The fact that you had to point this out is in itself very telling: it shows that the issue isn't simply the extent of corruption, but also the overwhelming success with mass disinformation and censorship.

I know the term is overused, but Americans really are being gaslit into believing that these brazenly criminal acts are things that previous administrations have always done, or that the current administration deserves to do it because they have secured the power to do so. And neither of these are even remotely true.

There's this insidious mass delusion facilitated by the oligarchy and mainstream media. Their fascist playbook is:

1. Commit as many crimes as possible, as quickly as possible, so that people don't have time to react or investigate. This is Steve Bannon's "muzzle velocity" strategy.

2. Control media messaging and suppress honest journalism by taking ownership of media corporations and threatening those who refuse to be silenced.

3. Delay or bury investigations through misuse of government resources and agencies. Ignore court rulings.

4. With cooperation of tech companies, set up mass surveillance to make people afraid to oppose them.

5. Instill hopelessness in the public by showing that they are still getting away with these crimes.

Their actions aren't really about reputation, whether their own or the company they represent. It's all about ego and control for these people. It's about demonstrating power and influence, to show that they belong to a privileged class for whom certain consequences do not apply.

When we think of it in that way, we can explain so much of the behaviors we have recently witnessed (and continue to witness). These are people who believe they can act with impunity because they have not been held accountable in any meaningful way. And for the most part, that belief has proven to be correct, which is why we repeatedly see corrupt acts go unpunished.

It isn't really about the corruption per se. That's just the cherry on top. In fact, the real purpose is to demonstrate and signal to others that they CAN and DO get away with it, with no or minimal consequences. And the reason they want to demonstrate this is because it creates a feedback loop of more corruption and identifies those who will suck up to them versus thsoe who have ethical standards. How else do you know who to trust if you yourself are not trustworthy? Who do you know to target if you are a psychopath? Signaling that you can get away with murder is the key.

And I would argue that, in this case, the punishment was far too lenient, because if you think of the crime in this context, it really says that these people DID get away with it. They got a slap on the wrist. The company paid the bulk of the damages. And so, this settlement again signals that, yes, the privileged class is above the law, because even when the law finds them culpable, the penalty is nominal for them. It's a cost of doing business.

So let me see if I understand your argument, which is that because surveillance is already pervasive and ubiquitous, we should allow the use of even more of these devices in a non-public space (which, owing to conference registration and admission terms, DEF CON qualifies as such)? Devices that make it even easier to record others without their consent, including bathrooms where there is a clear expectation of privacy, becuase by their very design, are intended to be worn at all times because of their functional relationship to vision correction?

Okay. If the surveillance state is already a problem, why are you defending the idea of making it easier? I'd say that's the oddest hill to stand on. Just because people already use their phones to record others without consent in public does not mean we should let that practice expand to eyewear.

The "9 to 5" part sure sounds 1960ish. By the time I entered the workforce, it was 8 to 5, with an unpaid hour break for lunch. Now? Am on call. Might be working any hour of the day or night, on weekdays or weekends. Some days, just getting enough sleep is tough to accomplish.

If you're a conventionally attractive person, you wouldn't be caught dead with these massive, chunky frames sitting on your face, unless it becomes a status symbol for your conspicuous consumption. The reason you're conventionally attractive is because you know how to groom and dress yourself, and to not buy shit like this.

If you're not a conventionally attractive person but somehow can afford to spend the money on these, believe me when I say that if you wear these, everyone within a 100-yard radius can see you're a creepy tech nerd, and everyone within a 200-yard radius can smell that you're a creepy tech nerd. You may as well be wearing a giant sandwich board saying "I install peephole cameras in public restrooms."

AI has done nothing of the sort, and in fact, has done the opposite. Individuals in creative industries have lost their jobs and income because consumers have chosen to either generate their own slop or purchase slop because it's cheaper than real, human-made work. And there is no reason to believe nor any evidence to support the notion that AI will lead to this post-scarcity paradise you claim will come into being. Simply legislating it will not make it happen. As much as I respect Sanders for the attempt, it fundamentally fails to address the core, underlying problem with generative AI, which is that it can only thrive by stealing the collective output of actual humans, and in doing so, suppresses the desire to be creative.

Nobody will WANT to be free to do what they want if everything they do is watched, tracked, datamined, analyzed, and repackaged for consumption. The problem is not even about the economics of labor. It's about what the quality of life means for a society in which every thought and action is being analyzed. I don't want to live like that. I don't know anyone who does, and if you do, then YOU go and do it. I don't want any part of your dystopian panoptic bullshit.

There is no reason bitcoin can't slide back to being worth a dollar a coin. There no guarantee of value behind it. You can argue about whether fiat money is any better once the US went off the gold standard, but there is still a bit of irreplaceable value there; "the full faith and credit" means you can use it to transact business with the government, both by contracting to do public works for which the government pays you, and paying taxes and fees which are used to perform government functions and give you tokens such as licenses which show that you've contributed your share. Money's very liquidity for these purposes is a source of value, even if you can't redeem your picture of a President for precious metal. By contrast, Bitcoin literally isn't worth anything unless you can find someone (for some reason the phrase "bigger fool" comes to mind) to trade you something for it that does have value.

I don't think that's a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.

And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.

The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.

So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.

I don't know this Eggers guy. I haven't read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they've stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.

I found the setting for this: chrome://password-manager/settings has a "Use Windows Hello when filling passwords". It was off for me - I can only assume that is the default, as I have several Chrome profiles over several PCs and it's off in all of them.

Also noticed there's this:

which, if I click on, takes me to a page that just says "On-device encryption canâ(TM)t be used for this account. Sign in to another Google Account and try again."

The teachers--at least, the competent ones--are often the only ones who care. But they're the least empowered of the parties involved.

They are paid a pittance by the district and treated like glorified babysitters by the parents. They have had their ability to enact discipline taken away; parents are unwilling to hear that their little angel could do anything wrong or that they themselves are responsible for a home environment that doesn't foster learning.

The administrators only want to line their own pockets. They keep increasing class sizes and cutting programs and services, while repeatedly falling for band-aid, quick fix "solutions" pushed by corporate educational snake oil salesmen.

Parents are overworked, underpaid, and can barely enforce discipline on their kids. They've abdicated their role as parents to social media algorithhms. In this regard, social media is a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. In other parts of the world where social media is as pervasive, why have we not seen a similar magnitude of decline in learning outcomes?

Meanwhile, corporations and politicians are behind much of these problems. It's a societal and cultural issue, in which those in power correctly believe that they don't need to cultivate future generations of intelligent citizens. They only need some of them--their own children and friends--to be well educated, while the rest of the working class only needs to be smart enough to do whatever menial tasks their corporate overlords enslave them to do.

Ah interesting, never seen that before! I've just turned it on to see how annoying it is.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'auth' here, but on my PCs (Windows 10):

It does require auth for passkeys, I think every time, but not for regular saved passwords in the browser. I have Windows Hello set up for a couple passkeys and I have to auth via Hello when I use them.

But I have regular saved passwords for almost every other website I use routinely and am not prompted to auth via Hello for that. My understanding is that for these, the auth/unlock is done once at user login and then the session has access to the unencrypted passwords.

(I posted elsewhere in this thread about Chrome using DPAPI as of 2024 - this was news to me so it's possible I'm just way out of date).

Been trying to figure out how Chrome does this because my recollection was that Chrome had the exact same problem - I remember making a similar point to you in forum threads a couple years back with people complaining about it then.

It looks like in 2024, Chrome added support for something called the Data Protection API (DPAPI), which provides some mitigation against arbitrary memory reads:

It's not clear from my quick read if this defends against this class of "attack" in all cases but it reads like it might provide at least some protection?

If that is the case, it of course raises the question why Microsoft - who created DPAPI in the first place - wouldn't use that same service in the same way. (i.e. maybe it just sucks and they know it's a waste of time :)

But I thought we were fighting fascism. Why don't you come out from behind the anonymous coward identity if you are so convinced that the oligarchy is better?

Too bad so many have hurt feelings about doing the right thing. Typical Slashdot.

The reason I pulled away from Amazon is because I'm not going to sit around pissing myself about the rich while funding their wealth at the same time. Too bad too many assholes don't feel the same about the situation. I still like physical books, for the most part, so now I buy used from Half Priced Books who has a local storefront.