The other day I saw a bunch of USB sticks for sale at a gas station with greatest hits of various artists and music genres and it got me thinking of physical piracy again. It's something I haven't consumed for over 15 years, but with the fall of prices of USB sticks it is completely viable economically if you do the math, and I...
Yes, there's an element of complexity that makes it hard to completely avoid bugs. But there's way more arbitrary complexity that doesn't serve a purpose and unnecessary dependencies that create more problems than they solve causing issues than there is just the inherent difficulty of what software actually needs to do.
Also, maybe just don't copy paste code from 20 different tracking tools wherever they tell you to.
Edit: also cloud everything. The amount of overhead it takes to put 100 million users in the cloud when there's nothing they need that can't be done locally is stupid as hell.
Long-term carrier lock-in could soon be a thing of the past in America after the FCC proposed requiring telcos to unlock cellphones from their networks 60 days after activation....
If we're talking "free" devices with some commitment, I'm OK with some limitation until the terms are met.
The second you charge a dollar for it, it should be unconditionally illegal to have it carrier locked the day they walk out of the store. 60 days isn't good enough.
Earlier this year, Microsoft revealed that a Russia-based cybercriminal group labeled as Midnight Blizzard got access to the email accounts of its top executives in late 2023. Today, the company has confirmed that it is informing more of its customers that emails sent to those executives were seen by that hacker group....
I'm not into the subscription library thing (though I do have PS+ premium, because it was a reasonably cheap upgrade from the base package on Black Friday when I caved and bought a subscription), but I can see how some people find value in the subscription library that's included.
That said, fuck Luna specifically, because I tried the "included with prime" version with one of the legends of heroes games, got moderately hooked, and it will only let you export the saves when they remove the game from the paid library. So even your saves are held hostage to a paid subscription.
Mac malware that steals passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, and other sensitive data has been spotted circulating through Google ads, making it at least the second time in as many months the widely used ad platform has been abused to infect web surfers....
I absolutely install stuff that doesn't have a signature verified by Apple, but you should be damn sure you know what you're installing before bypassing that security.
Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported....
Fuck everything about the changes they've made for the last several years, but they were always going to hit a wall when content owners put their content on their own platforms.
The entire source of their growth was "you can get almost anything you want to watch for one low monthly cost". They no longer have rights to any of that content, and for most of it didn't even get an opportunity to make a bid.
It's the equivalent of Oreo shipping 3 Oreos in a big box for 3x the price. But also they had to change their recipe because they didn't own the old one.
People discuss tech companies, and when a company keeps jacking up its price while making the experience worse for an offering that would be a ripoff at half its original price, people are going to be annoyed.
Especially with the trend of not being able to just buy shows any more.
Yes there are really bad products and their QC is horrible. I'll say the same for Aliexpress, Taobao, Amazon, Walmart and Bestbuy.
There's a huge difference between some 5/10 products at Walmart and Best Buy and the best case being a 5/10 product with the majority being 2/10 and some being actually dangerous like Temu.
Time removed its paywall in June 2023, resulting in a rise in advertising revenue but a loss of digital subscribers, with traffic remaining relatively flat....
LLMs certainly hold potential, but as we’ve seen time and time again in tech over the last fifteen years, the hype and greed of unethical pitchmen has gotten way out ahead of the actual locomotive. A lot of people in “tech” are interested in money, not tech. And they’re increasingly making decisions based on how to drum...
IBM has been doing (actually legitimate) business "AI" stuff with Watson forever.
They fucked up here because LLMs are at best part of an interface for the language processing portion and letting them anywhere near the actual business logic of setting up an order is insane, but partnering with IBM for "AI" isn't dumb at all.
Ranked choice. If no one has a majority, you eliminate the lowest vote getter and take the second choice of people who voted for that candidate. Repeat until there's a majority.
The problem with proportional representation is that it assumes candidates are fungible.
It's bad enough that people vote for a party over an individual, and inherently limits the element of trusting the human being that should be the deciding factor in how people vote. Systematically assigning vote to a party rather than a person is much worse.
You end up with the actual preference of the majority best represented. You don't get put in a spot where you have to choose one of Trump or Clinton based on which extreme is least objectionable. You can vote for someone sane, then choose between the two extremes as your "worst case".
It allows moderates to actually be represented instead of primaried out of the race, then scared to be in the general election because they might spoil the race for their party's winner.
But any system that actively enforces party lines should be automatically disqualified as a legitimate electoral system. It strengthens the power of the dumbest, least informed voters at the expense of rational voters willing to actually understand who candidates are.
That's not a bug. It's the entire aim of an electoral system.
The people who aren't the extreme ends of two poles and actually have policies the majority are in favor of are the people who are supposed to be in office. I shouldn't be choosing between "arrest people for using birth control" and "eat the rich and disband the police".
You also don't get progress in any direction when both parties are spending half their time unraveling everything the last group did.
The center should be the people representing the country. There's a lot of room in there for a diverse, varied set of perspectives. The fact that 1/3 of the country hates the two extremes and is OK with the middle is exactly why the people in the middle are the ones who are supposed to be elected.
The middle will move over time as the electorate's value change. That's where progress happens. The 10% who are Neo Nazis should absolutely not have anyone make it into office. That's not what functional government is.
If he's accurately representing the reality, he has every right to make behavior he considers unethical from an organization that takes donations known.
If you touch any personal information in any way (let alone medical), touching any known compromised system without very clear documentation of how the compromise happened, how it was resolved, and very clear process changes to make sure it doesn't happen again should be a massive fine per user you service, plus treble actual damages. It's gross negligence.
Having clear documentation of an attack isn't red tape. It's the absolute bare minimum.
One more point: a well structured law would likely lower the administrative burden on affected parties as well.
Service providers are asking because they genuinely need to know, and because medical information is pretty much the only area where there are comprehensive regulations on data protection. They could absolutely be held responsible for the negligence of allowing a known infected system to infect them. A known compromised system is known to be compromised until you've fully evaluated the attack vector, the scope of access, and taken steps to prevent that attack from happening again.
But because there isn't a legally standardized mechanism to report security issues, vendors are rolling their own. Many of them would be perfectly satisfied accepting an official, standard, form, especially is there was some language that made it clear that acceptance of the form for reports was enough of a "best practice" to limit their liability if the system infected them after the fact.
The locations of the license plates. Yes, people's location history is sensitive, and can be used for a lot of harm.
As for storing the information, that's where all the benefit comes from. To be useful, they have to be able to query the database for, eg., kidnapper's car and track where they've been. Without that you don't even have a debate of risk vs reward. It's not downside outweighing upside. It's all downside.
The world's top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned....
Either scraping to transform the information in the page is fair use, and consent isn't necessary, or it is not fair use, and the absence of a robots.txt doesn't constitute consent. There's no middle ground where a robots.txt can mean anything.
If you can't train using public, copyrighted material, Disney has a hell of a model and their monopoly over the entertainment industry goes from huge to insurmountable. No "little guys" gain anything. It's regulatory capture, nothing more.
Does anyone have any recommendations for alternate keyboard apps on iOS that don’t censor my less-than-polite speech? Having to type certain words out letter by letter is annoying enough since swipe texting won’t spell them out. And lately it seems like even after I type that stuff out, autocorrect will still go back and...
The issue is that accidental profanity (by allowing the board to correct to that language) does significant harm to their reputation and will genuinely make some meaningful portion of their userbase not use them. Regular touch screen keyboards already use invisible prediction magic to make the typing experience better, and swipe leans harder than that into their text prediction.
It's not as easy as you'd think to train two models to both correct to profanity and completely exclude profanity.
There are absolutely a meaningful number of people who are strongly opposed to profanity, and are not OK with their phone correcting to it, a much larger number of people who only wish to use profanity in certain contexts, and specific profanities (slurs) that absolutely can do real damage with a single use.
They don't correct away from profanity, but they don't correct to it either. That's a reasonable stance. The reason it doesn't work well with the swipe keyboards is because they're using the "correct" feature every time without biasing to the manual input, because that's the only to get decent results out of a bad input method like swipe.
I am considering replacing my old 50" 1080p TV which I use with (external) Chromecast and Roku. I would like a 4K display 60" or greater but I really, really don't want any smart features. I am aware that I could purchase a commercial display to achieve this and that's my fallback option. Can anyone here make any useful...
Really the only way to go is just accept that everything is a smart TV and pick one that doesn't gate your access to an initial online connection. Or a "gaming monitor" that's just a TV branded differently. But all the other options are terrible on a bunch of levels.
This isn't really Facebook. This is Adobe not drawing a distinction between smart pattern recognition for backgrounds/textures and real image generation of primary content.
I almost never "finish" games. I tend to prefer games that either can't be finished or are of sufficient scope that following a main quest line is only a small portion of what the game has to offer. I generally think most game writing is bad, and am not playing for a story.
Most cases where I finish games, I consider it a letdown because I think there should be more.
I haven't played in a good while, but just sneaking through the forests poaching deer (to cook because the second it's cooked it's not suspicious at all that I have 500 pounds of meat for sale) is one of the more satisfying hunting in games experience I've had.
(Edit: it's $3 on PSN right now. I have it on steam but I can't resist rebuying to have on both at that price.)
There's really no credible argument that their distribution of books even might be legal.
Their only defense is fair use, and there's no precedent for a "fair use" defense justifying copying a work wholesale for mass distribution. (Yes, "one copy at a time" to multiple people is mass distribution.) Copying a whole work has effectively only qualified as fair use when that copy is not re-distributed, and is actually for a personal backup.
Libraries can operate because of first sale doctrine. You can do almost whatever you want with a physical object that contains a copyrighted work.
What you can't do is copy it. There is no possible legal way to distribute a digital copy of a work without an explicit license from the copyright holder. There isn't even a legal concept of "owning" a digital copy. You purchase a license.
But "you're a hypocritical idiot for not saving all the money from a minimum wage job and finding a dirt poor country to live in or going across the world for some random job most people don't want to do" is nonsense.
Could offline physical piracy be good to games?
The other day I saw a bunch of USB sticks for sale at a gas station with greatest hits of various artists and music genres and it got me thinking of physical piracy again. It's something I haven't consumed for over 15 years, but with the fall of prices of USB sticks it is completely viable economically if you do the math, and I...
EVs still have major quality problems, and it’s mostly about the software ( www.theverge.com )
FCC proposes ending cellphone carrier locks after 60 days ( www.theregister.com )
Long-term carrier lock-in could soon be a thing of the past in America after the FCC proposed requiring telcos to unlock cellphones from their networks 60 days after activation....
Microsoft reveals even more emails to customers were accessed by Russia-based hackers ( www.neowin.net )
Earlier this year, Microsoft revealed that a Russia-based cybercriminal group labeled as Midnight Blizzard got access to the email accounts of its top executives in late 2023. Today, the company has confirmed that it is informing more of its customers that emails sent to those executives were seen by that hacker group....
Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse ( www.wired.com )
I tried to replace my Xbox Series X with a smart TV ( www.digitaltrends.com )
Mac users served info-stealer malware through Google ads | Full-service Poseidon info stealer pushed by "advertiser identity verified by Google." ( arstechnica.com )
Mac malware that steals passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, and other sensitive data has been spotted circulating through Google ads, making it at least the second time in as many months the widely used ad platform has been abused to infect web surfers....
Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete ( adguard.com )
Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported....
Shopping app Temu is “dangerous malware,” spying on your texts, lawsuit claims ( arstechnica.com )
What's Happened Since Time Dropped Its Paywall 1 Year Ago ( www.adweek.com )
Time removed its paywall in June 2023, resulting in a rise in advertising revenue but a loss of digital subscribers, with traffic remaining relatively flat....
Apple finally adds support for RCS in latest iOS 18 beta | TechCrunch ( techcrunch.com )
Toys 'R' Us Riles Critics With 'First-Ever' AI-Generated Commercial Using Sora ( www.slashdot.org )
Oh god make it stop.
McDonald’s Gives Up On ‘AI’ After Comedy Of Errors, Including Putting Bacon On Ice Cream ( www.techdirt.com )
LLMs certainly hold potential, but as we’ve seen time and time again in tech over the last fifteen years, the hype and greed of unethical pitchmen has gotten way out ahead of the actual locomotive. A lot of people in “tech” are interested in money, not tech. And they’re increasingly making decisions based on how to drum...
Cloudflare is bad. Youre right.
Centralization is bad for everyone everywhere....
What is the superior voting methodology? To whom does each alternative benefit
I'm not very well-versed on all this but it seems...
Mozilla is trying to push me out because I have cancer – CPO ( www.theregister.com )
California says AT&T can't shut down copper DSL network ( www.lightreading.com )
Red Tape Is Making Hospital Ransomware Attacks Worse ( www.wired.com )
New ALPR Vulnerabilities Prove Mass Surveillance Is a Public Safety Threat [automated license plate readers] ( www.eff.org )
OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content ( archive.ph )
The world's top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned....
iOS keyboards that don't censor "bad words"
Does anyone have any recommendations for alternate keyboard apps on iOS that don’t censor my less-than-polite speech? Having to type certain words out letter by letter is annoying enough since swipe texting won’t spell them out. And lately it seems like even after I type that stuff out, autocorrect will still go back and...
$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era ( arstechnica.com )
Options for non-smart TV in UK 2024?
I am considering replacing my old 50" 1080p TV which I use with (external) Chromecast and Roku. I would like a 4K display 60" or greater but I really, really don't want any smart features. I am aware that I could purchase a commercial display to achieve this and that's my fallback option. Can anyone here make any useful...
Photographers Push Back on Facebook's 'Made with AI' Labels Triggered by Adobe Metadata. Do you agree “‘AI was used in this image’ is completely different than ‘Made with AI’”? ( lemmings.world )
Source
What games did you have a good time with that you just never finished?
Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win ( arstechnica.com )
Lemons(?) of Lemmy, what is something that feels so obvious to you that you just get lowkey pissed at the world for not knowing?