calebio

Google/Waymo + Uber/Otto comes to mind here with Anthony Levandowski.

I think there's a middle ground of people who just are not interested in building or upgrading a gaming computer (or just don't like their typical form factor in the ready to go out of the box gaming PCs) but also don't want the completely closed off ecosystem of a console.

I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don't think the group of folks who care that it's Linux based is high enough to support production.

Did you just stop scrolling at the first group of people to come and make this comment?

You can easily burn through hundreds of dollars researching one or two relatively small court cases. I don't think you should be indigent or go to the courthouse/public library to avoid spending hundreds of dollars for that small amount of research.

Stalking has a specific definition that I'm not sure would apply here.

Your behavior on the internet is certainly tracked by corporations. Your phone's radio addresses were (are) tracked as you walk by things. None of that rises to the level of "stalking" as we commonly refer to it.

No, it's not. You are not protected from a private company that owns ALPRs as part of the 4th amendment.

The government purchasing data from 3rd parties (the third-party doctrine) doesn't violate your 4th amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. You voluntarily gave the data to a 3rd party and the 3rd party voluntarily sold that data to the government.

The carve out is really only for phone GPS data (cell tower connection logs) as specified in Carpenter v. United States.

So just like you're not protected from AT&T selling your call logs to the government, you're not protected from Flock selling access to their images of your car (at this time).

That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.

Reminds me a lot of AskJeeves :)

A lower resolution tracking is still tracking though. Spatial resolution is low/fixed doesn’t change the fact that I was tagged using the personally identifiable plate and my movements were tracked across the town.

You're not wrong that it's still tracking. Though, whether it's tracking or not isn't really the thing up for debate here.

In my head it's:

A) Whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy from a person or company when driving your car with a personally identifiable plate on a public street.

B) Is it your data that is being searched or is it the data of the company who owns the ALPR? Is it a violation of your rights for that data to be searched?

The decision in Carpenter is extremely narrow and doesn't cover things like cameras or non-targeted tower dumps.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

It's also similar to the ever growing network of toll road cameras and bridge/highway cameras that capture an image of each car + driver's face.

I think the question may instead be:

do you have the right to not have [a private company] tracking your movements and keeping logs of everywhere you’ve been for months or years, especially when you’re not currently suspected of any crime?

And

do you have the right for the government to not purchase that data from [a private company]?

While Carpenter v. United States (2018) somewhat changed the rules regarding the "purchase" of third-party data in the context of an investigation, it seems like the ALPRs do not violate the 4th amendment the same way that the decision in Carpenter decided.

Since ALPRs are effectively fixed in a geographic place with gaps and AFAIK do have relatively low retention periods (I need to double check this), they don't offer the same "whole person movement" data that a phone would when described in Carpenter.

Will be interesting to see how this goes, and I'm sure ALPR density may play a part in it, but for now I don't think it violates someone's privacy under the 4th amendment.

This debate also ties heavily into one around the surveillance network created via camera networks like Ring.

The L-Taraval, at least historically, was not reliable between downtown and the outer sunset (past Sunset Blvd).

Any idea if/when this would be coming to GHE? I know the release cycle is way different but curious about your thoughts.

I miss the Phabricator review UI so much.

Have they even filed the forms yet or is this another instance of "let's tweet a thing and let some of the public believe Y (new) while X (old) is actually still true"?

Historically, availability was very different between the two countries when we're specifically talking about purchasing SIMs for questionable activity.

Physically acquiring the SIMs is only one part of the process as they're pretty worthless without going through the activation process.

Prior to this year in Mexico (which introduced ID-based regulations around SIM purchase/activation), you could buy a SIM at a remote gas station, a data package in cash, and activate it without giving your name/email/etc. Now, in 2026, you have to show an ID/passport to do that.

The U.S. doesn't have a federal regulation (as far as I know) for this. That level of network protection is usually at the provider level. However, activating the SIM almost always requires an email or existing phone number and not just purchase/possession of the SIM+top-up card. Purchasing the top-up card sometimes can be done in cash, other times requires a pre-paid debit which has its own limitations/regulations due to a mix of KYC/AML. But applying said top-up card usually still requires at least some form of identity verification. For some of the top national providers, and I'm not sure what model they use to gauge risk to make this decision, they even require an SSN (for prepaid!) and run some form of a check on you (I'm not entirely sure if it's a soft credit check or what).

Not a direct answer to your reuqestion re: questionable activity, but for me it's more about ease of access.

A SIM in the U.S. is significantly more difficult to acquire than a SIM in Mexico/many other countries.

E.g.

- Limit on # of SIMs purchased at retailers, low ability to use cash to purchase them, generally always on camera

- SIMs locked up behind the counter at lots of major retailers in the U.S.

- Activation requirements on U.S. networks for prepaid SIMs

Granted, if you're a company you can certainly acquire a lot of SIMs. A lot of questionable activity uses straw purchases, very similar to folks using smurfs to acquire pseudoephedrine in the 2000s.

The 1994 paper (freely available at https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1341727/m2/...) is actually about proper E2EE.

That paper is about PKI-based session setup for End-End which is the ancestor of SSL/TLS. It even mentions a CAE which is effectively a CA and it does a synchronous handshake to establish a symmetric key. It's very clearly about transport layer security from end to end.

It's not about User-User E2EE (akin to Signal) and shares very little other than that data is encrypted from point A to point B.

It wasn't coined, it was reused. It historically meant things that were encrypted from the client to the server, e.g. SSH, SSL, TLS, etc.

RFC 4949 (Internet Security Glossary, Version 2) from 2007: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4949

     $ end-to-end encryption
      (I) Continuous protection of data that flows between two points in
      a network, effected by encrypting data when it leaves its source,
      keeping it encrypted while it passes through any intermediate
      computers (such as routers), and decrypting it only when it
      arrives at the intended final destination. (See: wiretapping.
      Compare: link encryption.)

      Examples: A few are BLACKER, CANEWARE, IPLI, IPsec, PLI, SDNS,
      SILS, SSH, SSL, TLS.

      Tutorial: When two points are separated by multiple communication
      links that are connected by one or more intermediate relays, end-
      to-end encryption enables the source and destination systems to
      protect their communications without depending on the intermediate
      systems to provide the protection.

I'll take the hit on the loose phrasing regarding the SSL paper "outlining plans". That was a poor description of mine of an analysis paper and wasn't a good example of the point I was trying to make. However, you are focusing on the trees and missing the forest. The citations you analyzed actually prove the semantic shift I am describing, specifically the MITRE one.

You quoted the MITRE paper (or the older paper it references) defining end-to-end encryption as:

"data being enciphered at the source and remaining unintelligible until it deciphered at its final destination."

This is the exact crux of the disagreement. In classic Client-Server architecture, the Server was the "final destination". The application processing the data lived on the server. Therefore, by the definition you just quoted, SSL/TLS from Client to Server was "End-to-End Encryption" because the network (routers/ISPs) could not decipher it.

The "modern" definition (post-Signal/WhatsApp) effectively redefined "final destination" to mean "another human user," relegating the Service Provider to a mere hop in the middle. That is a massive semantic shift.

re Saltzer's "End-to-End Arguments": The paper argues that functions (like reliability or encryption) should be moved from the lower network layers (links) to the "ends" (hosts/applications). SSL/TLS is the literal implementation of this argument: moving encryption out of the network links (Link Encryption) and into the application endpoints (Host-to-Host).

The term "End-to-End" in networking *has* historically meant Host-to-Host (Transport Layer), whereas the modern messaging usage means User-to-User. That is why a lot of folks from that era (and the RFCs) called SSL "End-to-End encryption" because relative to the network, it is.

---

RFC 4949 from 2007 (Internet Security Glossary) is quite explicit on this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4949

$ end-to-end encryption

(I) Continuous protection of data that flows between two points in

a network, effected by encrypting data when it leaves its source,

keeping it encrypted while it passes through any intermediate

computers (such as routers), and decrypting it only when it

arrives at the intended final destination. (See: wiretapping. Compare: link encryption.)

Examples: A few are BLACKER, CANEWARE, IPLI, IPsec, PLI, SDNS, SILS, SSH, *SSL, TLS*.

Tutorial: When two points are separated by multiple communication

links that are connected by one or more intermediate relays, end-

to-end encryption enables the source and destination systems to

protect their communications without depending on the intermediate

systems to provide the protection.

---

RFC 1455 from 1993 (32 years ago) also uses the term in the IP/Host context: https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/ietf/rfc/14/rfc1455.xml

At this time all Internet Protocol (IP) packets must have most of their header information, including the "from" and "to" addresses, in the clear. This is required for routers to properly handle the traffic even if a higher level protocol fully encrypts all bytes in the packet after the IP header. This renders even *end-to-end encrypted* IP packets subject to traffic analysis if the data stream can be observed.

---

Regarding your claim that "no one really used the E2EE term before it got the current meaning," the IETF standards for the internet (albeit an informational RFC and not a standards RFC) explicitly list SSL and TLS as examples of End-to-End encryption. The definition of "End" has simply shifted from the Machine to the User.

No, before that it was simply not a term, except in some obscure radio protocol

no one really used the E2EE term before it got the current meaning

It most certainly was a term and no it wasn't simply limited to "some obscure radio protocol".

1994: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/363791

1984: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/357401.357402

1978: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA059221.pdf

Some homemade encryption added on top of TLS is very unlikely to increase the security of the system

"Some homemade encryption" is not what I was suggesting at all. E.g. encrypted-at-the-source (client side) AWS files are still sent over TLS as an encrypted blob within an encrypted blob but remain encrypted past the TLS boundary.

Well respectfully your recollection is missing lots of references by people that were "knowledgeable in cryptography".

You can easily find these references in the literature, often comparing link encryption with end-to-end encryption. Some of the earliest papers outlining the plans for SSL in the 90s (Analysis of the SSL 3.0 Protocol) are based on this exact foundation from the 80s (End-To-End Arguments in System Design).

Hell, you can even go back to 1978 and see MITRE discussing this exact thing in "Limitations of end-to-end encryption in secure computer networks".

The modern usage of E2EE definitely means that "the server cannot access it". That's the meat of this entire discussion.

While you are technically correct in a network topology sense (where the "ends" are the TCP connection points), that definition has been obsolete in consumer privacy contexts for a decade now due to "true" E2EE encryption.

If we use your definition, then Gmail, Facebook, and Amazon are all "End-to-End Encrypted" because the traffic is encrypted between my client and their server. But we don't call them E2EE because the service provider holds the keys and can see the data.

In 2025, when a company claims a camera product is "E2EE", a consumer interprets that to mean "Zero Knowledge". I.e. the provider cannot see the video feeds. If Kohler holds the keys to analyze the data, that is Encryption in Transit, not E2EE. Even though in an older sense (which is what my original comment was saying), it was "End to End Encrypted" because the two ends were defined as Client and Server and not Client to Client (e.g. FB Messenger User1 and FB Messenger User2).

It was pretty common to call client-side encryption/SSL "end to end encryption" among network engineers who were analyzing data flowing through their networks[0] as well as those who were implementing SSL/TLS into their applications[1]. The ends were the client and the server and the data was encrypted "end to end". The goal at that time was to prevent MITM snooping/attacks which were highly prevalent at the time.

Papers in academia and the greater industry[2] also referred to it in this way at the time.

Stack Overflow has plenty of examples of folks calling it "end to end encryption" and you can start to see the time period after the Signal protocol and WhatsApp implemented it that the term started to take on a much wider meaning[4]

This also came up a lot in the context of games that rolled out client side encryption for packets on the way to the server. Folks would run MITM applications on their computer to intercept game packets coming out of the client and back from the server. Clever mechanisms were setup for key management and key exchange[3].

[0] as SSL became more common lots of tooling broke at the network level around packet inspection, routing, caching, etc. As well as engineers "having fun" on Friday nights looking at what folks were looking at.

[1] Stack Overflow's security section has references from that era

[2] "Encrypting the internet" (2010) - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1851275.1851200

[3] Habbo Hotel's prime and generator being hidden in one of the dynamic images fetched from the server as well as their DH mechanism comes to mind.

[4] Jabber/XMPP however used E2EE in the more modern sense around that time as they were exploring going beyond TLS and having true E2EE.

I think part of the problem is that prior to WhatsApp's E2EE implementation in like 2014, TLS was very often called "End to End Encryption" as the ends were Client and Server/Service Provider. It got redefined and now the new usage is way more popular than the old one.

I can't blame most people for calling TLS "E2EE", even some folks in industry, but it's not great for a company to advertise that you offer X if the meaning of X has shifted so drastically in the last decade.

It was only a decade or so ago that "End-To-End Encryption" began to mean something other than "encrypted in transit".

E2EE now means something wildly different in the context of messaging applications and the like (since like 2014) so this is more of an outdated way of saying "no one is getting your poop pictures between your toilet and us".

It also feels like it would never make sense for this to be "E2EE encrypted" in the modern sense of the term as the "end user recipient" of the message is the service provider (Kohler) itself. "Encrypted in Transit" and "Encrypted at Rest" is about as good as you're going to get here IMO as the service provider is going to have to have access to the keys, so E2EE in a product like this is kind of impossible if you're not doing the processing on the device.

I wonder if they encrypt it and then send it over TLS or if they're just relying on TLS as the client->server encryption. Restated, I wonder how deep in their stack the encrypted blob goes before it's decrypted.

It's turtles all the way down.

Usually when you commission something you're asking the artist to do art and create something unique with their own artistic flair... not just line-trace an existing photo.

The intention and cost of something like that is not at all comparable to what is being offered here.

We found that the the Great Flood in the book of Genesis existed

Can you elaborate what you mean by the "Great Flood"? There's certainly evidence for regional megafloods, but I'm not aware of any professional geologic body that recognizes what most people mean when they say "Great Flood", i.e. a single planet-wide flood around that time period.

Is it fair to say that also in your experience, those crucial edge cases/misses accumulate over time, making it even harder to ship things?

I've found this a lot in data systems where folks glue stuff together as fast as possible to "ship", while missing the huge glaring issues with the foundation that they've built on top of wet, sliding mud.

That's a really good question.

In my head, I'm imagining someone early in the morning posting a flyer up on a bulletin board downtown.

Throughout the day many folks walked by and took photos of the flyer with their cell phone.

At the end of the day, the original person came back and removed the flyer.

IMO, at the time that the folks took the photo of the flyer, that flyer was public information. It remains public information even after the flyer is removed[0].

This isn't a great analogy of mine, and has plenty of holes, but was interesting to me after I read your comment. I know it was in the context of doxxing, but I think it's pretty interesting philosophically.

I think something similar applies to photos taken of other people in public spaces. Both the person who took the photo and the subject of the photo are no longer in that physical public space, but the actions took place within that space.

I think something similar applies to digital "public spaces". But what does a public space even mean in the context of walled gardens[1], etc.

[0] you then run into the question of what happens if someone posts non-public information, publicly? [1] are digital walled garden communities that different from physical communities that gate access, whether free or paid. Whether information shared within those contexts are public or private is an interesting thread as well.