← Back to context

Comment by armada651

4 years ago

> The surveillance technology itself is not really that novel

What's novel is that the tech reports you to the authorities. Imagine your AV reporting you to the authorities for digital piracy, it's something that RIAA could only dream of back in the day. Now it's becoming a reality.

"We just scan every song on your iPod to make sure the neural hash isn't copyrighted content. If it is blah blah blah tokens blah blah report you to the RIAA."

Just bought a System76 laptop. Happy birthday Linux!

  • Or they could just scan the songs themselves. Why bother with hashing when you have full control? This is a red herring.

    Since they have had the ability and incentive to stop music piracy that way for at least a decade, and haven't done it, that should tell you something.

  • ok but how do they know you haven't bought that content?

  • who says the government cannot come up with a twisted reasoning of mandatory compliance to serve the unique IP industry which is struggling in the face of harsh pandemic and more seriously the threat imposed by those egregious hackers and thiefs who steal and consume content without paying for it. How dare they! they are killing the entire artist community. or " in the face of unprecedented attacks on our domestic soil by foreign alien enemies, we are forced to implement a assailant monitoring programme which i assure you will not be used for any other purpose. the programme is going to be strictly for intended purposes only. That said, while partnering with the industry, we have realized the immense potential to build an inclusive and healthy competitive environment in the market and will help the industry leaders root out evil "

Not the authorities perhaps, but it is already happening in some degree: Windows Defender sending “samples” or unknown binaries to the cloud to analyze them. I am extremely bothered by this and try to disable this “feature” as much as possible. As always with Windows, you have to aggressively tweak system settings to permanently disable the constant reminders “Oops we have detected suboptimal settings, please turn on every privacy invading feature for your convenience”. We can only hope MS doesn’t abuse the samples for other purposes, but given their and other big techs track record, we can assume there are additional parties interested in the submissions.

  • If you are tired of fighting with your own computer, consider switching to Linux. It's been working flawlessly for years for me.

    • I am certainly considering it every now and then. Already use it for main desktop usage. And I hear good things about Proton, but I really like ease of usage of Windows for everything gaming related. It somehow reminds me too much of my working job, when trying to figure out how a certain game needs to be started in Linux.

      1 reply →