Recycling an old post:

> We had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers.

> The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.

One might also view it as a kind politically-flavored nerd-sniping. [0] Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

[0] https://xkcd.com/356/

Malicious incompetence. The inbred kissing cousin of malicious compliance.

It'll end well, just not for the working class, if such a thing still exists at that time

It started with Richard Nixon and his cynical manoevering.

It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?

It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.

No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).

Fear what comes next. If there is a next.

I think Trump being elected is a result of anti-thought, feudalism-seeking part of society coming to power, not a cause. Enough people were fed up with thinking elites stealing from them, so they elected thought-averse elites to steal from them because they naively thought that the stealing is because of intelligence.

What? Trump is just a symptom. The US didn't suddenly become what it is now because of a vote. Like it or not (and I certainly don't), the people voted for this, twice. Whether they voted for it because they actually wanted it vs they voted for it because politicians convinced them they wanted it, it is what we wanted.

When a coworker leaves the company and I inherit their work, I am given a little bit of time to acclimate and understand the projects they were working on.

If it turns out a secret was exposed in production, or we're exposing PII in logs, or storing CCs or passwords in plain text, there's a certain time frame in which the blame shifts from my coworker for introducing it, to me for not catching it.

That time frame is a lot less than one year.

> HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.

In all fairness, that narrative has been helped quite a bit by the current administration!

To be fair that's the exact narrative European media seems to draw. Not sure how you could see anything else in this shitshow

As I've said, facts or meaning no longer matter. There are numerous cases where Trump blamed Democrats for something he did during his first term or took credit for something positive that the Biden administration did. HN does not create a narrative, people are free to post their opinions here.

Imagine telling those North Koreans that there are millions of people in the US that do it all for free.

Hell, some will even pay extra for access to the highest levels of ass kissing.

"lol, I no longer the craziest leader in the world"

They probably play StarCraft together and shit talk each other the whole time.

Oh, when I read it it says things are going great for everyone but you.

Seems reasonable but it's not as if no one speaks Korean outside North Korea to verify what's being said.

This is the best joke I've heard in a long time

> I mean if you agree with it, it’s not propaganda

A very workable definition of "propaganda" might be "an idea crafted specifically so that you will think it was your idea in the first place"

That's why "agreeing" with propaganda is not the correct verb.

You either believe propaganda or you don't. This has nothing to do with reason or logic.

Does it though? I don't see Canadian or Swiss or Slovak propaganda regularly reminding us that their country's leader is the "greatest ever."

If you think NK an US look the same from the outside check your body temp. Source: am outside both.

No. We aren’t all subject to this. MAGA isn’t even logically consistent. You don’t even need fact checking to spot the bullshit.

And miss me with the inevitable both sides response.

Trump saying recently that he hates hanging around successful people and prefers losers because he doesn't want to listen to other people's stories really speaks to the poor self esteem angle

> core value like helping the poor beat malaria)

Gates just doesn't want to be remembered for Windows. Much like Nobel didn't want to be remembered only for dynamite.

"The drive to achieve that level of success often comes from weaponized poor self esteem."

This sounds like all of the cope I continue to hear about successful people. Very successful people MUST have something wrong with them...

> To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

> - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

- Own a monopoly - Inherit your fortune - Run a criminal enterprise

Using just these three filters alone, you encompass more than 99% of all billionaires in existence. The amount of billionaires who do not fit into these categories can barely occupy a family sized vehicle.

The criteria here suggesting that there is a specific sociopathic personality requirement to being a billionaire as each category can be argued as harmful to societies.

Huge numbers (billions) of people have enough money to make massive changes to the lives of those less fortunate than them, but don't, and prefer instead to make incremental upgrades to their own lives. New rugs, more savings, first-class airline tickets, eating out a few more times a month, etc.

This is just human nature.

People who are at wealth level x tend to say, "I can't believe that people at wealth level x+1 aren't more generous!" all the while ignoring their own lack of desire to give generously to people at wealth levels x-1 and below.

Elon tweeted that he'd fund ending world hunger if someone presented him with an actual plan to do that. UNESCO did. Elon did not act.

Trump has largely not had that kind of money. He’s had a _lot_ of money, many many times more than most, but by all accounts except his own, those numbers are much lower than he likes to brag about. Well, they were - there’s been a troubling amount of money going out of the federal government that isn’t well-accounted for under his reign.

He had the kind of money that can hire expensive projects on trust that payment in full will be rendered, but only kept his money by often not paying out.

As with all things Trump, even up to the new ballroom not having a front door despite the massive staircase, his wealth is more in appearance, and less in actual assets…or was. Of course, someday maybe we will know the true extent or shortfall of his bank accounts

I don’t get puzzled that the criminal doesn’t use his ill-gotten gains for pro-social causes. Why would a person ever use anti-social means to acquire funds for pro-social goods?[1]

This is not too disimilar from the case of the billionaire.

[1] Excepting some Galaxy Brain philosophies like Effective Altruism

If you had that amount of money you would also be a sociopath. It's a precondition.

Good news is that you would sleep fine at night. No matter how destructive your existence was, and how much of a net negative you were to the world, you would still think very highly of yourself.

I specifically did not say money makes them mentally ill, but rather the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness.

Of course the money doesn't make them terrible. Being terrible makes them money. Lots of money. There aren't really other ways of obtaining so much money, which is why if you see someone that has that amount, they should be viewed with suspicion.

To be fair, if I had $999 million, it'd be bugging me all the time until I got to $1B.

> still hasn't collapsed

Which is why he's playing a shell game with xAI "buying" twitter and then SpaceX "buying" xAI

I think that's what bothers me the most about the last couple years. These ultra rich people are just brazenly being scumbags and there is nothing anybody can really do about it. I imagine this is what people felt like in the middle ages when their King was going senile.

>I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser

So you open safari first. I think that’s a step further than what’s being described.

Many people it’s just “hey siri, book a table at Miguel’s.” And then click whatever app, web result, or native OS feature pops up.

It’s a chaotic crapshoot that I have never been able to stomach personally. For others, that’s just called using their phone.

I recently took a trip to Hawaii, particularly Maui. I've never been before, but I hit the weather lottery and got to experience the Kona low system that raked the island with copious rain. Anyway... What I found, in the areas that we were staying, was that there were a lot of food trucks that looked to have great coffee, poke, food in general. But with the weather it was unclear if the food truck was 1) accessible 2) open due to other weather issues.

What I found was that none of these food trucks (and even some relatively nice restaurants) had operational web pages. One had a domain but, for some apparent reason, they posted the menu to <some-random-name>.azurewebsites.net. And that page just... Didn't work. The rest got even worse. Most had listings on Google Maps, but the hours and availability did not reflect reality. We went to a coffee food truck that wasn't there, even though the day before they had commented on a review. Then we had others that had a link to an Instagram page of which some claimed to house their "current" hours and location, yet we tried going to two of them and both weren't open.

It's 2026. If you have your business on Google Maps you should be able to update hours and availability quickly. But beyond that it costs almost nothing to host a simple availability page on a representative domain. And even if you don't want to deal with the responsibility of a domain, there are multitudes of other options. Now, I'm guessing that this isn't the norm for most of these vendors, at least I hope. But we weren't there during the worst of the rain, we hit the second low that went through in our timing. So while it was a significant amount of rain and some of the more treacherous switchback roads were closed - I'm talking about food trucks that were off of very accessible main roads & highways. My SO reached out via IG to about a half dozen vendors and only one responded 2 days later.

Clearly tech and simple services like availability and location that is easy to update is not accessible (or known) for these types of businesses. But it definitely does not require an app (nor should it). Having these simple "status" sites would have made the friction the weather caused significantly less than what we experienced. I don't want an app when I'm trying to find out if a restaurant is open. I, personally, don't find apps any more responsive. In many cases a lot of web sites are littered with far too many components that are not required. I've been doing a lot with Datastar and FastAPI recently and some of the tools I've thrown together (that handle hundreds of MB of data in-browser) load instantly and are blazing fast. So much so that I've been asked how I "did that". It's amazing how fast a web app can be when it's not pulling data from 27 different sources and loading who knows what for JS.

I want to be really clear that I'm not trying to argue with your experience, just to understand it... but:

> However even then, I'd rather have an app for them where I can enter in the items I want to order.

Really? You want to download a different app for every restaurant you order from?

That's border wait times, not what the OP was looking for.

TSA used to have an API [0]. But, of course while the deprecation page still lives on the service does not.

Edit: Also looks like TSAWaitTimes.com [1] is an option, I'm sure their API works. o_O

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/archive/mytsa-api-documentation [1] https://www.tsawaittimes.com/

Very well said.

Nope. Actual deanonymization.

You will of course need a couple additional threat intel feeds because what is provided via the browser itself isn't enough, but third party data vendors along with threat intel vendors are fairly cost effective.

I've seen a couple actual live demos of deanonymization a couple years ago - it's a capability that has existed in the Offensive Security space for a couple years now. And the company I'm alluding to is already live in Japan and Israel.

I was referring to the graphics/animations that the GP comment mentioned. I was more confident that those were AI-generated than the actual text. Upon further scrutiny I'm having second thoughts.

There are multiple cases of inconsistencies between certain claims and the sources that they linked to:

> The acting IRS Commissioner, Melanie Krause, resigned in protest.

No mention of that here: https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/politics/irs-dhs-sign-data-de....

The actual link should be https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/politics/melanie-krause-actin... (which is a "Related Article" in the former link).

> The Defense Department even purchased location data from prayer apps to monitor Muslim communities.

Nope: https://www.eff.org/issues/location-data-brokers

> ICE's contract gives them "unlimited rights to use, dispose of, or disclose" all data collected.

Quote doesn't appear here: https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2022/06/27/meet-smartlin...

> DHS's own internal documents admit Mobile Fortify can be used to amass biographical information of "individuals regardless of citizenship or immigration status", and CBP confirmed it will "retain all photographs" including those of U.S. citizens, for 15 years.

Both hyperlinks lead to the same page, neither quote appears: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202512/ices-use-of-cbp-biome...

> ICE Homeland Security Investigations signed a $9.2 million contract with Clearview AI in September 2025, giving agents access to over 50 billion facial images scraped from the internet.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT THAT!!! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/rights-organizations-d...

> This one requests 14 permissions including 7 classified as "dangerous,"

Only 6 permissions are classified as dangerous: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/gov.dhs.cbp...

If I really wanted to force the claim that the body text is AI-generated (or assisted) then I'd guess that the LLM (likely Claude) counted the "dangerous" icon from its appearance in "The icon [Red exclamation mark] indicates a 'Dangerous' or 'Special' level according to Google's protection levels."

> And the whole CBP ecosystem, from CBP One to CBP Home to Mobile Passport Control, feeds data into a network that retains your faceprints for up to 75 years and shares it across DHS, ICE, and the FBI.

This makes it appear that there are separate apps running concurrently, namely CBP One and CBP Home. They aren't. From the linked source, "CBP One is no longer available". It was replaced with CBP Home. The source does not mention Mobile Passport Control.: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/cbp-on...

> ...discussions around government applications that are loaded with surveillance tech (and in many cases it seems like the apps' primary, and sometimes only, purpose is data harvesting) seem very on-topic for HN.

Which is exactly why I said: "Some submissions are less about the subject matter than they are about providing a space to talk about only the subject in general."

The article in its entirety reads more like a desperate attempt at spinning the recent release of the "White House app" into a story about state surveillance. The problem is that it doesn't have a cogent conclusion or point to make except for a "Surveillance Data Pipeline" graphic that depicts ICE as the central destination for all of this data and the following:

> The federal government publishes content available through standard web protocols and RSS feeds, then wraps that content in applications that demand access to your location, biometrics, storage, contacts, and device identity. They embed advertising trackers in FBI apps. They sell the line that you need their app to receive their propaganda while the app quietly collects data that flows into the same surveillance pipeline feeding ICE raids and warrantless location tracking. Every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page, and they know that. The app exists because a web page can't read your fingerprint, track your GPS in the background, or inventory the other accounts on your device. > > You don't need their app. You don't need their permission to access public information. You already have a browser, an RSS reader, and the ability to decide for yourself what runs on your own hardware. Use them.

What is the link between the two? Who is the "You" being addressed here? We have apps that are apparently used only by ICE, apps meant for foreign travelers into the US, apps only someone's conservative/veteran grandfather would be caught using—these are disparate demographics to me.

If my initial impression to all of this information was "So what?" how would this article convince me that it's actually meaningful? Submissions like this aren't about discussing anything novel or critical about the subject matter (with the exception of the Huawei thing which is a missed opportunity from an editorial point of view). They are signal boosts to talk about bad government and technology in general.

I've spent enough of my morning trying to make actual sense of this story, that's not to say that it's not informative (albeit unsurprising), but the quality of the writing irrespective of whether its "readable" makes me question if the submission was popular because of its substance or because it's supposed to be a proxy for r/politics.

You owe me a coffee.

Oops. I meant apps can gather (more) data.

The inconvenience is considerable. In the last few days I had the choice of use the app or drive 20 mins each way plus park, walk and possibly queue. Required (UK) government ID verification. The issued my new passport without that!

It is often more costly to not use an app, not just inconvenient. My daughter had to use the bus company app to get (much cheaper) monthly ticker to get to school.

I use few apps, keep location turned off, do not use wallet, etc. but there is going to be more and more pressure to use apps.

> only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent)

There are plenty of reasons to dislike it. The money spent to develp it. The attention spent to maintain it. The abuse of users' goodwill. Dilution of the FBI's brand with a circa 2008. None of these are good. None of them are, frankly, issues I'm going to personally engage on.