I highly recommend Soren's tweet feed. His ideas are often so close to "yup, this will be in the app sooner than later" or "creepy but great" that I was fooled a few times thinking this was an actual feature of an app/site
Maybe this is unrelated but I refuse to do facial ID, or any type of facial verification. I don't want my phone, or any device that I am using, to record or analyze my features. Maybe that is nit picking a little but I am uncomfortable with all of it.
The problem is that the face is critical to “normal” interactions. Thus the ChatGPT demo of using the camera to determine if you are speaking to it (or to someone else) to choose whether to respond.
If talking with AI becomes more mainstream, face detection will (at first) make the experience better.
Storing the biometric data securely in the digital enclave only covers half the problem. The other half is in the form of falsifying said biometrics to gain access to a device, or physically forcing the actual person to unlock it against their will. With keys that are only stored in my mind, I have the ability to consciously decide that access should or should not be granted.
Studies have shown that amongst human subjects there's a really strong correlation between an economic agent having a gun pointed by someone else at their heads and conciously making choices that posit a positive utility increase for the ones holding the gun.
most govt implementing face identification is NOT on device.
all the on-device stuff was just to ease the tech literati who probably is still 12 years away from being impacted by the actual tech doing the damage, since those are for the poor and foreigners first
What do you object to exactly if the biometric data is on device only?
I’m not sure what is the privacy risk there. The apps that authenticate you don’t have access to biometric data.
The main risk I see is if that data was compromised and made available for something else, but I haven’t seen any breach of that that ended up being useful for anything?
Some folks may find collecting biometric data inherently creepy. I mean, yeah, there's also "what might happen when* it's leaked" but ... I just don't like it. It feels maximally invasive.
You can change a password, you can't change your face. Agreed that we have yet to see the mass-hack based on biometric data that generates the ohshit moment, but from a risk perspective 'it hasn't happened yet' is cold comfort.
The biometric data is not your password. It's used to unlock a session token. Getting that session token requires a "what you know" password. There's lots of events that invalidate that session token not the least of which on phones is multiple presses on the lock button (on iOS at least).
I don't trust the device, the maker, the company behind the facial recognition technology, and you. If I give software access to analyzing my face it opens the door to overt and covert acts that further erode my privacy.
But really, I don't need a reason other than I'm uncomfortable with it. I worry about people who are comfortable with it..
I don't want to upset or scare you, but if you've ever been in a picture that someone else has posted online to any social platform, your face has already been tagged, recognized, and a very thick file exists about you and everything you do, like, know, associate, etc.
Theoretically, those kinds of images lack the necessary detail to qualify as biometric data. If they somehow do, then the whole category becomes invalid for that purpose.
I personally oppose all forms of biometrics for security, as it can neither be invalidated, nor is it safe from physical coercion. I also oppose biometric use for "tracking attention" because it's none of anybody's business but mine.
tracking attention when you're driving is everyone's business. I'd rather you have a camera in your car making sure you're looking at the road, than have to drive next to someone who is on their cellphone and is trusting the self driving feature of their car.
There's a difference between tracking attention locally for driving as you suggest, and doing so for advertising and mobile device security, which is what the conversation was previously about.
While I consider your example valid in a vacuum, it poses a substantial privacy and financial risk in the real world. If a car that tracks attention also phones home, your insurance carrier may raise your rates or cancel your plan for occasional glances away (sneezes, children, etc), regardless of an actual problem on the road. Such measures ought to only exist locally within a car, but I have absolutely no faith that it will be implemented that way given the current data shared along those lines.
I am moving the discussion somewhat but it's not a theoretical. Ford's Blue Cruise system has a camera that looks at the drivers eyes to make sure the driver is watching the road and not texting. It covers a large amount of freeways. it's not as good as Tesla's full self driving but it very much does the job of driving on the freeway in traffic for you.
>> but if you've ever been in a picture that someone else has posted online to any social platform, your face has already been tagged, recognized, and
And that is a completely different issue. The OP just wants to prevent that type of thing when they can.
If I walked up to several individuals (maybe even you) on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up, a lot of them would object. I don't think "why not let me take it, it's already online someplace" would be a convincing reason to allow it.
> If I walked up to several individuals (maybe even you) on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up, a lot of them would object. I don't think "why not let me take it, it's already online someplace" would be a convincing reason to allow it.
In many jurisdictions including where I live in, taking pictures at public places is allowed by law whether or not some other human happens to be in the frame of my picture. It is called "incidental inclusion".
Others can request me to exclude them from my picture but they can only request, they cannot force me to do so. Of course, if someone asked, I am going to be nice to them and try and exclude them from the picture. Others could also try and move a bit this way or that way so that they don't get included in my picture. We live in a society and we can work it out.
In reality though, nobody makes such a request because most people know the law and they know that if they are out there in the public, they could become part of other pictures by incidental inclusion.
> > on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up.
> I might break your phone. How difficult would it be to sue me and for what purpose?
Easily. Damaging someone else's property is not even remotely on the same level as taking a photo of someone? How do I know it wasn't their _job_ to do so?
Honestly if you think that level of escalation is okay I hope to never meet you in person.
And trust me I find people taking photos of me creepy also but it's easier to block my face myself than to smash the person's device and expect to walk away.
Then it is not assault. See? The problems already started. The best you can get after an ardous process is an apology and a reinboursement, the worst would be it coming back at you.
Where I live, they recently declared gazing at a woman "indecently" as a small sexual crime, same as unrequested flirtatious comments to strangers. I have grabbed phones before, but I admit I haven't broken any. YMMV
With how small cameras are these days, you can buy a pinhole camera and tuck it into your shirt and record everything without anyone being the wiser. Face as biometrics doesn't really work. Mother's and daughters and twins have similar enough face shapes to fool FaceID.
If you don't trust the manufacturer, then it doesn't matter whether you turn Face ID off, those sensors are still pointing at your face. Do you physically keep the face ID sensors covered by tape or something? And how do you avoid other people's phones/cameras seeing you?
And you don't trust the manufacturer with a scan of your face, but you put a significant amount of communications and positional data and logins through it.
Do you avoid going out in public? Are you never going to step foot in an airport? What is your threat model here? Because it's pretty trivial for anyone to get a 3d scan of your face without you realizing it.
This just sounds like textbook paranoia to me (as in, the actual dictionary definition as an illogical fear that impedes your normal life), because there's nothing reasonable about thinking FaceID is compromised to the point that you have increased your personal safety by not using it.
I don't agree with the premise that disabling bio-metric security impedes a normal life. Nor has OP given me any reason to believe they are afraid of it in the situations you described.
Passwords and pass codes (when managed well) are perfectly normal security tools to use to ensure your privacy on a device you own.
I have the legal right to ‘analyze your face’ if you are out in public. Why do you believe that there’s something special about a highly secured, on device FaceID capture that makes it more dangerous than a guy with a camera across the street?
My own main objection is to biometric data being used as a password, since it is a publicly-viewable, likely-duplicatable password that can never be changed. My second objection is to the possibility of physical injury to me by someone that really wants to steal my credentials.
For what it's worth, you can be beaten with a wrench until you cough up a password also. Obviously there is a difference, but it's worth considering and understanding that.
it is a publicly-viewable, likely-duplicatable password that can never be changed.
Is this true? I mean, you can't really show an iPhone a photo of your face to unlock it, can you? Or are you thinking of a different attack vector?
My second objection is to the possibility of physical injury to me by someone that really wants to steal my credentials.
This possibility exists even if your creds are something you know. It also exists if your creds are something you have, and you happen to have them on your person.
> Is this true? I mean, you can't really show an iPhone a photo of your face to unlock it, can you? Or are you thinking of a different attack vector?
If you have the information that the iPhone wants to see, it is possible to create a synthetic face matching that data and hold it up in front of the phone.[1] You could also probably open up the phone and hotwire the sensors to give the hardened processor holding your Face ID data the readings it wants.
Both of these things are super difficult to do, and much further out of reach of your average thief than simply printing out a picture of the person's face, but the point remains that it is theoretically possible.
> This possibility exists even if your creds are something you know. It also exists if your creds are something you have, and you happen to have them on your person.
I can hand over my credentials or secrets to a thief without injury to myself, but I can't safely hand myself over, or a piece of me.
If it's on device and the output is hashed I don't see much of a problem with it. I guess the question would be whether you can trust big tech companies / governments not to have some backdoor to the raw data and what your concern would be if they did have that data.
Here in the UK face ID is pretty common place so I must admit my phone having this data is probably the least of my concerns. For example, one guy I know can't buy his own groceries anymore because he stole some food products from one of our major supermarkets, and since all major supermarkets in the UK have linked facial id systems he's now effectively banned from all supermarkets lmao.
There are plenty of ways for anyone to get a picture of my face. In particular, the State has a copy of my photograph, and almost certainly full motion video of me in the DMV getting said license.
I just don't like the fact that my face becomes a password. I'm usually not in a position to _obscure_ my face, so I have no chances to decide if my face should act as a password in any given moment or not.
So, if you hold the phone up to my face, and I look at it, it just unlocks. That's the opposite of "security."
I think xkcd has never been arrested by the police and had his belongings searched through illegally. There's more to be afraid of than state actors with the ability to kidnap and torture you without being held to account.
I don’t know if that is true, nabbing somebody’s phone at a protest and pointing it at them seems like the sort of thing a cop could get away with at a protest for example. It must be illegal, but in the hustle and bustle of the moment, might be hard to catch.
If you’re talking about someone holding an iPhone to someone’s face, there’s a setting called “attention aware” that verifies your eyes are open and looking at the phone.
> Attention awareness does not stop alarms, and it requires your eyes to be open and looking at the phone.
Attention awareness silences/drasticly reduces the volume of alarms, that's how it is designed.
If they have a bug in the attention awareness feature it stands to reason that it could not require your eyes to be open or looking at the device in question at the time.
Early in the iOS Face ID cycle I saw this play out with a parent and child where the parent would make a funny face each time the child held the phone up to the parent's face, defeating the biometric.
So what? Everyone who posts this xkcd meme is just vouching for the belief that torture works, when available evidence says otherwise; it's not effective on seriously committed people.
I'm so tired of hearing business people talk about how Elon laid off 80% of engineers at Twitter and "it still works!"
It doesn't work well. X is a buggy mess, and a way worse user experience than Twitter was prior to Elon. For the past several weeks, threads have failed to load whenever I click into a Tweet.
I am logged in, but for the past few weeks, replies won't load and I get an error message on my iPhone. The whole website is much slower too. I'm sure someone will tell me to use the app, but I don't have any intention to do so.
Until someone decides it's enough and makes a board elsewhere paired with a browser extension that takes the X URL and creates a thread where people can comment disregarding completely the one at X. The same can be made for Youtube for example; want dubbing in a different language, or play a different music that would trigger a copyright claim? All it needs is to sync the video with an external audio source, possibly shared through p2p; also doable by a browser extension.
Problem is that things like "manifest V3" may make this technically impossible (or you'll get a "manifest V4" to address this), and even then, software distribution is now controlled by a handful of gatekeepers who will quickly delete such extensions.
Seems like something there’d be a lot of resistance to, but on the other hand inevitable. Is there a site to place bets on when certain levels of enshitification will be reached? (Only half joking.)
For those unaware, OP is referring to Sony patent US8246454B2 which describes a system in which people can skip ads by e.g. shouting out the brand name of the ad.
I have always felt uneasy about that too. I think it’s because the next (and final) panel looks exactly like the first. It’s the implication that you’ll have to do something so over the top as getting up, raising your arms, and shouting a brand name, then resuming what you were doing as it that were completely normal.
You have to show exuberance when demonstrating your brand loyalty, otherwise you’re not loyal enough to pass the ad. You’ll need to watch the entire reeducation, I mean ad, in that case.
Unrelated, but what's the best way to read a thread when somebody posts a twitter link like this? I've never really used Twitter but it seems like there's no way to tell if there are any relevant replies or anything more than just this one image unless you login.
I used to use threadreaderapp but now it seems like they are asking for a login too :/
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com
Not to single out twitter because a lot of web sites simply appear as a blank page.
The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Even if you could see the replies they would almost all be off-topic attempts by paid "verified accounts" to take advantage of the eyeballs on the popular post they are replying to.
Twitter replies to any post that is semi-popular have been a worthless jumble of engagement bait for about a year now.
IUREO Anti-Ad FAKE EYE Mask - Fake eyes tricks eye-contact ad detect! - Black - 100% Polyester - Cool and comfortable ad-watching mask ad-block eye cover mask never see ads again mask - $2.99 on Temu
a few years ago I read an observation that Amazon is basically a hyperwebster for physical goods. If you can name a specific goal and think some product would do it for you, you simply type it into Amazon and by the time you press 'enter' a million monkeys on a million typewriters have already listed it for you. Your eschatrons immanentized in 48 hours or we offer you a $3 digital voucher, guaranteed.
And the "keyboard smashings" school of brand naming only makes this more pointed...
That is the reason they went absolutely crazy when adnauseam was introduced, as it used a different approach: it didn't block ads but loaded them in an invisible way, then "clicked" them randomly so that although the user wasn't pestered by ads, advertisers would get completely bogus click through data.
Isn't that good for their numbers though? I would imagine there are some advertisers who are buying out their own bots to juice click through rate. Why not? Incentives are high, disincentives are a slap on the wrist if you manage to even prove anything at all.
What would be the incentive for an advertiser to spend money on bots to juice the click-through rate of their ads? More ad-clicks mean more money spent on ad networks, and bots are notoriously stingy customers, all the more so if they are your own.
I've noticed that since the beginning of this year, YouTube has gotten very aggressive with ads, including more and more ads and multiple unskippable ads. And then they treat you like an idiot with a little popup that says "What to learn more about how to get rid of ads?", which just takes you to the YouTube Premium product, which is nothing but a premium for Google. Amazon Prime has also started adding unskippable ads.
The hour's getting late for being able to easily avoid this sort of bullshit. It's time to gather what you can, save it locally, and then shift to physical media. DVDs, books, etc.
Yea, I've been looking into what to do. I'm tired of subscription fees for one, although Spotify has remained sane. But I absolutely refuse to pay trillion dollar corporations more money, who already steal my data, just to get rid of ads. If they kept them reasonable, it'd be fine. But nearly all of the UX/UI additions are not to make the experience better but to make you click more videos and ads. There are even times that you can't even see the last few seconds of a video because it pops up clickable things that can't be disabled.
Isn't Spotify about to raise its fees again for the second time in about two years? I dropped it a while back after the whole podcast push. Not (solely) because I'm not a fan of the people they chose to fund, but because they penny pinch on music royalties but wanted to shower podcasters with money -- I signed up for music, not podcasts!
Spotify was easy (for me) to replace: I have a huge music collection already. YouTube would be tougher because I mostly rely on it for video clips I wouldn't be able to find elsewhere, except maybe Archive.org.
I returned to buying albums when a few that I loved disappeared off Spotify one day. It's bad enough to pay month after month and never own anything but to go listen to a favorite and find it's gone? Unacceptable.
At my age I'll never average buying more than one album a month anyway, especially since you can usually hear it first on bandcamp or YouTube so it's not a gamble like the old record store days, so it isn't even more expensive
Physical media and one-time payment desktop software are the only enshittification-proof types of digital products left.
I used to love the Google Music app, which did nothing besides play my locally stored music. Then one day I opened it and it had turned into yet another storefront constantly using mobile data to refresh the carousel. Since then, auto-updates have been turned off.
I love being able to reject app updates. Once the app does what I want, updates can only make it worse.
Sure but they are just experiencing the world for the first time and discovering what their “ground state” opinions and preferences will be. Surely exposing them to a deluge of ads can’t be harmful.
And also the millions of adults that DO browse the web without an ad blocker and don't pay for youtube premium. Like we don't have to wonder "aw man surely nobody suffers through this" because ad companies have expressly stated, in reports that must be somewhat accurate or else the SEC comes knocking, that only 1/3 people using their services uses ad blockers.
More people than not are unable or unwilling to block ads, and experience that disgusting web that plenty of us know to be obscene, obnoxious, and probably just not healthy for your brain.
But I bet every worker of google willingly chooses to browse that web without an ad blocker right? Surely they are happy to experience the same world they make their money from right?
Once YouTube Premium (Or Red initially, I guess), was released, it became extraordinarily hard to watch anything with ads in any capacity. When I visit my in-laws, they still have regular cable TV and I cannot believe that I ever used to sit through this much crap.
I was the first person in my friend/family group to do the cord-cutting thing (2012), and so this has been kind of an issue for the last twelve years for me, because whenever I would visit them I'd be stuck with traditional media.
The ads must make considerable money though; Amazon Prime started having them by default unless you pay an extra $3/month, which I will not do, and I won't watch ads, so I've just stopped watching things on Amazon, and I doubt I'm the only one; surely Amazon wouldn't annoy their customers like this unless they were getting considerable money for it.
It makes me a little sad that Blu-rays appear to be getting phased out, especially for TV shows. I'm not opposed to paying for media that I consume, but I really don't want ads or DRM [1], so I'm not sure what my options are but to just consume YouTube and from my existing (quite sizeable) blu-ray collection.
[1] I know Blu-ray has DRM but it's trivial to remove it in a rip so I still consider it DRM-free from a practical perspective.
My understanding is that some of that money goes to creators when I watch their videos without ads.
None of that bothers me. Premium content and access will always be a thing. It's the fact that the producer, the network, and the advertiser are the same entity.
Mine would be a frictionless micropayments mechanism that works across many/most sites, an idea that's as old as the web. Google are supposedly working on something like that but I'm not holding my breath.
I'd pay for something if they actually cared about the product. They don't, so I don't. Instead, they're just bullying me and others to pay them. YouTube doesn't make any of the content, and they don't care about the UX except to funnel you into more ads. I'm not going to pay for that experience.
if there's one person carrying for the product for $1 and another selling junk for free that will have intrusive ads as soon as that pesky $1 guy is gone, you'd be using the free one, like everybody else
I would pay $10-$20 a month for Youtube if they made significant improvements to how they work with creators, how they reward and encourage creators, and how they pay creators.
However, that's not as profitable to Youtube as the current model is, which is to force obscene amounts of advertising that they are auctioning off to whichever scam porn app can afford to buy rights to your child's eyeballs and then tell Million subscriber youtubers who have been on the platform making high quality, reliable content since 2007 that they cannot swear, cannot show body parts that you just saw in an ad, and that it's perfectly fine their videos keep getting content claimed by fly by night groups that don't even own the content they are claiming but it was a system designed to make Viacom not sue Youtube ever again so it's never going to prioritize the creators, you can't show a tank exploding, unless you are specific channels that somehow DO have tacit agreements with Youtube to allow them to show outright murder and death somehow, and youtube will let some stranger take over your channel with one phished credential and let them overnight run it as a scam fake Elon channel, despite google proving quite often that they have had account takeover protections for like a decade.
Talk to creators that have been on youtube since the early days and also have managed to get dedicated account reps. Youtube is horseshit to creators.
They enforce dedication to "the algorithm" which is just shorthand for "if you do not put out a video every couple days that has very high clickthrough rate (ie you better use clickbate thumbnails) then we will straight up stop surfacing your videos to not just new audiences, but the people who are explicitly subscribed to your content and have been for over a decade". Google has a system that is pretty much designed to push you beyond your limits, to burn you out, and replace you with the next 18 year old who has no idea what they are getting themselves into. Oh, and the entire time your comment section will be a spammy, hate filled hellhole and they will do NOTHING about it at all.
Google views content creators as easily replaceable laborers, as a resource to be consumed. Youtube doesn't want customers to pay for access to high quality pieces from talented artists, because it's literally more profitable to them if you as the consumer watch 10X as much slop that is full of ads.
"Oh why don't they go somewhere else then" well since Youtube was bought, google has been basically subsidizing and dumping "Video hosting" into the market, so nobody else can run a viable video hosting platform for Jon Q public. Some creators DID try to go somewhere else, like Facebook Video, which was blatantly lying about viewer numbers and basically caused the premature death of College Humor.
Youtube SUCKS. It's a pimp, not a partner. I won't give them a dime.
> I've noticed that since the beginning of this year
Beginning of this year?
I tried only once watching something on youtube without an ad blocker... some bloodborne speed run i think, it was a little over 1 hour long. That was 2-3 years ago.
It was the first time I was using the youtube app on that tablet, I generally use it for text content.
Youtube decided it should give me 2 ads every 5 ... fucking ... minutes. I think that if it were television, it would have been illegal in my jurisdiction.
I ended up finding it on twitch.tv which I think didn't give me any ads back then.
Well, however bad it was, it has gotten really bad lately. I just close out of videos and YouTube now, which I guess is good. Luckily, more of the niche content and small-time channels (the sort of videos that made YouTube nice back in the day) don't get as many ads, but even those are getting flooded with ads more and more.
Do note that this twitter account is posting fake screenshots of product ideas.
Other posts include "Google Meet option to punish interrupters by sending them to meeting jail" "iOS camera lock if you record too much concert footage" and "Spotify feature to lock Christmas music until after Thanksgiving"
Half of Soren Iverson's joke features are depressingly plausible and the other half are completely implausible but more compelling than any real "AI" product I've ever heard of.
I'd like this one. I've had quite a few trips where I asked the driver (Grab/Gojek, not Uber) if I could take over, and they pretty much always don't have an issue with it. Would have been nice to get a discount for it.
Wait, what? You've successfully asked a stranger if you can take over driving their vehicle – presumably a vehicle they rely on for their income and one you're not insured for – and they've said yes!?
Well the only alternatives are driving yourself everywhere (which kinda sucks in Jakarta), or hiring several full time drivers (which I have done in the past). All of the taxi/ride share services here are unreliable. But if you want to live in a developing country, you really just have to accept the fact that most things are highly dysfunctional and unreliable.
I've had a Lyft driver in San Jose, CA, who was not able to navigate a closed freeway onramp. The GPS map told him to turn onto the onramp, but it was closed in real life. So he drove past it, the GPS routed him to make four right turns and come back around to the same onramp. He just kept going in that circle over and over like a robot, coming back around again and again to the same closed onramp. I'm not sure if he expected it to magically open up for him or what.
So I told him to either end the ride or follow my verbal instructions, basically take the side street up to the next freeway onramp. Once he got there, he completed the rest of the ride successfully.
Business insurance for non employees? When geico figures out you are using consumer insurance for business purposes and then letting the customer drive they're not paying out.
I also enjoy the Peter Molyneux parody Twitter account, "Peter Molydeux" (@PeterMolydeux), who posts ridiculous Molyneuxesque game ideas. Somebody actually ran a game jam where they implemented a bunch of them!
Ever wanted to play a video game where you and seven friends control the legs of an octopus? How about where you play as a pigeon and fly from building to building, convincing businessmen not to jump to their deaths? How about a game where the "pause" button is your only weapon?
Thanks to last weekend's "What Would Molydeux?" game jam, you can now play those games and hundreds more.
What began as a tossed-off twitter joke exploded into a bit of a global phenomenon as hundreds of game developers worldwide pooled their talents in a nigh-unprecedented embrace of ridiculousness.
I would be willing to bet money that there are software engineers, maybe even current HN readers in this article, who are hard at work actually trying to build a Please Drink Verification Can like system in reality.
251 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadIf talking with AI becomes more mainstream, face detection will (at first) make the experience better.
And the day some manufacturer's database with 1.8 billion sets of facial data is going to get hacked and exposed, I'll feel pretty smug about it.
all the on-device stuff was just to ease the tech literati who probably is still 12 years away from being impacted by the actual tech doing the damage, since those are for the poor and foreigners first
I’m not sure what is the privacy risk there. The apps that authenticate you don’t have access to biometric data.
The main risk I see is if that data was compromised and made available for something else, but I haven’t seen any breach of that that ended up being useful for anything?
Or maybe I missed something?
* These days, I'd assume when, not if.
if you get involved with the wrong/right sort of people, they might do it for you
But really, I don't need a reason other than I'm uncomfortable with it. I worry about people who are comfortable with it..
I personally oppose all forms of biometrics for security, as it can neither be invalidated, nor is it safe from physical coercion. I also oppose biometric use for "tracking attention" because it's none of anybody's business but mine.
While I consider your example valid in a vacuum, it poses a substantial privacy and financial risk in the real world. If a car that tracks attention also phones home, your insurance carrier may raise your rates or cancel your plan for occasional glances away (sneezes, children, etc), regardless of an actual problem on the road. Such measures ought to only exist locally within a car, but I have absolutely no faith that it will be implemented that way given the current data shared along those lines.
And that is a completely different issue. The OP just wants to prevent that type of thing when they can.
If I walked up to several individuals (maybe even you) on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up, a lot of them would object. I don't think "why not let me take it, it's already online someplace" would be a convincing reason to allow it.
In many jurisdictions including where I live in, taking pictures at public places is allowed by law whether or not some other human happens to be in the frame of my picture. It is called "incidental inclusion".
Others can request me to exclude them from my picture but they can only request, they cannot force me to do so. Of course, if someone asked, I am going to be nice to them and try and exclude them from the picture. Others could also try and move a bit this way or that way so that they don't get included in my picture. We live in a society and we can work it out.
In reality though, nobody makes such a request because most people know the law and they know that if they are out there in the public, they could become part of other pictures by incidental inclusion.
I might break your phone. How difficult would it be to sue me and for what purpose?
> I might break your phone. How difficult would it be to sue me and for what purpose?
Easily. Damaging someone else's property is not even remotely on the same level as taking a photo of someone? How do I know it wasn't their _job_ to do so?
Honestly if you think that level of escalation is okay I hope to never meet you in person.
And trust me I find people taking photos of me creepy also but it's easier to block my face myself than to smash the person's device and expect to walk away.
Then it is not assault. See? The problems already started. The best you can get after an ardous process is an apology and a reinboursement, the worst would be it coming back at you.
Where I live, they recently declared gazing at a woman "indecently" as a small sexual crime, same as unrequested flirtatious comments to strangers. I have grabbed phones before, but I admit I haven't broken any. YMMV
Correct! I don't see where I implied otherwise!
You are missing the point.
>those sensors are still pointing at your face
some phones have a popup front camera. The camera is inside the phone. It is obscured and it would be alarming if it pop up on its own accord.
This just sounds like textbook paranoia to me (as in, the actual dictionary definition as an illogical fear that impedes your normal life), because there's nothing reasonable about thinking FaceID is compromised to the point that you have increased your personal safety by not using it.
I don't agree with the premise that disabling bio-metric security impedes a normal life. Nor has OP given me any reason to believe they are afraid of it in the situations you described.
Passwords and pass codes (when managed well) are perfectly normal security tools to use to ensure your privacy on a device you own.
Maybe we should do something about this rather than being defeatist and giving up on privacy.
I have the legal right to ‘analyze your face’ if you are out in public. Why do you believe that there’s something special about a highly secured, on device FaceID capture that makes it more dangerous than a guy with a camera across the street?
Is this true? I mean, you can't really show an iPhone a photo of your face to unlock it, can you? Or are you thinking of a different attack vector?
My second objection is to the possibility of physical injury to me by someone that really wants to steal my credentials.
This possibility exists even if your creds are something you know. It also exists if your creds are something you have, and you happen to have them on your person.
If you have the information that the iPhone wants to see, it is possible to create a synthetic face matching that data and hold it up in front of the phone.[1] You could also probably open up the phone and hotwire the sensors to give the hardened processor holding your Face ID data the readings it wants.
Both of these things are super difficult to do, and much further out of reach of your average thief than simply printing out a picture of the person's face, but the point remains that it is theoretically possible.
[1] Bkav Corporation has made masks that can fool Face ID for about $150: https://www.pcmag.com/news/researchers-claim-they-can-dupe-i... https://www.bkav.com/top-new/-/view-content/65202/bkav-s-new...
I can hand over my credentials or secrets to a thief without injury to myself, but I can't safely hand myself over, or a piece of me.
Here in the UK face ID is pretty common place so I must admit my phone having this data is probably the least of my concerns. For example, one guy I know can't buy his own groceries anymore because he stole some food products from one of our major supermarkets, and since all major supermarkets in the UK have linked facial id systems he's now effectively banned from all supermarkets lmao.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/mark-zuck...
I just don't like the fact that my face becomes a password. I'm usually not in a position to _obscure_ my face, so I have no chances to decide if my face should act as a password in any given moment or not.
So, if you hold the phone up to my face, and I look at it, it just unlocks. That's the opposite of "security."
https://xkcd.com/538/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kl4glp547o (bbc news article about it)
Attention awareness does not stop alarms, and it requires your eyes to be open and looking at the phone.
Attention awareness silences/drasticly reduces the volume of alarms, that's how it is designed.
If they have a bug in the attention awareness feature it stands to reason that it could not require your eyes to be open or looking at the device in question at the time.
[1] https://www.phonearena.com/news/court-ruling-cops-can-force-...
https://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/why-torture-doesnt-work-...
IMO, the issues surrounding biometrics stem from the fact that they define you, in a way that nothing else - not a name, not an address - can.
try to buy an africel (usaid sponsored telecom in Africa) without showing up in person for a face scan.
you're all to sheltered and will have no idea what hit you in the near future
It doesn't work well. X is a buggy mess, and a way worse user experience than Twitter was prior to Elon. For the past several weeks, threads have failed to load whenever I click into a Tweet.
To be fair to Musk, it's like that for years.
https://twstalker.com/soren_iverson/status/18012531876027884...
Seems like something there’d be a lot of resistance to, but on the other hand inevitable. Is there a site to place bets on when certain levels of enshitification will be reached? (Only half joking.)
I love (hate) that the figure in the illustration stands up with his arms raised. I wonder what the artist was thinking...
I used to use threadreaderapp but now it seems like they are asking for a login too :/
Replies clarify it's satire.
The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
But if you must:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
At the moment, this worked for me:
https://xcancel.com/soren_iverson/status/1801253187602788424...
Twitter replies to any post that is semi-popular have been a worthless jumble of engagement bait for about a year now.
Crazy world we live in where something like this seems plausible.
And the "keyboard smashings" school of brand naming only makes this more pointed...
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam
Spotify was easy (for me) to replace: I have a huge music collection already. YouTube would be tougher because I mostly rely on it for video clips I wouldn't be able to find elsewhere, except maybe Archive.org.
At my age I'll never average buying more than one album a month anyway, especially since you can usually hear it first on bandcamp or YouTube so it's not a gamble like the old record store days, so it isn't even more expensive
I used to love the Google Music app, which did nothing besides play my locally stored music. Then one day I opened it and it had turned into yet another storefront constantly using mobile data to refresh the carousel. Since then, auto-updates have been turned off.
I love being able to reject app updates. Once the app does what I want, updates can only make it worse.
If YouTube have an issue with adblockers, then that is a problem they brought upon themselves.
aside from millions of children on tablets, that is
More people than not are unable or unwilling to block ads, and experience that disgusting web that plenty of us know to be obscene, obnoxious, and probably just not healthy for your brain.
But I bet every worker of google willingly chooses to browse that web without an ad blocker right? Surely they are happy to experience the same world they make their money from right?
I was the first person in my friend/family group to do the cord-cutting thing (2012), and so this has been kind of an issue for the last twelve years for me, because whenever I would visit them I'd be stuck with traditional media.
The ads must make considerable money though; Amazon Prime started having them by default unless you pay an extra $3/month, which I will not do, and I won't watch ads, so I've just stopped watching things on Amazon, and I doubt I'm the only one; surely Amazon wouldn't annoy their customers like this unless they were getting considerable money for it.
It makes me a little sad that Blu-rays appear to be getting phased out, especially for TV shows. I'm not opposed to paying for media that I consume, but I really don't want ads or DRM [1], so I'm not sure what my options are but to just consume YouTube and from my existing (quite sizeable) blu-ray collection.
[1] I know Blu-ray has DRM but it's trivial to remove it in a rip so I still consider it DRM-free from a practical perspective.
My understanding is that some of that money goes to creators when I watch their videos without ads.
None of that bothers me. Premium content and access will always be a thing. It's the fact that the producer, the network, and the advertiser are the same entity.
a credit system where if I let them use one of my devices as part of their torrent nodes, they give me free hours of video each month.
a pay as you go model where I can select how many hours of YouTube I want a month and I can watch that much video.
However, that's not as profitable to Youtube as the current model is, which is to force obscene amounts of advertising that they are auctioning off to whichever scam porn app can afford to buy rights to your child's eyeballs and then tell Million subscriber youtubers who have been on the platform making high quality, reliable content since 2007 that they cannot swear, cannot show body parts that you just saw in an ad, and that it's perfectly fine their videos keep getting content claimed by fly by night groups that don't even own the content they are claiming but it was a system designed to make Viacom not sue Youtube ever again so it's never going to prioritize the creators, you can't show a tank exploding, unless you are specific channels that somehow DO have tacit agreements with Youtube to allow them to show outright murder and death somehow, and youtube will let some stranger take over your channel with one phished credential and let them overnight run it as a scam fake Elon channel, despite google proving quite often that they have had account takeover protections for like a decade.
Talk to creators that have been on youtube since the early days and also have managed to get dedicated account reps. Youtube is horseshit to creators.
They enforce dedication to "the algorithm" which is just shorthand for "if you do not put out a video every couple days that has very high clickthrough rate (ie you better use clickbate thumbnails) then we will straight up stop surfacing your videos to not just new audiences, but the people who are explicitly subscribed to your content and have been for over a decade". Google has a system that is pretty much designed to push you beyond your limits, to burn you out, and replace you with the next 18 year old who has no idea what they are getting themselves into. Oh, and the entire time your comment section will be a spammy, hate filled hellhole and they will do NOTHING about it at all.
Google views content creators as easily replaceable laborers, as a resource to be consumed. Youtube doesn't want customers to pay for access to high quality pieces from talented artists, because it's literally more profitable to them if you as the consumer watch 10X as much slop that is full of ads.
"Oh why don't they go somewhere else then" well since Youtube was bought, google has been basically subsidizing and dumping "Video hosting" into the market, so nobody else can run a viable video hosting platform for Jon Q public. Some creators DID try to go somewhere else, like Facebook Video, which was blatantly lying about viewer numbers and basically caused the premature death of College Humor.
Youtube SUCKS. It's a pimp, not a partner. I won't give them a dime.
Beginning of this year?
I tried only once watching something on youtube without an ad blocker... some bloodborne speed run i think, it was a little over 1 hour long. That was 2-3 years ago.
It was the first time I was using the youtube app on that tablet, I generally use it for text content.
Youtube decided it should give me 2 ads every 5 ... fucking ... minutes. I think that if it were television, it would have been illegal in my jurisdiction.
I ended up finding it on twitch.tv which I think didn't give me any ads back then.
Other posts include "Google Meet option to punish interrupters by sending them to meeting jail" "iOS camera lock if you record too much concert footage" and "Spotify feature to lock Christmas music until after Thanksgiving"
okay but I need that!
I'd like this one. I've had quite a few trips where I asked the driver (Grab/Gojek, not Uber) if I could take over, and they pretty much always don't have an issue with it. Would have been nice to get a discount for it.
* Driver is hopelessly lost and stands no chance of getting to the destination
* Driver has no idea how to read a map
* Driver is obviously very inexperienced and can’t handle the chaotic traffic
* Driver is obviously too tired to drive safely (or reach the destination in a reasonable timeframe)
* Driver is too hungry to drive/read map/think at all (common in the afternoon during Ramadan)
* Driver is obviously high on meth or drunk (especially in Indonesia where there are no laws against driving under the influence)
So I told him to either end the ride or follow my verbal instructions, basically take the side street up to the next freeway onramp. Once he got there, he completed the rest of the ride successfully.
Car insurance usually handles borrowing just fine.
You can end the sentence here. If there already wasn't proper insurance, then switching drivers is not the problem.
https://x.com/PeterMolydeux
Play More Than 200 Ridiculous Peter Molydeux Games Right Now
https://kotaku.com/play-more-than-200-ridiculous-peter-molyd...
Ever wanted to play a video game where you and seven friends control the legs of an octopus? How about where you play as a pigeon and fly from building to building, convincing businessmen not to jump to their deaths? How about a game where the "pause" button is your only weapon?
Thanks to last weekend's "What Would Molydeux?" game jam, you can now play those games and hundreds more.
What began as a tossed-off twitter joke exploded into a bit of a global phenomenon as hundreds of game developers worldwide pooled their talents in a nigh-unprecedented embrace of ridiculousness.
[...]
Some favorites:
- Hinge AR https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1620799382495924226
- Contact name https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1795470976555315429
- Message imbalance https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1800166023829787009
- Uber quiet game https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1799803638161789152
A - Please refrain from giving the builders of the Torment Nexus any further ideas.
B - Are we able to stop giving the builders of the Torment Nexus any further ideas?
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/fj24w7/sony_...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/