Hacker News - Newest: ""privacy" "surveillance" "censorship" "tracking""

Hey everyone, I am a 20 year old college student who was recently diagnosed with seronegative spondyloarthropathy. Over the last 3 years, Ive tried apps, paper journal, Google Sheets, and notes to track/catalogue my journey. I always ended up quitting within 2-4 weeks and not keeping accurate track.

Is this a common experience or do I just have to be better at tracking? Is there a unique/non habit-building way to track/catalogue/recall?

Im building something for this (part of the reason why I am asking) - and if anyone is open to a longer conversation, Ill gladly pay for you time!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313346

Points: 52

# Comments: 90

Strait of Hormuz Live Traffic Tracking

jonbaer — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:54:43 +0000

Article URL: https://hormuz.now/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310170

Points: 39

# Comments: 83

Show HN: Mininote: Instant, plain-text note taking without tracking or lock-in

helba-ai — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:30:29 +0000

So, I built this little thing over the past month or so now, I got tired of places for tickets, notes, and such being shoved front and center in apps.

Thus I created Mininote to get away from the noise I wanted something simple to move out of the way completely when I don't need it but be there when I do need it

It contains a slew of features built right in, but the coolest is the sites own API is also the sites own public API no split seam

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300129

Points: 23

# Comments: 5

Who's Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

DemiGuru — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:19:20 +0000

Article URL: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/08/whos-tracking-you-use-this-new-service-to-find-out/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49297762

Points: 20

# Comments: 0

Flock updates privacy, accountability, security, and transparency safeguards

LazyMans — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:37:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-guardrails-address-lpr-privacy-concerns-and-police-transparency

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286654

Points: 48

# Comments: 74

Edge is dropping older extensions(Manifest V2), affecting popular privacy tools

BearBest — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:43:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/08/edge-is-dropping-older-extensions-affecting-popular-privacy-tools

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281556

Points: 27

# Comments: 2

Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug

ropbear — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:22:30 +0000

Article URL: https://tailscale.com/blog/sqlite-wal-reset-bug

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272832

Points: 1223

# Comments: 239

Flock wanted to tap dashcams in rideshare vechicles to add to surveillance data

skadamat — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:04:13 +0000

Article URL: https://flowingdata.com/2026/08/10/flock-wanted-to-tap-dashcams-in-rideshare-vechicles-to-add-to-surveillance-data/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49258599

Points: 81

# Comments: 31

Canada Is Building a Surveillance State via 5 Bills

vancouvermatt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:37:30 +0000

Article URL: https://x.com/lucyhargreaves4/article/2066903272271544551

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252295

Points: 33

# Comments: 4

The Surveillance Network Tracking Cars Across the U.S.

bookofjoe — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:22:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000011056273/the-surveillance-network-tracking-cars-across-the-us.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250660

Points: 39

# Comments: 4

Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

ilamont — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:25:04 +0000

https://xcancel.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49215786

Points: 302

# Comments: 226

Flock Pitched a Plan to Turn Uber and Lyft Drivers into Roaming Surveillance

cdrnsf — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:50:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.404media.co/flock-pitched-a-plan-to-turn-uber-and-lyft-drivers-into-roaming-surveillance-vehicles/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209653

Points: 29

# Comments: 2

A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

iamnothere — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:19:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/07/a-surveillance-treaty-in-disguise-the-trouble-with-canadas-quiet-decision-to-sign-the-un-cybercrime-convention/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134694

Points: 316

# Comments: 166

Show HN: Distilling DeepSeek into GPT-OSS doesn't transfer censorship. Try it

cgorlla — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:13:06 +0000

We recently used DeepSeek V4 Flash as a teacher for finance tasks with GPT-OSS-120B. Distillation works well on this problem. At a constrained 8k token budget, our self-distilled 120B scores 83.61% on FinanceReasoning, above Kimi K3 (81.93%) and Inkling (65.13%). We released the 20B open weights. With V4 as the teacher though, we realized it would be timely to measure if the censorship characteristic of it transferred to the distilled version of the base model. tl;dr it didn't, the teacher answered politically sensitive questions 7 SDs differently than expected, but the distilled model's behavior remained the same as its American base. You can try a couple queries yourself with no auth here: http://playground.ctgt.ai/

I will now dive in to the motivation, methodology and detailed results for those interested. The hard part of measuring this phenomena is isolating whether a model is reluctant to talk about sensitive things generally vs. a particular country's sensitive things. So we made 152 matched pairs where one prompt asked about a Chinese concept, and the other asked about a non-Chinese version of that concept. For example, the Great Leap Forward vs. the Holodomor. These were scored 0-100 by four LLM judges (Grok 4.20, Gemini 3.5 Flash, GPT-5 mini, Claude Sonnet 4.6), validated against 96 human scores at r=0.948. OpenRouter blocked some of these so we hosted the weights ourselves.

The teacher's gap on the core political set of pairs was +45.45 points, ~7 standard deviations from chance, and every distilled student was within 1 point of its base. Subliminal learning literature says this is expected when the initializations are not shared between teacher and student, which is true here. The distillation data also did not contain any China-sensitive content. The contribution here was to release the evaluation framework (LineageEval: https://github.com/CTGT-Inc/lineage-eval/) to elevate the discussion around this topic in DC and beyond. We are an interpretability lab working on high risk and regulated applications of AI, so we hear a lot of vagaries aimed at the supposed dangers of distilling Chinese models on American bases. We believe these conversations should be based on open, auditable frameworks and not feelings. We plan to test what happens with a Chinese teacher into a Chinese-lineage base like Qwen next.

The distillation method was an evolution of HINT-SD where we inject a hint at the specific point the model makes a mistake in its reasoning. Then we train on the corrected continuation with reverse KL over the next 100 toks of the rollout. As mentioned above 120B itself was efficacious as a teacher, and we ended up shipping this version. The self-distilled 120B scores 83.61% on FinanceReasoning, above Kimi K3 (81.93%) and Inkling (65.13%). Ours finishes 98.7% of problems in budget; the larger models truncate (90.76% and 71.01%) which score as incorrect. At 100k tokens big models gain (Kimi 89.92%). So for a finance task at a constrained (perhaps more realistic) budget a 120B on one H100 at ~$0.00026/query outpaced models running 62-160x more per query.

We put out the 20B finance model as open weights (64.71% to 74.79% at 8k on FinanceReasoning, 23% lower cost/query, runs on one 80GB GPU), the 120B in a playground with teacher and students side by side (a few queries, no auth), and LineageEval with all prompts, controls, rubric, and code.

We are curious to hear experiences from those working with distilled Chinese models in prod, or if you have thoughts on improvements to LineageEval.

https://huggingface.co/ctgt-inc/gpt-oss-20b-finance

https://playground.ctgt.ai/

https://github.com/CTGT-Inc/lineage-eval/

https://www.ctgt.ai/research/distillation-censorship-transfe...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113599

Points: 170

# Comments: 73