Most Americans don't understand the distinction between partisanship and politics. The phrase "I'm just not political" usually means either "I don't want to hear your partisan bullshit right now." or "I hold objectionable views that I can't articulately defend."

That's not fair. They are still working super hard to disarm the people in blue states.

The thing is that he’s right

He's not right. The national debt is way fuckin bigger than 3 trillion. He's also wrong in presuming that an infusion of productivity (tax revenue) can "solve" intentional over-spending. He's just a serial scammer spouting uninformed nonsense to stay relevant.

I was all set to be pissed off at this, then I read that it was opt in. Home Assistant is f'n awesome!

One: Civility is eventually restored to government and these people are tried and convicted for their crimes.

Respectfully, that's an outcome, not a path to get there.

The MAGA shitheads won't just give up and let themselves be prosecuted. They won't stop appointing judges, they won't stop cheating on elections, they won't stop manipulating media, and they won't stop harassing, intimidating, and killing their opposition until someone makes them.

Because we don't really care about protecting kids.

Encrypted apps like Signal encrypt messages in a way that only you and the recipient can decrypt and read. Not even Signal can decrypt them. However it has always been the case that another person could look over your shoulder and read the messages you send, who you're sending them to, and so on. Pretty obvious, right?

What the author and Signal are calling out here is that all major commercial OSes are now building in features that "look over your shoulder." But it's worse than that because they also record every other device sensor's data.

Windows Recall is the easiest to understand. It is a tool build into windows (and enabled by default) that takes a screenshot a few times per second. This effectively capture a stream of everything you do while using windows; what you browse, who you chat with, the pron you watch, the games you play, where you travel, and who you travel with or near. If you use "private" message tools like Signal, they'll be able to see who you are messaging and read the conversations, just as if they were looking over your shoulder, permanently.

They claim that for an AI agent to serve you well, it needs to know everything it can about you. They also make dubious claims that they'll never use any of this against you, but they also acknowledge that they comply with court orders and government requests (to varying degrees). So... if you trust all of these companies and every government in the world, there's nothing to worry about.

Its a disingenuous argument based on the implication that the stuff you want to hide is criminal or immoral.

The reality is that everybody has stuff to hide. Anyone that makes this statement... ask them for their bank login and password.

I've got a few domains. I use Porkbun as registrar. They're awesome, and the domains were pretty cheap. Under $10 a year each.

Absent a warrant, probable cause, or some exigent circumstance, isn't "likely to escape" just a charged way of saying innocent person going about their business?

Even if this turns out to be true, Microsoft has a pretty clear track record that any walkback will be temporary and purely for PR optics.

Haven't we been all year?

Are you suggesting that Discord didn't have any technical means to detect and ban that activity before? And that having face scans of some users not only gives them that ability, but it's the most reasonable and sensible way to achieve it?

I do, and it's probably the main reason I started self hosting.

Managing parents estate made me want to get my shit in order for my own kids in the event I die. There's a good chance that if I die, my cell phone is gonna die with me. And commercial services from Apple, Google, banks, and other institutions are increasingly tied to a single cell phone as "identity." If you try to login on a device with no session cookies, they treat it as hostile, and do all sorts of oddball stuff that almost always requires the cellphone to access. And if you don't have that phone, it's incredibly hard.

By self hosting, I can choose to make access to that most of that data much easier for my family if I die and my cellphone dies with me. I don't expect them to continue self-hosting, but I do want them to have easy access to files so they can move them to some system they are comfortable with.

This is an interesting bit:

The women who work as courtesans at Sheri’s are hired as “independent contractors” by their employers (Jeremy Lemur, the brothel’s marketing director, provided a statement to Mother Jones that emphasized that specific phrasing multiple times). However, the terms of their actual jobs may not pass the “ABC test,” a legal framework used to determine whether a worker should be considered an employee.

And it's not just the employer saying that they are independent contractors, the courtesans themselves say it several times. Such as:

“A lot of us are artists,” explained courtesan Paloma Karr, who is also a writer and activist. “We have all sorts of other jobs."

There's a lot more to it than just a few quotes, but at least from the article, both sides seem to think they are independent contractors.

I think your description is reasonable, however I'd argue that they are not security cameras. Rather a nationwide public surveillance network intended to circumvent the 4th amendment.

Flock doesn't secure people or property. They merely catalog the movements of people and vehicles for future law enforcement work, allowing both current location searches and comprehensive retrospective location history searches, all without warrants or court orders. Again, not picking on you here; just adding some color because while security camera is easy to understand, it also has a connotation that is quote different from what flock does.

Isn't this what every major social media site does? It's certainly what security and privacy experts have been warning us about for years.

Once can hope LinkedIn pays a heavy price for this, but they've probably done it intentionally knowing the value 100x exceeds the likely penalty. This will probably end up with all of us being offered to join a class action where our settlement is a free month of LinkedIn premium.

They will have 100 different reasons to invalidate the results anyway.

I'm sure that the research team is awesome, and maybe saying this is important to some audience, but even to non-experts, it's pretty obvious it's already started.

I remember reading a thread like this a while back and saw Home Assistant. I thought I don't need that.

It's probably the most used self hosted app we have.