Yeah, I don’t think these cameras are used to ID people routinely. Government already has my photo - I have passport anyways. However, face scan is much more sophisticated and they cannot take it with overhead cameras

I draw a line between a photo and biometric face scan. I have a photo ID, so my government already has my picture, but face scan that is tied to my identity and allows for accurate identification is something new

No, I think that many people in my line were first timers, so they did both

I think this is what home NAS systems evolved into already. It’s not a network storage anymore, it’s a server that has a bunch of available apps, both proprietary and free. And many of these little boxes have enough resources to actually run a few typical “home server” services for a family and maybe some friends. They are often even marketed as a “personal cloud” or something like that.

Russia is no more totalitarian than any Western “liberal democracy”, their elections no more rigged than ours.

Ahahaha… Very funny. Can you please tell me how many politicians are imprisoned for their dissent in western democratic countries? Maybe there is a liberal democracy where the same person has been a president for 20 years plus 5 years as a prime minister? Or a democracy where a single party held majority in federal parliament for 21 years with last 8 years having more than 2/3 votes? By the way, it allowed them first to increase a presidential term from 4 to 6 years to let that one president to rule longer between elections, then to change Constitution to let that one president to be elected for his 5th term and potentially for 6th. Hey, what about a country where it is a crime to publicly say something about armed forces that contradicts what government tells people via government owned media? Up to 3 years in prison for that, you know… Like in any other western democracy, right? And that country has quite a few more laws criminalizing various public activities.

I get what you are saying about ruling class status quo, etc. Maybe from a perspective of someone who wants a radical change of the political system, Russian system might look not that different from western democracies. But totalitarian state feels very differently for people living in one. There is no political freedom, no freedom of speech, no choice, no chance to protest. Say something wrong and go to jail. It’s not an exaggeration, there was at least 3.5k prosecutions for social media posts or sometimes even for likes. The situation with freedom got much worse in last couple of years since the war with Ukraine began.

I gave maybe an oversimplified answer. I agree with you that a single person doesn’t control everything. But the government system is built to control what political entities are allowed to exist and express their views publicly. So, again naturally, the only parties that remain exist only because they follow president and party lines.

All independent parties have been stripped of the party registration or removed from all elected positions. Independent politicians get “foreign agent” status, forced to immigrate, get jailed or killed. Rigged elections don’t let almost anyone to be elected without government approval.

If we focus this discussion on LGBTQ topic, then I agree that many people in Russia are not “allies”, but as you mentioned yourself it might be caused by media (which is also far from being free) and the fact that there are laws in Russia making support of LGBTQ a crime. However, even with that, according to 2021 survey about a 1/3 of people there believed that LBGTQ people should have equal rights. Here is the link to that survey, they also have some details on trends of public opinion on the topic: https://www.levada.ru/en/2021/10/19/the-attitude-of-russians-to-the-lgbt-community/

Anyways, don’t judge people living in totalitarian state for the lack of progressive views.

Just ignore Mironov and his party. There are no independent parties in Russia, it’s all just a facade for Putin and his administration.

You still may find naive young members in Social Democratic, Communist, and even United Russia (the ruling party) that got ideas tey can do something but they either adapt to party lines or drop out over time. Mironov is a leader of the party and naturally he will say what Putin’s administration let him or tell him to say or what he thinks they like him to say.

Oh, sorry, I’ve assumed that you are in US since you posted an article about FTC.

I don’t know if there is a similar service in Europe. I think you could get a virtual card linked to a crypto wallet, but this obviously comes with downsides

There is Privacy.com that gives you virtual cards to use for purchases. Money go from your bank account to them. Destination is visible on payment description still, but it may fool bank’s algorithm. Or you can get paid plan from Privacy.com and mask destination completely.

Government: Only criminals use cash and crypto! Privacy advocates: Actually, this is not true… Government: makes cash and crypto illegal what do you say now, punks?

Because we all know that a sergeant and soldiers can’t even hit a starship from 10 meters. Yes, Stormtroopers, I’m talking about you. What, this is what community again?

I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.

While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.

Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Yeah, doesn’t seem that the proposed bill offers meaningful improvements. The article says

Under current New Hampshire law, voters are asked to provide proof of identity and age (usually a driver’s license), proof that they live where they want to vote, and proof of citizenship (either a birth certificate or a passport) in order to be able to register and vote.

It’s only if a person doesn’t have a proof of citizenship, they can sign a sworn affidavit to register or vote, which will be checked by attorney general office after elections.

This looks to me as a solid system already. One cannot vote by impersonating someone else, one cannot vote if you are not living in the district, one can only lie about citizenship with a significant risk of that lie to be exposed after elections with all legal consequences.

Unless you belive that damn liberals moving buses of illegals with forged IDs to steal the elections, there is nothing much to be worried about.

Apple’s PR is better. With Microsoft all news titles were like “OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI”, and with Apple it’s more like “Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been”.

Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don’t even have yet.

Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it’s done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it’s closed source and is subject to change at any time.

Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple’s products whatever the company does.

Natural teeth roots promote bone regeneration around them, while implants don’t. Therefore bone loss with age is worse around implants

Yay, I can get some targeted ads about data center hardware!

Mullvad has a feature to add random noise into traffic patterns, actually

This is a good point. Maybe setting up a VPN at home would the good option for when I’m on the go

Thanks for the suggestion, but anonymity is not my goal with VPN. I known about tor etc, and it is not working well for everyday web surfing

That would be just one last step before giving up on using internet entirely