This was written in 2021. Wow.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside
Um, what the fuck?
Well, guess how the comfy OK Google or hey siri works, hearing you while you say it all across the room. Or that noise cancelation for your calls. Admittably, the way he's put it sounds really tinfoil hat weird, but he's got a point there.
Any current mobile phone is so very crammed with sensors of any kind, which do make a lot of features possible/usable/comfortable and the same sensors may be used to track a good lot of your behavior, if used for malicious purposes. And we know that for a fact with targeted ads, where several people I've talked to noticed the same, where that even talking about a topic may be enough for ads to be show up. Check https://adssettings.google.com/ for example, it's actually scary what Google "assumes" about you, and even scarier how on point those assumptions are. A lot of this information is sourced from your devices sensors, and the argument of "there's just not that much computing power to process this data" is simply not valid anymore.
I'm not an engineer but I can think of multiple legitimate reasons for these microphones. Noise cancellation for instance, not for just what you hear, but also for when you are speaking.
The problem of course is that while there may be plenty of completely valid reasons for these items to exist, their very existence means that they can be co-opted for things that are nefarious.
The principle of data accountability is important. GDPR works, but only to a limited extent. Thankfully a few countries are starting to challenge. The nation will not collapse if Facebook or Amazon do
I wonder if Snowden is a TAILS user. The legacy of the foundation of computer science is that very little of the technology was built for privacy. Something like Tor or I2P ought be the internet standard. Computer architecture ought to be designed under the assumption that it will be attacked and surveilled. These standards are not something that will come from the corporate world, it has to be grass roots and institutional. While we're at that task, we can do away with all the proprietary and opaque systems that the corporate world has been busy creating.
"Google said 70% of serious bugs in its Chrome Browser are related to memory safety. These can be reduced by using safer programming languages." Theoretically yes, but I doubt that's possible in the real world. Low-level programming languages are being used for performance reasons and not because people like to use them.
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That's the niche I think Rust is trying to fill, it's both low level, and provides the tools to be memory safe whenever you don't need unsafe code.
I mean yes, see https://servo.org/ It has to be seen if it's really going to be a usable browser engine, and if it will have less security issues.