... and now that attacking the power grid is getting more attention, watch it become the Thing To Do for any idiot with any kind of grievance. Organized or unorganized.
I think there are a lot more spare insulators in stock than spare transformers or SCADA stuff, though. Power companies are set up to fix lines because lines get screwed up all the time.
Replying to undo erroneous moderation.
There are also ways to muffle the short-range antenna to prevent the victim's iPhone from discovering it, but without disabling long-range tracking.
That doesn't even make sense. Airtags don't have long-range radios at all. They work by communicating with all the iPhones around them, which then report their locations to Apple. If the victim's iPhone can't hear the Airtag, then neither can anybody else's, and the Airtag is completely out of commision.
But, yeah, sure, it's got to be trivial to kill the speaker.
I didn't say children were tiny adults. I said that they were capable of being helped to think for themselves, that they should be helped to think for themselves, that they were more resilient and a lot more capable than people gave them credit for, and that it was NOT possible to somehow "brainwash" a child with casual exposure to something the parents didn't approve of.
I will go on to say that the first phases of helping them to be intellectually independent should come at the first age when they can first have a conversation about anything vaguely complicated or important, and that it should continue from there.
Those views based on significant actual experience, observation, and even a certain amount of research. Including both raising a child who's nearly an adult now, and interacting with many other children.
Where the fuck do you think "wisdom" and "perspective" come from?
Hints:
Or at least they don't come from those things unless those things drive you into open rebellion. Which they often do, but not often enough.
True. A good point.
On the other hand, once you get the warring tribes riled up enough, you can reasonably hope they'll shoot stuff up themselves, so you don't have to take the risk. People on the ground who you can trust to do that sort of thing and maintain cover are a valuable, limited resource, especially just now.
What?
"A certain faction"? More than one faction, I think. I have my own strong opinions about which factions are worse, and yes there ARE better and worse factions... but there sure as hell isn't just one or even just two.
But none of this is about the rights of parents of whatever stripe. It's about the rights of the children, who are their own human beings and deserve to fully grow into their independence. And who are capable of sorting through a whole hell of a lot more than adults give them credit for, especially if you help them out a bit.
Your kid seeing a drag show isn't going to turn them gay. Somebody blathering the "good news" at your kid isn't going to turn them into a Jesus freak. NOTHING is going to influence your kid like that unless they get a LOT of it CONSTANTLY, AND been sheltered to the point where they never hear it challenged. The vulnerable kids are the ones who've never been asked to choose between real alternatives, never heard one adult contradict something another adult has told them, never been exposed to anything but indoctrination, never been given any critical thinking tools, never been taught to recognize when somebody's trying to persuade them, never really been allowed to question anything important, and have no resistance.
And even then they often get over it. You can brainwash a kid if you try hard enough, but it's a full time job and it's not results are not guaranteed.
The thing people really worry about is not kids getting other people's weird shit "shoved down their throats". It's that being exposed to the idea that there is weird shit out there might get their kids thinking about whether their OWN indoctrination falls into that category.
I think the FSB theory is even less credible than the "random drunks" theory. If you're Putin, you don't really want to make your statement in Moore County, North Carolina, and you're sure not going to destabilize the US by shutting down Moore County. And Putin loves sending messages. If he'd ordered it, it would have been intentionally obvious, and then he would immediately have issued an equally obvious bullshit denial.
As for the MAGA/Jesus types hitting the grid, I'm not saying they did, because there are plenty of other possibilities.
But you could imagine that they might have wanted to shut down the show from far enough away that they could avoid being noticed. They might have feared they'd be seen and even recognized if they came close to the building, in the middle of town with a lot of people around and at least some of those people on their guard against them personally.
And/or, as long as I'm making stuff up wildly, I could imagine they might have had military training that (1) suggested substations as targets, because they're effective military targets, and (2) didn't deal with the risk of getting caught by law enforcement, because the FBI doesn't typically isn't methodically tracking you in war zones. If they followed that training without independent thought-- and independent thought isn't one of their well known strong points-- then they might have done exactly what they did. They might not even have really been clear about how LONG they were going to shut down the power. It's not what they would have done if they'd been trained as INFILTRATORS, of course.
Or I can spin even more random stories. They could have wanted to do something bigger than the theater to make a point, or a threat, or even make other people believe that the judgement of God truly was coming down. Their Fearless Leader tweeted something that was technically not an admission and technically didn't claim "credit"... but sure kind of sounded like an admission and a claim of credit. Then she walked it back with "The Lord works in mysterious ways", which was just KIND of plausible because she's a known religious nut and what she'd tweeted just happened to also admit that interpretation. You could imagine that that whole show was designed to create fear of crossing her and her group, but in a plausibly deniable way. Almost Putin-like, but aimed more to create uncertainty and less to assert power by daring others to challenge the lie. She WAS a PSYOPS officer.
Of course, to come up with that plan, she'd have to be totally ignorant of how thoroughly law enforcement can crawl up your ass when it's a priority for them... but law enforcement's full capabilities are something she COULD plausibly be ignorant about.
Point being we don't know, and it could have been anybody, and I could make up these stories all night long, but if I were the cops I'd be keeping those people in mind as suspects (while going over the whole place with a fine-toothed comb). And I don't think I'd be suspecting the FSB unless something fell in my lap to point to them.
Retailers obviously need to record video for security reasons
They went literally thousands of years without that. They do not "need" it.
They will Not let people in their stores without providing whatever type of consent is necessary.
Nobody who actually operates any kind of retail establishment is going to tank their traffic by collecting any kind of meaningful consent.
And I did not say that there should be any exception for "consent" to begin with.
Also, why should it matter if it's " if it's done by a human" If it is still a picture and still provides the same information ?
Because it forces the scale to be small enough that the pervasive databases can't be built. If the data are collected, they will end up in the databases. It is much harder and much less reliable to control what happens to something after it's collected than to just prevent it from being collected to begin with.
The GDPR does very close to nothing in practice. And, by the way, for the data GDPR applies to, it requires consent to use when data are collected.
A picture is a 2-Dimensional Image - there is a lot of information not included that (specifically depth and minute 3D structures). Biometric data is detailed measurements about an image which can be processed automatically.
You do not know what you are talking about. ALL actually deployed facial recognition, both building the databases and detecting the hits, is done entirely, 100 percent, with 2D images, most of which were originally collected for totally unrelated purposes. And it's getting so they don't even have to be very good images.
Some guy in Mississippi might find out that I got an abortion. Some guy in Egypt might find out I went to a gay club. Some guy in China might find out that I spent too much time with Subversive Elements. Some guy in Saudi Arabia might find out that I'm trying to escape the country.
I did not make those up.
These tracking databases have killed people, and will kill more as they get better. Yes, including the fucking marketing ones. Excuse me if I do not give a fuck about the cereal guy's needs.
Surveillance-style recording of audio, video, or anything else, is not "normal activities"". It wasn''t even POSSIBLE 75 years ago.
By the way, audio recording of other people's conversations was (properly) made illegal in many places around when it became technically possible, so even now it could only be "normal activity" if by "normal" you mean "bad enough that it's already been literally outlawed".
And that kind of recording is also almost always done for malicious or paranoid reasons, so it's only "normal" for evil or paranoid people.
this includes that the store might take video or pictures on their property
It's time to revoke that norm. The new rule should be that you can take a picture of somebody in public if it's done by a human who specifically chooses the subject and composes the picture, but you can't direct an automated camera toward a public area. Nor may you try to be surreptitious about it, nor create any large central repository of pictures of any person, place, or particular class of persons or places.
The language needs to be fleshed out, but then it should be put into law everywhere.
Why, yes, I would also like a pony. But nonethless that's what the norm ought to be.
But you have Not consented to intrusive techniques such as capturing your biometric data which is private, or recording your voice conversations
A picture of your face is "your biometric data". It's not just similar, it literally is the biometric.
It is so convenient, so not sure what the driving force is for face-recognition based payments.
You can re-use the equipment to follow people everywhere they go and record most of what they do.
You should do a risk evaluation on any upstream project. You should have a contingency plan for losing any upstream dependency, or for bugs in it, or for its development direction changing, or for its licensing changing, or whatever...
"Open source" is not a particularly useful category. Commercial projects can also be buggy and unreliable.
... except that the cameras won't work and are basically being used as a token gesture.
Well, OK, not really "except that", because in fact what you write shows you've never lived in crowded housing and don't have enough imagination to realize why your suggestions obviously aren't possible for most of these people. But even if your suggestions were possible, the cameras still wouldn't work. Uber can claim any reason it wants; that doesn't mean that the cameras will actually achieve it.
To actually protect customer data, Uber would have to pony up to provide a controlled environment and whatever infrastructure was needed for people to work in it. You know, get a building or something. But that would cost Uber more money. Since Uber does not in fact give a shit about its customers' interests, and in fact just wants to protect itself from lawsuits and extreme bad press, it's much cheaper to come up with some fig leaf like the cameras. It won't work, and everybody close to it knows it won't work, but it'll shut up the PCI auditors, and probably give them enough cover to weasel out if something major happens. And that is all they care about.
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah
