HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

CircuitSeuss

255 karma · joined June 6, 2026

submissionscomments
CircuitSeuss··on ICE Has Been Dumping Protester Photos into a Palantir Database
> According to the legal filing, that afternoon, J.C. [an ICE agent] called [the spouse of an individual who had lawfully recorded an ICE detainment] on her cell phone, identifying himself only as "the Department of Homeland Security." According to [the call recipient], he told her she "should encourage" her spouse, [the observer], "not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist." J.C. testified in a deposition that he warned [the observer’s spouse] she would be arrested if she “continue[d] to do this.”

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone following US news, but we should be angry about it. Textbook intimidation.

> Government attorneys asserted in a court filing that [agent J.C.] denied referencing a “domestic terrorism watchlist.”

And then they lied about it!

CircuitSeuss··on Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video
This could also be achieved so many other ways for a fraction of the price
CircuitSeuss··on Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Federal Surveillance Program
There is at least one attempt [0] of input manipulation I am aware of, but it was several years ago, unproven, and I have to assume that input data manipulation vulnerabilities are unlikely to be present. If a new destructive attack could be found by visual data input, mass simultaneous deployment would be the most effective use of it, the logistical issues of which are a substantial barrier to efficacy.

Changing stickers or vehicle color would have little effect since they would all be read normally: you change your clothes daily but that does not have any impact on the database itself or the cameras. Swapping or covering plates is illegal, and even things like ghost plates [1] are just misdirection and would do nothing to combat the surveillance system itself.

Wrapping tour vehicle in a custom tailored adversarial pattern [2] may work, but this is mostly unproven technology in the field, and it would only work until the failures it caused became part of the training set, at which point you would need to re-wrap tour vehicle. It would also be a lot of effort and expense to do something that wouldn't make any impact on the surveillance systems themselves (by definition the best case scenario here is that object detection does not work on the wrapped vehicle, but it could still be recorded and you would not be doing anything to combat the surveillance itself).

Ultimately, our best bet is to start with the end goal: stop the data from being collected in the first place, don’t just try to hide from it. Social and political campaigning is probably the most effective path currently. Map your neighborhood on deflock.me, put flyers on your local streets, talk to your neighbors, attend city council meetings, and call your reps incessantly. Change the incentives… If you are independently wealthy, offer your county or PD a donation (via their PAC or a grant) in exchange for signing an agreement for X years to not use these technologies. If you work in governance, tie funding to privacy agreements. Make individual donations to groups like the Ludlow Institute or EFF, or ask them about grant funding for your projects. If we are able to pass better privacy laws, it’s possible that a private right of action would make it prohibitively costly for private companies to create programs like this which mass infringe on personal rights.

Some individuals have taken to the more expedient solution of direct action, physically disabling cameras with spray foam, tin snips, etc for a more expedient solution (vandalism is obviously illegal, don’t do crimes, that would be bad and naughty).

[0] https://www.ioactive.com/sql-injection-in-the-wild/ [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq9860162dj2o [2] https://sandbox.norecognition.org/

CircuitSeuss··on Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
I think it might be symptomatic of broader tech illiteracy: People don't know anything else or anything better. They want their software to Just Work, and ultimately the decision is made by an executive who decides that microsoft products are “the most stable” or “easiest” route.
CircuitSeuss··on Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion
What a terrible fucked up system.
CircuitSeuss··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
Chaotic neutral behavior.
CircuitSeuss··on I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
I think parent is within bounds to complain here. This is a pretty horrendous font that is an accessibility issue not just a “tangential annoyance”— this is also a uniquely nauseating multi color font with flicker effects that is both interesting in its own right and hardly common.
CircuitSeuss··on The Interim Computer Museum
If you’re in the area, check out the Connections Museum too! https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html
CircuitSeuss··on A/I shuts down
Not all problems are best served with technical solutions. This is a political problem.
CircuitSeuss··on I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
Eerie how easy it is to leverage these always on network connected sensors we keep putting everywhere to get precise data profiles
CircuitSeuss··on GrapheneOS project: pixel 11 no longer supports hardware memory tagging (MTE)
I have a pipe dream that Apple will pull a 180 and offer support for GrapheneOS.
CircuitSeuss··on Juul gets OK to sell vaping device with age-gating technology
Age verification continuing to chart hitherto unheard levels of absurdity.
CircuitSeuss··on AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made "large-scale, disruptive actions"
> “Internal posts also reportedly pointed to AI agents making “large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute” and leading to a 40 percent increase in major technical and security incidents compared to the prior year. Employee time spent resolving those problems increased by as much as 70 percent. Meta declined to comment on these internal posts.”
CircuitSeuss··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
FTC study, Jan 2025 https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p246202_surveil...

Frequently sited investigative video journalism on grocery delivery prices (and more): https://youtu.be/osxr7xSxsGo

Airlines: https://fortune.com/2025/07/16/delta-moves-toward-eliminatin...

Insurance: https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/technology/gm-l...

Frankly, it’s everywhere— if a company is large enough, they will leverage consumer data to increase profits as much as the consumer will bear. There are many other examples, but I’ll just link you this as a jumping off point if you want to go further: https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...

Ongoing US house oversight committee investigation http://pallone.house.gov/media/press-releases/pallone-launch... https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Lette...

See also: https://lpeproject.org/blog/surveillance-pricing-exploiting-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_pricing

CircuitSeuss··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
If you have time and are interested I highly recommend reading Privacy Is Power by Carissa Véliz https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442343/privacy-is-power-by-c... https://annas-archive.gd/md5/11585979e43939b8175e1cba336bc9f...

If you don't have time, you can find brief but less compelling argument here: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/

CircuitSeuss··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
Yes, but typically only on the retailer/ Point of Sales side. Your bank is not selling that information. Of course, things get weird when you have additional intermediaries like Apple or Google pay. In principle at least, there should be some measurable difference vs credit.

Would be very curious to see studies on this if anyone finds one!

CircuitSeuss··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
This ignores the aspect of consumer data. Credit issuers generate profit through issuing rewards programs in part due to the sale of their customer’s behavioral spending data. Cash and debit users largely retain their data privacy here.

It’s hard to put a real world number on what the cost to the consumer is for losing this data ownership, but it is not zero: these data are increasingly used for targeted pricing practices which extort additional margins from the consumer at a later date.

CircuitSeuss··on I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers
The scale of wealth imbalance, the scale of money in politics, the scale of grocer prices, the scale of data collection and abuse of targeted price manipulation, the scale of climate catastrophe, the scale of electric bills, humming noises, draught conditions. It’s about realizing the scales are uneven, and seeing a tangible incarnation of that being built. All those problems are starting to seem awfully close to home. You can’t reach the trillionaire, but maybe you can keep it out of your back yard, so you protest the data center.
CircuitSeuss··on I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers
Things are getting literal… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49442998
CircuitSeuss··on Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model
Keep in mind line items can be deceptive. e.g. “Corporates” can mean “money we make from selling access to individual’s biometric data to the government.”

https://ir.thomsonreuters.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

CircuitSeuss··on Police officer used Flock cameras to track estranged wife 717 times
Anecdotally, yes.
CircuitSeuss··on Police officer used Flock cameras to track estranged wife 717 times
Yes, invasive background checks like this are scary. Biometrics collection becoming normalized as well.

I encourage you to delete or suspend your accounts, and therefore legally list no accounts.

Maintaining a largely un-used social under your legal name with some cute photos of your pets which you can cite if need be is also a strategy many have used.

CircuitSeuss··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
> the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude.

This is a really interesting take. You don't need an entire organized religion in order to disseminate your desired belief system anymore… you don’t even need billions of dollars. Hard to say what the cost of disseminating an ideology to a nation is now, but likely somewhere between a few bucks a whole lot of luck to tens of millions. If that bar drops low enough, there is potential for a lot more ideological competition, and things will get interesting.

CircuitSeuss··on Comcast turns your Xfinity WiFi into a home motion detector
As Bleeping Computer notes, the Xfinity Shield motion detection feature is not new [0,1], and neither is the technology behind it [2]. But it seems that recent advancements in wifi-based environmental mapping via common routers has made it possible to not merely detect motion, but to identify the mass signatures of individuals with extraordinary accuracy [3,4].

> As first spotted by TechCrunch, Comcast's WiFi Motion documentation says the company may disclose information generated by the feature to third parties "without further notice to you" in connection with a law enforcement investigation or proceeding, a dispute involving Comcast, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena. [post]

Maybe someone is able to present more accurate numbers, but I see a minimum of 37,967,235 plainly labeled XFinity routers listed on Wigle [5], which could have Xtinity Shield enabled with the flip of a button. This does not include the likely millions more under unique SSIDs, or indeed any other modem which may be running a similar (but less widely accessible) wifi-based scanning technology.

That’s a lot of physical surveillance in a lot of places.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/1ey3m4o/new_from_x...

[1] https://cybernews.com/security/xfinity-wifi-router-motion-tr...

[2] https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/seeing-through-walls-comp...

[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3719027.3765062

[4] discussion of [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321783

[5] https://wigle.net/stats#ssidstats

CircuitSeuss··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]

Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks. Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.

[1] https://thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem

[2] https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your...

CircuitSeuss··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
Excellent time to apply for your library cards.
CircuitSeuss··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
As with most things, it would be ideal if we could have both good defaults to make things accessible and advanced user controls to allow users to retain control. That’s a rare mix these days.
CircuitSeuss··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
Very interesting! Parent poster is correct, that notification does feel akin to a key logger… although I’m not sure that it applies to this bluesky feature.

So in this instance, am I right in understanding that iOS posts a notification after the user has completed a screenshot, which would make it impossible for the developer to use this notification to trigger anything that would modify that screenshot? Hence the developer’s work around?

CircuitSeuss··on Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows
Alfalfa farms consume 26% of the Colorado River’s water (2024 statistic).[0]

Alfalfa and hay production uses up to 68% of Utah’s water, and amounts to 0.2% of the state’s GDP (2022 statistic) [1].

These feed crops are extremely water inefficient, consuming 18-36 acre-inches (≈ 489,600-979,200 gallons) of water per acre of harvested alfalfa [2]. Utah averages 4 tons/acre in harvest [3], which by my math works out to about 510-1020 tons of water used per 1 ton of alfalfa harvest. If that seems high you, you may appreciate looking up numbers on water consumption per pound of beef accounting for feed.

The USDA reports about 46 million acres of US land are foreign owned [4](although 2024 reporting suggests not all foreign ownership of farm land is being reported [5]). While there are not accurate public numbers on the percentage of that foreign held land which is used for alfalfa farming, water use by foreign entities has been widely reported on [6], and has prompted legislation in the example state of Utah among others [7].

[0] https://www.sustainablewaters.org/why-do-we-grow-so-much-alf... [1]https://waterdesk.org/2022/12/one-crop-uses-more-than-half-o... [2] https://ecobuilderz.com/how-many-gallons-of-water-are-requir... [3] https://www.progressivepublish.com/downloads/2025/general/20...

[4] https://www.fsa.usda.gov/documents/foreign-holdings-us-agric...

[5] https://www.dailymail.com/galleries/article-12985003/Foreign...

[6] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...

[7] https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/hbillint/HB0186.pdf

CircuitSeuss··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.

To my knowledge, this is a misunderstanding. The app does not know that you are taking a screenshot, rather iOS knows you are taking a screenshot (as it must) and is excluding an element on display that has been designated by the developer as sensitive information. This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager; the developer has simply performed a nifty trick to display a small icon behind where the “follow” button would otherwise be displayed.

There are plenty of instances where this sort of thing can be annoying, such as when you try to screenshot a streaming service app and DRM enforcement leaves you with a blank screenshot, but IMO this particular instance is actually very tasteful; seeing “follow” on every screenshotted post is just useless noise, but a small unobtrusive platform icon is a useful reminder that the post came from Bluesky and not another very visually similar service like X(cancel) or Mastodon.

Page 1 of 3Next →