Random Fashion Thoughts (Part 3: Style farmer strikes back) - our general discussion thread

[LA Guy]

Okay, last “they’re coming to get you, Barbara...” post from me. NYT ran a great recent series called One Nation, Tracked. Really good read. It’s meant for digital consumption but the hard copy ran in this last Sunday’s edition.

Opinion | Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy (Published 2019)

What we learned from the spy in your pocket.

www.nytimes.com

The CPPA is a nightmare that no one understands. Unsurprisingly, it was a citizen initatived piece of law. It's so confusing that California has de facto given companies six months to sort out compliance. I honestly don't even know if we are covered (it only applies to companies that meet certain critieria, only one of which we *may* meet.) The definitions are vague and unclear. It's a mess.

 

[dieworkwear]

anyway the only content i trust is shirley temple king, an instagram influencer who gives brutally honest reviews of non-alcoholic shirley temples. he is too pure to be corrupted by online tracking schemes or paid sponsorships. all he cares about is the TRUTH of shirley temple craftsmanship

 

[erictheobscure]

why does that kid look exactly like a baby seth macfarlane

 

[nahneun]

@LA Guy Oui Man Walks Alone

 

[lesamourai]

all the data out there on me and some company still can't tell me what size apcs to buy

 

[am55]

You don't have to, though. If you wanted to, you can live like you did in the 80s.

If your work demands email, then just use email and nothing else. This is not some despotic and dystopic future.

In a recent data leak, someone at one of these data brokers accidentally opened their server to the world with a few hundred million customers edit - 1.2 billion people! on it. Then someone figured you could just sign up for a trial account and get something like 100 API calls free a day 1,000 API calls for free. I grabbed one of the trial keys, input a few friends emails, and then sent them the list of the physical addresses they had lived in since their teenage years. Finally convinced 100% of them to install uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger

In the 70s the NRO could already obtain sub-meter resolution optical and radar satellite images. Today someone like ISIS can buy it from a non-US company (i.e. not subject to USG export restrictions) at quite affordable rates with ~4-5h refresh rate. Computation is still a bottleneck but getting cheaper and the software is open source.

If you read Snowden's Permanent Record and/or followed the various leaks you'll see that it is actually quite simple/cheap to track a single person (globally! the US runs, directly or by proxy, 90% of the internet), provided someone else is willing to sell you access to their database and data hovering tools.

Just like the NSA analysts with XKeyscore (the NSA's "internal Google for people"), you just need an email or phone number and everything else is linked nicely for you. Today it's the NSA and large corps, tomorrow anyone will be able to do it through a user friendly app. I sometimes wonder how long it will take until users trained to use TOR to buy drugs from Silk Road and its successors will be able to buy backdoors to activate their partner's phone microphone remotely (or the service thereof; even more user friendly).

The only way this trend will be stemmed is through government action. GDPR, California's recent moves, and Singapore's PDPA are recent examples. Even a sophisticated technical user needs to put in quite a bit of work and is in any case trackable through their friends and family. I personally miss the old, trusted internet and its rich and diverse content, not to mention Google unspoiled by the SEO spamming hordes.

 

[am55]

Totally not a dystopia. From Permanent Record:

I realized, as one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target—or someone in communication with a target—you had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around.

One thing you come to understand very quickly while using XKEYSCORE is that nearly everyone in the world who’s online has at least two things in common: they have all watched Appreciation at one time or another, and they all store photos and videos of their family. This was true for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race, and age—from the meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or cousin.
It’s the family stuff that got to me the most. I remember this one child in particular, a little boy in Indonesia. Technically, I shouldn’t have been interested in this little boy, but I was, because my employers were interested in his father.
[...]
Then there were his pictures, and a video. He was sitting in front of his computer, as I was sitting in front of mine. Except that in his lap he had a toddler, a boy in a diaper.
The father was trying to read something, but the kid kept shifting around, smacking the keys and giggling. The computer’s internal mic picked up his giggling and there I was, listening to it on my headphones. The father held the boy tighter, and the boy straightened up, and, with his dark crescent eyes, looked directly into the computer’s camera—I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was looking directly at me. Suddenly I realized that I’d been holding my breath. I shut the session, got up from the computer, and left the office for the bathroom in the hall, head down, headphones still on with the cord trailing.

 

[clee1982]

European has different standard than American (hence GDPR), in the US I don’t think we’re going to have a serious debate until a real big enough scandal happen.

and at that point the convenience factor might have been so great that people will actually think pretty hard about what they’re willing or not willing to give up as suppose to bunch theoretical philosophical debate...

 

[clee1982]

And of course in Asia completely different ball game, at least when I grow up privacy means nothing, not even in the government intrusion sense it’s just by default people were not expecting privacy...

 

[noob in 89]

Curb Your Enthusiam is back, and with it, fresh takes on Larry David’s (non-)style: plain sneakers and boring, but nicer than average, shirt and slacks, capped with an unstructured blazer so thin and labile it’s often mistaken for a cardigan. Some mention “bros”; others, normcore. (<- peep that semicolon). It’s either apolitical or deeply political, careless or deeply affected (the “sprezzzz”). It’s boring and maybe terrible, but I’m drawn to it — not entirely out of laziness. I like slacks. I like jackets.

I think he’d look good in some white Vans.

 

[ManofKent]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/listening

 

[happyriverz]

 

[Baron]

View attachment 1326404

Curb Your Enthusiam is back, and with it, fresh takes on Larry David’s (non-)style: plain sneakers and boring, but nicer than average, shirt and slacks, capped with an unstructured blazer so thin and labile it’s often mistaken for a cardigan. Some mention “bros”; others, normcore. (<- peep that semicolon). It’s either apolitical or deeply political, careless or deeply affected (the “sprezzzz”). It’s boring and maybe terrible, but I’m drawn to it — not entirely out of laziness. I like slacks. I like jackets.

I think he’d look good in some white Vans.

The sneakers in that picture looks worse than the ones he normally wears, which look kinda like Butteros. His clothes are basic, but they look expensive and they fit him well. Do you notice he's always wearing two t-shirts - a long sleeve over a short sleeve?

 

[tgaith77]

Those are Simple shoes. He's always worn those.

 

[bbconair]

Totally not a dystopia. From Permanent Record:

what's the context of your post? very scary