I bet it was something like the hardware id instead but she misspoke

I know that’s how it works in the US, but the lawsuit is in Japan, which you always hear about having stricter copyright laws. Not really sure how this one will play out though.

IIRC it spammed websites with traffic, didn’t conceal your IP at all, and some people got arrested for using it to make some websites go down for a very brief period. Basically a way to use people who didn’t know what they were doing as cannon fodder

I once wrote and sold some extremely shitty software, most of the effort was in the testing and support “departments”, which were merged as I just had my (fortunately mostly very patient) customers work through the bugs with me.

Could you elaborate? Does HOA mean something different in other countries?

Home owner’s association; when you buy a house and it is part of a HOA, you have to sign a contract to join the HOA as a requirement of buying, which means you have to pay dues and abide by the rules of the organization, and you have to require the next buyer to also join in order to sell your house.

Even while it was happening much of the response was to try to pretend it wasn’t happening

this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities

There is no chance it goes that way, how is talking to people outside even an option for someone used to just being on the internet? Even if the content gets worse, the basic mechanisms to keep people scrolling still function, while the physical and social infrastructure necessary for in person community building is nonexistent.

This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs

lol, trying to hedge against downvotes from the anti-AI crowd?

I doubt the school administrators who would be buying this thing or the people trying to make money off it have really thought that far ahead or care whether or not it does that, but it would definitely be one of its main effects.

IMO for some people arguing is a form of intimacy

I wonder if part of the reason for supporting this is that they like the secondary effect that all this information is now also available to governments

Can’t track mouse movements on mobile though

Obligatory LLMs see tokens not letters

The profit they get from the sale of the television should be enough that they don’t have to make the television shit to get slightly more profit, why do people even buy these

But televisions cost hundreds of dollars at least

“each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

Sounds like a pathetic amount of money for betraying your customers with a shitty ad infested smart tv

I bet you could do it with ring signatures

a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular set of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the set’s members’ keys was used to produce the signature

I agree that it’s bad that there’s a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn’t bother won’t be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.

Well, partly. For instance you might be able to approach the problem of gun violence with a culture of responsible gun use. But it could also reduce violence if you got rid of the guns. The problem happens when multiple conditions are satisfied; both that the tool is available and that people are going to misuse it.

To quote an excerpt from the book I mentioned:

I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.

The other elements being “high-modernist ideology”, an authoritarian state, and “a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans”.

The problem is that, like with the guns example, “regulating how it’s used” and avoiding all that stuff is a really precarious and difficult problem, and failure seems very likely, especially given the state of the US right now. For dangerous tools like effective identification schemes, I think favoring the added safety of resisting them is a legitimate choice when you can’t really trust the people who would be able to use them.