Posts by Dinanziame

Teen in court after '$600K swiped from DraftKings gamblers'

Re: New password for everything

Until the password manager gets hacked, and then you're in deep trouble

Privacy Sandbox, Google's answer to third-party cookies, promised within months

Re: Sounds worse

Note that all of these are replacements for techniques that are currently enabled by third-party cookies, and that are far more intrusive from the privacy point of view. It can't get worse than it already is.

Search the web at least once every two years or risk losing your Google account

Re: Our internal analysis...

So just mandate 2FA then, Shirley.

Yeah, no. There's probably hundreds of active users who will never move to 2FA, because it's too complicated/not giving Google my phone number/not buying a key fob...

Will LLMs take your job? Only if you let them

Re: Great quote

Yeah, I read so many SciFi stories about people losing their jobs to a robot, but curiously not a single one of them was about a SciFi writer losing their job to a chatbot

EU and Canada on waiting list for Google's AI chatbot Bard

Re: Growing competition

At the moment, the estimates I've seen is that each query costs on the order of a cent. It's not much, but they'll still be losing money for a while until they manage to get it under the cost of a subscription

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

Re: I do feel for Google.... but...

The price is not set by how much they would make through ads otherwise, it is set to maximize how much money they make. They do a study of how many people would accept paying for $2, $5, $10, $15, $20, and they chose the price point which maximizes how much they make. There is no particular reason to think this would correspond to how much they would make from ads. It's like thinking that plane tickets are set by comparing how much it would cost people to walk instead.

This is also how are set the prices of chocolates, clothes, cell phones, cars, and pretty much anything in life whose price is not regulated.

Re: Subscription

It would make no sense for them to do that. It's much better to have a billion users who grumble about ads than a couple of thousands who will watch very few free videos.

YouTube is what it is because of two reasons:

1) all the users who use it

2) all the creators who use it

The first reason is more important than the second, because creators can easily be on multiple platforms, it's worth it for them as long as there are enough users. But if you lose half the users, the creators won't come anymore. If YouTube becomes subscription-only, the vast majority of users will leave, and YouTube will die.

EU-US Privacy Framework could make life easier for a data biz, if it survives

Considering both the EU and the US are in the Northern hemisphere, there is no ambiguity. Same as it's perfectly fine for public clocks to indicate the time without mentioning the time zone, even though the meaning of a given time is location-dependent.

Dell reneges on remote work promise, tells staff to wear pants at least 3 days a week

Depends on the job. I've found it much harder to ramp up engineers remotely. I normally tell new team members they should ask me questions about ten times a day, and this really goes much better if we are sitting two meters apart. Text conversations are much slower, and video meetings are not so good either.

So you would interview new hires via text? You would teach courses at university via text? You would explain your new design via text? You would present your product to customers via text?

Yees... On the other hand, you regularly see stats published that the industry is lacking ten times more people than that. I don't think people who are laid off have difficulties finding new jobs.

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

Re: LLM. All your works belong to us.

What I find funny is that, though I read a lot of science fiction stories about people losing their jobs to robots, none of them imagined science fiction writers losing their jobs to chatbots.

Google sues CryptBot slingers, gets court order to shut down malware domains

Re: But…

Scammers have some of the best customer support on the internet.

Microsoft may stop bundling Teams with Office amid antitrust probe threat

Re: Saturation point reached.

If I understand correctly, the DMA does have provisions that messaging apps should somehow interoperate. If that's correct, it's going to be very interesting.

Techie sacked after jetting to tropical island on sick leave

Nice coworker

I'd want to leave a company staffed with such nice people.

Taiwan asks US if it could chill out on the anti-China rhetoric

In this case, I feel a certain numbet of politicians are all too happy to pile on the Taiwan issue and ratchet up the rhetoric, to look good towards their constituents. Taiwan might well wish they would stop raising the issue. Taiwan is de facto a country, and it would be nice if it could be recognized as such, but some things cannot be hurried or forced ro happen.

Re: So true..

We'll see how well you ride a bicycle when you're 80 years old. Those I know can barely walk ten minutes. And congrats on bringing his son in the discussion, as if he was relevant.

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

Not caught either... Or they never caught up with me

I once unintentionally created a security vulnerability in the lab website by creating a PHP webpage that allowed users to upload files into a subdirectory — for instance, upload an arbitrary PHP file that would then be executed on request, including executing bash commands. I realized the problem afterwards but didn't fix it, which came in handy later when I needed to grab a data file from my private directory once but couldn't get ssh to work for some reason; I was able to upload a PHP that would copy my file to the website and download it from there.

How much to infect Android phones via Google Play store? How about $20k

How much for iPhones

Don't tell me it's not possible

China somehow got through COVID without MS Teams but – phew! – it's arrived

Re: I wonder....

It happens regularly that western companies give up on making money in China and exit the market. Of course, no company ever did that of they were making significant money there...

Re: No morals then

Slight correction: Google products are pretty much all unusable in China, because indeed they don't censor results. It's probably not a big market for them.

When Google cost cutting goes molecular: Staples, sticky tape, and PC sweating

They never print anything at Google. They don't want to leave a paper trail.

Italy bans ChatGPT for 'unlawful collection of personal data'

"there may not be a lawful basis"

This sentence raises my hackles. It is full of FUD, and seems to imply that unless you have a law authorizing something, it must be forbidden by default. If there is a law being broken, then point out which one, clearly; otherwise go fuck yourself.

Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu Touch is out

Re: Sadly not tempted for now

What Linux on a phone needs to succeed (and isn't going to get) is the ability to be installed on virtually any old phone

Yeah, that's not happening for a long time. The hardware inside phones are way too different for that to be possible.

Re: Renaming and discontinuing

Don't tell me what I don't already know.

Okay, so... er... 2+2=4... The Earth is round... er... The sky is blue...

Google Cloud pitches 'Gen Apps' – low-code AI-based tools, not post-millennial kids

Re: Angels and Daemons vs Beasts in the Cellar Funding Wolves of Wall Street

Peak inception right here

Judge grants subpoena to ID Twitter source code leaker

Technically, it's unfair to say Twitter has lost half of its value since Elon Musk bought it. It had actually already lost a quarter of its worth during the acquisition since it was an LBO. Twitter essentially borrowed $13B and gave it to shareholders, saddling itself with the debt in order to reduce its own worth, just so that Elon Musk and his pals could buy it for only $31B.

They'll probably have to declare bankruptcy to get out of paying the debt; otherwise the company is as good as dead.

China urges Apple to improve security and privacy

Re: Wait, what?

It does feel like the wolf reminding the little red riding hood not to talk to strangers.

Utah outlaws kids' social media addiction, sets digital curfew

Re: And this is why...

Have a downvote from me. For excessive negativity!

Winnie the Pooh slasher flick mysteriously cancelled in Hong Kong

That's what Xi said!

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Shareholders sue Google, claim it hid anticompetitive ad practices

Re: What did I just read?

Sini Plenis Piscis, as it were...

Now Google to shove its answer to ChatGPT into Gmail, Docs, apps via APIs, more

Re: Gah

"I bought two chess computers... And set them up to play against each other, so I have peace and quiet"

Meta confirms decentralized Twitter rival in the works

I had to check the article, but you copy pasted correctly:

Twitter still has around 450 monthly active users

Singapore admits it should have explained COVID app data could be used by cops

Re: We're OK though?

I don't understand. Would you need to pay the government less if you didn't have an ID?

I'm surprised they even pretended the data wouldn't be shared, though. Singapore is generally pretty open about the level of control they want to have.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

- That person is dead

- No, I am that person, and I am not dead!

- I SAID, THAT PERSON IS DEAD. Units have been dispatched to fix the glitch.

Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?

What is your post trying to state? And what does it have to be with Android calculators?

Outage-hit Twitter muddies violent speech policy

Re: I am curious

I am told that if you use Twitter enough that it can guess your interests, it can show you people you didn't know saying something that is relevant to you. Not using it myself though.

Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, pals proclaim 'Japan Metaverse Economic Zone'

Re: Dodged a bullet

Sony and Nintendo don't seem to be part of it either. Methinks this is for losers who don't already have successful ecosystems.

Sensitive DoD emails exposed by unsecured Azure server

I'm gonna blame Microsoft on this one

If you're selling a secure cloud service to the DoD, it's on you to make sure that everything is properly secured by default, and that it's damn near impossible to remove those security measures.

Europe to consult on making Big Tech pay for the networks it floods

Re: Fuck off

This is Esso having promised unlimited gas for a fixed price to its customers, and requesting Ford to pay for it because the cars consume too much.

Re: All should pay their costs to the backbones

The fact of the matter is that ISPs cannot compete with each other on anything else than price, and it's easy to change providers, so their margins are thin. Big Tech providers are not nearly as interchangeable so they have larger margins and make a lot more money. This is similar to how truck drivers are paid very little compared to the companies who pay them.

Can YouTube be held liable for pushing terror vids? Asking for a Supreme Court...

What does "enabled" mean? Does Internet enable terrorism? Do terrorists use email? Do weapons manufacturer enable terrorism? For that matter, terrorists use cars; do car companies enable terrorism?

YouTube represents what's on the internet, and there's a tiny sliver of that about terrorism. I find it ridiculous to claim that imperfect filtering of terrorism apology videos means "enabling" terrorism.

Re: Was it algorithmically promoted? (I don't know)

There are people who watch YouTube like they used to watch TV; just automatically playing whatever's next. No, I don't understand either.

Quite apart from the discussion on section 230, I'm rather amazed that the family decided that the party which should be held responsible for a terrorist attack was Google. That's the mother of all Hail Mary liability lawsuits.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: When a product is better, people will naturally switch to it

When a product is better, people will naturally switch to it

That is slightly optimistic. There are ways for monopolies to prevent this from happening, and that's why we have antitrust regulations.

Re: Damned if you do...

I'm confused; if you don't use Google search or Chrome, where do you see those messages?

What Brit watchdog redacted: Google gives Apple cut of Chrome iOS search revenue

Re: Flawed logic

It bugs me a lot that Apple created a maps product that is only available on their hardware. For instance, when an Apple user shares a place with another Apple user, it links to Apple Maps, but when they share it with a non-Apple user, it links to Google maps. It just feels plain wrong. It's the same thing that they have with iMessages, and it seems that they're implying that it's a superior experience that is only available through their hardware products, and they're deliberately creating incompatibilities to try to pull users to their platform. I find it rather insufferable to be honest.

Re: I suspect Apple have cracked the code.

You're trusting ChatGPT"s answer though?