a day in the life of a peripatetic

No subscription. Just program.

On your computer. You got to use it forever and ever and never had to worry about it going away.

Because it was physically on your computer. As a program. That you actually owned. Not because you got it separately, but because it was a standard inclusion with your computer.

I'm sorry but I'll just never get over it. I remember when companies cared about their products being usable out of the box. I remember when our things belonged to us.

(unpaywalled link)

Earlier this month [in 2025] authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to multiple datasets obtained by 404 Media. The news shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology, made by a company called Flock and usually marketed to individual communities to stop carjackings or find missing people, and turn it into a tool for finding people who have had abortions. In this case, the sheriff told 404 Media the family was worried for the woman’s safety and so authorities used Flock in an attempt to locate her. But health surveillance experts said they still had issues with the nationwide search. “You have this extraterritorial reach into other states, and Flock has decided to create a technology that breaks through the barriers, where police in one state can investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another,” Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund, who researches both ALPR systems and abortion surveillance, told 404 Media. [...]

Sheriff Adam King of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman self-administered the abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.” “We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion,” he said. “It was about her safety.”. [...]

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at digital rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media “The idea that the police are actively tracking the location of women they believe have had self administered abortions under the guise of ‘safety’ does not make me feel any better about this kind of surveillance.” Elizabeth Ling, senior counsel for If/When/How, a reproductive rights group that runs a reproductive legal rights hotline, told 404 Media that many criminal cases they’ve seen originate after someone close to the person getting an abortion reports it to police. A research report published by the group found “about a quarter of adult cases (26%) were reported to law enforcement by acquaintances entrusted with information, such as friends, parents, or intimate partners.” [...]

also, from this 2026 article:

Sheriff Adam King told 404 Media: 'Her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.' He later gave the Dallas Morning News a similar account, insisting she was never a suspect. Flock Safety went further, branding the reporting 'unequivocally false' and insisting on its own blog that no charges were ever filed and the woman was never under criminal investigation. Flock's communications team has since refused further comment unless outlets, in Flock's words, 'correct the record'. But the lead detective's sworn affidavit, obtained by the EFF through public records requests, describes the case throughout as a death investigation of a 'non-viable fetus'. Deputies collected photographs, the FedEx envelope the abortion medication arrived in, and the instructions for self-administering it – evidence supplied by the woman's partner, who reported her two weeks after the abortion occurred. Investigators also called the Johnson County District Attorney's office to ask whether she could be prosecuted. The answer, recorded in the affidavit: the state could not statutorily charge her for taking the pill that caused the abortion. Deputies pressed ahead regardless, interviewing her, reviewing her text messages about the abortion, and keeping the death investigation open for more than a month, only closing it after the Dallas Morning News published its own account in June 2025. [...]

The man who reported the woman to police was later charged with assaulting her. She has alleged that, less than an hour after her abortion, he choked her and held a gun to her head. That case remains ongoing. Sheriff King now faces his own legal troubles. He has been indicted on felony charges related to workplace sexual harassment and whistle-blower retaliation, and separately charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury.