My girlfriend asked why I carry a gun around the house?
I looked her dead in the eye and said, “the motherfucking decepticons”. She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.
…. I don’t know. It’s just what came to mind when I thought of household appliances being hijacked.
I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip
So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!
So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.
Same. I went with them as a “good enough” option when I needed cameras because I have had a good experience with Anker products, but they’ve slowly enshitified to the point that I’d drop them in a heartbeat if the budget was there.
They always catch the people who search for “most popular way to get away with murder” but they rarely catch the ones who search for “most embarrassing way to die.”
The focus on piracy is a smoke screen. It’s about capacity.
Build the capacity, and then just start growing that list of reasons things are blocked.
This is out of scope for this community, but the U.S. is amidst a coup.
I mean, literally, it’s being raided by a corporate stooge that is breaking all manner of laws to just reshape it in whatever image they see fit.
In a geopolitical sense, they’re trying to break relationships with close allies, and trying to isolate the country. We see that with the tariff threats, the withdrawal from WHO, the Paris Climate accords, and now with threats to withdraw/pull back from NATO.
Domestically, it’s clear that businesses are bowing to Trump or facing government punishment. That much is evidenced by social media companies filtering search results, by media companies tepid criticism of Trump and by the lack of national coverage over anti-trump sentiment. We also see it in terms of the investigations that Trump and his cronies are trying to bring against NPR, of all things.
This is a play in the move to control information access in the U.S. After the media, and social media, which are now yolked, the open web is the next biggest threat to their coup.
And now this is the legislation they’re pushing.
I’m sorry this is going to be such a shit comment, but I worked with a guy that had a fitness watch of some stripe.
He was a heavier guy and well, that plasticy band was pressed tight against his skin. One day he came in with this nasty looking ring of red and peeling skin around his wrist. Said he got a rash from the watch. (It’s very possible it was an allergic reaction to something in the band.)
This is a shit comment because I don’t know the brand, and I’m totally saying “trust me, bro.” But like, trust me, bro, it apparently happens?
Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.
Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.
Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.