AmbitiousProcess

Yes.

Even if it didn’t explicitly stop my biometric data from being taken and transferred to a government database every single time I fly, it would be a vote against the system itself existing. The whole reason they are allowing people to opt out right now is to test how acceptable it is to people, to hopefully make it mandatory given too little pushback from the public.

Opting out doesn’t just protect your biometric data now, it protects everyone in the future from having their biometric data taken from them without a choice if this system is allowed to spread unopposed.

It seems like the point is that Microsoft would be developing some sort of alternative to the kernel with similar functionality for antivirus providers, that doesn’t need to have kernel level access. Anticheat uses a lot of the same techniques as kernel level antivirus to detect malware, thus it would probably have to adapt to this new system.

I think the article is more commenting on how Microsoft is directly partnering with antivirus companies for this new system right now, while they’re not directly partnering with anticheat companies, even though they’d probably have to migrate to this new system regardless.

To be fair, it certainly still makes cheating harder. If it didn’t exist, you’d just see even more people cheating, but it’s a pretty overkill way of system monitoring for such a relatively small benefit by comparison.

Massive privacy risk, only slightly better performance than other non-kernel monitoring.

I was thinking this too! Gait recognition can completely bypass facial coverings as a means of identification, but I also don’t think it’ll be much help here.

Gait recognition can be bypassed by things as simple as putting a rock in your shoe so you walk differently, so when you think about how much extra heavy gear, different shoes, and different overall movement patterns ICE agents will possibly be engaging in, it might not hold up well at tracking them down, especially since to recognize someone by gait, you’d need footage of them that you can already identify them in, to then train the model on.

In the case of fucklapd.com, this was easy because they could just get public record data for headshot photos, but there isn’t a comparable database with names directly tied to it for gait. I will say though, a lot of these undercover agents might be easier to track by gait since they’ll still generally be wearing more normal attire, and it might be more possible to associate them with who they are outside of work since it’s easier to slip up when you’re just wearing normal clothes.

Communicating on a platform you don’t own and can’t control seems very shortsighted.

I feel like this would be a much more realistic take if social media more broadly was all federated, and anyone’s independent instance could still communicate with the others, but that’s unfortunately not the case.

For a politician, which is better for their campaign? Starting an independent platform they entirely own and control, but with no local users to start out with, or having an account on an existing platform with millions and millions of users?

Obviously, even though in the first example they would have 100% control over their infrastructure, they wouldn’t exactly be spreading their message very far. They could always publish simultaneously on both platforms, but that still doesn’t mean much if the second platform has no users. However, the platform that has many millions of users can instantly grant them reach, which is kind of the point of them being on social media in the first place.

On your point about a bot, I’m assuming you mean more like a bridge mechanism that cross-posts from one platform to another. You could correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe AOC at least posts a lot of similar messaging on both Twitter and Bluesky, rather than staying isolated to one or the other. It’s not exactly the same thing, but it has a similar effect.

In an ideal world, everyone could easily host their own Mastodon server and just communicate with others without being tied to a platform, but unfortunately we still live in a world where the network effect is keeping people trapped in corporate social media silos, and there’s only so much an individual politician can do to change that without harming their own ability to message to the public.

Nobody left on that platform is going to be convinced of anything anymore.

I’d beg to differ. Although it’s true that the ratio of neo-Nazis and generally just far right freaks has far surpassed the number of everyday people, that doesn’t mean those people don’t exist anymore.

I always bring this up in conversations about leaving social networks, because if you don’t understand it, it will warp your entire perspective of why people stay on shitty platforms in the first place. The Network Effect is what keeps people hooked on these platforms, even when the owner becomes a literal neo-Nazi.

The people who have already left are the ones that are capable of and willing to sacrifice the scale, reach, and history that Twitter has, in the hopes that whatever platform they move to will treat them better. Leaving Twitter means deleting your digital history, erasing every connection you’ve made on the platform, and entirely cutting all of your messaging off from anyone who hasn’t yet left.

AOC is already on alternative platforms like Bluesky, so people who are willing and able to move, that would otherwise have stayed solely because she was still on Twitter have already done so. The people that remain do not remain because of her, they remain because of everybody else.

Yes, there are still quite a few neo-Nazis outnumbering the average person on there, but there are still quite a few average people that are still on Twitter. Don’t forget that the average person doesn’t seem to care when the companies they buy products from exploit child labor, fund wars that keep oil prices low, and suppress the wages of the workers in their own communities. The average person simply does not have the will to sacrifice what they must give up by leaving a large platform like Twitter, so they remain there.

If AOC didn’t benefit politically from being on Twitter, then she would have entirely left and deleted her account a while ago.

As a politician trying to reach members of the public, including those who could possibly be swayed by you, the last thing you want to do is entirely remove yourself from a platform with a very large reach.

Wanting people to leave Twitter is all well and good, but you can’t discount the fact that so many people are still on there, and refuse to spend the time setting up new profiles on entirely different sites with smaller userbases. For politicians, reach is key, and Twitter still has the users.

All I could find myself was a TikTok video making the same joke. It definitely seems like any story of it actually happening is made up, but I do hope some people take… inspiration from it.

If you have any family members who still play the “I still think Trump is doing what’s right” card because the media they consume has managed to spin every possible event as positive somehow, ask them how allowing a known cancer-causing chemical that directly financially benefits Russian corporate interests is beneficial to this country.

If the media can find a way to convincingly spin this as a good thing, I’d be shocked. Not that shocked, but shocked nonetheless.

This wouldn’t be an issue if Reddit always attached relevant posts, including negative ones even if those were the minority, to actually help people make a more informed judgement about an ad based on community sentiment, but I think we all know that won’t be the way this goes.

Posts will inevitably only be linked if they are positive, or at the very least neutral about the product being advertised, because that’s what would allow Reddit to sell advertisers on their higher ROI. The bandwagon effect is a real psychological effect, and Reddit knows it.

You mean the phone that originally sold for $250, that now sells for only about $170, that has been reviewed as having poor camera quality and limited 5G network speeds?

The one Trump Mobile is charging $500 for?

What a deal! /s

I’d actually found them to be better than Google for a while, but coincidentally after the AI craze started really taking off, search quality significantly degraded. Maybe that’s not so much of a coincidence after all.

Presearch is not fully decentralized.

All the services that manage advertising, staking/marketplace/rewards functionality, and unnamed “other critical Presearch services” are all “centrally managed by Presearch” according to their own documentation.

The nodes that actually help scrape and serve content are also reliant on Presearch’s centralized servers. Every search must go through Presearch’s “Node Gateway Server,” which is centrally managed by them. That removes identifying metadata and IP info.

That central server then determines where your request goes. It could be going to open nodes run by volunteers, or it could be their own personal nodes. You cannot verify this due to how the structure of the network works.

Presearch’s search index is not decentralized. It’s a frontend for other indexes. (e.g. it outsources queries to other search engines, databases, and APIs for services it’s configured to use) This means it does not actually have an index that is independent from these central services. I’ll give it a pass for this since most search engines are like this today, but many of them are developing their own indexes that are much more robust than what Presearch seems to be doing.

This node can return results to the gateway. There doesn’t seem to be any way that the gateway can verify that what it’s being provided is actually what was available on the open web. For example, the node could just send back results with links that are all affiliate links to services it thinks are vaguely relevant to the query, and the gateway would assume that these queries are valid.

For the gateway to verify these are accurate, it would have to additionally scrape these services itself, which would render the entire purpose of the nodes pointless. The docs claim it can “ensure that each node is only running trusted Presearch software,” but it does not control the root of trust, and thus it has the same pitfalls that games have had for years trying to enforce anticheat (that is to say, it’s simply impossible to guarantee unless presearch could do all the processing within a TPM module that they entirely control, which they don’t. Not to mention that it would cause a number of privacy issues)

A better model would be one where nodes are solely used for hosting to take the burden off a central server for storing the index, and chunks sent to nodes would be hashed, with the hash stored on the central server. When the central server needs a chunk of data based on a query, it sends a request, verifies the hash matches, then forwards it to the user, thus taking the storage burden off the main server and making the only cost bottleneck the bandwidth, but that’s not what Presearch is doing here.

This doesn’t make Presearch bad in itself, but it’s most definitely not decentralized. All core search functionality relies on their servers alone, and it simply adds additional risk of bad actors being able to manipulate search results.

Is there truly an audience for “I don’t want any proof, just answer my question”?

More people than I think we’d like to admit. Most people don’t spend time verifying whether or not what they’ve seen is true, they just believe what they see first, especially if it conforms to their existing beliefs.

After all, these models are quite literally plausibility machines. Their entire goal is to generate text that sounds plausibly accurate, because that’s how manual content reviewers fine-tune them. Their sole purpose is to generate whatever sounds plausible, not what’s necessarily correct, so if there’s one thing that will convince the masses that what it says is correct, it will be these “AI” models.

The military is also very good at propagandizing to the youth.

They primarily target young men who don’t know what they’re going to do with their life, then send them marketing materials (and even officers to their school) trying to tell them how much freedom and travel they’ll get if they join, and how it’ll build them into big strong well-respected men.

So even for the people who I wouldn’t say are dumb or even economically struggling, they can get roped in with false promises of things like the ability to get stronger and do work to help their community be safe, then in actuality just get deployed later on to fight the same people in their community when they protest.

This is one of the best reasons to socially stigmatize wealth hoarding, even if you can’t change the fundamentals of the capitalist system that causes it in the first place.

If enough people make people who hoard money feel lesser than, to the point that having less is a preferable alternative, then they’re more likely to give away their wealth and become at least a little bit less shitty people.

This is also, coincidentally, why rich people isolate themselves within bubbles of similarly rich individuals, who won’t look down on them for being so greedy and narcissistic.

Which privacy first smartphones would people recommend for US users

If you want to run GrapheneOS, then you can only use a Google Pixel.

If you want to run Calyx, you can use any phone on the CalyxOS “Devices” list, which includes Pixels, Fairphone, and some Motorola phones too.

I personally recommend Pixels because they tend to get the fastest and longest-lasting OEM-provided security patches (e.g. the Pixel 8 and later get 7 years of updates from when they were released) and Android releases, and they actually have a pretty decent selection of self-repair kits available for if you need to do a repair yourself, or if you want a repair technician to not have to go through a complicated ordering process for spare parts.

how does it work putting it on a network?

Make sure to buy one that’s not locked to a carrier, otherwise you’ll be unable to install the custom OS in the first place, since the bootloader will be locked. You can still set it up with any carrier you want once it’s unlocked. (this essentially means you need to buy the phone directly from the manufacturer. Don’t buy through your phone plan, or through a trade-in/upgrade with your carrier)

Your carrier, once you request it, will either mail you a physical SIM card you can put in your phone, or a digital eSIM you can activate immediately. I prefer eSIMs for convenience, but it’s entirely up to you. (you can check out this list of pros and cons if you’re interested. They’re mostly negligible.)

Do they go on the regular networks like at&t, sprint, Verizon etc?

Yes.

Now, if you’re going to install a custom OS, definitely make sure you watch a couple videos and read the official guide for the OS you choose on how to install it. You definitely want to make sure you don’t screw it up.

For example, if you’re installing GrapheneOS, you might want to use a chromium-based browser (chrome, ungoogled chromium, brave, etc) over something like Firefox, because it sometimes has issues installing via the WebUSB installer, while having no issues with chromium based browsers.

These little details are something you’ll want to pick up from those resources so you can actually feel confident when you flash the OS to your phone, and make sure you do it correctly. Plus, you get the upside of knowing more about how exactly the OS protects you compared to stock android.

I personally recommend GrapheneOS if you’re good with using a Pixel, since it seems to have some of the strongest security guarantees on top of its methodology around privacy. (Google has very strong hardware security measures that other phones don’t always have, which GrapheneOS takes full advantage of)

I don’t understand why anyone uses any of their platforms.

The answer to this question about almost any shitty platform is almost always the network effect.

Leaving Meta’s platforms means leaving where most of your friends and family spend their time digitally, which makes it harder to connect with the people you know. No one can collectively agree on an alternative platform to all simultaneously move to, so in most cases, leaving Meta practically means cutting yourself off from your entire social graph.

This seems like it could be a viable replacement for many plastics, but it isn’t the silver bullet I feel that the article is acting as if it is.

From the linked article in the post:

the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt.

Those components can then be further processed by naturally occurring bacteria, thereby avoiding generating microplastics

The plastic is non-toxic, non-flammable, and does not emit carbon dioxide, he added.

This is great. Good stuff. Wonderful.

From another article (this shows that this isn’t as recent, too. This news was from many months ago)

the team was able to generate plastics that had varying hardnesses and tensile strengths, all comparable or better than conventional plastics.

Plastics like these can be used in 3D printing as well as medical or health-related applications.

Wide applications and uses, much better than a lot of other proposed solutions. Still good so far.

After dissolving the initial new plastic in salt water, they were able to recover 91% of the hexametaphosphate and 82% of the guanidinium as powders, indicating that recycling is easy and efficient.

Easy to recycle and reclaim material from. Great! Not perfect, but still pretty damn good.

In soil, sheets of the new plastic degraded completely over the course of 10 days, supplying the soil with phosphorous and nitrogen similar to a fertilizer.

You could compost these in your backyard. Who needs the local recycling pickup for plastics when you can just chuck it in a bin in the back? Still looking good.

using polysaccharides that form cross-linked salt bridges with guanidinium monomers.

Polysaccharides are literally carbohydrates found in food.

This is really good. Commonly found compound, easy to actually re-integrate back into the environment. But now the problems start. They don’t specify much about the guanidinium monomers in their research in terms of which specific ones are used, so it’s hard to say the exact implications, but…

…they appear to often be toxic, sometimes especially to marine life, soil quality, and plant growth, and have been used in medicine with mixed results as to their effectiveness and safety.

I’m a bit disappointed they didn’t talk about this more in the articles, to be honest. It seems this would definitely be better than traditional plastic in terms of its ecological effects, but still much worse than not dumping it in the ocean at all. In my opinion, in practice it looks like this would simply make the recycling process much more efficient (as mentioned before, a 91% and 82% recovery rate for plastics is much better than the current average of less than 10%) while reducing the overall harm from plastic being dumped in the ocean, even if it’s still not good enough to eliminate the harm altogether.