Long before Tesla existed, the Hurst tool (aka Jaws of Life) was created. It’s like a giant can opener for cars, and firemen love to use it. The lack of door handles, locked doors, and even smashed and jammed doors,don’t really stop firefighters from getting in. This has been a thing since the 80s at least. Also, Teslas do have mechanical door handles on the inside, so occupants can open doors without power, but these factoids don’t make for good rage bait.
Mullvad VPN works well on Android and has some DNS based ad blockers & content filters in the VPN app (though off by default iirc). Mullvad browser is not ported to Android.
That said, it’s important to understand that VPNs don’t provide privacy in any absolute sense. They can (maybe) obscure data about your browsing habits from your ISP. But they won’t stop all the other, more effective tracking exists nearly everywhere else on the web.
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.
Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020
Harris actually dropped out months before the primaries in 2020. She was something like 16th most popular candidate at the time she withdrew. She was a pretty unpopular AG in California at the time and likely would not have even won her own state primary.
Agreed. Wrong word choice. And its an important, major correction. Not a small one. :-)
I don’t know about intentionally designing that. It would violate contracts and have to be a hidden, but broadly conspiratorial activity. I have some professional experience in consumer electronics, and I remember when TPMs started becoming a required component for CE. It took several years to become commonplace; a slow transition from security by obscurity to sensible practices when devices started to be internet connected.
Nevertheless, from my experience, I’d say the TPMs aren’t there for user security, they are there to keep Hollywood movies safe.
+100. People forget, or chose not to pay attention to the fact that Google sensor vault data was key evidence in convicting the January 6 insurrectionists (who were exonerated to become ICE). Surveillance capitalism doesn’t care which side you are on.
Just to clarify… my question wasn’t “do sleepers exist” it was should we continue to call them sleepers when they have broad access to the administrative branch of the US government.
And then, unless you jumped through hoops to disable it, your PC sends the key to Microsoft so they can just keep it linked to your account.
You’d probably also have to jump through the hoops to disable windows recall too.
Are they really sleepers any more?
Fully agree that the DE doesn’t matter much. I’ve used KDE and XFCE the most over the years, and cinnamon, gnome, and even enlightenment a bit over the years. I was never a big fan of gnome, however I recently got a 2in1 laptop, and after a few days of tinkering… I think gnome is a bit better for that kind of interaction than than the others.
There are things to like and dislike with all of them I’d say.
Could it be that he observed that the so called “agentic” operating systems (current versions of Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android) are essentially screen-scraping everything people do, and funneling it to the intelligence apparatus? Security researchers have been squawking about this for a while, and even recently the Signal Foundation CEO pointed it out. Or is that too mundane? Is it much worse? Intelligence gathering tools like Microsoft Recall are an intelligence agency’s wet dream.
The election interference thing certainly doesn’t strain credulity, but wouldn’t he be able to disclose something so wildly illegal? That is the whole point of congressional oversight.