worrydream is Bret Victor's site. He gave some electrifying talks in the past like The Future of Programming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4). I really miss those!
I wonder if there's a way for "targets" of CBP to easily maintain phones that can be toggled between their "real work" profile and some boring anodyne "CBP-safe" profile?
Locking/disabling the phone, I think, only creates suspicion as we've seen in a previous case not long ago. But if phones can have a cloud back-ups, shouldn't it be possible to have TWO different "back-ups" that can be chosen at will?
With the current political climate, that might be tantamount to destruction of evidence or contempt, and be the worst of all options. The problem isn’t any particular technical thing, it’s that the US government has become authoritarian and fascist, there is no legal “gotcha” that will ultimately work here.
The thing that's really disturbing is not how far Cambridge Analytica actually got in terms of influencing American voters through the "campaigns" they were hired to perform. In the end it was hard to assess how much damage they did.
But that's not the real problem here.
The problem is that it has been demonstrated how ad-tech infrastructure can be re-purposed for political propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. All of that power is now available to the highest bidder, and the infrastructure providers, as we are now know are utterly amoral, stronger and faster than any government regulations, beholden to their shareholders and nothing else even if the world burns.
> Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used...
Disinformation was used and it is NOT a "potential issue" that merely "elevates" the matter, it's profound offense that requires a harsh and comprehensive response.
I think subway rail systems do have "real live location", but whether that information is consistently provided to public distribution for use through apps is a question mark.
I suspect most systems are a mix of your platinum, gold and silver (and kidding me).
Lots of systems have some sort of real location data, but it can be... shaky.
In Dublin, train 'realtime location' is, AIUI, based on arrival at stations plus time-based estimate. This _usually_ works okay. Buses have transponders which register when they pass a stop. Or, ah, well, buses usually have transponders, and those transponders sometimes work. New buses sometimes lack them, as do very old buses used for covering capacity problems. If a bus without a transponder is used, they seem to just estimate where it is based on the schedule, which is useless. If a bus without a transponder is inserted out of schedule (they sometimes do this at peak time) it's totally invisible to the realtime system. Sometimes, the transponder isn't picked up, and then the bus will appear to hang around for a while and then abruptly teleport a few stops forward. Sometimes, a bus's transponder doesn't seem to start working when the bus starts up for the first few stops.
Still, it's better than when I was a kid, when you really just had the printed schedule, assuming the rain hadn't gotten to it.
> My TVs are on the IoT network so that I can control them from Home Assistant, but they're blocked from accessing the internet. NS lookups are redirected or blocked (53 redirected to my local DNS resolver, 853 blocked),[...]
That's great, good for you that you can do that.
Unfortunately, from LG's surveillance capitalism point of view, the 0.001% of LG owners that can even think about doing that isn't even a drop in the bucket. They don't care about any one individual, and the vast majority of individuals don't care or understand what LG is doing as long as they can watch TV.
It's only a matter of time before another Cambridge Analytica situation pops up, except with better tools and vastly more data. Or maybe something we can't even imagine yet enabled by simply re-purposing ad-tech into something political and malevolent? Some people will be wise to it, of course, but if enough are caught up in it, it won't matter, we all lose as a whole.
