a “unit number” for my box. Seems like they either haven’t dug into it and realized it’s a PO Box or they’re just small enough where they don’t care much about it like the big banks. So basically, you need a physical address these days, if you don’t you risk account closure.
Privacy and cars are mutually exclusive. If you want privacy use public transport and pay in cash. With cars you have licence plate scanner, cameras and tollbooths everywhere (no to mention that most people drive with their phones on them). “They” will know where were you driving no matter what car you use. The question really is what data are you trying to hide and from who? The obvious thing to do is not to give your data to advertisers. Selling you shit is the whole point of most of the data collection. Just get extra phone and use some fake google account for android auto and you should be fine here. As for car companies all they will gather is some generic data about your driving habits but guess what? Everyone knows this already because driving is not private (again, if you want to hide this use public transport). So yeah, it would be nice for car companies to be more transparent about the data they gather and how they use it but it’s really not a big issue. If you’re paranoid about it then don’t drive. If you’re driving the data your car is leaking though analytics is not your biggest problem.
And what did I say? “Just get extra phone and use some fake google account for android auto and you should be fine”. Kind of like I’m saying that while total privacy is not possible you can find a good compromise, wouldn’t you say?
I bought a 2015 Dacia. It’s just smart enough that it let’s you connect a device through Bluetooth, however it’s not smart in any other way. It’s barely got kilometers (sub 1k) and will last me a while.
Oh I’m sure there will be. It will be technically difficult (but not impossible) for them to allow other app-stores and sideloading but have the hardware and software be different enough in both markets to not have some slip through.
I suspect there will be lots of hacky shit for this.
I remember that there was an identifier based on model number. FaceTime wasn’t allowed in the Middle East for a while, there was a way to tell if the model will support it based on the last character after the / in the model number. Middle East models won’t even have the app at all.
Propably they’ll do the same for models sold in the EU.
There are already hardware variants of the same iPhone. I think the US gets an iPhone with all eSIM, and China has two physical SIM slots.
Literally all I had to do to make my phone have a usable performance again was to set the region to France, and the language to English. I should add that it was totally fine before an update.
I can see the abuse but what if this actually worked in a best case scenario? So dna is found say from a rape and that DNA is used to create a image of the person and then they find that person and then do DNA tests to match them. The image is not used as evidence but used to find the person. Honestly it seems like a good use, if it’s limited to that.
Dude facial recognition catches the wrong people all the time. It is not as infallible as they make it out to be and this is just adding an entire extra level of mistakes they can make.
Facial recognition tech is bogus and because of its technical limitations, unintentionally(?) racist. (ie the cameras are not designed well to take good photo/video of dark skin, leading to high false positive rates when it comes to dark-skinned people) edit: even further, the cameras are often too small of a resolution for quality matching.
Further, facial reconstruction based on DNA isn’t exactly super accurate on its own.
Don’t assume it wouldn’t be abused since the police have a shit track record. If anything like this we’re to be used then strict laws restricting how it can be used need to come first since the police are dumb and can’t be trusted to invent new applications of technology. They’re the last group that would be leading this.
I don’t know a lot about DNA, but i know about facial recognition.
Facial recognition is highly inaccurate. It would be easy for people from the same country to “match” at facial recognition despite being totally unrelated.
If “face generation from DNA” is only roughly accurate (ex: nose size or skin tone), then anybody from the same ethnic origin could be a match. Basically, the more you look like the “average person”, the more likely you would fit the generated face.
Doesn’t it sound a lot like technology-enabled profiling?
I think this is a bad idea, especially the way it’s being developed, but let me play devil’s advocate for a second. What if it were only used to narrow a search radius, the same way cell pings are used to narrow a search radius? Cell pings are already used to direct resources. Being near a crime obviously doesn’t mean you committed the crime, but it does narrow down where to look, and once you start looking you can find real evidence more efficiently. You could pair this with other techniques to narrow down the search, and then find real hard corroborating evidence. Also, since they need DNA in the first place they’d need a DNA match from the suspect preventing random people from getting charged.
Now to stop playing devil’s advocate, there are just so many ways this can be abused, and the police are the worst organization to lead it. They are not technology experts, they’re not even legal experts, and they’ve been shown over and over again to be easily biased, so even if they need corroborating evidence, that doesn’t mean they won’t be biased by the face match and then “find” evidence, or even plant it, plus, even just being accused can be hugely disruptive, and traumatizing when they target a non match. Imagine you’re innocently going about your day and you suddenly get snatched up for questioning and forced to give a DNA sample.
If anything like this were to be used in any way you would need so many safe guards and it’s obvious the police don’t care about setting any of those up. You’d need a double blind approach to evidence gathering, extreme oversight, and a very restrictive legal framework and course close guarding and anonymization techniques on any personal data, and probably more things I’m not thinking about. The police are so irresponsible to treat this like a whatever thing that isn’t incredibly sensitive and invasive and needing tons of safe guards to not be a massive violation of privacy and a dangerous biasing vector that could easily catch up innocent people.
Pardon the YT link, I haven’t dove into peertube yet. Here’s a very timely case where a man was misidentified by facial recognition, imprisoned, where he was sexually assaulted.
And that’s just one specious technology, add in the very immature process of trying to guess what people look like based on DNA and it gets a big “No Thanks” from me. I don’t trust cops to put reasonable guardrails in place when their incentive structure is driving them to put people in prison as quickly and inexpensively as possible.
No. It just does not work that way. The article specifically mentions that there’s no proof whatsoever that the company can actually generate a face from DNA. It’s like looking at a textbook on automotive design and predicting exactly what a specific car built 20 years from now look like. General features? Sure - four wheels, a windshield, etc. Anything more specific? Nope, not at all. And this is before we get into environmental factors - think of scratches or aftermarket spoilers on a car. Humans are similarly influenced by their environment, even down to the level of what we eat or the pollutants in the air we breathe.
What the cops did is as close to bullshit fantasy as makes no difference. Asking a fortune teller to draw you a picture would be only slightly less accurate. This is so insanely problematic those cops ought to be up on charges.
I am on the same boat. Somewhat similar thing was already done by those forensic sketch people that drew how a person might look like after x years if they had earlier photo. It’s not like those sketches meant they are irrefutable proof, just a method to potentially find what you are looking for and then investigate further.
That said, this feels like grasping at straws. I cannot fathom how with only DNA sample you could get an accurate portrait that face recognition could then match.
The problem is that there isn’t a singular replacement. People use Twitter for that feeling of being up to date with everything happening in the world. Until one of the alternatives can deliver that on a larger scale, Twitter will retain a considerable userbase.
I’m pretty sure the people who still use Twitter use it for the drama. Mastodon and Bluesky just aren’t as spicy to them. Hell, Mastodon takes setting up to even get anything interesting.
The technical term is “dummy load”, most antennas are around 50ohm “impedance” which in an incredibly roundabout way means the antenna is indistinguishable from a 50ohm resistor at whatever frequency it’s tuned to…which means you can replace the antenna with a 50ohm resistor.
This all assumes you care about leaving the radio functional (radio amplifiers will burn up if they can’t dissipate the energy they’re creating) and in most cases it’s probably fine to just cut the trace as close to the source chip as possible. That said, if the system is especially evil and well engineered it’ll throw errors in some cases so better to leave everything functional but unable to hear or transmit.
Here in Spain there’s minimal surveillance outside the big cities. My town (circa 40K residents) has no public cameras in town (I lived in the UK and they were everywhere).
But cameras are not the only concern, what’s about internet traffic analysis, piracy, ability to rent something or get some service like sim or home internet without documents and stuff
Or even transportation, like busses, trains, etc
Don’t get me wrong, i’m asking so I can have a better picture of how the stuff really works
Haha… If elections had any impact, it’s long time ago we would have seen any changes… ! Every year the same parade, with the illusion of choice between a turd or a piece of shit… Either way, they both come out of the same a Hole and reeks the same…
Money = power ! Vote with your wallet instead… Stop buying unecessary things, just shut down your TV, radio, mobile… and open your mind to the REAL outside world, reconnect with your intuition, stop filling your body with deadly poison and stop being a brainless sheep (not saying you’re, it’s a figure of speech).
You can do both. You always get the same shitty options to vote for because most people don’t vote, and even fewer of them vote in primaries or participate in the political process in other ways.
The reason you only get to vote for the “lesser of two evils” is because you don’t participate in primaries (assuming you are talking about the US system here). If MAGA can get a psycho like Trump to be their party nominee, you can get your kind of psycho nominated as well.
Primaries are where you actually get a chance to express what kind of candidate you want. Hell, you can even run for office! Generals are where you hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils because otherwise it’s an automatic vote for the worst of the two evils.
I agree voting seems pointless sometimes. But it’s still important. But it’s a lever of power you have access to and nobody can take it away from you no. And you can spend the 364 other days of the year impacting politics in other ways.
The reason you only get to vote for the “lesser of two evils” is because you don’t participate in primaries (assuming you are talking about the US system here)
Just popping in to remind you they destroyed the Iowa caucus to stop Bernie.
There was some shady stuff on behalf of the DNC but he legitimately lost. He didn’t get the votes. Because his voters didn’t vote in the primaries. A number of reforms have been made to the primary system since then, a bunch of the people who oversaw that primary got fired, and many states are now moving towards ranked choice voting which will eliminate the need for primaries entirely. If half the people who complain about how voting is useless actually participated in the primary process, our political landscape would look a lot different. I used to be one of those people, I get it, the whole damned thing is a bit of a racket, but it doesn’t change that voting takes 5 minutes and has a concrete impact on who runs the government.
Edit: And that’s the presidential race. You can make much more of a difference, and the rules are much less wonky, in local and state elections. Hell, many of those positions are entirely uncontested.
He “legitimately” lost after they handed Iowa to a nobody loser like Pete to render Iowa irrelevant in the future. You don’t really think Pete won, do you? Sure, they gave the appearance of “cleaning up” after Iowa, but that was always the plan! Now Iowa is done as a relevant caucus state.
I voted in Iowa. Getting my caucus vote made irrelevant showed me the Democratic Party is not a viable vehicle. They’ll literally throw out your votes if they don’t like it.
That worked out well for Florida that one time. But you’re missing what gets people nominated to the general primaries, boat loads of money. If you don’t have that, good luck getting anyone you want to win to run. Thoughts and prayers and wishing don’t fund a campaign, but money does.
All of these bills they pass about spying on you (“PATRIOT” act, PRISM, etc) all have pretty astounding bipartisan support. I mean they can’t agree on anything except when it comes to spying on us or wiping out whole societies of people that don’t look like we want them to look. They all fucking incredibly come together and agree on that. Every time.
Another independent search company with its own index is great. Repackaging Bing and Google isn’t good enough. I’d be cautious with their privacy claims though.
With own Index Andisearch (using AI) and SSuite Groot Search, you can also use a meta search like E-Tools, it use several search engines which you can select.
My wife has an iPad and one of the things I hate the most is that you can’t install adblock extensions into Firefox on it like you can on Android. Which is a thing that has made using the browser on the phone wayyyy more enjoyable.
I use AdGuard both on my Android phone and iPad. Not quite as good on the iPad because Apple doesn’t make it easy, but definitely makes a huge difference. For me, $30 a year is worth it and you can use it on 3 devices. I got sick of the ads in apps that were downright disturbing in some cases and reporting them didn’t do a whole lot. Browser extensions can do a lot more to tidy up the experience, but I will take what I can get.
I ended up getting it from them directly. I am on Android 90% of the time and don’t pay for the license from the Apple store. No idea if that one is a single device or the same as the multi-device. I tend to not do things from the Apple store as I don’t have an iPhone and they seem to want or assume you have one. Just like I can never use their watch (not that I want one).
The Orion browser for iOS/iPadOS supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions, however, the support is quite buggy and limited. Nonetheless, a valiant effort by Orion devs.
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