Trump only knows about Habitat for Humanity because Jimmy Carter did volunteer work for the organization and Trump was and is contemptuous of Jimmy Carter.
Digital Transformation, LandSH, mobility transformation, urbanism, software evolution, software quality, modelling, DSLs, micro solar power, born 326 co2 ppm.
This is an extremely good article of all the ways Trump is bringing authoritarianism to the United States of America. With multiple experts drawing multiple parallels to past fascist regimes and also, how it is different this time, particularly with information warfare.
Wake up America. For the love of god. WAKE UP AND FIGHT
HE IS TRANSFORMING YOU INTO EVERYTHING YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER BE.
"But most days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of four-teen-year-olds whoโve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them."
From Careless People: A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn-Williams ๐ micro.blog/books/1035065924
What a great surprise! Just got some community perks from the #BSDCafe from Italy!
Those coasters will definitely stay in the living room for guests but one will be taken to the office for my coffee! The stickers probably won't last long - the next #BSDNL conference is already around the corner!
Behind the scenes of The Electric State Production designer Dennis Gassner: "I have one fallback position: when in doubt, make it beautiful." arstechnica.com/culture/2025/0โฆ
@thelinuxEXP Was listening to the weekly news podcast, and enjoyed it as usual, but you might want to look at Kagi's CEO and his attitude to many things. Including utter disrespect to things like GDPR compliance. This is a good place to start: d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Not saying that it's horrible that they might publish a browser for linux, but that the company culture doesn't really match its advertising. I personally stopped my trial with Kagi because of the link above.
"They waited until late at night, but look at this little nugget and see what they snuck in in an effort to cut government: Scholars, museums, the Interagency Council on Homelessness and . . .
"The Minority Business Development Agency" -B Karem
Deal alert - Woot has the full size Famicom-style 8bitdo retromechanical keyboard on sale for $64.99. I recently reviewed the NES color theme on the channel. Find it here: lon.tv/i72zg (compensated affiliate link).
Should clarify, that's $6K, not just $6 like the title there suggests.
Back in MY day I was shocked to see $100 sneakers.. .
I guess I understand people paying lots of money for collectable things, but sneakers are just going to wear out through normal use (good sneakers can be worn for years, but they're NOT going to look mint condition for long) and I don't see any potential for resale value.
Fedi, who do you know who's the vintage MP3 player expert?
I'm asking Fedi because I have certain expectations and requirements that only Fedi can fill. I'm looking specifically to hear from That One MP3 Player Person, here.
There's definitely an era of Peak MP3 Player, the same way e-ink ereaders peaked in 2007-2008 in the Just Before Touchscreens Ruined Everything era - there's definitely an aluminium-body clicky-buttoned MP3 player that Just Plays MP3s and is tactiley perfect and beautiful in every way and probably unobtainum except with eBay and patience, and I want to know about it from The MP3 Player Expert.
I want the person with a display shelf full of MP3 players to infodump at me about when the buttons disappeared and everything carcinized into a phone and made them sad. I expect this person will tell me to look for something in the late aughts to early teens and know the part number for a replacement battery. If this is you, please give me a link to your website, and feel free to show me your socks as well because I expect they're cool as hell.
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Fedi, who do you know who's the vintage MP3 player expert?
I'm asking Fedi because I have certain expectations and requirements that only Fedi can fill. I'm looking specifically to hear from That One MP3 Player Person, here.
There's definitely an era of Peak MP3 Player, the same way e-ink ereaders peaked in 2007-2008 in the Just Before Touchscreens Ruined Everything era - there's definitely an aluminium-body clicky-buttoned MP3 player that Just Plays MP3s and is tactiley perfect and beautiful in every way and probably unobtainum except with eBay and patience, and I want to know about it from The MP3 Player Expert.
I want the person with a display shelf full of MP3 players to infodump at me about when the buttons disappeared and everything carcinized into a phone and made them sad. I expect this person will tell me to look for something in the late aughts to early teens and know the part number for a replacement battery. If this is you, please give me a link to your website, and feel free to show me your socks as well because I expect they're cool as hell.
No need to tell me you use your phone for music or tell me the MP3 player that you already own is good, I don't care. I want to find The Vintage MP3 Player Person With Heavily Considered Opinions, and ask them questions that only they will be able to answer. I need the MP3 Player Librarian. I feel in my heart that this person is here on the Fediverse somewhere.
UPDATE: it's only been 5 minutes haha, alright here's what I want: * no apple or apple-wannabe * plug it in and it shows up as a USB drive, I won't install software * takes SD or MicroSD * just plays MP3s * no touchscreen * no capacitive controls * preference: steel or aluminium
UPDATE: ipods are apple, I specifically don't want apple, I already know about ipods thx
UPDATE UPDATE: editing the question to make it more obvious that I'm looking for a person not a thing here, I don't want to know about your MP3 player, I want to know where the Vintage MP3 Player Wizard dwells
UPDATE 4: looking into Sony players around the tail end of the minidisc era, also this wee lad looks like a decent "modern" equivalent: binarydigit.city/a-simple-digiโฆ
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We made an aluminium Tangara case! :3
bluetooth seems to work fine, even when face down on a metal surface (??) we love how it feels!
@skyfaller @2d fwiw tangara ships with a milled polycarb case; the 3d prints were prototypes. it's an awesome device that's only going to get way better with time and you can support small creators making something we need in the world right now. the creators are here on fediverse. please think before you say mean shit.
imo you're gonna need to compromise. no device exists with everything you want at a good price with high repairability.
@bnys @skyfaller @2d printed prototypes so early that they predate my involvement in the project entirely!
(and as much as I love my metal tangara case, I kind of prefer the production polycarbonate - I was just curious to see how it would affect wireless functionality)
they even compare it to ancient ipod classic, and the comparison was not really in favor of Tangara, so much that they had to lie about formats supported (rockboxed ipod supports more or less anything you throw at it, except for heavily compressed apes (at least video (5th gen) had trouble decompressing some apes in realtime with its weak CPU, not sure about classic (6th gen)). Well I guess it's cool that it's open source, and that you can buy it new today. But 6th gen ipod from 2007 is a _really_ low bar.
@2d I didn't know about the Tangara, it sounds exactly like my ideal music player. Since it uses a esp32 it should be capable of playing opus and flac as well (a lot of my library is in opus). As others have mentioned, apparently the 3D printed case was just for the prototypes.
@gbrnt That's awesome! A long time ago I investigated doing a wireless low latency audio bridge with ESP32 and found that it's powerful enough for decoding, but not quite for encoding, and I wasn't experienced enough back then, so I didn't pursue it any further.
Probably the 5th generation iPod Color, right before Apple renamed the hard disk one the iPod Classic and cheaped out instead of using the Wolfson DAC? Really good sound, 80Gb hard drive, and if you don't like iTunes/Apple Music you can install RockBox instead and use it to play FLAC as well as MP3, OGG and a bunch of other codecs.
I mean. You probably know Iโm an iPod fan girl. A modded mini is my current every day carry. LCD screen you can see in daylight and a backlight when you need it. Mine is also modded to 256 gb. The built in DAC is actually pretty decent, too, more than happy with it.
I havenโt swapped it over to RockBox yet, but Iโve heard very good things!
Except that it uses MTP & uses internal storage, the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (they had a way of naming things) otherwise fits your description.
I loved mine until the hard drive failed, and I was not yet good enough at disassembling & reassembling tech to replace it with flash storage.
I'm not The Wizard, because I gave up when the buttons disappeared. But before that, I was quite fond of iAudio mp3 players. The last one I had was probably the U3. If you can find an iAudio model with a metal shell, your other requirements would be met. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAUDIO
I might not be The MP3 Person but I was An MP3 Person when I worked on the firmware for Rio Karma and Trekstor Vibez in the early 2000s. Cheap players to this day (I have an Agptek A20) tend not to be gapless track-to-track, which is annoying on albums such as Sergeant Pepper or Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. Rockbox will do gapless for Ogg and Flac but there are mixed reports on whether it can do it for MP3 (which is harder). Get a Trekstor Vibez if you can find a working one, otherwise get whatever matches your aesthetic that you can put Rockbox onto.
The Sandisk Sanza Fuze was my favourite of the old era, had a nice spinny wheel and a microSD slot for expansion. Used a nonstandard port though, and idk how readily replacable the battery was.
I kind of wanna take a look at the Tangara and see what it's like by comparison these days, because I don't know how much longer I can rely on having a phone with a headphone jack and support for Poweramp...
@be personally, I still think the second generation Zune is the best piece of hardware ever made. If it had just had normal file access instead of requiring Microsoft crap and had it come around a few years later when things just started using USB instead of proprietary plugsโฆ so close.
daaang, I've never seen these before! I'm surprised spinning disks could work in a "portable" device! I'd assume they'd just crash all the time whenever you drove over a bump or what not while using it
@be Also a great piece of equipment! I desperately wish Kei trucks were legal in Georgia (but big trucks might run them over, so they're "dangerous" and you can't get them registered, as opposed to the big trucks which are just fine somehow *endless-rage*).
I'm not the expert you're looking for but I wonder if Archos' mp3 players might do you. I saw one a couple of decades ago and it seemed to be built like a tank.
if "vintage" is ok, Thomson/rca lyra m20 series. They are old, probably have to resolder the shitty head Phone Jack. And mine literally slow burned the oled Display. And they run on and eat aaa batteries.
Cowon had some in the lineup. Some of them don't have sd card slots but they appear as normal Drive.
Obscure Chinese like shanling probably has something but i never bought stuff from them.
The later model Sony Walkman players from the late 00s, 10s might be up your street. Something like an NWZ-A15 is great if you donโt mind the WM-Port charging and syncing.
I loved the iaudio and iriver brands back in the day. Excellent sound quality. Supported OGG (and flac i think). Showed up as a usb drive, no software required. Excellent battery life, and some of the first full-featured mp3 players with solid state storage (as opposed to spinning disk)
I tend to feel like "has external storage" and "is built well" are mutually exclusive most of the time, but I also know there's probably some Creative Zen model that bucks this. Would have loved if my old Zen Vision:M did; probably would've replaced the teeny ZIF IDE disk with a CF to ZIF adapter and a decent SD and still be using it if so.
Definitely curious to find out! I've been thinking about similar literally this week so this is timely!
I feel ya. I keep a couple fm transmitter mp3 players in various auto glove boxes that tick all those boxes, buttons, sd card slot, not all of em have 12v plugs. Mine are plastic tho.
@mrcopilot oh wow, I think I had one of these for a whileโฆ or maybe a friend did? I had completely forgotten about it until I saw this picture and it made me physically feel the satisfaction of long pressing the little track seek dial in my thumb, but I have almost no recollection of itโฆ
the SanDisk Sansa e200 series are exactly as you describe. my only personal beef with them is the USB connector is weird and huge. they're rockbox compatible but the stock firmware should work just fine for what you're doing
If you want *the* guy, I would reach out to the rockbox forum (rockbox.org). That is a custom firmware project that supports all the best mp3 players from that era.
Peak imo was the sansa e200 series. Small, metal body, lightweight, sdcard, great interface. e280 has 8gb on board + sd card.
All the sd card mp3 players from peak era max out at 2gb sd card support.
Honourable mention: the Frontier Labs Nex IIe. AA batteries, compact flash card with no upper mem limit.
I used a lot of them, starting from CD-Audio players and via Sony's MP3-CD, to HDD-based Sonys, rockboxed ipods, Zunes, Kenwoods (but also looking at all the cowons and archoses and sandisks of course), having dealt with SonicStage, with the difficulties of ZIF->regular PATA conversion in limited space or trying to get CF work as a full-fledged HDD on a software level, moving on through a bunch of flash-based stuff like zune hd, more sonys, Kenwood recorders, Chinese "audiophile" players, until The Perfect One (for me) was finally released and I found it.
The perfect one for me is Sony NWZ-A17 (but anything from A1x/A2x lineup works). Good sound, takes microsdxc, just put audio files on it via regular MSC (shows up as a regular external drive, no software needed), has file-based navigation, nine hardware buttons (no touchscreen or capacitive buttons, although I do miss Zune 120 capacitive thingy), supports MP3 and AAC and a couple of other formats (including FLAC iirc), made of metal, really well built, compact and lightweight, fits good into hand and has generally good design/UX, one charge is good for 50 hours, and the price was good too.
Basically with sony flash players (I'm taking about mainstream flagships here) it's a progression between SonicStage required -> you can just drop the files on it, but the storage is still only soldered -> you can just drop the files on it _and_ it supports memory cards -> touchscreen. A1x/A2x models are exactly at that point in 2014-2015 where they finally gained that memory card slot (meaning that I could finally fit my collection on them), but didn't yet gain a touchscreen (which also came with reduction of battery life time from 50 to 35 hours).
I wouldn't agree with you on ereaders because eink screens keep getting better (if slowly). But yeah, there absolutely is such a thing as peak mp3 player because the (reasonably accessible) digital audio already reached its peak, and the only thing that improves with time is storage, and with microsd slots the storage comes from outside the player.
I miss the days of those sansa e200s with the detachable cap that covered the USB connection. You plugged it in, you dropped your mp3s into it, it parsed the tracks and was ready to play. The rockbox-able clip zips. The days where we had *dedicated* mp3 players that you could put in your pocket and played what you put in it. It was its own device, it didn't drain your phone's battery or took up your phone's storage.
If you yield the touchscreen ban, find a Sony Walkman NW-a55. Theyโre easy to import from Japan, a tool from Rockbox unlocks the language selector, and it has **hardware playback buttons*.
Legitimately wanted what youโre looking for a while ago, ended up finding the nw-a55, and other than the odd connector (which has โจaccessoriesโจ) itโs a fuckigng fantastic piece of work.
@gnomon I guess at this point the question's morphed into something like "Hey, this thing (binarydigit.city/a-simple-digiโฆ) tries to give a vibe like it's from 2007, what's the actual ebayable device it's trying to be like"
I certainly have Opinionsโข. You can go extremely old-skool and get these sort of tactile players shkspr.mobi/blog/2002/04/revieโฆ (compact flash, so probably not quite what you want). For many years I had a RockBox which had loads of alt firmware. Also had buttons, jogwheels, switches, inline headset controls. Probably the peak MP3 - but HDD. Excellent devices. If you're looking for something now, SanDisk Clipper. Small, MicroSD, nice enough buttons, etc.
in my opinion the iriver h140 was peak MP3 player. A metal brick that ran rockbox. Mine got stolen in a burglary and I'm still sad. cnet.com/reviews/iriver-h140-4โฆ might have a look at the mechen myself
I might lay claim to that title, or at least I was that person 10 years ago. ๐ Here's a list of devices mostly matching your requests, take your pick: rockbox.org/daily.shtml I'd say any of the Sandisk Sansas are probably be your best bet. They sold millions and generally held up pretty well.
I'm not _that_ person, but I can vouch for Sansa/SanDisk Clip+ or Clip Zip: they - are tiny - have goods DACs able to drive any headphone - support FLAC - support SDHC cards, so less wories about wearing out those old flash chips - support RockBox
They used to be the audiophile player on the cheap, back in the days. Nowadays, the battery and it's ability to be replaced might be a concern though ๐ค
โSupports Ogg Vorbisโ was how I fell into the weirder alt universe of players (iRiver, Rio). My favorite I recall being the Neuros II. It was a thin DAC wearing an entire heavy spinning laptop HDD as a backpack. The firmware was great, supported every format I threw at it. I still wonder if you replaced the HDD backpack with a modern SD or SSD how it would feel. Maybe my Neuros is still in a box somewhere for me to rediscover and try something like that.
Iโm not an expert on the whole field, but I do own a player from that Peak MP3 period thatโs a lot like what you described (except I believe internal flash storage only, no MicroSD). Importantly, it supports Ogg and FLAC too. Cowon iAudio 7, purchased in 2008.
the expert name that comes to mind would be w1re, from the s1mp3 (Actions, z80-core) reverse engineering lore. I have a couple of those, but with internal storage and AAA battery. One generation later they did have SD cards and Li-ion batteries, not sure how different the chips are.
Seriously tho I would talk to the rockbox folks rockbox.org/
I think peak mp3 was mid 00s. We have a shitton of sandisks here, because they broke. So no recommendation
I have fond memories of Rio. So I really wonder what kind of tech you want. Flash based, miniature hardware bases? With Video playback, minimalistic like the ipod shuffle?
And bluetooth headsets were rare so old ones might suck.
I'm a big fan of the Sony NW-A45 (there are other models with the same form factor) It fits right into the gap between smartphones and old school mp3 players imo.
It's new enough to have a touchscreen and bluetooth support but old enough to have an SD card slot, physical playback controls, a headphone jack and not run Android. It also can handle bigger music libraries, something 5th gen iPods struggle with.
The only thing I dislike about it is the proprietary dock connector.
Sorry, can't help here - but in this research did you stumble over some good overview of old mp3 players? Not the person, but the de-facto hand-curated list of things? I'd read that ๐
Destroy independent universities? Destroy independent media? Declare public protests illegal? Arrest and disappear legal residents? And you thought calling him a fascist was hyperbole?
Popular GitHub Action tj-actions/changed-filesย has been compromised with a payload that appears to attempt to dump secrets, impacting thousands of CI pipelines.
If thereโs any lesson so far in Trumpโs second term, itโs that playing nice isnโt just bad optics โ itโs a losing strategy. theintercept.com/2025/03/15/apโฆ
I recently noticed an unexpected wave of comments on my Chromecast video from a few months ago about the second-generation Chromecast devices suddenly failing to stream content.
"During the tragic Palisades Fire in Los Angeles in January 2025, 82 year old Katherine Kiefer lost her home and with it her beloved Maine Coon cat Aggie, or so she believed." #cats #caturday #pets #happy #newslaughingsquid.com/woman-reunitโฆ
Muskโs loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of peopleโs most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI.
Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading: "The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely."
Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: from Mar 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Theyโre ultra-rich, predominantly American, and over the next eight years theyโre bringing 21,000 units without rent control to a new building near you.
My last nationally bestselling novel was "The Bezzle," an ice-cold revenge story of high-tech finance crime starring the forensic accountant Martin Hench.
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in Californiaโs pris...
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
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I get to chat with one of my favorite writers about his new book, "Picks and Shovels", as well as what it's like to invent a word that absolutely nails the current zeitgeist with "enshittification".
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Weiร ein Alexa-Nutzer aus Deutschland hier Genaueres? Wie sieht es hierzulande aus? Oder ist dieses #Anti-Feature erstmal nur in Amerika aktiv? Ich nutze aus guten Grรผnden keinen an die Cloud gebundenen "Assistenten".
I told someone I know who has a Dot about this. They were "Oh. Anyway...". ๐ก Remember when the Dead Kennedy's released an album called "Give me convenience, or give me death"? I think I now understand the meaning of that phrase. "It's spying on you!" "Yeah, but it's handy for turning on a light, and listening to the radio!!" ๐ก
"If the #Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's #DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct makes it a felony to "bypass an access control"...
That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a...
An alternative to Alexa/Google Assistant is this: home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ It not polished yet, hence preview edition, but itโs open source with a local processing first philosophy. Should make it resistant to becoming worse over time.
When visiting one of my family a few years ago I was shocked at how much their Amazonthingy joined in conversations even when it hadn't been addressed, so assume that anything in range of it will be uploaded (and probably sniggered over): financial and medical phone calls included.
@sunflowerinrain They call them "smart speakers" but they are really "smart microphones", and they are always on... I wouldn't have one in my house, even my smart tv and blue ray player are never connected to the internet.
@Mayor_of_Smartarse @sunflowerinrain About 10 years ago my friend was a engineering exec at amazon, and we pointed out that alexa had to be always listening. Him: "No! Noo! No? Well, yes after a fashion. But not recording. Well yeah, except then. But you don't understand....."
this is enough for me to shut all mine off. I love home automation (it's a hobby), but its usefulness is now pretty low, and this above is making me do what I've thought about doing for a long time. Just unplugging them.
Never bought one of those monstrosities and never will. The government needs a warrant to enter my home and Iโm not going to bug my own house just to make it easier on them.
I assume that it didn't have a rubber backing on it. Nothing says welcome like a soggy carpet on a chilly day. I also note how the welcoming committee stood in such a way that he was almost forced to walk on the carpet into the puddle.
President of Ukraine about negotiations with international partners and developments on the frontline_____________________________________๐ด Be sure to subsc...
Please support my Patreon with a measly dollar so I can continue to write my silly little facts. You'll feel like a medieval king throwing coins or turnips at a dancing court jester. I do not know how jesters were paid. It could have been in turnips. patreon.com/lowqualityfacts
Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: from Mar 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It's easy to flap your hands at this thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which confines this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because of bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a *material* phenomenon, grounded in *specific policy choices* and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here - and where we should go next.
Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: *why* does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?
For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" - a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.
Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio - about triple the ratio of rivals like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors - they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock.
Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:
For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime.
Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.
For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.
That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies.
By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.
OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.
How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo *after you bought it*? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property.
Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:
> That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it?
Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:
That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let *you* get inside *your* Echo and change the software back.
Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner.
Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device *after* you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:
But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon - without your permission, against your express wishes - is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?
Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is *unbelievably* backwards.
Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:
Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:
To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.
Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:
Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:
Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.
Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:
Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:
Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are *also* being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.
reminds me of the East German telephone which was wired up to backfeed audio from the room to the Stasi (all analogue telephones of that era can be altered to do this, DDR built this wiring change into the telephone set), and even when this was a plug and socket phone which could have been unplugged many didn't do so (as they didn't want to miss the telephone calls and even having a phone was a privilege in those days)
As nations cancel their contracts to buy F-35 and other military equipment, one can be assured that similarly insecure post-purchase modification tech exists in those multi-billion dollar items.
Bought a military drone that uses Starlink? Can you be sure Musk won't shut it off in the middle of a fight for your survival as a nation?
Monitoring wildfires for waterbomber planes? What happens if #KochNetwork wants to evade lawsuits for climate change & shuts it off?
the highest p/e industry is health, which is especially disturbing when you consider politicians investment incentives... A public option could hurt some of them a lot. Stopping the expansion of monopolies is bad because they're the high-growth parts of their portfolios
Allowing politicians to invest such that they're aligned against their constituents opens the door to abuse. And that's without considering lobbying, cushy post-politics jobs, speaking gigs, book deals and the like.
just in case you needed one more reason to cancel your Amazon account. I dropped mine the day the Washington Post non-endorsement broke. I honestly do not miss it
What constitutes a digital lock? It seems to me that the only difference between a flag that prevents an action being taken by a program, and a cryptographically secure block on an action is the amount of time required to make the action doable; the intention behind an option flag and a cryptographic lock are identical โ stopping something from happening. Why is ignoring a user-set option flag not circumventing a digital lock and so illegal under the DMCA?
That then comes down to implementation details and would be denied by finding that the implementation is defective. Is any defective implementation of a lock not a lock? By definition, if a lock can be defeated, it's not an effective means of access control. Obviously being facetious here, but it does point to the idiocy of the legislation.
This probably means a blind friend of mine who keeps Echo on 24/7 will have all their intimate conversations with carers kept as data. Stuff such as catheterisation, mobility, diet, relationships that will come back to him as advertising.
Edit: Iโm obviously barking up the wrong tree re: several aspects of Echo listening in. I appreciate the conversation this then started. I think the take away is: at what point after wake up does Echo/Alexa stop listening if itโs not told to stop.
Concentration of power is the disease and "consumer welfare" style anti-trust is the infection point. But now it's metastasised to include no meaningful privacy, regulatory capture, Citizens United etc.
The US needs meaningful anti-trust but how can that be achieved when politicians and agencies are bought and paid for. Even Biden didn't prioritize this meta policy except for the very meaningful appointment of Linda Khan.
I used to have an Echo Show next to my bed. I was recently divorced and I just started dating. I hope whomever was listening on the other end heard some shit.
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cqd_sos
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •Corb_The_Lesser
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •Nadi Ah๐โฎ๏ธ๐๐ฒ๐ท๐ฎ๐พ
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •SufferForMe ๐
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •Franรงois @Prague
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •Toni Aittoniemi
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •The crime of accepting a federal grant.
But in all seriousness, you have to move very quickly to depose the Orange Mussolini.
This is moving so fast, protest could be outlawed relaticely soon and military police & brownshirts might be on the streets.
atlovato
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •ignacy ๐ช๐บ
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •iveyline
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •MariPot
in reply to George Takei ๐ณ๏ธโ๐๐๐ฝ • • •