beep boop

  • 1 Post
  • 834 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • Apple have a reasonable track record of pushing back against governments

    Only when it comes to individual consumer cases like terrorists or other crimes. When it comes to large scale political movements then they are very quick to lend authoritarian governments a hand, see for example their cooperation with the CCP to suppress the Hong Kong protests. But they have also always cooperated with police to some degree and this has only gotten worse.

    Forbes for the lack of a better source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/10/09/apple-sells-privacy-to-consumers-but-its-quietly-helping-police-use-iphones-for-surveillance/

    There’s a widespread perception that Apple has a combative relationship with law enforcement after the company refused to help the FBI hack into the iPhone of the shooter in the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attacks. But since then, it has ramped up collaboration with police through the conference and other meetings with agencies at both Cupertino HQ and its Elk Grove campus, as well as a variety of previously unreported projects helping cops use iPhones, Macs, Apple Vision Pro and CarPlay, the emails show. Most of these projects have not been announced publicly.

    Apple declined to comment.

    People just love believing in Apple for some weird reasons.



  • No, and even worse, its only for apple devices lmao. These kids are so unserious in their activism it would be funny if it werent so sad. If shit hits the fan, this stuff will go down instantly and im sure it has no backup plan for a Tor based or p2p service. Activists in the US should start using Briar. This situation is exactly what it was made for and people have to get their tech game up fast or they will be done for. Get a shitty 80$ android phone if you only have an iphone. Install a panic trigger app that will wipe the phone if you are in trouble.

    On ICEBlocks website it says:

    Modeled after Waze but for ICE sightings, the app ensures user privacy by storing no personal data, making it impossible to trace reports back to individual users.

    Which worries me, because if its closed source then thats a worthless promise and actually makes the app a perfect candidate for a honeypot or backdoor.

















  • Nah its just part of the MLM scheme that is “AI”. Its useful because they said it would be useful. Its worth the investment because it cost a lot of money. Once you realize that all these companies care about is revenue and “growth” then it all clicks. It doesnt have to work or be profitable, it just needs to look good to investers.

    They will even go as far as firing loads of workers and saying publicly that they “replaced them with AI” while in reality those workers were just doing something that the company was willing to sacrifice. They just replaced something with nothing to make it look like their magic AI can actually do things.

    Cory Doctorow put it better than i ever could: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/
    The whole post is good but i will just quote this section.

    The “boy genius” story is an example of Silicon Valley’s storied “reality distortion field,” pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn’t stop people from believing Zuck when he announced “metaverse.”

    Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck’s AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta’s stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta’s growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market’s willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of “losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume” look positively rosy.