If it weren’t for “CA” (California) in the description, I would firmly believe that the photo is of some house in simpler inland cities here in Brazil. It’s a fairly common thing that we call as “puxadinhos” (constructions that have no engineer, often built by the owners themselves, because both a civil engineer and a mason are generally pricey and inaccessible to a vast majority of Brazilian population).

“The system can listen to conversations”.

What a timely coincidence! Patent got published basically at the same time Meta’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s “Active Listening” got public as well. 🤔

Regarding privacy, PGP is far better than out-of-the-shelf IM-embedded encryption, if used correctly. Alice uses Bob’s public key to send him a message, and he uses his private key to read it. He uses Alice’s public key to send her a message, and she uses her private key to read it. No one can eavesdrop, neither governments, nor corporations, nor crackers, no one except for Alice and Bob. I don’t get why someone would complain about “usability”, for me, it’s perfectly usable. Commercially available “E2EEs” (even Telegram’s) aren’t trustworthy, as the company can easily embed a third-party public key (owned by themselves) so they can read the supposedly “end-to-end encrypted” messages, like a “master key” for anyone’s mailboxes, just like PGP itself has the possibility to encipher the message to multiple recipients (e.g. if Alice needs to send a message to both Bob and Charlie, she uses both Bob’s and Charlie’s public keys; Bob can use his own private key (he won’t need Charlie’s private key) to read, while Charlie can use his own private key to do the same).

It’s a complicated matter if we consider things such as the GDPR’s “Right to be forgotten”.

You didn’t specify which problem or which thing that broke. However (and based on my previous experiences on that matter), one could face a problem regarding package PGP/GPG signatures upon trying to update. This is because archlinux-keyring is not being updated before the signature checking. That said, a better approach is to always update archlinux-keyring (sudo pacman -S --needed archlinux-keyring) before anything else (sudo pacman -Syu). This way, you guarantee to be up-to-date with developer signatures, needed for pacman to check the validity for every package to be updated/installed. There’s also a pacman-key command, but I never had to use that.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (1984 - George Orwell).