431–440 of 505 posts
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The pinephone isn't much more expensive then that and doesn't have these problems.
You can't be serious about this right? Except from being a black rectangle, the ~$100-ish Xiaomi device isn't comparable to a PinePhone. The Xiaomi phone is better and more attractive in any other way, except privacy.
I don't see how you can expect any less of this, even in the US. American companies collect vast amount of information that are either acquired by the state later on, acquired via some deal with the state, or some network of revolving doors is further entrenching US-style state capitalism which erases the distinction. Frankly, American corporations are effectively more powerful than the government at this point, at least in certain domains (like where freedom of speech is concerned). It'll only get worse until something gives.
And given that American greed funded the wealth and power of the CCP in the first place, given the massive investments in China, I do not expect the globalist American imperial oligarchy to change course. Why would they? They like what the CCP is doing. They share more in common with the Chinese ruling class than with most Americans.
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The only company I would trust with home automation at this point is IKEA. They're the only ones doing this who are actually in the business of making their customers' homes nice, rather than collecting and monetizing their customers' data. (And now I'm half expecting someone to respond that IKEA also collects our data. I don't know if they do, and I'd expect them not to, but I'd really like to know if they do.)
It's a company. With shareholders. Even if you can trust them now, that's no guarantee for the future. Trusting companies is just silly.
I think what the GP is stating is that Ikea's model is based on selling home goods, so the incentives align to sell you home goods not collect data for the Dutch government. Apple could steal all your most private data as well, but their business is luxury electronics so it's not in their best interest. Could this change? asolutely, but are you more concerned with what could be, or what currently is?
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Genuinely, I really want to see Purism succeed and increasing numbers of competitors in that space, because we need tools that don't require so much blind trust. Whether caused by inept software devs, scope for malicious code / backdoors in firmware, analytics spyware, and whether this stuff is well intentioned or not, if it can be abused, it will be. Open source and verifiable down to the firmware is the only chance…
> Open source and verifiable down to the firmware While I agree with your intent, the problem is that, many open source software is not verifiable. Remember that a Kaggle competitor was openly cheating with his published code? (cf. https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/ai_kaggle_contest_che... ) Eventually he got caught, but it's sometimes extremely difficult to spot a well-hidden malicious code in a plain sight. We…
> While I agree with your intent, the problem is that, many open source software is not verifiable.
To me, this sentence reads as "That a nice idea, but untenable in practice." rather than "Open source is necessary, but shouldn't be considered sufficient." which strikes me as counter-productive to the objective of easily verifiable software.
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How much political influence do you think someone like Bezos really has? Everyone in washington hates him. No one wants to do favors for him. They drag him in front of congress do get a bunch of soundbites to play next election cycle. They win elections on shutting down his headquarter plans. They want to break up his company, raise his taxes on unrealized capital gains, they want to force him to divest his personal…
> Everyone in washington hates him. In public, sure. Behind the scenes, they're taking meetings with his lobbyists, and somehow the tax raise never happens despite politicians talking about ad nauseam. Part of modern politics is running a kabuki theatre of performative populism on the campaign trail. Not much happens once they are in office, because you need quick wins ahead of the next election.
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I realise this is an opinion du jour around here now, but it's a pretty paranoid take on the market economy. I trust that if I buy a can of coke, it will contain coke because coke want to keep selling me coke. They don't need to be good people, they just have to care about making money in the future. The fact that I think they care about that is why I can trust that the can of coke in fact contains coke with high pro…
> market economy If your argument for the market economy working in a way that shouldn't inspire paranoia is based on trust and distinguished consumer choice, you've not been paying attention to world news or you're arguing in bad faith.
No, I think you missed the point. It's based on greedy organisations being predictable. Amazon will send stuff we order so that we buy more stuff from them. Electricity grid with zero regulation will fail to invest in preventative measures against extreme events. Trust or distrust arises from the particular game theoretic situation we're talking about. Simply thinking every corporation will screw us at every moment is the paranoia.
Related to Xiaomi, the company is also doing some sketchy things in the smart home space under their brand "Aqara". I use HomeKit in my apartment and opted for Aqara branded wireless buttons and temp/humidity sensors because of the attractive hardware and good reviews. The devices require a wi-fi connected hub, not too strange for things that use Zigbee, so I gave that a go. Well, on cursory examination, the Aqara/Xi…
It doesn't mean Xiaomi doesn't learn everything about my air quality, temperature and humidity, but it at least decreases the attack surface.
Related to Xiaomi, the company is also doing some sketchy things in the smart home space under their brand "Aqara". I use HomeKit in my apartment and opted for Aqara branded wireless buttons and temp/humidity sensors because of the attractive hardware and good reviews. The devices require a wi-fi connected hub, not too strange for things that use Zigbee, so I gave that a go. Well, on cursory examination, the Aqara/Xi…
I use a couple of Aqara sensors to report temperature back to my Home Assistant instance via a HUSBZB-1 USB Zigbee dongle[0]. They work pretty well, although they report data pretty infrequently absent any large temperature swings, so not great for data-viz purposes. I'm not at all surprised the hub thing constantly chats with its family back in China, but a properly security-paranoid home automation aficionado would…
That sounds like the definition of a cell phone.
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Considering the current target of deplatforming is the far-right, and given Germany's history specifically, they have a lot of reasons not to trust local hardware and software. The same goes for the Le Pen crowd in France, a somewhat adversarial government on the other side of the globe is often less risky than the status quo across the pond allied to the current French establishment.
I was wondering how long it would take until we got to the argument of "oh no, won't somebody please think of the unfortunate oppressed fascists! it's a good thing that xiaomi has phones and software for them, because their own local european government is against them". The paradox of tolerance and an open society is that if you allow actual fascism to flourish (and Le Pen is absolutely a fascist, in my opinion), yo…
"oh no, won't somebody please think of the unfortunate oppressed fascists!..
The latest version of "terrorist", "activist" or "heretic".
and Le Pen is absolutely a fascist, in my opinion
Consider this - If a "fascist" is democratically elected, what wins: anti-fascism (presumably from the perspective of an opposing 3rd party, as Le Pen doesn't describe herself as a fascist); or democracy?
so you say "if you allow actual fascism to flourish.. something much worse in the long run" - who gets to decide what is "allowed", and what isn't?
Seems to me the basis for such stability would have nothing to do with subjective judgements of what constitutes "fascism" - and more to do with principles of democracy - i.e. a fascist entity can be democratically elected - it just can't be given powers that would allow it to override democracy, or escape legal oversight. Perhaps the key word is "extralegal"?
The problem is that too many political entities (not just far-right) seek extralegal, overreaching powers; believing it OK so long as "they can be trusted"; but if the king of today is a good king, his heir might still be bad. And the good government that allows for overreach enables the bad government that does the same.
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I have a cheap air quality meter which basically connects to an MQTT broker server in China to transmit its readings constantly. The phone app connects to the same MQTT server, subscribes to a topic and receives the readings. I guess this is a very simple way to do it. Too bad the MQTT server has no authentication so you can actually subscribe to any topic. Many IoT solutions seem to be made by developers not very ex…
Are you saying you can actually read the air quality readings of other users? That's... quite an oversight. :-/