I have a number of family and friends who met online through video games or through online matchmaking websites (and one even through a dating app, starts with an H).
Successful, long term, loving and happy relationships. Not top 5% most attractive people. Mostly nerds, some overweight, some not.
My elderly mom has (had?) familial essential tremor and did two ultrasound brain lesion treatments: one for each hand.
The treatment was very effective. She went from not being able to eat soup without making a mess and barely being able to use touch screens (let alone write) to no visibly noticeable tremor. They had her draw a before and after spiral and it was an amazing improvement.
But the side effects were rough. She had trouble walking for weeks after the first treatment, though it eventually resolved with time and physical therapy. She had speech (cadence, slurring, word-finding) issues after the second treatment that she's currently doing therapy for.
It was a really big quality of life improvement for her but I don't know if she would have done it if she were not retired or didn't have a strong family support network.
You can look up crime clearance rates. It's a little depressing.
Here's an FBI chart for 2019 [1]
Though some countries like Japan and Germany have really good clearance rates for homicide. [2]
But more heartening, it seems like it doesn't really matter how many people the cops catch. Crime rates are still generally on a long downward trend (with some bumps along the way). [3]
People in the 1700s would not expect all of their movements to be tracked and watched at all times. They would definitely take issue with this. The issue of their time was general warrants/writs of assistance which let the British search anyone anywhere at any time and take their property. [1]
The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.
The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.
The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.
> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]
Any particular individual's movements could be tracked in the 1700s, and people have been tailed since forever. Your movements are in public space, no warrant was ever needed for that.
The stress on individual was to denote that you can't, for example, get a warrant to search every American's home. It has to be limited in scope.
The judge was saying that the police needed probable cause and a warrant to search the Flock system because it's dragnet surveillance, similar to needing a warrant to access cell phone location data. [1]
Just because you don't have an expectation of privacy while moving in a public space doesn't mean you don't have an expectation of privacy for all of your movements ever in every public space. That scenario wasn't possible in the 1700s.
For an individual today, it's fine for the government to tail someone without a warrant. [2] It's probably not fine for the government to put a long-term GPS tracker on your car without a warrant (probably because the issue was sidestepped with trespass). [3]
Even Alito notes that in the past it would have required too much labor for the government to surveil every movement of an individual for a long period of time and so society has the expectation that the government is not doing that. [4]
I don't think any of this case law is relevant, trackers and requesting info that already exists are different from collecting publicly visible data.
The expectation that the government doesn't tail everyone might have been reasonable, the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not.
I'm not arguing there shouldn't be protection against total surveillance, I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.
> ...I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.
Luckily, the courts disagree with you, and have for -probably- longer than you've been alive. From printed page 31 of [0], discussion of the Constutionality of putting a radio transmitter in cargo in someone's car and tracking it:
But the defendant in that case raised concerns that “the result of the [Court’s] holding sought by the government would be that ‘twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision.’” Id. at 283 (citing Br. For Resp., at 9). The Court addressed the defendant’s concern:
But the fact is that the “reality hardly suggests abuse[;]” if such dragnet type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable. Insofar as respondent’s complaint appears to be simply that scientific devices such as the beeper enabled the police to be more effective in detecting crime, it simply has no constitutional foundation. We have never equated police efficiency with unconstitutionality, and we decline to do so now.
Id. at 283–84 (cleaned up).
More than 40 years have passed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Knotts, and this Court is now faced with technology that appears to be approaching the dragnet type law enforcement practice Mr. Knotts warned of. Therefore, lower courts need to reexamine the result in Knotts as technology advances past the rudimentary beeper in that case. Adhering too strictly to the Supreme Court’s language in Knotts about a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in “his movements from one place to another” risks ignoring the Fourth Amendment principles at stake.
That analysis is from the case that people are quoting when they say "You're not entitled to privacy when you're driving on public roads.", but -as you can see- what was actually said by the court there is more nuanced than that, and very clearly says that the rules that apply to dragnet surveillance must be reconsidered when such surveillance becomes feasible. Tragically, it seems like even many judges who cite the case don't bother to actually read it.
The whole document is well worth reading if you have a free fifteen-to-thirty minutes.
> the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not
Yes but there is an expectation that the government doesn't tail you at all times for your entire life with no warrant, right? Largely because in the past it was infeasible for the government to do so: it cost too much money and required too much manpower.
That's what Alito was arguing in Jones: people expect to be tailed sometimes but they don't expect to be tailed at all times for a whole month. And commentary suggests the Court would have had a similar opinion if they had not sidestepped the issue by leaning on trespass.
As Alito said, the question the Court has not decided (and didn't need to decide in that case) is where the line is drawn. When does tracking a vehicle become a search and enter 4th amendment territory and require a warrant? (He said surely before 4 weeks.)
Are you saying to take a hash of a picture and convert that to base 6 for your dice rolls to plug into a word list for creating a passphrase?
Is that actually better (in practice, not in terms of entropy) than /dev/urandom? I have a lot less trust in my ability to successfully scrub a picture from my phone that deterministically created my passphrase.
If you're concerned about that, you can concat your JPEG with a few bytes from /dev/random and you'll get the security of whichever is stronger. In practice none of this will be your weakest link.
Certainly it didn't implode and is not failing but it's not clear to me that its user base is increasing from pre-Musk. And Threads supposedly has a similar number of active users.
Twitter had around 230 million monetizable daily active users in 2022 before Elon Musk acquisition. They didn't publish monthly active users. [1]
Twitter IPO S-1 in 2013 said 500 million tweets per day from 215 million MAU and 100 million DAU. "We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs." [2]
2024 Elon Musk claims 600 million monthly active users [3]
2025 SpaceX S-1 Filing 520 million monthly active users. [4]
2026 Also SpaceX S-1 Filing 550 million monthly active users. 350 million daily posts. "The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active" [4]
Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 [5]
I think you're conflating naturalization/citizenship with immigration.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 (and subsequent) acts said you had to be white and have lived in the US for X years already to become a citizen. [1]
However, per your cited article a law was passed in 1882 to decrease Chinese immigration (who famously immigrated and helped build our railroads). [2] The Chinese immigrants couldn't become citizens but there was nothing (at the time) stopping them from moving and living and working in the US. [3]
Anecdotally and more recently: my Mexican grandmother, who married my World War 2 veteran grandfather in Mexico, legally immigrated just fine in the 1950s.
But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself. [4]
> But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself.
You don't think it had anything to do with the Naturalization Act of 1790 that limited citizenship to whites, or the fact that even in 1965, congressmen felt the need to lie to the public and promise that law would not change US demographics? It was just because it was "expensive", that people from Europe immigrated, but not from South America?
Cox v. Sony Music went all the way to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit started in a Virginia US District Court in 2018 and the Supreme Court opinion was in 2026. [1][2]
Successful, long term, loving and happy relationships. Not top 5% most attractive people. Mostly nerds, some overweight, some not.
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