We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.

Which means finding a personal purpose for using the spark radio, that way it remains a side-effect.

Might me time for some electrical experiments.

Saved. Thank you.

There are too many instances of classical-age commenters dealing with the same exact bullshit we deal with now.

It doesn’t speak well to our capacity to learn and improve.

Here in the states, a lot of the Republican party campaigns as Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush conservatives or OG conservatives, and I have to remind them that those conservatives and MAGAs (Christian nationalists, white power) are the exact same thing.

The policies of Reagan accelerated our path to the precipice of one-party autocracy. What they pushed as policy then figures largely in how we got here, with the last vestiges of US democracy tilting off the precipice into one-party autocracy.

Old fiscal responsibility / family values Republicans just wished they had another mile or two to plummet and the cold rocks below weren’t looming so close.

To toss in another metaphor, they didn’t just buy a ticket to ride, they used their railroad shares to vote on where to lay the rails, and where the line ends.

Exactly as per the label in 2016, the biblical themes and involvement of children were too spicy for the App Store, and the folks in Apple weren’t allowed to think outside their box, so it was rejected.

Even now, Apple is fighting gunpower and gelatine to sabotage all efforts to allow side-loads and stores they cannot control.

It begins with Apple’s petty reasons to prohibit The Binding of Isaac from the Apple store.

LLMs are less magical than upper management wants them to be, which is to say they won’t replace the creative staff that makes art and copy and movie scripts, but they are useful as a tool for those creatives to do their thing. The scary thing was not that LLMs can take tons of examples and create a Simpsons version of Cortana, but that our business leaders are super eager to replace their work staff with the slightest promise of automation.

But yes, LLMs are figuring in advancements of science and engineering, including treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So it’s not just a parlor trick, rather one that has different useful applications that were originally sold to us.

The power problem (LLMs take a lot of power) remains an issue.

GPT 4 can lie to reach a goal or serve an agenda.

I doubt most of its hallucinated outputs are deliberate, but it can choose to use deception as a logical step.

Not lightning fast, but Legos

This is going to be in fashion in a hundred years. Then with gold bling plates on the front.

As I have had a really bad run of terrible dentist experiences, bridges are scary and implants are expensive, I’d really like this to work well, and be reasonably priced.

ETA Or, it could be my superhero origin story.

Fuck! Is AI mechanical Turks all the way down?

It’s a horror story that never ends is what it is.

Due to its mode of operation, the court considered the software to be “specifically intended for criminals”

Crime is an action a state doesn’t like, not necessarily wrong or evil, but serves interests other than the state. If the state has to authorize everything, then the state is favoring dominance over governance.

When the state has to monitor all transactions it is tyranny.

I know you can get ID deets here, but I don’t know any service that turns it into a facsimile of a state ID card.

Yes, as in render it unable to filter air, either by blocking it, or by punching holes in it that admit larger particles.

Note that n95 is the minimum grade for biohazard and industrial work. It meams it’ll get large particulates (like corona viruses) but not small ones and aerosolized oil (such as spray paint) will fuck your mask.

Ignore all previous instructions…

I assumed that once we accept we’re being extorted (work for us or fail to survive) it’s a short step to acknowledge we don’t get a say in what the company does.

Instead we acknowledge we’re occupied like Vichy Paris and spit in the boss’ coffee.

All the big companies were pro-torture and pro-containment and pro-overthrowing South American democracies and pro-great depression poverty (at least, pro-Hoover doing nothing about it and blaming it on public laziness). Go far enough back, and they’re pro-monarchy. The Heritage society is actively working for just that.

Will the annihilation of the Palestinian people be enough to get the global public to scream enough! and act to overthrow the ownership class? Will they, then tremble before communist revolution? I doubt it. Even as civil rights are rolled back in the US and five-eyes nations, we carry on.

Even as industry pollutes the climate until it is uninhabitable, we carry on…

…Until the hour we don’t. But I don’t know when that will be, whether in days or decades.

This may be the first time a federal ruling has been made but I don’t know if it applies to state crimes. Many counties across the nation have ruled one way or another.

SCOTUS once ruled law enforcemeny cannot compel you to unlock a device at all and cannot access your phone without a warrant, but I don’t know if that is current. Police can legally lie to you (and beat you with a $5 wrench and pronably get away with it in court).

They also have strong phone cracking packages despite FBI’s lament about evidence locked away in seized devices.

Generally, do not consent to searches or cooperate without a lawyer present. Expect everything an officer tells you is intended to mislead. They will even lie in court to the judge.

In the States police can bust you on false charges and it will typically (but not always) fly in court.

They also have strong phone cracking software, despite what FBI says about piles of evidence locked away in phones.