Look into the benefits offered by your other credit cards. My identity was stolen a few years ago and I learned like a few months ago that one of my credit cards offers free identity protection services if/when your identity gets stolen.

They handle all of the annoying shit like contacting the bank, getting the debt off of your credit card, etc.

If not, and you were part of the Equifax (or any) hack, you likely have this same service available to you for free.

There was an encryption system a few years ago that offered this out of the box.

I can’t remember the name of it but there was a huge vulnerability and basically made the software unusable.

Crypt box or something like that.

This exactly. NAS+RAID gives you a backup of your local media. It can account for one of your three copies and one of your storage mediums. But you still need something off site.

So assuming you had a copy on your computer proper, it could work. Better than no backups.

I wish there was a good way to store a backup of my media. I recently suffered a terrible hard drive issue. I lost a terabyte of media. Fortunately, the pirate ship has saved me and has me rethinking some of my backup methodologies.

Outside of periodically backing up onto an external hard drive, I haven’t been able to find a reasonably priced online backup solution that isn’t going to fuck me when I have to pull data out. Egress fees are killer.

Edit: I just saw your edit. Great job fixing it! God I hate that you had to do this.

What is the make and model of the wheelchair and the wheels?

Links to their official website would be helpful.

Did your wheelchair come with a regular manual? A link to a PDF would also help.

If you want to go down a more…questionable route, you could call the wheelchair provider number. Use social engineering by saying you’re from a doctor’s office and you can’t get the wheels to activate.

It helps to have a friend do this for you. You want a buffer and you want your friend to say “I am not sure” or “I don’t know” a lot. That way the company gives him or her more information on what to do next before calling you back.

This is a terrible situation. Maybe your insurance will spring for the cost. It’s so infuriating that if I had access, I probably wouldn’t sleep until I figured it out and posted it everywhere.

Jesus fucking mother of Christ.

Ok, I’m going to skip my indignation.

I’m not an app developer or a wheel chair person. That said, we need some info to help you better.

• What phone? Android or iOS?
• link to the app (and a link it’s APK or whatever iPhones equivalent to an APK would be)
• instructions on how you register, e.g. is registration tied to your phone, the wheelchair, or both?

Here is some general hacking advice:

• check online for your wheelchairs “provider” manual. I “hacked” my CPAP machine a few years back. My doctor forgot to turn on heated tubing and the setting was hidden behind a “provider” menu. Chances are good that there will be a similar manual for your wheelchair.
• if you haven’t already, search for the make and model of your wheelchair and see if there are forums or discussion boards
• typically, physical access is the best access. Depending on how your phone communicates with the chair, you might able to spy on the signals that it uses. My guess is Bluetooth. It probably is encrypted but medical devices are notoriously easy skimpy on their tech security. Might be worth a try
• If you have the tools and the knowledge, consider taking apart the wheelchair to access the physical components. Information like the processor, chip set, etc will make it easier to understand how it works. While you might expect custom boards and software, more and more devices are going the Raspberry Pi or Pico route because they are cheaper to manufacturer than to do a whole custom board. If it’s a run of the mill consumer board, you have a lot more attack vectors.

Often settings like these are based on PKI(Public Key Infrastructure), meaning that the program on your wheelchair likely knows the public key for the company and will test any input to change the settings will require the private key. Again, generally speaking.

But also generally speaking, medical equipment, especially consumer equipment, has to deal with the lowest common denominator, meaning people who don’t have apps, who don’t know what a smart phone is, etc. Because of that, my hunch is that the setting is in plain text and you just need to change it.

You also have to remember that the people setting this up are often in doctors offices, which means it must be easy to do because time is of the essence. The doctor would not recommend their product if it takes more than a few minutes to set up.

I’m sorry I can’t give you better more specific advice but hopefully you can figure this out.

Obligatory: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T0fAznO1wA8

If you ever go to r/relationship_advice and read posts where their friend T did S with P and then A (23 F) got into with G, then yeah…Alice and Bob suddenly makes a lot of sense.

Yeah…

Hate to break it to you but our world is owned by like 11 companies

That’s the irony of all of this. I too would donate to a project that was actively trying to do this, even donate to their legal fund. I’d probably pay more than the subscription!

These asshole companies just don’t realize that a determined developer and engineer will move heaven and earth to make sure that their freedoms (as in speech) aren’t restricted.

I don’t care if it’s illegal. It’s my fucking car. Once you sell it to me, it ceases to be your property. You leave $100 bill in the glove compartment before you sell it to me? Well it’s mine now.

You leave software on my car’s computer? Welp, it’s mine now.

They intentionally didn’t roll the subscription into the sale price. That’s the goal. They want that sweet, predictable, monthly income that they sell their investors on.

They also figured that if you’ve found your car, you’re less likely to walk away for what is essentially a fraction of the car’s price.

I honestly hope the next car I buy has shit like this. Because boy am I going to make it my mission to jailbreak it and release my code open source.

Pretty sure that’s desert terrain.

The problem is that because the hardware is there, a determined person with physical access can change the settings to join a network you don’t control.

Ideally, you can open the TV and remove the wifi modules but I suspect that might be beyond the skills of most TV owners.

Tbh, I stopped owning a TV since college. I watch everything on my computer or phone now.

When you share your playlist or have Spotify hooked up to some other service like discord, it shows the name associated with the account.

And changing that name is not as straight forward as you might think.

Given the fact that it’s shared so easily, I wouldn’t be surprised if email addresses could be exposed with the right options.

Not necessarily shady.

I use 10 minute email if a merchant requires me enter an email account before seeing the total price on an item (including shipping). That’s the most common pattern I’ve seen. My guess is that they want to ping you to complete the purchase.

Or a website might require free registration in order to view the content.

One place I use 10-minute email is actually Spotify. I didn’t want to give them my Gmail address since your name is exposed to the world via their sharing API.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of bad uses for it as well. But privacy minded people use it too.

The only correct regex for email is: .+@.+

So long as the address has a local part, the at sign, and a hostname, it’s a valid email address.

Whether it goes somewhere is the tricky part.

Doesn’t surprise me one bit. I’ve noticed that a lot of websites will only accept .com and a few will only accept email addresses from popular providers (Gmail, Hotmail, outlook, etc.)

My guess is that it’s trying to reduce spam and fake account generation.

Probably because anyone can contribute to it. But you have to pay to use them.

Kinda like another website that recently made this change…

Looks like this happened a year ago and analytics can be opted out.

If you are still using Nova, make sure you go to Settings> Advanced > Disable “Error & usage reporting”

Not sure if that fixes anything…

I’ll keep watching this post…I’m curious about recommendations. The default pixel launcher is…just garbage

Anyone else remember the first ad-pocalypse?

Like when OG AdBlock was created and there was an all-out race between individual websites and AdBlock?

Then OG AdBlock sold out and allowed “approved” ads to still show.

We are seeing history repeat. The only reason ads survived was due to increasing number of users who weren’t using adblock.

Now, with market saturation, Google is starting to fight back.

I would absolutely love to see a revitalization on proxy software specifically designed to eliminate ads and tracking. I haven’t looked into this in quite some time but I think we’re crossing into this territory now.

The pessimist in me says to look out for a bill authored by Google to make adblocking illegal.

But the optimist in me says “the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.”