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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 25 declined, 17 accepted (42 total, 40.48% accepted)

Submission + - OpenAI features custo GPT pushing creepy incel ideology. (citationneeded.news) 1

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Crypto reporter Molly White discovered OpenAI's featured chatbot page showcases a Lifestyle GPT called "Looksmaxxing", full of misogynist talk and dangerous advice. The chatbot that rates men “subhuman”, encourages dramatic surgeries, and repeats incel beliefs about how women are “unfair” and “hypergamous”, OpenAI has chosen to leave it available and prominently featured on their shared GPTs page.

Submission + - Apple's clandestine chip fab plant poisoned local neighborhoods in Silicon Valle (mastodon.social)

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: A whistleblower just revealed via a Mastodon thread that Apple not only operated their own chip fabrication plant in Silicon Valley, they did so in violation of numerous environmental regulations. This included releasing toxic fumes in the air to nearby residences and public parks.

Submission + - Netflix is still saying "no" to ads on its service. (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: During its Q4 earnings call, Netflix shot down the idea of an ad-supported option for its service.

From the article:

'To grow a $5 billion to $10 billion advertising business, you’d need to “rip that away” from the existing providers [such as Facebook, Amazon Google], he continued. And stealing online advertising business from [them] is “quite challenging,” Hastings added, saying “there’s not easy money there.”

“We’ve got a much simpler business model, which is just focused on streaming and customer pleasure,” he said.

The CEO also noted that Netflix’s strategic decision to not enter the ad business has its upsides, in terms of the controversies that surround companies that collect personal data on their users. To compete, Netflix would have to track more data on its subscribers, including things like their location — that’s not something it’s interested in doing, he said, calling it “exploiting users.”'

Submission + - Google's insistence on forcing all sites to HTTPS is misguided (this.how)

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Dave Winer makes an interesting point on how Google's insistence on forcing all sites to use the HTTPS instead of HTTP (flagging them in search results if they don't) is misguided. He writes:

A lot of the web consists of archives. Files put in places that no one maintains. They just work. There's no one there to do the work that Google wants all sites to do. And some people have large numbers of domains and sub-domains hosted on all kinds of software Google never thought about. Places where the work required to convert wouldn't be justified by the possible benefit. The reason there's so much diversity is that the web is an open thing, it was never owned.

Many of these sites don't collect user data or provide user interaction, so the "risks" of not using HTTPS are irrelevant.

Submission + - Verizon to Force AppFlash Spyware on Android phones

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Verizon is joining with the creators of a tool called "Evie Launcher" to make a new app search / launcher tool called AppFlash, to be installed on all Verizon phones running Android. The app provides no functionality to users beyond what Google Search does. It does, however, give Verizon a steady stream of metrics on your app usage and searches. A quick glance at the AppFlash privacy policy confirms this is the real purpose behind it:

We collect information about your device and your use of the AppFlash services. This information includes your mobile number, device identifiers, device type and operating system, and information about the AppFlash features and services you use and your interactions with them. We also access information about the list of apps you have on your device. ... AppFlash information may be shared within the Verizon family of companies, including companies like AOL who may use it to help provide more relevant advertising within the AppFlash experiences and in other places, including non-Verizon sites, services and devices.

Submission + - Kindle Unlimited Scammers Gaming the System at the Expense of Real Authors (annchristy.com)

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's book service that lets customers "check out" any book from a large selection without paying for individual titles. Like most things on the Internet, it's fallen prey to scammers. The system is designed to pay authors out of a single pool of money based on how many pages of their books are actually read. However, scammers have figured out how to rig the system by posting large, fake books, then hiring click farms to "read" them. This doesn't affect people using the service to read books (other than the nuisance of occasionally stumbling over bogus titles). But legitimate authors are getting squeezed as more of the KU payment pool goes to thieves and their bogus books.

Submission + - Are Bug Bounties the Right Solution for Improving Security? (codinghorror.com)

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood is questioning if the current practice of paying researchers bounties for the software vulnerabilities they find is really improving over-all security. He notes how the Heartbleed bug serves as a counter example to "Linus's Law" that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

...If you want to find bugs in your code, in your website, in your app, you do it the old fashioned way: by paying for them. You buy the eyeballs.

While I applaud any effort to make things more secure, and I completely agree that security is a battle we should be fighting on multiple fronts, both commercial and non-commercial, I am uneasy about some aspects of paying for bugs becoming the new normal. What are we incentivizing, exactly?


Submission + - Google Glass Teardown

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Ever wonder how Google packed all of the Google Glass functionality into a slender eyeglass frame? Find out by checking out this teardown by Scott Torborg and Star Simpson. Goodies found inside include proximity, light and inertial sensors, sound transducers, a TI OMAP CPU, flash, RAM, camera and tiny projection display.
Hardware

Submission + - Opportunties From the Twilight of Moore's Law (bunniestudios.com)

Submitted by
saccade.com
saccade.com writes: "Andrew "bunnie" Huang just posted an excellent essay, Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. He shows how the gradually slowing pace of semiconductor density actually may create many new opportunities for smaller scale innovators and entrepreneurs. It's based on a talk presented at the 2011 Open Hardware Summit.

Are we entering an age of heirloom laptops and artisan engineering?"

Submission + - Telehack re-creates the Internet from 25 years ago (telehack.com)

Submitted by
saccade.com
saccade.com writes: "Telehack.com has meticulously re-created the Internet as it appeared to a command line user over a quarter century ago. Drawing on material from Jason Scott's TextFiles.com, the text-only world of the 1980's appears right in your browser.

If you want to show somebody what the Arpanet looked like (you didn't call it the "Internet" until the late '80s) this is it.

Using the "finger" command and seeing familiar names from decades ago (some, sadly, ghosts now) sends a chill down your spine."
Space

Submission + - Missing Apollo 11 tapes may have been found (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
saccade.com
saccade.com writes: "The Register and several other outlets are reporting that the missing tapes of the first manned lunar landing may have been found at a storage facility in Perth, Australia. If found, these could have much clearer pictures than the recordings we currently have that were downsampled for TV broadcast. We don't have pictures yet, though: 'Whether the world will finally enjoy high-quality pics of Aldrin and Armstrong strolling the Moon's surface remains to be seen. When NASA coughed to having lost the original tapes, John Sarkissian of the Parkes Observatory noted that even if a machine could be found to replay them, they would be "so old and fragile, it's not certain they could even be played.'"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - China's "Shanzai" electronic mash-up desig (bunniestudios.com)

Submitted by
saccade.com
saccade.com writes: "Bunnie (of XBox hacking and Chumby fame) has written an insightful post about how a new phenomena emerging out of China called "Shanzai" has impacted the electronics business there.

A new class of innovators, they're going beyond merely copying western designs to producing electronic "mash-ups" to create new products. Bootstrapped on small amounts of capitol, they range from shops of just a few people to a few hundred. They rapidly create new products, and use an "open source" style design community where design ideas and component lists are shared."
Security

Submission + - Hotel WiFi Tracks You as You Surf

Submitted by
saccade.com
saccade.com writes: "During my last hotel stay, I thought it was a pretty strange that it took two browser re-directs before the hotel's Wi-Fi would show me the web page I browsed to. Picasa developer Michael Herf noticed the same the thing and dug a little deeper. He discovered: "...their page does some tracking of each new page you visit in your browser, outside what a normal proxy (which would have access to all your cookies and other information it shouldn't have, anyway) would do. This "adlog" hit appears to also track a "hotel ID" and some other data that identifies you more directly. Notably, I've observed these guys tracking HTTPS URLs, and of course you can't track those through a proxy.". Herf notes the WiFi service provider, SuperClick, advertises that it "allows hoteliers and conference center managers to leverage the investment they have made in their IP infrastructure to create advertising revenue, deliver targeted marketing and brand messages to guests and users on their network...""

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