491–500 of 622 posts
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This is why I advocate for making selling location/identifying data illegal. If nobody is allowed to sell it then the government cannot legally buy it.
Just because the government can't buy it, doesn't mean they can't ask for it reeeeallllllly persuasively.
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As people are getting shot by ICE today. Today on HN on the front page there was an article about someone being forced to use their biometric security to unlock their phone. And then to say this country has never been what I’m saying is to ignore Jim Crow, sundown towns that were prevalent into the mid 80s, etc.
Democrats (the South) always said that this country was always about slavery. They used that rhetoric to argue FOR slavery for decades after it was abolished. This is all documented in supreme court cases from the 18th century on up through the civil war. Some of the founding fathers argued as attorneys in some of those cases in fact, stating firmly that slavery was always illegal in the United States. Republicans (L…
Let me ask you this: what party did Strom Thurman swap to and why?
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In general the emergency services would rather come out for something that sounds on the face of it stupid ("This sign is hanging down above the road and flapping in the breeze, can you come out to it?") and deal with it with plenty of time. Far better than getting the call "This sign has come down and chopped a bus in half, and then four cars have run into the back of the wreckage". Build the fence at the top of the…
yea, that's exactly why I called. 99% of people wouldn't notice, and of those that do 99% won't call.
What, you want me to call 999? To get a ring that's too tight off? I mean it's hurting my finger but is it really an emergency?
Yes, dumbass, it's an emergency. Get the ring off your finger right now before the blood supply gets compromised and you end up with a big slug of stale dead blood washing round you when you finally do get it off. You could lose your hand if you piss about with it too long.
I know it seems like overkill to have a 18-tonne Scania rock up with five guys in it just to cut through that little ring, but they have the right tools to do it quickly and easily, and no-one wants to have to cut your hand off.
Ring 999 while you still have two working hands.
Smoke alarm going off? No apparent reason? At least ring them up for advice. There might be something you haven't seen. Just phone them.
It's far easier dealing with you not being on fire in the first place, than dealing with you being on fire later. Not being on fire is good.
"and notify the user when such attempts are made to their device." We aren't going to remove the security state. We should make all attempts to, but it won't happen. What needs to happen is accountability. I should be able to turn off sharing personal information and if someone tries I should be notified and have recourse. This should also be retroactive. If I have turned off sharing and someone finds a technical loo…
I turned off all cell carrier tracking 5 years ago. 100% of it. By canceling my cell phone subscription. I know I know, I must be amish, I have heard it all. But I run two tech companies, travel, have a family, and do most of the things most around here probably do other than doom scrolling. So much more time in my own head to think.
My friend was going through a pretty massive depression after his mom passed. He'd been with my wife and I at our house for a number of hours talking through it, and apparently not texting his sisters back. They called in a welfare check. We live in a reasonably dense suburb. Police showed up at our front door and asked to speak with him. They just wanted to make sure he was doing OK. He asked them "how did you find…
My friend was going through a pretty massive depression after his mom passed. He'd been with my wife and I at our house for a number of hours talking through it, and apparently not texting his sisters back. They called in a welfare check. We live in a reasonably dense suburb. Police showed up at our front door and asked to speak with him. They just wanted to make sure he was doing OK. He asked them "how did you find…
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My provider knows who I call, who I text, which websites I browse, my bank account number, my home address, my rough location, which countries I visited for holiday and through DTMF they can even sense which buttons I press on my handset.
Eh, no? How does your provider know all your bank accounts? If at all, then the one you are using for billing - but the 2FA apps do not expose such data to the provider? The Apps communicate via HTTPS calls in the background?
"and notify the user when such attempts are made to their device." We aren't going to remove the security state. We should make all attempts to, but it won't happen. What needs to happen is accountability. I should be able to turn off sharing personal information and if someone tries I should be notified and have recourse. This should also be retroactive. If I have turned off sharing and someone finds a technical loo…
I turned off all cell carrier tracking 5 years ago. 100% of it. By canceling my cell phone subscription. I know I know, I must be amish, I have heard it all. But I run two tech companies, travel, have a family, and do most of the things most around here probably do other than doom scrolling. So much more time in my own head to think.
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Oh! So IIRC it used to be that the modem could only get a rough estimate of your location and typically Apple/Google's location infra(which combined wifi/blue and lately satellite position based shadow mapping) to determine a precise location. And law enforcement got precise info from _that_ infra(E911 requirements for every device). Clearly they don't need that now because 5g cell towers have gotten precise enough?…
5G isn’t inherently any more precise, but because of the higher frequency used in 5G, the radio signals are blocked by obstructions much more easily, so there must be many more 5G radios per unit area to provide coverage. And one feature of having many more base stations around is that triangulation of specific phone is much more accurate and precise because of how close the 5G base stations are to all 5G phones. 5G…
For the most part they use the same or lower frequencies. N71 (600mhz) is lower than any of the 2G/3G bands and requires less cell density than 3G (UMTS/WCDMA) did.
> 5G infrastructure isn’t limited to tall easily visible radio towers like 4G and before;
Nor were earlier technologies. DAS systems get used in large buildings/cities and were done with 4G as well. Small cells and femtocells have been a thing since at least 3G era.
> 5G transmitters are small and relatively inexpensive, making them very common.
Transmitter cost wasn't the primary limitation before, the options for unlicensed/lightly-licensed spectrum were low before and the standards weren't really designed to use them as primary carrier until NR. Also you had to run way more components to run earlier technologies, the stack is just smaller for a NR deploy.