Spoiler: Adam Back, one of the usual suspects. Wake me up when someone acknowledges being Satoshi and proves they can access the original Satoshi wallets. Otherwise this is more guesswork.

I don’t think so. I’ve read the opposite and IME you learn not to sweat the small stuff. That helps a lot.

This has a LED, is that ok?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3423

Hmm ok, but it still sounds kind of sus. One of the insights of the Mixmaster era is that what really matters is the amount of message reordering you can do, and that’s why remailers typically had 24 hours or more of latency. So I’ve never believed in Tor (near real time). Even with a text chat network, more than a few seconds of latency will have a significant usability hit. And also, as mentioned, using the service at all probably makes you into one of the usual suspects.

The Guardian (newspaper) handles this in an interesting way, for 1-way communication from users to the Guardian itself. They have a news reader app used by millions of subscribers to access news articles and stuff. And if you want to send them a confidential news tip, the app has a feature where you can enter a text message for their editors. The news reading protocol includes some space for this type of message in every transaction, under a layer of encryption so that an eavesdropper can’t see if a message is present. Allowing user to user communication through such a scheme could easily lead to mayhem, but for sending stuff to an identified recipient (the Guardian) that has some establishment cred, it’s clever.

Wait you mean the chat users have to pay to send traffic through the mix pool? This sounds worse and worse. Is BitMessage still around?

I would say once you’re observed sending data into Tor or anything resembling it, you’re already compromised even if your correspondent hasn’t been uniquely identified. I can’t see getting excited about the app.

It costs money to run a node? That’s even worse. The people most willing to pay will be the ones up to no good.

blockchain

Ok I still don’t know what this program does that’s interesting, but it sounds like another thing we don’t need.

I wouldn’t call them super cheap though they depreciate a lot from the new prices. Lots of quality ICE cars of similar age at lower prices, i.e. they are still expensive cars.

You can get fantastically good deals on used Fiskers. The company is bankrupt but there’s a lively community of owners and getting stuff like repair parts isn’t hard. I’m slightly tempted but only slightly. What I really want is an EV conversion for an old cargo van, so it would have very few computers inside.

What has it got in its pocketses? The One Ring.

PIC64 is a product line now? And it’s Risc-V underneath? Interesting. PIC32 is/was MIPS-32 so I guess it fits.

People run Chrome on Linux.

I see, like putting the person on speaker phone. Not nice, but thanks!

I didn’t hear a mention of this watch being usable for phone calls but if that’s in the cards, then I guess that’s a legitimate application, though I don’t see how it would work. You hold your wrist up to your ear? Sounds painful. Is it somehow better than using an earbud? If you don’t want to walk around wearing an earbud like a Borg when you’re not on a call, maybe they could put an earbud holder onto the watchband. The watch could be shaped to accomodate the earbud and maybe even recharge it, if it’s shaped like an Airpod.

There’s a whole book about this, written (wow) all the way back in 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision, by Diane Vaughan. Technically a different incident, but it sounds like history repeats.

Yes and it’s a constant issue, and there is tons of security stuff in the phone to deal with the mic’s presence. I’ve elsewhere suggested making phones with no mics, so if you want to make a voice phone call you have to use an external mic. At least the phone has an important application that uses the mic.

The mic in this watch seems to have been added to the hardware just because they could. But as they say, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

This is about a watch, not a phone. It looks like they added the mic as an afterthought.

The crappy old Casio that I use now has no microphone and no wireless comms. Just an LCD and some pushbuttons.

Ugh, it has a microphone. Eavesdropping malware incoming. And it’s another big clonky smartwatch.

It’s nice that it has a blood oxygen sensor I guess. And there’s a 6d accelerometer. I don’t see mention of a temperature sensor either, though with the wireless connectivity and presumed frequent recharging, I guess you can keep correcting the time.

I still like the Sensorwatch (sensorwatch.net) better. Much more modest, smaller, etc. Runs for a year on a coin cell, has a temperature sensor which can used to correct the oscillator and give timing accuracy to within a few seconds a year, and other cool stuff.

2016 at this time of night? Probably typing on a computer.

Now? Typing on a computer.

This looks AI, or at least blithering.