satyrsangre: true! London's surveillance apparatus is terrifying already, not to mention johnson is allowing huawei to build britain's 5G network...against the national security advice of every other country
so much cyberpunk fiction and no one consumes it as though it were a warning-thought-experiment
In the meantime you have Intel Management Engine probe in your CPU (or AST in case if you have AMD) - independent RISC CPU running RTOS even if your PC is in standby mode/powered off (unless it's completely unplugged) and what exactly does it do - no one knows. Some people found out that it can be *partially* disabled and Intel was forced to admit that they have option to disable it for government users but still don't provide that option for normal users.
To add more fun to this obvious spy probe situation, exploitable bugs were already found and it's only matter of time before someone will figure out how this thing ticks completely. Imagine some felons logging your key input, downloading stuff from your PC, crashing it on purpose etc.
Also your smartphone is a surveillance device - ever noticed how search engines show you ads etc for stuff you were talking about with friends etc. ALL of them. Also there's no hardware killswitches for GPS and cameras/microphones, and suddenly most phones/tablets and even laptops have non-removable battery. For laptops i find it funny that number of those started to increase exponentially after IME/AST was implemented in Intel/AMD CPUs. Before that even tiny netbooks had removable batteries, which is totally makes sense - if you're on the move and can't charge your battery you just take a pack of charged ones. That's what i did in 90s-early 2000s. Then suddenly even high end workstation class laptops mostly switched to built-in batteries. Planned obsolescence? Partially. Because to install HDD/SSD/more RAM you can still easily open most laptops and also get access to the battery and except Apple/ultrabooks with glued batteries it's usually super simple to replace that battery - one-two screws and one connector.
The answer is simple - they don't want you to completely power off your personal telescreen that easily. Be it a laptop, a phone or a tablet.
So yeah, cyberpunk at it's finest is here already. Add global economy crashing soon-ish to the mix and we have funny times ahead of us (the coronavirus/KSA trying to get their hands on all oil market aren't the main reasons for the stuff even, just a tiny needle that popped that bubble that was about to burst maybe a year or two later, and that's just the first wave anyway. All the fun will be a little later.)
