SSTF

I’ve been off Reddit for a couple of years, but that’s still sad news. That was a legitimately good community, and the name flip was good, and I think they were partnered with worldpolitics which was the flipside community.

I agree. Tech communities have a habit of drastically over estimating how much everyone else cares about the details of tech.

Even something as simple as PC gaming scares off a lot of people because of the perception that you need to be some kind of tech wizard in order to cobble everything together to make a game run. Actual cobbling together of software to pirate (no matter how simple it seems to people in the know) is just a bunch of technobabble.

It is interesting to me that the chorus always talking about “switching” to piracy after every incident is also intimately familiar with piracy already. Almost as if it’s just people who already pirate talking to each other about how hard they are going to pirate. Meanwhile general audiences don’t care.

What does the creation of a multi-national state owned search engine have to do with Google? I presume nations have the resources to do that all on their own.

What would you suggest the Google search engine be allowed to do to profit as a business?

I get the feeling a lot of people would complain about Google search doing that too.

Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?

The older generation demographic continues to shrink, while it seems the great majority of Gen Z and A are perfectly happy to use whatever ecosystem is built into their device. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t want better software, merely being realistic about the choices of populations.

Chrome was backed by Google, a multifaceted staple of the Internet ecosystem and rolled out with a ton of marketing behind it.

I remain skeptical that Firefox could plausibly overtake Chrome. The mere word of mouth of tech enthusiasts simply isn’t enough to make a population majority proactively switch.

Dreaming is one thing, but I remain skeptical. Tech people always seem to vastly overestimate how much the average population will react to tech news. Most people don’t care. They should but they don’t. In addition to that, use of Chrome by businesses is heavily entrenched. The IT guys probably hate it on a personal level, but it takes a lot to make business bigwigs change direction away from a “trustworthy” big company like Google.

Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I’d torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn’t work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.

He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I’m not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.

I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a “whoa retro.” which hurt me deeply.

That requires the freedom to do so. If it is a situation where the police interaction starts suddenly, there are many scenarios where this advice is not useful.

There are two related but distinct issues, and I hope to keep them separate otherwise the conversation goes in circles:

1 - Can police under the circumstances look at the contents of the phone at all? This is to say, if the phone is completely unlocked, can they look through it?

2 - If the police are allowed to look at the contents, but the phone is locked, in what ways can the police unlock it?

Subject 1: This is by far the more important question, and the one that seems to get ignored in discussions of phone searches like this. I would argue that under most circumstances there is no probable cause to search a phone- the phone can not contain drugs or weapons or other contraband, so to me this is the larger hurdle for police. Police should have to justify what illegal thing they think is on the phone that gives them probable cause, and I don’t think that pictures of illegal things are the same as the illegal things themselves. Lawyers would have to hash this out, because I do notice the suspect here was on parole so perhaps there is a clause of parole for this or something. But this is the bigger, much bigger issue- can police even look at the contents? There is an argument from the pro-search side that constants of an unlocked phone are in plain view, and so that right there is a big nexus for the issue.

Subject 2: If we assume yes, only then does subject 2 become an issue. How much can police compel? Well, they can’t compel speech. A passcode would count as protected speech, so they can’t compel that. Biometrics however, from what I have seen of court reasoning, tend to be viewed as something a person has rather than something they know. This would be analogue to a locked container with a combination lock compared to a key. The police can not compel the combo, but if they find they key in your pocket they can take it and use it.

If you are up in arms about privacy, my view is not to fall into the trap of focusing on 2 and the finer mechanics of where the line for what kinds of ways to lock a phone are, and focus on subject 1. Reduce the circumstances in which searching a phone is acceptable, even if the phone is unlocked to begin with.

This is about biometrics, not passcodes.

He can’t keep getting away with it.

And this is why I’m asking, because I know little about UK law, and am trying to figure out how this is going to move forward. She can sue, now I wonder about the theory that leads to a win. Protected categories is a start, but it feels vague, and I’m curious what the precise angle and evidence brought in will be.

I am waiting to follow the case for updates, because while I hope that the outcome pushes back on AI system like this, I am skeptical of current laws to perceive what is happening as protected class discrimination. I presume in the UK the burden for proving fault in the AI lays on the plaintiff, which is at the heart of if the reason is legitimate in the eyes of the law.

If the AI is flagging faces and immediately alerting employees, it is likely also going to throw up a flag for abnormal interference like that. Or if it doesn’t do it now, it is a feature that could be added if such hats become a common enough.

A tangent to explore. I though am curious how the current case under the current laws is expecting to go forward.

I presume at that point the store would just have security walk out the person wearing the hat.

This is a bad situation for her. I am genuinely curious under what standing she is suing. Thinking it through, this seems like a situation where the laws might not have caught up to what is happening. I hope she gets some changes out of this, but I am really curious on the legal mechanics of how that might happen.