If this pretending works 100%, then a malware can use that technique to pretend that the phone is secure, to trick you into using your bank app and steal your money anyway.
I also prefer to own my device and be root on it, while installing all the "pretend I'm non-rooted" functionality on it, I did think "this is basically installing a rootkit to tell the OS 'yes, I'm clean!'.". Then my bank (fuck them very much) decided to add a check for a locked bootloader and refused to work without it. I suppose maybe there's a way for the "rootkit" to lie and say "Yes the bootloader is locked!"?
I didn't read all the comments, but it seems to have been lost that it's a fight between freedom (allowing people to "own" their devices) and protecting the general public from harm (being scammed and losing all their money). We also have to give up some freedoms, eg. we are forced to wear helmets or seatbelts as participants of traffic, to ensure a better protection.
I watch a YouTube series of 2 guys who restored a classic Mini car (putting the running gear of another car into it, adding bells and whistles and more bells and whistles). They've been going at it 12 years, when they could've just bought a modern car. Seems like a lot of work for nothing.
They show a bike at a location, if it's rented it will disappear off the map, if it's "returned" (available to hire again) it will show back up on the map, but at a different location.
So "represents one real bike ride" is... I guess a lawyer would say technically true.
I was recording similar location data of a Car2Go-like service for a year or two some years ago, I realize considering they charge rentals by the minute, I could estimate how much they earn by analyzing how long the cars disappear for.
That's if they ever face a "truth and reconciliation" commision like after Apartheid South Africa.
If not, and if you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch. The director said "It was like I went to Germany 40 years after WW2 and found out the Nazis had won".
There was an "anti-communist" massacre in Indonesia in 1965. The killers were sanctioned by the government who remained in power/are still very powerful nowadays. (When a reformist president said "maybe we can look at this part of the country's past", the rumour was, the army was going to let protesters (who are still gung-ho communist-hating) protest near the presidential palace, and not intervene if/when they invade it.
This documentary follows one old killer and his "journey" from being able to talk about it casually until he ends up meeting his conscience.
Same in former east Germany. Poland did did much better though, they kicked most of the bastards out but it was a dime on its side for a while, a lot of Polish pensioners were yearning back to the good old days and even today there is still a remnant of this.
I have 10 windows open and 8 of them have about 20-30 tabs (two of them have less than 10 each), I don't think my hoarding is thriving. It's more of a scatterbrain saying "Oh I'll get back to that idea", and taking days or weeks to get back to it.
In Vivaldi, vertical tabs mean each tab takes about 40 vertical pixels of height, and about 250 pixels width, so I can skim through the titles of each tab...
Seems like it needs higher level stuff, although that's a bit too sci-fi. Captain Picard can just ask "Computer, where is Commander Riker?" and the computer answers him, he doesn't need to say "Computer, launch people finder app" and "Computer, input 'Commander Riker' in the people finder app"...
I use Google Assistant for things like "add a reminder", "set an alarm", which is natural language processing but doesn't seem to need so many neurons as LLM. And faster than this Gemini crap, anyway.
I saw a social media clip of a woman in the passenger car of a Chinese car (her - presumably husband - is driving) asking the car "Has there been a woman in this car other than me?". The car seems to have an LLM app, because it responds saying "I can't see that", and then start giving tips how to find out (check the recent addresses list in th navigation, check the trips log if there has been long trips, see if the car is cleaner than he usually maintains it), and ending with talking about trust and communication in a relationship...
Hah, in our imagination we'd get KITT from Knight Rider. In reality...
I have an alarm clock with Google Assistant, I can ask it where my Pixel 7 is, and it will make that phone ring using whatever Google's equivalent of Find My Phone is.
Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman was also in the area, 20 odd years ago, when they did a montorbike trip from London to New York, "The Long Way Round" (Crossing Europe, Mongolia, Russia, Canada and USA): https://youtu.be/6kajsHTy3hA
Man, looking at the map it feels like one of the last wild place on earth. I was wondering if this shipyard is on the Arctic Coast, but not really. If it were, it'll be relevant in the near near future. At the moment it's connected by a river to the Arctic Ocean, it's probably booming with business.
It was a neat series, but the start where they whinge about not getting free bikes from their brand of choice was so incredibly entitled and such a turn off.
That's right. I wonder if the decision-makers at KTM regretted that afterwards.
Addendum: Considering that the GS has been a bestseller ever since. It feels like every other motorcycle enthusiast in Germany rides one. It has been the best-selling motorcycle almost every year since then. In Italy, many also seem to prefer riding GS bikes over Guzzi/Ducati/Aprilia.
Similar: During pandemic Ewan and Charlie did an electric bike ride from Argentina to the US and the support crew were in Rivians along with the Rivian CEO or head of engineering or something, as an extended QA run before full production. It was my introduction to the brand and sufficiently impressed me such that I think it’s the only option I’d look at for an EV.
What I remember from that show is that they plug in the Rivian to charge, and 12 hours later the charge level has increased by some miniscule amount. At some point they have to bring in a gas-powered support truck with a gas-powered generator to charge various electric vehicles. If anything, it was a commercial against EVs at the time.
It seems that EVs didn't make much sense in the environment of that trip (going through all of South America, where fast chargers were rare at the time)
They offered KTM a 10 hour advertisement series, which would go on to become a classic for motorcycling enthusiasts worldwide. KTM's response was "eh no you could never pull that off, and will make us look bad". It had nothing to do with the cost of the bikes.
He was coming off the high of being the "star" of the new Star Wars movies. He was a main character in the story but not The main character. I recall watching these on physical DVD via netflix in ~2008 and wondering why he seemed (what we now casually call) entitled; I'd been watching the series for ~3-4 episodes before it clicked with me that he was one of the actors from star wars, despite being a long time star wars fan. He was definitely entitled, the blow up was centered around KTM not being interested in what a Star Wars actor was doing and not taking him seriously. I distinctly recall seeing him cry, or almost cry on camera.
That said, ignoring that drama, the rest of the series was quite good, when they published "The long way Down" from Scotland to South Africa I jumped on that and watched it as well. Someone else pointed out they did an EV thing from Argentina to... Alaska? with Rivian, I might go look at that too.
And it really want's Ewan that was put out about the KTM rejection--he wanted to ride the BMWs, but Charley Boorman was pissed. Charley had dreamed of the KTMs for years.
But given that McGregor has millions in the bank, he could have bought 3 KTMs and not even noticed the cost. Instead, they insisted that they will only ride bikes that someone gives them for free. Because the poor millionaire Hollywood actor "I was in a Star Wars movie!" couldn't possibly pay for his pet project out of his own pocket. Oh how unfair, those evil oppressors at KTM!
The 40 minutes of the presentation before the hack gives a lot more context: there are 2 journalists in addition to this anonymous pink Power Ranger, and they investigated the Nazi network, which is international. And Martha Root (the pink power ranger) was trolling them by creating an account and using LLM. The LLM didn't work properly, the account was blocked for suspicions of being a bot (and maybe for having "= 1 OR 1" as eg. gender), she talked her way out of it, and incredibly the admin that unblocked her asked if she wanted to meet up with him, and the site's founder. She said yes, didn't show up, but used that opportunity to covertly follow them and uncover the founder's identity - the journalists found that it's a 57-year old lady who's never been known in the scene, who was married to a French banker whose parents survived the holocaust, but in the last decade fell into the rabbit hole of white-victimization-theory.
I also prefer to own my device and be root on it, while installing all the "pretend I'm non-rooted" functionality on it, I did think "this is basically installing a rootkit to tell the OS 'yes, I'm clean!'.". Then my bank (fuck them very much) decided to add a check for a locked bootloader and refused to work without it. I suppose maybe there's a way for the "rootkit" to lie and say "Yes the bootloader is locked!"?
I didn't read all the comments, but it seems to have been lost that it's a fight between freedom (allowing people to "own" their devices) and protecting the general public from harm (being scammed and losing all their money). We also have to give up some freedoms, eg. we are forced to wear helmets or seatbelts as participants of traffic, to ensure a better protection.
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