I assumed this was widespread already. It's very similar to the usual procedures to share hotel (and yes, aircraft) wifi across multiple devices while only paying for one connection. It's polite not to be a dick about it and try to steal strangers' credentials though.
Instead of stealing credentials, they could gain some goodwill by resharing the wifi with an SSID like "free_wifi_from_DEFCON."
They all use GPS now, so they are all as doomed as the rest of us.
London cabbies still have to pass The Knowledge. It's in the summary.
I honestly dont give a crap about one OS over the other because to me they fundamentally look and act the same. The minor differences with how to get to some such menu or another is such a minuscule leap/difference that it's negligible and I really dont care
I agree but it's frustrating as hell when the OS decides to change things for no good reason. For example, Windows moving the settings/control panel. And changing the behaviour. Some of the settings I have to click on "Save" and exit the menu, but other settings update live.
For information, the way this is solved in the EU is that laws (most recently through GDPR) makes it in principle illegal to surveil the public space.
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if curious neighbours are stupid enough to post videos of that include other people's property, or of your family walking on the public street, you could get a court order and have their camera system removed.
cannot post videos on the net, or you drag them to local court and have their camera removed as there is evidence they're filoing
you just cannot post videos
Everything I read on Slashdot makes it sound like the EU has very sensible laws about privacy and technology. As soon as I have improved my language skill I intend to move to an EU country, so I can enjoy the privacy, removable batteries and great food and beer.
Great it worked for you. I had video footage of a guy stealing stuff from my carport. The footage wasn't great, but you could see it was a white male and he had a tattoo on one forearm. I took a USB of the video to the police. They did nothing about it.
A year later a guy climbed the fence and burgled the house. Again, I took a USB drive with the footage to the local police.
The fucking pigs haven't even returned my USBs, let alone caught the criminals.
So why bother with cameras?
In several countries a functioning e-call system is part of a yearly roadworthyness test.
My 1990 Mazda would fail that test
Bilderburg just happened and no one covered it except for maybe one article in The Guardian.
I had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I remember first encountering this sort of thing when Google started to get big. I remember looking around for a contact email address or phone number, and wondering what I would do if I ever had a problem that couldn't be resolved by their online documentation... turn to the user "community"?
Ooh ooh I know this one! Google doesn't care. Google really doesn't care. Locked out of your account? They don't care. They have billions of other suckers giving them piles of email, location and phone data to mine and advertise on. You are not even a rounding error. It is better for their bottom line to ignore you. I went through all this when they cancelled my AdWords account due to "suspicious activity." Yes, I went through all the online documentation. I filled in their "appeal" form a couple of times. No response and the account remains locked.
It has taken a couple of years but I am almost 100% google-free now. I have an old legacy Gmail account but all my new emails use Proton and my ISP. The phone is on KaiOS so there's probably some legacy google crap on there too, but I hardly use it and the cell service is so shit where I live that Google would have trouble exfiltrating any useful info anyway.
But yeah, I'll repeat it one more time. Google doesn't care about you, me, or any of the peons who feed their advertising engine. If you spend a lot of money paying Google to advertise stuff, Google might care about you.
Maybe these days. Maybe (as I'm cynical) some companies intentionally cripple human support (e.g. pointing you to online resources) so that you might as well use AI support, and thus making an argument for cutting out human support. Like Google Search enshittifying itself to the benefit of Gemini
The Commonwealth Bank is cited in the article. They have been shutting down their physical bank branches for decades. At their remaining physical locations, they literally have an employee at the door whose job it is to make customers go away. They ask what the customer wants (duh, they want to do some banking) then tell the customer "you should use our app instead." The Commonwealth Bank has been enshittifying since before Cory Doctorow coined the word. Then they have the gall to blame the customers for being scammed. If the bank had allowed granny to talk to a human instead of forcing her to use an "app," then granny wouldn't be feeding her life savings into a bitcoin ATM to some scammer in Transnistria.
The article cites the Commonwealth Bank. They have been openly hostile to their customers for decades. They definitely don't want to "help" anyone except the guys in suits in the big office in Sydney. For decades they have had an active policy of shutting down retail bank branches, and what branches are left literally have a person at the door telling customers to go away. I'm not even joking. They stand there all day telling customers who have queued to speak to a human to "use the app." all the while charging every customer a monthly fee for the privilege of the bank making it hard for that person to get their own money. It's even worse in indigenous communities. There have been multiple government inquires into the their practices and the outcome is always that the bank is truly awful: https://treasury.gov.au/public...
Then absolutely nothing gets done and the bank comes up with new ways to squeeze their customers. So if the Commonwealth Bank has embraced some new tech, this is a sign that it is solely to improve short-term gains and has nothing to do with actually helping customers. The Australian banking cartel means that banks don't have to compete for customers, so there is no penalty for treating them like shit.
Many retired people have shares in the Commonwealth Bank and in conversation they say with a straight face "oh, they're terrible, but they pay a good dividend" like the rest of us should forgive them for profiting from the misery of others. The other big owner of Commonwealth shares is the various superannuation funds. So working Australians also aren't too upset when the bank does more evil, because they have been sold the fiction that superannuation will give them a comfortable retirement, and definitely isn't a slush fund for a whole generation of finance bros.
the biggest trick was to get the customer to look at the right thing that would most quickly reduce the problem space. Once the problem was clear it usually made the best solution clear, too. So far I hain't seen a chatbot like that.
Like many on here, I did my share of tech support back in my early years. "Asking the right questions" is the hardest part. Just because the last three customers had a firewall problem, doesn't mean the current customer does. A good script of questions can help, but a bad script will just get you stuck in a loop. And customers have been conditioned to expect the helpdesk to be useless, so by the time they give and phone for help they are already probably upset, so you have to first convince them that you really do want to help.
It's not always an easy job and doing it well costs money. Most businesses don't want to spend the money so they don't do the job well, and this taints all "help desk" jobs as low quality. Using LLMs sucks but probably won't make it any worse. I have found the text-based chatbots to generally be better than a phone call. I think these generally have human supervisors each supervising a few instances of the chatbot. So when the chatbot script breaks down, the human can intervene. There is no long "hold" at the start, and there is no trouble with accents or bad audio.
Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn't need to be.
These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.
And the world gets worse for all of us.
I live in Australia. I am a grown up. I haven't given ID to anyone online since this ban. It hasn't affected my grown-up life one bit. I can still bank, do business, read the news and communicate with people online just like I have always done.
I always thought the problem with gambling wasn't necessarily that poor people waste their money on it (though some percentage certainly do), but that rich people waste their money on it. Rather than investing in things that generate genuine economic activity, you end up with wealthy people just playing a game of financial chicken against each other.
Can't it be both?
Tough. I don't want a total surveillance state. We have it in England and our country is becoming a dystopian sh*t hole. Crime and shoplifting continue, but the hard working motorist is ticketed for accidental speeding.
It can always get worse. In
This guy even got a fine for doing a manual gear change because the authorities thought he was holding a phone: https://www.canberratimes.com....
I don't know what the system does if you happen to routinely drive with a comedy rubber phallus in your lap. Hopefully a few (thousand) public-spirited citizens are trying this out right now.
You think DVT is the problem, but imagine the toilets.
It would be an interesting graph to see which ruins the toilets more: fewer passengers for a long flight, or many passengers for a shorter flight.
What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey
