deltoidmaximus

Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.

Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!

I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.

That's assuming they don't just have a backdoor inserted expressly for this purpose. Now only the rich or powerful can produce an "authentic" recording of an event and the same system can be used to hunt down whistleblowers and political enemies by looking up who bought the camera.

It actually might make the new horrible world even worse. Imagine the populace getting used to a AI image detector flagging things as fake using this fairly easily defeated GUID marker system. Most people are just making memes or cat videos and don't even try to remove this so eventually the populace starts to believe these things actually work.

Now some one slightly more sophisticated starts creating deepfakes of a woman and uploading them or fabricating video of an political event without this marker. The subject protests it's fake and AI generated but a loud majority of ignorants feed it into Microsoft AI detector and call you a liar and say it's confirmed real. Most people don't know any better and eat it up because a computer said so.

The smartphone camera supply chain already made possible easy purchase of miniature spy camera devices of various types, they're all on Amazon. Sometimes they're pretending to be nanny cams or something but others are hidden body cameras or glasses. So pervert glasses already existed and were pretty cheap.

The downside with the Meta glasses really is this gives "cover" for wearing these kinds of things. If you caught some one with a pocket button camera or the cheap pervert glasses before, well you knew what they were up too. Now they can hide behind being a tech enthusiast or a trend follower or even some kind of fashion thing and wear them right out in the open, allowing nefarious use to be hidden in plain sight.

We've already decided to do verification of users, now we can look into which groups of users should be limited or barred entirely.

I've seen people argue for lowering burdens of proof for particularly heinous crimes and seemingly unaware they're arguing from a position of rage and need for revenge.

Pretty obvious place to start. The purpose of the TPM is to prevent users from running unapproved software on the device.

And there's the problem that if the PIN or worse a biometric version of this becomes remotely well known you've now created an incentive for a car thief to kidnap people even if they only want the car.

The service can use the use the attestation feature to block passkey providers that are deemed undesirable for whatever reason. Hard not to see eventually only major providers being accepted, even things like Microsoft services requiring Microsoft Passkeys using the Microsoft Passkey App which you're now required to have on your phone. Or worse you now need Symantec Passkeys to login to Symantec services (using that example since I believe Symantec had a ToTP App you needed to reverse engineer to extract the ToTP seed from if you wanted to use a different Authenticator)

I avoid using them altogether for the same reason. I won't use them for low value accounts because it signals that I think they might be acceptable to eventually require for high value ones. And of course low value accounts have no value so I don't even care about phishing on most of those.

With foresight you can get around this since you can reuse the TOTP seed values.

The annoying thing is so many services don't even support TOTP. They either want their own proprietary app, still insist on SMS, some of them even try to get you to use voice prints!

That's where the attestation feature comes in. It allows them to force you into a hostage situations by restricting passkey implementation. There's a reason that was part of the spec from the get go but a passkey transfer system wasn't.

I can't think of many things I'd less like to verify with Persona than NSFW reddit. They should just ban NSFW content altogether at that point.

The frustrating part is that since so many companies collect PII under the guise of security (and then use it for advertising) it's harder to tell if this is a legal scam or illegal scam.

I think these products were always niche for the reasons parent suggested, I recall their price and max capacity being unappealing when I was looking to make use of a drawer full of obsolete RAM. But since there were several iterations from a few companies they must have sold well enough to justify their development.

They seemed to stop making them altogether around when SSDs came out which probably shrunk the market niche right out of viability.

Are any streaming services actually serving that bitrate?

Wish it was at least at FWD. I know, I'm the oddball that wants a subaru brat. I'm more concerned about snow handling with very limited truck utility.

I could have sworn there was actually some kind of study that proved this. Cars are sufficiently expensive and longer lived these days that resale value is actually something buyers at least think they need to take into account.

It's actually a little depressing if you're sitting in traffic, just watch the cars go by and see how few of them actually have a unique color. And most of the exceptions are something like an almost gray blue.

For my part I've found new car styling hideous with little difference between brands my entire adult life. Probably for nostalgic reasons I like the sharp geometric shapes of cars from the 1980s which largely disappeared with a focus aerodynamics for gas mileage. So I'm usually satisfied with whatever color is on the lot since I hate the look by default anyway.

Enough control will create value for them anyway, it just might be at the expense of everyone else.

Ashton Kutcher wrote a letter of support for Danny Masterson and his character when Masterson was convicted of multiple counts of rape. When this showed up in the media his defense was he thought this letter would be private even though it was sent to the judge in a criminal trial. Apparently, he and his friends should be able to use their fame/connections to quietly help their rapist friends get reduced sentences but everyone else should have their private communications scanned.

I'd say this is more about being able to identify and crush any nascent political movements that threaten the status quo in their infancy, but no reason not to let the implementers wet their beak to get buy in.

I have to figure out by my kid's new Minecraft account is banned/blocked or whatever even though she hasn't even used it, looks like the standard pump for extra PII scam every account setup runs now. She was about on the verge of tears telling me about it.

I deal with the shenanigans at work but I'm at least paid to eat shit there. That's how they run things I guess, you give them money, then they extort you to get more if you want what you paid for or they'll make your kid cry. I'm grinding my teeth just thinking about it.

This was modus operandi for Comcast as well, along with continuing to bill you for service at an address after you'd canceled and moved off the property. IIRC one older woman went to their local offices and started whaling on things with a hammer in response to this.

And IIRC tons of FBI employees combed over the files in 2025 likely to remove Trump or Trump and allies at the cost of millions of dollars. And even after that he's still all over them so imagine what was in there originally.

The "I can't bank" complaint is strange to me. I've never done any banking on my phone, the closest is when paypal extorted a phone number out of me for SMS verification. I still do banking through web browser at home, for several different accounts. But maybe it's different outside of the US.

Walmart.com recently deleted my phone number from my decade+ old account and refused to let me purchase anything until I coughed one up. When I put my actual number in it told it was no good. Possibly this is because my wife has an account using the same number, which was never a problem until sudden phone numbers only belong to one person I guess? I'm trying to give these guys money.

I gave them a google voice number and apparently that satisfied them. Then lost access to the google voice number because I never used it for anything else.

I didn't care for the UI at all which is the most common complaint about it. But it was the least offensive complaint to me, the existence of the Microsoft Store was had me looking for the exit. I guess I overestimated Microsoft's competence because the store remains an irritating tumor that hasn't yet metastasized.

Unpopular opinion: Windows 10 is worse. You could still control updates and uninstall or never install the telemetry packs in 8/8.1. And the UI problem could be solved with 3rd party tools. Windows 10 had the spyware baked in and got more annoying over time. But poor adoption of 8 and Microsoft abandoning it meant that in practice driver and software support for 8.1 often disappeared before even Windows 7.

I was reminded of this sequence when one of my required trainings not only had a quiz but also a required minimum time limit. It wasn't enough knowing the material I needed to waste time on it as well.

And then I remembered people in jobs that pay less than mine are already viciously harassed for not acting like identical automatons.

I doubt it helps but this is such a small piece of the pie I'm not sure how much this hurts things either. Steam Deck is kind of a niche in a niche and doesn't sell in huge numbers compared to other players like PC OEMs and phone OEMs that are now all over a barrel as well as OpenAI tries to buy all the RAM so no one else can have it.