Posts by Dinanziame

X reverses course on headlines in article links, kinda

If that's Elon Musk's plan, he is the most fantastic actor alive. Especially since he complained about and claimed to "expose" the controls exerted by the lizard overlords on Twitter before he bought it.

Help! We are prisoners in a headline factory!

Nice headline on this article

Irony alert: Lawsuit alleging Chrome’s Incognito Mode isn’t will settle on unknown terms

Re: I'm shocked!

Chrome doesn't have a private mode, but an incognito mode. Firefox and Safari have a private mode, and Edge has an InPrivate mode. I don't think they work any differently, but since we're talking about users' perception of the feature, the naming matters.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

this gang have proved highly manipulative "The crew's tactics included phone-based social engineering".

Like you, I used to think that social engineering required high-level con skills. However, I've since learned that there are scam labor camps in South-East Asia, where people are kidnapped and forced to work on online scams: 7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp

The implication is that you can kidnap a random Chinese farmer, chain him to a desk with a bunch of phones and a script, and he'll manage to scam people online. No highly-manipulative social engineering skills needed, it's that easy.

"broke into Rockstar Games using an Amazon Firestick, his room's TV, and a phone"

I'm seriously impressed. If it was a movie, I'd be laughing at how unrealistic this is and complaining about clueless writers.

FTC wants to crack down on Big Biz profiting from kids' data

On one hand, I think it should be illegal to monetise kids' data — no opt-in, no T&Cs, no loophole: Illegal.

On the other hand, I'm aware many kids are using their parents' accounts and as a result "their" data is getting monetised. So the fight is a bit of a theatre of shadows.

Mozilla decides Trusted Types is a worthy security feature

Re: Strong Typing

Alternatively, it means El Reg is properly escaping your input so that your &lt; is not interpreted as a < or your &gt; as a >.

Europe classifies three adult sites as worthy of its toughest internet regulations

I suppose the EU will let a website off if the number of users goes significantly below the limit for a few years.

However, users don't need a subscription to access those websites... Or So I've Been Told!™

So they don't have a mechanism to limit the number of their users.

Google coughs up $700M in Play Store antitrust suit

So they are settling the lawsuit with the government, and appealing the ruling with Epic? I guess you got to pick your battles.

Google Pixel gets privacy mode to keep your selfies safe from prying repair techs

Re: I can't see the UK government liking this one bit.

They do

Google pencils in limited third-party cookie purge for January

Re: None

"Should" being the operative word here. I think certain websites have been lazily using third-party cookies for authentication to their own services.

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

Short sighted sci-fi

I will never get tired of pointing out that I've read lots of sci-fi stories about people losing their jobs to a robot, and not a single one of them was about a sci-fi writer losing their job to an AI

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

Re: Breaking up is hard to do x

I think Chrome was started by Google. And they might have initially bought YouTube and Google Maps, but those have so little in common with what they used to be at the time that I'm willing to attribute the success to Google as well.

Amazon's game-streamer Twitch to quit South Korea, citing savage network costs

Re: is this better for SK Broadband?

The content streamer’s view of “fair” is like Steinway driving a customer’s new piano to the local postal sorting office and saying “Here you go: Get that to Apartment 6, 113 Main Street, thanks. Oh, and we’re only paying you five bucks, considering we’ve brought it most of the way for you.”.

Note that in this case the "post office" has entered a contract with the owner of Apartment 6, 133 Main Street, stating that they will deliver whatever is requested at no extra cost. ISP have customers, and these customers already pay for the traffic. In South Korea, that probably means they pay for optic fiber, which has no problem handling the load.

Considering Twitch apparently had the largest market share of video game streaming in South Korea, it's got to be really bad for them to decide to leave the country. Though there's also the fact that Amazon did a bunch of layoffs, which also affected Twitch. It could be that they were told to improve profitability "or else", and they are complying as best they can, even though that seems rather short-sighted.

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

Re: Just let it go....

My wife recently asked for pictures from 14 years ago. For a while, I thought we could only get them from a NAS that I disconnected 2-3 years ago for lack of use, but was still keeping in the basement. It turned out that I didn't have a power cable that would fit, and that I would have to buy one somewhere... But then she said that she had somehow posted the pictures to Facebook 8 years back, so we went back to look for that post and found that it was a link to a picasa album, now surviving in Google photos on the account of our son. So the NAS went back to the basement, still containing some unfinished research articles, my old collection of MP3s and possibly the code for my PhD thesis. We already got rid long ago of the server I bought when I was in university, which boasted a whole TB of disk, and which demonstrated its lack of usefulness by not being turned on for so long it wouldn't boot anymore.

US senator claims Google and Apple reveal push notification data to foreign govs

Cool idea bro

Have you talked about it to the NSA?

India's Moon mission pulled off another trick: an experimental orbital sequel

Sometimes, it is rocket science

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

I think you need a bronze or silver badge to use HTML, and otherwise you can't link.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html

UK competition watchdog wins appeal – investigation into Apple will go on

The CMA had previously opted not to open an investigation during a market study, so it does not have the power to do so now.

Well that was a stupid argument. Markets change, the situation evolves. The fact that something used to be fine doesn't mean it's fine now, particularly in matters of anti trust.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Maybe he was looking for the one-armed man who killed his wife?

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Obvious next steps

Facebook will soon realize that the worse the ads are, the more people will pay!

We all know where this is going

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

It's impressive to see unions developing their full power. Sometimes you wish it would happen more often.

Couldn't happen to a nicer CEO, too

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Re: Stating the obvious

This is why Tesla never claimed the technology was fully autonomous

O RLY?

"a Model S and Model X, at this point, can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person." — Elon Musk in 2016 (YouTube link)

Fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman may join Microsoft

Re: Microsoft's investment was mainly in kind

It will depend on how many scientists he can persuade him to follow him to MS whether it has a chance of taking off

Reportedly, 80% of OpenAI employees have signed a letter stating they will follow him unless the board resigns.

CEO of self-driving cab outfit Cruise parks his career

Re: Self driving cars.

Of course it solves problems. Self-driving cars have the potential to vastly reduce the number of accidents (they probably already have less accidents than human drivers, but they get more scrutiny). They also allow people to concentrate on doing more interesting things than driving in traffic, like reading or sleeping or anything they want. On average, American drivers spend two years of their life driving, which is a real waste of time.

I think it's important to note that Waymo has been working far longer on the problem, seen far less accidents, and are still operating.

UK won't rush to regulate AI, says first-ever minister for digital brainboxes

Good luck regulating anything anyway

It's going to take at least a decade before we figure out what can be regulated and how. Success will likely be partial, like the enforcement of copyright laws.

Google Workspace weaknesses allow plaintext password theft

Not really, that's the point of LSASS accepting such a credential provider in the first place. This fits the cloudy model that everything important is done through the online services, and it doesn't matter which machine you use to access them because there's nothing important on the machine itself.

Meta's fix for teen online mental health? Hold Apple and Google responsible

Re: Support for a federal law? Eh? It already exists.

My kid receives instructions from teachers about homework and upcoming tests by a combination of Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp.

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

X has taken action on hundreds of thousands of posts in the first month

In other words, one every eight seconds. I can only suppose that the automated systems are unable to start, the rater team has been laid off, and there is one single temp somewhere in the bowels of the company who has to take down each post manually. Which explains why 99% of the hate is still up.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Re: Stalking

The thing is that Google would be happy about such a regulation. They are in the absolute best position to show ads to non-tracked users based purely on the query they just entered.

Meta, YouTube face criminal spying complaints in Ireland

I'm unconvinced that this has any chance. Criminal complaints have a much higher bar to pass to be confirmed by courts. This feels like a publicity stunt.

I think a determinant point for YouTube will be whether the script which detects the adblocker does in fact send the information back to the server. If yes, then there can be a claim of spying — it's getting information about the user, which is the domain of GDPR. If the code just prevents the videos from playing without sending anything back, then it's just code which controls how the page is displayed, part of the page requested by the user, executed by the browser controlled by the user. You might as well sue about the bandwidth costs caused by ads that you didn't request.

Child psychiatrist jailed after making pornographic AI deep-fakes of kids

Re: Hands up if anyone reading this is the least bit surprised.

We shall have to do something about it (see icon).

Just wait until they stopped supervising him at 111, and he immediately commits a new crime!!1!

Scarlett Johansson sics lawyers on AI biz that cloned her for an ad

This has nothing to do with the Streisand effect, which is about keeping something hidden or secret — It's closer to a copyright/trademark issue. There's not much difference between Scarlett Johansson going after AI copies and Louis Vuitton going after fake handbags.

Google ends partnership to build four San Francisco GoogleBurbs

Looks like they really can't convince their employees to get back to the office in California. It might be different for Europe and the US — people in Europe tend to live in smaller places that do not have room for an office, but with a small commute, and Americans live in large houses with a two-hour commute on the highway.

Alphabet CEO testifies in Google Search trial: We pay billions to keep Apple at bay

I see a loophole here — as long as Google managed to keep their intentions of the record, they could do whatever they want? The EU approach is simpler on this: they rule companies to be a monopoly, no matter whether they intended it out not...

I'm confused by the whole discussion. Google is paying billions so that Apple puts them as default search engine, no one disputes the facts. This is either legal or illegal. I don't understand the need to bring up discussions from years ago on the value of this or the effect of that.

Ex-NSA techie pleads guilty to selling state secrets to Russia

Re: Security Engineer, indeed

Good point. A number of "security engineers" do nothing else than applying basic checks and give access rights accordingly.

Microsoft seeks EU Digital Market Acts exemption for underdog apps like Edge

Re: Whatever next?

Well Amazon did complain about being called a "very large online platform", though it was not for DMA but for DSA:

Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

It's a smart move going for YouTube, even if they are not actively blocking users who use ad blockers. Any privacy complaint related to Google gets a much harder look than if they'd gone for Forbes or Wired.

It's going to be very interesting how this ends up. I'm not convinced it will be successful though. On one hand, the likes of Google can use extraordinary means to make sure you see ads if they put their minds to it, and on the other hand, there are so many websites that depend on advertising for revenue that there will be a lot of pressure going the other way as well. Regulations in that space tend to hurt small players more than big ones.

13-year Google privacy settlement pays litigants the equivalent of a Big Mac meal

Well to be honest here the settlement is low because few people care about the issue. This was the default way for the Referer header to work, and at the blessed times we're talking of people didn't care about the fact that the website they were going to would know the very keywords... which had brought them there. If anything, they might have thought it was valuable for web admins to know which keywords would turn up their website in Google results.

Google Cloud misses revenue estimates – and it's your fault, wanting smaller bills

Re: Meh

why would they need to create a whole new sub-service for "short" videos

There is no minimum length on YouTube videos. The Shorts service is more about giving users a different way to watch videos (short video repeats automatically until you swipe to the next one). I understand that video creators can choose whether their video should show up on Shorts, but only if the video is less than a minute long. As to why they've created a "whole new sub-service" to watch videos in a slightly different way, that's because they've noticed a lot of users thought it was more enjoyable to watch videos in that way. From the numbers, it seems they were right.

When is a privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit

As far as I can tell, WAA is this:

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?hl=en-GB&utm_source=google-account&utm_medium=web

and this is what Google uses for personalizing your searches. If I understand correctly, the claim is that this Firebase thing which is used for Google Analytics is storing the same data even if you turn WAA off. Definitely Firebase would be storing some data, but I suppose Google's viewpoint is that they are not actually storing the same data and it's fine to store some data for analytics because users accept it in a different place (maybe with a message like "send analytics data to Google to help it make improvements to tools" or something). The lawsuit's viewpoint is that Google should have a master switch which prevents Google from storing any data whatsoever no matter where and how the user accepted it, including analytics data.

Japan to probe Google over 'suspicion' that antitrust laws are being broken

Google in particular does seem to be irrevocably unamendable. They evidently don't care one jot about being caught out engaging in "anti-trust" activities. If they did care one would imagine that, having suffered the public shame of one fine they'd work hard across their entire company to ensure that they weren't crossing the line anywhere else. But no. They're just sat there, waiting for regulators around the world to eventually get round to another part of their business.

To be fair, it has taken more than twelve years for Japan to write a law that might make illegal what they are doing; and every fine from the EU comes after years of examining the business practices to figure out if yes or no this is breaching antitrust laws. The US is only now waking up, and it's not even clear they will find Google is doing anything wrong. What they do would probably be completely fine it was a smaller company doing it, and indeed with DSA and DMA the EU has simplified the matter by declaring new regulations that only apply to mega-corporations, which is pretty much a first. It's not very surprising if Google thought all these years ago that what they were doing was fine — If they hadn't become so successful since then, it still would be.

Google - yes, that Google - testing proxy scheme to hide IP addresses for privacy

Re: Pardon my lack of trust

Google has form on that, they also push stuff like DNS-over-HTTPS that makes it harder for anybody else to track you as well as they do. It's about who gets to "own" the user.

Bad Vibrations: Music publishers sue Anthropic AI for using copyrighted lyrics

Giving back lyrics with proper attribution might be fine, after all that's what Google without crumbling under copyright lawsuits (I'm aware they have deep pockets for lawyers). Claiming credit for it is clearly not ok though.

Governments resent their dependence on Big Tech

Re: Well they could have all used Linux, but most didn't.

I do have a problem with my government going back to paper-based technology. I haven't filled a paper-based tax return in over ten years, and I don't intend to ever do it again.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: You're not supposed to open all the cabinets at once

Which is why many filing cabinets have a mechansim that prevents you from opening two drawers at the same time.