This one?
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No no, freedom unit, not freedom chunk
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How many bald eagles is that?
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Give or take 1/34th a bald eagle
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It would be1/35th if the eagle wasnāt bald
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Whatās your experience with nebula?
As much as I enjoy YouTube theyāre starting to tiktokify like every other platform and have given me more and more reasons lately to switch.
I just donāt know what to expect from other platforms and what the best choice is? I watch a variety of things from scientific content to gaming to art and am worried I wonāt get that diversity on a smaller platformā¦
(I have it in the background when doing other stuff so I have 5+h average daily watch time so I do run out of content quite often)
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Have you tried YouTube revanced? It will let you block ads, has sponsorblock integration, can hide features you donāt use like shorts, etc.
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I have YouTube premium so no ads. Which Iām okay with, paying a reasonable price for a service I use and enjoy a LOT.
Iāve tried a couple tools to remove stories but they are not super reliable and donāt really fix the issue, just cover it up. Also:
I disagree with YouTubeās policy, censorship, greediness and advertiser-centric behavior towards creators most of all and thereās no extension for that. Hence why the Nebula ads are appealing.
Also all of that does more harm to the creator than YouTube itself so Iām not 100% sold on tools like that even though I use adblock all the time.
So a Canadian farmer found a crashed chunk of SpaceX debris and is trying to sell it to build a hockey rink.
Ya know, sometime the stereotypes ring true. Not always, but how very Canadian.
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license plate reader manufacturer claims to be able to read rfid tags (?) from moving vehicles
In case anyone canāt get behind the paywall.
New Police Tech Can Detect Phones, Pet Trackers And Library Books In A Moving Car
Thomas Brewster
6 - 8 minutes
Italy-based Leonardo says its tool creates a fingerprint of drivers and passengers by scanning for anything that emits a signal from their car, from smartphones to library books.
Senior writer at Forbes covering cybercrime, privacy and surveillance.
Cars and devices within are beaconing information out constantly. Police and surveillance vendors are trying to take advantage.
getty
American police are testing a new technology that can scan moving vehicles for anything that emits a signal, including phones, smartwatches, cat and dog tracking chips and even library books, according to its creator, Rome, Italy-based surveillance, defense and aerospace company Leonardo.
The nascent technology, called Elsag EOC Plus, is typically incorporated into one of Leonardoās Elsag license plate readers, though can be deployed as a standalone surveillance device, and is designed to help police monitor suspects as they move. But privacy advocates told Forbes the new technology could be abused to warrantlessly track people across large tranches of the country, learning more about them by identifying their belongings without their knowledge.
Leonardo claims the tool can identify specific models of devices like iPhones and Bose headphones inside moving vehicles, according to a marketing brochure from the Milipol conference in Paris last year. It can also identify unique signals emitted by pet chips, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, wearable tech like fitness trackers, in-car infotainment systems and tire pressure sensors, and can even detect the RFID of a library book, according to the brochure. For law enforcement, all that data can be linked to a carās license plate number, becoming a unique āfingerprint.ā As a person travels through other license plate scanners, their fingerprint can be followed around a given area, even when the driver or passenger switches vehicles.
āItās ripe for abuse not just because of how it could be used to track people, but it gives a cheat sheet of all electronic devices on a person.ā
āAs an example, while 30 cars in 100 may contain iPhones, only one will have an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder and the license plate ABC-1234. The collection of data represented by these specific things is an electronic signature,ā Leonardo explained in its brochure.
Customers of the new technology may not be limited to police departments or public roads. Leonardo wrote in its brochure it could be useful in āoff-road areas such as rail stations and shopping centers.ā As Forbes reported earlier this month, malls across the U.S. are already equipped with AI-powered car surveillance technologies from Leonardo rival Flock Safety, and are feeding data straight to police agencies in a bid to catch shoplifters. Flockās AI cameras similarly create āfingerprintsā for different cars, but rather than scanning for devices inside, it looks at identifying features on a car beyond the license plate number, such as color, make, model, bumper stickers or wheel rims.
A Leonardo brochure marketing its new car surveillance technology.
Forbes
Leonardo spokesperson Nate Maloney told Forbes the company recently obtained a patent for the technology so it was āgoing full steam aheadā in trying to sell the product across the world. It currently has no paying customers, though confirmed at least one of its current license plate detection customers was trialing the tech in a test environment, Maloney said. He didnāt say which American police department was assisting in trials, but said they were not currently being used to surveil the public. The company claims to have over 4,000 customers for its Elsag license plate readers across the U.S.
Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he couldnāt see how the police āwould justify spending taxpayer money on this.ā
āI have a hard time seeing a use case for a tech like this when police already have license plate readers,ā he added. āItās ripe for abuse not just because of how it could be used to track people, but it gives a cheat sheet of all electronic devices on a person.ā Police could use this information to determine what devices to seize when stopping and searching an individual ā especially concerning for activists and journalists at a protest, Guariglia said.
Maloney said that Leonardo would work with police agencies so they stayed within the bounds of the law. If an agency was not permitted to identify any devices within a car without a warrant, for instance, features could be turned off in the surveillance tool to prevent excessive data collection, he said. He noted the tool would not collect content from peopleās devices. āWeāre not going in and decrypting anything, these are just the signals in the air,ā he added.
Last month, Byron Tau, reporter at Allbritton Journalism Instituteās nonprofit publication NOTUS, revealed that similar technology made by a German company called Jenoptik had been trialed by U.S. law enforcement in two Texas counties, though itās unclear how widely it was deployed. (Jenoptik hadnāt responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.)
Guariglia said the new technologies were āStingrays by another name.ā Stingrays are surveillance tools also known as cell-site simulators, which pose as mobile cell towers to collect information about all phones in a given area. As Forbes previously reported, theyāve also been used to find cars. Because of their potential to harvest information on innocent citizens, they have proven highly contentious, leading some states to require warrants before theyāre used.
The Leonardo tool also ātricks your device into pinging against it and uses it to track you wherever you go,ā Guariglia said, adding, āJust because itās pinging a different kind of signal doesnāt mean itās any more innocuous.ā
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Not saying it canāt be done as they claim, but that sentence alone makes me pretty comfortable that they probably collated data from a single car considerably close to their device in order to generate the data for said brochuresā¦
I meanā¦ considering that EM fields are spheric by nature, the further away you are from a target, the more targets you will hit.
So you need either a pretty neat triangulation system or a fairly narrowed down (blinders style) system to ignore all the fields not coming from a specific lineā¦
And this is still thinking only about the devices which actively emit their own signals (such as Bluetooth)
Nowā¦ I wonder how strong would a field emmiter need to be to be able to trigger passive tags from the distances they showcaseā¦ and then consider if said intensity wouldnāt affect negatively other devicesā¦
Yeah I think they mean pet trackers like gps collars and air tag trackersā¦ not the chip implants. Marketing people put that brochure together and probably donāt know there differences between those and pet chip ID implants.
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Yeah, I will take a stance.
War is Hell. It only benefits the rich in the end. The military is fed by the poor. There are soldiers in America that receive state benefits because they canāt even pay them enough.
I would go the mercenary route if I did anything again. I could pick what conflicts I fight for, which side, my pay, and that pay would be significantly more than being enlisted.
If I had to give any suggestion for a career route, it would be in the trades. Electrician, Plumber, Masonry work.
Edit to add Government work. If I became a Mailman at 18, I would almost have 20 years in, and have earned a pension plus benefits by now. Hindsight, 20/20
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Too good to live in the lounge.
I made it a Wiki
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In my email inbox:
āIt was OK I guess but it wasnāt the book on Rubber Fetish Inspired Dildo Toys I was expectingā
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True.
One thing that I fail to understand is why some people who get into self help nonsense idealize the military and have these crazy ideas about discipline and that everything can be fixed with discipline. Itās not a lifestyle that Iād like to have TBH.
And while I know that Iām not patriotic in any way, Iād rather move to another country than get drafted into a war. In fact, I already moved because I knew that things were going to get really bad where I used to live and Iād do it again if I had to.