You wouldn't have people being charged with human trafficking just based on random travel patterns because you wouldn't have a fascist government looking for reasons to charge people with crimes they didn't commit.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The problem is once you have a fascist government all the individual security and privacy in the world won't save you. If all else fails they will just come down on you like a ton of bricks with simple violence.

And by yourself you can't stop fascism because billionaires always want fascism. Before that it was billionaires but that's just inflation. If you're going to withstand the assault of people with that much money the only way you can do it is by grouping together with large numbers of people.

So protecting your individual privacy won't stop the actual thing you're afraid of, which is being arrested for crimes you didn't commit.

Coming from you, I am very pleased you think that. Your hate feeds me.

Just make certain you aren't looking into a mirror. I don't often deal with people who cannot enter a discussion without dropping to profanity. But in previous conversations, you have proven that profanity, is the alpha and omega of your ability to have discussions. You do you, but it ain't a good look.

Victim.

It will just be long enough for them to catch up. Same thing as when they used Intel and then switch to in-house silicon first chance they got.

If you even read the summary you would realize this isn't about their market dominance. This is about them having a walled garden for an app store.

Apple absolutely has a monopoly on app stores for iOS. Europe has already started breaking that down but United States has not.

The accusation is that Apple has used their Monopoly of app stores and app loading illegally.

One of the reasons we can't get any decent antitrust law enforcement in this damn country is that unless you have something that is so fucking obviously a complete total Monopoly of a critical resource people just don't believe it is a antitrust issue.

Antitrust law is highly nuanced and if it's one thing America hates its nuance. We desperately want things to be simple, clear and above all black and white. And that's just not how it is. Which is what gets us into messes like this...

Because Trump is your god king but the difference is when the journalists got called out there they rapidly corrected themselves whereas I never once saw a correction about the Joe Biden story and I never once saw anyone seriously criticizing Trump for losing his marbles 20 minutes into a town hall...

Well not exactly I think one of the editors over at the New York times tried to and got fired for it. Or maybe he just decided to resign all on his own after decades of working there...

Dude you won. You own everything. Your side can do anything it wants now.

Fascists are never happy because fascism is about being angry all the time so no matter how much winning you get you're going to be more and more and more miserable. Almost as if you probably shouldn't be a fascist...

Shut this down as not budget related? Then again there are literally hundreds of things to Republican party stuffed in that bill that aren't related to the budget so some things are bound to slip through.

Somehow I don't think 1 trillion dollars of Medicaid cuts should be included in a budget bill. That should be considered way too significant a policy change since it basically shuts down medicaid...

In other news 1 trillion dollars of government spending is on track to exit the economy. That's going to result in a hell of a lot of job losses. Not just in healthcare you can't take that much money out of the economy and not have it Go boom.

So what you describing is called a browser fingerprint and there are plenty of ways to prevent it.

On the other hand like I mentioned on another comment that only applies if you are fairly technical and while that might protect you it's not going to protect the vast majority of people who simply do not have the skills.

And if it's one thing the last 6 months has taught me it's that the rest of the world will drag you down with it. Freedom isn't something that can be protected with individual action. It requires a concerted effort from a large number of people.

Presumably the idea is that website y knows that VPN provider x is using it.

From there it's an opsec problem. Most of the time though hackers don't get found out by incredibly complex shit they get found out because they accidentally post their email address onto a forum and it traces back to them.

Stuff like this is mildly useful for peace of mind if you're doing something dodgy online and possibly very useful to foreign intelligence agencies that have really good opsec.

But society-wide it's not really going to allow us to avoid the techno feudal dystopian hellscape that's coming. Even if you're opsec is so good you never get caught when all your neighbors are getting caught they're going to drag you down with them as society collapses.

Freedom isn't something that individuals acting alone can protect. But nerds really really like to be individuals because it's a huge drag to deal with people. We wouldn't be nerds if that wasn't the case..

I'm tired of hearing that we don't have to worry about techno feudalism because magic space technology we can't imagine is going to save us. It's a childish appeal to Middle School level sci-fi.

We have tens of thousands of years of human beings being absolutely fucking terrible to each other and outside of a few developed countries human beings are still absolutely terrible to each other.

The real problem is you're stuck in a bubble where you've had a comfortable life so you can't imagine that being taken away from you because why would it? This is the way the world is and the world can't change. Certainly not for the worst because that wouldn't jive with the Sci-Fi books you read when you were 13.

It's the classic 4 to 14 problem where you have an idea that was planted in your head around that age group. In this case you're a nerd and I can see the same sort of Hope the future without the fear of dystopia that comes from being a slightly older nerd that grew up reading Asimov and Bradbury outside of Fahrenheit 451...

You might also have glomped onto the cyberpunk dystopia's where brilliant hackers can still live great lives. Nerds love that because we're the kings in that world.

None of us ever considered techno feudalism though. Or if we do, again we think of ourselves as the Kings and not the peasants...

I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

Has it out for you then unless you have been protecting democracy non-stop for the last 50 years you are already fucked. And with the exception of maybe possibly France I don't know any country that has been doing that. Pretty much all the first world Nations have been balls deep in moral panics instead of making sure they are systems of checks and balances were functional.

It's that classic, he's got 1024 bit encryption what do we do! Hit him with this $2 wrench until he gives us the code...

In America right now you no longer have guaranteed rights as a citizen. Under our current regime you could be declared a non-citizen relatively easily and by the time the court system gets around to correcting that you're in a prison in El Salvador.

Like everything terrible this model will eventually spread to the rest of the world if left unchecked and I don't see anything to stop it.

Actually, it's a pretty common strategy for breaking into the accounts of celebrities. It usually involves convincing someone who works for one of the phone companies that you've gotten a new phone, i.e. they already have enough personal info from you to impersonate you to the phone company. And then after that, all your accounts fall like a house of cards.

At least the one bankruptcy that should have put him under. The people who owned them all the money did some calculations and found that it was better to let him swim for a bit and see if they could get some of their money back by letting Trump pretend to be rich and letting him fleece people out of money.

Basically Trump was almost completely broke at that point and his creditors would have gotten nothing. So they let him keep a chunk of his remaining assets rather than take what little he had so that he could go around pretending to be the smartest rich businessman long enough to get a bit more money for them to get some of their money back.

Basically they were counting on Trump being able to rip people off and frankly it paid off. It did help that our legal system let Trump launder money for the Russian mafia for something like 20 years...

The news media basically covered for him. So much so that we had to create a new term for it, sane washing.

Studies show Trump got billions and billions of dollars of free advertising during the 2016 campaign. And the 2024 campaign was insane. I watched dozens of well-respected editors and journalists dog walked from major institutions like the New York times and Newsweek and even USA today because they criticized Donald Trump or corrected misinformation about Joe biden.

My favorite example was a case where Joe Biden was taking a question from somebody off camera and multiple news outlets reported that as him staring off into the distance. He was just looking at a person that wasn't on camera waiting for them to finish their question.

Meanwhile Trump short circuited during a town hall, stopped everything 20 minutes in and proceeded to dance to his iPod playlist. The news media called this a brilliant move that brought him closer to the voters...

The billionaires bought the media and they are exerting the power that they paid for now.

Taking shortcuts. I don't know what the current state is but the last time I looked which admittedly was when it was called machine learning instead of AI the system was fed a bunch of data consisting of things humans had already diagnosed and initially it looked like it was doing an amazing job until somebody pointed out that it had figured out that the slides that had the diseased parts also happened to have some framing that the slides with the healthy parts didn't have and that the AI was just using that framing and had no idea what was or wasn't a problem.

AI is going to take the path of least resistance. And it's often difficult bordering on impossible to scrutinize how it works properly.

We are a hell of a long way away from Star wars medical robots.

On the other hand since we don't consider healthcare a right, and let's not get ourselves the majority of people reading this don't, I suppose having a barely functional AI reading your chart and diagnosing you is better than nothing.

Of course we'll probably still just give the majority of people nothing. Because you still have to earn the right to exist in our civilization. If you can't generate consistent shareholder value then you need to just go away curl up into a ball and die...

Because human life is only valuable when it's making somebody else rich or when it's already rich