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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • My friends dumbass 12 year old kid was told he wouldn’t be given access to any social media until he was at least 16. He claimed he understood, and then proceeded to make an Instagram account with his real name and started sending pervy messages to various insta thott accounts.

    Basically as a parent you have to give them access to very limited apps and make them repeatedly demonstrate they won’t misuse them. Then as they get older, assuming they don’t do anything stupid or illegal, training wheels gradually come off.






  • Chinese cars are a known data privacy nightmare with proprietary software/ecosystems.

    Tesla is much the same in the US… I’ve heard it analogized as “Tesla is the Apple of the automotive industry” and it is hard to argue they’re not. Like the iPhone at its first launch, Teslas were the “new hotness” until they became so ubiquitous they are now the most basic bitch car ever. They’re massively overpriced for what they are, they promise lots of features that often fall flat in execution, they are terminally online and reliant on proprietary cloud services. They collect tons of user data and do lord knows what with it.

    All that said, can you imagine if Apple itself had successfully launched a car in the US market? Its fanbase would be beyond insufferable and it would likely have all the worst issues of both Chinese cars and US EVs.


  • People don’t seem to understand the risks presented by normalizing client-side scanning on closed source devices. Think about how image recognition works. It scans image content locally and matches to keywords or tags, describing the person, objects, emotions, and other characteristics. Even the rudimentary open-source model on an immich deployment on a Raspberry Pi can process thousands of images and make all the contents searchable with alarming speed and accuracy.

    So once similar image analysis is done on a phone locally, and pre-encryption, it is trivial for Apple or Google to use that for whatever purposes their use terms allow. Forget the iCloud encryption backdoor. The big tech players can already scan content on your device pre-encryption.

    And just because someone does a traffic analysis of the process itself (safety core or mediaanalysisd or whatever) and shows it doesn’t directly phone home, doesn’t mean it is safe. The entire OS is closed source, and it needs only to backchannel small amounts of data in order to fuck you over.

    Remember the original justification for clientside scanning from Apple was “detecting CSAM”. Well they backed away from that line of thinking but they kept all the client side scanning in iOS and Mac OS. It would be trivial for them to flag many other types of content and furnish that data to governments or third parties.



  • Remember, when iPhones are off, they just become Airtags. Most modern phones are sending/receiving BLE signals even if you don’t expressly intend them to. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a protest with anything besides degoogled Android, because its the only OS where you can actually disable the radios. Even then I would probably opt for a Faraday bag.

    Other considerations… Apple (and probably Google) devices are doing client side scanning of images and turning on GPS to geotag images unless you specifically disabled that features. In other words, there are ways you can be correlated to locations and activities after the fact. Just ask all those J6 rioters.



  • I suppose your level of enthusiasm for this offering tracks strongly with how credible you consider Rob Braxman. I have heard people here and elsewhere say he’s a quack or even a psyop. I do know that he’s one of the few sources to talk about client side scanning, the illusory nature of Apple’s “privacy” and other modern privacy issues.

    We need robust options for privacy. Googled Android and Apple iOS are horrible options for genuine anonymity and privacy. So, I welcome any competition in this space.




  • Honestly all of this bullshit is why I went with a Steamdeck a few years ago. As a working adult with a family I have different economic obligations and priorities.

    I need to build a new PC soon (mine is now 10 years old) but I can’t justify spending $5K on a gaming rig. If I built now with a flagship card, just the card itself would cost more than I spent on my entire rig when I built it in 2014/2015. Pair that with Microsoft’s ridiculous operating system enshittification, and the PC situation gets even more complicated for me.

    Consoles have gotten to be a bad value proposition for me as well. Paper launches, scalping during the pandemic, DRM etc., services going offline. All that garbage leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

    I’m having a decent enough time with Steam sale games, Indy games, and retro emulation.