Isn’t this what every major social media site does? It’s certainly what security and privacy experts have been warning us about for years.

Once can hope LinkedIn pays a heavy price for this, but they’ve probably done it intentionally knowing the value 100x exceeds the likely penalty. This will probably end up with all of us being offered to join a class action where our settlement is a free month of LinkedIn premium.

attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings.

Streaming box / stream app makers have been working around local DNS for a long time. Sometimes of course they’re assholes that want to do shitty things and do this to make interdiction harder. But sometimes there are legitimate reasons. Ones I remember… users who don’t really understand what they’re doing can be overly aggressive with blocking and block things that are necessary for a particular service (causing support problems). Sometimes the ISPs DNS servers have shit performance, and using a well known commercial provider like cloudflare or google can improve performance at scale. It’s not always evil.

Cops ain’t really buying anything. More probably they are directing the spend of taxpayer money on some vibe-coded garbage ass app one their friends made for a100x markup along with a long-term training and support package.

Could it be that he observed that the so called “agentic” operating systems (current versions of Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android) are essentially screen-scraping everything people do, and funneling it to the intelligence apparatus? Security researchers have been squawking about this for a while, and even recently the Signal Foundation CEO pointed it out. Or is that too mundane? Is it much worse? Intelligence gathering tools like Microsoft Recall are an intelligence agency’s wet dream.

The election interference thing certainly doesn’t strain credulity, but wouldn’t he be able to disclose something so wildly illegal? That is the whole point of congressional oversight.

Mullvad VPN works well on Android and has some DNS based ad blockers & content filters in the VPN app (though off by default iird). Mullvad browser is not ported to Android.

That said, it’s important to understand that VPNs don’t provide privacy in any absolute sense. They can (maybe) obscure data about your browsing habits from your ISP. But they won’t stop all the other, more effective tracking exists nearly everywhere else on the web.

Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020

Harris actually dropped out months before the primaries in 2020. She was something like 16th most popular candidate at the time she withdrew. She was a pretty unpopular AG in California at the time and likely would not have even won her own state primary.

Agreed. Wrong word choice. And its an important, major correction. Not a small one. :-)

I don’t know about intentionally designing that. It would violate contracts and have to be a hidden, but broadly conspiratorial activity. I have some professional experience in consumer electronics, and I remember when TPMs started becoming a required component for CE. It took several years to become commonplace; a slow transition from security by obscurity to sensible practices when devices started to be internet connected.

Nevertheless, from my experience, I’d say the TPMs aren’t there for user security, they are there to keep Hollywood movies safe.

+100. People forget, or chose not to pay attention to the fact that Google sensor vault data was key evidence in convicting the January 6 insurrectionists (who were exonerated to become ICE). Surveillance capitalism doesn’t care which side you are on.

Just to clarify… my question wasn’t “do sleepers exist” it was should we continue to call them sleepers when they have broad access to the administrative branch of the US government.

And then, unless you jumped through hoops to disable it, your PC sends the key to Microsoft so they can just keep it linked to your account.

You’d probably also have to jump through the hoops to disable windows recall too.

Are they really sleepers any more?