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U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

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61–70 of 381 posts

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#61

> The government says it needs this information to identify and interview witnesses who can testify about how the tools were actually used. Why start this whole thing, if you don't already have this information and have people willing to help you as witnesses? Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then? Rather than finding every user of th…

> Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then? They probably have tons of data and testimony from witnesses who use the product illegally. You can find hundreds of threads online of people telling you how to defeat emissions controls using their products. The case prosecutors want to make is that EZ Lynk knowingly enables this behavior. If…

Then they don’t need to unmask users to get testimony, right?

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#62
post #29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just write it yourself? We can all have ChatGPT regurgitate the same information. You're supposed to add value, editorializing isn't enough. Just like I don't want to look at AI art or listen to AI music, I don't want to read AI written blogslop. The web is now full of shit. What a waste.

Writing it myself would mean doing the research myself. How would I do that? ChatGPT can do it faster at scale. Then the summaries are short enough that cutting any particular part wouldn't make sense. I could re-word it, I guess. Why don't you write all your assembly code yourself? Why do you use a compiler? Why do you generate images, when you can draw them yourself? You're supposed to add value. I don't think prep…

The people doing the downvoting are different people from the whiners. I'm one of the whiners.

That's kinda fair, like it's still useful to prepare a list, but it's also like if you didn't go research your information yourself why would I start from a position of charitability when I read it? When I research something with LLMs, I know to double-check everything myself before I use it as a basis for my thought or repeat it to other people. Knowing an article is AI written forces me to doubt every sentence. Or maybe it's worse, I have to assume nobody cared about the sentence. The old format was a guarantee that someone gave enough shits to put the article together. Relevance comes implicitly bundled in each sentence. It's like someone talking to you in public in that there's often a reason to pay attention.

It's not as though that person is going to say something correct, or ethical, but I've had a lifetime of dealing with human kinds of wrongness. When stuff is wrong, I'll know it's wrong because the article is slanted or wrong because the author was lazy etc., which will let me discount it selectively and still get value from it when, e.g., a slanted author contradicts themselves. Reading an LLM article I have no clue whether the person who put it up even read the whole thing, so when I read sentences, I have no guarantee that the sentence communicates something worth paying attention to. I dislike that ambiguity and would prefer to guarantee that the text is slop by asking a bot myself. Then I know its worth upfront. I'd be fine with it if these sites included a direct statement in bold at the top: HEY THIS IS AI SLOP IF YOU DONT WANT THAT LEAVE. Then I know exactly how to parse it.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#63
post #12

Welcome to our brave new digital world, governments and DOJs do this because now they can, I am afraid this is only the beginning.

How is this, in principle, any different from the DOJ using a subpoena to get customer records from an adult store that was allegedly selling illegal explicit material?

Just because you use the internet to commit the crime doesn't make it not a crime.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#64

Missing key points: Why is this administration, which is all for coal, oil, and against environmental policies pursuing THIS? This DOJ is all about pursuing cases for retribution. It could be, they already know someone they want to punish, and already found they're using the device. Or, use it as a source for finding people they want to punish.

It’s not about this administration. The lawsuit was filed in 2021.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#65

Missing key points: Why is this administration, which is all for coal, oil, and against environmental policies pursuing THIS? This DOJ is all about pursuing cases for retribution. It could be, they already know someone they want to punish, and already found they're using the device. Or, use it as a source for finding people they want to punish.

Also strange as it would disproportionately affect modified diesel trucks, who are overwhelmingly Trump supporters.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched a pickup roll coal in the middle of freaking East Bay, literally within site of downtown San Francisco, on a bicyclist. I reported their license to the California Air Resources Board, and not longer after that I saw it up on jacks in a neighborhood auto shop. That made my day. Asshole.

I'm in Idaho, so not such resource exists. It would have to be a federal agency that does the enforcement because our cops/prosecutors/lawmakers won't ever make something like that happen.

You can take temporary comfort knowing that it’s costing them $7 per gallon for that little asshole stunt. It seems you have to he is especially insecure to intentionally want to burn smoke on someone else. Especially when Tesla’s have a BioWeapon air filtration setting.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#67
post #29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just write it yourself? We can all have ChatGPT regurgitate the same information. You're supposed to add value, editorializing isn't enough. Just like I don't want to look at AI art or listen to AI music, I don't want to read AI written blogslop. The web is now full of shit. What a waste.

Writing it myself would mean doing the research myself. How would I do that? ChatGPT can do it faster at scale. Then the summaries are short enough that cutting any particular part wouldn't make sense. I could re-word it, I guess. Why don't you write all your assembly code yourself? Why do you use a compiler? Why do you generate images, when you can draw them yourself? You're supposed to add value. I don't think prep…

How can you be certain that the ChatGPT "research" you cite is a faithful representation of facts? How do you know that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google haven't introduced RLHF to subtly steer model output on specific topics to align with their political/economic interests?

I'm seeing increasing numbers of people credulously citing ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output as ground-truth fact. Many more are increasingly lulled into a false sense of security by the citations models append (to the point of neglecting even a bare-minimum skim of the cited sources, much less critically evaluating/contextualizing the nature of the sources themselves). My fear is that most people are blissfully ignorant at the new paradigms of propaganda that AI could enable; most of us here wouldn't be taken by the "slop" image-gen deepfakes (right now), but can you say the same about a couple of citations taken out of context?

We already know how trivial it is to win over a sizeable chunk of society by introducing red-herrings, misrepresenting statistical data, etc. -- oil companies perfected that art, and now as a result a huge number of voters in the US believe that climate change (doesn't exist|isn't man-made|is unavoidable). And that effort was "fully manual" and carried out without the aid of extensive psychological profiling at the individual level via an ad-surveillance complex. Today, society is almost completely defenseless against the extreme granularity/subtlety of manipulation that ownership of frontier AI models enables, especially when it's armed with even a fraction of the torrent of personal data that's being collected on each of us every day.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#68

That's why you should be downloading from F-Droid anonymously.

Any device with Google services installed has all apps scanned at least once per day. >Real-time protections for non-Play installs Google Play Protect offers protection for apps that are installed from sources outside of Google Play. When a user tries to install an app, Play Protect conducts a real-time check of the app against known harmful or malicious samples that Google Play Protect has cataloged. https://develop…

>Any device with Google services installed has all apps scanned at least once per day.

You can turn it off, so it's not "any". At best it's "most".

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'd HAPPILY report every single truck rolling coal around me if there was a place to report that information. Hell, I've seen a truck roll coal around cop cars and, obviously, nothing happened. This is just gross privacy intrusion masquerading as "protecting the environment". We don't need 100% compliance to the law and simple prosecution/ticketing of obvious violations would go a long way towards solving the p…

I was on a bike ride with my young kid. We were going up a hill and being passed by a lifted diesel truck. I could tell that the driver was desperately working the throttle to avoid accidentally blowing smoke in my kids' face. Congratulations, buddy. You've designed your life around being such a massive unlikeable asshole to random strangers. But for a brief moment you understood shame. I'm generally pretty libertari…

> I'm generally pretty libertarian, but I'm all for throwing the book at these guys.

To me that seems perfectly in line with being libertarian. One of the legitimate roles of the government is protecting people from violence by other people. Libertarians are not anarchists.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#70
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why F-Droid eventually won't work on new Android phones.

We're going to have two phones, the big brother phone you usually leave at home for banking apps and tax filing and boring stuff like that, locked down and nanny up, and the "real phone" from aliexpress or whatever that is purchased rooted and you actually live your real life upon. I would not be surprised to see double sided phone cases so we can carry our big brother phone with our real phone. There is some prior a…

>and the "real phone" from aliexpress or whatever that is purchased rooted and you actually live your real life upon.

Ironically the phones with best third party rom support are google pixels. Good luck getting lineageos support or even unlocked bootloader on a random aliexpress phone. You might be able to sideload without restriction, but the ROM is probably gimped, won't receive updates, and has random privileged apps possibly spying on you.

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