Today's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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Awrrr
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#3511211 14-Jul-2026 11:39

MikeAqua:

I only tell my doctor stuff I would be comfortable with a future theocracy or caliphate finding out about 🤣.

Not just the future. Doctors already have an enforcement function in this country. Doctor/patient confidentiality is a myth.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

kingdragonfly

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#3511220 14-Jul-2026 12:17

It's better to have an ordinary conversation with your general practitioner now than to end up seriously injured and needing emergency medical treatment from EMTs.

Trust me, you ain't the first, and you won't be the last.

Frankly it's so mundane, you might as well be asking about cotton swabs.

NZ doctors only have a few legal exceptions to report

Notifiable infectious diseases
Child abuse concerns
Fitness-to-drive concerns
Gunshot wounds
Threats of serious harm

Regarding privacy, worst that could happen is an unexpected party invitation from your GP (just kidding)

MikeAqua

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#3511250 14-Jul-2026 14:14

Rikkitic:

Not just the future. Doctors already have an enforcement function in this country. Doctor/patient confidentiality is a myth.

My doctor is very solid. She has never ratted me out to the feds. She even gave me some solid advice on psylocibins in relation to PTSD.

Seriously though, I think the bar is reasonably high - danger to self or others, before your doctor can disclose anything to the police or whoever. For example, if you're beating your kids or likely to go postal.

Mike

Rikkitic

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#3511251 14-Jul-2026 14:18

I wasn't making a value judgement, just pointing out the fact.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

johno1234

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#3511252 14-Jul-2026 14:26

Rikkitic:

MikeAqua:

I only tell my doctor stuff I would be comfortable with a future theocracy or caliphate finding out about 🤣.

Not just the future. Doctors already have an enforcement function in this country. Doctor/patient confidentiality is a myth.

Wondering what the limits are. For instance to prevent immediate harm to someone? I could understand that. But what if Mr Plod is asking on a general criminal prosecution?

kingdragonfly

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#3511258 14-Jul-2026 14:53

The New Zealand limits are very high, and doctors generally cannot disclose anything to police for a normal criminal investigation.

That NZ list I gave previously is complete I believe.

Outside those, police cannot simply ask a doctor for information and get it.

Police would need a court order, or a situation where disclosure is necessary to prevent immediate and serious harm

Otherwise, the NZ doctor must refuse.

NZ doctors can only break confidentiality to prevent immediate harm or when legally compelled like a court order. Police asking about a general criminal case is not enough.

In NZ and Australia, there are many times the patient consents in particular those who want to clear themselves of suspicion to name one.

Australia has similar ethics, various state laws authorised more. For example some Australia states require the doctors to report stab wounds, domestic violence injuries, sexual assualt injuries, and violent crime injuries. Again varies by Australia state.

The US is as usual, much worse, incredibly complex, and varies by wildly varies by state. It's getting worse every year in the US, with court cases trying to compel doctors to rat out on abortion requests.

It may sound strange to us, but in the US medical privacy depends on your ZIP code.

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Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE. Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

Ge0rge

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#3511264 14-Jul-2026 15:21

kingdragonfly: The New Zealand limits are very high, and doctors generally cannot disclose anything to police for a normal criminal investigation.

That NZ list I gave previously is complete I believe.

I was under the impression that, if a doctor knows their patient is a licensed firearm holder, then the threshold for reporting any form of mental health concern, even including stress, is significantly lower than for patients without the same license.

MikeAqua

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#3511270 14-Jul-2026 15:47

Ge0rge:

I was under the impression that, if a doctor knows their patient is a licensed firearm holder, then the threshold for reporting any form of mental health concern, even including stress, is significantly lower than for patients without the same license.

I have a firearms licence and a (well controlled) mental health issue. I've never had an issue with licence renewals.

Mike

kingdragonfly

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#3511273 14-Jul-2026 16:05

Onto a new subject, The following is only of interest to VPN users, with privacy concerns. It gets real technical, real quick.

For background "GDID" in Windows, it acts as a permanent, unique digital fingerprint that Microsoft automatically assigns to a specific PC or virtual machine installation. It only changes during a Windows new installation. How it's generated and stored is not well-known, and Microsoft ain't talking.

This news is making the rounds that a GDID was used to track a VPN user.

No mentioned here, this follows news on that Microsoft turns over BitLocker disk encryption keys to the FBI on request.

Linux is looking very appealing.

GDID on Windows 11: Why Deleting the Registry Value Doesn’t Remove It
...
The Scattered Spider Case Made a Hidden Correlator Legible

The arrest that gave this issue oxygen involved an alleged [hacker] was caught by the FBI in April 2026 while hiding traffic behind a VPN with IPs across three different countries.

The practical significance is not that investigators had one magic number and nothing else.

...the GDID story matters because it shows how a Windows-origin identifier can help connect activity that the network layer alone was supposed to separate.

That is a hard privacy lesson because VPN marketing has trained users to think in IP addresses. If the IP changes, the user feels changed. If the exit country changes, the session feels laundered. If traffic emerges from somewhere else, the local connection feels obscured.

The GDID collapses that intuition: an operating-system identifier that survives the network costume change can make multiple exits look like the same underlying Windows environment.

[Allegedly] the GDID as an identifier that Windows carries continuously and that Microsoft can hand over to authorities when asked.
...
The alleged Scattered Spider member was reportedly trying to disappear behind infrastructure, but the machine itself still had a name tag.

That is why this story has spread beyond the narrow crime-reporting angle. The same property that helps investigators tie a suspect’s Windows activity to a device can also worry journalists, activists, employees using personal devices, administrators handling sensitive networks, and ordinary users who assumed “use a VPN” was the end of the privacy conversation.
...

Behodar

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#3511278 14-Jul-2026 16:15

kingdragonfly: That is a hard privacy lesson because VPN marketing has trained users to think in IP addresses.

I can corroborate this. I've mentioned before that I'm a moderator on another forum. It's fairly common, when a user gets banned or suspended, for them to fire up a VPN and register a new account. We can see this immediately.

cddt

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#3511347 15-Jul-2026 05:56

The objective here is ultimately to remove online anonymity.

Mighty Ape

Shop now at Mighty Ape (affiliate link).

MikeAqua

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#3511426 15-Jul-2026 10:30

Today Blenheim council are fishing temporary barrier fencing out of the river. This because it was left in a place that 50mm of rain floods, when 90mm of rain was predicted. Rate payers' money being carefully spent as always.

Mike

wellygary

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#3511431 15-Jul-2026 10:45

kingdragonfly: Onto a new subject, The following is only of interest to VPN users, with privacy concerns. It gets real technical, real quick.

....
That is a hard privacy lesson because VPN marketing has trained users to think in IP addresses. If the IP changes, the user feels changed. If the exit country changes, the session feels laundered. If traffic emerges from somewhere else, the local connection feels obscured.

The GDID collapses that intuition: an operating-system identifier that survives the network costume change can make multiple exits look like the same underlying Windows environment.

With Cookies and other forms of interactions between installed applications and "the network" its never been a slam dunk that a VPN makes you anonymous, Heck, They managed to track people across TOR years ago....

So unless you're doing drive-bys on open wifi networks you're probably eventually findable..

kingdragonfly

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#3511442 15-Jul-2026 11:30

This thread is probably not a great place for on-line privacy.

I only brought it up because it's apparent Microsoft is happy to make the US government's job of tracking much easier, really trivial, while hiding the details of tracking from its users.

It's true several people were "outed" on the dark web, TOR, but deep dives into those point to user mistakes have been far more common than breaking Tor's cryptography.

Like the case of the University student using TOR to send in a bomb threat, but made the mistake of doing it from his dorm room; The firewall showed he was the only one in the dorm using TOR ports when the bomb threat happened.

For Silk Road, the owner used an email address to advertise the web site in its early days.

And similar.

It just the "Scattered Spider Case" mentioned above is it's first publicly known federal criminal case where Microsoft's GDID is explicitly described in an affidavit and used as a major evidentiary link.

k1w1k1d

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#3511979 16-Jul-2026 22:45

Earthquake near Te Anau and now Civil Defence website has gone offline.

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