Haven't heard anything new lately, but there is a push to eliminate physical currency for, what I presume, is a similar reason -> make everything trackable.

I think this will backfire too. I think they way underestimate the amount of people already using "underpowered devices" that will just continue to do so without the new cloud services shit.

Basically everyone I know us using a 5-10+ year old laptop, for example. And they just use it fine, sure it's pokey, and it's not everyone, but it's a lot.

LLMs ('AI'), not so great, but it can get (probabilistic, but fascists don't care) descriptions of video feeds into easily searched text. Gobs of GPUs in datacenters paired with surveillance devices all over the place however presents a greater threat, where there's an (evil) will, a way will be forthcoming. Nice of Ukraine to point out how fragile they are. There's a deathstar analogy there somewhere.