Perception filters? Absolutely they could be used for good... Being able to put window dressings on your reality is basically the AR version of deep dive VR
The core problem is - Teslas suck. They're not the best, they're not the cheapest, they're not the safest or most reliable, and they don't have the most features. There's now electric cars out there that beat them in every category
I mean, yes and no. They just capture device info for a location, which can often be tied back to a person, but they just grab the info the phone sends to the tower. These days with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi you can even do something similar with just your phone
I don't love that it exists for obvious reasons, but it's a far cry from looking through your phone
I mean, the cell providers already sell your location info to anyone (including LEO, which is unconstitutional without a warrant as far as I'm concerned), as can Google, apple, and all sorts of apps - so this is a niche thing
FWIW, you can defeat that pretty simply... Just leave your phone behind and/or in a faraday pouch. No signal, no signature, no location data (from your phone at least). It won't necessarily stop the NSA, but it'll protect you in a protest where your just another face in the crowd
I mean it's still insanely overvalued. It's a car manufacturer priced like a tech giant - the stock is so high because of hopes they'll be the ones to crack true full self driving, human level robotics, or produce batteries at some insane scale
They're so behind and have lost so much trust on all those fronts that they'd need to actually do it for the stock to pay out. But they're no longer the best cheap electric cars, their self driving features are some of the worst because they went all in on visual only, and there's many companies worlds ahead of them on robotics automation. Even their safety is so bad countries easily banned them once musk's reputation tanked
Plus, musk would have to divest or have his shares called in to fully separate him... Either of which means the stock tanks or already has tanked
Rather than locked down, they're basically a black box - I think they have their own firmware and hook into the OS and hardware in weird ways (part of the reason why Linux phones are so difficult to make work)
If the NSA wants to ping your phone location or even turn on the microphone, they can, supposedly even when the phone is "off". If they want to side channel load in a rootkit, they probably can
But NSA surveillance comes in two main flavors - broad and focused. If they think you're a terrorist or of strategic interest, there's a lot they can do... But that means actual humans are interested in you, personally.
But for everyone else, they're not going to sift through ten million phone storages - that's way too much data to be useful, and they already have long collected way more than they could make use of. The broad stuff is about flagging people - the most effective is to look at networks of people. If you have connections to a terrorist, you're a potential part of the network, and so you'll be flagged as more interesting. I've heard rumors that certain keywords might be flagged on calls too, who knows. Too many flags and they might devote some man hours to looking into you personally
But generally, they're very protective of their tech. They don't use the good stuff widely, because it's not useful, and it increases the chance for discovery and countermeasures. My understanding is they won't share their surveillance systems either - they might put notes or flags on shared LEO systems or tip someone off, but they really, really, like to play it close to the vest. Even with other 3 letter agencies
So yes, this possibility exists - especially with llms to help filter through this information ocean - but there's no shot they're sharing capabilities with border control agents
Because they're watching mainstream news, which even tiptoes around the tarrifs and doesn't broadcast Trump's daily interviews unless a clip makes him look good. They really just know the government is getting cut and that we've started a trade war with (checks notes) everyone
This is going to change when effects of his policies actually start to land - so far we're looking at disastrous moves in horror, but they're getting a very toned down snapshot through a rose colored lens
I don't think Vance could be the new figurehead - he's so easily hated that they had to hide him away for months after he was accused of fucking a couch
Not that they wouldn't try, but I don't thing the maga cult transfers to anyone on the playing field right now
But again, hacking is a tool when they want to go after something in particular - a single lemmy server is minuscule. Even the full scale of everyone on lemmy is a very small target... They might go after it if they have specific reason to, but they're unlikely to do so when there's plenty of work to be done on bigger platforms
Conspiracy theory? They've posted proposals for it on their website. They want to exclusively use for inter-Bank transactions, although you could read it to imply they want to replace fractional reserve banking with it, possibly even globally
It's deeply concerning, because they don't need this at all for banking as it exists now, and if the global banks use the same system they'd have an insane amount of control over the global economy - they could use this system to more directly control the exchange rate of currencies, which they already use to force austerity and outside investment on resources
The conspiracy really kicks in when you start to question if they're trying to crash the USD and a global recession to do something like this... And for the last few years they've been giving very weird answers to questions like that
The NSA doesn't generally give access to agencies on the ground like that - at most they flag individuals in the interdepartmental system, they don't hand over what they have easily
But, if you have physical access to a device, there's always a way in. Border control or a police department can buy tools to do it or hire contractors
Be careful what you say - don't call for violence, definitely don't make threats of violence against specific figures, especially ones in office, and as a general rule don't spread personally identifying information
Past that? Let's say there's a crackdown. They're going after low hanging fruit to instill fear. By nature, the fediverse is hard to tie back to individuals... But if they're looking for you individually, they can find you
I wouldn't worry too much. Dissatisfaction is insanely high... They're more likely to do a great firewall and kill the fediverse long before they bother looking into lemmy accounts
Elon is a Canadian citizen by birth. So if Canada becomes a state, he would qualify to be president (and theres precedent for this)
That's the only explanation that makes sense to me - like yeah, Trump wants to push for territorial expansion, and Canada does have a lot of natural resources, but Canada isn't an easy nut to crack
The other theory I buy into is the northern passage. Climate change is going to open up new shipping lanes in the artic, so Canada and Greenland both would be strategically located to control it - add in Panama, the hooties (sp?) and he's consistently pushing control of key shipping lanes
What do you mean? It's a problem in your way, it takes how long it takes to get through it