archchan
@archchan@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source 13 hours ago:
There’s some good discussion about the security in the comments, so I’m just going to say that Lumo’s Android app required the Play Store and GPlay Services.
It’s also quite censored.
- Comment on GOG.com gives away free horny games to protest credit card company censorship 14 hours ago:
Damn, I missed it.
- Comment on Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off 3 days ago:
Yarvin and Thiel scare me…
Here’s some of Yarvin’s writings, if you want to feel like disappearing into the woods, getting on a rocket, and blasting off as far, far away from this planet as possible:
precedent should be rolled back to 1900 at the latest, and probably more like 1800. The democratic era has corrupted everything, law being no exception.
One way to see internal security in a Patchwork realm is as a compromise between two sorts of Orwellianism. In the sense that the realm is (effectively) omniscient and omnipotent, it would fit most peoples’ definition of “Orwellian.”
Residents of a Patchwork realm have no security or privacy against the realm.
All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both. Residents cannot use this data to snoop into each others’ lives, but Friscorp can use it to monitor society at an almost arbitrarily detailed level.
There is one problem, though, which is … the problem of adults who are not productive members of society. In our little Newspeak we call them wards of the realm.
As Delegate of San Francisco, what should you do with these people? I think the answer is clear: alternative energy. Since wards are liabilities, there is no business case for retaining them in their present, ambulatory form. Therefore, the most profitable disposition for this dubious form of capital is to convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.
Okay, just kidding. This is the sort of naive Randian thinking which appeals instantly to a geek like me, but of course has nothing to do with real life. The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass.
However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.
The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.6
The virtual worlds of today are already exciting enough to distract many away from their real lives. They will only get better. Nor is productive employment precluded in this scenario—for example, wards can perform manual labor through telepresence. As members of society, however, they might as well not exist. And because cells are sealed and need no guards, virtualization should be much cheaper than present-day imprisonment.
Many other regions of the earth, however, contain large numbers of human beings whose existence may well prove an unequivocal liability to the owners of any ground on which they would reside. If so, they can be virtualized, creating giant human Wachowski honeycombs of former bezonians, whose shantytowns can be cleared and redeveloped as villas for retired oil-company executives.
- Comment on Project Dystopia: How a Little-Known Non-Profit Has New Orleans Considering Mass, Real-Time Facial Recognition Surveillance 3 days ago:
Bryan Lagarde.
Have fun!
- Comment on Microsoft admits it would have to let Trump spy on EU data if demanded 5 days ago:
Because the one in the US is working out so well for humanity right?
Fuck Silicon Valleys. Use and support open standards and software.
- Comment on Rule34 blocked the UK entirely rather than comply due to the new law. 1 week ago:
I feel like if most websites chose not to comply, there’s fuck all the government could do tbh. What are they gonna do? Fine big tech with a slap on the wrist again? Try to shut down every indie hentai site hosted in the Congo or something? Please… it’s all absurd.
- Comment on Google Is Helping the Trump Administration Deploy AI Along the Mexican Border 3 months ago:
A nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives is working with Semptian, whose technology is monitoring the internet activity of 200 million people in China.
$1.2bn contract with the Israeli government. Known as Project Nimbus, the joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military
- Comment on Sergey Brin: We need you working 60 hours a week so we can replace you as soon as possible 4 months ago:
It was never off the menu, just rebranded a little bit.
- Comment on Apple has 90 days to allow app sideloading in Brazil 4 months ago:
Corpo marketing to obfuscate the idea of installing software and nurture dependency to pre-installed proprietary repositories for an entire crowd of dependent non-tech savvy users that doesn’t know what an apk is probably.
I avoid using the term unless I’m being cheeky about “sideloading” from Google Play.
- Comment on Mullvad's privacy-focused search engine Leta is now free for all users | Leta acts as a proxy for Google and Brave search results 4 months ago:
That’s nice, but I feel we need engines with independent indexes and crawlers more than another metasearch engine that just acts as a private middleman to big tech corps.
- Comment on Jeff Bezos is scared to have an open debate on economics 5 months ago:
Hydrofluoric acid
- Comment on ‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners 5 months ago:
McDonald’s wants your IQ too. Seriously, it’s in their privacy policy.
- Comment on Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study 5 months ago:
A post from the reddit thread on this that led me down an “dark” (double pun in this case) rabbit hole:
Larry Ellison is either independently coming up with, or stealing, an idea from an authoritarian freak named Curtis Yarvin. From an article about his ideology:
Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
Yarvin is a thought leader who influences many of the most powerful people in the world (and also a couple elected politicians).
Larry Ellison basically floated the idea of an AI surveillance panopticon several months ago.
Ars Technica: Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison
- Comment on Mexican President Threatens to Sue Google Over 'Gulf of America' Label on Maps. 5 months ago:
It’s the details that make up the whole picture.
As an isolated situation, the renaming thing may be stupid and not worth giving any credence. Energy can be spent resisting elsewhere in more useful places. However along with the rest of the actions of billionare corpos that kissed the ring, it’s part of the overall trend with devastating consequences. Bullshit details shouldn’t be ignored, but acknowledged as “they’re fucking us from all directions right now and waging war on reality, and we really should stop letting them”.
- Comment on Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website | TechCrunch 5 months ago:
Anything that uses FCM doesn’t get push notifications. That’s most of them. Very few apps work fine, others I have set up to use UnifiedPush. Unfortunately Proton Mail requires manually checking. I’ve not had any issues with location.
I’ve had one app straight up refuse to work at all and others that throw up an “enable Google Play Services” at every launch (dismiss it and it still works), but it’s nothing critical so I don’t care. Most of my apps come from F-Droid anyway. I haven’t had enough time without the play store to see if other apps trip the play integrity api stuff. Even if it did I don’t care.
But apps can’t hijack my entire screen anymore, battery life is improved, naturally privacy and security as well. No more “update available” pop-ups on app launches or that pop-up to scan all apps that I kept having to decline. No more anxiety from waking up to a bunch of marketing notifications. There’s also just the plain satisfaction of being free.
Google has Android by the balls but I’m so jaded and done with this corpo hell world shit to put up with even their privileged system apps anymore, even if it’s less convenient. Maybe Linux phones will become viable.
- Comment on Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website | TechCrunch 5 months ago:
It feels good to say that I’ve been rid of Google for a while. They can shove Play Serives and Store too.
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
I really hope this gets a proper foss “for you” algo. Personalized content and people discovery features are lacking on the fediverse.