Bold of you to assume this wasn’t always the plan for Pokemon Go. A ton of online services are basically designed from the get go to be mass surveillance machines and the founders know they’re eventually going to be sold as exactly that.

I see. Thanks for sharing. This will be good to know next time I’m looking for a printer.

Microsoft has project Silica where they store data in glass. Being electromagnetic field-proof is one of the stated goals.

but they’re a different kind of hassle

Can you elaborate on this? I thought they would be straight up better to work with and I was thinking of buying one in the future. Is it just about the drying up issue you mentioned or are there other drawbacks?

The DMCA takedown seems to be specifically about Ryujinx’s ability to decode ROMs. Circumventing DRM is in fact illegal according to the DMCA so they appear to have a valid argument. However, in their takedown notice they assume that the decryption keys are obtained illegally. I’m wondering if the DMCA forbids extracting the decryption keys (without distribution) from your own legitimately owned Nintendo hardware for personal backup. If so, then the Ryujinx feature might also be defensible.

This also raises the question of whether an emulator could be made to work on already decrypted media and let you figure out how to do that yourself. Nintendo could argue that its main use is still to play illegally decrypted ROMs but the emulator would have a decent defense imo.

Basically, all encryption multiplies some big prime numbers to get the key

No, not all encryption. First of all there’s two main categories of encryption:

• asymmetrical
• symmetrical

The most widely used algorithms of asymmetrical encryption rely on the prime factorization problem or similar problems that are weak to quantum computers. So these ones will break. Symmetrical encryption will not break. I’m not saying all this to be a pedant; it’s actually significant for the safety of our current communications. Well-designed schemes like TLS and the Signal protocol use a combination of both types because they have complementary strengths and weaknesses. In very broad strokes:

• asymmetrical encryption is used to initiate the communication because it can verify the identity of the other party
• an algorithm that is safe against eavesdropping is used to generate a key for symmetric encryption
• the symmetric key is used to encrypt the payload and it is thrown away after communication is over

This is crucial because it means that even if someone is storing your messages today to decrypt them in the future with a quantum computer they are unlikely to succeed if a sufficiently strong symmetric key is used. They will decrypt the initial messages of the handshake, see the messages used to negotiate the symmetric key, but they won’t be able to derive the key because as we said, it’s safe against eavesdropping.

So a lot of today’s encrypted messages are safe. But in the future a quantum computer will be able to get the private key for the asymmetric encryption and perform a MitM attack or straight-up impersonate another entity. So we have to migrate to post-quantum algorithms before we get to that point.

For storage, only symmetric algorithms are used generally I believe, so that’s already safe as is, assuming as always the choice of a strong algorithm and sufficiently long key.

No, the implied solution is to reevaluate the standard rather than hacking around it. The two humans should communicate that the standard works for neither side and design a better way to do things.

This is really funny to me. If you keep optimizing this process you’ll eventually completely remove the AI parts. Really shows how some of the pains AI claims to solve are self-inflicted. A good UI would have allowed the user to make this transaction in the same time it took to give the AI its initial instructions.

On this topic, here’s another common anti-pattern that I’m waiting for people to realize is insane and do something about it:

• person A needs to convey an idea/proposal
• they write a short but complete technical specification for it
• it doesn’t comply with some arbitrary standard/expectation so they tell an AI to expand the text
• the AI can’t add any real information, it just spreads the same information over more text
• person B receives the text and is annoyed at how verbose it is
• they tell an AI to summarize it
• they get something that basically aims to be the original text, but it’s been passed through an unreliable hallucinating energy-inefficient channel

Based on true stories.

The above is not to say that every AI use case is made up or that the demo in the video isn’t cool. It’s also not a problem exclusive to AI. This is a more general observation that people don’t question the sanity of interfaces enough, even when it costs them a lot of extra work to comply with it.

It’s much more complicated than this. Given that models have been shown to spit out verbatim copies of some training material, it can be argued that the weights do in fact encode the material, just in some obfuscated way. Additionally, it can be argued that the output of the model is a derivative copy of the original work regardless of whether the original work can be “found inside” the model weights, just by the nature of the process. As of now, there is no precedent that I know of on whether this constitutes redistribution of copyrighted material.

Agreed. A few year back the devs looking for quick fixes would go over to StackOverflow and just copy answers without reading explanations. This caused the same type of problems that OP is talking about. That said, the ease of AI might be making things even worse.

As far as I know, the apps are not intercepting the text messages for passcodes. The messages have a specific format and a hash to indicate which app they are targeting. It is up to the messages app to read the message and to forward the code. This design should not need to give the apps any access to your messages.

Comparing pregnant women who drink to men in prison as equally violent individuals?

Straight up adding pregnant women who smoke to pregnant women who drink alcohol to women who get late stage abortions with no concern that an individual might belong to more than one group?

Removing fathers who drank before conception from the equation entirely with the justification that an article called it less harmful, but clearly not harmless, which is the opposite of what he did when he put number of drinkers and convicted criminals in the same equation.

Go there & argue with guy if you are capable of showing a more accurate math

I’m not going to argue with that dipshit because it’s total waste of time. And so is arguing with you. I only commented for the benefit of other users who might scroll by without noticing the absolutely ridiculous evidence you cited, and get trapped into taking your position at face value.

Bro, no way you’re not a troll. I clicked on the 2nd link to see what the source is. It’s a guy using copilot to calculate percentage of women smoking and drinking during pregnancy, as well as late abortions, then does completely arbitrary math to conclude that women are more violent. If I wrote a parody of a person abusing stats to prove stupid points I would never have managed to make it as ridiculous as this.

The issue is that even if you choose a hosting service outside the US, they might choose to block your content anyway in order to comply with US regulations and avoid legal trouble.

The 75% of your contacts you describe sound like they installed Signal only to talk to you or at most a handful of people, while most of their social circle is on WhatsApp. These people are trapped on WhatsApp exactly because there is no interoperability.

That’s only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I’m having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.

But even if you’re right, that doesn’t change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.

Thanks for the heads up. I am aware of the spying issues with smartphones (and any way you access the internet really). This is part of the reason why I don’t think proving the unauthorized use of the microphone to spy is really important and why we need systemic solutions to prevent abuse in any case.

All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.

According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.

https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/

There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it’s not just about the number of stories. It’s also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it’s not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).

All that being said, I don’t think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There’s plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.

Is the bootloader really that important for a lost phone? If someone finds your phone can’t they just tear it apart and read the storage with external tools? A locked bootloader sounds more like an anti-tampering measure and not for protecting your phone’s content after it’s lost.