Seeking Community Input: Help Us Design a More Accessible Power Bank (Free Prototype for Testers)

João, again, you’re incorrect. Since you keep shifting the goalposts, here goes.

What goal posts are you talking about? And how many times did I shift them? Do you even understand what shifting or moving the goal posts actually means?

First. Engagement. Engagement doesn’t magically mean sticking around arguing in the comments for three days.

I was the one who mentioned engagement in the first place, and I explained what I meant too, so unless you can demonstrate that my new arguments assume a completely new position, you are not proving your allegations.

I can go on but the point is; That is engagement. Pretending otherwise is just you redefining the word to suit your argument.

You might not agree with my definition of engagement, which is perfectly fine, but that doesn't mean that I'm moving the goal posts, or that I am using any other kind of informal logic in the debate for that matter. As long as I make my points clear, and I did explain exactly what I meant when I used that term, which you seem to have understood, then there's no miscommunication, therefore even if my definition did not match the general definition of the term, it would remain valid. As a matter of fact, defining terms is very common practice in law, so you are totally misconceived.

Second. Your “malicious hardware must have liability behind it” point is just wrong. There are entire Amazon storefronts filled with counterfeit junk. Drives advertised as Toshiba turning out to be knockoff western digitals. Counterfeit USB cables with embedded keyloggers. No liability. No accountability. They still exist. They still end up in people’s homes.

Where did I deny the existence of such products? I do know that they exist, but I also know that if I buy something off Amazon, they are liable for any damage that the products cause me or my property. I don't even care who the seller is, because the retail marketplace that I'm doing business with is Amazon. This is totally different from having a device shipped by a completely anonymous entity to my mailbox that I decide to bring home and plug to my systems, since then if anything goes wrong, nobody is going to take the blame for the damage. Even if this wasn't the case and consumers were really as unprotected as you think they are, an anonymous entity that cannot even be shamed for potential damaging practices should be enough to make people feel weary of their activities, so you really have no point.

And again, this is irrelevant anyway, because nobody was plugging anything in. You’re treating a Google Form like a rogue USB stick someone found in a parking lot.

I was obviously not talking about the form itself there, but rather about the power bank that would allegedly be delivered to the testers by mail, and I'm not even sure how anything I said could have led you to think otherwise. Your next claims of projection and risk assessment are both entirely based on this totally ridiculous deduction so consider them refuted by this paragraph as well, and the irony of saying that you take cybersecurity very seriously on the same paragraph where you attempt to devalue my advice because you think you are smart enough to correctly assess all the risks, and go as far as to acknowledge that even smart people fall for scams, is definitely not lost on me.

Fifth. Paranoia. You’re claiming you weren’t escalating anything, but the moment you dragged in identity theft, surveillance, impersonation, malicious devices, unapproved hardware “exploding,” and data exfiltration from plugging in rogue accessories, you were absolutely slipping into worst-case-scenario territory. That is paranoia by definition. You took a simple optional survey and stretched it into a cyber-horror movie script.

Well, for someone claiming that I moved the goal posts by redefining a term to fit my argument as if it was some form of informal logic, I find it odd that you actually decided to do that here, because the definition of paranoia definitely requires feelings of persecution, and the scenario that I mentioned was just a hypothesis of what could potentially happen if this thread had been made by a malicious actor, a possibility that cannot yet be ruled out at this point, but that I also made clear that my intent was to advise, not accuse.

Sixth. “Only one person needs to be compromised.” Compromised with what? The original form didn’t ask for name. Didn’t ask for email. Didn’t require login. Didn’t require shipping address. So what data is being “compromised”? And how does one person’s shipping address, assuming someone willingly gave it, compromise anyone else? It doesn’t. And no, “your network IP” doesn’t magically give someone your exact location — especially not with dynamic IPs or VPNs. That’s not how that works.

For someone who takes cybersecurity very seriously and is way too smart to be scammed, I find it weird that you don't even consider the security implications of plugging a random device shipped by an anonymous entity to your mailbox into your smartphone's power port, which is also its data port and thus can potentially be exploited for local malware injection. It's this kind of overconfidence that I decided to advise against on this thread, as well as why I labeled my previous comment "Hubris", which is the perfect term for what you are currently displaying.

Seventh. Your point about scammers not needing required fields is wrong. Scammers pressure you. They create fake urgency, fake deadlines, fake logins, fake authority. They force information out of you. They do not leave the critical data optional. If this was a scam, the shipping address would have been required. The form would have forced a login. It would have required an email. It would have used urgency and fear. That’s how actual social engineering works.

This is the evidence that you think you know everything there is to know about social engineering, which you probably just learned from asking a large language model but I have no problem arguing against those either so it's all fine. Social engineering is not just about exploiting other people's psychological weaknesses for your own benefit, and much less about fake urgency, that's just one of the most common techniques used to wield it as a weapon, but there are lots more, since the whole concept is actually all about getting people to do things that they normally wouldn't, which also includes helping them overcome their own psychological obstacles. The fact that you lack notion of all this shows that your understanding of this concept is superficial at best.

And again, projection. Every accusation you threw at me about “misunderstanding social engineering” is actually the gap in your own argument. You’re describing scenarios that don’t match the reality of what happened.

I'm not even sure you even understand what projection means at this point. In fact, my conclusion is that you are way in over your head, drifting wildly with absolutely no clue of what you're talking about, while trying to come across as an expert, which is just ridiculous. From previous interactions with you on this forum, my take is that instead of taking the opportunity to learn from debates, you take them as personal attacks, and that doesn't contribute to anything positive. It's fine to have questions and ask them, your position is not weakened by actually trying to understand what I'm saying, but it is weakened by misfiring and straw manning, which is what you're doing likely from a position of ignorance.

I notice that most complained that there is not much accessible apps or adoptive tech for our iPhone or apple products. Yet when someone come here and ask for support for testing or input people mostly talked about how much and if is subscription or upset that they need to provide their data. I get it and people are adults capable to say yes or no to share or not share. If we have concern, we can bring it with respect and ask applevis to give us more info. Also thanks for those who have concern and let us know without getting negative. Long live cats and if you do not want to share data, you are free not to do so. Keep warm all.

Some people don't seem to understand that it's perfectly possible and even reasonable for a group of people to have completely distinct views on a single subject, so using other people's opinions to imply that I am personally being incoherent makes zero sense, and in fact I challenge anyone to browse my entire forum history in search for any actual accessibility complaint from me. This is a pretty bold statement that I'm making, and I'm well aware that someone would actually find an example or two if they really wanted to because I don't remember everything I said exactly the way I said it so there's some chance that it might have happened, but I feel comfortable doing so because my default stance is to try to find solutions to my own problems, not to unload the blame on someone else.

Stating that there's little to improve when it comes to the accessibility of a power bank is perfectly in-line with my normal behavior and thus pointing out the red flags here is in no way a demonstration of incoherence. Even if I had a history of complaining about accessibility, that doesn't mean that I would be desperate to the point of taking a bait like this and letting my guard down. The fact of the matter is that this thread shows very low effort, and up until now there's absolutely no way to confirm that it's genuine, so the people defending it are actually standing on their own wishful thinking, not reasoning, which is what I'm warning about. At this point I'm debating with people who for whatever reason decided to step in to defend some entity that they know absolutely nothing about, not because said entity is being attacked, but because I am presenting actual reasons to justify not trusting them, so to these people I'm some kind of agressor.

There's a historical figure, commonly considered the godfather of modern political science, called Niccolo Machiavelli, who studied and documented mass manipulation techniques, whom I recommend reading about, because what's happening here is a perfect showcase of one of those techniques. I'm not saying this to accuse the original poster of any wrongdoing here, only pointing out yet another psychological weakness that a malicious actor could be taking advantage of in order to get the audience to silence those who can actually see through the bullshit. The technique that I'm talking about is avoiding self-defense in order to make the audience perceive the ill intended as a victim and step in to defend them.

I think by now we get it and we are capable to make a choice. It is nice that you are concern and let people know but continue to do do so is over doing it. Long live cats.

Looks like there was an additional area that added a place for an e-mail address, so I re-did the survey and put mine in there. I was wondering why there was no place to put in an e-mail address in the beginning there, but it’s there now, so I put it in. I look forward to seeing where this project will be heading from here. ☺️