TaviRider

In America there’s a concerted effort to destroy public education. That means there are insane policies like this one: Some public schools lose a bit of funding each time a student doesn’t show up. Doesn’t matter that the school’s expenses stayed the same. It’s not like they could tell a teacher to go home 15 minutes early and reduce their pay accordingly, which would be awful for the teachers anyway. So schools are extremely motivated to keep kids in the school.

Yes, device management systems can push apps directly to devices, but the devices have to be managed first. So I think it probably is about the lack of Google Play.

One of the hardest parts of managing devices is getting them enrolled in device management in the first place. Microsoft uses the Microsoft Authenticator app to authenticate users as part of the enrollment process, so they know which employee is using the device and how to configure it. They need a reliable app store to distribute that app, and they need to do it before the device is managed. So usually they rely on Google Play.

It tells when the user is online. This is useful for sending spam, because being on top of the inbox makes it more likely your message will be read.

To be fair, I doubt anyone’s implemented this specifically for ICMP. Instead I’d expect tracking that watches for any IP traffic whatsoever, and that happens to include ICMP.

ICMP reveals your IP address, which is easily correlated with other traffic…

Ahh, “Weev” is a four-letter version of “Weave” the same way “Chex” is a shortened “Checkerboard”, perhaps referring to the Ralston Purina checkerboard logo.

But what’s Weev?

And IntelliSync, so you could have the same contacts in your PC and your Palm Pilot.

I still wouldn’t trust it because of homograph attacks.

There’s a fatal flaw in the premise. It is impossible to fasten something to a cat.

Yeah. The huge legal distinctions between different ways of unlocking a device seem absurd. Comprehensive privacy legislation would help.

Authorities with a warrant can drill into a safe to get to its contents. That’s legally distinct from forcing someone to unlock the safe by entering the combination. It takes some mental effort to enter a combination, so it counts as “testimony”, and in the USA people can’t be forced to testify against themselves.

The parallel in US law is that people can be forced to unlock a phone using biometrics, but they can’t be forced to unlock a phone by entering a passcode. The absurd part here is that the actions have the same effect, but one of them can be compelled and the other cannot.

The downloadable shortcut described here also worked for me.