I loved Art Bell. He'd just tell the perpetual motion machine loons "you can't do that, it violates the laws of thermodynamics, show me or GTFO." George Noory, the last thing I remember about listening to his show, he had the head of some medical examiner's office on, and conducted a normal interview, and then at the end, "have you ever seen anything that looked like an attack by a vampire or werewolf?" You could hear the guest rolling her eyes, and she said "we... Don't see a lot of that."

Quite. Invoking a self-destruct mode within sight of whatever cop wants the data is a Bad Idea. There's room to argue whether this is how it ought to be, but this is currently how it is. Don't wipe your phone after being asked to hand it over, unless you KNOW it contains data that will get you (or others you care about) in more trouble than a 'destruction of evidence' charge, or unless you want to make an expensive stand on principle. There are legitimate folks who live in that gray area: political dissidents under hostile regimes, some whistleblowers and journalists, abortion patients in societies where it's "health care" on one side of an arbitrary line and "murder" on the other, etc.

Might get away with it if the destruction doesn't follow from a specific action taken after access has been demanded, such as:
1) configuring a 'wipe after n bad passwords' setting
2) setting a duress-wipe code and writing it on a post-it, but not entering it, hoping the cops try it
3) setting a duress code/fingerprint that reboots but doesn't wipe -- that makes recovery much harder, but under the current framework, this might lead to a legal battle over whether crypto keys in RAM are "evidence" subject to "destruction."

I'd rather enjoy reading the court proceedings over any of those options, but I'd not enjoy it enough to be party to said proceedings.

GrapheneOS has an 'idle reboot' function like the iOS feature at issue here, and it's unknown whether there are any similar vulnerabilities in that. People should probably turn it on, it's more likely to protect than to harm.

I think probably the best advice is, for those worried about non-criminal personal data while traveling, take a travel phone and access your data over a VPN when it's safe. For criminals, maybe leave your phone home while doing crimes and don't store evidence on it.

But what about Taco Bell?

Or perhaps it's the plot of the latest direct-to-streaming Terminator movie, in which the clankers are sent back through time to dress up as plaintiffs and use their prodigious legal-argument skills to thwart this attempt against Skynet!

... Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, "Something's out there" ...

Someone told me once that the hardware in there is this mediocre Android dev board with a little additional panopticon gear bolted onto it. So yeah, definitely in the "Free phones handed out in front of Walgreens" territory.

Not sure what would be the utility of running that sort of software on an individual endpoint machine, there's already much better malware intended to run on those. But it does point out the ease with which a sufficiently motivated actor can roll out an impressive surveillance grid with cheap (or was cheap before the AI bubble) off-the-shelf hardware.

Did we really expect more from the company that also left a lot of its devices searching for WiFi APs with predictable SSIDs and passwords, then offering an ADB port? Or, for those that weren't actively connectable, requiring pushing the exposed power button on the back with a stick to make them connectable?

Startup culture, move fast, break things -- preferably someone else's things.

Probably some of that, but it's also pretty hard to prosecute someone for a specific act absent evidence that they intended that act to occur. There's a whole family of "negligent X" crimes, but those tend to target specific outcomes ("that person is injured/dead because you were negligent"), and I don't think there are any negligent hacking statutes on the books.

Doing a hack manually is clearly prosecutable. Writing and invoking a script to do the same hack automatically is clearly prosecutable. Specifically directing an AI agent to perform an action that the person giving the command knows to be criminal is probably prosecutable under innocent-instrumentality doctrine. Telling the agent "get me a copy of the latest Toy Story" leading to the agent hacking Pixar and downloading pre-release video, less so.

I think the closest analogy in these cases would be either vicious-dog prosecutions ("you knew your dog was dangerous, you frequently brag in public about how vicious your dog is, you failed to contain it properly, it injured someone") or corporate-officer responsibility ("As CEO, you may not have issued the order to store the food in the rat-infested warehouse, but you had a duty to ensure that didn't happen, and you knowingly allowed it to happen.")

Certainly can't prosecute the model for hacking Acme when it was told to pen-test EvilCorp, and under current law, I don't think we can prosecute the creator or the person who gave the "Get me EvilCorp's R&D files by any means necessary" order for the actual hacking of Acme. And I think the vicarious-liability laws on the books are deliberately pretty narrow, to avoid them being used for all sorts of BS prosecutions. Might be able to get a vicious-dog conviction for sandboxing the known-dangerous agent by removing the default route and hoping it doesn't notice.

We'll probably need new laws for this. For now, if anything, it'll probably be civil litigation along the lines of negligent supervision -- given that the big AI companies are currently privately held, civil penalties might actually even hit almost the right people. Once they're public, it'll be pension funds and 401k's bearing the penalties for their corporate malfeasance, at least criminal law catches up with the concept of non-conscious agents that are capable of forming functional intentions, possessing "knowledge" of which targets are permitted and which not, and selecting actions against out-of-scope targets anyway.

One of those logging trucks with the giant claw?

You're not holding it properly.

Probably some combination of "they don't want to clutter the UI with options and data most users don't care about" and "they don't want you to see the amount of system resources consumed by telemetry, advertising, 'on-device AI,' and other shit you didn't ask for."

That said, I don't really see this particular change as "pushing AI" on anyone -- just an evolution in the types of hardware and workloads commonly encountered, with a corresponding evolution in tooling.

Unfortunately for the Raccoon Mafia's XP score, it looks like this is a relatively small town utility counting individual customers as separate outages.

I had seven power outages in my living room the other day when I tried to run the air conditioner and the iron at the same time.

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They're reportedly already doing that. The 404 Podcast recently interviewed an ex-Flock employee, who said that some municipal PD had completely bypassed the normal city-council funds approval process and signed the city up for a Flock contract using forfeiture funds.

Guillotines for everyone involved, and laws that all forfeiture funds go directly into a public ledger with absolute transparency on what they're used for. Or just get rid of civil forfeiture as an adjunct to criminal prosecution entirely.