Andrew Drake

@ifixcoinops boost button but you can specify the entire emotional valence as a vector with uncertainty intervals

@ifixcoinops @drahardja on the hardware side, some locally-visible indication that the device is being controlled remotely (e.g. blinking for a few seconds after a command) + some way to easily disable that remote control + local controls so you still have the basic non-smart functionality? Though it's cheaper not to add all that stuff so the cheapest option at the big box hardware store will probably also be the most abuser-friendly :/

@ifixcoinops I'm definitely prone to that line of thinking. My instinctive reaction was "what's the point of adding safeguards when the abuser can just comment them out". But I've been programming for nearly as long as I have memories, and it's been nearly 20 years since the last time I saw a piece of open-source software as something I couldn't just change to do what I wanted. It takes some conscious effort to remember that isn't how it is for everyone!

@ifixcoinops I think a lot of developers in open-source projects talk themselves out of it because they're acutely aware that any limits they put in place can just as easily be removed. If you had an open-source AirTag, for example, it would be easy to flash a version of the firmware without the functionality that enables finding a stalker's tag. Of course this misses the fact that a relatively small percentage of bad actors are also skilled enough developers to do that, and so those safeguards could still have a lot of positive impact!

@arthfach @nitinkhanna @adrienne fwiw, keeping a computer powered while seizing it is a standard tactic, and tools to do it are commercially available and not particularly expensive, e.g. https://cdsg.com/products/hotplug-field-kit?image=0 No surgery needed most of the time, unless you are connected directly to the wall (no power strip), and your power connector doesn't expose anything hot while slightly removed from the wall.

@admin @mhoye pretty sure the CPU on an Eye-Fi (WiFi SD card) could handle a database with a few million records.

@mhoye we had a vendor that our data team was using for replicating our databases. Super expensive, and with a pricing model clearly (to me) unrelated to their actual costs. This came to my attention about a month before we were supposed to renew our annual contract. In that month I replaced them with some Rust that was an exact drop-in, but faster, with a couple of new features we had long wanted, and literally *two orders of magnitude* less cost. Hundreds of thousands a year to less than two thousand. The compute now easily fits on a laptop, but it does benefit from a local network connection to the database 😉 Their CEO was pissed we were leaving (because they had already given us a big discount) and absolutely certain there was no way we could possibly do it cheaper, and that we'd come crawling back. Given the obvious insanity of that position, my only explanation is he was drinking his own SaaS pricing Kool-aid.