If nginx, here’s an open-source blocker/honeypot: https://github.com/raminf/RoboNope-nginx
If you have it set up to be proxied or hosted by Cloudflare, they have their own solution: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/
Absolute horseshit. Bulbs don’t have microphones. If they did, any junior security hacker could sniff out the traffic and post about it for cred.
The article quickly pivots to TP-Link and other devices exposing certificates. That has nothing to do with surveillance and everything to do with incompetent programming. Then it swings over to Matter and makes a bunch of incorrect assertion I don’t even care to correct. Also, all the links are to articles on the same site, every single one of which is easily refutable crap.
Yes, there are privacy tradeoffs with connected devices, but this article is nothing but hot clickbait garbage.
They’ve already got it mapped out.
My car needed some repair work. Insurance set me up for a rental with Hertz who told me not to pay for bridge tolls with my own car’s transponder. When I take the car back, they tell me I’ll be invoiced later for the tolls. Had 4 toll crossings which ordinarily would come to less than $30 (even less if I had used the transponder).
A month later, the Hertz charges show up: $77 (including ‘processing fee’). Called and complained. They said they’d look into it. Never heard back.
Not using them again.
On-device AI is the way to go. No privacy leak. Doesn’t have server and networking costs.
This specific use case (looking things up in Start menu and settings) is a good one, since finding out which setting to tweak is a major PITA.
Apple just announced at WWDC embedding Foundation Models on phones. Except they will allow apps to access them and give them custom prompts. This doesn’t go quite as far.
Similar to other apps, CoverDrop only provides limited protection on smartphones that are fully compromised by malware, e.g., Pegasus, which can record the screen content and user actions.
I know it’s fun to bash on Gates, but it’s also bullshit. Dave Cutler worked on at least two major operating systems. He’s way up there in the Hall of Fame.
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Alarming, yet like an episode of a sitcom.
“Be a shame if something bad happened to you, Kyle.”
They could replace the whole article with https://xkcd.com/2347/
They were doing this a decade ago, to help track app marketing campaigns.
IIRC, it turned out you could get pretty close to uniquely identifying a device with permutations on only 7 attributes. The problem is if you install a plugin to return false data, it could break non-malicious websites, like running games or data visualizations.
Drone meeting spear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90TrnpsJiTE
Years ago, folks hacked a Jeep Wrangler remotely, with a WIRED reporter in the car: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/
That freaked the shit out of vehicle manufacturers. It led to encrypted CANBus messages: https://dev.to/living_syn/can-bus-message-security-3h43
Problem was, your mom and pop repair shop would need a special $$$ ‘authorized’ dongle from the manufacturer to be able to diagnose problems beyond what plain OBD-II let you see. This effectively locked out third-party repair shops. People screamed and IIRC, a lot of car manufacturers backed down and just hardened remote access.
What Deere did was even more harsh. They tried to block off not only self repair, but third-party firmware that made the tractors work better, especially older ones that were out of warranty: https://schiller-tuning.com/vehicle-listings/agriculture/john-deere
They’re trying to game copyright laws and click-through terms-of-service agreements to lock out third party repair.
This is a test case. If they lose, it’ll be a BIG win for Right to Repair laws, covering phones, laptops, consoles, etc.
Running it on a current generation iPad Mini. Runs OK. I would wait to see if the on-device AI support will work on base level machines or not. IMO, that’s the killer feature worth upgrading for. If not, probably not worth upgrading yet.
Liquid Glass is meh. Those of us old enough to remember ‘lickable’ Aqua have seen these UI fads come and go.
I’m running it on a latest-gen iPad Mini. It broke screen updates on a whole lot of third-party apps. Turned out the only way to get them to refresh was turning on multi-tasking and resizing the window. After a couple of them updated and fixed the problem, I turned off and went back to normal non-windowed mode.
On a big size iPad Pro I might be tempted to turn it on, but the only reason to do it is if I was copy/pasting from one app to another, and I can already do that by toggling between apps.
If I needed to jump between a lot of windows, I’d stick with a Mac. My regular Macbook sits docked with two large monitors on each side of the regular screen. I can get a lot done fairly quickly between them. Not sure what advantage the iPad offers.
Speaking of iPadOS-26: on 18.5 Safari, I had a LOT of tabs open (1500+) in different groups. These were iCloud shared with MacOS. After the iPadOS-26 upgrade, Safari has become unusable. Down to a crawl with 30-60 sec refresh times per tab. Reported it. Switched over to Firefox for now, but I hope they fix it.
For serious dev work, I need a Mac running Docker, Parallels (Windows/Linux), and USB ports. Apple knows this too. Doubt they’ll add background server support to the iPad since it can drain the battery and they wouldn’t want to cannibalize Mac sales.
BTW, I HIGHLY recommend everyone watch the WWDC25 developer videos on local Foundation Models, especially the advanced one. This is a mind-bogglingly awesome feature, coming soon.
On the Mac, you can use an iPhone as a remote camera. Just tried it with iPadOS-26. It didn’t let me pick a different camera.
However, it can live transcribe / close-caption what is being said during a Facetime call and translate it into a few other languages (tried French). It’s not perfect, but then again, it’s being done on-device.
I have friends working on ways for content providers to charge AI training models. But I have a feeling that’s not enough.
The future will have to be where creators have an incentive to consistently create, and consumers pay for what they like, or services to keep them informed and entertained without them having to do much.
In between will sit middlemen and aggregators to enable a smooth flow. Who that will be and what they do in this next phase is the big question.
Under the current method, Google’s search and ads groups are competing against each other. Don’t see that going well for anyone.
On iPad with multitasking and windowed apps turned on. There’s a lot of screen noise. Stuff overlapping and flying all over the place. Lots of excess, laggy animation.
I’m giving it a few more days before turning it off.
Totally understandable.
If scanning to help send traffic to your website, that’s cool. If scanning to generate summaries that won’t send any traffic your way. No bueno.
Ultimately, it should be whatever most benefits users.