a2decrow

Autism is the product of having a differently wired brain than a non-autist does. It's something you're born with, not something you can get later.

Certain medications used by pregnant women can result in children being autistic, but I seriously doubt that this extends to any vaccines as well. Perhaps some really exotic ones maybe, but common vaccination definitely not.

Source: I am autistic, read up on it to be able to better deal with it and am dealing with it on a daily basis.

And truth be told, I don't know if I'd be better or worse off without it. It doesn't make my life unlivable and I guess the understanding of autism of most people is too much based on rumor-mongering and hearsay, than any actual facts.

Then it shouldn't be connected to a non-secure network / the internet in the first place.

Makes me wonder how many of those infected machines didn't have to be connected to the internet in the first place.

The Echo is a neatly packaged surveillance device that's disguised as a.. What are these things called? Voice assistants?

As with pretty much every IoT device, these things can be broken into by malicious actors and then they get to listen in too. Next thing on the list is that Amazon can do whatever it wants with those recordings and I highly doubt they're only listening in after you mention certain keywords. More likely that's just the trigger to flip the "answer back" switch. And last but not least we should not forget about the surveillance agencies, who will get unrestricted access to this one way or another.

In the grand way of things, this is just another method people are letting themselves being monitored. Just another small step towards total authoritarian control by mega-corporations and dictators. We have to step up and stop this from happening while we still can, or else there won't be any privacy left for anyone of us and the next generation will just grow up with it "being normal".

And before you ask, no, I don't have a smart phone. I have a very dumb phone that I can only use to call someone with or get called myself and more often than not I don't carry it around with me.

If the safe AI problem isn't solved by the time AGI arrives, I fear ending up with something equivalent to Skynet would be among our best outcomes.

I began working on a application firewall like this a little over 6 weeks ago for my thesis, as I was mildly disappointed there wasn't a GNU/Linux version of this (yet) and I considered it an interesting topic to dive into.

Note the date - 04. September 1999.