afh1

True. All of the measures mentioned have local benefits, with a price tag attached. Global impact is less clear cut.

None of it matters when China is burning coal like crazy and 99% of all ocean plastic comes from Asia.[1] Europe is mostly costly virtue signaling.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/06/90-of-plastic-pollut...

There is no "we". There are people and their bodies and their wishes. And authoritarians who want a say on it. Doesn't matter if nice sounding words like law and democracy are used to describe the tyranny.

Information can be sold or leaked, abused by a single employee for personal reasons, or used en mass for surveillance, regardless of what's written in the paper. Faith is actually an accurate term for this level of trust in government. I for one reject the notion of being tacked at all times by law.

The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled.

Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new cars to be equipped with "driver impairment" tech which was called a "kill switch". Media rushed to say it's not really a kill switch, just "sensors or cameras to monitor the driver’s behaviors, head or eye movements" and "block the driver from operating the vehicle". So... a kill switch. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-402773429497

Anyway, I'm staying with my old gas Honda until it dies which is probably never with proper maintenance and eventually restoration. I'll never go electric. Modern cars are just smartphones on wheels at this point, and smartphones are just spying devices at this point.

One can do whatever to one's computer, it doesn't matter if one is still carrying a microphone in one's pocket the whole day and sleeping next to it too.

If you don't have a good night's sleep your day is poisoned from the start. That compounds to life-ruining status if not quickly addressed.

Same here in Brazil. Even in the countryside.

Even if that was literally done, it would still be a better home than Mars :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GjOuqAlFEk#t=6m45s

(not trying to make any kind of point, just a fun fact / video)

There is no monopoly.

There are a lot of other browsers.

A lot of people use them.

Most people use one of them.

They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.

But no.

There is a monopoly.

It is bad for you.

Only we the State can save you from it.

A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth.

Constructing sewage, the evolving history of work, and regulating hearing aids have very little in common, and apart from the last very little to do with regulators.

Thank God for regulators! How dangerous would life be otherwise. How could we live without them?

Related discussion, 7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057139

It is actually relevant in this case because the text portraits defensive communication as bad, and this editing stance fits the bill. In fact the current state of political speech in the west puts everyone in defense, such as with this kind of crap.

Anyway a great read, it applies to various contexts, from work and family to politics and online discourse.

> And metadata is as important as data in messaging and storage.

Is it? I guess this really depends. For E2E storage (e.g. as offered by Proton with openpgpjs), what metadata would be of concern? File size? File type cannot be inferred, and file names could be encrypted if that's a threat in your model.

Depending on your social circle such exposure is not so hard to avoid. Maybe you cannot avoid it entirely but it may be low enough that it doesn't matter. I have older relatives with basically zero online presence.

> There's literally NOTHING you can do to stop that specific attack vector.

E2E. Might not be applicable for remote execution of AI payloads, but it is applicable for most everything else, from messaging to storage.

Even if the client hardware and/or software is also an actor in your threat model, that can be eliminated or at least mitigated with at least one verifiably trusted piece of equipment. Open hardware is an alternative, and some states build their entire hardware stack to eliminate such threats. If you have at least one trusted equipment mitigations are possible (e.g. external network filter).

Unfortunately most people seem comfortable with the idea of a Ministry of Truth, at least here in Brazil and from what I read on the web, in many parts of the world also.

If you are a regular city dweller, not necessarily...

What do you cook on?

Fun read but not sure it can be attributed to type checking or the lack thereof

Well, great, then!

>PVC water pipes

This is the most relevant one IMO. You can buy glass cups and jars, it doesn't matter if the water you put into them comes through PVC pipes! Even if you buy BPA-free phthalate-free bottled water, I think it's safe to assume that at one point that water went through several meters of PVC pipes to get to that bottle!

PVC water pipes must be ubiquitous nowadays, and are certainly better than the older copper alternative, which in turn is better than the older lead alternative!

Maybe the next step is special PVC for water piping. Until then I guess we're better than we have ever been, water piping-wise.

Hum, almost all of my t-shirts are 100% cotton, or at least that's what the label says. I use mostly the same clothes from 15 years ago so maybe synthetic is more common nowadays? I think the only t-shirts I own that are not 100% cotton are those I've got for free on things like marathons and hackathons. Does it contain phthalate? I have no idea, there is no label saying what they are made of. Probably polyester. Does it have phthalates in any meaningful concentration? This review says basically that "it varies a lot" and "needs further study". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138266892...

Ironically behind a paywall (and below a political ad)

IP address is a fingerprint to be shared with third parties, of course it's relevant. It's not ulterior motive, it's explicit, it's not caring about your traffic because you're not good product. They can and do differentiate by requiring a sign-in. They just don't care enough to make it actually work. Because they are adtechs and not interested in you as a user.

Same, but for VPN (either corporate or personal). Reddit blocks it completely, requires you to sign-in but even the sign-in page is "network restricted"; LinkedIn shows you a captcha but gives an error when submitting the result (several reports online); and overall a lot of 403's. All go magically away when turning off the VPN. Companies, specially adtechs like Reddit and LinkedIn, do NOT want you to browse privately, to the point they rather you don't use their website at all unless without a condom.

In my experience "unsubscribe" emails often do not work at all. SimpleLogin is the only way.

This angle is even more impressive IMO https://x.com/kimbal/status/1845451222750306344

Why open source anything, let alone with permissive licensing, right?