There ought to be a "one switch" law: Cut off all on-device AI features with a single switch.

If you want to pick and choose, use some, not others, OK, that's on you, you can't use the switch.

But if you just want it all off, you shouldn't have to continuously pore through arcane and poorly-named menus looking to find where the tech bros have wormed it in, or turned it back on with an update.

One switch. I want it off. All of it.

"Realistically the greatest risk to your phone's privacy lives behind the screen not in front of it."

Well, until getting root with an exploit comes along...

Then authentication and encryption - or a better protocol (http?) would seem de rogue.

C'mon, "Melania" is offering some VERY stiff competition in that race.

Good to see ya, Woz!

It's theoretically possible to have both.

Let's suppose Meta honestly builds WhatsApp on the OpenWhisper protocol, honestly encrypting the chat from end to end.

And then let's suppose Meta _also_ transfers the contents of the input fields back home via a separate encrypted tunnel, whether via a "feature" of the WhatsApp app, or some other infrastructure it's placed on the phone.

In such a case, It _is_ end-to-end encrypted, just pointlessly so.

Sure, phone OSes are designed not to let one app's infrastructure snoop on another app. That doesn't mean there's no way around the problem.

For all the worry about quantum computers breaking encryption, device compromise is a faster and easier route to the same end (see:NSO).

"Why?"

"We've recreated a dam disaster. The entire lab is flooded. The guys are all in kayaks. Gonna have to get Grandma off the roof."

Also, if you're on a business network or a work VPN, or any of a few other situations, they could be assuming the location of your gateway to the Internet (so not a router in your house). One of my former offices in Georgia was periodically "in Texas".

I'm not saying any of this suckness is OK. Just providing some of the failure modes.

It ought to be better

Dunno where your jurisdictional borders are, but you might be closer to another ZIP Code's boundary than you are to Whole Foods or Lowe's.

The culprit for your "wrong store" problem might be 'ZIP code search', vs 'geocoded address search'.

The largest ZIP code in the US is bigger than Maryland, and 'center of nearest ZIP code' can be a blunt instrument.

Hard to say if that kind of failure is poor shop site design, bad database design, or a fallback from refusing to provide your location (maybe a long time ago and remembered/persisted).

Could easily be something else, of course. Amazon certainly is one of the most mature shippers re: GIS. Whole Foods? Who can say?

YOU SIMPLY DON'T UNDERSTAND!

We're ONLY trying to force this shit on your face that you don't want on your face! It BELONGS on your face, otherwise you're not ENJOYING it!

BTW, just TRY aspic! You'll like it! No, really - not like last time!

But they're getting essentially random and unvetted information from a chat bot. That ought to be illegal.

Something only a crazy person would do...

This is, idea-wise a Raspberry Pi 400 (and yes, a VIC-20, A C64, a TRS-80, a TI-99/44, an Atari 800XL, an Amiga 1200...).

What I wanna know is whether HP brings back B. Dalton and Egghead so you can get programs on cassette tape!

If you mean individual emails on servers all over the world, sure. Guys looking without a warrant can just go fish. Everyplace. In the world.

If you mean my own mail server (which I run), nope.

Don't want my email corpus sitting on someone else's server. Do not want IMAP.