If they don't have admin/root rights on their own machine... more is the pity.

If a Meta employee hasn't figured out how to use an intervening device driver with a random number generator-with-timer, maybe another gig is in order.

I believe in human rights, too. But any good hacker has sufficient skill to thwart such madness whilst still doing their job. Oh, and I'll be there's an AI vibe code generator they could use with but one token to get the job done.

I've been a CLI coder for decades. Mouse use mostly gets in my way.

That's OK. Your iris data will be uploaded to Palantir to match up with your other biometric information, along with the total dossier that is you.

This will be compared to the Amazon adware databases, vetted against your FBI profile, crosschecked with Google, purchased by Meta, aligned with various space lasers through the Starlink Alliance, and weighed against various API sets for corroboration.

You were screwed years ago.

Evolution always applies because of random mutations, and the fact that all 8billion of us have not yet mated with the remaining 4billion or so. We have no idea what comes of that.

Add in causal mutations, meaning the introductions of new pressures on DNA. Microplastics in life comes to mind. Add increased radiation by harming or altering the atmosphere that serves as our shield from certain death.

Selective bacteria, viruses, microRNA, enter the picture.

We might evolve, but we always mutate; except for clone humans, we're 100% the combination of two trees of life merging, your mother and father. Currently, we have no other selective medium to alter the combo. Yes, CRISPR and other technologies can be introduced. Selective zygote assays as a filtration mechanism. Never marry that (fill in the blank of undesired pseudo-tribe).

Weaker might be better; it's surmised that survivors of Bubonic Plague had their own weaknesses that became selective strength. Of those that have celiac-related diseases naturally didn't eat contaminated bread-- and there was a LOT OF THAT. Or those that survived mild/dairy-borne diseases.

Evolution doesn't stop; evolution is a subjective determination. Mutation is the objective observation.

For all history we have functioned without this.

We have a right of association, and not to incriminate ourselves, for roughly 228 years in the USA, depending on how you want to cite case law on the Bill of Rights.

We still have those rights.

Is that your old friend from HS? GO ask

You sit behind pseudoanonyimity with your sabeede "screen name" account on website where you can be outed.

In theory, this requires a warrant, and probable cause, among other tests. Maybe that person from HS doesn't want to be identified, especially BY YOU.

This is the Pandora's Box of the panopticon: Kleptocracy (not democracy) for the masses. Now everyone can redistribute.

Go ahead, walk into that locker room. Do your upskirt shots. Walk into that nudist camp or even gay bathhouse.

See that screen in the doctor's office? Maybe that tax return. Sealed court order?

How about that flab in the mirror? Maybe that scar.

These aren't SmartGlasses, whether Meta or Apple, these are the tech bros whittling away at your privacy and liberty-- for profit.

By a human, from memory, or by a random human, who may or may not be tied to "the government"?

Which one is Big Brother?

Choose your answer carefully.

Property rights are ephemeral, but tangible assets do indeed exist.

As regards your sense of right to association, free speech, and more, there is a long battle we can fight.

My stance is you assert certain privacy invasions; I believe that human dignity has as a component, anonymity. Is dignity in us Constitution? Law school could help you understand where dignity, liberty, and freedom reign, and what parts of the Bill of Rights apply, and how.

I continue my stance that racing to the cloud to identify me on the street is a bridge too far.

See the other link, please, in the post, repeated here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/0...

That doesn't meet the smell test.

You can elect to be on Facebook. FACEbook.

Or you can elect to never go there.

On the street, you must travel, or your are jailed in your location, enslaving you. Actual freedom means walking down the street, going into a store, driving, biking, whatever.

Liberty dictates you have freedom of movement and association. It doesn't mean you can look up any random individual and drill through who/what they are. In public and private places, the Fifth Amendment applies, also unreasonable search and seizure, no matter who does it, government or not.

The Meta glasses are an onerous extension of cloud-based profile lookups and matching. Identity and privacy are dignity. Meta glasses remove that privacy, and any remaining shred of dignity.

I think what is missed here is that the device itself still works fine. You can download books to your computer and transfer via USB cable like always. The basic e-reader functionality is still there. What Amazon is pulling support for is all the services around it that made it more convenient to use- buying a book and having it delivered over the air to the kindle, and I presume the actually very useful method of emailing a book to an email address that behinds the scenes gets it delivered to your device.

I guess one point that I could see people being upset about is that they are in some sense losing access to books they already bought. That's not really entirely true, there is a kindle app and such, but its not the same. Even so, you do have the opportunity to download them all before they shut things off.

The hardware still works though, nothing is getting bricked.

This actually drove me back to Pixels. I felt like I was constantly fighting against all of Samsung's crap. They IMHO made the messages app look deceptively similar to the actual Google app, same with contacts. I felt for years Google and Samsung were in a low key war to own my contacts. And eventually you reach a detente- you have all the bloat in check... and then a big update comes and its alll back again. And then one time I had these random terrible games just appear- and the cause was another helpful Samsung update that somehow installed some kind of backdoor to install these games. The same went for the UI- nearly every departure they did from stock android IMHO made things worse, and I was constantly trying to tone it down- I couldn't get the clutter of notification icons to go away without having to do pretty invasive mods that again often undid themselves when updates came.

The hardware was better from the POV of a specsheet, and that's what kept me on Samsung for a bunch of years. However, when the Pixel 6 came out I decided to give it a go. And it was just a huge addition by subtraction in terms of experience. I hardly tweaked a thing- the OS just stayed out of my way. The hardware, for whatever it lacks on a spec sheet or benchmark, has never felt sluggish to me. Whatever flaws in the optics are more than made up for by the software. I feel like I own the phone again.

There was just so much underhanded crap that Samsung tried to pull, I just felt like I spent way too much time managing the phone. The tradeoff for "lesser" hardware is 1000x worth it IMHO, even if I lost a bunch of features that I rarely used (example: split screen view- which was recently-ish added to PIxels). I am long past the point where I want to mod my phone with roms, I just want it to work and stay out of my way.

The problem with the vast amount of hardware turf that Microsoft covers is different from say, Apples, because Apple highly controls their hardware platforms, and Microsoft by its nature, cannot.

Add in driver components, software legacies, and Microsoft users continue to pay this tax, generation after generation. So indeed these issues ARE similar.

When Oracle updates key functionality, they risk a domino effect, just as Microsoft does. The QA feedback loop can help, but all old code must become crusty because of physics. Reinventing the core code then causes its own ripple effects.

There are ways to fight this, at the risk of business partners going away-- the hardware makers and software vendors with huge installed bases.

Every time a change is made, it would be wonderful to do regression testing. That's why there are "insider" programs, the little beta site for these changes because regression testing today is impossible because the installation platforms are too diffuse.

There is truth in the aphorism, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall.".

Have you ever noticed why no one celebrates Patch Tuesday in the pub? It's because they're waiting by consoles waiting for stuff to break.

Windows, client and server, are a house of cards. This goes far back in history. The citations you challenge are each provably wrong. Ever wonder why the cloud isn't rife with Windows servers? There's a reason for that. Cloud Native Windows is almost an oxymoron. Linux and to a lesser extent, BSD, have taken over that space.

In so many ways, Windows is now a legacy data OS in data centers and for good reason. It's developer community has all but collapsed. It's backwards compatibility with other house-of-cards platforms like dot-net have put ball-and-chains around its neck.

The additions of tawdry pre-release-in-production AI with Co-Pilot causes new train wrecks each and every day.

No serious services developer uses Windows as a new development platform. The metaphors you diss are a dodge. You know exactly what the remarks are about. Windows continues to be a sieve for security. Linux and BSD are far more difficult to breach, correctly configured-- and it doesn't take much.

As a developer, if you are one, Microsoft is putting you to the pasture. Have fun eating oats.

And rightfully so, IMHO. The IA has legitimate goals for fair-use, but I don't think that fair use extends to bulk copying of an archive and for profit.

It's also my belief that the Internet makes it really convenient for outright theft of other intellectual property.

You can't have it both ways; kleptocracy is evil.