9 ms·

The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethica

by mjr00 8mo ago

The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done. Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.

ViktorRay 8mo ago
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11. Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more. These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
- mjr00 8mo ago
  Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good. One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
- jazzyjackson 8mo ago
  Charlie's Angels (circa 2000) uses voice recognition and geolocation of cell signal as the terrifying new technology that allows the villain to track down his nemesis, Charlie. The entire film is about the Angels getting hoodwinked into giving Sam Rockwell access to the mainframe. Fun movie.
slg 8mo ago
It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
- RankingMember 8mo ago
  I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
  - sandworm101 8mo ago
    And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses. https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-fight-club-groups-spreading-in-canada-investigation-finds https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs
    - hackable_sand 8mo ago
      It's groomer behavior
    - tencentshill 8mo ago
      Also see: The Art of Self Defense
  - hydrogen7800 8mo ago
    And Scarface was an inspiring rags-to-riches story.
  - 8mo ago
koolba 8mo ago
> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done. A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation. I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
- polar 8mo ago
  > Alfred Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
  - loloquwowndueo 8mo ago
    It was :) Morgan Freeman not Michael Caine.
    - hdgvhicv 8mo ago
      I’d trust Morgan Freeman over Michael Caine any day.
  - dylan604 8mo ago
    same difference
  - koolba 8mo ago
    Oh you’re night! I had Morgan Freeman’s face in my mind too.
- foobarian 8mo ago
  These kinds of resignations are interesting. The character is such a good protagonist, he resigns rather than do Bad Thing. But that pretty much guarantees the boss will hire someone more pliable. Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall. The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.
Gagarin1917 8mo ago
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
- mjr00 8mo ago
  Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
  - MichaelZuo 8mo ago
    That kind of change in morality seems possible for an 18 year timespan? If anything the slope is closer to typical than to the maximum recorded. The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
- dylan604 8mo ago
  Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
  - steezeburger 8mo ago
    I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
    - wat10000 8mo ago
      Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain. But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
      - izacus 8mo ago
        The fact that Batman is an ultra wealthy 1 % which dishes out justice with his expensive toys while hiding from most of the authorities is also quite a message.
        hdgvhicv 8mo ago
cyode 8mo ago
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly: > Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it? > Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone. > Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver. > Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong. > Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius. > Lucius Fox: At what cost? > Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person. > Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person. > Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it. > Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
- culi 8mo ago
  Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted? Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
  - StilesCrisis 8mo ago
    I rewatched recently. That's what he says all right.
    - parl_match 8mo ago
      He also says "aflongaflongkong". https://youtu.be/0ukMXA0SJaM https://youtu.be/0ukMXA0SJaM
      - OrangeMusic 8mo ago
        He says "What's wrong with a phone call?".
  - seg_lol 8mo ago
    They should have used base64 encryption.
bayindirh 8mo ago
In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?). When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this". When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays". I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now. Scary.
- whiskey-one 8mo ago
  Subsequently in PoI we see two imperfect super-intelligent AIs let loose in the real world fight each other for domination and their objectives. For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.
  - ocdtrekkie 8mo ago
    Person of Interest is really good. Unfortunately I learned too much about the lead's IRL behavior, and it's on my shelf of shows I'll enjoy once the involved parties aren't collecting royalties anymore. It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
    - slyall 8mo ago
      I see it as a textbook approach of a show that built up the characters with "number of the week" episodes and then integrated the world-building and big arcs gradually. Very hard to do and less common these days with shorter series. oh and the actor will be getting royalties until he dies so you are are effectively waiting for that. Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money.
      - ocdtrekkie 8mo ago
        > you are are effectively waiting for that That's essentially what I was saying. I sort of hope when people are dead I can enjoy their performance more fondly even if I know they sucked before. > Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money. I've owned the whole series on Blu-ray for a number of years. It really is just one of those things that feels tainted, at least for now. :/
chrisrogers 8mo ago
My read is that it's immoral because it's a surveillance hijack without the knowledge of the users, as opposed to an opt-in.
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  And its not just opt in for the camera owner/licensor it should be explicitly optin for anyone who gets recorded
  - loeg 8mo ago
    In the US, you don't have an expectation of privacy in public places.
    - hackable_sand 8mo ago
      I'm in the US. I have an expectation of privacy in public places.
      - loeg 8mo ago
        I suppose you can expect whatever you want, but the law is not on your side.
tavavex 8mo ago
The Amazon Knight (2028): Batman hacks Ring cameras to track down the Joker, showing himself to be a rebellious vigilante who's not afraid to break a company's ToS to make justice happen. After the job is done, cut to a montage of Batman telling an Amazon worker about Wayne Enterprises' new villain-detection technology that could be used to upgrade Ring, then screwing in cameras in every room of every building of the city, and then proudly telling the bystanders that they won't have to suffer any more. He's invited to a ceremony where Jeff Bezos thanks him. A swarm of anti-evil Amazon drones takes off, flooding the city streets. The morning sun rises over Gotham City, colors become more saturated, faint shots of executing every criminal in the city can be heard. The civilians run to the streets to cheer it on, finally free from oppression. The screen fades to white, revealing the Ring Camera Pro 3 Batman Edition, complete with a Batman logo on its black outer shell. "Now only $99! (Available for free in partner municipalities)"
JohnMakin 8mo ago
I think it’s because in the early 2010’s these companies were doing truly awesome things, at least in my pov. Google search felt like magic and a portal to a web you could only imagine, facebook actually connected you with friends, nothing like amazon ecommerce had existed yet, cloud shit was insanely cool. Hell, my primary motivation in pursuing my degree was to work at google. I recoil in horror thinking about it now. I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
doctorpangloss 8mo ago
let's get this stupid social media purity test thing out of the way: blah blah blah, i oppose surveillance. now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems. and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them. the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.
Lammy 8mo ago
And now Palantir sells exactly this product, literally named Gotham https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/
EA-3167 8mo ago
If you want to see where the discussion on privacy and tech has gone since, suffer through the recent “film” Mercy. A sane reading of the premise would suggest a profoundly anti-surveillance and AI message, but it’s quite the opposite. In an way it’s best paired with the Amazon mess War of The Worlds, which is so thematically empty that it ultimately seems to suggest that while you can’t trust the government with your data, Amazon is a great custodian!
loeg 8mo ago
Surely it's problematic that Batman doesn't have consent to hijack phones? Whereas participating in Ring is voluntary? Anyway, movies aren't, like, the arbiters of truth. Sometimes they just have simplistic themes.
- CursedSilicon 8mo ago
  Is it voluntary to be recorded by Ring cameras?
  - loeg 8mo ago
    In the US, we don't have an expectation of privacy in public spaces.
- 63stack 8mo ago
  By that logic having a phone is voluntary as well
stackghost 8mo ago
My background is aerospace engineering. Specifically, I have managed technical risk on a variety of aircraft fleets including SAR, military tactical aviation, and special missions aircraft. In a nutshell my job was to look at complex systems, identify likely failure modes, and come up with engineering solutions. I'm very good at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that identifying failure modes in complex systems is a highly transferable skill. When I launched my first startup shortly after COVID I realized that that skillset makes me shitty at raising capital because I tend to only see the faults in my ideas and I end up with a "nobody would pay for this" mindset. But I also tend to easily spot the ways that tech companies' products can (will, do) go sideways. I am a perennial late adopter. I don't own an Alexa or really anything "smart" equivalent because I knew early on that they would become dystopian surveillance devices and/or security risks. And I am so off-the-charts tired of being right.
- lnsru 8mo ago
  My personal question to you: were you able commercialize your error finding skills? I am electrical engineer, I predict very early the week when shit hits the fan. Nobody listens and most of my job nowadays is cleaning the shit. I am sooo tired of being right. I want to find a way to use my future forecast skill instead of fixing obvious things afterwards. One manager told me it’s a normal process to hit the wall at full speed and the re-scope project and move from there. But damn… I don’t want to waste my lifetime doing obvious errors and fixing them. To be clear, errors happen and it’s fine. But most of them are easily predictable.
  - stackghost 8mo ago
    I left Aerospace and am currently building a privacy-preserving digital identity system that I think has technical, commercial, and social merit. We'll see how it goes. Hoping to do a Show HN in a month or so.

by mjr00 8mo ago

ViktorRay 8mo ago

The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11. Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more. These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.

mjr00 8mo ago
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good. One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
jazzyjackson 8mo ago
Charlie's Angels (circa 2000) uses voice recognition and geolocation of cell signal as the terrifying new technology that allows the villain to track down his nemesis, Charlie. The entire film is about the Angels getting hoodwinked into giving Sam Rockwell access to the mainframe. Fun movie.

slg 8mo ago

It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.

RankingMember 8mo ago
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
- sandworm101 8mo ago
  And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses. https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-fight-club-groups-spreading-in-canada-investigation-finds https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs
  - hackable_sand 8mo ago
    It's groomer behavior
  - tencentshill 8mo ago
    Also see: The Art of Self Defense
- hydrogen7800 8mo ago
  And Scarface was an inspiring rags-to-riches story.
- 8mo ago

koolba 8mo ago

> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done. A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation. I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.

polar 8mo ago
> Alfred Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
- loloquwowndueo 8mo ago
  It was :) Morgan Freeman not Michael Caine.
  - hdgvhicv 8mo ago
    I’d trust Morgan Freeman over Michael Caine any day.
- dylan604 8mo ago
  same difference
- koolba 8mo ago
  Oh you’re night! I had Morgan Freeman’s face in my mind too.
foobarian 8mo ago
These kinds of resignations are interesting. The character is such a good protagonist, he resigns rather than do Bad Thing. But that pretty much guarantees the boss will hire someone more pliable. Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall. The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.

Gagarin1917 8mo ago

I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.

mjr00 8mo ago
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
- MichaelZuo 8mo ago
  That kind of change in morality seems possible for an 18 year timespan? If anything the slope is closer to typical than to the maximum recorded. The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.

b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago

This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.

dylan604 8mo ago
Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
- steezeburger 8mo ago
  I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
  - wat10000 8mo ago
    Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain. But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
    - izacus 8mo ago
      The fact that Batman is an ultra wealthy 1 % which dishes out justice with his expensive toys while hiding from most of the authorities is also quite a message.
      - hdgvhicv 8mo ago

cyode 8mo ago

Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly: > Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it? > Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone. > Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver. > Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong. > Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius. > Lucius Fox: At what cost? > Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person. > Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person. > Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it. > Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.

culi 8mo ago
Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted? Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
- StilesCrisis 8mo ago
  I rewatched recently. That's what he says all right.
  - parl_match 8mo ago
    He also says "aflongaflongkong". https://youtu.be/0ukMXA0SJaM https://youtu.be/0ukMXA0SJaM
    - OrangeMusic 8mo ago
      He says "What's wrong with a phone call?".
- seg_lol 8mo ago
  They should have used base64 encryption.

bayindirh 8mo ago

In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?). When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this". When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays". I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now. Scary.

whiskey-one 8mo ago
Subsequently in PoI we see two imperfect super-intelligent AIs let loose in the real world fight each other for domination and their objectives. For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.
- ocdtrekkie 8mo ago
  Person of Interest is really good. Unfortunately I learned too much about the lead's IRL behavior, and it's on my shelf of shows I'll enjoy once the involved parties aren't collecting royalties anymore. It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
  - slyall 8mo ago
    I see it as a textbook approach of a show that built up the characters with "number of the week" episodes and then integrated the world-building and big arcs gradually. Very hard to do and less common these days with shorter series. oh and the actor will be getting royalties until he dies so you are are effectively waiting for that. Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money.
    - ocdtrekkie 8mo ago
      > you are are effectively waiting for that That's essentially what I was saying. I sort of hope when people are dead I can enjoy their performance more fondly even if I know they sucked before. > Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money. I've owned the whole series on Blu-ray for a number of years. It really is just one of those things that feels tainted, at least for now. :/

chrisrogers 8mo ago

My read is that it's immoral because it's a surveillance hijack without the knowledge of the users, as opposed to an opt-in.

whattheheckheck 8mo ago
And its not just opt in for the camera owner/licensor it should be explicitly optin for anyone who gets recorded
- loeg 8mo ago
  In the US, you don't have an expectation of privacy in public places.
  - hackable_sand 8mo ago
    I'm in the US. I have an expectation of privacy in public places.
    - loeg 8mo ago
      I suppose you can expect whatever you want, but the law is not on your side.

tavavex 8mo ago

The Amazon Knight (2028): Batman hacks Ring cameras to track down the Joker, showing himself to be a rebellious vigilante who's not afraid to break a company's ToS to make justice happen. After the job is done, cut to a montage of Batman telling an Amazon worker about Wayne Enterprises' new villain-detection technology that could be used to upgrade Ring, then screwing in cameras in every room of every building of the city, and then proudly telling the bystanders that they won't have to suffer any more. He's invited to a ceremony where Jeff Bezos thanks him. A swarm of anti-evil Amazon drones takes off, flooding the city streets. The morning sun rises over Gotham City, colors become more saturated, faint shots of executing every criminal in the city can be heard. The civilians run to the streets to cheer it on, finally free from oppression. The screen fades to white, revealing the Ring Camera Pro 3 Batman Edition, complete with a Batman logo on its black outer shell. "Now only $99! (Available for free in partner municipalities)"

JohnMakin 8mo ago

I think it’s because in the early 2010’s these companies were doing truly awesome things, at least in my pov. Google search felt like magic and a portal to a web you could only imagine, facebook actually connected you with friends, nothing like amazon ecommerce had existed yet, cloud shit was insanely cool. Hell, my primary motivation in pursuing my degree was to work at google. I recoil in horror thinking about it now. I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.

doctorpangloss 8mo ago

let's get this stupid social media purity test thing out of the way: blah blah blah, i oppose surveillance. now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems. and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them. the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.

Lammy 8mo ago

And now Palantir sells exactly this product, literally named Gotham https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/

EA-3167 8mo ago

If you want to see where the discussion on privacy and tech has gone since, suffer through the recent “film” Mercy. A sane reading of the premise would suggest a profoundly anti-surveillance and AI message, but it’s quite the opposite. In an way it’s best paired with the Amazon mess War of The Worlds, which is so thematically empty that it ultimately seems to suggest that while you can’t trust the government with your data, Amazon is a great custodian!

loeg 8mo ago

Surely it's problematic that Batman doesn't have consent to hijack phones? Whereas participating in Ring is voluntary? Anyway, movies aren't, like, the arbiters of truth. Sometimes they just have simplistic themes.

CursedSilicon 8mo ago
Is it voluntary to be recorded by Ring cameras?
- loeg 8mo ago
  In the US, we don't have an expectation of privacy in public spaces.
63stack 8mo ago
By that logic having a phone is voluntary as well

stackghost 8mo ago

My background is aerospace engineering. Specifically, I have managed technical risk on a variety of aircraft fleets including SAR, military tactical aviation, and special missions aircraft. In a nutshell my job was to look at complex systems, identify likely failure modes, and come up with engineering solutions. I'm very good at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that identifying failure modes in complex systems is a highly transferable skill. When I launched my first startup shortly after COVID I realized that that skillset makes me shitty at raising capital because I tend to only see the faults in my ideas and I end up with a "nobody would pay for this" mindset. But I also tend to easily spot the ways that tech companies' products can (will, do) go sideways. I am a perennial late adopter. I don't own an Alexa or really anything "smart" equivalent because I knew early on that they would become dystopian surveillance devices and/or security risks. And I am so off-the-charts tired of being right.

lnsru 8mo ago
My personal question to you: were you able commercialize your error finding skills? I am electrical engineer, I predict very early the week when shit hits the fan. Nobody listens and most of my job nowadays is cleaning the shit. I am sooo tired of being right. I want to find a way to use my future forecast skill instead of fixing obvious things afterwards. One manager told me it’s a normal process to hit the wall at full speed and the re-scope project and move from there. But damn… I don’t want to waste my lifetime doing obvious errors and fixing them. To be clear, errors happen and it’s fine. But most of them are easily predictable.
- stackghost 8mo ago
  I left Aerospace and am currently building a privacy-preserving digital identity system that I think has technical, commercial, and social merit. We'll see how it goes. Hoping to do a Show HN in a month or so.