just to be clear, for fear we mentally normalize this

1. this is hostile behavior from Chrome
2. what the customer does with the browser, in a sane world, is of no concern of the guy who made it.

to accept that another person has one sided authority to determine what you can and can’t do with a tool, after it is in your possession is weird.

Kids, remember, Google is an advertising company.

One thing to note - The science is still calculating. Yet. SpaceX (and presumably others) are allowed to continue and increase what they’re doing. This is the bass ackwards way to protect future us.

Its the same mentality as driving in a random direction for 20 minutes while someone looks in the car for the map on the off chance that when you get the map open you’ll be where you wanted to be anyway.

It has the potential (and at this point, just the potential) for planet level changes, and is being done by one group. Should I, a random dude, be able to do something that might possibly affect the entire planet, and the planet as a whole just have to wait and see how it turns out?

The hopeful thought that its probably nothing, before anyone can prove that it’s probably nothing, makes a bet where the short term wins are mine, but any long term losses are everyone else’s.

You are not the only one.

This weeks game of ‘Internet pile-on’

its a good warning, but there’s no new info here.

• the scanners are usually not technically x-ray, some are mm wave, some are xray backscatter.
• the technology can see through clothes and produce a grainy bw image of a naked person
• the tech is very closed, and the customers are NDA’d into not letting the public know anything
• the enhanced privacy changes don’t change the device - its still taking naked pictures of people, its just doesn’t show them to the operator.
• before you look, as of a couple years ago there are just about 6 images from these devices out there on the internet. (iirc, there is a researcher who bought one off of ebay to study, but lost track of their work. )
• its in use in border patrol type operations to see into the trailers, trucks and cars.
• no one can prove they aren’t keeping a database of naked people. ;-)

https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy-pia-tsa-ait.pdf

https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/resource-center/technology/z-backscatter-x-ray-imaging

Which is a end-game around E2E. Saying ‘the message is encrypted’, but yes, I look at all messages before and/or after violates the expectation of E2E.

… its the scale.

we’ve had photograph manipulation since the photograph. we’ve not had the ease and scale which we are about to have. and its not the same.

anyone can open the box at the corner and mess with a traffic light. and has been able to since we had them. now give me the ability to mess with all the traffic lights in a city.

the difference is scale.

Here’s a subtle thing…we say both the manufacturers and consumers have choices.

The manufacturer has the choice between all the thousands of possible ways to deliver a product, and picks one or two. A consumer has the choice between those two. ( or do without )

Those are all valid choices, but they are not alone of equal weight

most definitely that. not the other. The guy who played Pavel Checkov, the Enterprise’s navigator. Not the noted author born in 1860.

Yes, this is a bit outside the screen problem, but it is pertinent to car UI. Buttons/Joysticks give a form of tactile feedback, they don’t give positional feedback. Take a button. Pushing it does give tactile feedback (she feels that she pushed the button), but it’s quite possible that the button wasn’t pushed enough or long enough to register the push, same with joystick up/down. Flipping a switch for example is different. The position changes, and latches. She is certain that her intentions (turn on the light) were either carried out or not, because the switch with either be in position one or two. Buttons/joysticks require a second evaluation, to check that the button knows it was pushed. It’s a subtle difference, but serious. Sliding the gearshift all the way forward, we just know it’s done. Likewise pulling up on the handle, hearing the ratchet sound, I know that my parking brake is on.

What about the one sided ability to change a contract??

A year from now Roku pop up says “Click to Accept” , the text says **"this contract means you’ll have to give us your first born child? ** My reasoning says if they can do one then they can do the other. There is nothing that would prevent them from adding ‘fees’, or ‘subscriptions’ or simply turning off the device. (!)

This is egregious. We bought something. In normal commerce, the contract was set in stone at that moment. The seller can’t roll up 2 years later, change the contract, force you to agree before you can use your device, and then say , well maybe if you beg, you can opt out.

For more thinking about this issue for software/hardware makers a good read is “Enchanted Objects” by David Rose.

iirc. He says we’re in a ‘Glass Rectangle’ phase, where makers are stuck on screens, Like Xhibit in Pimp my ride - we put 22 screens in your car. They know how to “screen” and they use it the solution to all problems. It’s like an infatuation, where you just can’t see another way. There are entire sciences of Human Machine Interaction that explain why these designs are messed up, and the designers are aware, and have chosen otherwise.

2016 Actor Antov Yelkin who played Checkov is killed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, pinning him to his mailbox and fence. Because it didn’t have a gearshift. It has a thing that looks like a shift but is a joystick.

Do they mean 1.3 Million subscribers dropped Disney+ ?

If that’s what they meant, english would actually let them say that.

Win7 and Win10.

headline: “We’re still asking some people what they think should be done about the harm they caused.”

must be nice to get asked what you think you you might want to do about it.

late to the party, but I had OperaGX do a clever evil thing recently - I have an old machine running MacOS 10.14 (for reasons), I had GX up, and I alt-tab’d and noticed there was the “don’t symbol” (ghostbusters) over the OperaGX Icon. I thought, “that can’t be right”. I’m running GX right now. I double checked, and I was using GX with several windows open. But the symbol was right - they had Updated OperaGX that I WAS running, WHILE I was running it, to a version that WOULDN’T work on the computer I was on. I eventually restarted GX, and got a 'You can’t use OperaGX with this version of MacOS". Jerks.

I dug around, and very roughly, the .app file is not the App. They use a folder off in Library to store the actual pieces of the app, and it there is a few different pieces, and the .app file points to the actual executables.

Anyway it was fun while it lasted. Never again.

1. In terms of terms of service -this is not in the terms of service. Its a secret social contract. What do we know about the lockset on our doors? not much. What do we know about the company that made it’s ability to make keys? not much. There is a trust that the creator will know things that we wont, and for everyone’s betterment, they go to the grave with that knowledge.

Security is always temporary. Security puts an obstacle in the path of the treasure, it doesn’t seal off the treasure. That’s not how the real world can work. Bury it in concrete, seal it in steel. If the owner can get it, with enough time, the theif can too. Perfect security isn’t real.

2. Should they be forced - how can you? There are a thousand vulnerabilities to every product, its just that we don’t usually care so much. This is the idea behind many openSource ideas. We all know. In reality, businesses make and keep secrets.

3. It already is a social contract. It just seems important because now it’s concerning something we care about.

4. This is the struggle of law and order. To create laws that are never self-contradicting. Laws that don’t need exceptions. It’s hard math. Each society decides what IT values, and then makes laws around those values. Every fireman has a protected right to not simply break in to my home, but destroy my home in order to save lives inside it. It happens every day. They don’t come with keys, they come with battering rams and axes.
   two things are different though- We trust them, based on years and years and years of faithful service. They are honest. the second, is their actions always leave Clear evidence that they did something. I wouldn’t come home and wonder if the fire department has been in the house. I would see the broken window and smashed in door and know. With the phones - we don’t know if anyone was in, and this is very very different. There’s nothing that prevents the phone from flashing a bright red warning that its been opened from the inside - except if the person disables the alarm :-) but its possible.

17 years ago Apple stated that they have a ‘kill switch’ for the apps, and this is similar. What do you do if a million phones go wild. If you could have set up a kill switch, would you regret not doing it.

What does it mean? It means that people who use these things HAVE to put trust in the person who made it. In the same way I have to trust in VW or FORD if I sit in one. There is no using the thing, without putting a tremendous amount of trust in the person who made it.

This is a bit of misdirection. This is a patent issue not a stolen IP issue.
What’s the difference? IP is secret. Patents are public. Published by the Government for all to see.

This would lead the reader to believe that the issue at hand is Apple was trying to steal secrets from Masimo.

The issue at hand is a patent violation: Apple using Masimo patents in its product. Masimo claims 5 patents were infringed ( used without permission or licensing ). On Jan 10th, the Judge found that Apple had indeed infringed on a Masimo Blood Oxygen Patent.

Yea, that Linux thing will never amount to much with this kind of strategy.

But wait. …

It’s all fun and games till the baby blows up when it really really shouldn’t blow up. And I personally, would rather have people learn that pain an email than learn that a million people are in pain because of their ignorance/bad work.