Fail secure sounds good but now you also need to consider how quickly the brakes engage. Don’t want some random electrical hiccup locking up your brakes mid curve while you’re three-wide doing 70 on an interstate. Slowly draining capacitors or whatever to gradually engage them might be an option. Then you also, preferably, need some means of physically disengaging them. Otherwise you’re gonna get disabled vehicles in the middle of roadways that have to be dragged up onto flatbeds or the side of the road because the wheels won’t roll without restoring brake power first.

The means of distribution was direct, internet connectivity (for most) was slow, and some technical ability was required but the warez scene was absolutely jumping in the 90s. Granting computers were still niche, of course. I was just a kid but my understanding is lots of Russia was mob run following the CCCP’s collapse. There was a lot of craving for outside media there (games, music, film… everything, really) so lots of FTP servers and fserv bots on IRC were based in former Soviet Union states. It wasn’t like any central authority was left to crack down it or cave to pressure from international authorities that were still very tech illiterate. And those authorities were not yet under pressure themselves by the movie and recording industries. Napster eventually changed that in about a year’s time.

Like a GameShark, there was also “Game Enhancer” for the PSX. I still have mine somewhere. It plugged into the same port and came with a little button/spring to keep the lid detector button depressed. You could boot with a legit game disc (I think a black disc was either preferred or required) then open the lid and swap to your copied game. On top of that I believe it also had the same memory editing/cheat functions that GameShark provided.

Dreamcast had a software exploit that was found pretty quickly. Something to do with Windows CE, if I recall. Wasn’t long before a boot disc came out, no extra hardware required. That evolved into a patcher so copied games could be burned as directly bootable, skipping the boot disc. Also various homebrew from a devoted fanbase.

Before any of the above and before my time, people had been dumping arcade boards and cartridges to ROMs for quite a while. Programmable carts and flash tools were coming out for various systems. I remember a buddy in high school, early 00’s, had something akin to a dev kit for his old Gameboy and was working on writing his own games. Another friend actually had a Game Doctor for the SNES which let you play backups off a 3.5" floppy. Precursor to modern flash carts, before bigger storage started coming in smaller form factors. Neat stuff mostly lost to time now.

The actual article title is only slightly more decipherable. Meta hired a company, which employs a number of people in Kenya, to review videos recorded by Meta’s AI/Smart glasses. The employees were to provide manual annotations to the videos in order to train Meta’s AI. Meta terminated the arrangement stating expectations weren’t met. The employees of the firm claim they had to review obscene or intimate content. Examples mentioned include a man leaving his glasses on, on a nightstand, where his wife later came in an undressed, instances of glasses wearers engaged in intercourse, etc.

So 1100 people are out of work. Meta says they axed them for poor performance/redundancy. The company says “that’s bull” and it’s because employees raised awareness about what was being recorded.

Sucks for the folks out of work. With regard to the users, I personally can’t feel bad for anyone who willingly brings a Meta device into their home or who uses their apps. As for third parties, who don’t want to find themselves part of a porno they didn’t agree to star in, I guess people need to add “glasses go in the drawer” to their pre-coitus checklist. Maybe just file all Facebook and Insta users under “unfuckable” and call it a day.

Facial recognition is just one way to begin or build upon a profile, but there are others. Cameras would also be looking for things like specific brands of clothing being worn. Raggedy, no-name work shirt? You get a pass. $80 Carhartt jacket? Maybe we add a buck fifty onto that tub of Folgers you rely on to get through the day. Wearing the latest $300 T-shirt drop from the Foofoo X MTBLZ brokemaxxing collab? Hell, I’d personally wanna charge you extra on principle.

Even without cameras and their “AI” trying to gauge your wealth, past purchases can just as easily be associated with the credit/debit cards used to pay for them in order to build a profile. If they know what you regularly buy they can start nickel and dime’ing those things to test the limits of what you’re willing to spend. I feel like I also heard about some stores using Bluetooth or NFC triangulation. So your phone, smart watch, fitness tracker, etc could essentially serve as their means to watch you movements. They know the moment you entered, how long you lingered in a specific spot in any given aisle, and what register you checked out at. Now there’s a profile for those devices. Paid with debit/credit again? Then those devices and the purchasing method are connected and the overall profile has grown.

I’m kind of curious how much longer places are going to accept cash. It’s anecdotal but, from grocers to department stores, there never seems to be more than a single staffed checkout lane around here anymore. Then, of course, the self checkouts don’t accept cash (or the few that do seem to always be out of service). Probably equal parts “we don’t want to pay more employees” and “we want your data” motivating that shift.

We’re decades into dystopian already.

set -o vi

:D