It’s never really about protecting children. It’s about making sure the government can monitor everything you do online and tie it back to your real-world identity. Encrypted channels are to be eliminated. The government wants to hear every word and see every action. And age verification is an excuse to demand ID.

Traditionally this kind of surveillance has focused on left-wing and environmentalist movements, anything that challenges the interests of capital. Today it will be the same, but with a side helping of transphobia and the looming threat of all this material falling into the hands of fascists within a few years, something that everyone but the terminally dull Keir Starmer can see coming.

It seems to be an open source application that anyone can host on a server.

The Github repo is called “meet”. So maybe they named it Meet then thought, “Oh no, Google will sue us, let’s choose a different name like… Visio!”

They should really call it Visio Zoom Meet for Teams that Excel.

Following their link to LiveKit’s blog, it seems LiveKit provides a real-time communication stack with adaptive video encoding. So they’re using it to handle multiple video streams over connections of varying quality. I don’t think it’s mainly about AI, even though that’s LiveKit’s focus.

If they had hardware backdoors we wouldn’t know about them. In the end, with closed-source hardware, drivers and firmware, there’s a lot we just don’t know about what our devices are doing.

But as a Canadian I consider the USA to be a more immediate threat than China. I’m trying to extract myself from depending on US technology bit by bit, as far as possible.

So never buy OnePlus products. Got it. Thanks OnePlus for making the advice so clear!

Support like continually threatening to invade them or destroy them?

Maybe he’ll let its friends move in and finish the job.

It’s astonishing how many organizations are still using it for their official communications when there are ready alternatives.

You can also set up local AI alerts (AI here is mostly used for facial recognition) e.g. to alert you if your MIL comes around uninvited, or if your kids sneak out at 2am, and so on.

That sounds awful. I’d rather just not, and avoid that mindset altogether.

Theoretically a little spray paint could work wonders. Or something like a strong glue, or a well aimed laser. I think there’s also something called a WiFi deauthentication attack for a bit of temporary disruption.

We have the numbers to resist effectively, but we need to get used to going out and organizing and working with each other. A coordinated campaign of disabling cameras should be a relatively easy thing to get going.

Don’t buy anything from Amazon.

Yeah. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my name to a slice of that dreary blandness.

As a long-time user of the em-dash I’m pissed off that my usual writing style now makes people think I used AI. I have to second-guess my own punctuation and paraphrase.

I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Lately we’re all getting these messages from management that don’t give requirements but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say “just put this in.” We can see where this is going: management are convincing themselves that our jobs can be reduced to copy-pasting code generated by a machine, and the next step will be to eliminate programmers and just have these clueless managers. I think AI is robbing management of skills as well as developers. They can no longer express what they want (not that they were ever great at it): we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.

There’s this talk, where researchers found major US cellular networks decrypting people’s conversations at the tower then broadcasting them unencrypted to the entire continent via satellite:

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-don-t-look-up-there-are-sensitive-internal-links-in-the-clear-on-geo-satellites

Yeah you need hardware for that. They’re making it so we can’t get hardware and we can’t self-host.