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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
January 28, 2026 at 8:37am January 28, 2026 at 8:37am
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Here's a source I don't share often: PCMag.
The funny part, the whole reason I saved this link, is the description of a "poop-analyzing toilet" system as "end-to-end encrypted."
That's where my amusement stops.
A toilet camera that can analyze your poop isn’t as private as its marketing suggests.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I say!
In October, Kohler Health announced the Dekoda, a $599 camera that hangs on the rim of your toilet and analyzes your stool and urine for potential health insights.
I am moved to wonder: is this article really a privacy warning or, given the repetition of the vendor, product name, and price tag, is it actually an ad?
However, Kohler designed the camera’s sensors to face downward and advertised the system as end-to-end encrypted, a term that often implies the provider can’t read the user’s data.
What's it matter where the camera is facing? Some asshole seeing my asshole is far less worrisome to me than someone being able to exploit the data. For instance, selling it to health insurers. "Oh, don't be paranoid; that won't happen." Maybe not, but the risk is too high. It's like those period-tracker apps, which women living in red states quickly found out were notifying the authorities whenever a pregnancy was possible, so they could be investigated for abortion if the period started up again too soon.
Oh, wait, that didn't happen. I know. At least I don't think it has, not yet. But it's not outside the realm of possibility. Government access to data normally considered private is absolutely possible, supposedly with a search warrant, but either way, "legal investigation" is one absolute exemption to privacy.
But a former technology advisor to the Federal Trade Commission took a closer look at the encryption claims, and found them to be bogus.
I'm not going to get into whether this one guy was correct or not. I don't much care because I'm not going to buy a poop anal-yzer either way.
I know a lot of people have given up on privacy. Those people are as annoying to me as I'm sure I am to those who haven't yet given up on the idea that we'll do anything about climate change.
End-to-end encryption is most often used when talking about messaging apps... The term means that only the sender and recipient’s devices can decrypt any data, preventing the service provider from reading the messages.
This is why WhatsApp and Signal can’t hand the contents of you messages over to law enforcement. The encryption keys are stored on the devices, not the company’s servers.
I vaguely remember reading recently that at least one of those apps isn't truly secure from that, either.
Kohler Health also confirmed that it can harness the collected data to train AI programs, a concern that Fondrie-Teitler flagged.
Great. Now the AI is literally up our asses.
In response to the privacy concerns, it noted: “Privacy and security are foundational to Kohler Health because we know health data is deeply personal. We welcome user feedback and want to ensure they understand that every element of the product is designed with privacy and security in mind.”
My own internal poop-analyzer is tuned only to that which emerges from the male bovine, and it just flashed red. |
© Copyright 2026 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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