It’s very frustrating to me to see people say things like “socialism/communism always ends in a dictatorship” while ignoring that capitalism tends towards oligarchies and monopolies. I’m glad to see someone else pointing out that “capitalism only works on a small scale.”

How though? You can still get TLS certificates for fake websites. Why do you think you couldn’t properly sign a fake QR code?

Non flatpak things aren’t sandboxed either.

They accept all of that information in one way or another.

How would signing help here??

How’d you get that from that???

Most of those points are true for non flatpak things as well though.

That’s still a wall switch that’s wired to an outlet. Some countries have switches on every outlet just built into them.

Don’t those just make the plugs fit? Isn’t that the point of the story?

It’s mass phishing versus spear phishing. I believe anyone would fall for a highly specific spear phishing campaign from dedicated individuals, but I don’t believe most people are important enough to be victims of it nor do most people need to really do it.

I didn’t even know this was a feature. My understanding has always been that Echo devices work as follows.

1. Store a constant small buffer of the past few seconds of audio
2. Locally listen for the wake word (typically “Alexa”) using onboard hardware. (This is why you cannot use arbitrary wake words.)
3. Upon hearing the wake word, send the buffer from step one along with any fresh audio to the cloud to process what was said.
4. Act on what was said. (Turn lights on or off, play Spotify, etc.)

Unless they made some that were able to do step 3 locally entirely I don’t see this as a big deal. They still have to do step 4 remotely.

Also, while they may be “always recording” they don’t transmit everything. It’s only so if you say “Alexaturnthelightsoff” really fast it has a better chance of getting the full sentence.

I’m not trying to defend Amazon, and I don’t necessarily think this is great news or anything, but it doesn’t seem like too too big of a deal unless they made a lot of devices that could parse all speech locally and I didn’t know.

I interpreted it as meaning lone words as in only a few here and there.

Tacology

Exactly. They just don’t care. They’re not necessarily ignorant and participating in good faith.

Maybe they just end up in the plane where it is now. You’re overthinking it. It’s not a monkey’s paw and they weren’t using it with intent to harm.

Magic exists in that universe though and they’re using some of the most powerful objects in the universe. So like if it’s granting a wish, you just wish that everyone comes back to earth or whatever. It’s not even really a suspension of disbelief. It feels more silly to think that genius scientists using wish granting artifacts wouldn’t remember to account for the movement of the earth through space.

Damn. If only there was a way to get protection against measles without having to get measles. Some sort of injection. That’d be useful.

But by giving the poor money we’d be robbing them of their ability to reach self actualization by creatively solving their own problems! (/s obviously)

Yes! I love this comic (well, I guess it wasn’t originally) and reference it all the time. I was randomly very curious which shot glasses we own are the biggest and was trying to use this as an example because we have some tall skinny ones and short fat ones. “You know! The thing where kids think the tall one is bigger??”

Yeah, I remembered Super Auto Pets and immediately realized I’d made an enormous mistake.