Well I’ll be got-damned, looks like Search Party is a feature native to the Ring Neighbors platform and separate from the whole Flock partnership. https://www.cnet.com/home/security/what-does-rings-search-party-ai-pet-tracking-do-to-your-privacy-i-got-the-details/

Specifically, this feature appears opt-out, so if someone does have a Ring camera, good idea to take a spin through the settings. Or, the easiest remediation was my original suggestion, chuck it in the bin (or responsibly dispose of it, if you can).

FWIW, Ring announced they were canceling their partnership with Flock a few days ago following the Superbowl ad where they were universally dragged. https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-and-flock-cancel-partnership/

Do I think Ring is still running some sort of analytics on video feeds? Probably. Should you put anything from Amazon directly in the trash? Absolutely.

Silver lining I guess is that public pressure still works at least a little when companies try to go straight dystopian.

He seemed to play fast and loose with sexual consent, seems like plenty to warrant “kind of a piece of shit” if not more.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/last-tango-in-paris-butter-scene-b2270513.html

100% it’s always a question of your resources vs theirs, but you’re dead on to make it harder.

I’ll just add to also turn it off, pull the SIM, and show in a Faraday bag on your way back too. If the recent reporting about ICE buying location data from ad networks shows anything, it’s that they are interested in a capability of following people to and from protests. Graphene should obviate this by disabling Google Play services by default anyway.

You should leave your regular phone at home, go to another place, power on your other device, speak your part in public, then travel another location and power off. This provides no consistent start or end location to work with for a particular device.

Alright, I already “umm, ackshually’d” someone in this thread but this post in particular hit a nerve with me. The Tor security model is based on 3 hops but does not guarantee 3 different jurisdictions. Their circuit building only takes into account “jurisdiction” in the way we’re using it here if you use guard nodes or specific cases when you cannot access the network directly or look like you’re exiting from a Tor node.

That said, it’s still a very strong project and security model. And everything you said about spreading out your providers without a single point of failure (or pressure) applies.

I know this was in jest but seems on topic with the post - please switch from pattern to PIN (or better still, password). Pattern is orders of magnitude easier to crack than PIN.

Sorry, I wasn’t as clear in my original post.

At the bottom of the settings page you can generate a “bookmarklet” that includes the config options in your URL. So https://duckduckgo.com/ becomes https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=t if I want the Terminal color scheme. And this works without cookies. And this applies for all possible settings.

Interestingly I set my home page to a string that should disable all the AI features and I still got summaries sometimes so not sure if that’s a bug, user error, or hostile UI. In either case, something like you suggest with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?kae=t&etc=… should give you the best of both worlds.

For you and whomever else needs to hear it, you can solve the second part by going to https://duckduckgo.com/settings and saving the bookmark with all the options included. Then you can clear all the cookies you want and it’ll always load the same settings.

I bought an Analogue Pocket maybe 9 months ago, so glad I dodged the fascist bullet on that one. But kinda sad that I have to wake up each day and read the news to see what product I have to start boycotting because someone running the company has jumped on the wrong side of history.

+1 for Explosions & Fire and Extractions & Ire. This guy puts out videos where he’s synthesizing various explosives or just extracting weird compounds from things, all laced with a blend of Aussie humor and shitposting. Highly recommend

There already was a company called Brandless that tried to do the same thing with basic groceries like ketchup and paper towels. Looks like they’re in the process of getting back to market, but seems like they had the same mindset.

Would be really nice to have something similar for clothes.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the FIDO2 standard works. It is not designed to be vendor specific and as other people in this thread point out, plenty of open-source secrets managers and hardware implement passkeys.

What we’ve seen is the typical Silicon Valley model of “embrace, extend, extinguish” so you’re right to be wary of any implementation by Google or Microsoft.

Same goes for biometrics - how you unlock the passkey isn’t specified in the standard. It is left up to the implementation. If you don’t want to use biometrics, you don’t have to.

Alright, devil’s advocate here - maybe this setup can prevent it. You plug something permanent, like a mouse & keyboard, into the leftmost port and leave the right two open. Then when you try the first one and it’s misaligned, move to the other port and it’s correct. No flipping of the USB connector required.

I don’t think that’s why they did it but hey…

For anyone unaware, there is a community effort to map these cameras. https://deflock.me/

I think you are overestimating the amount people will pay for convenience or cling to their old ways.

Did e-readers kill the bookstore? Some people will always prefer to cook out of a book or dive into docs to write code.

Or look at the modern streaming landscape. In the beginning there was basically Netflix and everyone was fine paying that monthly fee for the convenience of streaming basically everything. Now we have 20+ vendors all charging for some subset of content. And we have seen a corresponding loss in subscribers as people hit the limit of what they are willing to pay for convenience.

I’ll play devil’s advocate here: agreed that the rest of the (US) economy seems to be slowing or shrinking but remains buoyed by AI / Mag 7 stocks. That said, a lot of the investment reflected above is in data centers and hardware (Nvidia, Coreweave, Oracle, Microsoft).

The bubble pop will hinge on whether there is value in this data center buildup beyond AI. Unless everyone starts paying fistfulls of cash for AI chat, these companies may be able to find another use for all that compute and avoid a total crash. That could be a target for all that investment you mention.