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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 17th, 2026

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  • IDK… I’m not defending the bad shit Apple does. But they pushed back against both US and UK govs who were trying to backdoor their shit.

    In the UK case, they pulled the entire feature rather than backdoor it for the Home Office. With warning for users, so ppl are not expecting to have encryption, w/o knowing it is backdoored.

    In the US case, the US gov tried to compel Apple to create special versions of IOS with encr backdoors. The gov later found a 3rd party who was able to unlock the iPhone, and withdrew the demand. But a judge ruled that Apple could not be compelled to build a special backdoor version.

    I don’t like Apple. I don’t use 'em. They have privacy probs for sure. But they also have pushed back lots of times vs gov attempts to force backdoors into iOS.



  • so many third-parties involved with managing PHI, it’s impossible to secure it.

    For sure! I got notified my PHI was breached. By a company I never even heard of! And certainly never directly used. I never even figured out the chain, from health services I used, to the breached co. Might have been multiple others between. Given how often these breaches happen, defacto we have no medical privacy.

    And no doubt people are trying to grab live audio of doctors visits

    Happens already, yah! New England Journal of Medicine has a paper about the privacy risks. Prob lots of other papers too, that’s just what I had in my bookmark list.

    These systems capture audio of clinical encounters and generate transcripts and structured clinical notes, yet vendor practices differ substantially in how long each data type is retained and whether it is used for AI training.

    Offices are supposed to have signs, and/or the dr should tell the pt. But drs are human, right? They may forget! And sometimes, you may be there in your worst, vulnerable moments. When you are badly injured, or distressed.

    It chantges the whole trust relationship between dr & pt.









  • Its where we keep the emergency reserves of Vegemite

    To be fair to the threat actors here, if I was a foe of a country that could deploy Vegemite in anger, I would also want a strategic counter. That’s barely short of haggis on the escalation ladder.

    But n/m culinary weaponization… it seems like nobody knows how to put critical infrastructure online without these issues. Sometimes it’s technical, sometimes social engineering, but it will get compromised. It’s happened in so many countries and separate cases. There have been countless of these persistent threats in critical infra discovered in the USA too. What % did we even find? Were they completely removed? I doubt.

    Feels like air gapping is the way to go. It isn’t perfect, just ask Stuxnet, but it’s waaaaaay more secure than dropping water and power systems onto the internet, no matter how careful.


  • There is a reason why medicine is setup to have experienced people guide the uninformed;

    Or at least it used to be. Before social media made everybody think they know better than ppl with like 8 entire ass years of post graduate education. Valuing expertise was nice while it lasted, tho.

    But yah. Tech is also highly complex. And fraught with peril. At least in medicine, docs normally want the best for their pts. In tech, most want to take advantage. To collect personal info. Or lock them into an ecosystem. For every time ppl hear “that’s a bad app, use this instead” they hear 20 times “this is the hot new app the cool kids are all using.” And that hot new app is designed to be addictive AF.

    IDK how to fight that.


  • Consumers do not have the technical knowledge required to make an informed decision

    I’m battling with a friend. He bought a new smart TV. He’s all enthused about the cool features from putting it on his n/w. I’m trying to explain why that is a bad idea. It’s very hard. He’s a non-techie. He just doesn’t get the dangers. To be fair, TVs didn’t used to have surveilence baked in them! Or semi backdoors. Also to be fair, TVs shouldn’t be hostile!

    IDK if I can reach him. But I see, the avg consumer has no hope. They do not have ANY sense of tech safety or danger. These are the same folks that years ago happily clicked on TotallyNotMalwareTrustMeBro.jpg.exe. Asking them to navigate all this is a losing battle.