- only 45 days of media

- link lost if inactive for 30 / 45 days

- max 5 devices

Is it because of reliance on the network to provide these features?

I used ICQ decades ago and I could back up everything and move it to a different computer, I can still search the message archives to this day, and there weren't these silly artificial limits. Why has chat regressed?

But I found this link more informative: https://signal.org/blog/linked-devices-and-android-tablets/

Guess I shouldn't be surprised, coming from an AI maker.

While I don't doubt there's a place for automating defense ops, I truly believe a big part of the problem is the crummy quality of software our industry has been churning out for decades. Prioritizing ship tempo, new features, and next quarter's revenue over correctness, robustness and meticulous engineering care.

The world has become too accustomed and tolerant of bugs and bloat.

Instead of elegantly simplifying, we just keep making modern systems more complex - layering and patching as we go.

The scaling capabilities brought by AI are simply presenting the bill for our collective tech debt and informing us it's come due.

In a nutshell, I understand them as a sort of "blockie" for binary data formats. Things like WAV audio files, bitmaps, ASCII text, machine code, etc. each generate their own distinct visual signature (but different examples within any of these categories tend to generate similar signatures). So once you learn the "blockies" for different types of data, they really pop out when content is viewed this way ("hey there's an image buried in that sequence of 1's and 0's!").

The explanation on this page isn't bad, and the bitmap example near the bottom is particularly illustrative (once you've seen the reference image for bitmaps earlier in the page):

https://inside.battelle.org/blog-details/battelle-publishes-...

My armchair-expertise here is only about 20 minutes old, but I hope this helps someone else looking for a starting point to learn about them!

Or you could just stop fucking sending my data to third parties when it's for your own sole benefit rather than mine.

I realize my comment is crass, but it's getting ridiculous how pervasive the sharing of PII has become between tech companies, and the risk-laundering that's given rise to. Everyone's adopting a myriad of SaaS platforms that are deceptively easy to plug in, and it's too tempting to shed accountability. Attitudes of "it's not our fault, it was our vendor" beckon better due diligence.

I don't mean to single out Framework here - the problem is not in any way limited to them, and to be honest their response may be one of the more responsible disclosures I've seen (it's helpful it lists the specific fields and some technical data, and I'm glad they're clamping down even if it comes too late). I'm a fan of their mission, and wish them resounding success in their business.

But a forceful call to action is needed!

Tech leaders and CTO's: Let's get our act together as an industry. Treat PII like the toxic asset it is. Remember each row in that database is a real human being, and appreciate the gravity of responsibility they entrusted you with when they forked over their information. Be more rigorous vetting your vendors (think about the gauntlet Apple puts their hardware suppliers through). And for god's sake, stop indiscriminately shipping it off to every trendy service du jour.

Consumers: Avoid falling into indifference. Refuse to accept these data thefts are inevitable. And get rightly fired up and angry when the companies you trusted with custody of your data let you down.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205536

Points: 9

# Comments: 3

Some feedback on the UI. Just knowing there was an automatic timer made me feel rushed while reading each expanded step (regardless of speed selected), so I tried to manually take over the navigation, by using the pause button, next step button, and tapping factories. This caused my conveyor cart to somehow become decoupled from the current step and felt kind of buggy.

I also felt trapped in the Loop, which went around 3 times. I didn't notice an exit button. Better yet, this is a transition where perhaps a swift animation of the cart going around a few times on its way to the next step may help communicate the sense of repetitiveness you're trying to make the user feel.

I was on mobile and I noticed by the end of the park my phone had gotten quite noticeably hot - which is unusual except when under heavy gaming load.

Thanks for putting this together. Ironically, I found your concise and frank little written synopsis at each step the most interesting part.

> It backs up data for apps opting out of cloud backups with allowBackup="false"

This is untrue for older apps targeting API 30 (Android 11) and earlier. As I understand it, allowBackup is still respected for them, preventing their backup even in D2D mode. https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/1112#i...

Those apps are slowly going extinct since the Play Store stopped accepting updates written against the older SDK in 2022, but I gather there are still a few floating around out there (including some niche favorites that have unfortunately abandoned development).

And one wish:

I'd love the ability to maintain a "hotspare" device that's identical to the original in every important way. So if your phone is chucked in the ocean, dropped down a cliff, etc. you can just grab the other one (checkpointed from a few hours or a day ago) and seamlessly keep on going.

I think this is impossible today because of the way the system protects secrets in the Android Keystore and how it's intertwined with the TEE / secure element / Titan M2 / etc. I wish there were a way to truly own my phone including the ability to perform perfect-fidelity backup and restore.

There's slop, and there's masterpiece. In which would you rather invest your time? (Either creating or 'consuming'?)

It's a shame, if they had an AI transcription tool that kept everything in-house I'd be much more comfortable with it. Or perhaps some kind of zero-knowledge cloud-based product where I hold the keys.

> As far as the number of while loop iterations, I’m instead going to iterate a fixed number of times, log2 of the number of buckets. For some value this might involve a bit more work, if previously the bucket would be found in an iteration or two, but the saving in speed from avoiding branch mispredictions will make it worth it.

Bad actors might use the data you're publishing to fingerprint specific exploits to which the machines are vulnerable, multiplying the problem.

If producing an IP blacklist is one of your aims, divorcing it from any specific traffic would be more responsible.

You may also want to consider the risk traffic from compromised machines could leak PII (eg. say a script tried to use you as a relay to exfiltrate data) - and the ethical and legal consequences. A filter for SIN, credit cards, etc. would be a basic table-stakes mitigation step.

But I see that tenet degrading in various ways - how we broadcast our views on social media (reduced empathy), how we interact in the real world (less patience and understanding), the polarization of our politics (less compromise and thus less effectiveness), and how organizations treat their customers (even basics like Terms of Service and Privacy Policies that have trended much more user-hostile over the last decade).

Cooperation is the fundamental basis on which civilization is built. I'm not sure what the start of a dark age looks like, but part of me feels like over the course of my lifetime I may be witnessing us entering one.

I fervently believe it's not too late to correct course, and I'm interested in ways individuals can have an impact. Set a personal example. Push back against dark patterns proposed by your corporate colleagues. Instill a deep sense of responsibility and healthy skepticism in your children. This is just a start, and I'm open to more suggestions.

Is there some means to monitor the queries it's sending (or hold and review before transmission) or throttle to avoid triggering abuse thresholds on any single domain?

Sounds like the source of your problem, right there.