I stood ready to pay and then the cashier said “now I just need your phone number and you can pay”. Hold up. What. I did not expect that, I honestly had a burst of anger inside me (never gonna take it on a cashier, they are just doing their job). I asked nicely why do I need to give my phone number and I was told that to register me as a member so I can get the discount.

“Sure thing, It’s +XX 111 222 3333” Just give them garbage.

I’ve had the idea for a while to use an LLM to gather metadata about books for me as well as generate tag lists for themes, plot, writing style, etc for everything in my ebook library. You could also generate non spoiler plot summaries and produce recommendations for similar books.

I recently had to explain to my boomer mom why a Ring doorbell was a bad idea. She didn’t seem to get that the system is cheap because it’s constantly feeding whatever it sees to both Ring and your local cops.

Glassholes was coined back when Google was working on Google Glass about 10-12y ago and people kept theirs on and recording while in public

Welp, guess it’s time for IR reflective tattoos to defeat facial recognition

OP you appear to be committed to (not) dying on this hill and I applaud you

Why are we tolerating this criminal behavior by corporations?

Because it’s done in the open and it’s accepted as part of the cost of the device. This is an expected consequence of our adtech surveillance economy where devices are now subsidized because they can harvest data about you, your usage and your behavior to sell on an ongoing basis. We’ve been screaming about these sorts of practices since the late 90s and consumers have just blithered right along with every new and creepy intrusion because they get cheap things and don’t think about the real costs or consequences. And so … Here we are.

I’m just waiting for them to add a sideband channel to some LoRa network so they can exfiltrate data even when their devices are “offline”

Interesting that the one has such large capacitors in it. I imagine that is as last-ditch effort to keep the board powered long enough to finish flushing all of its caches in the event of a power failure.

That’s exactly the point of power loss protection (aka PLP.) As a side effect of not needing to wait for a flush after a write synchronous write workloads are dramatically faster on enterprise drives with PLP.

Edit: To add a bit of detail - you don’t need to wait for a flush after a synchronous write with PLP because the drive firmware can lie and immediately return from a flush call because there’s enough backup power to complete that flush if the power were cut.

“it appears that the GOP’s leadership may have played themselves into making the right call for the right underlying reasons (the censorship powers), but based on a near total misunderstanding of how the world actually works.”

So business as usual for them

Why don’t you volunteer to be the test case Larry?

I mean, global warming us slowly into extinction is a pretty AI way to go about it

If: you’re a starred contact and call twice within 10 minutes and I happen to have the phone at hand and I’m pretty sure you have something important to say I’ll probably pick it up.

That happens about once or twice a year. We invented voicemail so we can speak when it works well for both parties.

You can access Gmail over IMAP and pull down messages locally. If you do this; Back. Up. Your. Mbox.

Also, fun fact, you can move messages from a local mbox to Gmail while preserving read status and original dates if you want to add old email to Gmail for some reason.

+1, your list of browser extensions, list of plugins and list of available fonts are also available to anyone trying to fingerprint you. This idea that NAT will somehow obscure you enough to be anonymous online is security voodoo.

Yes, the machine that stays off 363 days of the year is such a security risk to my home network 🙄

I mean, the horror of having to tick a box to use rotating v6 addresses. These are all solved problems, they’re not a flaw worth ignoring the entire ipv6 protocol over. Most major operating systems have moved to stable privacy preserving addresses by default, that’s true, but it’s not all that difficult to turn on address randomization and rotation either. And, hell, if you’re that married to NAT as security just use NAT66 and call it a day, nothing about NAT is exclusive to ipv4.

Your firewall should take care of that, it’s pretty rare to be connected directly without one and by default any decent routing package will filter incoming traffic that’s not in the state tracking table. NAT isn’t designed for security, any security benefit it provides is a side effect rather than the intended purpose.

Edit: check out ipv6 privacy extensions too, there are solutions there that can reduce info disclosure if that’s a concern. You can accomplish many of the same benefits of NAT with v6 features without the downsides that NAT brings.

Ipv6 is fantastic, it has less overhead than v4 and removes the need for NAT or other translation. Support can be spotty in cheaper and older devices but there’s no reason not to learn and adopt it where possible.