Article misses one of the scariest cases of abuse because it attacks society: https://www.kcur.org/politics-... Lenexa, Kansas police used Flock to track an op-ed writer that was critical of them.

Stalking the ex-girlfriend is one example of abuse that everyone, including the co-workers, can agree on is bad. What about when they stalk a reporter?https://www.kcur.org/politics-elections-and-government/2026-02-02/lenexa-police-investigated-column-writer-critical-failure-warn-ice-raid-councilwoman-investigation The potential for abuse is too great to justify its existence.

When they are being used to attack free speech, what other issue is more important? https://www.kcur.org/politics-...

Its not the large media companies responsibility either. Parents should be the one deciding and policing what their children do on the internet. They won't let them walk home alone after school why are they letting them walk alone on the internet? Plus, the idea that this age verification push has anything to do with protecting children is laughable. The end goal by politicians is Identification to use the internet in order to crack down on anonymous free speech.

Age verification laws have nothing to do with protecting children. It is an attempt to force collection of IDs and politicians go to their number one excuse whenever they decide to violate our rights, "think of the children."

The oil refineries in the US where built to process heavy crude oil. The US produces mostly light crude oil which is a higher value crude because of what it can be refined into. So the US is importing the cheaper heavy crude oil to use and exporting the more expensive light oil. The US isn't importing oil because our domestic production doesn't cover our use. The US is basically swapping expensive oil for cheap oil and making some money along the way.

You can mail Proton an envelope of cash with your username.

His comment about 7.0 doesn't mean any big new features is why some projects have gone to date based version number: 2026.02.01

Some vendors will actively try and lock consumers out of local control but there have been some vendors that have embraced Home Assistant: https://works-with.home-assist...

Another reason for schools to ban cellphones.

We have the world reserve currency, the currency that most nations stash (used to be gold), to protect their economies. This protects the US economy from things that would normally crash other nations, like printing all that money during the pandemic. We also have a service economy. Most Americans don't want to work in factories and if they did, most of us couldn't afford what they produce.

Most schools don't have the money to code something like this. The schools that do, should be spending that money on something else instead of reinventing the wheel. The regulations on what data schools have to collect and submit to state and federal governments make creating something like this impossible. I also don't see how you expect a school to vet the security. It also doesn't help that funding is being cut to CISA. Many school districts host powerschool locally but the hacker used a support tool to download the databases.

I'm guessing there will be lawsuits over if updates are included or not.

I'm not a fan of PowerSchool, but who are they selling the data to? The one example looked like it was just a tool to compare to other schools. As for anonymized data, it might just be counts and percentages. Thanks for the link. I'm all for student data privacy. I push for it within, but this could hurt schools. I use competing products.

The data collected for LMS is often similar to an SIS, assignments and grades plus some demographic information.