Given it’s targeting businesses violating a city ordinance that’s in place to reduce pollution, I don’t see an issue with it. If it was people snitching on other citizens for minor violations or something, I’d be against it.

I guess the qualifier for me is, is the law something that’s in place for public good? If so, it should be enforced.

Jokes aside, this is a pretty rad program.

Under the Citizens Air Complaint Program, they can record idling trucks or buses, report them and keep 25% of any fines, which typically range from $350 to $600.

Even if you aren’t doing it 6-9 hours a day like this guy is, getting a cool $75-$150 for making a report while out of the house anyway doesn’t sound bad at all.

Not that I’d use this service for it, but I’ve had use cases for this sort of thing. It’s not so much about plausible deniability as OP wants to sell it as, but more about security. You send the locked link (or a PW protected file or whatever) via, say, email, and the password through a text message. Then, in order for the data to be stolen, the attacker would need access to both of those, rather than only one. It’s niche, but I’ve needed to do it for my job before, so I can at least see the point.

Makes privacy-focused service

Disallows access through VPNs

Mate…

No love for them from me, either, but trying to be objective, this honestly doesn’t look any worse than an inexperienced human driver. Not that I’d choose to use it given alternatives, but having been riding with a teenaged student driver recently, this looks like about that same level of stressful.

The question wasn’t, “Could this be used as evidence?”, it was “Would this exonerate you?”

Maybe we’re answering two different questions, but I don’t see this being enough to exonerate anyone without some supporting evidence to go with it.

It’s like saying you couldn’t have committed a crime because your TV was on at the time; it seems too flimsy to even be usable if you didn’t have some other form of evidence supporting that it was actually you using it to go along with it. I’m not a lawyer, so it’s possible I’m totally wrong, but surely no competent lawyer would expect that to work and no judge would take that as evidence on its own merits.

It wouldn’t exonerate you, unless you could prove beyond a doubt that it was you using the phone. It’d be easy, if you were planning a murder, to give an accomplice your phone and have them use it all night to cover for you. It might be able to be used in conjunction with other evidence, though, to assist in your defense.

Is this… is this something positive coming from Greg Abbott? I must be misunderstanding this article.

I remember when I was in middle school, I saw my older brother working on a Unix system and it looked like he was some elite hacker. Now, it’s the same look I get from my kid any time he sees me doing anything in the terminal.

I didn’t say I was unwilling to change my mind; I said that it became clear that it wasn’t going to be changed by the people replying. If you want to debate it, my DMs are open, but leave the ad hominem attacks out of it or it’ll be a very short discussion.

Well, to answer your other comment, it’s replies like this that made me realize it’s just not worth trying to have a discussion with the folks who disagree with me, because I won’t change their mind, and they won’t change mine. I think you (and the majority of folks replying here) are not considering the simple fact that taking away spaces occupied by people you dislike will not make them go away - it’ll just make them try to take over your spaces, instead (hence the Nazi bar analogy).

Regardless, I’m not going to engage any further here. If you want to have a rational discussion, you can DM me and I’ll happily discuss it with you. I had my say, everyone else had theirs, and I don’t really think there’s anything more that needs to be said.

I think my viewpoint is akin to the Nazi bar analogy. I don’t want to drink at a Nazi bar, but I’m glad the Nazi bar exists, because it gives the Nazis somewhere to go that’s isolated and away from everyone else. I’d rather these people hold their own event and congregate there than go protest at a pride parade or whatever else they might be doing, and I don’t think ‘kicking the hornet’s nest’ by trying to disrupt them is really helping anyone. Case in point, I’d never heard about them before, and wouldn’t have if this article hadn’t been written, which it wouldn’t have been if nobody had crashed the event.

Maybe I needed to add a \s to that. :D

Well, now I feel like I need to provide a picture so folks don’t get the wrong idea!

I feel like this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but… really, I don’t see a problem with these people having this event, and I think the person who got up to sing the pro-LGBTQ+ song was in the wrong here. But let me explain before you crucify me.

It’s pride month, and they have anti-LGBTQ+ views. Holding their own event for people with similar views is by far preferable to going and causing problems at pride events, and while I don’t agree with their views, I support their freedom to hold them, given they aren’t causing problems for others, which it sounds like they weren’t.

An LGBTQ+ person “crashing” their event isn’t really any different from an anti-LGBTQ+ person crashing a pride event, which I’d obviously have a problem with, so I think it’d be somewhat hypocritical to applaud someone for doing it to these people, however much I disagree with their viewpoint.

Edit: Yep, knew it’d be unpopular. Rather than just downvoting me, though, why not tell me why you disagree?

Swordfish was always one of my favorites. Writing a worm using a custom compiler he wrote many years prior (to 2001) and had stored on a tape drive in some dusty basement.

I have a giant Chillet plush that I sleep with. It’s basically a body pillow. It serves this function admirably, and goddamn is it cute.

Hacking scenes in old movies are ridiculous to look back on. Always some crazy GUI-heavy pseudo-video game with people clattering away madly on keyboards and tense music playing. So unlike hacking scenes of today, which are obviously much more realistic to appeal to a refined modern audience. We’ve truly come a long way.

As far as I’m aware, death punishment is not what happened to any of those that refused during Vietnam or Afghanistan.

“Life-ending consequences” doesn’t necessarily mean literal death. Court martials for serious offenses (which disobeying orders absolutely is) can come with very heavy penalties. It’s possible that it’s a regional colloquialism, but ‘life-ending consequences’ refers to consequences that end “life as you know it”, typically referring to something that is reasonably impossible to recover from.