Who's wee? The name of the system?

He did have a great memory and skill for social engineering.

Or buy a T-shirt that says.. WWND - and ask yourself.. What would Neo do? /s

I think this reads like Ray Kurzwheil (sorry not able to spell that off top of my head, that bloke who wrote that book about the future) .. But yeah very dystopian and totally realistic. Not if but when..

I LOVE Kurzwheil! Thank you for the compliment, I'm very far from having his writing skills. But yes sci-fi is looking more and more like, well, sci.

The skyline was inspired by north east England, Middlesbrough Teesside. ICI was one of the largest chemical sites in the world. Ridley Scott had studied at Teesside Polytechnic and took inspiration from the Imperial Chemical Industries that over looked Middlesbrough. One side of the skyline in the area you see towers and smoke billows and roaring flames, the other picturesque north Yorkshire moors and Odins Mount. Quite a contrast.

I think the next 6 month will be a golden age for inference. The weights will be available for anyone to download from hugging face which could create a price fall once providers start competing for your business.

with the devices mentioned in the article, there is no consent requested, and the malicious apps are installed either before the box is sold or after as a requirement for getting the streaming services to work.

You call them malicious apps but what is the evidence they are more malicious than the things they fight against?

Really? You'd be ok with me putting a proxy server on your home network then, which anyone with a few bucks can use to attach your IP address and subscriber details to anything they choose to request from the internet? How about a Tor exit node?

Its incredibly obvious to anyone applying any thought at all to this that its a malicious to sell a product that labels itself as a TV streaming stick which is in fact a paid for relay server with the money made from providing the internet connection to a random third party unrelated to the person who bought the thing without ever telling the customer.

Yeah I actually do several of those to earn a few bucks.

The typical consumer has no idea what they're buying, and they shouldn't have to because the retailer selling the product should have done some basic due diligence before stocking the thing. People aren't going to some clearly shady Chinese website and buying a device labelled "cheap TV streaming stick, will sublease your internet connection to criminals", they're putting "FireTV" into amazon.com and somehow being presented with these things alongside the Amazon FireTV they expect to find, or maybe "streaming stick" which really shouldn't be surfacing clearly malicious products.

If the average consumer did get a disclaimer it would sublease their internet connection to a few criminals and a lot of people who aren't criminals, would they care?