Jordan Bravo and Stephen DeLorme return with a news-packed episode covering the latest privacy violations and surveillance schemes. They discuss Trump's plan to create a master database of Americans using Palantir, WhatsApp AI accidentally leaking user phone numbers, Meta and Yandex exploiting Android phones to track browsing habits, and Ford's patent for cars that report speeding drivers. Plus, Jordan shares updates on his sovereign computing journey including anonymous phone services, Alby Hub lightning setup, and self-hosted lightning addresses.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction and Digital Footprint Philosophy
• 00:35 Welcome to Sovereign Computing Show
• 00:51 ATL BitLab Sponsorship
• 01:55 Production Updates and Schedule Changes
• 03:18 News: Trump Taps Palantir for Master Database on Americans
• 06:02 Discussion: Government Data Collection Reality
• 08:50 Advice: Minimizing Digital Footprints
• 09:42 Personal Anecdote: Marketing Work with Surveillance Tech
• 13:17 News: WhatsApp AI Mistakenly Shares User's Phone Number
• 18:07 Analysis: LLM Context and Security Rules
• 24:01 WhatsApp Metadata and AI Concerns
• 24:59 News: Meta and Yandex Android Tracking Exploit
• 28:34 Technical Details: localhost Port Listening
• 30:56 Instagram Microphone Surveillance Discussion
• 34:23 News: Ford Patents Car Surveillance Technology
• 38:37 Future of Autonomous Vehicles and Privacy
• 40:06 Privacy Alternative: Toyota Hilux No-Frills Truck
• 42:08 Jordan's Sovereign Computing Updates
• 42:31 Text Verify for Anonymous Phone Verification
• 45:12 Steven's Experience with Simple Login App
• 48:01 Mint Mobile Payment Issues and AT&T Alternative
• 49:55 Self-Hosting: Albi Hub Lightning Node Setup
• 51:48 Self-Custodial Podcast Boosts with Podverse
• 52:09 Self-Hosted Lightning Address with RustDress
• 54:20 Nix Package Repository Work
• 55:05 Wrap-up and Contact Information
• 55:46 Outro and Bitcoin Tips

Links

• Jordan Bravo
• Stephen DeLorme
• Boost in on Fountain.FM
• Trump Taps Palantir Article
• WhatsApp AI Phone Number Leak
• Meta and Yandex Android Tracking Research
• Text Verified
• SMS for sats
• SimpleLogin
• Alby Hub
• Podverse

Transcript

SOV016 - Random Show

Jordan Bravo: [00:00:00] The thing we advocate for is minimizing our digital footprints and stopping or, or minimizing the leakage of our personal data.

And that will continue to benefit everyone who does that. If you are thinking long term and taking steps to always leave a minimal digital footprint, then in the future, whether it's a current administration or a future administration, doing something untoward with personal data, the less of it you have out there, the less you can be harmed by this.

welcome to the Sovereign Computing Show, presented by ATL BitLab. I'm Jordan Bravo, and this is a podcast where we teach you how to take back control of your devices. Sovereign Computing means you own your technology, not the other way around.

Stephen DeLorme: This episode is sponsored by ATL BitLab. ATL BitLab is Atlanta's freedom tech hacker space. We have [00:01:00] co working desks, conference rooms, event space, maker tools, and tons of coffee. There is a very active community here in the lab. Every Wednesday night is Bitcoin night here in Atlanta. We also have meetups for cyber security, artificial intelligence, decentralized identity, product design, and more.

We offer day passes and nomad passes for people who need to use the lab only occasionally, as well as memberships for people who plan to use the lab more regularly, such as myself. One of the best things about having a BitLab membership isn't the amenities, it's the people. Surrounding yourself with a community helps you learn faster and helps you build better.

Your creativity becomes amplified when you work in this space, that's what I think at least. If you're interested in becoming a member or supporting this space, please visit us at atlbitlab. com. That's A T L B I T L A B dot com. Alright, on to our show.

Stephen D: Welcome to the Sovereign Computing Show. [00:02:00] I'm Jordan Bravo and I'm recording here today from the heart of Atlanta in a TL Bitlab with Steven de alarm up. And we wanna remind you that you can boost into the show with Fountain or another app, such as Pod verse. You can also email us at sovereign@atlbitlab.com.

That's S-O-V-E-R. EIG gn@atlbitlab.com. And remember, we now can be found with the name Sovereign Computing. So if you can look in any of your podcast players, whether that's Apple, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera, and you will be able to find the search results for the Sovereign Computing Show, and you can subscribe there and you can listen in any app that you choose.

It's been a few weeks since we've released an episode, and we apologize for that. We were getting a new [00:03:00] production flow going. We have a new editor and, hopefully we will be able to return to our weekly schedule now, and you'll, you'll see them once a week, typically on the same day. But, we hope you'll stay tuned for a lot more good episodes coming up in the future.

All right, today's, we have a few news articles that we want to take a look at, stuff that's been going on recently that's relevant. The first one we're gonna talk about is the, the headline is Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American. And if you haven't heard about this. the Trump administration is planning to collect data on Americans, and they are contracting with the company Palantir to do this.

Palantir is a military contractor. the article that we have on the screen here is the new republic, new [00:04:00] republic.com, and this is a pretty, uh, typical like left wing biased, publication, but just keep that in mind. However, it still is reporting facts here that are, you are gonna be the same no matter where you get the information.

So there, this article injects its opinion a little bit here and there. You know, it says stuff like, far right, billionaire, Peter Thiel, da da, da. But the point is, Trump has enlisted the firm. founded by Peter Thiel to carry out his executive order for, instructing government agencies to share data with each other.

And the, the danger here that we see at least is that this is a, another of the, we talked about this problem before when Doge was going through the, social security information. But the problem here is that this, they want to create a giant [00:05:00] database of Americans, personal informations. And I, I think ostensibly this is for Trump to be able, to Trump and the administration to be able to crack down more on illegal immigration.

I don't know what the supposed benefits of it would be, but the problem for people who care about privacy. Is that this is a large, centralized database of personally identifiable information and any database can be cracked. And the, bigger a database of information, the more of a centralized honeypot.

It is a bigger of a target it is for hackers. and, you know, rogue agencies, rogue, governments, et cetera, that could leak it. And then. Once they do that, that's a huge treasure trove of, of personal data that they can share. Steven, do you have any thoughts on this? I don't know. I don't [00:06:00] know that I'm nearly as alarmed by it.

I don't know if that that's wrong of me, but, at least my read of this article is that, This is data that these government agencies already have and you know, it's like Palantir is just being tapped to help, like, organize this data and make it more accessible and, you know, easily searchable and all of that.

So yes, the idea of a like woo, easily searchable master database on all US citizens sounds scary. Having said that, it's kind of like, are we gonna ask, it's like it, it's weird to ask an organization to like function ine effectively. I don't know. I guess it, it's like, it's just, it's rational for any organization to like, want to have its data easily [00:07:00] searchable and indexable and all that.

I mean, maybe that sounds naive of me to say that. so I don't know. I guess it's, I'm not saying I love it, it's just, it, it's sounds expected. I mean, I think we should really like to a certain degree you have, we have to get used to this sort of thing because, well actually this will be the second time today.

I've said this on a podcast, but, I think when you look back at like, what happened with, with Doge, and, and you have like the speed at which they move with Doge was incredible. Right? And, and you had, um. You know, young people getting involved in government, young people with technical skills, using AI to move much quickly, process massive amounts of data very quickly.

Doge moved quicker than we are used to government moving, and you know, we might have to get used to that being the norm. Like we're used to thinking of governments as being very slow moving things, I think. [00:08:00] But. using AI and using technology and using more motivated people, that may not always be the case.

and I think we might have to get used to the idea that like, especially when the pendulum swings and, you know, eventually we'll have a left wing president again, that next administration very well could, do the exact same thing. If they were motivated enough, they could, Put in very fast moving, highly motivated people with ais, who, you know, are, are able to make change very rapidly.

So, I don't know. I, I'm not saying I love it, I just, it's kind of expected to me and I, I, you know, I don't know, I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I, I think this doesn't really change anything as far as advice goes.

Jordan Bravo: the thing we advocate for is minimizing our digital footprints and stopping or, or minimizing the leakage of our personal data.[00:09:00]

And that will continue to benefit everyone who does that. if you are thinking long term

Stephen D: then and,

Jordan Bravo: and taking steps to always leave a minimal digital footprint, then in the future, whether it's a current administration or a future administration. Doing something untoward with personal data, the less of it you have out there, the less you can be harmed by this.

Stephen D: Yeah. Or any of it. I, I'll tell a fun slash scary story that, about this kind of thing, and my background was doing a lot more marketing design work, like video and motion graphics and all that kinda stuff.

And, the, with the, the company I worked for, we, you know, worked a lot more with like, tech companies or like B2B Tech products and stuff. I used to have to work on like a lot of videos and stuff that were for, Like kind of tech products, targeted at like, you know, governments and stuff like, you know, [00:10:00] they might be marketed to, police or like emergency services or disaster response.

Like, not all like bad stuff, right. obviously like a disaster response. I think you, you want that to be very coordinated and efficient. But I, I remember this one product I had to do a, a video for was very alarming to me. 'cause when I was being shown the, like, videos and screenshots of the product, I was like, holy crap, they can do this.

The reason I'm reminded of this particular product is because, it was, you know, they were telling me like, oh, you know, this, this is like. They're trying to compete with Palantir or they like, want to be like seen as like roughly analogous to Palantir. and so I was looking through this product and like basically, you know, you could just type in a person's name and it would just like pull up this like web of details about the person.

It was very creepy. Like you could just type in somebody's name and it would generate this like chart for you and it would be like. [00:11:00] So the name would be in the center, and then it would have like little like lines going out to different nodes and it would say like, these are all the addresses that this person's connected to.

And then these are all the phone numbers that this person's connected to, and these are all the Twitter handles they're connected to, and, and so on, and so on and so on. Then it would map out and it would, it would like connect to them to like known associations like. For example, it might be like, like let's say you were connected to an address, will it also show you another person that was connected to that address too?

Like, um, uh, you know, like might, maybe it was like a former roommate you had or someone who co-signed on the lease with you or whatever it was. Or maybe it was someone else who is also connected to the same phone number or whatever. And so like, this data has to exist in some form, right? Like. Either, you know, at the phone company or at, you know, uh, you know, if you've [00:12:00] signed a lease for a, an apartment or whatever, um, you know, all this data, it has to already be out there, but I think it just makes it more easily searchable.

But it was very just like alarming to me that somebody could just go, like, buy a product like this and it would be able to easily search all that information. And then could like present it in this nice, like easily digestible, graphic. So it's pretty alarming out there, like how much data is like, already out there and already in databases and, if a government wants to buy access to one of these products and like, you know, get all this stuff, they can, I, I guess what wasn't clear to me when I was working on the project was.

Are they buying access to the data or are they providing the data and using the product to make the information more easily searchable? That's what I wasn't clear on, but yeah, these product exists and they've, they've been out there for a long time on the market, and this kind of goes back to something we saw on another podcast where it's like this, this thing has [00:13:00] always been a problem.

The amount of data that's out there and you know, your privacy. being leaked and compromised. We just only worry about it depending on how we feel about the president. But it's always a concern. It's always an issue. and I don't know, I just, I, I was alarmed. So anyways, that's my personal story.

Roughly what year was that, that you saw that product? Uh, 2014, I think if memory serves. Okay. So you can imagine how in the past. 12 years. It's only, or 12 ish years. 11 ish years. It's only gotten, yeah, 11 years. A lot scarier with the, a advances in AI and data collection. Oh, I'm sure it has. I mean, that was supposed to be like cutting edge stuff at the time that it was like this thing identifies connections between people, places, and things that a human would have trouble doing.

So now with like a agentic ai, it's probably even better. Oh yeah. I mean, you probably just type, like, you probably just upload like a blurry photo of somebody and it, [00:14:00] you know, probably pulls up a full dossier and backstory and all that. I don't know. Well, with, with that thought, it's behooves us to stay vigilant.

Yep. Alright. I, I think we've talked about this article All there is to talk about. the next one that we're gonna talk about is the headline is What's WhatsApp AI Mistakenly, let's see here. It's terrifying. WhatsApp AI Helper mistakenly shares user's number. I don't know why I said it in that voice.

So, we've got the article on the screen for those of you watching and we'll of course have all of these links in the show notes. But the, the gist of this article is that. Some a, a WhatsApp user was using WhatsApp's built-in meta ai, which is provided by Meta, the parent company, and it, he asked for the phone number of somebody in his contacts, you know, he [00:15:00] said, call so-and-so, and what the AI did was it pulled a number out of seemingly nowhere and called that number and it was the wrong number.

But it wasn't just a random number, it was the number of another WhatsApp user, just a stranger to this person. But it was a real number and it was real WhatsApp user. So the question is, where did it get that phone number? It seems like it got it out of the WhatsApp database. And so the, if that, if, if it's not clear that why that's a big deal.

The AI. Was somehow granted access to, uh, like if, if the AI has administrative access, let's say, on every user in the database, then the info from one user is being leaked to another user.

Stephen D-1: Yeah, so the, the, basically what happened is the, if I understand the, uh, [00:16:00] assistant, it was asking for the customer support phone number for some company, the Trans Penning Express, and then the AI came back with the phone number of, not the customer service, but another WhatsApp user. And so the concern is that the agent has like access to a database of WhatsApp users.

Yeah, I think I explained it incorrectly, so thank you for that. the idea is this AI should have just been able to do a simple task for you. Like, Hey, look up the public number of this company, trans PanIN. And you know, that should be scrapable from the web that, or their Google Maps listing. You know, many places where you can find a company's public contact information.

But instead, what the number that [00:17:00] the AI dug up was a private WhatsApp user, which shouldn't be available. so the question is how did the AI get that number and then. When the user asked how, like, where did that number come from? The ai just kind of the chat agent just kind of backpedaled and said like, what are you talking about?

I didn't do that. So it's a little, it's a little crazy like the AI gas lighting and trying to cover its tracks. but the weird thing about this is there's no good or definitive answer. there might be some follow up articles later on, but. From this article alone, we don't have any more information on where the AI got that number.

Yeah, that is interesting. I mean, I think to to like it, it does say on here. Smith Hurst wanted to know why he had shared the private number, which it turned out belonging to James [00:18:00] Gray, 44 property industry executive from Oxford Shaw, who is also a WhatsApp user and whose number appears on his company website.

Ah-huh. So, I don't know if I understand the, uh, allegation that it's a private number, given that it is, does appear on the, the company website and, given that it's on a company website, it could be, given that it's on the, from a company website, it could have been pulled from a publicly available, like web search.

Like in theory, if we want this like WhatsApp AI to be able to find stuff on the web, for us it, it has to be like an agent that's able, like, capable of like, either searching a database of like web search results or, query and Google or whatever on its own. so I think that just the fact that it's on the guys company website easily could easily explain how it got there.

Or it could be like a database of WhatsApp users. I don't know. There, I, I think we don't really know, but that could be that in terms of like the AI covering its tracks, uh, I just wanna say, yeah. [00:19:00] I did not see that part of the article where the, it says that this guy's number is public is a avail available on his public website.

So to me that really lessens the impact of this story. You know, it's like you said, if you can scrape the web publicly and find the number, then it's less scary to me that, you know, the it, it didn't necessarily come from a private database. So, I don't know. It kind of feels like more of a nothing burger article.

A little bit. I mean, it definitely indicative of how the general public perceives this stuff. Smither said he did not believe the chat bot and told it. Just giving a random number to someone is an insane thing for an AI to do. It's terrifying. Smithers said after he raised a complaint with meta, if they made up the number that's more acceptable.

The overreach of taking an incorrect number from save data is, has access to his particular worrying. So I don't know. It's,[00:20:00]

I think when you look at how, like you brush up against the limitations of LLMs and agents. When we see stuff like this because they, like, they sometimes hallucinate stuff and they don't know how they hallucinate it. Like they, they just, they don't know, like, 'cause they're not like on all the time.

They're not like a consciousness. They it, so they, they just sometimes hallucinate like bad answers to things. Right. And I think one thing, if you've ever tried to. Program anything that involves an LLM, like, you know, there's this idea of like, you can give it context, right? Like, so there's the prompt, which the surface level prompt might be me asking it, Hey, can you find the phone number of this company?

But behind the scenes, there might be all kinds of other context being [00:21:00] given to that LLM. That might be stuff like. You are a helpful agent. You always respond in a polite, you know, tone of voice. but there might also be deeper stuff in there. Like, never ever say this, never ever say that. there, there could be a whole list of complicated rules behind the scene that's not visible in that prompt.

And, you know, that might make you think, well, I don't like that. I don't like the fact that there's all these rules that I'm not seeing. But from a security perspective, if we want this agent in the background to go run around and like scurry around finding information for us, we have to have some of these rules in the background.

'cause like, one, it's just not useful. Sometimes these rules are put in place to, you know, give it a, a, a certain good output. but in other, other times you actually have situations where like. You know, people can really get sensitive information by talking to these chat bots. Like we've had multiple [00:22:00] demonstrations at the AI meet up here at Bitlab, where people have demonstrated like jailbreaking ais and like, I mean, you can just, you can Google search of, you can just find all kinds of examples of just bizarre information that LLMs will leak if you give them the right prompts.

So, given that this agent. Is probably hooked up to some kind of database. It has access to something. There's probably rules, coded into it about like, into the prompt that we can't see that, that, you know, guard what it can and can't do. so I don't know. I, if I had to guess here, what's probably happening is the reason why it's giving such.

Like kind of bullshit explanations for why it gives the information is there's probably rules in the coded into the context so that we can't see that govern what it's allowed to say to customers. I. Yeah, something like never admit to anything illegal or private or [00:23:00] that you did anything that would violate users' privacy or blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. And, and also like, you don't want, you don't want WhatsApp users being able to gain the AI into divulging critical backend secrets. Like, you don't want some kind of prompt where the WhatsApp agent tells you like, I'm, I'm oversimplifying this. But you don't want something where the WhatsApp agent can like tell you what version of database software they're running or, you know, grant access to areas of the data information that the user's not supposed to have access to.

And some people have like really, you know, found security loopholes where they can convince agents and LLMs to give them information they're not supposed to get. So I don't know that would, that would be, that's my read on what's going on here. But I, I don't know. I'm not a agent expert and, I don't know how [00:24:00] WhatsApp's AI works.

I'm just, piecing this together based on, you know, the, you know, my experience, you know, working with a, you know, ai, APIs and stuff. That's interesting. So what is the upshot of all of this? Number one, if, if you haven't listened to our episode on Instant Messengers messaging apps, please go back and do So, we talk extensively about WhatsApp and the, um, metadata collection that it, it does as an app.

And then you wanna, if you add on top of that, the meta AI that is now built into WhatsApp. you're gonna run into the same issues. So all of your, the, the AI likely has access to the same metadata or, or at least a, a portion of the metadata that, um, the WhatsApp app itself has. And [00:25:00] so I, I just personally, I don't like using WhatsApp because of all of the metadata being collected.

And I know that it's profitable for meta. so I, you know, this article doesn't really change anything in my opinion. It's kind of a weird quirk, but I don't know. It's kind of a, like I said, it doesn't change anything for me. Yeah. Yep. All right. Well, let's take a look at our, the next article that we have today.

Ooh. This one is. meta the company and Yandex, which if you aren't familiar with Yandex, Yandex is a company that is Russian based. They, they fulfill the same role that Google fulfills here in the us. They are a search engine and map software and stuff like that. So what this article says is that, meta and Yandex were shown to [00:26:00] be.

Exploiting Android phones and tracking data and users browsing habits based on a, a little hack. And for those of you who might know a little thing about web development, local host is the name of the website, quote unquote, that's just your local machine. this only takes place on Android.

So if you are an iOS user, you are not affected by this. But on Android, there were certain native Android apps, that from Meta and Yandex, and I think they list the meta apps. Here. It was Instagram. do you see the other ones? Uh, let's see. Might have been up. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Here we go. We found that native Android apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex [00:27:00] apps, including maps and browser, silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes. Yeah, so if you have the Facebook app install on Android, the Instagram app install on Android. Or, um, these other Yandex apps.

Then what they were doing was, normally Android has a little bit of sandboxing and, there's barriers put in place to prevent apps from listening to other apps. And so what the Instagram app and the Facebook app were doing was taking advantage of if you are in your mobile browser and you visit a site and it, it had a.

Meta tracking cookie in it, the cookie would then run in your browser in the background and report data back to the, and back to the native apps like your, um, Instagram and, I'm sorry, what was the other one? The Facebook app. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so by [00:28:00] using this little hack, they were able to break out of these, these privacy sandboxes that the.

Operating system's supposed to have in this case, and it was basically able to track all of your, or not all, but it was able to track a lot of your web surfing and browsing habits within that browser. So this was, um, and when, when this article was published, and this is kind of like a research, very technical article, but, a security researcher did this and was able to discover it and replicate it.

They, the response from meta was that they are, they just quietly stopped doing it, at least in this, these instances, but they never, as far as I know, I've been following this, they have not responded or apologized or said, we're not gonna do it anymore. They just stopped doing it in this particular case.

Now, that doesn't mean that they couldn't try doing it again in the future or, or a [00:29:00] slightly modified technique, but, um. They've been doing this for many years. Yandex has been doing it since 2017 and Facebook has been doing it since. let's see. I don't know, I think, I think I read earlier that they've been doing it since at least the beginning of 2024.

But if you go to the very top of this page. You'll see that they say there's an update as of June 3rd, 2025. The meta Facebook pixel script is no longer sending any packets or requests to local host. So essentially, Facebook stopped doing this. it says Yandex has also stopped the practice we described below.

So the, this is very shady. Obviously. It should come as no surprise to any of us at this point. That. Meta is doing everything in its power to track users. That is their business [00:30:00] model, right? They sell ads, that's their primary revenue stream. So that's what they're gonna do. You know, meta is gonna meta. the fact that they stopped doing it in this particular instance doesn't really give me any assurance that they're not gonna do it again in the future or do it on other apps or with other techniques.

But, I would say if you have the Facebook app installed on Android or you have the Instagram app installed on Android, consider uninstalling it. If you need to use these spyware laden, uh, services, you can use your browser. And, and one other thing about the Instagram app. This is not in this article, but we know that the Instagram app was using the microphone permission in the background without explicit user permission.

Like it was just, asking for it on upon install or, or like that was [00:31:00] the default permission. And this is why you, you get so many stories of people who say, oh yeah, I was having a conversation about something I've never talked about before. Or my friend recommended something to me, and next thing you know, I'm seeing ads for it on Instagram.

Right? These are the creepy phone spying things. So it's good to be explicit and specific phones, like when we say our phone is spying on us, it's a very vague statement. Like, well, what do you mean the phone is spying? Is the operating system spying? Is there a hardware listening device plugged into it?

Is it a particular app? And so in many cases, it is an app. And in many cases, that app is Instagram. I don't know if Facebook does this as well, the Facebook native app on Android, it's quite possible. It does. It wouldn't surprise me, but if you have either of these apps installed on Android, consider getting rid of them.

if you have to use these services, consider using them in your [00:32:00] mobile browser. That'll give you protection from these kinds of things. And so was this like, this was like the, Instagram app on Android could send a request to your browser while you're using it? I believe what was so. Insidious about this particular technique is that it could just do it in the background constantly. Oh, so you didn't even need the Instagram app open, right? Oh, that's weird. Yeah. Ugh. Okay.

Well that's gross. I, I agree. Okay. Yeah, so basically this thing is just like spying on your traffic. Nice. Yeah, it's pretty fucked up. Hmm. Well, don't use Facebook and Instagram, everybody. Yep. And if you're interested in the nitty gritty technical [00:33:00] details, this article goes into pretty good detail. They have a, a, video that shows them, like screen sharing, the Android app with monitoring the network requests.

And you can see. Just a stream of all of the websites that they're visiting and how the, the Instagram app has direct access to that. Yeah, that's creepy.

This is very, very detailed report. I love it. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. This person knows their stuff. Maybe we should give 'em a shout out. What's the author's name? Uh, well, I think it's actually a lot of people.

Yeah, this is like, they have a, you can reach the entire team, local mess at pm Do me authors are Anna Kath, garish, una Kar, cio, Velina Rodriguez Nuna. We are Sakara and Tim Lumin. So it looks like a lot of [00:34:00] PhD students and some professors, a lot of them have a, they look like they work at this same.

An organization called I-M-D-E-A networks. I'm not familiar with that, but it's probably a research institute. Yeah, I think so. Anyway, the link will be in the show notes. Check it out if you're interested.

Alright, the last article we want to take a look at today is. the headline is Ford Wants Patent for Tech, allowing Cars to Surveil and Report Speeding Drivers. The headline kind of says it all, but this has not been created yet. This is not an actual product in the wild, but a patent has been filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, and it is, the idea is that they.

The car itself can report on the speed of the car to [00:35:00] police, and so basically you might be going above the speed limit and your car tells the police on you. So it sounds very dystopian. I sincerely hope that this doesn't actually become a thing. I hope that if it ever did become a thing that. People would just revolt and refuse to buy it.

But you know, people are kind of oblivious. So what do you think says the patent explicitly states this idea for a system is specific for application in law enforcement vehicles such as the Ford Police interceptor, as it would automate a capability that law enforcement already have in used today? That, so it looks like it's more targeted at being inside of law enforcement vehicles specifically. I guess it's just that Ford makes consumer cars and police cars. Yeah, I, I mean, it sounds plausible, but [00:36:00] also I'm skeptical. You could install it as a feature in cars and then, you could, uh, set it up so that, Uh, governments could pay people to, narc on speeders. So you could actually get, you could actually get paid for sharing the data from your car with law enforcement and narcing on everyone around you. Yeah. It would be like a government app that's in the similar vein of ways, except instead of reporting to other ways users that Oh, there's a speed trap up ahead.

Watch out. Yeah, you're reporting, Hey cops, here's this person. Speeding. Give him a ticket, arrest him. Yeah. And then eventually that would solve the speeding problem because no one would speed. 'cause they would know that they were always, you know, because everyone would be sharing the data because they would want to get paid.

And so no one would speed. Is that, I don't know. Yeah. Who, who knows? It kind of reminds me of. Have you seen the [00:37:00] movie Minority Report? Mm-hmm. Yep. Well, in that movie there's a, it's in the future and there's, driverless cars, like self-driving cars, but they're ubiquitous. You know, every car on the road is a self-driving car, and there's a scene where the main character played by Tom Cruise is running from the cops.

You know, he's been wrongfully accused of some crime, and there's a chase scene. And he gets out of his, he, he's in a self-driving car and it's like a high speed car chase thing, but these cars are driving themselves. So he, he gets outta the car and he's standing on top of it as it's driving itself. And he's, and he's in traffic surrounded by all these other self-driving cars, and he's hopping from car to car.

And it's just sort of like a river of self-driving cars. Yeah. And then, uh, it goes over to the side, like these cars aren't confined to. Just driving on the ground, like they can drive on walls. So the road starts going vertically, and now he's hopping from like vertical car to vertical car. And it's, so I'm just, I'm picturing [00:38:00] the a, a future in which we all have, like, cars that just report on everything and are self-driving and like, we just are completely taken out of the loop as humans.

Yeah, it could be. I think the future is, uh, with, uh, driverless cars, you know. Which is, there's good, there's good things and there's bad things to that. Yeah. I just fear the, surveillance technology packaged with them. Yeah, totally. But it's, it's where it's going. So you gotta, you gotta get the compound off the grid out in the middle of nowhere with the, the diesel pickup truck and, you know.

Yeah. Well, you, you people who are interested in privacy. What they can do with regards to automobiles is you can actually buy older cars of course, but not everybody wants to do that. There is a new car coming out that has, that explicitly is advertises itself as not [00:39:00] having all of this newer technology, meaning newer surveillance technology as well.

Stephen D-2: Okay, so this is the, the car I was looking for. Toyota has a 10 th $10,000 pickup truck and uh, what is it called here? The, to Toyota Hilux. H-I-L-U-X. Hilux pickup. Yeah. And so the idea is that this is a no frills truck pickup truck. And it's very basic. Doesn't have any of the, um, a lot of modern, extra features, but it's just a basic pickup truck.

And this is, I guess this is meant for low GDP markets, which is like fancy way of saying other countries where they have less money. But privacy minded people have looked at this and thought, Hey, I'm interested because it has. None of the modern technology in it that is now so often used for spine, you [00:40:00] know, it doesn't have the computer tracking on, um, location and, all of that other stuff.

So I, this is just a fun aside, I wanted to mention, Hmm, the future for private privacy respecting automobiles is difficult, but not hopeless, I would say. Hmm. Yeah, that's cool to see. But, you know, I, I don't know. it's an interesting like thing for me 'cause I, I, I do just think that, you know, the future is going to be like driverless.

There's just, I don't, I just don't see like, there's so much momentum heading in that direction. I don't see it. Not, so the, the big thing for me is can somebody make a dry roadless car that's like private 'cause. You know so much of them right now, like involve them, like being kind of like a software as a service thing.

And eventually it'll be interesting to see if we can get to the point to [00:41:00] where you can have a driverless car that's totally compatible with society and yet, you know, also maintains your privacy. I want a sovereign driverless car. Yeah. And obviously for a long time we're still going to be able to take the wheel and, uh, intervene as a human, but I could see a time in the future that comes when there is no steering wheel at all and you're just completely at the mercy of the car, in which case it's so important for the car to work for you, the owner, not some other company or organization.

Similar to how we advocate on, on our computers and our phones and other computing devices. We want them to be under our control and working for us. The dream is that if we get to a a stage where everybody's got driverless [00:42:00] cars, we would also be able to do that with our vehicles. Yeah. All right. I don't have anything else to add on this topic.

I wanna get into a few things today. So it's been a, it's been several weeks since we had an episode, and I wanted to just check in and give a few updates on some of my sovereign computing journeys in the wild. the first thing I wanna talk about is call is when you have to use a phone number to sign up for a, a website.

Let's say you're creating a, a new. Google account or anywhere that requires a phone number just to create the account, just to move forward in your interaction, but you, but there's really no good reason for them to actually need your real phone number. I use a, a couple of services that I highly recommend.

One is called text verify.com and the other is SMS for sats.com. But I'm just gonna focus on Text Verify [00:43:00] because they essentially provide the same service. And what it does is you create a free account and then you, you can buy credits. So yes, it is a paid service, and you can do that with Bitcoin.

You could top up your balance pay with Bitcoin, you could also pay with credit card, et cetera. And once you have a balance, you can then generate a one time phone number, real phone number that is used solely for the purpose of getting a two factor authentication code. So I'm signing up for Google, let's say, or Ticketmaster.

They've got all these examples listed on their website. Tinder, Yahoo, PayPal, Uber, Walmart match.com. DoorDash, when you sign up for any of these sites, they ask for a phone number so that they can send a one time code to just so you can complete your account creation. And what you can do instead is you log into text verified you generate a one time number.

You paste [00:44:00] it into whatever service is asking for it, and then it gives you that one time code and text verified and boom, you're done. You never have to use that number again, and they don't have your personal information. So even if you have VoIP numbers that are private that we've talked about in previous episodes, go check those out for more information.

Those are still. Costly to spin up, you know, they're not free. so these text verified disposable numbers provide a really economical way of getting one time numbers right. It's, it's maybe, um, 25 cents for 10 cents or something like that for a one time number rather than where you have to buy a reusable number and then spin it up, pay for it, and then destroy it and get another one that's, it's a lot more costly and less efficient to do that.

Any, any thoughts on this? Steven? have you ever used this before? I have not used it. What I have been, using [00:45:00] lately, the, is like, kind of on a related topic is, simple login. and, uh, we've talked about that, you know, previously in terms of giving emails and it's like a, a similar problem. You go up to a place, they need your phone number for something.

Or want your phone number for something? I've been, going, you know, started going to the gym more recently and, uh, been trying out like different gyms and stuff and like, they, they all just have this like, just atrocious onboarding experience or like, even if you just want a day pass, they like, want all this personal information and they, they make you fill it out at like a tablet at the front.

oh God. It's the most annoying shit. you know, for the email I've been really happy. Previously, I was just been using Simple Login and the web browser. Now I've actually started using the app on my phone. I found it really a delight to use because if somebody demands an email from me through a required input field, I can pull out the Simple login app and spin up a, a new one and, you know, maybe type in the name of the gym or whatever.

And, uh, so it's been [00:46:00] super easy. I've been very pleased with it. I haven't had any issues with using it. and if you're already paying for a simple login through like your proton or a la carte or whatever, it's very easy. And they have a nice feature too if you do need, if you need to give it to somebody so that they can type it in, like somebody behind a counter, they have an option where you can make the email and then press the button to like, just bring up a screen on your phone that just displays that email, which is really handy.

'cause then you can flip the phone around and just show them the email. I did have an experience recently checking into a hotel where I tried to type in one of my simple login emails and the tablet, the self check in tablet, just thoroughly rejected my email because, um, it was like, not Gmail, at Gmail or at Yahoo, like it was set to like only check for like primary domains, which is so annoying.

But I was just, polite, but persistent with the person. No, that's my email. And they're rejecting it. This isn't, you know, they're like, okay, cool. I'll check you in manually. Yeah. They did it. So, but yeah, I, I haven't tried text [00:47:00] verified yet, but I'd like to try it. 'cause I've had pretty good luck with Simple Login and being able to just very quickly make a fresh email for every single business that I go to.

So it would be nice to, I don't know, try ever, phone numbers as well. I'm a big fan of Simple Login as well.

All right. Yeah, check out text verify.com at anytime. You need to create, have a one-time, uh, phone number, and then if text verified is not working for you, for whatever reason, SMS for SATs is a backup. the next thing I wanted to talk about is in our. Yeah, previously in our episode on phone numbers and, and getting private and sovereign phone numbers, I talked about how I was currently using Mint Mobile and they used to be able to, they, I used to be able to buy a sim and refill the EIM by, paying online anonymously by using Bit Refill where I'd, I'd buy a vanilla [00:48:00] Visa card with bitcoin.

And then I would use that vanilla visa to pay for my Mint mobile eim. A couple months ago, mint Mobile, mint Mobile stopped accepting those vanilla Visa cards. they didn't explicitly say they would stop doing it. They just, I tried to pay for it, and the account just kept failing. I tried multiple times with different cards and it kept failing.

So I came to the conclusion that they are just not accepting that anymore. So what I did was I went to. A Best Buy in person and I bought a physical Mint mobile sim card, and I was able to pay for that in cash without any identifying information, and that worked great, except for I don't want to have to do that every three months.

It was a three month SIM card, and so I had to go back after three months, I try. I went back and I tried to buy a 12 month sim because I figure. I'm okay with going once a year and buying a sim in person if it, if I get a fast [00:49:00] bandwidth and I get to pay. And honestly turns out they do not sell them for 12 months in person.

I don't know if they previously did and don't do it anymore, or if they just never have, but it wasn't available. So, I got another three month just to, since I was already there, but I, I started doing some more research on other options. One option I found is a company called Cloaked Wireless. They, they have, anonymous eims data eims, very similar to silent link where you can pay for these with Bitcoin anonymously.

However, I tried it out and I do not recommend it. The bandwidth was incredibly slow, even slower than silent link. So for me, that was just not acceptable as a daily driver. so I, I went back to my physical mint sim, but I was still looking for an alternative so that I wouldn't have to buy a new one every three months.

And what I found [00:50:00] is that at and t also sells prepaid sim cards, and you can get 12 months of that at a time. So when my mint, my current mint is expired, and that'll be fairly soon. I'm going to try out the at and t prepaid sim. And I will let you know on the next episode or, or when I've done that, I'll report back and, uh, that might be a good option for eims going forward or for physical sims going forward.

Any thoughts on that? Not really. Sounds good to me. Okay. the other thing I've been getting into is I set up a new self-hosting app on my home server. It's called Albi Hub. And for those of you who haven't heard of this, it's a way of having a lightning node and some other ancillary services tied to your lightning node in a, in a really easy package.

So it's got a nice ux, you can spin it up real quickly. It's got, [00:51:00] several LSPs liquidity service providers or lightning service providers that you can choose from. And, um, it makes it super simple to open a channel, have inbound liquidity, set all of that stuff up. It's very easy. I think it was a delight to use.

So I, if you're interested in setting up a lightning note and maybe you thought this is a little difficult, I don't know what to do, check out Albi hub. Very nice experience. one of the. Features that I'm able to use with Al Beh hub is now I can have self custodial boosts in streaming. So instead of having to use Fountain fm, which is is nice for not having to set anything up, but it is a custodial wallet, I now have, through my self-hosted Al Beh hub, the ability to plug my pod verse app.

And that's a, that's a podcasting app that has. podcasting 2.0 features, I'm able to plug my auth information into there and now I can stream and boost to [00:52:00] podcasts that I'm listening to completely from my self-hosted node node running on my own server. So that's pretty cool. Great experience there.

Once it's all set up. The other self-hosting lightning related thing that I've got set up now is I've set up my own self-hosted lightning address server and Noster name verification. You might, those of you who are noster aficionados might know this as the nip NIP zero five. Uh, standard and that just, it allows you to have a human readable name that looks like an email address for your noster nub, which is a long string of characters that nobody ever wants to type out or have to say out loud.

So, for example, if my email ad, if my domain name that I own is bravo.com, I could have a lightning address. That's jordan@bravo.com. And I could also [00:53:00] have a noser address, that's jordan@bravo.com. And so if somebody is going to send me Lightning, they can just send it toJordan@bravo.com. They don't have to request an invoice from me and have it be an interactive back and forth.

And then for Noser, likewise, you could look me up@jordanatbravo.com. bravo.com is not actually my domain name, so don't look me up with that. Uh, I just using that as an example. One last thing I wanted to say about this, this self-hosted lightning address thing, it's called Rust Dress, and our own Natasha here at Bitlab wrote it.

Oh, and it is called Rust Dress because it is a lightning address written in rust, the programming language. So, uh, yeah, I set it up and it was super cool. I got it up in a couple hours of tinkering and now I'm a fully. Self custodial self-sovereign light, not lightning address, having Bitcoin or nice [00:54:00] rust dress.

I did not know he made that. That's cool. And I am currently, for those of you who are Nick's nerds, I'm currently working on packaging his rust dress application to be available in the nix packages repository. So it's as simple as doing like a single command and nix and it would install it for you. Oh, nice.

That's cool. Then it would just install it and you'd be able to run it from your Nick system? Yep. Or any system that's running the Nicks package manager. Got it. Yeah. And then from there, I guess you just need to expose the ports properly to the outside world and all of that. Yep. Suite.

So that's everything that I've been up to lately in terms of cyber computing, self-hosting, and privacy. anything that you wanted to check in with Steven? Any, what have you been working on? Anything related to this topic? Oh, not really. yeah, I mean, I think all [00:55:00] of my fun anecdotes I've sprinkled in throughout the rest of, uh, rest of this episode.

So yeah, I think that's probably it for me for today. All right, cool. Well, that's all we have for today. We wanna remind you that you can boost into the show. We'd love to hear from you. that would be the Sovereign Computing Show. You can look it up on Fountain and you can use Fountain to Boost. You can also use other apps to boost like Pod verse.

I'm particularly enamored of that one at the moment. You can also email us sovereign@atlbitlab.com and. Yeah. Anything else you wanted to add, Steven? No, I don't think. No, I think so. I think I'm good. Alright. Thanks a lot everyone. We'll see you next time. Catch you later.

Stephen DeLorme: Hey, thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to learn more about anything that we discussed, you can look for links in the show notes that should be in your podcast player, or you can go to atlbitlab. com [00:56:00] slash podcast. On a final note, if you found this information useful and you want to help support us, you can always send us a tip in Bitcoin.

Your support really helps us so that we can keep bringing you content like this. All right. Catch you later.