I find when colloquialisms like this are used it's to make a point, like using a child's nursery rhyme to indicate "something so obvious a child would know it". I think in this case it's meant to imply "This is such an obvious statement that it would be known even in antiquity, but..." to allay a "duh, no kidding" response and make the headline more eye-catching.
This; I went from being astonished by Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 to being stunned by Shenmue only a two years later on my Dreamcast. I bought both of them on release.
The Dreamcast was a great machine, I have fond memories of many hours playing Rez, Phantasy Star Online, Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia and Space Channel 5..
They don't. The app may ask for it, and there may be some benefit to the user if they provide it, but it's not like the headphones magically acquire any of the data the author is complaining about.
If people want to give their personal information out, that's up to them. I personally limit what information I share, and I get annoyed when devices or apps try to sneakily get more information than I'm willing to intentionally provide, but this article is silly.
The younger generation has grown up without a sense of personal privacy, and they're largely ok with it. They will happily give away personal details in exchange for a "free" app or product, and they bend over backwards to expose their entire lives via images and videos on social media. There's always mock outrage when someone "discovers" that the reason the Internet is free is because someone is selling personal data to drive advertising, but everyone knows that. Most people just don't care.
They care. It exudes as a cynicism about the world and continual jokes about talking to the FBI agent assigned to watch them. They (as are we) are just powerless to prevent it as every single service and every single platform and apparently every single product is collecting data on us. And since the value of services and platforms and, sadly, even products goes up as more people are using them, the arguments of "don't use these products and vote with your dollars" that people constantly push are nonsensical: you can value your privacy but also value having a romantic partner, and most people these days use dating apps to date; you can value your privacy but also value getting invited to the birthday party, and most people these days invite everyone to their party on a social network; you can value your privacy but also value being able to travel, and so unless you want to be the one insane person in your friend group who doesn't use Lyft/Uber and never knows when the public transportation is running late and takes forever to book hotels (and always ends up spending a lot more when you do)... well, you are going to use a bunch of apps that do a bunch of data collection.
That sounds like you do have a choice: spend more money. In a world where this wasn't allowed, presumably you'd be forced to spend more money. So you can inhabit that world right now if you want.
We're talking about a companion app for one of the most expensive consumer headphones you can get ( $350 ).
I don't think this is about money, this is about using dark patterns and morally questionable behavior to get user data.
Yes, if you're older and wiser you can work around these, disable the app location data, etc. But a lot of people are oblivious to this, not because they don't care but because they are being purposefully deceived.
Sure, but they deserve to be able to make the choice too. So if you move to a world where selling your data for services isn't available, then you're forcing them to pay and since we've determined they can't pay, all you're doing is removing the choice from them and forcing them in to the no-service option.
And I know how it is because I was once affected by this. All these "but the poor people" folks disappear when the poor actually ask for help. It's like this:
Poor people: Hey, can we get the right to work for a living in a dignified way and use the same services as everyone else?
The Privileged Protectors: Okay, how about I make it so you can't work for more than 20 hrs and umm... I'll throw in some privacy
>So if you move to a world where selling your data for services isn't available, then you're forcing them to pay and since we've determined they can't pay, all you're doing is removing the choice from them and forcing them in to the no-service option.
Like this is the only option... We already see a lot of services that sell multiple tiers of their products, with power users or larger companies paying significantly more.
Bose and Sony, 2 of the most expensive tech product companies, are the example here. The option is buy your sub $10 wired skull candy earbuds and ignore anything that's more expensive because it isn't an option. It's the same reason recent generations grew p on fast food, it's cheaper and easier and all some people have resources for.
I’ve lived in a world similar to that. It was called the 1990s. It wasn’t particularly expensive, it wasn’t that hard to book hotels and, amazingly, people also got invited to parties and events. Also, your headphones didn’t spy on you.
This is how you know you were wealthy. Everything was so much more expensive then. I remember even trying to get maps or a digital marker for where you were required so much money. Noise canceling headphones? Forget about it.
And if you weren't in America with money, you could barely do anything online.
Hotels, air travel? So expensive. Way cheaper now. TVs? So cheap now. And where I lived you couldn't even book your own flights at the time. You needed a travel agent. Up costs. Nightmare.
I can assure you I'm not wealthy and never have been, other than in the sense of me living in the west (though not the US). My point is that life can be pretty damn decent without digital markers for where you are, constant air travel and a new TV every other year.
Yes, certain things have gotten more affordable. But is affordable noise cancelling headphones and cheap air travel really the result of apps and websites crawling up our backsides with a microscope and shuffling that data to some unknown other?
Air travel in the 1990s was much cheaper than, say, in the 1950s, much like computers, TV:s and headphones. In fact, the price of air travel dropped by roughly 1/3 between 1980 and 1995[0].
Evidence suggests that happened completely without constant digital surveillance.
Just like with air travel, TV:s have gotten larger and cheaper for a long, long time before data harvesting even existed as a factor. Yes, the price of TV:s are continuing to drop. Mostly because of cheaper panels. Of course manufacturers claim that TV:s would be unsellably expensive without telemetry, but then again, they make lots of money off it and "cheap" is a neat way to justify that.
Current prices might've taken a bit longer to reach without telemetry - although the latest most significant price drops occurred a decade ago or more, well before spy TV:s were baseline models.
Today, you can buy a 32" monitor for $200, and they've not yet begun spying on us. For pure screen real estate, yes, it costs more than a 55" model. But is it "expensive"? Heck, would it be "expensive" if it was a 28" CRT, like the one my current LCD TV replaced a decade ago?
Sacrificing privacy for constant upgrades to something bigger and ostensibly better is, to reply in kind, if anything a kind of wealth blindness: What could possibly go wrong to anyone who owns a 55 inch TV?
Bullshit. People don't care. You don't even have to go so far as not to use certain applications. In this particular case, if people didn't buy iPhones en masse, we probably wouldn't be dealing with wireless headphones because neither Google nor Android phone manufacturers have cared to be innovators on the hardware end.
I dunno... when it comes to the tiny things this article is talking about I really don’t care. This all seems like outrage in the name of a few clicks. That annoys me way more than my headphones asking to know how long I use them each day.
If I remember correctly, the very first time you ran Windows 95 a little animated text box saying "<-- Click Here!" would fly across the taskbar to draw you to it. Coming from Windows 3.11 with Program Manager, it was initially a little confusing. Where was everything?
Yup, a little red airplane animation with a light yellow banner, on the taskbar, if I remember correctly. Didn't see it on all installations, though. Is it a specific version?
Are there articles out there about how modern copy protection works? I'm interested in why there aren't Switch flash carts, or why there aren't shady companies with BD-ROM pressers making bootleg copies of PS4/XB1 discs.
I think the copy protection on the original Xbox, the 360, and probably most modern consoles worked like this: executables must be signed, executables must list what types of media they can be run from, the system supports a special type of disk that CD burners and regular disk pressers can't produce, and all game executables specify they can only be run from the special type of disk.
With the 360, you can do a firmware hack to the system's disk drive to make it report every disk is the special type of disk to allow you to play games from burned disks. There are some known utility/demo disks containing executables signed to be executable from burned disks, so they can be copied (and have resources modified if the executable doesn't verify the signatures of everything it loads).
I kept reading expecting The Machine to be a metaphor for local economies or something, but no, they want to actually build a Star Trek-style replicator that runs on a trickle of water and garbage that's funded by Kickstarter.
I’m the author. Actually building the machine is one possible outcome but essentially The Machine is a metaphor for local economies. A fact I’ve felt I should clarify in a subsequent essay.
I basically protect my phone number like I would my social security number. I was getting 5+ spam calls a day. Ended up changing provider and phone number to get away from them. I haven't added my new number to the Do Not Call list (none of these calls were legitimate businesses; just scammers with spoofed caller IDs) and have resisted giving my new number to anyone. Pretty much just my bank and a few friends have my real number, everywhere else (where they need a phone number associated to an account or for a retail store bonus card) I just use my old number. I think of the Do Not Call list as a public list of phone numbers guaranteed to be valid - not worth the risk. I think maybe adding it to my resume on job sites got the number out there as well.
Does this actually do anything? A computer that can dial all phone numbers in the US is not hard anymore. (the computer will probably get all numbers in North America, but what do scammers care?)
In the last year I've only gotten 2 spam phone calls. So either Google Fi is doing a better job at blocking them than Verizon was, or the scammers that targeted me stick to known numbers. Either way I'm not taking my chances. It was seriously frustrating being on their victim list.
Was interested in this but from my reading of the docs it looks like it just queries a local instance of Wikipedia? So I couldn't ask "What's the weather today" or "Do I have an appointment on Saturday" or "Who won last night's Redskins game?". Which means it's a neat toy but nothing I'd ever use.
I find when colloquialisms like this are used it's to make a point, like using a child's nursery rhyme to indicate "something so obvious a child would know it". I think in this case it's meant to imply "This is such an obvious statement that it would be known even in antiquity, but..." to allay a "duh, no kidding" response and make the headline more eye-catching.