Asides

Thanks, Trending Topics, for yet another example of a prominent conservative shouting about persecution when he discovers he’s subject to the same rules and economic consequences as everyone else. Like all the other comics canceled by the same conglomerate.

Thanks, Trending Topics, for yet another example of a prominent conservative shouting about persecution when he discovers he’s subject to the same rules and economic consequences as everyone else. Like all the other comics canceled by the same conglomerate.

I wonder if the kid wil ever tumble to the fact that the best way …

I wonder if the kid wil ever tumble to the fact that the best way to reverse the loss of privileges due to school attendance problems is to JUST GO TO SCHOOL. Earn back the screen time,the access to gadgets or services, etc.

Heck, we’d evenbe willing to talk about new gadgets or an allowan raise if he’d JUST GO TO SCHOOL

He tunes out online school, he doesn’t listen to us enough to homeschool him, and it’s not like we’re going to hire a prvate tutor to teach him a full 6th grade curriculum.

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So we’re stuck with trying evey morning to convince him to walk out the door, and he pulls up his best Bartleby impression, occasionally pausing to throw a tantrum

which is great for anyone else’s ability to think, too.

we’ve encouraged him, we’ve tried to address things he’s complained about, we’ve reminded him when it’s pizza or orange chicken day, we’ve bribed him with the promise of Coffee Bean snacks. We’ve reminded him that he gets more computer time the more of school he attends.

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We even reminded him that the classrooms all have air conditioning. It was something like 95, humid, gloomy and windy. AC would have been nice!

And that we can get in trouble too.

The only thing that kept him from getting kicked out of 5th grade was his IEP, which acknowledges the whole not-wanting-to-stop-preferred-activities(like being at home instead of at school) and staff who were trying to help with the whole process.

But tactics only work once, or work for 2 weeks and stop

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I describe it as rotating shield frequencies to keep up with the Borg’s adaptive weapon.

At least he’s figured out that if he gets caught using the hack against MS screen time limits, he’ll be in more serous trouble. Or that may just be that he hasn’t had the place to himself except on days when he actually *did* earn screen time and doesn’t need to.

He used a Linux boot thumbdrive to get at the file that manages MS Family Features and deleted it.

We now have a pinky promise not to misuse it.

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I’m torn between impressed thathe figured out which file to remove, howto gain access to remove it, and checked to see if it worked. And that he told us instead of keeping it secret.

I mean, he’s learning. He’s problem solving.

But I wish he’d put some effort toward walking though the wide friendly doorin front of him and learning how to deal with school intsead of trying to tunnel under, climb over, or phase his molecules through everything else trying to get the screen time without school

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it would be so much easier if he either was willing to go to school, or was willing to actually *do* an online cirriculum instead. He’d get education AND a full afternoon of Satisfactory (his latest game obsession) AND time tohang out with hisonline friends on a device where he can play the same games instead of just watch screen shares from zoom.

And we’d have time during the day to get stuff done.

And not be getting official warnings about truancy and its legal consequences.

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Ugh, sorrry, evenings seem to be turning into ranting times when I don’t pick up a book.

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Thinking about different aspects of location tracking in terms of…

Thinking about different aspects of location tracking in terms of

1. Your device figuring out where it is.
2. Others figuring out where your device is.
3. Your device telling others where it is.

1 would include GPS, or just listening for cell/wifi signals.
2 would include IP geolocation, or seeing which towers your calls go through, or tracking which map tiles you download while moving around.
3 would include telling a website, or an app uploading your location

1/

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Pinging hotspots or cell towers is both 1 and 2, figuring out your own location while revealing clues.

So you’ve sort of got passive sonar, active sonar, communications metadata, and actual reporting.

As for tracking:
Passive sonar isn’t a risk
Active sonar’s risk is inherent to being active
Metadata’s risk is inherent to actually using a connection
You can obfuscate it by things like onion routing, vpns, extra requests, pulling location-specific info ahead of time, etc.

2/

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And then there’s the issue of when your device explicity sends your location once it’s figured it out. Like when you search for the nearest coffee place or bank branch, or you’re using navigation software, or updating an online map in real time. Or when an app or website just wants the data.

Fortunately, OSes and browsers have decent access controls for letting apps and websites know your location (as determined by your device). But an app or website can still try to infer from other info

3/

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An app with online ads could look at which CDN endpoint you end up connecting to. Or make connections to sites with known locations and see which is faster, just like a speed test app or site choosing the nearest server to make a proper test. It’s a lot less precise, but it’s not like the OS can block the upload as easily as it can just refuse to hand detailed location to the app.

And of course it can be correlated with other metadata like geolocation

4/

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And of course anything you *intentionally* report — online navigation, check-ins, Pokestops you spin, the nearest ATMs on the bank site — you have to trust that the service at the other end isn’t going to misuse it.

Your bank isn’t going to care. They already know which branches and ATMs you visit.

I wouldn’t trust an ad network with a 10-foot pole.

Something big like Google or Microsoft or Amazon? That’s where you get into trade-offs.

5/

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Offline maps & navigation definitely have an appeal to them. Especially if you aren’t sure you’ll have reliable network access where you’re going. It’s doable. The only downside is you can’t add live traffic info. You could probably download typical traffic per day/hour along with the map and get rough esimates, butof course not be able to know there’s a 10-mile slowdown because a truck jacknifed, fell over, spilled an entire load of cheese and caught on fire

6/

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or maybe grab traffic data for a wide area, quantized so that it only reveals which large rectangles you’re passig through, not which roads. Like iNaturalist does with obscuring locations of observations.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m still writing this. I just wanted to write down the active/passive sonar analogy, and i kind of rambled on from there.

7/7

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