Someone earlier posted about “paranoid behavior concerning privacy”.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with my son. We were sitting outside, no one around.
My son mentioned that later today he was getting his hunting license. I asked if he was going to the gun shop downtown on Main Street?
He answered, no he was going to Big 5 Sports. I responded, Big 5 over near the hiway.
This is where something strange happened. (never happened before). My Apple Watch displayed, Big 5 Sports with address listed in my town plus a couple nearby cities.
I consider this strange because I never went to my Apple IPhone or watch for an address.
Is someone or something listening to my private conversations???
In general, I’m sure that would be the case. But I know that I would miss out on certain things if I got off completely. For instance, a friend of mine recently lost a child to an illness. Had I not been on Facebook, I likely would not have known. And then I reached out to others in our friend group through Facebook so that a bunch of us could show up for the memorial service. Sure, 90% of the crap on there is useless and probably affecting me negatively. But sometimes that other 10% is significant.
That may still be true today, but if it is, it won’t be for long. Apple not only admits, but brags about creating a work-around to customer privacy so that they can spy for some sorts of child criminal activity. For some reason, they think that selectively spying for one criminal activity is okay. My two arguments to that idea are:
The slippery slope blah, blah.
What makes that criminal activity worse than murder, rape, or any other criminal activity. By their policy, are they not condoning murder, rape, and all other criminal activities?
Here are the technical specs on that new Apple “think of the children” identification of pictures that someone says might be related to child porn.
In particular, a government supplies Bad Picture hashes to Apple, who scans everything on everyone’s cloud storage and reports any matches to the government. Your phone can’t know if a given image matched a hash, nor if the hashes Apple are checking against are, in fact, the hashes Apple claims they’re checking against.
On the privacy front, Apple is very happy to comply with China’s demands to do business there, so I’m sure the Tiananmen Square guy will be scanned across all the phones if they ask, just like how the FBI could demand Apple scan for all the pictures of the Capitol Protest Insurgents and slap Apple with a FISA court order not to tell anyone about it while they track down everyone who took any pictures for political persecution.
The last time the FBI demanded they decrypt some terrorist’s phone, Apple said they couldn’t due to the tech making impossible. Now that they have the tech, they will be forced to use it.
True story and I’m taking a little liberty here since this is my thread:
Between fifteen and twenty years ago I used to attend the computer auctions on a regular basis. You could buy used computer equipment of all sorts and varieties at those live events. My buddy once bought an old server, having no software, which we rehabbed and got up and running. I mean, they were auctioning a very wide variety of computer stuff and related paraphernalia. It was a lot of fun. Heck, I still have my box of 500 floppy disks for which I paid three bucks!
Anyway, from time to time Apple gear would go on the block. Not often. Thing I remember is that there were virtually no bids. Higher end Apple computers in working condition would end up going for five bucks. Nobody wanted their s***.
That was then. This is now. And I realize Apple has been reborn since those days and today is very popular and well regarded. But to me Apple remains the Apple of those long ago auctions. I still do not want to own any of their products. To hell with them, their fancy overpriced products, their intrusive spying, and their “we know best” attitude. I want no part of Apple.
No. You have fallen for the right wing deceptions hook, line and sinker. It’s been long enough that I don’t recall all the problems with the story but it never added up.
The biggest problem with the story is how the media reported it as baseless Russian interference, while not a single person involved in the story has ever denied it being true.
The sequence of events were reported as they were in order to not make sense. What was also not reported was any effort whatsoever to ask any Biden directly if this was or was not Hunter Biden’s laptop, nor if the various examples of info/pictures/messages allegedly pulled off it had or had not been altered (if real at all). The only reason that isnt your first question is if you are afraid that the answer might destroy your preferred narrative.
That’s the only story they had. And only those directly involved know the truth.
It goes both ways - most conspicuously, Trump passed on multiple opportunities to ask Biden directly, during the debates last summer/fall.
The point is, we rarely see the truth reported. What we get is the “truth” that best fits the desired narrative. If the truth was the goal, the first, and only, question everyone would ask is if the laptop and the messages real. Rather than focusing solely on how the information might’ve been sourced through Russia and thus might’ve been altered and might not be reliable.
I get the sense that you’ve bought in, and thus assume anyone mentioning the opposing perspective has also bought in. But a lot of people are just calling out the contradictions and omissions in an attempt to get to the actual truth.
Since you won’t provide a reference I will provide a reference that shows your assertion is false. The story did add up but was deliberately mis-reported and obfuscated by the left-wing American media. You have to go to the UK to get any facts
The FBI has seized Hunter Biden’s laptop and confirmed the former vice president’s son’s controversial emails are ‘authentic’, while dispelling earlier claims that they are part of a Russia disinformation campaign.