Thank you! This is huge and more people need to know about. Geocoding has been way too difficult for way too long.

Also, is there a guide or tools available for generating the .bin files ourselves?

Pretty sure the problem will sort itself out soon enough… they won’t have any customers left if they ban them all.

just try to build a module with clang for a kernel build with GCC

I did just now, and it worked fine.

I thought it was legal for them to sell driving data to brokers (not that I agree with it)? What is the actual alleged crime here though?

You can’t load modules built with a different compiler.

Sure you can. There’s even multiple guides for how to write C++ kernel modules, which inherently is going to use a different compiler than what was used for the kernel itself. BOSS Linux even writes C++ kernel modules.

if you want to use a module wrote in rust you also need to have built in the rust support in the kernel

Only if the module uses rust-specific interfaces in the kernel, otherwise it can be assembled into a .ko to have plain C-style symbols loaded by the kernel like normal.

you know you can intercept the traffic and prove your suspicions (right or wrong) instead of making baseless accusations, right?

sounds like win/win

Echo Show has had a camera for many years, I don’t understand the outrage now all of a sudden. It does have a physical shutter slide though.

it’s possible to intercept the traffic to see what they are sending or not sending… I don’t see the need for ad hominem.

you need to build the kernel with clang to build the kernel with the rust support

I believe this statement is incompatible with how C works. The kernel can load modules written in any language as long as it outputs a .ko, so there can be no technical requirement for building the rest of the kernel itself with clang.

it is not the default

If someone makes a Rust-free fork, please name it Stainless.

https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr

https://github.com/jerome-pouiller/reredirect

https://github.com/trishume/telefork

https://pasky.or.cz/dev/retty/

IDK but I have a lot of issues with that list anyway… they seem to have a strange definition of “permissive AI policy”, i.e. any mere mention of an AI service gets you on the list.

Example: OpenBSD and NetBSD both show as “permissive” on the list, even though both have publicly stated otherwise, just because there are one or two commits where someone (prominent dev) commented something like “I had help from Claude but you can’t tell, and I personally vouch for this and I know what I’m doing.”

If you use Tor + NoScript, you won’t be unique

Hard disagree, there are still ways to uniquely fingerprint you.

Thankfully modern browsers use Certificate Transparency, and there’s no indication that any compromised certs were actually used publicly.

However, there are many devices that use TLS which are not browsers, and those devices could in theory be selectively targeted with an evil cert without alerting the public CT servers.

I think the hivemind has already spoken, they are taking this to mean that the kernel is now vibe-coded and people are actively jumping ship.

IMO “more private” is pointless when you’re still unique either way

This is actually much worse for privacy than leaving everything stock, because a site can tell you aren’t downloading or running any javascript, and that immediately puts you in an extremely tiny bucket of people it needs to differentiate from, making any differences visible via IP/TCP/TLS/HTML/CSS much more unique.

And yes, fingerprinting is possible with just HTML and/or CSS… I would argue even moreso without JS.

They actually do move… cities/towns/place names expand and contract, and incorporate and unincorporate all the time… it’s a huge pain in the ass for our system at work. Some place names are also 100% made up by the USPS and only used by them, and guess what, you still gotta support it. Even the professional paid databases don’t contain every possible place name people use.

And my comment was more about geocoding of exact addresses, not whole cities.