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We should together stop calling devices which film in dressing / locker rooms smart.

These devices record video & sound track serve Ads and do Data fusion

What if you took a cam corder to a locker room? People would be upset, that is not allowed. That would not be nice. This is not nice either


Much like a cell phone, nobody would even really care if you brought a camcorder down so long as you aren't operating it (which is very obvious).

What makes these things gross is that it's not obvious when someone is recording.


Which Meta Glasses try to counter by making it obvious when someone is recording with the recording light; arguably more obvious than cell phones.

> As he films them from multiple angles, the predominantly English-speaking employees ask the presenter questions such as, "What are you doing?" and "Are you filming me right now?"

Meta employees themselves couldn't tell if he was recording!


This is the non-confrontational way to say, "I know you are recording". It allows a quick "Oh, sorry" if the person is willing to turn it off when confronted, without escalating to an actual confrontation.

There's a technology that can hide an LED light, it is called "a small piece of tape."

I don't know how effective it or how it works but Meta says they disable recording if the recording light is blocked.

https://9to5google.com/2026/07/07/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses...



The idea that Meta gives any serious shits about anyone's privacy or well-being when it's in opposition to their revenue is laughable.

The $17b settlement they just agreed to said as much.


And the next generation of "smart glasses" made by companies that aren't so reliant on public image will just forgo this entirely voluntary nicety.

They are designed to be easy to bypass. Plenty of tutorials exist online and I can't imagine that Meta engineers didn't know about it beforehand.

Provide this 'easy' tutorial please.

https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/4352861484/smart-glasses-led...

> Take control of your privacy with this easy-to-use LED and Camera Blocker


That is a camera blocker. your camera will not work with that.

Read the product description:

> Designed for users who value discretion, this accessory covers the video recording LED and optionally blocks the front-facing camera — perfect for content creators, streamers, or anyone in sensitive environments.

There is two parts, one to block the LED, and an option to al part to block the camera.


Ah, well that wont work. If you block the LED, the camera doesnt work.


Search for "meta glasses led bypass" on youtube.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bAw1ybPuzPk


You have to hold up a cell phone to film people with it. It's a very obvious action. Definitely not intentional in the design but it's an accidental feature.

I agree we should do something in this instance, but with the speed of which things are changing? Eventually, this tech is going to be undetectable.

"Oh no that's sci-fi and decades away", I really don't think so. I think neuralink, and competitors too, will next move on to reading the visual cortex. They already have plans to push data to the visual cortex, to enable the blind to "see", reading in healthy people seems quite doable.

I expect something like this to happen before 2030.

Regardless, I agree for now? Yes. But the future? I don't see it as blockable forever.

There are two ways we decide how severe the punishment for broken laws is. One is to enable just punishment. The other is deterrent. This may fall into "deterrent is the bigger part of the sentence", where people posting private information receive years in jail as a result.

There is a little bit of a conversation about this here:

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/other-autre/cndii-cdncii...

And the above certainly covers Meta glasses too.

I think it won't be long before it's the posting of non-consensual imagery that is so criminal, that few will do so. For years in Quebec, sharing of images captured in public isn't really legit. You control "images of yourself", regardless of where they are taken, public places or not:

https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/your-right-to-control-pho...

And they're so worried about problems with image sharing, they've almost automated the process to deal with it:

https://www.quebec.ca/en/justice-and-civil-status/support-vi...

So this is already being criminalized in a lot of places.


> "Oh no that's sci-fi and decades away", I really don't think so. I think neuralink, and competitors too, will next move on to reading the visual cortex. They already have plans to push data to the visual cortex, to enable the blind to "see", reading in healthy people seems quite doable.

> I expect something like this to happen before 2030.

I think 2030 is too early for that, medical tech is slower than most people expect. What may happen by then is (more) retinal implants connected to external cameras, as the early tests of that kind of thing are now well into the past and early models were actually authorised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis

The non-medical surveillance risk is higher. The smallest camera (as of 6 years ago) was already small enough to be easily missed amongst makeup sparkles if you were so inclined: https://originalpricing.com/ov6948-medical-camera-sensor/

Low resolution? Sure. Expensive, too. But I can easily see this being embedded in someone's nail lacquer, or eyelashes.

There have been hidden cameras of various kinds for a lot longer than that, hidden in buttons etc.

Between this and how easy it is to use AI to fake a picture of anyone you choose, anywhere you choose, doing anything you choose… I have absolutely no idea what will happen to consensus reality and shared social norms next year, let alone by 2030.


Yes, the reality issue is big. This may be in fact the only thing which saves 'big' news. And it may be what kills all forms of social media posting.

Some yahoo you don't know, posting a video of <thing happening> is useless without some degree of trust. So whether an established celeb on Youtube or actual media outlets, centralized reporting is going to become more of a thing.

When I was a kid, pre-internet, pre-camera, 'rumours' could be devastating, and were often wildly made up. Yet there was always this category of people who simple could not get through their head, that simply because someone hears something, it isn't therefore true.

This category of people still exists. And I think they'll be most hit by this.


>to enable the blind to "see"

Please watch this ad to enable 5 minutes of premium color vision!


> Regardless, I agree for now? Yes. But the future? I don't see it as blockable forever.

It's increasingly necessary not to allow guests to bring their devices into your house or establishment. Somebody should go into business doing courtesy phones, where you can switch your sim/esim at the door to a dumbphone owned by the business.

When it comes to smart glasses, if they're prescription you had better have spares or you're going to be blind.

Canada's censorship solutions are no solution; you can't stop people from doing things by cracking down on civil liberties, people will just ignore you and do it anyway. Then you're stuck chasing anonymity, now your entire society is totalitarian and everything is rooted. In order to fight the totalitarian surveillance and tracking instituted because you wouldn't tell some pervert to take his robot glasses off, the electorate makes MechaHitler your PM, and it's now in control of your surveillance system.

It would be very funny if Skynet took over because people elected it, like Hitler did.


It's not censorship to be in control of your own likeness. And having laws which are easy to call upon is part of justice being served. In the Quebec example, someone posting something about you is as easy as 'take that down' then 'police are called if you disobey the court', which is really how courts have always worked everywhere around the world.

The US has a crazier takedown regime, letting companies do this. At least in Canada it goes through a court, it's about your personal likeness, and you can contest it.


They're basically Flock Cameras, except they could appear anywhere. Nobody wants mobile surveillance potentially brought into any room.

Are smartphones just phones now?

Yep, they're spy glasses / perv glasses.

I don't like it but it's totally normal, especially for youth, to have their cell phones out in locker rooms. Targeting only glasses with this concern is largely out of touch with current behavior.

That isn't normal and it's actively enforced against in gyms and pools where I live.

Glasses are passively recording. Recording with a phone is active (for the most part). You need to take it out and point it at what you are recording...


> That isn't normal

Every gym I've been to is full of people with phones out in the locker room, from cheap chain gyms to the nicer athletic club I currently go to. My experience is much closer to GP.

> Glasses are passively recording

All the smart glasses I know of have a light on when recording. My phone does not and can be much more discreet (subject to the fact that everyone has a phone out already).

I agree that if a location is actively banning phone use patrons should absolutely also be asked to take off smart glasses.


> All the smart glasses I know of have a light on when recording.

that light can be easily disabled

https://www.pcmag.com/news/modders-can-remove-the-recording-...


> All the smart glasses I know of have a light on when recording.

How long until someone differentiates themselves on the market by not having the light?


Not to minimize Meta's push for these things, but there have been devices that do this for quite a while now. You can get tiny cameras hidden in pens, watches, glasses, and all sorts of other items.

It's just that in the past, these were sold by janky companies selling them as spy/hidden cameras, not massive multinational data brokers like Meta.


I would be surprised if those don't already exist, I hear stories in the news all the time about small hidden cameras places they shouldn't be. For a private space like the locker room I'm not sure what option there is besides laws making that illegal (I assume/hope that already is?). Someone dedicated already can get a much more discreet camera.

For public spaces, at least where I am, there really isn't a legal expectation of privacy. I couldn't tell if someone was watching YouTube or filming me with their phone and I probably don't have any recourse anyway.


People already sell services to disable the light.

My children's school have an interesting way of dealing with the ever growing list of devices they need a policy for. They borrowed the police term "data carrying devices" and wrote a policy based on that. When Metas glasses started to be come a problem no policy change was needed for the school, they were automatically covered.

That's probably the best solution, deal with the functionality, not the device type.


I think to reduce ewaste part it should be mandatory with open firmware and open hardware specifications

glq is a re implementation gpl port of QTIP Trellis encoding of large language models as vLLM plugin. glq is efficient between 2-4 bits per word where it has an edge over scalar quantization. Fit larger LLMs on consumer hardware GPUs. glq extents QTIP up to 8 bits per word by running the original algorithm two times with a residual.

1.Incoherence processing — two-sided randomized Hadamard transform (via FWHT) makes weights ~i.i.d. Gaussian 2. BlockLDLQ rounding — sequential sweep with Hessian error feedback 3. Viterbi encoding — bitshift trellis + computed Gaussian code 4. Decode — stateless bit-shift arithmetic, fused into matmul https://github.com/cnygaard/glq/blob/main/docs/trellis-3inst...

glq comes with a user friendly installer which installs glq, vLLM and gradio chat interface and optionally a local coding agent. If you choose glq-chat glq sizes which model fits in VRAM downloads the model and starts a chat, on a 24GB Nvidia card Gemma4 is choosen. glq also ships with picode and then Qwen 3.8 27B is used.

glq also works on pure CPU. Because the LLM weights are compressed and are decompressed on the fly less DRAM/VRAM bandwidth is used.

The target group of glq is PC gamers with Linux and a Nvidia gaming card. If you happen to have an AMD Epyc 9005 server CPU the cpu encoding/decoding should be usable.

Original QTIP paper not affiliated but grateful to the original authors, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.11235


What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?


Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.


Piracy is one.


If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.


I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD.

I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.

*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.


I watch films on streaming rather than old dvds with unskippable nonsense like "don't pirate this dvd" (well obviously I didn't, that's why I have the dvd), or the pain of the menu systems to just press play.


Often the same people behind both!

Fun fact: pirates are more likely than the average person to purchase media.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anoth...


Physical media isn't guaranteed to retain future access. There are protocols for players to update various bits of data from the newest disk you have ever inserted into them. The Nintendo Wii certainly does this, I'm not sure if BluRay does but I don't see why they wouldn't.


That's a great point. Something I forgot: I brought a couple DVDs when moving between countries and had a player block a couple of them... :/


You can still buy physical media online, though an increasing portion of movies and shows are produced by the streaming companies, and you don’t really have an alternative there.


No. Sony has recently removed 551 movies that people "bought". Sony's distribution license ran out with a studio and they didn't renew it.

They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's no legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.


With that attitude from the corporations, why wouldn't anyone pirate?


No. The whole issue is that the seller needs to maintain an online service to allow you access to the movies. This online service costs money so over time is likely not worth the cost. This plus the online service provider undergoing changes (bankruptcy, acquisition, mergers, etc) or they themselves losing rights to the movies. Seems to me that rental or purchases are still unbeatable. The alternative is streaming but the downside is higher costs over time and worse quality movies.


Subscribe, screengrab what you like, unsubscribe. Repeat. Really easy to do in a virtual machine, so it doesn't conflict with anything else happening on the computer.


You can stream your own stuff, from home, to all of your devices and your friends' devices, for free. And since the movies are on your own hardware, you have them forever. Movies, tv, music, books, comic books, video game roms, basically any sort of media you can even name. And it's been possible for you to do so for the last 15 years, maybe more.


1/ watch in theatres

2/ consume free streaming (tt, ig, YouTube, etc)

Just don’t watch movies at home.


Explore Pixel Grapheneos Lineageos or Fairphone Unlocked boot loader in pixel to load third party operating system. PinePhone for Linux Ubuntu touch


Sennheiser Momentum 5 has user replacable battery which is better for the environment

https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Sennheiser_Momentum_5


Why are you comparing in-ear earbuds to over-ear headphones?


The battery on the AirPods is 10 times smaller. So you would have to replace it 10 times to break even.


Not if the response to the AirPods losing capacity is to replace them altogether.


What % of people replace a battery over the lifespan of an item? Does the increased complexity and size of the unit make up for the slightly longer lifespan? What makes it "better" for the environment, exactly when it all ends up in a landfill after 5 years anyway?


Those are some weird looking in ear earphones


why would I want a replaceable battery? My airpods have been working fine for 6 years now. Isn't THAT better for the environment?


You want a replaceable battery because once the battery wears out if the repair is expensive people will throw the used air buds. Used airbuds creates electronic waste ewaste on landfills.

Not all electronic recycling ä works well some non working electronics are shipped to Africa . The "recycler" takes the profit in the pocket. People have put airtags to track where such electronics to goods end up.


There is no proof that user-replaceable batteries meaningfully reduces e-waste. A lot of tech is upgraded due to obsolete CPUs, etc, not batteries. Plus, batteries last a long time now.

Also, landfills work really well. Most recycling doesn't work and pollutes more.


It is illegal to send e-waste to landfills in California and 22 other states


by the time the battery wears out on this one, the speakers are also busted anyway (infact it already is true for mine). So battery replacement isn't an issue for me, the device will be worthless by the time I am done with it.


True. Also heard one guy in gym was thinking of Apple releasing devices with things like replaceable batteries. He got a heart attack next day. It's very unhealthy what PC is suggesting and yes I agree with you.


Can we please agree on calling devices with a cpu and os that spy on the owner smart? I personally think that closed operating systems with spyware is quite dumb for user privacy.


This is the same behaviour as the german secret police in east germany. The difference now its for ads and by tech. All collected data are probably ai transcribed from audio to text and is fused via data fusion to serve ads. Add collaborative filtering to find similar interests between users.


this is the same behavior as the secret police in 2026 USA, the biggest customers of the ad tech companies.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...


how do you know it is for ads? how do you know it will always be only for ads if it now is?


that's the fear, but it would be reasonable to say that ads are what has gotten us to this point


Why not both?

Mossad would love to know who to de-bank for criticising Israel, United Health Care would love to know who to deny coverage to based on remarks about their back pain.


// Mossad would love to know who to de-bank for criticising Israel

"Criticizing Israel" has moved from edgy subversive to lamely pedestrian in the last few years.

There's no great secret that Mossad needs to unearth by spying on you watching tv.


+$7,000


People should know more about data fusion. How browser javascript fingerprints and unique personal id of the adtech works. Hint it traveres VPNs. The seven has an id of you

Check your id https://amiunique.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion


I'm using an addon that just changes my unique fingerprint every ten minutes. Not sure if that helps or not.


There is us fair competition law Sherman anti trust act laws. "is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce and consequently prohibits unfair monopolies"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act


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