If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.

Isn’t it risky plugging usb drives into untrusted machines?

I bet it was something like the hardware id instead but she misspoke

If she grabbed that thing out of the air and smashed it anon couldn’t really call the cops on her for it

If they had an in with Blizzard though shouldn’t it be anon getting banned not the Chinese people seeing his message

So how would this work, the Chinese ISP is inspecting unencrypted packets from videogames for banned text and shutting down the connection on seeing any? Wouldn’t most relevant text be on https websites anyway, why even implement something that way when the text isn’t guaranteed to be in a clear standard format and it’s just game chats?

Maybe people just started typing it that way instead to begin with, you can’t know

I figured, but seems relevant that what they’re buying is bullshit no matter what

Conversion therapy isn’t real though; you can’t make someone not be gay. From the parent’s perspective, their problem is likely that they think they have a religious obligation to not accept homosexuality (perhaps their place in their community depends on this), but also want a relationship with their son, and don’t want to have to choose between these. So probably what they really want is for their son to go back in the closet in a way that is plausible, and the service they are paying for offers that plausibility and creates the greatest possible chance of it happening (being nice to anon and letting him know he has an undo button without feeding him bullshit or being pushy).

So on second thought, maybe it’s not unambiguously wholesome, because it is lies and could be enabling a homophobic culture. But on the other hand it’s probably for the best that this sort of conflict be put off until anon is no longer a teenager who is totally dependent on their parents. Whether the money was earned honestly I think is less of a big deal here ethically, it’s basically in the same category as paying for a consultation with a psychic, the sort of thing where they are all but explicitly paying for the fiction.

What a wholesome story

I wonder if part of the reason for supporting this is that they like the secondary effect that all this information is now also available to governments

The profit they get from the sale of the television should be enough that they don’t have to make the television shit to get slightly more profit, why do people even buy these

But televisions cost hundreds of dollars at least

“each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

Sounds like a pathetic amount of money for betraying your customers with a shitty ad infested smart tv

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

tbf the article only assumes he told them no because of how implausible it seems the task would be, the actual details of what if anything was discussed and what happened are unknown.

Probably what businesses really want is unethical people who are competent at lying about it, and the professor was giving anon practical career advice if not actually ethical advice.

Privacy means personal agency and freedom from people, whether individuals, companies, or the government, controlling you with direct or implied threats, or more subtle manipulation, which they can do because they have your dox and because information is power.

A lack of privacy adds fuel to the polycrisis because if we can’t act in relative secrecy that basically means we can’t act freely at all, and nothing can challenge whoever runs the panopticon.

This one can do that stuff: https://github.com/huchenlei/ComfyUI-layerdiffuse?tab=readme-ov-file

I feel like the pattern of severe social isolation is itself getting to be a pretty normal life