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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • It doesn’t matter, nobody would have a cause of action to challenge their interpretation if they decided that it meant any HOA or self-declared neighborhood watch.

    In the end they are giving the data that they own to who they choose. The fact that it came from a device that you chose to bolt on the side of your house doesn’t mean anything in this transaction. The data instantly becomes theirs by virtue of the TOS (that you read, right?) that you agreed to when you signed up for the service and you have no say in what someone else does with their data.

    These kinds of programs are just whitewashing, it makes it look like there are significant barriers in place to prevent your data from being used to enable a nationwide real-time surveillance network. There are not.

    Flock could start charging a subscription fee for access to their video feeds tomorrow and it would be within their rights as owners of that data. The reason that they create these ‘programs’ is because it creates the impression that the user has control of ‘their’ data.


  • The owner chooses what to share in response to a request. Just like IRL when the police knock on an owner’s door to request information.

    Yes, through this program you are technically correct that the user has to press a button to send the video to law enforcement through this specific program.

    This implies that the user has the ability to refuse to send the video to law enforcement, but that is not true.

    The videos are stored on Flock/Amazon’s servers and that means that the police can, via a subpoena or court order, access the footage or real-time video from any device or storage that the business can access. You have zero say in this and cannot opt out, the case law on requesting ‘business records’ is long settled as is the idea that digital files are considered ‘business records’.

    In addition, this program does not preclude Flock/Amazon from voluntarily providing access to anybody or any group that asks/pays. The data is theirs, not yours.

    This program is whitewashing the creation of a nation-wide real-time video surveillance network, paid for by you or via your tax dollars.



  • Another good MVNO, for privacy, is Phreeli. Louis Rossmann (on YT) created a MVNO which collects no data from you, you can even pay cash-by-mail anonymously and with crypto.

    Pretty straight forward value proposition: You pay and they provide phone services, don’t sell your data and design their systems around not collecting your data in the first place or, if collected (like payment information) is used for the transactions and deleted.

    The only information you provide is a zip code (optional, but ties the phone into your area’s 911 system if you’re into that kind of thing)

    I am not an ad bot(OR AM I?)



  • There’s a VERY important distinction here.

    The ‘unlock’ that they are talking about here is to unlock your phone’s SIM to be able to be used with another carrier’s service.

    This does not mean that the bootloader is unlocked and you will not be able to replace the OS. You will still be stuck with Verizon’s spyware-laden release of Android even when you move to a new carrier.

    So, buy your devices directly from the manufacturer and make sure that the phone supports the ability to unlock (and re-lock!) the bootloader. If you need a recommendation, get a current generation Pixel and install GrapheneOS or if you won’t give up Google Play and dependent apps, LineageOS.




  • (the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?)

    End of Feb (the 26th?), these sales seem to be to promote the launch of Part 3.

    I played the 2nd one with a friend for a few hours last night. I appreciate the humor, the music selection is above average, the movement feels good and every time we died it was due to us being dumb. No bugs (playing on Linux, with GE-Proton10-27), runs great on maximum settings.

    We were having an easy time by going on a murder spree, then we noticed that the game gives you rank medals for speed, avoiding kills and avoiding detection so we started playing to maximize the end-score. Those constraints make the puzzles a bit harder and I can see wanting to run a level multiple times in order to get it right.

    Overall, it’s a fun experience, does the stealth thing competently and the graphics/music/animations/dialog is good.






  • As someone with experience with people who are in the MAGA reality bubble, this is because there is no in-canon explanation of Trump’s actions (yet, the story writers patch these up pretty quick). There was no setup for this, no laying the misinformation groundwork and no existing goal that this advances.

    Since Greenland wasn’t part of the story, it just came out of nowhere. Lacking any in-MAGA explaination, they are examining this situation as a normal person who knows normal facts and this is completely an unforced error by any measure as anyone can see.

    If this was something that was serious and planned then we would have started hearing about this months ago as they started preparing the lies and the misinformation seeding into social media via paid/artificial content creators or otherwise useful idiots. This is probably the strongest indication that Greenland is a distraction and not a real move. This is probably the case with Canada too, in my opinion.

    They would rather people talk about anything but the Epstein files and how they are very clearly covering them up and not complying with the law. They don’t want reporters to have time to report on all of the people that he has pardoned who also have made $2-5 million dollar donations to various MAGA PACs, some of them committing even more crimes and getting another pardon…

    They need to throw things into the air to distract people. Some of their planned events are polling negative (the Minnesota Invasion, Healthcare Subsidies) and they don’t have anything else so instead we get more random tariffs and more random military threats because they are something that the Executive Branch can do unilaterally and suddenly to ensure that they grab the next news cycle.

    This is the “Flood the Zone” tactic that Steve Bannon said that they were using during the first admin.