In the future, people willingly surveil themselves 24/7 with cryptographic proof, because fake images and video will be so good that it will be the only way to prove what one didn't do. Total Information Awareness achieved :D
> In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]
As a 12-year-old I could barely afford shared hosting let alone a license for Invision or vBulletin. I recall that phpBB also had a reputation for stability (manually-applied RPG mods excluded) that Invision sacrificed in favor of more features and faster development.
As a forum administration enthusiast, I still remember the fiasco when Invision rugpulled "lifetime" and "perpetual" licence holders by saying that it was only for those major versions.
I was so glad when XenForo came about and gave those sleazebags some competition.
Hah I actually just had 5.6 sol upgrade my old heavily modified IPB3 forum’s code to run on modern php8/mariadb11, backported cve fixes, gave it strict CSP etc and have it running seemingly securely exposed to the internet.
vbulletin 3.8 was peak for me. the 4.x major broke a ton of mods so there was still a huge community sticking to 3.x. was a big fan of xenforo too, the default design was quite refreshing compared to vB and IPB
If something is technically possible, one should act as though it is already happening and hope to be wrong rather than refusing to consider the issue until sufficient “proof” is given, by which it will be too late. Doubly so when advertisers are involved, who as a group are economically-incentivized to not care about consent.
This would be trivial to test and detect. Just like every claim that TVs will connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them to a network. Yet after years of these claims and being extremely trivial to test not a single shred of evidence has ever been provided.
Isn't messing with TTLs a pretty obvious thing to do when communicating covertly? And wouldn't that kind of packet inspection only catch cases of TVs literally acting as packet-level routers, but not catch application-layer shenanigans like aggregating statistics in the exit node so that all the data going over your own network appears to be originating from the same device?
It's still implausible, but thoroughly verifying that your TV isn't spying on you isn't trivial.
There's no requirement that the mesh be IP-based or function as a layer-3 router...
Even if it were IP-bsaed, it would be extremely straightforward for one box to send a UDP message to another, and receive and retransmit at the application layer. No TTL nonsense, No multiple IPs showing up communicating upstream.
Put a WiFi NIC in monitor mode and see if the TV is connected to another AP based on the 802.11 packets.
Or if this theoretical implementation by a manufacturer is using a custom protocol/frequency (very unlikely for a variety of reasons), you'd begin by probing with an SDR.
I only semi-agree with GP; it's trivial for someone who works in Tech to pull it off, but that's really all you need to blow the lid on the whole operation given manufacturers would likely have implemented the same behavior across all TVs of the same model/product segment.
This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but there is no evidence of some super-advertiser doing. It's not even clear to me that much of the 'fingerprinting' (past basic re-targeting) actually works.
> This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but [...]
Isn't this what people said pre-Snowden? Not that NSA spying is the same as corporate "surveillance capitalism", but if companies can make more money off it and the technology exists, it seems prudent to assume companies are trying it.
There was evidence of the NSA intercepting international communications before Snowden, but for some reason that didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
It's also significant to note that while the government is quite bad at keeping 'problematic' behavior secret, companies are much worse at it.
Analogously, there's evidence that companies will make extensive use of available techniques (browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) to track and surveil users without their knowledge and often against their will. The exposure of that arguably also hasn't triggered an effective backlash against those companies. So, as with the pre-Snowden evidence for domestic communication interception by the NSA, I think there's ample evidence of the willingness of companies to exploit whatever technologies they can in order to surveil users.
The way this is typically handled is through compartmentalization, where no one working has enough of a global view to be able to claim that the behaviour is problematic.
There's a lot that's problematic that we suspect that is going on but don't have firm proof, because the organization actually is pretty good at keeping it secret enough. There's some exceptions where things do get leaked/revealed, but how would you know if this was 99% of wrongdoing, or 0.99% of it?
> we were sat in a room thinking 'How do we design this to be different, so we don't get sued by Apple?' The Mac had a menu bar of text across the top, so we thought 'we can't go across the top, we'll have to go across the bottom
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