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Cake day: April 19th, 2026

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  • No government is going to enforce a universal flat-rate. However that doesn’t prevent what I’m talking about. Uber can give everyone a different flat-rate. How would you know? You wouldn’t. That’s the problem. A friend gets charged a different flat-rate? Ok, now you know, but when the government goes to investigate Uber says, “well the flat-rate had to increase. It’s now XXX.” Again, the imbalance is enormous between the businesses that have the data and any external regulatory body that has to do footwork to get any data.

    The same item sells for two different prices at separate stores? “Oh, that store just had a sale.”




  • dropdrip@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world•I don't like passkeys | Ethan Hawksley
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    10 days ago

    This isn’t a good article @ouch. It’s dull, meandering and conflates issues.

    Both Apple and Google want your identity anchored to their operating systems.

    That’s true regardless of passkeys and why is Microsoft excluded here?

    Logging into accounts on devices you own is the ideal scenario for passkeys. When you have to handle a colleague’s computer, it gets much more inconvenient. You could plug in a hardware key, but you don’t always have access to the ports.

    What sort of drivel is this? Is anyone reading the article? I doubt it. Sorry, I’m not logging into important accounts on a colleague’s computer, regardless of being unable to squat and plug in a usb-dongle. The last statement even concedes that passkeys are an improvement for 99% of the user-population. It’s an improvement for 100% of the user-population. Like usual this is just drivel generated from friction around ‘newness’. It’s different–which automatically becomes scary for some users. The writing is just not coherent and there’s zero critique on passkey’s design and technicalities, of which there are things to criticize.

    Get a physical passkey and if you have more than 100 accounts you have a problem. Buy two and use one as a backup in case you lose your first. Keep it in a safe and if you forget your safe’s combination… well, I guess we should abolish safes too: terrible account recovery support there. Yikes!

    Passkey’s themselves can be protected with a PIN–the software I’ve used does not limit it to numbers. It can be your ‘master password’ if you want. This is a technical complaint of mine as all software I’ve used reference it as a PIN (personal identification number), which means numbers only. Except other characters are allowed. I’m not sure what the official spec. states.





  • Yes and using their terms like “side-loading” is another introduced hurdle. Using that term reinforces that new, imaginary hurdle. It’s new-speak. It’s your personal-property; it’s your computer; you have every legal-right to install what you want on your computers. Google is attempting to do something new: dictate absolutely your private-property. That’s absurd. Don’t even try and defend it.


  • Yes. GrapheneOS isn’t a bridge too far for anybody. It’s a modified Google Android. It’s in the background and out of mind; it’s an operating-system for mobile-computers; it is Android. It’s like saying, “A Samsung is a bridge too far”. It doesn’t even make sense. Family members are used to Android mobile-computers? Guess what? GrapheneOS is Android.

    It’s blatantly absurd to ditch Google’s Android out of a concern about monopolistic abuse and buy an Apple product… I’m sure they can twist themselves into knots attempting to explain it, but it probably comes down to, “I want an iPhone.”

    I want to state clearly: all of this bullshit is collective. Have a fucking spine. Use free-software on your computers. Stop letting Microsoft/Google/Apple fucking rape everyone. That’s capital being slurped up only to further cement their monopolies and fuck everyone else over. Your decisions matter. If your point is that your family-members are drop-kicks and don’t know how to use a computer how can you explain your decision? Let Google or Apple look after them? Hello? We’re kind of in this situation from that trajectory… Knuckle down and let’s continue then. Nothing changes.




  • Thread about LG TVs conducting mass-surveillance on consumers just because they can: computers are dirt-cheap and consumers foot the bill: they pay for the malicious- & spyware-infested computers and they pay for the data connections that allow those malicious computers to exfiltrate data back.

    User concerned about mass-surveillance.

    Your post: that’s completely and technically impossible. I just highlighted how mass-surveillance of a national-population’s location is now child’s play because it’s fundamentally ‘metadata’ that’s generated by the network: it’s how computers work. The difficult part is computing on these large databases, something that technology companies have made great progress in.

    Nearly everyone literally carries around an internet-enabled microphone in their pocket; surveillance-capitalists are trying to hot-mic and hot-video(?) consumers 24/7: see Apple’s watch and Facebook’s spyware glasses as the latest attempts to make that behavior socially acceptable. They rapaciously want more data. “They” isn’t a nebulous, unidentifiable term: it’s right here in this thread: LG, Facebook, Google, the FBI, the NSA and whoever else is trying to make a profit out of mass-surveillance. The computers are there collecting data maliciously (as it’s done secretly) and users’ data-connection’s are abused to transmit what is collected.

    You continue to ignore all the leaks and literature about America’s intelligence agencies and their global mass-surveillance programs. What even is your rebuttal to Edward Snowden’s leaks?

    I guess you’re ignoring the public-news about A.I. companies ‘partnering’ with America’s Department of War and hand waving everything away with a gotcha: oh you’re just talking about a nebulous They™. You’re a contrarian dipshit.

    We kill people based on metadata.

    —Michael Hayden

    The American Government blaming the killing of children on outdated data and computers.

    Here’s an article that highlights the duplicitous nature of surveillance-capitalism and its brazenness: Pokemon Go users collected data that will be used to kill people. It was not consensual and it was done in secret.


  • Umm… You’ve seen NSA’s data centers?

    “No way every domestic telephone call is being recorded and transcribed!”

    Next moment:

    “Woah! Gnarly dude! A.I. that’s been trained on ludicrously large datasets! It can mimic your mom’s voice, dude! Here, check it out! It can also write e-mails like a human!”

    All the leaked intel points to: this is a very real and possible situation. Better not think about it and stick your head deeper into the sands.

    On a technical level Google knows where 80% of Americans are, because they’re using Google’s Android. It could report back what cell-tower their mobile-computer is using, or it could be using the mobile-computer’s GPS, or it could take the SSID of any nearby WiFi or Bluetooth device and compare it to a map that’s diligently updated daily by every Google Android user. To say Google knows where every Google Android user is is very technically possible. It’s also technically possible to infer other things with a satisfactory probability, like where the other 20% are.

    The NSA, CIA and FBI were the data harvesters. The solutions to their needs were financed by them and we got… for instance, Google. They had vasts amounts of data and needed a way to search through it. Likewise the intelligence-agencies wanted ways to impersonate others digitally and… oh look, we have live ‘deep-fakes’. I won’t bother espousing how the economy serves the state’s needs first and any consumer commodities are second- or third-order artifacts, but really? You don’t think the very thing advertisers are doing now–in no way secretly either–are not technically feasible for the rapacious, infinite-money pits of the secret-police?

    Right–I forgot! Only communists have secret-police!


  • I take personal offense (on Sony’s behalf). How could you possibly frame innovation and progress as anti-consumer behavior? The reality is that the industrial mega-corp is providing the services and products consumers actually want. If they didn’t capitalism would be sure to punish them and they’d die an economical death. Children’s entertainment is funded via their parents and neither child nor parent is choosing to buy physical media. You can’t blame Sony for holding on to stock that no one wants to buy. ‘Gamers’ can have their emotional outburst, but things will continue as normal and they’ll have forgotten about it after nap time.