My girlfriend asked why I carry a gun around the house? 
I looked her dead in the eye and said, “the motherfucking decepticons”. She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.

…. I don’t know. It’s just what came to mind when I thought of household appliances being hijacked.

I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip

So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!

So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.

Same. I went with them as a “good enough” option when I needed cameras because I have had a good experience with Anker products, but they’ve slowly enshitified to the point that I’d drop them in a heartbeat if the budget was there.

Yeah, I’m not even religious and I knew about 1234.

Is it an accident?

Trump (and specifically, the heritage foundation) believe in isolationism. Alienating its geopolitical and geographical neighbors serves that purpose. Think of it as the groundwork for a full North Korea style break from non-state controlled culture.

Oh, and as evidenced by the government losing control of the backdoors they implanted into telco companies, this data will be hacked. And having all of it in one place will make it a big target.

So it’s not just the U.S. government that will know about your business, but so will the U.S.’s foreign rivals.
Great fucking strategy. Let’s make sure all our health data is accessible, not improve the health system, and just hope that none of the people whose information you can freely and easily buy online due to lax privacy laws have expensive medical bills and a sensitive job.

Way improve national security. Dumbasses.

What an unexpectedly deep bit of research this threw me into.

In 2005 a company called Fortress Credit loaned the Trump Organization $130 million dollars for the construction of trump tower that it later ‘forgave.’ Fortress Credit is owned by Fortress Investment Group, which is owned by SoftBank. Additionally, SoftBank tried to engage with Trump in 2017 under a similar scheme, where they offered to invest in the U.S.’ IT infrastructure as part of some deal they were cooking up with Trump.
Incidentally, in 2019, New Fortress Energy, also part of the constellation of companies, was granted a peculiar permit to transport LNG over rail lines within populated areas - something that is generally not done due to the danger involved.
So that’s just, you know, the corruption cherry on top of this shit cake.

So now, we have SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle - companies whose CEO’s ‘bent the knee’ announcing a half a trillion dollar investment into an all knowing AI medical black box that the government (and its corporate sponsors) intend to use to track all your medical information.
Yes. Centralized government tracking of your periods, ladies. If this system ever works, the government will know if you’ve ever told a medical professional that you use illicit drugs, even drugs that may be legal at the state level, but illegal federally. The government will know if you’re on antidepressants - something that JFK Jr. wants to send people to re-education/labor camps for being on. They will know if you’ve ever told a doctor that you’re not CIS or straight.

And we know that SoftBank can’t afford to invest that much. They took out a $4 billion loan 2 years ago, and then asked for another 1.1 billion shortly after. Even Elon Musk is saying they don’t have the money.
So they’re going to invest some money in something, get very overpriced government contracts for the operation of it, and use a fraction of the overages from that to ‘invest’ further until their obligation is fulfilled or forgiven – in much the same way that telcos fleeced the government to build out broadband and never did.

It’s a bad deal for all of us, and the very best outcome for anyone is that it will never work.
Because if it does work, we will lose our medical privacy, and we lose control of any data we’ve ever shared with medical professionals - one of the few areas in U.S. citizen’s lives where there are privacy laws to keep them safe.

Oof. That hurts to hear.

Yeah, I know. And I know there’s way more market demand for mirrorless, as well as simpler mechanicals, so they have less failure points, but do I ever love the sound and that subtle feeling of a mirror slapping up and the shutter flicking out of place.
The feedback that offers when you capture a photo feels like you’re doing something ‘real’ when you take a photo. Everyone knows that you captured that moment. Those photons are yours forever, trapped in your little art-making box.

It’s kind of romantic, in a way. I feel like modern tech is great, but tends to be inscrutable.

I have such fond memories of shooting on my old Canon DSLR.
It’s been 20 years since I bought my last DSLR (life, you know?) and I recently started thinking that maybe I should buy another before they close out the DSLR product line.

A huge disappointment to see this enshitification.

I’m sorry this is going to be such a shit comment, but I worked with a guy that had a fitness watch of some stripe.

He was a heavier guy and well, that plasticy band was pressed tight against his skin. One day he came in with this nasty looking ring of red and peeling skin around his wrist. Said he got a rash from the watch. (It’s very possible it was an allergic reaction to something in the band.)

This is a shit comment because I don’t know the brand, and I’m totally saying “trust me, bro.” But like, trust me, bro, it apparently happens?

God‘s Gonna Cut You Down, by Johnny Cash

While I was standing there in the kitchen, the smart TV started playing an old movie randomly, blasting the audio through all the smart speakers in the house. The Roomba hit me right in the ankle, just as the door to the stove fell open and the speakers yelled “Feed me Seymour!”
But I mean. It’s a Roomba, and the stove takes time to preheat, even if I had fallen in. The cat helped to blind the Roomba while I unplugged everything. Now I’m huddled in the dark, fighting against the cold, wondering if I should chance the thermostat.

Ahh. Interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen the HIBP one!

Now it’s going to bug me, trying to remember the one I was thinking of. (Unfortunately, I’m out and about today and can’t really take a moment to hunt down what I’d previously seen.)

There’s one by …. Microsoft, I think?

It actually requests your password (vs email for HaveIBeenPwned) and checks it against rainbow tables. It doesn’t ask for other identifying information, so it’s okay, but feels super sketchy.

No clue!

The power almost never goes out at my house, which is nice, but there are 4 appliances with clocks in my kitchen. The microwave runs fast and is usually about 12 minutes ahead every time the clocks change, the stove is always rock solid, the coffee pot is never set (despite being the only appliance with a timer mode that would actually be useful), and the air fryer is only accurate during summer because I can’t remember how to set it (and I don’t care enough to fix it).

I tried not to, but it formed a mesh network with the neighbors toaster, and that connected to someone’s dishwasher the next street over, which connected to a washing machine down the block, and so on, until they found a self-aware microwave that just happens to be benevolent but sort of mischievous, and now whenever my toast is done, the Grindr chime sounds off and the toaster asks me to put it back in.

My organization seems to have already thrown in the AI towel, or at least are resorting to magical thinking about it

We’re highly integrated with Microsoft - Windows Login, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and even a managed version of Edge as the org-wide ‘default’ browser that we’re encouraged to sign into with our organizational credentials to sync account information, etc. Our AI policy is basically “You can use any Microsoft AI feature your account can access.”
They can try to block whatever sites they want with the firewall, but once you let a user get comfortable with the idea of allowing systems to exfiltrate data, you aren’t going to also make them more discrete. They’re trusting that by throwing open the floodgates users will actually use Microsoft’s offerings instead of competing offerings — as if folks who sometimes still cannot tell the difference between a web browser and ‘the internet’ will know the difference. And they are also trusting that Microsoft is going to uphold our enterprise license agreement and their own security to keep that data within our own cloud instance.

Boy howdy, this will be interesting.

The cities also indexed their streets off of the same river, but at different places along the curving bank. As a result, traveling south in KCMO increments the street numbers, but in KCK, the numbers increment when you travel west.

For more hilarity, the cities to the south of KCK adopted the KCMO street number designations, so KCK is the odd city out.