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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: March 12th, 2025

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  • You’re right, it appears that NPU hardware was introduced in the iPhone 8, in 2017, and I say this typing away from an Apple device. Sounds like I’ll be busy this weekend with that rusty spork.

    However, it’s the recent generation of NPUs that provide the processing power needed to run the expanded scanning services implemented by these OS’s. That’s why Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15, and Microsoft is hawking Recall laptops.

    While I admit the pins-and-string-on-a-corkboard tone, I don’t think we actually disagree on anything here. Eventually, an open source platform will become the only way to avoid this kind of hardware enabled surveillance.






  • Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all quietly integrating NPUs into their devices, and implementing the software infrastructure in their operating systems to do on-device classification of content: Windows Recall, Google SafetyCore, and Apple Intelligence. These services are obsequiously marketed as being for your benefit, while all are privacy and surveillance nightmares. When the security breaking features of these systems are mentioned, each company touts convoluted workarounds to justify the tech.

    Why would these companies risk rabidly forcing these unwanted, unpopular, insecure, expensive, and unnecessary features on their collective user bases? The real reason is to capture everything you do and store on your device, use the tensor hardware you may or may not even know that you purchased to analyze the data locally, then export and sell that “anonymized” information to advertisers and the government. All while cryptographically tying the data to your device, and the device to you, for “security”. This enables mass surveillance, digital rights management, and targeted advertising on a scale and depth previously unseen. Who needs a backdoor or a quantum computer to break consumer-grade encryption when you can just locally record everything everyone does and analyze it automatically at the hardware level?

    Each of these providers is already desperate to scan, analyze, and classify your content:

    Microsoft has been caught using your stored passwords to decrypt archives uploaded to OneDrive.

    Apple developed forced client side scanning for CSAM before backlash shut it down. They already locally scan your photos with a machine learning classification algorithm whether you like it or not. You can’t turn it off.

    Google recently implemented local content scanning with SafetyCore to “protect you from unwanted content like spam”. Then why is it scanning your photo library?

    I would rather saw off my own nuts with a rusty spork before willfully purchasing a device with an integrated NPU. I fear that in the next 5-10 years, you won’t be able to avoid them. We are paying for the edge hardware being used for our own unwilling surveillance. Then, our tax dollars are paid to these tech companies to purchase the data!

    Do you trust the rising fascist regimes and their tech lackeys in America and the UK to use this power morally and responsibly?

    Do you really believe that these features that you didn’t ask for, that you cannot disable, and are baked directly into the hardware, are for your benefit?



  • Same here - I was on Reddit for close to 20 years. After the purge, I had to stop because it literally became unbearable. Reddit is now fake dead pet pity posts, brain dead relationship outrage baiting, unintelligible post titles and comments, and barely obfuscated advertising.

    Apparently, it’s more profitable than ever; a monument to enshitification.











  • Who actually benefits from this? The only “goal” I can see here is intentional depopulation. But when the next pandemic hits, and there’s no vaccine for 3 years because research funding has been gutted, who will be left to work for all these rich assholes and sustain the economy all their money depends on?

    I just cannot fathom that RFK is such a demented narcissist so high on his own farts that he actually believes the shit that comes out of his mouth. There just has to be another endgame I’m not seeing. But what??

    Either they’re trying to kill us all, or the inmates are running the asylum except they think the asylum should be run like a business.