This is a valuable lesson for any manufacturer: never awaken the nerd sleeping inside your customer, because his wrath shall be terrible.
In this case the warning was quite literal.
The company annoyed a buyer enough to push him into full blown nerd mode. He tore the product apart, reverse engineered every part, and then published a step by step guide showing exactly how to disable "kill switch" that prevented the use of the product without the vendor spying on the user.
What started as a minor grievance became a public, technical exposé that left the maker exposed and embarrassed.
Moral of the story: underestimate your users at your own peril.
Update: This post seems to have struck a nerve and went very wide. As I will not be able to answer every comment, I want to add a few points:
The linked article was not written by me. It came to me on a different channel (Discord). I only wrote the post on Mastodon.
The top image in the article looks AI generated. It is no a good image, but in my view less irritating than an advertisement (which is far more common).
Some people suggest the article itself is AI generated. I don't think this is the case. I wouldn't rule out he author wrote the text in a different language and used AI for translation assistance.
The claims in the article are not fully backed by the linked repo, but the general statement is correct and IMHO important.
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it.
The Beginning: A Curious Experiment
It all started innocently enough.
Chcete nainstalovat Linux, ale ještě nikdy jste to nedělali? Přijďte v sobotu k nám na stánek talks.openalt.cz/openalt-2025/… a bude tam několik odborníků (včetně mě), kteří vám pomohou. Vstup zdarma. A kdo to boostne, tak má taky vstup zdarma.
V říjnu 2025 končí bezplatná podpora Windows 10, což pro řadu uživatelů znamená nutnost nákupu nového počítače. Náš workshop ukáže, jak lze stávající zařízení oživit instalací operačního systému Linux a prodloužit jeho životnost.
Really could use help with the mac. I need like the most basic of basic instructions. I've been fighting for 5 minutes just to try to connect it to a network.
Hey man, what timezone are you in? Happy to jump on a quick call to help you out. I've got time now, but can also meet later on this week. DM if interested.
Medical masks were never designed to protect the wearer — and leading safety authorities are finally saying so. Only respirators (like N95s) qualify as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Read more: whn.global/whn-joins-in-the-ch….
Overview Throughout the COVID pandemic, there has been confusion from public health and medical leaders over which masks to wear to prevent transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
I see so many people (mostly men, this isn't random) talking about how Meta's Ray-Ban glasses are "incredible" or "still not ready" yet, I don't see anyone calling it what it is: Voyeurism.
This technology will increase voyeurism and stalking aggressions in unacceptable ways. These glasses are a voyeur's dream weapon. Also a doxxer's and stalker's dream weapon.
Why are our laws and cultures not protecting us against this?
To anyone with questions about Meta's Ray-Ban glasses and how this is problematic for privacy and consent, I highly recommend reading this excellent article from Janus Rose at The Verge:
"“One way to think about it is protecting your community and the people you care about,” said Gilliard. “When you’re wearing these glasses, when you use your video doorbell, when you record everyone’s conversations, you’re not just surveilling yourself. And there’s no consistent and foolproof way to guarantee that information won’t be used against people you care about — to hurt trans and queer people, or hurt immigrant communities. I wish people would think about it in those terms instead of ‘did my package get delivered.’”
I'm Nouran. I'm 19 years old. I survived after 2 years of genocide. I have big dreams. But my only dream now is see my family in a better situation. We are still suffering. We don't have healthy food. We wait long time to fill water. We lost our home and now we literally live between the rubble.
Your donations helps us overcome this difficult time and secure our basic life necessities.
Mastodon is seriously such an interesting place. I have posts boosted by people with thousands of followers (the most was something with 10k) from who I'd just never expect to boost random stuff like that I post. It's mostly quiet and just moving along, silently reading the tl, at least for me, but once it gets engaging, it's fun as well. But I think much also depends on the server, and I'm happy with mine.
I wanted to send myself an email to my gmail account, in order to open it in evolution and test something for the day job. I used my sdf.org email to send the email, figuring that Google might be less likely to consider it spam than something I sent from my vps (in hindsight, I should've used my work email, but didn't think of that for some reason). But, no, it landed in my junk folder.
Sometimes I wonder if I should give up and use Google or Microsoft for my email, so that all of the people who use Google or Microsoft for their email would receive my emails, but then, if I did that, then I would be the one with other peoples' emails being caught in their spam filters.
There are those moments in life you know already from the start are going to be the rare once in a lifetime events. This evening was one of those times.
Sonic Onslaught and Full Circle are Canceled this week for a variety of reasons. Please enjoy Halloweek uninterrupted. @Derek would like to inform you that both Scream movies will begin at 2 PM EDT!
I just learned that there are 4 of them, the last 2 of which I haven't seen before. Also, I just looked and although "halloweek" has ran for about 4 days, there is still content that has 0 plays. That's a lot of random stuff to check out. www.hkcradio.com
As a kid, I learned English from English language cartoons on FilmNet. I learned from German TV shows. My passion for Swedish crime series taught me Swedish.
But now, the largest tv medium of our time, YouTube, has begun auto-translating everything. Future generations will not be exposed to foreign languages and be inspired to take an interest.
There was no public review of this, no democratic vote. One company just decided to turn foreign cultures off and make the world dumber.
I admit that it feels kind of special to have #Fedora Linux 43 released on my birthday. Thank you, @adamw and others, for your thorough testing, which delayed the release process just enough to make this happen. ☺️
I largely prefer the architecture and experience of the fediverse/Mastodon over ATproto/Bluesky, but there are a number of accounts I care about that are only on Bluesky and not bridged to the fediverse. And even with bridging, it's not the best experience.
How are other people handling this?
The result for now is that I have two separate accounts… but I really don’t want to manage two different accounts. 😭
@sesivany I do mostly use mobile for social media, but I guess I'll be using the desktop a bit more for work. Hmm. I have tried @openvibe a few times and usually stop because it seems pretty janky scrolling-wise on my Pixel and then the notifications were next to useless last time I tried. I should give it another go.
@sesivany I stopped using Openvibe because it was a frustrating experience. Media uploads would fail to bsky half of the time, it would sign me out of bsky constantly and like you said scrolling was janky and impossible.
I just use the two apps separately and post in both places. Lots of copy and pasting but this also helps curb my usage a little bit.
Yeah I could see it as a nice way to pull in content and aggregate it all into one app rather than bouncing between apps for consumption. I generally really like @moshidon as my Mastodon client though; Openvibe is interesting but feels *so* different. 🤔
"This document specifies the experimental ai Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme. The scheme provides a dedicated access point for Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources, enabling autonomous systems and robots to connect natively while allowing human-facing applications to interoperate via HTTPS gateways"
This document specifies the experimental ai Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI) scheme. The scheme provides a
dedicated access point for Artificial Intelligence (AI)
resources, enabling autonomous systems and robots to connect…
This document describes a non-normative architecture for the AI Internet Protocol (AIIP), centered on the "ai" URI scheme. It focuses on a direct connection model for robots, devices, and software agents to communicate natively over AIIP.
Something somehow resolves to something else that might be an HTTPS endpoint or MQTT topic. But please tell me more of this new namespace registrar that can rent me one of these names needed for doing AI.
@bortzmeyer Artificial Intellidunce continues being so revolutionary! it merely requires a wholly separate standards to match promises! what a small price to pay amirite?!
(I continue to hope for it to become normalized to laugh these clowns out of any room)
they should put soap and xml on top of it so they can easily transport one bit of imformation over 32MB of packets with a round trip time of 2 minutes. This is so nonense to call this ai:. its just an API.
I’m trying to figure out what they mean by Autonomous System. “enabling autonomous systems and robots to connect natively” makes it sound like it’s not real ASes. Did they try to invent a term without searching even once if it’s been previously used? Or did they misunderstand how internet routing works THAT badly…?
not wrong! but they’re proposing an alternative to IP like four paragraphs below that, so I don’t think you can blame me for asking this question. Just downright bonkers.
lol, the “AIIF” which he SIGNS THE DOCUMENT AS does not exist. but the bloke did file a trademark for it. trademarks.justia.com/994/45/a…
so this seems to be just One Sad Guy. I have better things to do than to dig deeper, but thankfully it doesn’t seem like anything will come out of this one
@domi @littlefox all I found was "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INTERNET FOUNDATION (AIIF) INC is a Delaware Domestic Corporation filed on September 30, 2025. The company's filing status is listed as Active "
this seems... pointless? unless they're going to somehow back this up with some sort of global DOI-like URI scheme where you can somehow attribute generative output back to the origin, but I can't see how that could possibly be feasible at scale.
I'm sure that is going to go great. Like when we all agreed to change our websites for accessibility and there were zero problems with it. Super easy to get the entire internet to enable AI companies to steal their content more efficiently.
"Quick reminder that on October 31st, your JAWS, ZoomText, or Fusion software will no longer receive product updates, support, and new features."
OOOOOH NOOOOO! My Jaws for Windows 7.1 from 2006, or something like that, which doesn't support Windows Vista (the last version I can actually run with my own serial number), won't receive updates anymore? SADNESS!
For context, I've been using NVDA as my primary Windows screen reader since about 2009 or so.
Hey, Anthropic owes me $9000! They illegally used at least 3 of my books on LibGen to create Claude. Now they're paying a $1.5 billion settlement, at $3000 per book. See if *your* books are on the list:
Actually I exaggerated: the payment will be split between authors and publishers, but I have to make the claim - so the settlement is making me do some work my publisher should be doing for me. My coauthors and I will just get half, $4500. One of these books has 2 coauthors, one has 3, and one is a book I edited, with essays by lots of authors. So $1000 is a more realistic estimate of what I get. Oh well.
Bizarrely, my most popular book, Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, is not on the list. But I guess it's not surprising:
"The settlement agreement discloses that approximately 500,000 titles out of the 7 million copies of books that Anthropic reportedly downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi meet the definition required to be part of the class."
Only books whose copyright is registered with the US Library of Congress meet that defiinition!
If you have a book on the list, you can opt out of the current settlement and join future lawsuits. But you have to take action to do that!!! For more information on that, see item 40 here:
Updated October 2, 2025 IMPORTANT: The Works List Is Now Live on the Settlement Website The searchable Works List and Claim Forms are now available at www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com. Find more info here and below. Background Bartz v.
I agree with that: if something is good, it doesn't matter to me whether it has meat in it or not. The only vegan or vegetarian thing I don't want to eat is imitation meat, fake meat, whatever you'd like to call it.
@frog67 I never tried that, actually. I've eaten meat equivalents, most often tofu, but that's actually a common ingredient in many Asian cuisines, so...
I haven't tried imitation meat either, I simply don't want to. I don't really enjoy tofu: when I was in Taiwan years ago, visiting my brother who worked there at the time, I tasted it in several local dishes.
@frog67 I used to agree with you, but it's gotten much, much better in recent years. I went to a Vegan cafe and had a fake chicken burger, it was genuinely fantastic. I'd have it again any time. Fake prawns and chicken nuggets, also fantastic.
I'm more or less vegetarian myself, and I think the difficulty is that vegetarian stuff in many restaurants is really an afterthought. The taste just isn't there. This has changed recently to some extent, but is still the case quite often. For a good number of years, "vegetarian" was a synonym for "bad". Sad for us who are, but there it is, and it might explain what you've seen. @TheQuinbox
La @dinum soutient (financièrement et techniquement) la fondation @matrix. #Matrix est un protocole de messagerie instantanée libre et décentralisé, utilisé par #Tchap, la messagerie de l'administration française.
La Direction interministérielle du numérique annonce mardi devenir le premier État partenaire de la Fondation Matrix, qui est derrière le protocole open source qui fait fonctionner Tchap, la messagerie instantanée sécurisée des agents publics.
Draupnir call for participation: reviewing the last development cycle and affirming the project direction
If you value the work that we do on the Draupnir project and think that it is important then we need to hear from you.
We are trying something new where we provide a short update and reflection about the project and an interactive vote where you can affirm contributors about the project direction.
icymi, in the Matrix State of the Union they said they didn't plan on pursuing decentralized social media, but they do hope to make it easier for those ecosystems to use Matrix so they don't have to reinvent what Matrix has already done
#Fedora Linux 43 released on my birthday. Thank you, @adamw and others, for your thorough testing, which delayed the release process just enough to make this happen. ☺️
Zach Bennoui
in reply to Kyle Smith • • •