What if the glasses come with a little flag stuck in the frame that says “I’m born blind, this thing helps me be less disabled. It’s not filming you.”? I mean, there are genuinely helpful use cases for such things out there.

No, you got me wrong. My position is that I don’t want anything that is capable of recording and that looks like an object that normally can’t do that. So I tried to imagine how something may have camera to capture what user sees, but not be able to store the recordings - only process it in like real-time, or close to it.

I may not understand the hardware design good enough, but I think if you make an open source device, it should allow custom firmware. If you allow custom firmware, someone will write a version of it that will work around the restriction on recording somehow. To be clear, I’m not concerned about communication protocol interception, but about someone changing how such device handles the data it captures.

Oh, and all that applies not just to camera, but also to microphone. Damn, such a good topic to talk about.

Actually, there is a way to use a camera, but I’m not sure if it’s possible from technical or usability perspectives.

Imagine a device that has a camera, but no data connectivity. No WiFi. Only USB for charging and firmware updates. Maybe BT for firmware or control from app. No memory card slot either. Internal storage reserved for system only, camera software cannot store videos or images persistently.

This will probably have to be not open source, especially if bluetooth is present - otherwise someone will figure out how to capture camera feed with a custom firmware.

But if possible, such device can use camera for smart navigation, object recognition, some basic tasks on-device, depending on how much compute (and battery) can be placed into such a small package.

Smart glasses with HUD and speakers, and bluetooth, no cloud dependency - yes, please.

With camera - absolutely not. This would be just a hidden recording device, absolutely capable of intruding other’s privacy, regardless if it’s cloud connected or not. I realize that camera provides a lot of functionality, but I just don’t see the way how it can preserve privacy of other people and fit in glasses form factor.

You don’t need much money to pay for Posteo, it’s 12 EUR a year. If you paranoid enough to suspect that bank tracks bills that you withdraw from ATM, just pay with these bills for a sandwich in a small convenience store. No standard surveillance camera will catch the serial numbers on the bills. Maybe do it a few times in different places. Then send the envelope through the drop box in suburbs or rural area where are no cameras. Don’t bring your phone to any of these locations. You’ll be fine.

Obviously, your threat model matters. You didn’t say in the original post anything about it, and the mainstream privacy methods, I believe, are mostly to protect from general surveillance by commercial entities. If you have to worry about feds, maybe just going offline is a safer choice.

Google Pixel has a standard “Now Playing” feature that is using on-device recognition. Well, you have to trust Google on that, though.

I started from zero with Forgejo, so Gitea is not a consideration. I just don’t need latest and greatest as long as security is covered. But I finally noticed that v15 is the new LTS, so that’s what I hope to run during the next couple of years.

Well, before your response, v11 was the latest LTS release, received security patches and did all I wanted it to do. Now, I actually did look at the new release and found out that 15 is a new LTS. So, thank you! I guess it’s time to review the breaking changes and get prepared.

I’m happily running v11 LTS - I have enough to do besides dealing with breaking changes every 3 months.

Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.

The fuck it does. Claude is already censored - you can’t get a recipe of a poison, schematics for a bomb, an advice on how to hide a body. If you can, then it’s Anthropic engineers didn’t do their job.

Knowing who is using it helps either with conditional censorship, or helping governments to track people based on their prompts, or just plainly lying and using data for analytics and training. All these easons are shit.

And don’t tell me this is to protect the kids again. Let the parents do their job.

Look at maple ai (trymaple.ai). This looks like one of the most privacy oriented projects in the space

I would not keep up any hopes on Ubuntu. Canonical will comply with any laws