For me, it’s worth it. I live next to a forest already, far outside the city center, and there’s still assholes racing at night at the nearby street because it’s quite secluded and straight.
Also, I’m not worried about microphones on busy streets. It’s a public space already, which affects the content of my speech already. Microphones at home should be much more important for anyone worried about privacy.
Ngl would community self-reporting be better? I don’t even know how to report traffic violations etc. in the US. Do they also need proof in order to do something about it? I wonder if being able to record and send video to the police of loud vehicles would be better. Or perhaps that could turn out worse?
If a motorcycle is zooming at Mach 3 in a general vicinity of your house it’s pretty hard to report due to practical issues like getting shoes on, getting to your Mach 4 capable vehicle, locating the offender and catching up with him to get his plates.
I don’t think you want to outsource these kinds of things to the general population. If I have problems with noisy drivers in front of my house, I’d have to stand outside all day waiting for them to take a picture, or I’d have to install a camera. Both aren’t things a private person should have to do.
I live in Amsterdam and can confirm this is a real problem. Lots of assholes with small dicks who pimp their cars or motorcycles to be loud as fuck. I applaud this measure
I agree that it is sad that we have to come to that, but if good procedures are in place to make sure that the cameras and microphones are used for only this purpose, this can really help to have a better living environment.
It is unfortunate that some countries are using cameras, microphones and others to control the behaviour of people. I agree that it is a required measure - as some people do not change their behaviours out of good will - but it is definitely not ideal.
Hopefully, in some years it will no longer be necessary, as people will have those good behaviours deeply rooted.
Great, for added big brother points, the government could literally listen to every conversation on every street corner…
Edit. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to why the police having live recording microphones everywhere is a good idea, generally you’d need a warrant to record citizens.
But sure, this is just for loud exhausts and has no other possible uses. Lol!
I always ask myself with these sorts of things, what would the CCP do?
China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public.
That’s not the point. The point is we shouldn’t have to.
Mics can collect voiceprints. It’s like the police dusting for your fungerprints wherever you go. Which, if they had a warrant and cause, fair enough, but everyone 24/7? Seems like a privacy invasion to me.
A system like this isn't any less harmful to privacy than speed cameras, is it?assuming it's not implemented with a bunch of other non privacy friendly features (which I'd argue isn't an issue with the microphone)
Have you been sleeping under a rock for the last 15 years? If the government wants to listen to you, they’ll just use the microphone in your pocket. Or better: they don’t listen to your incoherent ramblings and go straight for your search history, which is much more interesting than what you are generally talking about.
I don’t know if you know this, but it’s pretty easy for someone to make private their phone, search history, etc. You just need to be a little dedicated and sacrifice some usability.
You cannot do the same with microphones listening everywhere that you do not own.
Unless there’s something beyond switching DNS, using a VPN and your own router/modem. It’s maybe 100$ up front and ~3-5 per month to be able to circumvent any telecom.
Switching DNS does jack squat for your privacy. Any telecom worth their salt can read all DNS requests no matter which DNS you talk to. They only don’t filter content on alternative DNSes because they don’t care about filtering/blocking in general unless forced to by law.
Using a VPN doesn’t add privacy, it just swapps out who is monitoring your traffic. Many VPN services are actually owned/run by secret services or cooperate with them (like NordVPN). Others are directly run by criminals who use them to steal data or inject malware. Also, VPN providers also have ISPs that reside in countries. In the very best case it’s not your ISP spying on you, but the VPN’s ISP. In the worst case, you now have an ISP and a VPN provider spying on you.
Your own router/modem again does nothing at all for your privacy.
That’s what I mean: people think they are doing privacy enhancing things, but actually what they are doing isn’t helping at all.
As someone who knows a bit more about privacy in networking than watching the sponsored bits in YouTube videos, I agree with the examples you posed, but there are other technologies to fix your DNS leaking to your ISP. One of them being DNS over HTTPS. It’s default in Firefox, and pretty hard to crack just like any other HTTPS query. All your ISP can know is that you’re potentially making a DNS query. Another option is a local DNS server cache. Choose some domains you wanna be able to access, and diligently update your local cache using HTTPS from existing DNS servers every fortnight. Your DNS queries will never escape your LAN.
DoH is an actual improvement, that’s true. But at the same time it’s a meaningless one, since the ISP can just do a reverse DNS lookup of the IPs you are contacting, and there isn’t really an option to hide the IP, unless you are using TOR or a VPN, but TOR sucks in real-world usage (and can also not really be trusted) and VPNs have been discussed before.
I worked on the “evil” side for ~7 years, in a company that made internet monitoring devices. Originally I was told it’s only for debugging ISP network problems, but after a few years, when I was trusted enough in the company, they told me that a significant portion of our customers are actually secret services all around the world.
The foreign ones usually wouldn’t just say that they are secret service, but they’d buy through other companies, which lead to some weird requests. For example, one time a small little British bakery asked for network monitoring equipment for their business. But they wanted the solution to be able to handle ~100 TBit/s, which was at that time roughly the total bandwidth of the whole UK plus some margin.
Some secret services, though, talked to us completely openly.
I’ve been at one ISP quite a few times at the department that handled secret service requests. I asked that guy what they do with our products, and he showed me the full suite that they are using. He entered a random phone number into the system, and an overview over the last year’s activities of that guy showed up. It had a list with timestamps of every site he accessed. It had all emails (of his ISP account and also emails that were sent unencryped) and SMS that that guy sent and received. It had a full movement profile of that guy for the whole last year, including his visits to other countries. The system allowed the operator to easily find contacts of that guy, even through the movement profile. So you could e.g. list all users that were close to that user at a given time, or all users that are frequently close to that guy.
Well yeah, you cannot completely cut deduction off the table. Not even in the real world. The fact though that the internet makes it easier is of course true. Even Tor is vulnerable to deduction-based MITM attacks using nodes that log activity. Nowadays though I think it matters less and less what you access, since everything in the internet has been reduced to a handful of huge websites (fucking SEO). If you’re in one of them, I doubt DNS info are going to be much of any use, apart from them having accessed Facebook, or YouTube. When I’m doing stuff I want hidden though, tor and DoH are a must.
Well, centralized services make it easier, not harder. Now secret services can just call up their contact at Facebook or any of the other services and they can not only monitor metadata but get content as well.
You mean the VPN advertising everywhere, who gives out the user data whenever a goverment agency knocks on the door? Or the other big name VPN, where the company owner has another business that makes money by selling users internet data?
Yeah, i’m sure they will bend over backwards and file lawsuits to “protect your privacy” for $5/month…
All of those things are within the dedication to privacy. A lot of upfront time commitment but near effortless after the fact. On desktop it’s even easier.
This can be done without constantly recording or transmitting what the microphone perceives. It can simply start recording sound and picture when a noise is detected that is loud enough / matches the pattern we’re looking for. This can be done just on the device. No big brother tech needed.
None needed, but that doesn’t stop autocratic regimes from doing mass surveillance.
China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public.
It reminds me of the case in NY where they charged someone for murder because they caught his license plate while he was driving near a shooting with no evidence whatsoever other than being near the shooting.
One microphone would be like having 1 ear. If you’ve ever known someone who is deaf in 1 ear, they have trouble locating the direction sounds come from. IIRC, the implementation involves something like ~50—100 or so microphones. If you have a lot of noise entering your house you can point the thing towards a window and it will generate a heat map image showing red color where the noise is the highest.
When adults talk about education, they always think back to when they were in school. Often years ago. Often you'll get someone who brings up that Socrates quote where he complains about the kids being lazy.
But it really is different. Covid, lockdowns and omnipresent social media have changed things. Childhood mental health issues and suicides have spiked in many countries. Sure, that's partly down to increased diagnosis, but you'd expect suicides to go down if we were diagnosing more of them.
When I was a teacher until quite recently, I had kids recording tiktoks in the middle of lessons. When you called them out on it, there'd be physical altercations. They'd have panic attacks. They'd listen to music during classes, then get upset when you told them to switch it off. Throwing literal tantrums, crying because you asked them to switch off their phone. Complaining about not being able to listen to music during a test, that kind of thing.
A teenager who knows the rules, and knows to hide their phone? Normal behaviour. Healthy even.
A teenager who doesn't hide their phone, and cries when you take away their phone? Not normal behaviour. Immature. Maladjusted.
Good to hear the idiocy of an alert system being under the control of the current owner is being pointed out. The sooner twitter stops being used like this by governments etc the better off we will be.
Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but is there something else (that currently exists) they can use that would get as many eyeballs on the alert? No one watches TV anymore. If they were to use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for alerts, they’d hit 90% of the population.
If they were to use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for alerts, they’d hit 90% of the population.
Twitter used to be very reliable, that is no longer the case.
In this case they blocked access and that is the problem. Twitter decided, with no warning, to block all access without an account and logging in.
There is no guarantee this or worse will not happen again.
This broke the system in place. That is my point. Social media in private hands cannot be relied on to provide a time critical alerts like this.
The governments around the world screwed up by seeding this system to a private company that can be trusted to maintain a service. But they did it for the usual reason, it was cheap to implement.
Maybe they can integrate a system into the cell phone networks so cell phones can get emergency text alerts without the need for a third party service... oh wait we already have that.
Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but is there something else (that currently exists) they can use that would get as many eyeballs on the alert?
What advantage does social media have over a basic website, other than the ability to spread through engagement? In a situation like this, I see no practical reason why they're not directing people to a government site along with social media.
I think the answer is just basic laziness, because it's easier to have some intern send a tweet than update a website, so we're offloading necessary functions to mercurial and unreliable capitalists. And that always ends well.....
The main advantage is that people would get the alerts as notifications from the app. It's not much different than sending alerts by email or SMS which are also privately controlled. But, those systems have maintained a reliable amount of freedom where as Twitter has gone off the deep end.
Its not much different than sending alerts by email or SMS which are also privately controlled.
See, this is where you're right, but very wrong. You are correct in that text and email are privately controlled, but they arent comparable to Twitter - in scale, composition and ownership.
Email and SMS are open protocols that are not controlled by any one group, and the systems are all interoperable and open standards control how they work. Twitter is a privately controlled platform with no visibility into how it works, no interoperability with other services. The better comparison would be email and SMS to the fediverse.
But, those systems have maintained a reliable amount of freedom where as Twitter has gone off the deep end.
That goes back to openness, standardization, and interoperability of email/SMS. Because of all those items, no one person can disrupt communication because there's no central control.
The alert was already sent directly to everyone's phone. The issue is that it directed people to Twitter for updates, when it could have just as easily pointed to a national weather service site.
In the heart of Silicon Valley is a nine-classroom school where employees of tech giants Google, Apple and Yahoo send their children. But despite its location in America’s digital centre, there is not an iPad, smartphone or screen in sight.
nltimes.nl
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