Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete
futurism.com
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Recipients of bionic eyes from Second Sight are starting to go blind after the company behind the technology stopped supporting their products.

Welcome to Capitalism, where you can lose your vision because some corporation didn’t get enough money.

Is this the innovation people keep talking about

Arsen6331 ☭
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212Y

Yes, Capitalism does in fact create innovation, in precisely the wrong direction.

SpaceCowboy
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102Y

Everything is a scam under capitalism.

capitalists will somehow make this the fault of the people who bought the bionic eyes to see

Arsen6331 ☭
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162Y

Of course. Clearly, they should’ve bought the company’s stock if they liked it so much.

comfy
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102Y

Obviously they should have created a demand for bionic eyes.

Have they considered simply stop being blind?

smh its so simple!

Arsen6331 ☭
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22Y

Of course, how did they not think of this before??? You deserve a nobel prize!

Cool, prepare to live in cyberpunk dystopia.

This is literally CP2077 Corpo intro when weird cucks in suits come and be like “You’re fired, all your implants will cease to function in 60 seconds, good luck”

SpaceCowboy
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32Y

This character from the Secret Life of Walter Mitty was an excellent portrayal of layoff consultants

For real tho!

I’d like a pair of bionic eyes without a Wi-Fi card, please

According to the article, the eyes are still working for now, but if something goes wrong they’re screwed.

Very tricky situation. Having the government do things like this is one option (although the government isn’t doing it), but having laws forcing these corporations to be open source is another tentative solution.

Audited open-source (software and hardware) + no auto-updates would be the only way I could trust-ish a private company (or a bourgeois government) with this. Unfortunately, the people who need this probably can’t afford to be cautious, but imagine what would happen if the eyes stopped working while the user was driving

I argue it needs to be free/libre software not just open source. Yes there is a difference; “Open Source” is usually used as a marketing term by companies and refers to software that is under a permissive license, which doesn’t necessarily grant the users any freedoms; It can still contain proprietary binaries or have strings attached in some other way. In other words it can still serve the interests of private person(s) by only releasing parts (usually non-crucial) of the source code.

Copyleft licenses are the only way to go here if you want software where the user has 100% control.

I’m aware of the difference, but even with a copyleft license, there may still be proprietary blobs (e.g. Linux). That’s why auditing and general transparency are important.

What happens when you miss your neuralink payment?

comfy
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92Y

Maybe they get to ‘forcibly employ’ your body to pay off debts.

We’ve already seen teledildonic chastity ransomware, I’m now waiting for limb rootkits.

Well I guess it was inevitable after corporations made consumer electronics “leased” rather than bought. Just look at the text for Windows 10 license for example. Or the notorious John Deere tractors. Prosthetics were a next logical step.

Arsen6331 ☭
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142Y

These corporations are a plague upon this earth. I’ve spent a couple years setting up my own servers running my own services, some of which I wrote myself (search engine), and buying open-source hardware to distance myself from them.

Well done!

some of which I wrote myself (search engine)

Meta search engine or independent with its own crawler?

Arsen6331 ☭
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02Y

Metasearch engine that strips all identifying information and generates a random user agent for every request. I also have it going through a VPN so that my IP can’t be used for identification.

If you ever want to go independent, since some search engines (namely Google and DuckDuckGo) censor search results, there is always YaCy.

If you do want to give it a try make sure to run it on decent machine (good performing multi-core CPU, at least 8 GB of free RAM and at least 1 TB of storage space).

I actually have been running my own YaCy instance on my homelab Server for a few months now. Currently it has indexed about 13 million web pages. Right when this shit with Ukraine started and I read that DuckDuckGo is now censoring russian search results I had enough. And first thing I did was search for things like “China concentration camps” or “North Korea escape” and blacklisted all the US media that popped up. Like you said:

These corporations are a plague upon this earth.

Arsen6331 ☭
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12Y

Yes, YaCy is great, but I currently don’t have a free machine with enough resources. I run most of my services from Single Board Computers because they’re very power efficient and cheap. Most services don’t use anywhere near their capacity, so I have plenty of room to expand. The unfortunate downside is that I can only run resource-intensive programs on my powerful servers that are all currently in use. I am getting some more powerful servers though, and might run YaCy when I do.

comfy
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132Y

It would be morbid but interesting to know if there are accidents caused by this, leading to litigation. Take the close call with the stairs in the article, or a car crash. How would an (e.g.) US court treat it? Do recipients sign away rights?

Arsen6331 ☭
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112Y

I would not be surprised if the company forced the patients to sign a contract with a Limitation of Liability and Arbitration clause in there somewhere to prevent lawsuits.

Purdue addicted a nation to oxy and the family got to keep their billions. Capitalists live by different rules.

They weren’t joking when they said that disabled people face dystopic levels of suffering under capitalism. Pay to live, pay to see, pay to reduce pain, pay to breathe.

Breadbeard
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i bet it runs linux, i bet it can be easily hacked… because an item of this size & complexity of function cannot have a very secure connection and thus could probably easily be reverse engineered to connect to a raspberry posing as the company server. just man in the middle yourself…

Arsen6331 ☭
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52Y

Only if the company no longer runs the server, you can’t exactly reverse-engineer it because you don’t know what the server responds with to the client’s requests.

Breadbeard
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52Y

well, there is always a service listening on some port to a server answer. so it’s usually about identifying the service waiting for a server response and reroute the services listening to this process to ignore it. kinda like shitpiping specialist Robert Deniro in Terry Gilliams “Brazil”

Arsen6331 ☭
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22Y

Well, the way it usually works is that there is a port open on the server and the client connects to that port, sends something, and then receives a response. If there’s no longer a server running, connecting to the port will fail, so even if you can open the same port and get the client to connect to it, you’ll get the data the client sends but you won’t know what to send back. If it’s a standardized protocol, then yes, you can do that, but the likelihood of that being the case is very low.

Breadbeard
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the way i know companies is that they usually steal open source code rightaway or they modify standard stuff slightly to throw sand into peoples eyes rather than waterproofing everything. either way, you should be able to find the services listening to the service listening to the port, server answer or no server answer, if you know the name of the service, you can find the services listening to it or waiting for some response from it (changing a 0 into a 1 in some otherwise empty textfile in the extremely stupid case)

Arsen6331 ☭
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32Y

You can figure out what the client is doing, but this wouldn’t be a one-way conversation. Client sends a request, server sends a response. The issue is that even if they’re using a standard general-purpose protocol such as HTTP or WebSocket, they still send data over it. You wouldn’t know what that data is. The only possible way to find out would be either to capture packets going between them, which doesn’t work if there’s no server or it’s encrpyted, or by examining the source code, which is not available. Either way, without both halves of the connection or the source code present, you cannot do anything.

Breadbeard
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12Y

i mean it’s all hypothetical in the end since i ve never had the thing before me, but i m saying: due to the size of the device, hard encryption and continuous server connection is not probable and spoofing and reverse engineering of the device probably doable for a person of advanced IT security or reverse engineering knowledge…

Arsen6331 ☭
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12Y

It’s not impossible, but not the easiest thing to do. It would take years to do for full compatibility because you’d be completely blind and have to basically try things until it works.

Breadbeard
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12Y

well, i wasn’t suggesting the person blinded by the vendors neglect should be tasked to solve this… but from the article it seems that is exactly what they intend to happen…

Arsen6331 ☭
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12Y

I meant blind to the way the protocol works, not literally blind

Imperator Furiosa would have killed Immortan Joe earlier but her arm reached its end of service life and quit working.

AgreeableLandscape☭
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