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2019 Surveillance Glossary

Part 1: 2019 Tech Glossary

A dictionary



Summary: Distortion of technical and nontechnical terms in this day and age of '1984'

Phone: a small computer that can also make phonecalls (but rarely does) ISP: surveillance company that give bandwidth in exchange for your personal data (deeply-inspected packets) Car: surveillance on four wheels ATM: location-tracking checkpoint, converting or exchanging financial data in return for notes Smartwatch: surveillance attached to one's wrist Fitness tracker: surveillance optimised for insurance companies' needs Sleep tracker: same as above ("fitness tracker") but for nighttime Data mining: interpretation of personal secrets and mental thoughts/beliefs based on publicly-stated information Photograph: object/file with location/temporal data and typically faces to decipher who was where (and when, who with, mood) Streaming: modality for tracking one's choice of acoustic input and sometimes mood Account: facility for identification (to combat anonymity) 2FA: enhanced means of enforcing identification to stifle anonymity Phone number: enumeration of subjects (see above), akin to RFID and serialisation Data portability: facility for passing (copying) data from one surveillance datacentre to another, or from one spying company to another Printer: device for printing pale yellow dots with some other, user-required rendering on paper Webcam: low-cost user-facing CCTV that cannot be removed but can typically be covered by tape Operating system: a back-doored, remotely-accessible piece of software on which to run other software X86: a high-performance albeit defective (by design) chipset as failsafe for the above Journalist: a glorified writer who calls privacy-conscious people paranoid Data broker: surveillance monetiser President/Prime Minister: elevated politician who signs papers to authorise all the above

Recent Techrights' Posts

Topics We Lacked Time to Cover
Due to a Microsoft event (an annual malware fest for lobbying and marketing purposes) there was also a lot of Microsoft propaganda
EPO Education: Workers Resort to Legal Actions (Many Cases) Against the Administration
At the moment the casualties of EPO corruption include the EPO's own staff
 
Gemini Links 23/11/2024: 150 Day Streak in Duolingo and ICBMs
Links for the day
Links 22/11/2024: Dynamic Pricing Practice and Monopoly Abuses
Links for the day
Microsofters Try to Defund the Free Software Foundation (by Attacking Its Founder This Week) and They Tell People to Instead Give Money to Microsoft Front Groups
Microsoft people try to outspend their critics and harass them
[Meme] EPO for the Kids' Future (or Lack of It)
Patents can last two decades and grow with (or catch up with) the kids
Gemini Links 22/11/2024: ChromeOS, Search Engines, Regular Expressions
Links for the day
This Month is the 11th Month of This Year With Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (So Far It's Happening Every Month This Year, More Announced Hours Ago)
Now they even admit it
Links 22/11/2024: Software Patents Squashed, Russia Starts Using ICBMs
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 21, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, November 21, 2024
Gemini Links 21/11/2024: Alphabetising 400 Books and Giving the Internet up
Links for the day
Links 21/11/2024: TikTok Fighting Bans, Bluesky Failing Users
Links for the day
Links 21/11/2024: SpaceX Repeatedly Failing (Taxpayers Fund Failure), Russian Disinformation Spreading
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Earned Two More Honorary Doctorates Last Month
Two more doctorate degrees
KillerStartups.com is an LLM Spam Site That Sometimes Covers 'Linux' (Spams the Term)
It only serves to distract from real articles
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 20, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 20, 2024