Except social media is a bane for kids, even moreso than for adults.

It’s a shit show.

Samsung from a phone vendor like Verizon is bloated, but not one from Samsung (well, except the Samsung crap like Bixby).

Depends on whether it comes from Samsung or via a phone company.

Either way, Universal Debloat Utility is your friend.

Just like Robocop, right? 😆

Easier to be automated, like a Roomba.

A mall isn’t open 24hr a day, and I’m sure they know when the least riskiest hour is, probably like a couple hours before opening.

Police don’t prevent crime - their job is the grab people who commit crime.

Prevention is a much more complex issue (cultural).

Even as kids we all did shit our parents told us not to, and we just tried to not get caught.

You don’t need a stingray to simply pickup cell broadcast which has the ID in it. Technically your phone is doing this, as the tower you connect to has an ID.

I suspect it works a lot ore than 30%

As you mentioned, cell ID is there too. Pretty easy to simply capture IMSI data (don’t even have to do anything, phones are alway broadcasting their ID).

Combine IMSI, BT, MAC, date/time, and boy you’ve got one helluva surveillance device.

Add in BT headphones, watches, etc, and you have even more data points to associate.

I wouldn’t be shopping there just because of that.

Pretty simple really.

Plastic explosives has been around a long time. I could only guess what exists today.

GMRS radios (I’m assuming it was GMRS or something similar) are/can be mostly empty space.

Radios are open receivers, could easily send a signal that the hardware could trigger on, or have a timer to trigger on a certain date/time.

Just need access to the devices before shipping łor be able to intercept them).

Even better, just give up on the shitty protocol that’s 20 years behind existing protocols

Circling back around, I do feel like not all hope is currently lost.

My own contradiction: I feel pretty cynical about it, and yet I’m working on my own solutions for my family and friends. Part of me thinks it’s pointless, but I refuse to give in completely.

I already try to use better comms, minimize the data my phone shares (setting up a de-googled pixel now), and have always avoided most social media (never been on FB/Twitter, etc, as in never even gone to the websites).

I dunno, all my younger family and their friends are neck deep in the shit, and aren’t interested in hearing my “conspiracy theories”…despite them being front page news every day (all the ransomware, hacks, etc).

Be the change you want to see.

Since people won’t (for example) switch to privacy-respecting comm apps just because I ask them too, I’m building my own self-hosted box that I can duplicate for my family and friends.

My goal is to provide them with a single box solution for DNS filtering (PiHole), media server (including auto disc conversion and sharing between boxes), local backup (which will replicate encrypted backups to the other boxes similar to what Crashplan Personal did), phone backup and management (MDM and file management from PC), image and file sharing (something like Facebook for family only), instant messaging (most likely XMPP), etc, etc.

Yes, it’s a pretty bold plan, but my family and friends are tech illiterate, so if I want to see an improvement in privacy for myself and them, it’s on me to do it, and make it attractive for them.

They are crazy fast on their element.

Good point about platform agnostic remote for management stuff. VNC is ideal for this.

And systems like Proxmox use a web GUI for most stuff, it’s a touch slow but I think that’s mostly just waiting for the system to finish the actual changes I make, and not the UI.

It uses some form of VNC (forget the name). Performance is fine for the VMs for non-video stuff.

You can run whatever you want inside a VM too.

Works for me, but damn it’s dog snot slow. Like typing takes 1-2 seconds for each character to show up

Serious question, why not use current wifi for that kind of distance?

I know, it’s probably not really easy to make the comparison at this point - power usage is definitely part of that equation. Though the lower bandwidth of this doesn’t seem quite enough for video?

Edit: I misread the bandwidth as 347kbit, not Mbit. So yea, this looks very promising for video, especially given the limitations of Wifi, plus using less power.

Everyone of my phones aged out from lack of OS updates, not because the hardware failed or was too slow.

I have a box of them.

How do you know how much it’s filled?

Also, hot water heat works differently than steam, and many steam systems have been converted to hot water, so it’s not easy to know just by looking at a radiator.

As other people have said, let the maintenance folks handle it. They know the system.