What Makes Us Human? The authors are Iain S. Thomas and Jasmine Wang, here is one excerpt:
What is the proper response to suffering?
If this life is all there is, then the proper response to suffering is to embrace it
and be transformed by it.
If there is more than this life, then the proper response to suffering
is to take the next step in your journey.
It’s not simply for punishment. Pain is an opportunity for spiritual growth.
We suffer from the growth that comes from suffering.
The subtitle of the book is An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.
Most books don’t succeed either in terms of sales or critical unanimity. Most writers don’t earn a living wage from their writing. Tenure-track appointments (I teach college writing) are rare as unicorns. But being a writer is not a sentence handed down, it’s a choice I’ve made. - The New York Times
Police can use Fog Reveal to geofence entire buildings or street blocks—like the area surrounding an abortion clinic—and get information on devices used within and surrounding those buildings to identify suspects. On top of identifying devices used in a targeted location, Fog Reveal also can be used to search by device and see everywhere that device has been used. That means cops could identify devices at a clinic and then follow them home to identify the person connected to that device.
Or they could identify a device and follow it to an abortion clinic. The EFF discovered that Fog Reveal is already covertly used by police in various states, sometimes to conduct warrantless searches. Police demonstrating interest in the tool shows how all those smaller, less-scrutinized apps that sell user data to third parties could end up collectively contributing more data to local and state police investigations than is expected from even the biggest tech giants.
In the “worst-case scenario,” Fog Reveal could become a go-to tool allowing police to track abortions in-state and across state lines, EFF policy analyst Matt Guariglia told Ars. Because unlike similar scenarios in which major tech companies like Meta or Google are served warrants compelling them to supply data to police investigating crimes, abortion data surveillance via Fog Reveal could seemingly be conducted without warrants and without any legal oversight.
That invisibility could be a desirable feature as states prepare to strictly enforce laws across state lines that either shield or block access to abortion. No one can protest another state using the tool if it’s never named in court, and that, Guariglia told Ars, is often the case with Fog Reveal. As one Maryland-based sergeant wrote in a department email—touting the benefit of “no court paperwork” before purchasing Fog Reveal—the tool’s “success lies in the secrecy.”
