IMO anything to raise awareness is good. Right now, lots of ppl don’t even know it’s happening!

I like the sign idea. Tho, if you’re petitioning your state reps for signs, you might as well petition them to ban the effing things. Individual communities are seeing success. Moving it to the state level is good too! Prob harder, but also more impactful.

We might be able to do signs without the state on board. Might have to get property owner permissions or w/e, IDK, but that’s possible. Very few ppl want these things. They just don’t know.

But how about, say, Lemmy, or other self hosted places

Well… how many Lemmy instances are hosted in the EU, Canada, USA, Australia, UK, …? They can be threatened under the full power of the state, unless they req ID checks.

OK, you may say, just use one in Tuvalu! But someone below mentioned it. Govs will not think, gosh darn it! I guess we got foiled by those rascally nerds! Pack it up guys, we lost! No, they will double down. They will create national firewalls. VPN bans. Already the UK, and Utah in the USA are pushing for VPN bans. They will make examples of people, to deter the rest.

It’s very hard to solve political probs with technical methods.

I guess that’s a morsel of hyperbole, but just in case! The truck is tied to your person. Those cameras are specifically designed to ID it. And not just plates. Other features too, scuffs and scratches, stickers, window tint, trailer hitches, even TPMS signals. W/e. Anything that fingerprints the vehicle.

If your intention is to be caught, for the purpose of making a public legal fight, that’s one thing. But be aware that’s a likely outcome. NAL, but I believe the case would not be about ALPR. It’ll be about your specific actions, with you as the defendent, not Flock. You can end up charged with criminal mischief or vandalism or w/e.

Hasn’t virtually every single study ever performed on the subject found a strong, direct link between unhappiness and social media use?

From what I’ve seen, the answer is it’s complicated. On avg, you’re right, and it prob does cause unhappiness and mental health probs. But there are unique situations where it can be helpful. Ex, people who do not fit norms of thier peers, and find healthy connections with others more like themselves. So it has no single, simple universal answer.

The algos, esp on big tech social media like FB, IG, TT, X, etc, are very much designed to make you unhappy and outraged. Even the data scientists who designed the algos have testified to that fact before the US congress. B/c anger and outrage is the most powerful way to make you engage more. TT’s internal research shows the more you use TT, the more probs you have with cognitive skills like memory formation, empathy, and anxiety.

Ofc, the harms of social media doesn’t mean these bills are the right way to handle that. I believe we have a prob. But this is not the right solution.

Kinda with you in spirit. How I think about it is… it is harmful for both adults and children. Esp in big-tech co form. FB, IG, TT, X, and w/e. There’s a lot of research about it. But the cure can be worse than the disease. What the EU wants to do is not the right answer to address the immense harms of social media to our world.

Both the US and Canada have similar bills on boil. Both are also terrible ideas.

Yah I do agree there will keep being those quasi gray area legal sites.

But even so, most ppl will live with the ID reqs, since they won’t go to the gray sites. Esp if the heavy hitters like US/EU go down the China road of hardcore clamping down on VPNs. In China today, some ppl get around that. It’s just very risky, so most ppl give up and use what the gov wants them to. I’m afraid we could eventually see a similar story in the US and EU. Also I forgot that Canada has a bill pending too, Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act”.

IDK how the US bill will go. I am trying to remain hopeful. It sounds like it passed the House, but could be DOA in the Senate. And even if it passes the Senate, it’ll be hit with 1A lawsuits and go before SCOTUS. We can’t count our chickens yet or let off the pressure, but it has hurdles to clear before it becomes law of the land.

It often shadowbans for that, so you can still log in and read, but if you post, only YOU can see your post. Nobody else can see your post. It gives you the illusion that you posted.

One of the ways ppl knew if they were shadowbanned, was to open the post in a private window. But that will be harder now. The priate window won’t be logged in, so you won’t be able to look. And ofc if you log in, you’ll see it, b/c that’s what shadowban does. The only way will be to use an alt account to look.

The enshittification continues.

But how strong of a win when due process is optional now?

There was actually another thread posted about this case a couple hours after mine here that got a lot more traction. I need to work on my clickbait skills, haha. WAY more discussion over there.

But if you want my $0.02 about that. IMO we absolutely have probs now with due process being ignored sometimes. Various high profile cases. That’s a big prob and we have issues to fix. But due process is still here in general, and is still being upheld in endless cases by endless judges in endless courtrooms. They don’t make the headlines, b/c “everything was OK” isn’t much of a headline. It’s still the norm, I’d say.

Both things can be true at once, that we have bad problems, AND due process still works most of the time. Lots of cases are thrown out due to 4A violations, and a shitton of cases were won recently against 1A violations. Arguably, this very case, and Carpenter v. United States, both helped strengthen 4A protections. Will that play out perfectly in every case every time? No, I doubt it. But it does set a tone. It does give the lower courts ammo to use.

Anyway, we coulda had a much worse outcome. With this court, it’s a crap shoot how anything goes.

There are.

But if you get the US, EU and China all requiring ID verification… plus other authoritarian leaning countries like the Saudis and w/e. The odds that like, IDK… Bahamas or Iceland gonna hold the line on this are… long.

Prob not even Canada has the throw weight to do it in the long run. Love you frozen northerners, I got your back in every way I can in this effed up world, but Canada just doesn’t punch in the weight class of the EU, US, and China. Editing: I forgot Canada has Bill C-34, a similar bill to what US and EU are floating.

It’s so, so important for ID reqs not to pass at the national level in the US. There are strange bedfellows tho. It has bipartisan support AND bipartisan opposition. It could also face major 1A challenges here. Time will tell.

We have kitties and cookies and stuff.

Yah. We do. For now. Mostly b/c it’s flying under the radar.

Long run, I think Lemmy cannot escape enshittification. Bots, politicians, lots of drivers.

Not having outrage amplifying algos helps Lemmy. But that’s like 1 driver of enshittitification. There are many other sources that will try to shit on the cookies.

I believe Lemmy is more resistant than reddit or w/e. But it won’t be enough. Esp if it becomes very popular.

Me -> NAL. So I’m only guessing.

One prob might be that fingerprinting IDs a device. There could be a 70 yo and a 7 yo using the same dev in the same house. It prob wouldn’t stand up in court when Little Billy, 7, became a victim because Grandpa Wilson, 70, used the same device. Or the old dev fingerprint gets used with a new account. They let the account in b/c they know the fingerprint. But they never knew the dev was sold to a new owner who is 15.

Fingerprinting is way more powerful than most ppl realize. But it does have limits. If the EU, or the US, comes at them, they need something straighforward and easy to explain to a jury. If Little Billy forged a photo ID, that’s a solid defense for the co. But if they screw up with hard to explain statistical methods, they have more legal risk.

I think the only way we’re getting out of this is if people start protesting to their representatives way louder and in way greater numbers.

I agree that is our best hope.

There is not a long term tech solution for a political problem. Best we can do is kick the can down the road. This has to be solved politically.

Read-only use of old reddit was the only way I use it. There are actualyl some good resources for niche topics. You can search, like how do I disassemble my electric toothbrush to replace the battery the mfg sealed into the unit. Somebody prob posted about it. Or weird game trivia. W/e.

Read only searching was the best remaining use for reddit. Which will now die.

space heaters, and more from their chinese cloud backdoor.

Cloud enabled … … space heaters?

That’s up there with cloud enabled Bunsen burners as “this is just not a good idea at all.”

the kind that only works on the local LAN

I am lowkey astonished that it isn’t the normal way.

That sweet, sweet data is just too tempting.

YW.

Yah the risk is prob modest provided you don’t give it a wifi pw so it can get onto your local n/w. Modest… but not zero. Lots of IOT devices ship with def passwords, and all units of that model share it. Also, somebody in range with the app could connect, depending on what the mfg does for auth. Some might require a button on the appliance to pair, that’s safer. Mine didn’t.

Also in theory, it could look for open networks on its own. That’d be a bigger risk for appts in a Manhattan hi rise than, like, somebody on a horse property on 40 acres.

Mine was wifi, which has a longer range, but some might be bluetooth. When I was sniffing for the wifi signal, I noticed my neighbors appliances too, lol.

Oh another good search is, model number + service manual. Or model number + repair manual.

Tyvm!

Wish I didn’t have to spend my time doing it. But here we are.

IDK if it will directly impact Flocks - although I don’t know it won’t. But at the very least, it helps build momentum. There is a national level, bipartisan bill to heavily restrict ALPR now. The more legal momentum there is vs related issues like geofence requests, the easier it is for that to pass. Also a lot of municipalities have already banned ALPRs locally, so that also helps build momentum.

I fucking hate ALPRs.

Disclaimer -> NAL. I think it’s extraordinarily rare for rulings to have retroactive effect. If sth was legal when you did it, you can’t be held to account if that thing becomes illegal later on. That would open up all kinds of bad probs. Editing to add, your ability to follow the law today, can’t require that you successfully predict future laws or future court decisions.

But geo-fence data already collected would fall under this decision in the future. So let’s say there’s 2024 data. Data still exists on some Google server. Now it’s 2028. Cops would need a warrant to obtain the 2024 data in 2028.

That’s my understanding. Again NAL.