Yeah, I do believe it’s a good tool for search, just with the caveat that if it can’t find an answer it makes one up or otherwise kinda just fills in little missing details with noise.

That’s the question, what are they actually providing to warrants. You don’t need to provide a name to be able to identify someone. Do they provide logs or data that could be uniquely identifying before the police pull a tower dump? Who knows…

The LLMs are just somewhere between an averaging and a lossy compression of everything on GitHub. There’s nothing about the current paradigm of “AI” that is going to somehow do better than just rehashing that training set but with the inclusion of various classes of errors.

I think it’s better to view it as spicy search rather than any form of intelligence.

Okay I looked over their stuff, a couple thoughts:

I want them to be more clear in their privacy policy about what exactly they can and would reveal for a court order, what their screening process is for those orders, under what conditions they would fight one and if they will reveal anything outside the context of a full court order.

Reason: this is one of your biggest areas of vulnerability when signing up for a phone plan.

The lexipol leaks showed that many police departments use phone information requests so much that they include a set of request forms (typically one for each carrier) in the appendix of their operations manuals. Frequently the forms are the only data request tool in that appendix.

If you happened to have a call with someone who then did something Cool™ and got picked up, expect the detective to have your name and address on a post-it on their desk by the next morning. If you talked to them on some online chat platform they’ll send a court order to that platform for your IP then do the same to your carrier to unmask your identity.

Yes, if you were also sufficiently Cool™ they’ll start doing more invasive things like directly tracking your phone via tower dumps, but that’s a significant escalation in time and effort. If things got Cool™ enough that this is a concern though, it may buy you time to get a new phone if you live in an area dense enough for that to not be immediately identifying.

Also: I suspect the zip code is completely unverifiable so put whatever you want in there, basically pick your favorite sales tax rate.

That is in fact the reference

Hello fellow criminals, anyone get up to any good crime lately?

It negates the need for updates because it’s much less likely that BFU attacks are discovered that could compromise the phone.

Set a reboot timer. It’ll shut down and dump the keys out of RAM putting it in the more difficult BFU state. That way if you phone is taken and not unlocked successfully by you within a day or so it’ll render itself much harder to crack.

Vim, Emacs, Helix, Neovim

Some enterprising individuals in the US figured out you could print out your Venmo QR and stick it to parking signs to get people to just send you money

This is the correct initial reaction but given the extent to which the US monitors every single transaction everyone makes, it’s getting awful hard to manage the influx of feral hogs without having them streaming through your door.

It comes down to how the network is designed, Meshtastic is open source, you can go look at how the encryption works right now. There are issues with Meshtastic from a privacy standpoint but you could somewhat trivially design a derivative that is much more zero trust.

As with all things, layer your defenses. Not using the network that’s known to be surveiling you and instead using one that you have some confidence is leaking less info on top of the usual precautions is a solid improvement.

It’s another thing they have to do. They’re not all RF/SW engineers so they’d have to adapt to it the same way they’d adapt to anything else. By building networks that aren’t corporate controlled, however, activists can engineer them around anonymity instead of serving the police.

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It’s mostly a nothing burger. You basically need to have code already running on the chips. It’s less of a backdoor and more of just an undocumented function. That may sound scary but it’s rather common in production chips. In some ways it’s a good thing, it means there are now more possibilities for messing with the chip and doing fun stuff with it.

Blue marble is essentially an open source Google Earth desktop application. Idk if it’s exactly what you want but it’s not terrible.

OsmAnd is the same thing for Android and iOS and it’s absolutely wonderful.

That’s still an absurd amount given the context

The keep out databases are mostly nonsense, it’s a big point of contention in the community. If you live near a random hospital helipad or municipal airport and try to fly in your backyard below the tree canopies with a drone with less mass than a bird you are still blocked.

As you’ve probably seen you can buy semi dumb security cameras from Armcrest/Loryta/Empiretech/whatever that’ll run off of a barrel jack and/or Ethernet cable. Most of them have the option to insert an SD card and they’ll event log to that, at which point just don’t plug in the Ethernet cable except to manually pull recordings.

One other thing to think about is maybe consider “Frigate NVR” running on a pi or something and connected to cameras on it’s own wifi or Ethernet network that’s isolated from the Internet and your LAN. It’ll make local access easier because as with just about anything security related you’ll want to periodically check to make sure it’s actually working. You should be able to setup the pi to serve as the WiFi access point for all this.