You don’t think they are already using the surveillance state/surveillance capitalism in this process? Its not hypothetical, its just that the scope is narrow this moment.

When powerful people (government or not) have a record of every little thing a person does for decades retrospectively, just watch inconvenient people you like suddenly start disappearing from public discourse.

They will only apply it to retail VPNs. You think capitalists play by the same rules?

These laws tend to effect any company that does business in the state or country. Any commercial service or company wanting to make money from UK customers will be required to implement the VPN block for all their customers.

To clarify that - cryptography (and hence VPNs) work, but OPSEC is hard. And, reading-between-the-lines, the user seems like a bit of a dolt.

Don’t forget /tmp, and maybe logs too. Theres docker storage and kvm image locations if you use that. Maybe others. FDE also makes an evil maid attack much less trivial too.

Amazing that mass downloading of scientific databases turned out to be “just fine”, when big money wanted to train AI. What he downloaded was nothing compared to the scrapers running amuck now.

Gender isn’t part of biology (as a social construct) but the complexity of sex absolutely is.

This kind of thins is just moral panic. Funny moral panic, but still pointless. There’s always been a tiny fraction of the population that is completely out to lunch, and there always will be.

Not much changes. This will affect the commercial web, but I consider that the commercial web’s polish to be not really worth the privacy invasion before this. All the small web/fediverse/indie web/open source/Free/gemini/gopher/irc/ whatever alternative stuff is plenty to keep me happy, despite always being clunkier. It’s good enough.

Nothing to do with the states definition of safety, but just an excuse to do more surveillance and collect more data.

It’s insane that this is even needed. Show me ads for things relevant to the content of the web page and nothing else. If I’m reading about furnace filters, sure, show me an ad for buying furnace filters, I might buy from you, but don’t follow me around for 2 weeks shoving furnace filter ads in my face. If I’m not reading about them anymore, I’ve moved on.

The added benefit of this approach for advertisers would be that you can literally embed the ads in the page, making ad-blockers ineffective. They literally chose the worst method for everyone involved.

What is the threat model where this matters? You have to trust the recipient with Signal. The only one I can think of is the case where your recipient is using a compromised fork and is unaware. In this case, talking about the tool and checking with them about what they are using is really the only countermeasure.

Yes, all while he’d have a private chef and a staff that keep him safe.

As a thought experiment: what would have happened if instead of a public health regulation approach, we dealt with restaurant safety by providing a few safe places and advocating everyone go there if they don’t want salmonella or e-coli poisoning. We’d have people ignorant going to the dangerous places, others misinformed or in denial, and a flood of misinformation that food poisoning is either “fine” or there’s no avoiding it anyway so best not to worry.

There’s a difference between a wake word and general purpose speech recognition. A simple wake word can be done in simple hardware on the device, while general purpose speech processing either requires heavy, relatively constant CPU usage, or heavy network traffic to pipe the audio to a server for processing.

Yes, that’s how I use it. It has access to a read only bind mount of my photo directory. The ML doesn’t write exif data to the images, just keeps that in its database.