Uhhh that exact technology has been in use for years. Your phone broadcasts/receivers a beacon at regular intervals while Bluetooth is on. Anyone can pick it up if they are looking.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.html
The process is so streamlined companies bragged your advertising profile is updated before you check out.
The Next Major Version of Bluetooth Might Help Advertisers Track Your Smartphone Faster
FIFY
Let’s not pretend this feature didn’t trickle down the data harvesting dog-hydrant to us peons solely for our benefit.
Straight up, Firefox isn’t search, so that’s never going to be competitive. Changing from Google is easy though. That aside though …
Comparing Firefox to Chrome is a little complicated as it comes default on pretty much all Android phones. Yes, we can change, but it’s still installed and running services in the background if I recall. I really hope the move away from useful extensions takes a toll on chrome and brings users over to Firefox.
Million dollar salaries are excessive IMHO and rarely justified. I’m with you on that.
Some things Mozilla does, and doesn’t do, have been instrumental in not only bringing awareness, but security for the web and triggering dialogue. That openness is important and not something Google has been known for.
Google may be covering their butt funding Firefox, but an Internet without Firefox may look much different today.
“Who am I?”
“Why am I here?”
“When I’m done rolling up this booger, should I eat it or throw it out the window?”
I sort of already do. It’s called dreaming about driving a car.
I think these folks forgot that random dreams play an important role in information processing. I’d rather not mess with that too much.
Ha! Yes! Even today USB 5 volts is pretty sweet for low power stuff. USB PD re-complicates things, but it’s not user dependent so that’s a plus.
And you need a loooot of copper to prevent voltage drop especially when a grid of 100 houses 1/2 mile long draw 20-80 amps each. The math starts adding up real quick.
I heard it said many years ago that if DC won the battle, we’d have power stations every 10 miles and power lines as thick as your wrist.
Converting local power is fairly easy, with AC inverters added for universal compatibility.
But, take note of how many DC voltages you use in your house. Devices in mine range from 3v to 25v and some weird one like 19v for a laptop. You’d still have adapters all over the place.
I use kimai. It’s gotten much more stable over the past couple years and there is a mobile app. (I think it’s a couple bucks now, but works pretty well)
It runs in docker so it’s pretty easy to set up.
I have one customer who is pretty nuts about bills and this is the only way to track and invoice all that nonsense.
There are several out there using yt-dlp. Tube archivist, tube sync, etc. They are fairly straightforward to set up in docker if you use that.
I’ve been downloading my subscriptions and loading them into Plex. Plenty of room for improvement in that system, but I get a nostalgic hit of YouTube long ago. Man, it’s fallen so far over the years.
Also related, I’ve hit 2.4TB of internet use for the first time last month doubling my previous record.
I was also leaning towards Garmin, but the price and style kept me with Fitbit for now. I really wanted to jump ship recently though.
As a longtime Fitbit user, the writing is on the wall. The Google buyout has been horrible, features disappearing, support sucking, no more web dashboard, payment issues, calorie goals no longer customizable, etc.
They bought the company for user data and patents. Merge what they want into their watches and discontinue the rest. Absolutely minimize maintenance costs by dropping features and firing employees. They’ll keep the Fitbit name, maybe roll that into a watch sub-series, but the buyout was definitely a gut-and-dump deal.
Too bad the antitrust suit won’t save what used to be a great product and company in time.
Whoa! Really! That would be awesome. I couldn’t find it at all last time I had it out. Interesting it would use govee though. Is there something special I’d have to do to set that up?
Yup! I have the stuff, just haven’t gotten around to flashing one yet. Working on a wind meter at the moment.
The original models will. While Home assistant has an Anova integration, it is cloud dependent and it’s the cloud that will discontinue support. As I understand it.
Local control uses a Bluetooth bridge which I guess is my next project.
It’s kinda nice to just search what you are making, click cook, and all the settings are preloaded and the device starts. The manual interface is clunky.
I looked into that and you need to build a Bluetooth bridge out of a ESP32. Pretty easy once you have the dev platform set up, but not for your average Joe.
There is an anova integration, but depends on their cloud service. When they stop supporting old devices, they will no longer function.
That’s what I understand anyway.
Wow, you just reminded me of a data use policy I wrote up when I was young and sent a data broker after a security breach!
They laughed at me.
You and I think alike here.
Alrighty, brainstorming time people. If you could write some practical laws, what protections do we need to stop these from happening.
I’m thinking 3 categories: Reporting, oversight, and accountability.
Reporting: all entities holding personally identifiable information (PII) must reach out once every 12 months. This hopefully unveils seedy brokers relying on obscurity. Maybe a policy to postpone notification up to 5 years (something like that) may be available as opt-in.
Oversight: targets of PII have oversight of what is collected/used. Sensitive information may be purged permanently upon request.
Accountability: set minimum fines for types of data stored. This monetary risk can then be calculated and factored into business operations. Unnecessary data would be a liability and worth purging.
The user may not be aware they have this tracking technology on their phone. The toolkit may be some app developer integrating a 3rd party library for analytics. Banking apps, loyalty apps, phone companies, games, utilities… they all can rely on 3rd parties for proximity services.
In fact, I was going to mention an app, Exodus, that can reveal these trackers and in scanning my phone, I found 2!. The first is home assistant, which is understandable, but the second is a Health app my doctor office uses! Man, that irks me!