Technology

I'm disappointed that it took seeing that ad for so many people to realize what should have been obvious: ring, along with teslas, and any voice assistant listening devices, or any other cloud-based tech that monitors video, audio, or even other data, can be used to set up an unprecedented surveillance network. Phones are a part of it, too, at the very least as tracking beacons, assuming the mics and cameras aren't being tapped more often than that little activity dot indicates.

There's a reason why the venn diagram of people who really understand tech and people who are enthusiastic about most new tech in the last decade and a bit aren't the same circle. The Snowden revelations weren't surprising on the "what they are capable of" side of things, though there had been hope before they came out that they weren't crossing the lines that tech would have easily allowed them to. Just like when zuck bragged about the information fb users just gave him, that wasn't all new but there was an unspoken (and perhaps naive) rule that admins should respect their users' privacy.

When I was on the webteam for a gaming community, it would have been trivial to set up the login page to also store all user/password/email combos in a location none of the other team would be likely to notice. We hashed the password in the db, but I could change the source code to do whatever. Even if it was hashed on the client, I could have added a temporary unhashed field and get all the plaintext credentials to check who uses the same password for their email. I didn't because I respected our users, but from then on just assumed that any site admin could see my credentials and never reuse passwords.

That also applies to Lemmy, btw. At the very least, you shouldn't use the same password for you email and anything else (though also be aware emails are just sent as plaintext to a bunch of servers while being routed to your email provider).