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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • My best guess is that I know one of them uses Facebook. Apple phones. Facebook, Uber, and a few others have had pretty deep access to APIs not accessible to other software companies. Sometimes they’re caught like when Uber was caught using a screen scraping API. Sometimes they aren’t. The other guess that glues it together is that Facebook has indeed scraped audio to text for a long time. It was almost 10 years ago that I had the EE conversation.

    Google and Meta pay Apple money to gain access to their user metrics. It’s likely symbiotic relationships. Facebook once had hooks directly in iOS. Likewise, the little mic/video indicators the OS displays when they are “active” are completely software-controlled and can be overridden.

    At a time, I worked at a company that had(has) deep access to other aspects of iOS. Apple always required the source code is available to them so they could inspect it. I doubt that has changed. It also means they would be complicit. External tools wouldn’t really be able to figure this out. For someone to black-box this they’d need a jailbroken iPhone and some specialized tooling or MITM decryption capabilities.

    Not to sound hyperbolic, I’m connecting dots with no evidence, it’s pure speculation. The compute seems to be there and with no regulation in source code, anything goes, if you want money bad enough. Especially with the mad dash every tech company has been on for the last 20ish years to harvest everything they can, ever since smartphones became powerful and commonplace enough.


  • It’s surprisingly easy to use adtech without voice and make a connection to serve a targeted ad. Had a friend ask me about what I was drinking. They were on my guest wifi network. They searched for it. Next day, I’m getting ads because of geoIP pinned my IP address as having an interest.

    Also had someone that lives off the grid with no active network or devices watch a DVD of a movie and the entirety of their Internet connectivity was two cell phones in the room. They started seeing things related to the movie. They’re older and not constantly on their phones. The phones just sit somewhere in the room.

    Had a discussion with some tech friends a few years back and remarked that keeping awake to do this would take a lot of power. The EE mentioned running audio recording would take basically nothing. I expanded from there, the device uploads audio for off-phone translation to text, or queues batch jobs to process locally when power is high enough or on charger. Etc.

    It is 100% probable that code runs on phones and just ships off amalgamated text frequency charts or entire conversations and the user won’t even notice the battery dent.

    That being said, I can’t find even in the greediest capitalist money-claw that the person giving a go would not think, “well, I can’t trust my own device anymore…” and maybe go: “yeah, I shouldn’t do this.” Maybe I’m too optimistic though.











  • No diss. I read that slot comment above you and went, “yep, yep, yep, makes sense. Man our standards are often dumb.”

    Laughed with joy at your comment, because I totally get how foreign this shit is to so many people. It’s like if I walked up to a building engineer asking how they know that iron beam is safe for another 50 years via their skills and I’d just be like “…do what now?”


  • You know. It’s interesting. I’ve been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.

    …but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I’m comfortable, but… I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.

    I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I’d just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE “start” menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app’s icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.

    So I went, “ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I’ve seen this work for decades,” so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.

    Then I went and saved and launched another application.

    GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, “he’s dead, Jim.”

    Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the “start” menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn’t the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze. (It is possible that the bug is in fact time-based or boot-sequence-based, and since I was trying to reproduce the bug rapidly, the other app had nothing to do with it.)

    I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as “no I can’t parse this,” and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code executing that app launcher icon config, and deleting the config for that application would delete whatever mess that was created, and hopefully was created discretely.

    Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn’t glitched since.

    It’s shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.