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Comment What's actually better? (Score 5, Insightful) 35

It's been a long running complaint of mine that these UI changes are created to do little more than make other UI folks happy. The features and functionality of android have been going down over the last few releases. Seriously who approved that stupid stacked clock forced onto our home screens only a few releases ago? The alarm feature of playing the news is now working about 1 in 5 days. I had to start running a launcher so I could setup my grid and shortcuts the way I liked. The calendar switched to week mode each time you add or modify an entry forcing you to swipe back into month mode. I'd love to see additional usability or useful features instead of the AI creep and dare I say Enshittification of the OS.

Submission + - Fresh Off of Parole, Samsung Heir Ascends To Chairman of the Company (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung Electronics officially has a new executive chairman. The heir to the Samsung empire, Lee Jae-yong (aka Jay Y. Lee), ascended to the throne of the world's biggest chipmaker on Thursday. Samsung announced the move alongside its Q3 2022 earnings report, which it probably hopes will distract from the 23 percent drop in profits compared to the previous quarter. Lee has been the de-facto leader of Samsung for several years now, so his appointment is mostly a formality. The former Samsung chairman and Lee's father, Lee Kun-hee, died in 2020, but before that he was incapacitated for years following a 2014 heart attack. Lee's ascension to chairman has always been expected, but it has been delayed due to Lee's numerous legal issues. [...] The new chairman's legal troubles are not necessarily over. Lee is still facing yet another trial for stock price manipulation and accounting fraud.

Submission + - Facebook's privacy tools are riddled with missing data (inputmag.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: "The obvious holes in Facebook’s privacy data exports paint a picture of a company that aims to placate users’ concerns without actually doing anything to change its practices.

DATA LISTS ARE INCOMPLETE — The most pressing issue with Facebook’s downloadable privacy data is that it’s incomplete. Privacy International’s investigation tested the “Ads and Business” section on Facebook’s “Download Your Information” page, which purports to tell users which advertisers have been targeting them with ads.

The investigation found that the list of advertisers actually changes over time, seemingly at random. This essentially makes it impossible for users to develop a full understanding of which advertisers are using their data. In this sense, Facebook’s claims of transparency are inaccurate and misleading."

“More than anything they’re a ploy to placate users’ concerns.”

Comment Windows RT 2.0 (Score 1) 76

by SlickNic (#59717280) Attached to: Microsoft Promises Windows 10X Updates Will Take 'Less Than 90 Seconds'
Remember how Windows RT went? How about their Windows phone OS? This one is likely to go the same way, very little support which will lead it to being discontinued early and all devices running it will go to the scrap heap a few years earlier than they would have if they had another fully supported OS.

Submission + - Coronavirus 'kills Chinese whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang' (bbc.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Li Wenliang was working as an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital when he sent out a warning to fellow medics on 30 December.

Police then visited him to tell him to stop, as authorities tried to keep the news under wraps.

The virus has now killed more than 560 people and infected 28,000 in China.

Submission + - A Months-Long Investigations Reveals Pornhub's Terrible Moderation Practices (vice.com)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: On May 1, 2016, in the middle of final exams, a young woman got a text message that would change her life forever. It included a screenshot of a pornographic video posted online, featuring her. Panicking, she quickly tried to justify what she had done. "They said it would only be in Australia," she told her friend, according to court documents. "I only did it for money."

The video spread like wildfire. Jane Doe 11—one of 22 women who sued porn production company Girls Do Porn in 2016 for coercing them to have sex on video and lying to them about how the videos would be distributed—learned from the student council president that "everyone was watching it in the library, so much so that the internet essentially crashed."

In October 2019, after Michael Pratt was charged with federal sex trafficking crimes, Pornhub removed Girls Do Porn's official Pornhub channel, as well as pages promoting Girls Do Porn as "top shelf" content and a reason to pay Pornhub a subscription fee. In January, after the ruling in the civil case found Girls Do Porn owed 22 women a total of $13 million, the official GirlsDoPorn.com site was taken offline.

But even with the official site shut down and its owners in jail or on the run, the ruling has done little to stop the spread of the videos online.

Pornhub claims that victims of nonconsensual porn—as many of the Girls Do Porn videos are—can easily request to remove videos from the site, and that those videos can be "fingerprinted." Broadly speaking, video fingerprinting is a method for software to identify, extract, and then summarize characteristic components or metadata of a video, allowing that video to be uniquely identified by its "fingerprint." According to Pornhub, this would automatically prevent future attempts to upload a video that was flagged.

But a Motherboard investigation found that this system can be easily and quickly circumvented with minor editing. Pornhub's current method for removing Girls Do Porn videos and other forms of non-consensual porn not only puts the onus of finding and flagging videos almost entirely on potentially-traumatized victims—those victims can't even rely on the system to work.

Submission + - AT&T is doing exactly what it told Congress it wouldn't do with Time Warner (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: AT&T lost $1.2B in Q4 by preventing Time Warner shows from airing on Netflix.

AT&T's decision to prevent Time Warner-owned shows from streaming on Netflix and other non-AT&T services reduced the company's quarterly revenue by $1.2 billion, a sacrifice that AT&T is making to give its planned HBO Max service more exclusive content. AT&T took the $1.2-billion hit despite previously telling Congress that it would not restrict distribution of Time Warner content, claiming that would be "irrational business behavior."

Comment Would a smaller plane do? (Score 2) 293

by SlickNic (#48935577) Attached to: US Air Force Selects Boeing 747-8 To Replace Air Force One
This seems like an obvious question but why does one guy and his staff need a more than 400 passenger plane? Wouldn't something built for extended flight time, reliability, and speed that held closer to 75 or 100 passengers still be overkill? I certainly don't know a lot about airplanes so maybe a better alternative simply doesn't exist and this was the best option. Are there better 100 passenger options?

Comment Re:It does work (Score 1) 219

by SlickNic (#46631423) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Experiences With Free To Air Satellite TV?

The fun part about BUD TV was you could receive uplinks from reporters/camera crews in the field. So you see a reporter standing there playing with his tie, conversing, picking his nose etc. Then suddenly he would stiffen up and a few seconds later make his report, go silent, ask if he was finished and then walk off camera. The feed would either continue for some time or go blank.

Yes, I remember this happening. Usually it was super boring though since they generally just stood there and looked at the camera.

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