3RTB297

Sure, but then the whole scenario is pretty anthropocentric. It's Star Trek aliens that are bipedial humanoids because they're played by humans and the story is just using aliens to explore the human condition. It's human drama, not inter-species relations.

Real aliens might look at us the way we would look at a raven using tools. It's cute and novel, but not exactly scary. It's either pure hubris, or drama for the sake of a story that doesn't end in the first 2 minutes, to assume that humans with little bottle rockets we can barely use to defend ourselves from rocks in orbit around us would stand a chance against any species advanced enough to physically cross light years of distance to show up here.

To be fair, it's only privacy-violating if you have access to a way to lookup who owns the blue Toyota Corolla with license plate 1ABC234. The Driver Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal to disclose PII based on a license plate

A single bumper sticker or distinctive paint color or a dent in the door can be just as immediately identifying as a license plate at that level. Even in places where the plate is always the same for the car and doesn't change when it's sold, it's just a way to tell one vehicle apart from another.

Case in point, my user name is a license plate number of a total stranger, and I imagine you'd be hard pressed to even tell me the color of the car, let alone their name and address. I'm not asking you to doxx someone, but saying it's not trivially easy for the average person, even when considering the boatload of data broker information out there on every individual.

>have a generic plate that can go anywhere

Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.

As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.

This assumes a pretty basic human sci-fi version of aliens. Any species capable of physically getting here would also likely still see us as a non-threat to anything other than ourselves.

Why nuke us from space when we're the best reality show in this corner of the local cluster?

It's already live, I had to go through it last week. It's in developer options, then it asks if you're moving the selector to allow the installation of non-play store apps because you're being asked to by someone.

Then it starts a 24 hour timer. When that hits zero, you have 1 hour to go back in and select that you want to install apps on a device you own and paid money to own.

It's not scam-resistant at all. Any scammer will gladly work around this and send someone to one of many malicious apps in the play store, or a malicious URL, or even just set an appointment to call Grandma back the next day.

I usually go for Samsung TVs, but same, I never give it network access. I use a Fire Stick that gets its power from the TV's USB port. Best as I can tell, turning off the TV turns off power to the Fire Stick.

I would be willing to bet the TV's demo mode used by most box box retailers disables that by default, specifically to avoid such an issue.

Also noticeable as the first buildings show up - each one isolated and miles from anyone else? Generally not how human habitation clusters up, even if it was all farms to start.

A lot of government software moved into some cloud-based, browser-accessible platform during COVID. It depends on the office and the government, but especially with how easily a vendor can modernize legacy software with an LLM, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker issue. It might make more sense to modernize than rely in perpetuity on the one guy that should have retired 3 years ago and you can't let go because he knows COBOL.

And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.

That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.

Office is very much not a problem. LibreOffice has UI plugins that arrange everything in a standard Office pre-365 layout. I've been using it for years and I can't recall a single time I've ran into any issues. I think Excel macros are where the start of dealbreakers begin, which is a niche issue. 90+% of Office users won't hit that wall.

Second, the EU has been pouring money into an OpenOffice fork for official use and replacement of Office 365 for a while. https://office.eu/

Came here to mention Max Miller as well. Amazing work putting together historical context and recipes. Always fun, fascinating, and the recipes are generally very approachable.

I've also made the Babylonian stew from this recipe, and it's rich and hearty. It's easy to see how this would knock the...sandals off of ancient people.

Other ancient recipes...let's just say that humans have very much not held the same tastes over the eons. Some recipes were incongruent or sweet and savory in a strange way, or simply a flex about how many spices you had access to and cold throw in a dish, not about what it really tasted like. YMMV.

From the article, it's some national-chain hotels, car rentals, casinos, dispensaries, and a couple maybes like if you bought alcohol at Target and they scanned your ID or sent something via FedEx that required an ID scan. Your ID might be scanned and in there multiple times.

He speaks with all the conviction of a classic "Fire and Brimstone" preacher. Someone for whom the only metric is stirring emotion, not accuracy of statement.

It really can't be understated how many non-profits operate on a shoestring budget and over-extend that few staff they can afford as a standard operating procedure, and have very low technical skill among everyone as they're mission-focused with what little resources they have.

I've worked with and for a couple non-profits where IT help was someone's spouse or kid or brother willing to help out. Often I've been the spouse. Often a shared Google drive filled with poorly managed PII is the solution that works well enough...until something bad happens.

As much as the original author bemoans having to do the labeling themselves, 99% of people don't care or don't have such a mix of cables as to make it a challenge to find one to suit the task.

If you care, then care enough to do small, practical things for yourself. A little loop of tape. Paint marker. Even just sorting them into drawers/boxes/whatevers by type.

Banks are only a part of the larger issue.

Imagine traveling somewhere, and run through the things you'll need to work without tinkering. Camera, eSIM, GPS/maps, more "exotic" messaging apps that for some reason people use instead of Whatsapp.

It seems like most Linux phones are barely suitable for someone that just goes home to work 99.999% of the time.

As an alternative to actually talking for them and being near them, maaaaaybe. Though, at that point you're introducing trust to something that attackers might learn to emulate enough to make it part of the scam one day.

The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.

Honestly, not really. The problem is that often the scams are symptoms of a larger problem.

The elderly still want autonomy, and the scams adapt and change faster than education can get most of the elderly caught up to the risks. That's entirely removed from the technical aspects, which are a whole other level of education on risk. Scams always will move faster than defenders and efforts to block them.

All of which are divorced from the real problem, which is isolation of the elderly. The elderly often jump in to these scams simply because they just want someone to chat with. Many romance scammers will report that all they do is strike up a conversation with people, and quite often that's all it takes to get in deeper on an emotional level than the victim's entire family. The family treats this like a money problem, when it's an emotional gap the scammer is exploiting.

I had a neighbor once who was so poor her gas got turned off. Blind due to diabetes. Still managed to send half her meager social security check to a televangelist, because the televangelist was on TV in her face all day, and her family visited once a month. The elderly were prime candidates for 1-900 psychic numbers for decades because it was someone to talk to. I imagine your grandfather wanted to feel like he was helping someone, and scam letters gave him a perfect way to convince himself he was doing exactly that.

You can easily selfhost a redlib instance and keep reading. I stopped logging in to reddit a year or two ago, but there's still a couple niche communities that are worth it for me to read. Meanwhile, I'm back to a half dozen internet forums as my daily check-ins for real questions or human connection.

I could be wrong, but it may be more of an age demographics issue, really. People too young to default to internet forums as where they would go now that reddit sucks (many of whom call reddit "an app" and only know it as the post-API single platform on mobile) just started showing up from FB or IG or Tik Tok only because reddit had a certain amount of huge critical mass.

My issue is that they're touted to the consumer as secure, and they're not really doing much more than a complex password.

How do you generate a new key if you need one? Same process as a password reset. Does it prevent session stealers? Not at all.

Its "benefit" is grandma can't read it to an attacker. OK, well can grandma click a link and have a session stealer bork her life instead? Yeah, and attackers know that and just shift methods. Session stealing isn't a sophisticated attack, and so all that's being done is shaving a cost on PW resets in the interest of shareholder value, at the cost of security theater and locking up your keys in a single domain that holds control over our access to everything.

Thanks for making this privacy-forward. I had been using Heliboard and then a kludge to get another language they don't support via Simple keyboard. It worked well as a workaround, and then an update last week broke my workaround.

Futo just has all the languages I need, and does a better job with EN swipe than Heliboard. 100% convert. Plus, learning about Clearflow is a game changer.

It does, actually. Do a loop around the doubled letter. It's a common swipe gesture on most keyboards, IIRC, for at least a decade. Not sure why it's hardly ever mentioned. iphones only got it a few years ago.

So for feel, you start at F, go to E, loop once, then L. For fell, start at F, go to E, then loop on L. Very easy to pick up as a physical habit.

I just tested those two on futo, and it easily picked them both out.

Unless you've had fraud committed against you, that's a hard sell. What dollar figure do you use as the basis? Are you suing for years of credit monitoring? Because that's typically the solution for people who are the victims of PII leaks.

One could argue that it's a failure of law enforcement or telcos or regulators to do enough to prevent fraud and maaaaybe bring a class action or something, but that's a massive stretch.

Having worked with telco companies, 99% of it is "Yeah, but this stuff still works just fine;) And if a government compels us to change our equipment for reasons other than national security, we're going to pitch a fit and demand financial incentives beyond reason." A lot of the pressure to boot Huawei from tech stacks globally ran straight into that wall and flopped. Even with national security at its back.

Considering most of those same telcos are donors and employers of large numbers of people across many constituencies of almost every nation, usually no politician has or is willing to spend political capital to shoot themselves in the foot like that. And no nation with a national telco company runs it well enough to ever even dream of spending money for something like IP addresses, they typically barely keep the lights on.

The most amazing part of Blue Zones, IMO, is the staying power of a few mythological health Shangri-La places.

Debunked or not, people will repeat this idea for a generation or two until, ironically, anyone that's read the book has shuffled off this mortal coil.

At some point we all have to remember that the monitor showing these commands is also an actor, and not actually a computer hooked up to a special laser that scans your body, destroys it, and pulls you into a 1980's era computer still managing to have, per the screenshot in the blog post, about 4GB of memory free in some respect.

Same as how Garrett Hedlund is neither a youthful stock owner in a computer company, nor intrinsically knows Unix shell commands.

I imagine people won't like the comparison, but this is exactly how changes in leadership work for developing countries.

Anyone tied to the old regime that isn't immediately, obviously, and hugely beneficial to the top of the new ranks is scrapped. Business arrangements and government contracts have to be re-negotiated to cut in new leadership. If business owners don't hedge on both sides, and get in there immediately after the election, they become castigated as loyal to the old regime, leading to more friction, costs, and work to simply get back to normal operations.

For a while CBS refused to put Northern Exposure on streaming platforms due to the rights needed for all the songs that appeared both in the soundtrack and just in the background on KBHR.

I ordered the DVD box set during COVID, later sent it to my parents, who also enjoyed the re-watch. Great show that mostly still held up over the years.

Having done data broker opt-outs manually using the Big Ass Data Broker Opt Out List (https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-Li...), very little of the process can be automated. Intentionally.

A few of these services ask you to go find your record among their lists first, so you can confirm which record you want removed using the URL of the record. So either it has to guess on that, or simply isn't doing it.

That's the point of the comment, humans do things all the time that aren't part of some larger cultural-ritual-religious aspect. We spend a lot of time and resources doing things that seem cool at the time and only seem cool to a few people.

Someone spends a few hours doing a large tag mural under a freeway and it's not a painting to honor the gods because that spot on the freeway gets sun at a certain time of day.

There's often practical reasons people do things that anthropologists can incorrectly attribute to something larger.