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Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

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Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#481

Post by roywiggins »

gcanyon wrote: post #448
roywiggins wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain. And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.

If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake). And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.

It's not that security is fake, it's that giving up liberty doesn't naturally produce more security, and pursuing greater liberty doesn't necessarily erode security either.

It's not like pre-Revolutionary America was a notably secure place that inevitably see-sawed into a freer but insecure place afterwards.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#482

Post by johnnyanmac »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #367
pear01 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices. These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win. Any such agenda mus…

And we can get there with ranked-choice voting. We really need to press hard until we get it.

When we get out of this hole, that will be the number 1 thing I dedicate my civic duties towards. It's the last true bipartisan gridlock and it of course works against the people.

Even by its nature, ranked choice means that radical ideas need to temper themselves or somehow be extremely popular. Trump never would have won in a ranked choice system.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#483

Post by weird_tentacles »

jeffrallen wrote: post #249
notepad0x90 wrote: post #234

I don't think people grasp the gravity of the situation. I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and contr…

It is not yet illegal or dangerous to call for a general strike. Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services will people create enough economic disruption that the billionaires will call their political toadies to heel and get them to start fixing this shit. We still have the power to panic the billionaires, and they have the power to get what they want. If what they want is tempor…

Ha! The "general strike".

The general strike is a sad, obvious myth solely to delude us tax-cattle that we will have power, one day, for a day. Something something workers something bosses something something struggle. Bullshit for peasant workers.

"general strike" needs to be thrown in the same box as "communism" and "democracy" and "representation".

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#484

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

hypeatei wrote: post #452
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t remember suggesting that. But, go on with your strawman, you are doing great.

" Now… let’s say you were to call the national guard in to safeguard those areas "

Ah yes. Good point.

Someone uses a scenario as reductio ad absurdum, you can yell “THEYRE ONLY 12” and claim it was an endorsed suggestion.

I mean it, you’re doing great. Keep digging.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#485

Post by 3form »

kortilla wrote: post #437
wredcoll wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, nobody knows why "the west" (whatever that is) leapfrogged anyone, and this is a fairly small period in terms of total human history.

The industrial revolution is quite well documented

And any leapfrogging done there hardly has anything to do with human rights I guess, so I'd say the poster above has a really bold claim here

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#486

Post by nobody9999 »

Gormo wrote: post #475
saulpw wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the arguments for approval voting, and I'm sure it's all the things you mention and more, but people don't get it . I don't get it. I don't want to vote for both Hillary and Bernie. I want to vote for Bernie, and then only if Bernie can't win , would I let my vote go to Hillary. You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally…

Approval voting seems to me to be worse on all counts that the previous commenter was levying against ranked-choice. To your point, the spoiler effect seems like it would be much worse with approval than with a ranked ballot, since highly partisan voters would have little reason to approve of any candidate other than the single candidate they want in office. Approving of anyone else lessens their candidate's chance o…

>A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.

That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.

While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.

I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."

In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.

All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#487

Post by acdha »

tsunamifury wrote: post #451
acdha wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren’t loopholes and are widely known? I mean, they have an entire E2EE iCloud feature giving customers a choice between security and convenience: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756 RCS has never offered that security guarantee at the protocol level. Google has deployed a proprietary encryption layer on top but refuses to allow other clients access. This was rather famously part of the blue/green message di…

Im referring to the legal and cooperation loopholes Apple has put behind those. Each one allows for access, at times warrant less, at any moment. It’s bizarre that you think this is “Ok”. Insane you are defending it. Combined it makes a hard hard take that they are security oriented. Beyond that Apple has cooperated with data turnover at the personal request of President Trump multiple times. So pull your head out of…

Okay, can you express the “legal and cooperation loopholes Apple has put behind those” clearly enough for me to understand what you mean? Are you alleging that iCloud E2EE is compromised? Are you saying that Apple promised RCS would do something more than the carriers designed it to do? It’s hard to assess vague, unsourced claims.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#488

Post by syntheticcdo »

mvanbaak wrote: post #443
dopidopHN2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight

but then you send a mail to $person, and this $person uses gmail, and now your mail is still indexed by google. The only way to get around this is to use encryption. dont send plain text email.

And if the recipient uses a Chrome extension to handle the decryption... Google still has access to the cleartext. There's no winning.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#489

Post by mschuster91 »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #397
mschuster91 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. Which changes? metoo certainly didn't change much, the George Floyd protests also led to nothing, just look at how ICE has been executing US citizens in the last months. In 2025 alone, before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE murdered 32 people with zero accountability [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-intera…

Shot. Killed. Executing is a ridiculously inaccurate framing bordering on rage baiting. And that is before we get to whether Pretti or Good were committing felonies, when they were willfully obstructing federal agents from doing the job they were assigned.

> when they were willfully obstructing federal agents from doing the job they were assigned.

Even if one assumes that to be true: there might have been a case for an arrest, but not for firing into a moving vehicle that is forbidden even under ICE guidelines, and certainly not for unloading a whole magazine worth of ammunition into an unarmed person.

I stand by my judgement: both cases were extrajudicial killings and clear enough in their intent to be called executions.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#490

Post by 3form »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #271
hermannj314 wrote: post #252

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls. 1. Postal Service Act of 1792 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera. We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to d…

Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!" Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to th…

>Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.

Which Chinese cameras do this? I've only seen some dumb IP cams.

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