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Comment by nszceta | Hacker News Reader

There is no limit to the power grab. The only acceptable thing to do is to dig the trenches before it gets worse.

My trench is keeping backups of ISO's that do not contain this creeping garbage. I will manually patch apps and where I can't the OS will be read-only and ephemeral. This will be my process until governments are no longer vulnerable to bribery.

I suspect the dark pattern this will lead to is user-maintained ISO's as was the early days of Microsoft. People would slip-stream in patches, applications, better default settings and in some cases, malware.

And how well did that strategy work for Apple with the DMA?

The trenches will eventually be overwhelmed regardless. Once the government has AI and sensors, it will mandate its ubiquitous use.

For minors, we have this lovely law coming in NYC: that will broadcast to everyone that you’re a minor: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8102

But let’s talk about around the US. For example, all cars manufactured in 2029 and onward will be required to have a built-in alcohol detector / breathalyzer and to shut down and not let you drive if they detect your blood alcohol level is too high: https://www.clear2drive.com/the-pass-act-explained/

And in 2027 — next year — new cars are required to watch where you are looking, how much you’re blinking or nodding and alert authorities if you aren’t alert enough: https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...

And it’s not just the US government. That phone in your hand? Governments have mandated tha all vendors preinstall spy software, filters and apps on it, that are not removable: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/government-mand...

Also these phones no longer shut down when you shut them down. They continue operating and sending telemetry so the government can eventually know where they are at all times. https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/228682/why-do-ce...

This is in addition to the interlinked CCTV cameras that are the norm in various cities (eg in the UK), new Flock cameras in US, etc. But the government doesnt even need Flock or Ring to cooperate. They have plenty of their own housing programs to install thousands of cameras to spy on citizens 24/7, and can now deploy AI to sift through it all. Here in NYC we already have the lovely Domain Awareness System: https://nysfocus.com/2025/08/11/eric-adams-nycha-nypd-camera...

To sum up: the government can know what you’re doing at all times, with sensors in your car, mandated apps on your phone, cameras on your street, and soon, mandated telemetry sent by your operating system. Caretakers of kids are required to report anything to authorities and not let parents know, in case the department of child services might need to know. Every child is required to be vaccinated too, with lots of different vaccines.

I wouldn’t be surprised if toilet plumbing in every apartment in the future will be required to install a test for what you’re eating or drinking, to catch diseases early and for public health.

Looks like this short film is a documentary about our future, except with AI doing the snitching instead of humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8

> Also these phones no longer shut down when you shut them down. They continue operating and sending telemetry so the government can eventually know where they are at all times. https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/228682/why-do-ce...

That's not much of a source -- a 100-karma user in 2020 based on "I've known this for a long time. A quick google confirms that many people think the same." I don't believe it is true.

The sobriety check requirement for cars is so optimistic:

“Once data prove the tech cuts drunk-driving crashes, insurers may trim rates.”

Why would any insurance company want to cut into their profits by reducing rates?

Because it's a competitive market and offering a lower price than your competitors helps you earn more business. If your competitors lower their prices and you don't lower yours then you'll lose business.

This is a wildly optimistic view for insurance companies in particular. You basically need to jump providers every few years, or else you're overpaying.

I don't understand how this is supposed to be an argument against what I'm saying. The fact that you can shop around and get a better rate demonstrates the fact that insurance is a competitive market and companies will lower rates to win business.

Or they could all just agree to not cut prices so everyone profits more than with a race to the bottom. Not the first nor last time for this to happen.

Undercutting the competition pays off when they're much smaller and you can eliminate them that way and subsequently raise prices.

They could. It's very hard to enforce a cartel like that when there are a large number of competitors. It's a prisoners' dilemma with dozens or hundreds of participants. It only takes one defector to break it.

If you've ever shopped for car insurance, it should be pretty clear that there isn't a cartel holding prices high. Prices differ substantially across insurers, and are influenced by many other factors as well. Premiums are much lower if you have a clean driving record and no claims, or if you drive a car that's cheaper to repair, or less likely to cause injury, or you're of an age/gender with less propensity to crash, or live in an area with less automobile-related crime. Why would they give you lower rates for these things when they could just keep the premiums high and collect more profits?

It's optimistic to think it will even do anything to stop drunks. It's a $5 wrench problem. They think all this tech will stop drunks, when in reality some guy gorded out his mind on vodka is paying his 12 year old his weekly $20 allowance to blow into the machine.

To be fair, it's not about blowing into the machine, but a bunch of sensors all around the driver, e.g. looking at the finger pressing the button to test your blood alcohol content through your skin, detecting alcohol particles, etc. So you better hope your passenger isn't drunk LMAO

What's hilarious is that in supposed dystopic corrupt hellholes I've lived or spent time in (Syria during the civil war, Iraq, Philippines, etc) all of this is unimaginable. Westerners view freedom as having a piece of paper that says they are free plus not having to bother fighting off ISIS or the gangsters because the even bigger gangster in a clean uniform and nice jackboot will take care of it. Much of the rest of the world views freedom as the government being weak enough that it's actually possible for rebel groups to emerge, which you might then have to fight off, but at least that is easier to fight off than a central government that consumes 25+% of the GDP and projects their air power to every end of the earth and meanwhile if you exercise a bit of freedom it goes under the radar particularly if there is no victim to complain about it.

Of course, there are cases like North Korea where you get the worst of both worlds (strong central government + not even a useful piece of paper limiting it).

I often wonder what rights were not written down because the people writing the Constitution in the US just didn’t think of a state with enough capacity to infringe on them. I think a lot of surveillance stuff is like that: they concerned themselves with improper searches because that was how your privacy was violated. They didn’t even consider a system that could just automatically log all public actions and what could easily be inferred from those logs.

That said, I don’t think I would like to live in a region governed by gangs or rebel groups, even if they probably don’t have the capacity to annoy everybody, the low odds of a catastrophic interaction with enforcement seems bad.

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