For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.

This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.

The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted to the type of things that their AI is able to reorganise for other languages. E.g. it might go further in the direction of vocabulary memorisation.

Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?

Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.

It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.

FSF's Zoe Kooyman and Krzysztof Siewicz will give a presentation on Sunday 2nd of Feb:

"FSF's criteria for free machine learning applications"

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffosdem.org%2F2025%2Fschedu...

It'll be streamed. Well worth tuning in for. A recording should be online soon after.

Thanks for the details.

Sounds solvable. Not simple, but sounds like they'll be able to solve it, unless they're trying not to.

Maybe new lists could be downloaded per-domain. If I view one page on a domain, I'll probably view others in the same session. And energy use, there are probably ways to make the plug-ins more efficient - in their own code and by improving the functionality the browser makes available.

For the privacy problem of ad-blockers needing access to all of every webpage you view, this could be fixed by plug-ins being reviewed and verified. Mozilla does something like this.

So, the postponed the disabling of Manifest V2, but can the problems faced by the ad-blocker projects be fixed with some extra time?

I.e. Is this an actual solution? I presume ad-blocking is a bit of a cat-and-mouse, so auto-update filter lists sound crucial for ad-blockers to function. If Chrome blocks that, then they're not allowing useful ad-blockers.

Ad-blockers are the canary in the coal mine of the open web.

I said the same thing tomorrow but the mods deleted it. They've picked their side.

The "robot holding a shotgun" was a plot device. We can't wrap our brains around billions of IoT devices self-organising, so he told that story through the representation of various characters.

That's the Terminator series of films to me. May there be many more!

Thanks for clarifying, guruevi.

I was hoping to gather examples of data being stolen when services not using e2ee. Would be a useful thing to document so that policy makers can understand why they shouldn't ban e2ee.

If anyone has examples, I'd be very interested.

Seems like the type of story that should help policy makers understand that they shouldn't ban end-to-end encryption. The EU is talking of banning e2ee.

But can someone confirm that encryption would have prevented this?

The linked story says "The vulnerability allows hackers to gain unauthorized access to an affected MOVEit serverâ(TM)s database." So I guess the data was unencrypted on the server.

> the pointless nature of it all

A lot of things could be reduced to this, but does it really matter if you're looking at the real Proxima Centauri or a slice of Chorizo? What's the point of looking at art?

If looking at a "live" photo of Mars would get your mind racing about how far technology has come, then tune in and enjoy.

If you want to go do something else, that's fine too.

What do they mean by "it wonâ(TM)t be truly live"?

Only one picture every 50 seconds, 17 minute delay for transmission of the signal. Still "live", AFAICT. Those are just quality issues. Given the conditions, the quality is nothing to complain about.

He developed a definition for free software, the concept of copyleft, a set of licences to implement copyleft, he travelled the world for decades building support for this, he wrote code for GCC and GNU Emacs and a lot of other software projects that enabled others to make the packages we use today, he inspired campaigns against software patents, against DRM, against bad copyright laws.

And he persevered despite decades of insults and other people trying to ensure no one heard of his work.

Not sure of the current status, but I remember in 2007 that Alexandre Oliva reverse engineered the software for filing taxes in Brazil:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux.com%2Fnews%2Ffsf...

Very much looking forward to seeing the video of Richard's 17 March speech and the Right To Repair keynote!

I guess they'll arrive here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.libreplanet.org%2F...