Spider

If this is about a personal relationship, all you should focus on is minimizing harm. Assume that any fear on one party is valid, and help to keep them separate from a potential attacker. Don’t invalidate the feelings of either party - we may not always get to learn the truth, but many times we have to mitigate with incomplete information, but also that it is not your responsibility to fix alone. Remember that your strength is for protection, not destruction. Everyone sees things differently, including you, so there might be red flags that one party sees clearly that you missed - assume their judgment is right. If you are super positive, double checked, super sure that there is no risk of harm, then you dont need to directly intervene, but you can still emotionally support both sides without invalidating the other one, and it’s their loss if this is only about turning you into the rope in a tug of war for attention. Make some different friends if this is only about manipulating you.

If this, however, is about politics, then you must remember that the only true natural law is that the biggest army wins, therefore, there is no such thing as neutrality. You cannot stand for all sides, nor should you stand for nothing and you should move to protect your family, friends and community from acts of hatred. Use your strength for protection, never against the weak and powerless, lest your own alliances and friendships be short lived; History shows repeatedly that movements formed from hatred are weak, short sighted, make poor allegiences, never learn from history, and are self destructive. Distrust any source of information that makes you feel scared and angry - especially if they use stereotypes to do so - since these are wedges to separate you from your community and to keep you addicted to propaganda. Keep your sources of information as varied as a healthy diet would be. And never ever, no matter how bad things seem to get, lose your faith in humanity. In the art of trying to be well informed, you will stare into the abyss. And the 1/3 of the human population made of evil hearts will dominate this information. You wont hear any of the other 2/3. Especially that last third made of good hearts. Hold onto this hope, and you will know any voice against the whole of society is wrong.

Android app dev here, i cant tell you what governments are capable of, but i can describe for you some of the complicating factors preventing them from doing this.

For one, to prevent impersonation, apps are cryptographically signed by the developer using a private key they never share with anyone (like a password), and the public key is sent to Google Play and the App Store so that they can verify the identity of the uploader. This prevents app store listings from being hijacked by rivals, competetors, hackers, pirates, foreign governments, and yes, their own government. So, any goverment cant just walk up and push a rogue update to the store.

For two, deploying app updates isn’t my job, it’s Google’s and Apple’s. In my opinion if the government wanted to hijack the supply chain, going directly to Apple or Google would be the way to do it. The narrowest group of people I can push updates to are the people who opted into alpha or beta versions. To target an individual, youd have to do it through Google or Apple.

For three, my boss barely gives me enough time and resources to meet the company’s own goals, let alone letting me clean up tech debt. The idea of a government that twists my boss’s arm to force me to work for the government instead of the shareholders is kinda funny and nonsensical. I live in the USA, where shareholders are king. I bet that even if we went full toltalitarian this would never happen because of rich people backlash. So i dont think the hacking coming from inside a company would happen. Then again, i perhaps dont work for a juicy enough place to see how a government could solve this problem, *or maybe they would be stupid enough to incur the political expense anyway.

And last, money money money. Programmers are not cheap. Designing and dedicating and selecting targets for an attack isnt cheap. Hacking into a company to steal their private key isnt cheap, and could also be expensive in a political sense if the wrong people get pissed off aboit it… If paranoia is what drives your question, then ask yourself, are you a high profile politician? A billionaire? A high profile leader of a movement like Martin Luther King Jr? Someone actually worth spending several millions of dollars on to spy on? If you’re a simple petty theif or protestor than i wouldn’t bother worrying about this.

*If you’re worred about your personal data getting taken and spied on., your bigger worry is the browser you use and what data gets stored on servers for services you use. Those are waaaaaaaay less expensive to get into.

Tl;dr

So basically, id only worry about relying on apps owned by the government. Or the services you use that take your data to sell it to advertisers, because theyll give it to the government directly as well.

Most homeless shelters in San Francisco dont allow people to take their belongings in with them.

Attitudes towards the homeless are highly backwards - demanding sobriety as a condition for aid, when in reality drugs are used as a way to escape the pain of trauma and homelessness. SF residents voted and passed Proposition F, cementing the idea that feeling smugness over the homeless is more important than actually trying to help them escape poverty.

For a computer, I recently learned there are mod kits for the game boy, so i installed a backlit screen on mine. I use rechargeable batteries with it.

I bet it’s more to do with how little Americans own their own culture. Copyrights in the USA used to expire after 30 years, after which it became public domain. Or in other words, culture was returned to the people as a whole.

Nowdays the copyrights last beyond a lifetime, and Americans grow up in a world where they almost never experience relevant pop culture outside of being owned or controlled by someone. When you find American content, you don’t think of “American culture” you think of “This is owned by Disney” or “This is owned by Paramount” and so on and so forth. You have original authors and content creators, being the gods of the world they created, and everyone else are “fan artists” or “fanfic writers,” being implied to be lesser. Those fan artists will be fan artists their entire lives, and their works will never be ‘canon’ in the eyes of the Owners. If you like Harry Potter but not Rowling, too bad. The public cant reclaim it.

That’s not how culture works though. Culture remixes, reinspires, deconstructs, rebuilds, and memes on. That’s how everyone did stuff before the advent of recorded media. The good stuff is repeated and boosted. In a way, the Internet culture that emerged in the 90s sought out to rebuild what was lost after the 1890s.