> The government says it needs this information to identify and interview witnesses who can testify about how the tools were actually used.
Why start this whole thing, if you don't already have this information and have people willing to help you as witnesses?
Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then? Rather than finding every user of the tool, find the users who use the tool in the way you don't approve of, then request the information for those?
Really bananas approach to go for "Every single user of the app" and "Everyone who bought a dongle" when it has very real and legal use cases.
Yeah, I'd HAPPILY report every single truck rolling coal around me if there was a place to report that information.
Hell, I've seen a truck roll coal around cop cars and, obviously, nothing happened.
This is just gross privacy intrusion masquerading as "protecting the environment". We don't need 100% compliance to the law and simple prosecution/ticketing of obvious violations would go a long way towards solving the problem outright. Much like we didn't need our cars emailing prosecutors every time someone drove without a seat belt on. Cops giving out tickets for not wearing a seatbelt was enough.
I watched a pickup roll coal in the middle of freaking East Bay, literally within site of downtown San Francisco, on a bicyclist. I reported their license to the California Air Resources Board, and not longer after that I saw it up on jacks in a neighborhood auto shop. That made my day. Asshole.
I'm in Idaho, so not such resource exists. It would have to be a federal agency that does the enforcement because our cops/prosecutors/lawmakers won't ever make something like that happen.
You can take temporary comfort knowing that it’s costing them $7 per gallon for that little asshole stunt.
It seems you have to he is especially insecure to intentionally want to burn smoke on someone else.
Especially when Tesla’s have a BioWeapon air filtration setting.
I was on a bike ride with my young kid. We were going up a hill and being passed by a lifted diesel truck. I could tell that the driver was desperately working the throttle to avoid accidentally blowing smoke in my kids' face.
Congratulations, buddy. You've designed your life around being such a massive unlikeable asshole to random strangers. But for a brief moment you understood shame.
I'm generally pretty libertarian, but I'm all for throwing the book at these guys.
> Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then?
They probably have tons of data and testimony from witnesses who use the product illegally. You can find hundreds of threads online of people telling you how to defeat emissions controls using their products.
The case prosecutors want to make is that EZ Lynk knowingly enables this behavior. If they can show that the majority of users are committing crimes with the app, that's a much stronger case than just rounding up a handful of witnesses.
If you've ever seen any body cam footage on YouTube I'd wager that about half of them have a moment where the cop is asking someone for information they're not legally required to provide, and it's framed as "I have to investigate." The smart ones reply with some flavor of "ok, I'm not required to help you investigate."
This seems like a much more invasive, much more expensive version of that. "We have [potentially spurious] evidence that this application is used in way we deem a Bad Thing. We need to violate the privacy of this company and thousands of individuals to gather evidence that we should be required to get before bringing this suit in the first place, but we're the government so we don't have to do that."
The DOJ first sued EZ Lynk in 2021, accusing the Cayman Islands-based company of violating the Clean Air Act by marketing and selling “defeat devices.” These tools allegedly allow users to bypass factory emissions controls on diesel vehicles, primarily through the EZ Lynk Auto Agent app paired with an onboard diagnostic (OBD) hardware dongle.
Opponents say “Investigating this claim does not require identifying each person who has used the product,”
That's not a a valid argument. That's just an opinion.
The DOJ obtained a lawful subpoena through the legal system to request this information. The legal case is against EZ Lynk and by interviewing users (how will they know who to interview if they can't get the data? duh!) they can build their case against EZ Lynk and their product if the main usage is violating the Clean Air Act.
How else would the DOJ obtain evidence if they don't know who is buying the product?
> (how will they know who to interview if they can't get the data? duh!)
What I don't understand is how they know someone has to be interviewed, but they don't already know who, which makes me question how the investigation got started in the first place?
> How else would the DOJ obtain evidence if they don't know who is buying the product?
The question is, how did the investigation got started, unless they already can see that people are misusing the product? And since they obviously must be able to see that people are misusing it, why don't they instead obtain evidence about those specific users, that they must have observed already?
The case is against EZLynk, not the folks using the product.
> The question is, how did the investigation got started, unless they already can see that people are misusing the product? And since they obviously must be able to see that people are misusing it, why don't they instead obtain evidence about those specific users, that they must have observed already?
Well you'd have to get into the legal case for the specifics, but I don't think this is an accurate assumption to make. They can just see the product "on the shelf", test it for themselves, realize it can be used to violate the Clean Air Act, and then request the ability to talk to the consumers of the product to see how they use the product or if they've used it to violate the Clean Air Act. You don't have to engage with a specific person at all.
How else do you get what might be illegal products off the shelves? Perhaps the users primarily use it for other purposes and the interviews bear that out? That would inform the DOJ and the court on the merits of the case.
Lawful evidence gathering doesn’t require you to know the answer to every question you want to ask someone up front. Nothing would ever get solved if investigators couldn’t act on the perfectly logical conclusion that the suspect must have talked to SOMEONE to get this part of the crime done, and this SOMEONE ELSE knows who that was.
The balance is in tailoring the access that the investigators have to the SOMEONE ELSE. They have to convincingly demonstrate the connection between the questions they want to ask the third party and their ability to legally use that evidence to further their case.
It’s like saying the cops can’t subpoena the taxi dispatcher because the suspect only ever talked with the driver.
It's worth pointing out that EZ Lynk is a sleezy company that originally tried to hide behind a Section 230 protection (lol).
Their more recent legal defense of the product was throwing their own users under the bus: "we can't control if our customers are using the product to break laws". So they are the ones who framed all of the customers as potential criminals.
I've learned never to believe the reasoning provided in DOJ filings. Realize it is written as a calculated manipulative tool to get a particular result. Whether they want it for the purpose stated is almost immaterial. The only thing you can really glean is they want the result is of whatever they're asking for, but no one knows if it is for the reason they state.
I am surprised that a lawsuit started in 2021 about maintaining emission standards survived up to this point. The DOGE search terms must have misspelled "emission"
Any device with Google services installed has all apps scanned at least once per day.
>Real-time protections for non-Play installs
Google Play Protect offers protection for apps that are installed from sources outside of Google Play. When a user tries to install an app, Play Protect conducts a real-time check of the app against known harmful or malicious samples that Google Play Protect has cataloged.
They will also go further for apks with novel signatures - take a copy, upload it to google to decompile and scan, and then if you have their express permission, allow you to install it.
99% sure Google would still know the app was run associated with other identifiers, but probably won't be turned over with the list of users downloading from the Play Store.
No, it will continue to work just fine. The restrictions are being added to Google Play Services, not Android itself. I and many others do not run closed source software like Google Play Services on our devices.
We're going to have two phones, the big brother phone you usually leave at home for banking apps and tax filing and boring stuff like that, locked down and nanny up, and the "real phone" from aliexpress or whatever that is purchased rooted and you actually live your real life upon.
I would not be surprised to see double sided phone cases so we can carry our big brother phone with our real phone.
There is some prior art in people being forced to carry a "work phone" and a "personal phone" at the same time.
There will be strange product marketing effects. If you only carry one phone, you can currently talk people into spending over $1K on a high tier big brother phone. But if you only use a big brother phone for bank apps and only at home, a $1K phone from Apple or Samsung is a hard sell, I'd be more likely to spend $1K on a really nice anti big brother phone on ali express or whatever.
Why is this administration, which is all for coal, oil, and against environmental policies pursuing THIS?
This DOJ is all about pursuing cases for retribution. It could be, they already know someone they want to punish, and already found they're using the device. Or, use it as a source for finding people they want to punish.
How is this, in principle, any different from the DOJ using a subpoena to get customer records from an adult store that was allegedly selling illegal explicit material?
Just because you use the internet to commit the crime doesn't make it not a crime.
The saddest part is, most people simply do not care, my parents constantly echo the sentiment that if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear. I would argue this slippery slope came about 20+ years ago during the initial Patriot Act. They normalize the behavior, take a few more freedoms, and keep on trucking. I used to be proud to be American. Now I am just worried.
I understand why they don't care and I don't fault them. The truth is that this doesn't affect most people in their daily lives. It sounds entitled to say that this demands their attention.
Tyranny comes and goes, and sometimes just changes shape and serves some more than others, and that gives the illusion to those it serves that it's gone. It's always been around in some form or another.
These companies will likely comply too [1]. Defenders will say "they have to comply with the law" but there's compliance and then there's compliance. For example, an adminstrative subpoena has no power. Companies can and should force the government to go to court and get a court-issued subpoena.
This isn't really anything terribly new either. The government regardless of who the current president is will routinely go after individuals for (allaegedly) hurting coprorate profits. We saw it in the Napster/Limewire era, in the BitTorrent era and even with physical products far earlier than that. There's a ban on importing cars less than 25 years old because Mercedes-Benz dealerships lobbied for a law in the 1980s because too many people were importing them directly from Germany at a lower cost [2].
Heck, 60 years of Cuban embargoes and sanctions as well as the 1954 Guatemala coup were US efforts at the behest of the United Fruit Company. Same thing for oil and the 1953 Iranian coup.
> Defenders will say "they have to comply with the law" but there's compliance and then there's compliance.
More importantly, there's not spying on the user in the first place. The law doesn't force Google to spy, nor does it force Apple to lock consumers (for sure not "owners") out of their phones, so that they're left helpless when the CCP bans VPN and protest apps [1] (not to imply spying from Google alone isn't bad, before any other actors get involved).
This does seem like a fishing expedition though there is a facially legitimate purpose.
Fortunately, we have more powerful policy tools to clean the air than attacking individual gearheads... convert America to an electric car system. You need to attack these problems at the point of production. Consumption side approaches are petty and not very effective.
It would be more concise and the analysis section at the end would be more useful. I still read it I just hate reading articles online knowing I could have run a chatgpt deep research to the same effect.
Can you tell me what you would cut, in this article, specifically, that would make it more meaningfully concise?
The point isn't that you can't run the deep research. Everyone now has more capabilities, and if you want to waste time and tokens you can do it. The point is someone has done the work compiling these, and made it available once, for everyone to read. Think "caching". It has the exact amount of information needed to show the details of every attack. There is a lot. Sadly making it "concise" will remove information -- there is that much.
I do usually make edits to an article after I get it from an AI, as an editor would do when a writer submits something. I hate having AI shibboleths like "It's not X. It's Y". So I make it more humanized. But at the end of the day, the article does what it's supposed to do: make people aware of things in one place, rather than have to research it themselves every time.
Writing it myself would mean doing the research myself. How would I do that? ChatGPT can do it faster at scale. Then the summaries are short enough that cutting any particular part wouldn't make sense. I could re-word it, I guess.
Why don't you write all your assembly code yourself? Why do you use a compiler? Why do you generate images, when you can draw them yourself? You're supposed to add value.
I don't think preparing a list of all the threats, editing it and publishing it for others is a "waste". I'm not publishing random stuff, this is important and in line with what I want people to know.
Some people on HN downvote any criticism of AI, other people complain that things are written by AI. If you're such big fans of AI being used more and more, then accept the consequences!
The people doing the downvoting are different people from the whiners. I'm one of the whiners.
That's kinda fair, like it's still useful to prepare a list, but it's also like if you didn't go research your information yourself why would I start from a position of charitability when I read it? When I research something with LLMs, I know to double-check everything myself before I use it as a basis for my thought or repeat it to other people. Knowing an article is AI written forces me to doubt every sentence. Or maybe it's worse, I have to assume nobody cared about the sentence. The old format was a guarantee that someone gave enough shits to put the article together. Relevance comes implicitly bundled in each sentence. It's like someone talking to you in public in that there's often a reason to pay attention.
It's not as though that person is going to say something correct, or ethical, but I've had a lifetime of dealing with human kinds of wrongness. When stuff is wrong, I'll know it's wrong because the article is slanted or wrong because the author was lazy etc., which will let me discount it selectively and still get value from it when, e.g., a slanted author contradicts themselves. Reading an LLM article I have no clue whether the person who put it up even read the whole thing, so when I read sentences, I have no guarantee that the sentence communicates something worth paying attention to. I dislike that ambiguity and would prefer to guarantee that the text is slop by asking a bot myself. Then I know it's worth upfront. I'd be fine with it if these sites included a direct statement in bold at the top: HEY THIS IS AI SLOP IF YOU DONT WANT THAT LEAVE. Then I know exactly how to parse it.
It's poorly structured. I think a better split between technical vs social measures and how they interact would result in a much better article. It also doesn't seem to even mention DPI or great firewall of China as prior art.
The Department of justice needs witnesses because they’re trying to prove that ez lynk is profiting from the distribution of “emission disabling software” They are not going after any of these individual users.
Tldr: they’re trying to get the mod taken off the market.
Hopefully they hand it over, and all of these people lose their licenses. I'm sick of breathing in their exhaust on the way to work.
I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.
> I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.
Hey congrats, you discovered Society! This is what all those rules and shit are all about - your impact on other people, and their impact on you! It turns out that just saying “people should be able to do what they want” doesn’t actually solve anything, because other people also exist, and some of them are you!
I also absolutely loath the coal-rollers and everything about what they do, and if I could snap my fingers and have them lose both their trucks and their licenses to drive with no other consequences beyond their frustration, I'd do it.
Nevertheless, we cannot allow this good reason for which be both agree to be used as a wedge to let the state just wholesale collect data for whatever reason they want.
Very soon, the reason the state wants to wholesale collect data will be for a reason we entirely disagree. That is not an "IF", it is a "WHEN".
But this isn’t actually to throw the coal rollers in jail and take away their trucks it’s to get witnesses so they can build a case to get this mod taken off the market
> The government says it needs this information to identify and interview witnesses who can testify about how the tools were actually used.
Why start this whole thing, if you don't already have this information and have people willing to help you as witnesses?
Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then? Rather than finding every user of the tool, find the users who use the tool in the way you don't approve of, then request the information for those?
Really bananas approach to go for "Every single user of the app" and "Everyone who bought a dongle" when it has very real and legal use cases.
Yeah, I'd HAPPILY report every single truck rolling coal around me if there was a place to report that information.
Hell, I've seen a truck roll coal around cop cars and, obviously, nothing happened.
This is just gross privacy intrusion masquerading as "protecting the environment". We don't need 100% compliance to the law and simple prosecution/ticketing of obvious violations would go a long way towards solving the problem outright. Much like we didn't need our cars emailing prosecutors every time someone drove without a seat belt on. Cops giving out tickets for not wearing a seatbelt was enough.
I watched a pickup roll coal in the middle of freaking East Bay, literally within site of downtown San Francisco, on a bicyclist. I reported their license to the California Air Resources Board, and not longer after that I saw it up on jacks in a neighborhood auto shop. That made my day. Asshole.
I'm in Idaho, so not such resource exists. It would have to be a federal agency that does the enforcement because our cops/prosecutors/lawmakers won't ever make something like that happen.
You can take temporary comfort knowing that it’s costing them $7 per gallon for that little asshole stunt. It seems you have to he is especially insecure to intentionally want to burn smoke on someone else. Especially when Tesla’s have a BioWeapon air filtration setting.
For those, like me, who aren't familiar with the term "rolling coal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
I was on a bike ride with my young kid. We were going up a hill and being passed by a lifted diesel truck. I could tell that the driver was desperately working the throttle to avoid accidentally blowing smoke in my kids' face.
Congratulations, buddy. You've designed your life around being such a massive unlikeable asshole to random strangers. But for a brief moment you understood shame.
I'm generally pretty libertarian, but I'm all for throwing the book at these guys.
> Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then?
They probably have tons of data and testimony from witnesses who use the product illegally. You can find hundreds of threads online of people telling you how to defeat emissions controls using their products.
The case prosecutors want to make is that EZ Lynk knowingly enables this behavior. If they can show that the majority of users are committing crimes with the app, that's a much stronger case than just rounding up a handful of witnesses.
Then they don’t need to unmask users to get testimony, right?
If you've ever seen any body cam footage on YouTube I'd wager that about half of them have a moment where the cop is asking someone for information they're not legally required to provide, and it's framed as "I have to investigate." The smart ones reply with some flavor of "ok, I'm not required to help you investigate."
This seems like a much more invasive, much more expensive version of that. "We have [potentially spurious] evidence that this application is used in way we deem a Bad Thing. We need to violate the privacy of this company and thousands of individuals to gather evidence that we should be required to get before bringing this suit in the first place, but we're the government so we don't have to do that."
Next up: expect the same treatment if you've ever downloaded a .gguf from HuggingFace.
That's not a a valid argument. That's just an opinion.
The DOJ obtained a lawful subpoena through the legal system to request this information. The legal case is against EZ Lynk and by interviewing users (how will they know who to interview if they can't get the data? duh!) they can build their case against EZ Lynk and their product if the main usage is violating the Clean Air Act.
How else would the DOJ obtain evidence if they don't know who is buying the product?
> (how will they know who to interview if they can't get the data? duh!)
What I don't understand is how they know someone has to be interviewed, but they don't already know who, which makes me question how the investigation got started in the first place?
> How else would the DOJ obtain evidence if they don't know who is buying the product?
The question is, how did the investigation got started, unless they already can see that people are misusing the product? And since they obviously must be able to see that people are misusing it, why don't they instead obtain evidence about those specific users, that they must have observed already?
The case is against EZLynk, not the folks using the product.
> The question is, how did the investigation got started, unless they already can see that people are misusing the product? And since they obviously must be able to see that people are misusing it, why don't they instead obtain evidence about those specific users, that they must have observed already?
Well you'd have to get into the legal case for the specifics, but I don't think this is an accurate assumption to make. They can just see the product "on the shelf", test it for themselves, realize it can be used to violate the Clean Air Act, and then request the ability to talk to the consumers of the product to see how they use the product or if they've used it to violate the Clean Air Act. You don't have to engage with a specific person at all.
How else do you get what might be illegal products off the shelves? Perhaps the users primarily use it for other purposes and the interviews bear that out? That would inform the DOJ and the court on the merits of the case.
Lawful evidence gathering doesn’t require you to know the answer to every question you want to ask someone up front. Nothing would ever get solved if investigators couldn’t act on the perfectly logical conclusion that the suspect must have talked to SOMEONE to get this part of the crime done, and this SOMEONE ELSE knows who that was.
The balance is in tailoring the access that the investigators have to the SOMEONE ELSE. They have to convincingly demonstrate the connection between the questions they want to ask the third party and their ability to legally use that evidence to further their case.
It’s like saying the cops can’t subpoena the taxi dispatcher because the suspect only ever talked with the driver.
It's worth pointing out that EZ Lynk is a sleezy company that originally tried to hide behind a Section 230 protection (lol).
Their more recent legal defense of the product was throwing their own users under the bus: "we can't control if our customers are using the product to break laws". So they are the ones who framed all of the customers as potential criminals.
Why stop there? Why not request the PII of every person who could have plausibly downloaded the app at any point in time?
https://dictionary.justia.com/overbroad
It's the only way to be sure. Also, think of the children.
I've learned never to believe the reasoning provided in DOJ filings. Realize it is written as a calculated manipulative tool to get a particular result. Whether they want it for the purpose stated is almost immaterial. The only thing you can really glean is they want the result is of whatever they're asking for, but no one knows if it is for the reason they state.
I am surprised that a lawsuit started in 2021 about maintaining emission standards survived up to this point. The DOGE search terms must have misspelled "emission"
That's why you should be downloading from F-Droid anonymously.
Any device with Google services installed has all apps scanned at least once per day.
>Real-time protections for non-Play installs Google Play Protect offers protection for apps that are installed from sources outside of Google Play. When a user tries to install an app, Play Protect conducts a real-time check of the app against known harmful or malicious samples that Google Play Protect has cataloged.
https://developers.google.com/android/play-protect/client-pr...
They will also go further for apks with novel signatures - take a copy, upload it to google to decompile and scan, and then if you have their express permission, allow you to install it.
99% sure Google would still know the app was run associated with other identifiers, but probably won't be turned over with the list of users downloading from the Play Store.
For sure. Another demonstration of why "side loading" software is better.
That's why F-Droid eventually won't work on new Android phones.
No, it will continue to work just fine. The restrictions are being added to Google Play Services, not Android itself. I and many others do not run closed source software like Google Play Services on our devices.
We're going to have two phones, the big brother phone you usually leave at home for banking apps and tax filing and boring stuff like that, locked down and nanny up, and the "real phone" from aliexpress or whatever that is purchased rooted and you actually live your real life upon.
I would not be surprised to see double sided phone cases so we can carry our big brother phone with our real phone.
There is some prior art in people being forced to carry a "work phone" and a "personal phone" at the same time.
There will be strange product marketing effects. If you only carry one phone, you can currently talk people into spending over $1K on a high tier big brother phone. But if you only use a big brother phone for bank apps and only at home, a $1K phone from Apple or Samsung is a hard sell, I'd be more likely to spend $1K on a really nice anti big brother phone on ali express or whatever.
It works right now, though.
Missing key points:
Why is this administration, which is all for coal, oil, and against environmental policies pursuing THIS?
This DOJ is all about pursuing cases for retribution. It could be, they already know someone they want to punish, and already found they're using the device. Or, use it as a source for finding people they want to punish.
It’s not about this administration. The lawsuit was filed in 2021.
US Attorneys aren't forced to toe the party line on every issue.
This issue is just not directly politically important enough to get the "don't touch" treatment.
Donors and party power brokers aren't rolling coal.
Also strange as it would disproportionately affect modified diesel trucks, who are overwhelmingly Trump supporters.
Will this turn into be a blow to anyone who gains access to the hardware paid with own money?
Welcome to our brave new digital world, governments and DOJs do this because now they can, I am afraid this is only the beginning.
How is this, in principle, any different from the DOJ using a subpoena to get customer records from an adult store that was allegedly selling illegal explicit material?
Just because you use the internet to commit the crime doesn't make it not a crime.
The saddest part is, most people simply do not care, my parents constantly echo the sentiment that if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear. I would argue this slippery slope came about 20+ years ago during the initial Patriot Act. They normalize the behavior, take a few more freedoms, and keep on trucking. I used to be proud to be American. Now I am just worried.
I understand why they don't care and I don't fault them. The truth is that this doesn't affect most people in their daily lives. It sounds entitled to say that this demands their attention.
Democratic governments can be held accountable, corporations cannot.
Even if this was correct (it's not), it seems irrelevant to the point.
Tyranny comes and goes, and sometimes just changes shape and serves some more than others, and that gives the illusion to those it serves that it's gone. It's always been around in some form or another.
Get a warrant…
These companies will likely comply too [1]. Defenders will say "they have to comply with the law" but there's compliance and then there's compliance. For example, an adminstrative subpoena has no power. Companies can and should force the government to go to court and get a court-issued subpoena.
This isn't really anything terribly new either. The government regardless of who the current president is will routinely go after individuals for (allaegedly) hurting coprorate profits. We saw it in the Napster/Limewire era, in the BitTorrent era and even with physical products far earlier than that. There's a ban on importing cars less than 25 years old because Mercedes-Benz dealerships lobbied for a law in the 1980s because too many people were importing them directly from Germany at a lower cost [2].
Heck, 60 years of Cuban embargoes and sanctions as well as the 1954 Guatemala coup were US efforts at the behest of the United Fruit Company. Same thing for oil and the 1953 Iranian coup.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promi...
[2]: https://www.jalopnik.com/the-25-year-import-rules-history-is...
> Defenders will say "they have to comply with the law" but there's compliance and then there's compliance.
More importantly, there's not spying on the user in the first place. The law doesn't force Google to spy, nor does it force Apple to lock consumers (for sure not "owners") out of their phones, so that they're left helpless when the CCP bans VPN and protest apps [1] (not to imply spying from Google alone isn't bad, before any other actors get involved).
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-pulls-mapping-app-used-by-h...
This does seem like a fishing expedition though there is a facially legitimate purpose.
Fortunately, we have more powerful policy tools to clean the air than attacking individual gearheads... convert America to an electric car system. You need to attack these problems at the point of production. Consumption side approaches are petty and not very effective.
Worth pointing out that this is part of a much larger encroachment on user privacy, and not just in the US: https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
I wish that article wasn't extremely ai written
What would that improve in this case?
It would be more concise and the analysis section at the end would be more useful. I still read it I just hate reading articles online knowing I could have run a chatgpt deep research to the same effect.
Can you tell me what you would cut, in this article, specifically, that would make it more meaningfully concise?
The point isn't that you can't run the deep research. Everyone now has more capabilities, and if you want to waste time and tokens you can do it. The point is someone has done the work compiling these, and made it available once, for everyone to read. Think "caching". It has the exact amount of information needed to show the details of every attack. There is a lot. Sadly making it "concise" will remove information -- there is that much.
I do usually make edits to an article after I get it from an AI, as an editor would do when a writer submits something. I hate having AI shibboleths like "It's not X. It's Y". So I make it more humanized. But at the end of the day, the article does what it's supposed to do: make people aware of things in one place, rather than have to research it themselves every time.
Why not just write it yourself? We can all have ChatGPT regurgitate the same information. You're supposed to add value, editorializing isn't enough.
Just like I don't want to look at AI art or listen to AI music, I don't want to read AI written blogslop.
The web is now full of shit. What a waste.
Writing it myself would mean doing the research myself. How would I do that? ChatGPT can do it faster at scale. Then the summaries are short enough that cutting any particular part wouldn't make sense. I could re-word it, I guess.
Why don't you write all your assembly code yourself? Why do you use a compiler? Why do you generate images, when you can draw them yourself? You're supposed to add value.
I don't think preparing a list of all the threats, editing it and publishing it for others is a "waste". I'm not publishing random stuff, this is important and in line with what I want people to know.
Some people on HN downvote any criticism of AI, other people complain that things are written by AI. If you're such big fans of AI being used more and more, then accept the consequences!
The people doing the downvoting are different people from the whiners. I'm one of the whiners.
That's kinda fair, like it's still useful to prepare a list, but it's also like if you didn't go research your information yourself why would I start from a position of charitability when I read it? When I research something with LLMs, I know to double-check everything myself before I use it as a basis for my thought or repeat it to other people. Knowing an article is AI written forces me to doubt every sentence. Or maybe it's worse, I have to assume nobody cared about the sentence. The old format was a guarantee that someone gave enough shits to put the article together. Relevance comes implicitly bundled in each sentence. It's like someone talking to you in public in that there's often a reason to pay attention.
It's not as though that person is going to say something correct, or ethical, but I've had a lifetime of dealing with human kinds of wrongness. When stuff is wrong, I'll know it's wrong because the article is slanted or wrong because the author was lazy etc., which will let me discount it selectively and still get value from it when, e.g., a slanted author contradicts themselves. Reading an LLM article I have no clue whether the person who put it up even read the whole thing, so when I read sentences, I have no guarantee that the sentence communicates something worth paying attention to. I dislike that ambiguity and would prefer to guarantee that the text is slop by asking a bot myself. Then I know it's worth upfront. I'd be fine with it if these sites included a direct statement in bold at the top: HEY THIS IS AI SLOP IF YOU DONT WANT THAT LEAVE. Then I know exactly how to parse it.
It's poorly structured. I think a better split between technical vs social measures and how they interact would result in a much better article. It also doesn't seem to even mention DPI or great firewall of China as prior art.
The Department of justice needs witnesses because they’re trying to prove that ez lynk is profiting from the distribution of “emission disabling software” They are not going after any of these individual users. Tldr: they’re trying to get the mod taken off the market.
Sounds like I need to download this app..
If you start tuning, then make sure you turn it off before bringing your car to the dealership.
It'll void any warranty.
Hopefully they hand it over, and all of these people lose their licenses. I'm sick of breathing in their exhaust on the way to work.
I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.
> I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.
Hey congrats, you discovered Society! This is what all those rules and shit are all about - your impact on other people, and their impact on you! It turns out that just saying “people should be able to do what they want” doesn’t actually solve anything, because other people also exist, and some of them are you!
Yeah
I also absolutely loath the coal-rollers and everything about what they do, and if I could snap my fingers and have them lose both their trucks and their licenses to drive with no other consequences beyond their frustration, I'd do it.
Nevertheless, we cannot allow this good reason for which be both agree to be used as a wedge to let the state just wholesale collect data for whatever reason they want.
Very soon, the reason the state wants to wholesale collect data will be for a reason we entirely disagree. That is not an "IF", it is a "WHEN".
So, no, this isn't a justification.
Very soon, that ca
But this isn’t actually to throw the coal rollers in jail and take away their trucks it’s to get witnesses so they can build a case to get this mod taken off the market