> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
It’s a pretty safe assumption that any headline prominently featuring “Thiel-“ will not be substantiated by its article body. If we applied this standard of evidence to every pair of entities separated by one or two degrees of common investor, we’d have a whole industry of tainted corporations with dubious motives. (Oh wait…)
1) The slow and steady institutional journalists who are reporting on the government
2) The fast and loose citizen journalists who are reporting on the government
3) The government who is saturating the attention of both of them while they look for something that exists in the 98% portion of unreleased documentation about government wrongdoing
I mean who’s the idiot? Maybe it’s the government interns who need to read 100% to release 2%.
That system is nothing compared to the geolocation databases curated by Apple and Google, with GPS sensors combined with Wi-Fi wardriving, IMEI tracking, cell tower handoffs, and the rest of the insane amount of telemetry they collect collect in real time. And that’s before even considering BLE and the Find My network. Imagine the “God mode” dashboards they could have in Cupertino (or more likely, in Mountain View).
Imagine a Google Maps / Google Earth where you can see everyone’s location and identity in real time, with tagging/targeting/following capabilities and quick links to thorough personal profiles.
Not only that: also nth-order interactions (Alice—Bob, Bob—Charlie, Charlie—Deborah, …), connectivity clustering, time spent in same location heatmaps, etc.
These devices are very few in reality. One reason why I keep investing in almost every company that makes a Linux based smartphone. Still need the 2FA and digital magazine for the loo.
Even large retails install bluetooth tracking in their buildings now. Was interviewing for one of them and they ask what you would use that style of tracking for to support the consumer. Giving the consumer a reason to use it helps validate and maximize the meta data.
I'm sorry but I just don't think that's the threat at all. I think these companies actually realize the existential risk and harm this data has, and do a lot to anonymize it quickly & effectively. If the government was actively backdooring Apple or Google to get realtime data like this, it would be found, and it would be a shitstorm that would greatly impact these companies.
We really need to get a little more discerning in our hatred. Apple especially I think is a real piece of work. But there are so many worse hideous monsters out there. Clearview AI just signed with DHS for access to a facial tracking database. Flock is out here basically giving playbooks to law enforcement to tell them to use only the most vague indirect reason when asking for data. There's so many other even less visible but incredibly dangerous data-broker foes to society, doing such harm.
Google and Apple have a level of caring far far far far far far above the vile anti-human campaign happening now. I just think you are off by a million miles, that you're not even on the right planet, for where the actual real harm is coming from.
But that seems far different to me than directly making their own products whose express purpose is to send data to the feds / local law enforcement.
Google is not a huge data broker selling your data to the world. They keep that inside, & sell ads based in data they have. But if they started trying to be a data seller or data provider, like Amazon has been, I think they realize that would almost surely be a huge crisis.
There's many good reasons for all the big tech hate. But I do think that Google and Apple have extremely strong incentives to not become a go-to everyday source for law enforcement, I think the person I was responding to has a level of suspicion that is wildly over critical & hyper rampant, and I think we would know if stuff was that bad, and I think we would all be a lot more pissed & many people would have found the door out by now.
The past gives a lot of lessons, all negative ones. Power people are endlessly greedy for more power, there is no end in that spiral. All top folks are like that, if you look for the signs you can see it in their behaviors outside PR rooms. Sociopaths to the last one, all big names and then some more.
So, when in doubt, feel free to have good faith in these behemoths. I don't. Secret court orders for example can force any company into anything, and it can be pro bono for some gov contract later. Why would they disclose this, ever? We had Snowden and others.
Come on lets be realistic here, all that data is a wet dream and ultimate goal of any 3 letter agency all around the world.
> Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.”
It sounds to me like they still have the hardware, since — according to the article — "Mac Minis are selling out everywhere." What's the problem? If anything, this is validation of their hardware differentiation. The software is easy to change, and they can always learn from OpenClaw for the next iteration of Apple Intelligence.
I don't think it's hardware differentiation as much as vendor lock in because it lets people send iMessages with their agent. Not sure about the running local models on it though.
Because people are forced to buy them. Same as how datacenters are full of mac minis to build iOS apps that could easily be built on any hardware if Apple weren't such corporate bastards.
The actual secret is to use IPv6 with varied source IPs in the same subnet, you get an insane number of IPs and 90% of anti-scraping software is not specialized enough to realize that any IP in a /64 is the same as a single IP in a /32 in IPv4.
> any IP in a /64 is the same as a single IP in a /32 in IPv4
This is very commonly true but sadly not 100%. I am suffering from a shared /64 on which a VPS is, and where other folks have sent out spam - so no more SMTP for me.
They have a robust KYC that appears to serve, at least in large part, as a way to stay off the shit list of companies with the resources to pursue recourse.
Source: went through that process, ended up going a different route. The rep was refreshingly transparent about where they get the data, why the have the kyc process (aside from regulatory compliance).
Ended up going with a different provider who has been cheaper and very reliable, so no complaints.
Yeah, they make you do a Skype interview (or probably Zoom interview nowadays). You could call this KYC or collateral, depending on your view of the company. It does limit the nefariousness of their clientele but I doubt they do much, or any, monitoring of actual traffic after onboarding (not for compliance reasons, anyway).
I think they should have requested KYC when I was complaining about being unable to log into gmail, but I’m not going to complain as long as the service works.
I don’t use Luminati for anything illegal though, so it’s possible they just have some super amazing abuse detection algorithms that know this.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
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