Lots of companies do this. I've seen it on HN even. We probably should consider it an attack, but there's no way regulators will go for it. There are counter measures against it though, but I doubt anything is foolproof
Removing noise is difficult if not impossible. The best someone could probably do is find a sensor whose noise characteristics are a superposition of their cameras and another additive distribution. There are simple ways to defeat this, but it's best not to share them, as I think the only people ruñning from this kind of tracking would be sketchy criminals.
This. Sure all three letter agencies need avenues to shuffle large somes of grey and black market cash around, art is convenient for that... Music and movies too. An extra plus for hiding messaging and all that... But I wouldn't view these operators to be as all encompassing as stories like these make them out to be... The next step is crap like "Leonardo da Vinci was actually a cia spy recruited by the freemasons", and once you go that far you're one cardboard sign and a roll of tinfoil away from an institution.
Yup. Defense is mostly technical nuance. Attacks outside of academia often rely on the weakest links, distracted or scared humans. Chatgpt and LLMs like it can easily mass phish or otherwise thousands of targets in a matter of seconds. Can also be used for OSINT on human targets... Combine the two and ransomware will be a true cottage industry ran by script kiddies.
That said there are things they could do to prevent this. They won't do them, it'd be costly research... But they could.
If you check my posts on this subject I never said anything about this being big. I even said it'd probably fail.
I didn't know the authors had no intention of not doing anything with the repo. In which case it's just someone trolling. Which is also not a big deal.
Maybe they have a different vision for it. And sometimes people prefer to work under different conditions. The ends don't justify the means. People jump from one insurance company to another insurance company for changes in leadership every day. If these people don't want to work under the current leadership I'd say they aren't doing the same thing.
You may not realize this but, every cellphones gps is tracked and bought and sold to various companies every day. Every minute of your physical location and identity. Every ad you see, your search interests, also for sale by the petabyte. Your browsing habits, your purchases, even your social media data has likely been bought and sold. Your ISP also sells your data, likely to advertisers.
The FBI actually recently purchased a bunch of this kind of data because the governments restrictions would t allow for it any other way.
This. Once a bias is known it must be corrected. Allowing it to stand is basically saying "we don't care about black consumers, they can't use this feature, and we will continue to insult them on accident". Which it's no longer an accident, it's a known racially discriminative software feature...
It's like hiring someone to do plumbing. A few customers invite them into their home and report that the new plumber said racist stuff. As a business owner you do what after this?
Are there other trust worthy distros for older not Google android devices? I remember checking out the space half a decade ago and it was dismal. IE, may brick your device, may be malware, may have worse security issues, etc.
No. It's just people doing what they want with OSS. The majority of the mindshare is still in one place. It looks more like a protest and or a hobby project then anything else.
Maybe it'd be a good idea to just clean house and elect new people. Possibly even people who resigned exclusively and some people with emotional maturity.