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Comment It's his plane... (Score 1) 232

...let him pay for the upgrades. If it's not his, and really being given to the government, then it's without restriction, and 47 doesn't get to keep it when he leaves. In which case, auction it off, and use the proceeds to help pay for the already-planned replacement. Way cheaper than retrofitting.

Submission + - Google Faces Trial For Collecting Data On Users Who Opted Out (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A federal judge this week rejected Google's motion to throw out a class-action lawsuit alleging that it invaded the privacy of users who opted out of functionality that records a users' web and app activities. A jury trial is scheduled for August 2025 in US District Court in San Francisco. The lawsuit concerns Google's Web & App Activity (WAA) settings, with the lead plaintiff representing two subclasses of people with Android and non-Android phones who opted out of tracking. "The WAA button is a Google account setting that purports to give users privacy control of Google's data logging of the user's web app and activity, such as a user's searches and activity from other Google services, information associated with the user's activity, and information about the user's location and device," wrote (PDF) US District Judge Richard Seeborg, the chief judge in the Northern District Of California.

Google says that Web & App Activity "saves your activity on Google sites and apps, including associated info like location, to give you faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences in Maps, Search, and other Google services." Google also has a supplemental Web App and Activity setting that the judge's ruling refers to as "(s)WAA." "The (s)WAA button, which can only be switched on if WAA is also switched on, governs information regarding a user's '[Google] Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services.' Disabling WAA also disables the (s)WAA button," Seeborg wrote. But data is still sent to third-party app developers through the Google Analytics for Firebase (GA4F), "a free analytical tool that takes user data from the Firebase kit and provides app developers with insight on app usage and user engagement," the ruling said. GA4F "is integrated in 60 percent of the top apps" and "works by automatically sending to Google a user's ad interactions and certain identifiers regardless of a user's (s)WAA settings, and Google will, in turn, provide analysis of that data back to the app developer."

Plaintiffs have brought claims of privacy invasion under California law. Plaintiffs "present evidence that their data has economic value," and "a reasonable juror could find that Plaintiffs suffered damage or loss because Google profited from the misappropriation of their data," Seeborg wrote. The lawsuit was filed in July 2020. The judge notes that summary judgment can be granted when "there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Google hasn't met that standard, he ruled.

Comment Doctor doctor! It hurts when I do _this_... (Score 1) 39

"The Reddit user told 404 Media that at one point he had uploaded selfies of himself into Instagram's "Imagine" feature" So... you deliberately published a photo of yourself to a publicly accessible website with a profit motive in selling you ads, and found that someone in that public place used it in an ad? Gosh, that _is_ shocking...

Submission + - Gen AI Is Accelerating and Democratizing Vulnerability Hunting (csoonline.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Large language models (LLMs) are proving to be valuable tools for discovering zero-days, bypassing detection, and writing exploit code, thereby lowering the barrier to entry for pen-testers and attackers alike, writes CSO's Lucian Constantin in a feature on how several penetration testers are using the tools today. 'LLMs and generative AI are likely to have a major impact on the zero-day exploit ecosystem,' said Chris Kubecka, cybersecurity author and founder of HypaSec. 'These tools can assist in code analysis, pattern recognition, and even automating parts of the exploit development process.' Kubecka, for example, built a custom version of ChatGPT called Zero Day GPT, with which she was able to identify 25 zero-days in a couple of months — a task she said might have taken her years to accomplish otherwise. 'Tools like these have significantly simplified our bug bounty work, and I believe everyone in this field should have similar resources in their toolbox,' said Horia Nita, whose team took second place in a recent DefCamp capture-the-flag competition. His team uses uses several custom-made AI tools to help scan new codebases, provide insights into potential attack vectors, and offer explanations for code they encounter. Nita also uses LLMs to generate payloads for brute-forcing. 'With the current state of AI, it can sometimes generate functional and useful exploits or variations of payloads to bypass detection rules,' he said. Constantin's report takes a closer look at the trend, providing a few examples of what is currently being accomplished by top bug hunters.

Submission + - Your In-Store Whole Foods Purchases Are Now Listed In Your Amazon Account

Submitted by FairAndUnbalanced
FairAndUnbalanced writes: In what could be an unwelcome surprise to those sharing their Amazon Prime cards with spouses or others, Amazon is now displaying your in-store Whole Foods purchases under the "Your Orders" section of the associated Amazon.com account. The thing is: you agreed to let them do that. Per your data sharing agreement with Whole Foods (that you probably don't remember agreeing to) :

"...if you self-identify as a Prime member at a Whole Foods Market store by scanning the designated QR code or providing the phone number associated with your Amazon account, or if you use a payment card that is saved in your Amazon wallet opens [sic] in a new tab at a Whole Foods Market store, then your Whole Foods Market transaction information will be associated with your Amazon account and that data may be used by both Whole Foods Market and Amazon."

Any in-store purchases that you made in Whole Foods stores using your Amazon Prime credit card, or by scanning the QR code from the Whole Foods app, show up, and all in-store purchases as far back as mid-2020 are displayed. There appears to be no press release or formal announcement about this change.

Submission + - AI identifies hundreds of mysterious Nazca drawings in Peruvian desert (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Email
Some 2000 years ago in a desert in southern Perú, the ancient Nazca and Paracas peoples created massive designs in gravel and stone, depicting animals, humanlike figures, and plants in geoglyphs up to 90 meters long. Now, an artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of aerial photographs has helped identify 303 new glyphs in just 6 months, allowing researchers to know more about why ancient South Americans made them.

In the 20th century, researchers spent almost 100 years uncovering 430 geoglyphs. Scientists classified the drawings into larger, line-type glyphs, created by removing stones and gravel to reveal lighter colored earth beneath, and smaller, relief-type glyphs, drawn using surface stones of colored both white and black. The big line-type glyphs are easier to spot using photographs shot from the sky, whereas the relief-type glyphs, averaging only about 9 meters in size, are harder to see because of erosion and more subtle contrast with the desert terrain.

To find more glyphs, researchers led by archaeologist Masato Sakai of Yamagata University trained an AI program to identify relief-type glyphs in high-resolution drone images taken of the entire region. The program identified 1309 possible geoglyphs, and the team confirmed 303 of them with on-the-ground surveys, almost doubling the number of known geoglyphs of this type, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Among the new glyphs, about 80% depicted humanoid figures, decapitated heads, and domesticated animals, particularly llamas (see image showing original photo and AI-identified humanoid glyph). Most relief-type drawings were found within viewing distance from foot trails, and researchers think the art communicated daily-life activities for viewing by small groups or individuals. In contrast, about 60% of line-type glyphs depict wild animals, such as birds, monkeys, and felines. The team suggests these were linked with ceremonial pathways and pilgrimage routes.

Submission + - AI Code Generation as an Agent of Tech Debt Creation

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In AI Code Generation as an Agent of Tech Debt Creation, Dan Hulton begins:

I've disabled all LLM-based AI Assistants/Copilots/whatever-you-call-'ems in my IDE. Take a moment to let the shock, horror, and betrayal to pass through you (or, potentially, the giddy "OMG I'm not alone!" squeal burbling up from deep inside), because I'd like to expound for a bit about why I've done this, and I know the title is a bit of a giveaway, but no, it's not because I'm some cranky old man who can't stand that new-fangled ding-dang technology. Well, I mean I am old and cranky, but what I mean is I work at a company that heavily uses AI to augment real, serious professionals' capabilities. I'm not an anti-AI absolutist or anything. I just think that it's a disaster waiting to happen for the software development industry, is all.

Here's my core thesis: LLMs will never be as capable as we have been told they will be. All of ginned-up demos that we've been shown around LLM-based tools being given a three-sentence description of a feature and building it and writing the tests and reviewing itself and deploying it, all automatically? They don't work now, and they never will. LLMs can never "know" or "understand" anything. They seem to have interesting emergent properties, but every new announcement about those capabilities quickly falls to pieces in the Hacker News comments, as curious devs give it a try and find that it actually doesn't work quite that well, at least not under all circumstances, and critically, not to achieve the overblown promises we're being sold around feature-scale AI code generation. Hell, this just happened again with the release of OpenAI's o1 series of models, models that we are told "think" but in actuality do nothing of the sort. They mostly just go "hmm" and "ah!" a lot, and then over-charge you via a new secret token mechanism to return dangerously close but not-quite-right code just frequently enough to cause serious problems down the line.

Hulton concludes:

That famous Steve Jobs saying, "A players hire A players, B players hire C players?" Well, it may have been heartless, but there's a logic to it. That said, I think it needs updating for the modern era: "A players hire A players, B players hire C players who hire AI chatbots and pretty soon nobody knows how the f*** anything works anymore."

Comment Re:Perverted inventives (Score 1) 234

by Sir Realist (#64772774) Attached to: College Grades Have Become a Charade. It's Time To Abolish Them.
They lose money on tuition and have an obscene endowment because wealthy grads donate to it... because the wealthy grads get high-paying jobs with their straight-A GPAs, and get guaranteed spots for their kids in exchange. And those donations? Are definitely going away if junior doesn't get enough A's.

The pressure on teachers to pass students regardless of worth at endowment-funded schools is very much as real as it is at schools without those endowments. Even at the public university that I worked at decades ago, a friend who was in her first year of teaching mathematics was explicitly told that she could not fail too many students. "But what if they don't know the material?" she asked. "Then fail the worst ones and pass the rest." I've forgotten now what the exact percentage she was told she was allowed to fail, but it wasn't high. And failing even that many reflected badly on her annual review.

Decades later, I worked at another public university where the Dean gave a talk to our department, explaining the university-wide problem with retaining students to the end of their degree. And then, in the next slide and with a straight face, explained his campaign to increase enrollment by, effectively, lowering admission standards. Hmmm. Whyever are these students having trouble, I wonder? There wasn't even a direct financial benefit to the university of increasing enrollment - as you've pointed out, on tuition alone they ran at a loss. It quite simply, and quite obviously, was a priority because it padded the Dean's resume, and set him up for his next job, to be able to say that he'd increased enrollments.

Comment Nobody yearns for upgrades (Score 1) 174

by Sir Realist (#64111499) Attached to: The Beauty of Finished Software
"So the next time you find yourself yearning for the latest update..." I realise its literally the point of the story as a whole, but this line is weird. No one ever yarns for upgrades. Upgrades are how companies convince you that its all right that they arbitrarily obsoleted the thing you bought, so you have to buy it again.

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