As an American and avid rights understander, it is not the 5th Amendment which this risks violating (which you did cite correctly), but the 4th Amendment, which guarantees protection from undue searches and seizures of your person, property, or effects. This is the whole reason for the warrant requirement and the reason you hear us bitching whenever something comes up that lets police or agents of the government acquire non-public access to information or property in a warrantless way.

An example: the police are investigating Mary’s death and suspect you of having planned the murder in the Notes app on your phone, so they want to get into your phone. Without a court order (warrant), you have to give them permission. With the court order, you must give the passcode and/or unlock the phone.

Now, at this point, if your passcode happened to be ‘I killed John02&’ you could argue 5th Amendment protection because divulging the information would incriminate yourself in the crime, or a different crime.

I will look at QuickConnect as that sounds potentially ideal.

I honestly don’t trust MS as far as I could throw them. The amount of ads they are forcing into the OS level is evidence enough for me to believe that they are willing to abuse customers. And if DropBox is any indication of how ToS and EULAs can change in the blink of an eye to include all files, past and present, to be used for AI training with no recourse to opt-out, then MS’s current ToS doesn’t really give any fuzzy feelings.

I will definitely have to look at dyndns as I need to find a way to provide a static endpoint to gain access to ethically sourced AI training materials for my own works and that sounds like it might work.

And yes, I do work in AI, which is why I am so focused on not allowing the megacorps to ignore even the most basic regimes of ethics or customer respect.

I’m not above getting my hands dirty and this sounds like it could have promise. Thank you.

I don’t mind self-hosting, I just need something that can host from a dynamic IP since static is too expensive right now.

Ideally, as easy to interface with as possible for non-tech literate users. My mother-in-law once told my wife “I don’t know why you would ever want to strengthen your mind.” in response to confronting my wife on why she was reading a book outside as a child instead of playing physically. This is a mantra she has continued well into her 50’s and is still going “strong”. I need something she can access and download pictures from to print off and hang on her wall like she does from FB now. This is essentially the low bar. Everyone else should be more competent than that.

Thank you on the congrats! We are so happy and he could not be more adorable.

Also thank you for the suggestion, I will dig into it.

This has potential in many ways. I will have to set it up and see how it feels.

I will happily look at the alternatives. We avoid Apple like it carries the plague, mostly on my objections to their licensing policies alone. Also, I love that you linked to something about The Fappening, have a 💯 and my heartiest appreciation for you as a scholar and a gentleman.

This could be a good option. I will have to look into it. I know some of our family is not the most savvy (lucky to be able to use FB) so I may have to look into building a front end on top of it for them, but this is a solid start.

Big difference is consent.

I usually go a little harder with it. Suggest they strip down and walk down the street in the buff, or offer to look in their windows at night without them knowing. It’s amazing how people forget that “modesty” is another form of privacy. The issue is that people have a visceral understanding of what a violation of their direct privacy is and what it means, but their virtual privacy, they don’t understand the danger, not the implications of it being taken. Make them feel violated and them get them to equate the two feelings.

Ummm… That’s the wrong freedom for them to be trying to invoke. They have their own. It’s called Freedom of the Press. But they don’t seem to want to invoke that one when they know it is bullshit.

Thank you, I was going to comment this but decided to check if someone else had already.

Perhaps. I like to blame my crippling ADHD and lack of generational wealth.

Or just open the side panel and pull the lead off the speaker. Hopefully they didn’t do something dumb like wire the speaker in series with the main power supply so to the computer so the whole thing doesn’t work if the speaker is disconnected or dies.

I wish I were a billionaire. I would literally start a company that made cars, phones, tech of all kinds on the basic premise that I don’t give a fuck about you or your data. Make it private. Make it have no EULA that says anything beyond IP protections. Make it so consumers never have to worry about underhanded bullshit. Sure, I may not make tons of money, but I think I could be happy turning a small profit, paying employees fairly, and knowing that I am selling better products and undercutting all the assholes to send them careening directly I to the ground.

Except it’s really not. Most of the dealerships around are thinly veiled fronts for the manufacturers. The salespeople are shills and scam artists who are specifically hired for their ability to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That poor sap working at Chik-fil-A is some minimum-wage kid who is about as complicit in the greater organization than the mop is. Dealerships are a mouthpiece for the very manufacturers who are patenting ways to make your care self repossess and are charging subscriptions for basic functions that are built into the cars.

The comparison is shallow and not at all reasonable.