SeanMacConMara's comments

Interesting reaction. Is the highly negative reaction correlated with US culture maybe ?

I've used them for many years and had several complex support interactions with them.

Their customer service policy is very "API-like" in that you get exactly the t&c you paid for and nothing more. Hand-holding and soothing noises are not included in the t&c. They fuck up you get a refund, you fuck up they'll tell you exactly that. Outside that they're very casual relaxed humans to communicate with.

I find that far more trustworthy (in the mathematical sense) than a "slick" twitter feed.

Politness does not imply trustworthiness.

I think we are talking at cross purposes.

If the chips are tightly integrated propriatary black boxes like on most hw then from my POV its _physcially_ possible for them to read anything regardless of what the designers/industry say because I do not trust them.

You trust your sources that say "..simply false that the cellular modem can access arbitrary data in RAM". I don't. Even if you claim to have personally designed, fabbed and shipped that silicon I still have no practical reason to trust.

It's not FUD. It's about different threat models.

General design failures/bugs from assumed acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers vs not-acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers.

Assuming the radio's are the primary threat to privacy then I'd prefer a design from a privacy activist company who explicityly designs the hw so that the less trustable parts are forced behind physcial and defined interface "firewalls".

i was referring to the "golden age" of captive eyeballs ie eveyone watched lots of TV and mostly could not avoid seeing most of the ads.

at least we've had ad blockser on browsers that work well up to now

the tracking of web ads obviously vastly overshadows what happened with TV.

they obviously want the best of both worlds "avoidable ads" and "extreme tracking"

consider the concept that lots of businesses operate perfectly fine whilst temporarily having full physical control over physcial objects owned by their customers

why not treat data the same way ?

yes it will be very disruptive to some businesses. i hope.

im happy to just block/not visit those entire domains

there comes a point when the content is just not worth it

doesnt scale obviously

we're headed back to the "golden age" of TV advertising except via http instead of radio waves/cable

i fear people will "want it" when it gets good enough

the combination of "dumb screen(TV?) as interface" with "any/all content* you want (cheaper with ads)" will be very attractive to the 99% of humans who dont want to think about computing

is widespread personal physical ownership and control of general purpose computing a feature of the future ?

what laws do we need to think about to prevent harm that may cause ?

*text/radio/TV/movie/social/web/games/etc

i hate ads i cant avoid seeing because my agency to do that has been subverted. i will attempt to acquire tools to avoid that in future.

i dislike ads as 99.??% are effectively automated insults.

"buy this or you are lessened"

over my lifetime the ad industry has offered insult to me perhaps 100s of 1000s of times.

is ordering silence and secretly seizing control of the publication technology (ie website) then maintaining a false warrant canary a way around compelled speech ? if so then regular live press-conference/video appearances would be the only practical implementation method. if they say nothing and exit then the canary is dead.

An important detail in the US juristiction certainly.

On a practical basis i cannot evaluate the jurisprudence involved and I would assume the number of people who credibly can is very small, especially in the context of "secret courts for national security reasons".

A useful test would be if any of those few had demonstrated a personal risk using this as a defense and succeeded. The rest of us can only guess the risk based on the reputation of the entites involved.

A warrant canary is utterly useless as a defense. Any secret legal order to alter IT systems (the specific threat model it is most often suggested for) can logically also include an order to maintain a fake warrant canary.

Did your "learning about" include sitting in meetings with legal during contract planning and C-level strategy meetings for market domination ?

Awesome maths.

A practical problem I see is that even if everyone used this everywhere, an attacker has no reason to believe any forceably decrypted plaintext.

The disclosing party would have had to beforehand craft a fake plaintext that was credible enough to trick an alerted attacker based on its contents alone.

continue button doesnt even work without disabling all my browser security. no thanks.

They have no hope until they fix the terrible audio quality on Linux that appeared several months ago.

If your threat model includes any sovereign state's intelligence agency then a warrant canary is worse than useless. Given their other widely abused powers it is likely trivial to force a normal company to continue business as normal and make any statement.

I submit that warrant canaries are at best legally and politically naive virtue signalling and at worst deliberate obfuscation of the actual threat model.

> Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird

I'm no expert but I vaguely recall hearing from non-trivial sources that this is a common but inaccurate misrepresentation as regards their "intent". They are not "toying" with their hunting target so much as obeying a powerful instinct to be careful to kill it with the minimum risk of infection from getting even a small scratch in return from a target that is "playing dead" as a defense/evade tactic.

the _nearest_ star is actually quiet close :-]

Both stories literally feature mechanically automated fast-food outlets.

care to elaborate your pov please ?

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm pops to mind. again.