John Malkovich has always been based.

So let me get this straight. They are not exposing it to consumers. Everyone is being explicit that it is NOT exposed to CONSUMERS. Doesn’t that leave it open to being exposed to non-consumer entities? Things like Meta internally and government entities are non-consumer entities. I believe other businesses could be construed as non-consumer entities as well. So they could easily NEVER expose this to the end users and still make bank selling the data to brokers, government agencies, or private surveillance companies like Palentier or Flock.

Cool cool cool… Good to know.

Let’s start with law congressional pensions and 3rd party law enforcement contracts, yeah?

Easy, replace all price tags with qr codes that you scan with your phone. Then they can make the price whatever they want for whomever they want individually. More realistically they will use an categorization AI to put people into rulesets which set their prices.

Here is a great video to illustrate and educate: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/acpd3UXQdmw

And an article to back it up: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/05/walmart-rolls-out-digital-pricing-could-the-ai-fue/

This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.

The point on this is the cars are broadcasting the numbers. Imagine your license plate including a loud speaker that shouted it’s number while the car was running. Tracking via plate requires line of sight. Tracking it in an automated way requires a good high speed camera, text analysis computer vision to log the vehicles, and storage for all of the images. In contrast, this signal is a repeating unencrypted broadcast. I could build a Raspberry Nano device that I can sit next to an intersection and capture the numbers of every vehicle that drives by. It is also just presumably storing the number and time, so years of tracking data could be managed with a gig or two of storage.

This is absolutely a threat, and I am surprised it is not actively exploited by companies like Walmart to track every vehicle which drives by their stores and enters their parking lots. Hell, Amazon has enough vehicles out driving around that they could pretty effectively generate profiles for every vehicle in a town just by equipping their trucks with scanners and compiling the data into a behavior analysis system. Every car which drives past is read and stored. It is truly worrying.

The ONLY way this is even remotely OK is if the OS is set to 18+ all other age verification laws are satisfied and I don’t have to provide even more intrusive information to random companies.

And in other breaking news: the sky is blue, tree pretty, and fire hot.

In other news: fire is hot, water makes things wet, and things that taste good make us happy.

I have taken to using my a quote of my own with people recently, on both sides in different situations. Quote: “Those who neither ascribe to nor participate in the social contract of tolerance are not afforded the protection it brings.”

I say it to the right when they complain about me calling them out on their BS or making it known that they are generally shit human beings.

I say it to the left when they try to call me out for saying that literal Nazis holding signs on the side of the road should have beverages thrown at them by passing cars at the tamest. I would prefer throwing much heavier objects, but the law protects them. The Law, not the social contract of tolerance. Within the confines of the law, people like that should not be tolerated and should be informed with as much force as possible.

You assume that the governments of which you speak are not assisting intentionally. These companies did not write the EULA legal frameworks that allow them virtual carte blanch to take and do whatever they want just because the population is trapped in the endless cycle of coercion that is our life.

Why do all of these companies decide they are so tired of existing?

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My landleech padlocked the basement and attic of the house I rent. I keep a large screwdriver for exactly this eventuality. Something goes wrong in the basement and that lock point is done for. Just slip it in the gap around the padlock and pull. Will only take about 200N to rip the thing off the door and I can get way more than that with a little bit of leverage.

Vehicles are generally owned and maintained by the driver. Also, these charges long predate the digital age. They pass them off as paying for maintaining a shitty app for ordering, but it is just a convenience fee, extra money they can make off those of us who are too busy, tired, stuck, or lazy to go pick it up. Always has been, always will be. Proof: if I go the old school way and call in to order it directly they still charge it.

Isn’t a true air gap pretty solid though? Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly it would be pretty hard to bypass, or am I on Mt. Dunning-Kruger over here this time?

I prefer the answer of giving the giy the reins and letting him get it so riddled with viruses then when he calls for support replying “sorry, your property your problem. You have absolute dominion over it and thus we give no warranty as we have no responsibility.”

I know it isn’t “always”, but it has been proven that the “overcharging” is a way to launder money into black budget projects and operations. They aren’t always “bad”, the Manhattan Project was a black budget, as was the development of the stealth bomber.

I am also less concerned about a 5k pair of socks and more worried $90 million/plane F-35 that is widely regarded by pilots as a worse plane than the jets being replaced. You know, the one we spent $2 Trillion developing. I’m sure there were some $25k hammers in there, but overall it was so much other waste. Let’s cut some of that type of spending.

Not that I know of. In the end you are editing the browser rendering parameters. Anyone can inspect the page and see that the opacity on the page is being turned down. Finding where it is happening is the only thing you can really make hard. Have a couple of the pass through scripts be machine generated and you can have it use nonsensical variable names and a bunch of dummies that lead on wild goose chases. It could all be fixable, but you can make it a pain in the ass. Add a redundancy or two and it will make debugging a nightmare because even if one is fixed, the others will make it look as though it has not.

The real answer is to have NEVER do freelance web development inside the client’s firewall. Never. If they try to require it, walk away. If it is inside their firewall then they can just take the source code and stiff you. If they try to spout some BS about security, say that is precisely what you are concerned about and point blank ask them what safeguards they are willing to allow you to put in place for developing in their system. If the answer is none, walk. If they are willing to let you VPN in, run the code from a local copy over the VPN and node lock it so if someone attempts to serve it from another machine it fails.

Apologies. I’m tired and hate businesses taking advantage of “Independent Contractors”.

Bury it six JavaScript and 2 php scripts deep so it is a pain in the ass to find.