Revv

I have no doubt that China can and does buy data from data brokers. I think it’s unlikely, however that any of the major players are going to be willing to sell all their data on anyone- being able to target ads to individuals is their entire value proposition after all. On top of that, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have fallen pretty heavily out of favor with folks in their teens/early 20s (i.e. the demographic most ripe to be sources of bad OPSEC).

But even assuming that an adversary could buy all the data they could possibly want, doing so could tip off anyone who cared to be watching about the sorts of data they’re interested in. This is generally not something you want as it can reveal your own strategic concerns/intentions.

Having your own app that can collect whatever you want, where you can promote whatever information/view that you want is a pretty big advantage over buying data.

If the argument is about privacy, I think banning tik tok is complete bullshit. If it’s about limiting intelligence gathering and influence campaigns, I think it makes more sense.

Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.

Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don’t really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.

Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.

It’s worse than that. It’s arguing that her estate and surviving husband can’t sue because he had a trial subscription to Disney+. It’s fucking absurd.

Ah yes, tracingwoodgrains.com- everyone’s source for hard-hitting, unbiased news coverage. 🙄

This story got shot down for the whiny trash it is two days ago. What made you think people would forget?

Aside from driving being an activity that, in my opinion, will require something approaching AGI, there are other issues to consider. Self driving cars will be completely unable to make difficult decisions reliably. How, for example, do they deal with a robbery where you just have someone stand in front of the car to immobilize it and then have the folks inside the car at your mercy? I have to imagine that either you’re producing pedestrian murder machines or serving up passengers on a silver platter.

Personally, I take comfort that the executive will be weakened as it looks more and more likely that we’re about to have a wannabe dictator coming to office.

If only there had been another widespread, wasteful prior use of expensive and power hungry compute equipment that suddenly became less valuable/effective and could quickly be repurposed to run LLMs…

Is there a good reason I don’t know about to prefer this over Aegis?

Since before it was the CIA. Open Source in this context isn’t about software licensing, it’s about gleaning everything you can about an adversary from publicly available information without infiltrating anything.

A non-intelligence example of this would speculating on what products a company is working on based on their job postings.

To bring it full circle, one can glean from this posting that the CIA is looking to hire someone to troll the internet for folks to target for further intelligence gathering. Business as usual.

To me, this reads like “Giant-ATV-Based Taxi Service Couldn’t Exist If Operators were Required to Pay Homeowners for Driving over their Houses.”

If a business can’t exist without externalizing its costs, that business should either a. not exist, or b. be forced to internalize those costs through licensing or fees. See also, major polluters.

Seriously, what’s with all the Mozilla hate on Lemmy? People bitch about almost everything they do. Sometimes it feels like, because it’s non-profit/open-source, people have this idealized vision of a monastery full of impoverished, but zealous, single-minded monks working feverishly and never deviating from a very tiny mission.

Cards on the table, I remain an AI skeptic, but I also recognize that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. I vastly prefer to see folks like Mozilla branching out into the space a little than to have them ignore it entirely and cede the space to corporate interests/advertisers.

The only tablet that immediately comes to mind is the Pinetab. For just reading books and satisfying your ethical requirements and running Linux, I imagine it would do the trick.

Good to know. Thanks.

Are there distro-specific issues? I’ve always just downloaded the zip and run the installer with no issues.

In addition to all of the open source options that have been offered, Davinci Resolve runs well on Linux and has all of the above features (and many, many more). It’s also a buy once keep forever situation rather than a subscription since they make their real money on hardware. OSS it isn’t, but it’s incredibly powerful, has an extensive free (as in beer) edition and beats the hell out of paying a monthly fee.

However, extensions using Manifest V3 can still update some filters the old way, without a full update to the extension and a review process by Google. These are called “dynamic rules,” and starting in Chrome 121 (which arrives in January, several months before Manifest V3 becomes mandatory), up to 30,000 dynamic rules are allowed if they are simple “block,” “allow,” “allowAllRequests,” or “upgradeScheme” rules.

Maybe the filter rules required specifically for YouTube don’t work with those rule formats, I don’t know! If they’re not, then Google still allows an additional 5,000 rules with more broad capabilities. Either way, the statement “whenever an ad blocker wants to update its blocklist […] it will have to release a full update and undergo a review” is not true and can be easily disproven by checking the Chrome developer documentation, Mozilla’s documentation, or a blog post that Google published a month ago.

Perhaps my reading comprehension is off here, but I don’t follow the logical jump being made here. My only guess is that the author is reading claims regarding the need for a full extension update to update block rules as meaning that the extension update & review are needed for any/all updates to the filter rules. That seems a rather pedantic and ungenerous reading to me. Especially when considering that the impact on users is the same if an update to those 5,000 rules is needed to effectively block the most frequently encountered and obtrusive ads.

Regardless, I think I’ll take my info from the folks developing these tools rather than someone who admits to not understanding how ad blocking works before acting on their urge to correct “someone who’s wrong on the internet.” 🙄

In federal court, a judge has a few options to deal with spoliation;

Under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 37 possible sanctions are as follows:

• dismissal of the wrongdoer’s claim;
• entering judgment against the wrongdoer;
• exluding expert testimony; and
• application of adverse inference rule.

The last of these basically allows the court to infer (or instruct the jury to infer) that the destroyed evidence was the most possibly damning thing and hold that against the party in question.

Outside of the above, destruction of evidence is a crime. The judge has no power of investigation that I’m aware of, but maybe it just means informing those who have such power.

It’s not that I care what they’re made of. Here they’re required to charge 10¢/bag. I would happily take a paper bag. The thing I don’t like is being treated like an extremely petty criminal.

As an aide though, everything I’ve read supports the conclusion that the bag bans only lead to more waste. IIRC, a generous estimate would mean you need to reuse a bag at least 20x in order to break even on resource usage… Which basically never happens. It’s an excellent example of a feel good solution that sounds good until you run the numbers. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

That said, I’d be perfectly happy to see us eliminate almost all uses of disposable plastics.

The thing I really hate about it is that where I live, they don’t have bags at the self checkout. Cuz you know, someone might steal a fucking plastic bag. 🙄

What on earth would possess folks to replace their often expensive existing peripherals for no benefit? To totally get rid of USB-A a person will either be out a bunch of money or be stuck with having to keep track of adapters for all their devices they can currently just plug in. An industry move to do so would necessitate the creation of a huge amount of e-waste and would net everyone else precisely nothing.

USB-C is great for mobile devices as it’s small, relatively robust, easier to connect, and does pretty much everything from power deliver to video to connecting any device imaginable. Desktops (and even laptops really) don’t need to place such a premium on port size. Laptops and other mobile devices standardizing on USB-C for power is great. We can charge all our devices from the same charger. Fantastic!

Making 20+ years of working equipment harder to use and forcing billions of people to buy stuff they don’t need (and that many can’t afford) would be wild.

Expect to continue seeing USB-A for a long, long time. No need to replace anything with a USB-C version until it breaks (and maybe not even then).