Posts by Dinanziame 1150 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
I'm reminded of how scam emails are apparently easy to see through because it preselects for the most gullible people. After all, there's no point in starting conversations with people who will eventually figure out during the process that they're being scammed; far better to go for the 0.1% of people who will swallow anything you tell them.
Makes sense that Apple customers are prime targets then!
honestly, I've yet to come across advertisements that introduce any product to me that I'm not already aware of.
Even if you know the product already, you might think of it more often afterwards. Advertising does not need you to be aware of its effect for it to be effective.
I mean, everybody knows the iPhone exists, but I'm sure Apple has a good reason for renting huge billboards advertising it.
With all due respect to the fantastic advances so far, I'm pretty sure it's not nearly precise enough to be used as identification for payments... And then six months later, a kid discovers three other kids look like him and he's been paying for them all the whole time??
Usually, the others are non UK despite i put UK in the search string and google UK site.
Pro-tip: You can restrict to .uk domains by putting site:uk in the search query. This works for websites (e.g site:theregister.com in the search query to only get results on theregister.com), but also for TLDs.
I wish I shared your optimism regarding the likelihood of China invading Taiwan. The current great leader is the most hawkish since Mao, and Taiwan has never been closer to declaring officially they want to be a separate and independent country, as they can see all too clearly what happened to Hong Kong when they tried to join the mainland and keep their rights.
Then Mavis should listen to her doctor telling her this is unrelated to the vaccine. She should most definitely not listen to whatever crap people trying to sell dodgy nutrients are spouting on the internet. There's one person like Mavis born every minute, but we should protect people like Mavis from those trying to take advantage of them.
I don't know where you get the idea that Google is getting paid for Android? Android is supposed to be free. Maybe you are confusing Google with Microsoft forcing manufacturers to license their patents allegedly infringed by Android?
In any case, even if Google did get paid that much for Android, it wouldn't be even 20% of the money they actually earn selling ads.
EDIT: found what you meant. Due to the EU ruling, Google charges manufacturers this fee, and lets them earn back the fee by adding certain Google apps and giving them a percentage of the revenue.
Google earns $60B per quarter, and Facebook $30B. Meaning that even if every person on the planet was equally profitable to them (and UK users are definitely more profitable than people in, say, India or China), that means they earn on average ~$3 per month per person.
How much less would they be earning without the use of privacy data? That's how much we need to pay.
It might be technically a bit more complicated. If I just forward a message, it would be trivial for me to modify the message. Or create a fake snapshot, or something similar. Here, I assume WhatsApp is at least able to confirm the original message. It's also possible — maybe, I don't know — that rather than forwarding the message, the reporting user transmits the decryption key to allow the abuse team to read the original message directly.
Ultimately, you can be spied on, even in the real world. The UK is a good example.
My first thought was of Ferdinandea island... Well, no. My first thought was Jingo, then the other one.
The thought occurs to me that Google probably prefers to have complaints raised by the regulators of small countries. They don't have as much leverage than the EU or the US, but the solutions achieved become reasonable blueprints for everybody else.
If it had been the EU, I'm betting that Google would be forced to protect the accounts even on YouTube, and they'd have paid a stonking big fine as well.
For what's it's worth, Google swears they don't use your DNS requests for anything nefarious, not even ad targeting:
https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy
I was surprised as well.
We know how the hash technique works, and that doesn't require Apple holding a training dataset.
Considering even humans have been known to disagree on what was objectionable or not, I wouldn't trust an ML model to do the job... Especially when false positives have such consequences.
Oh it takes you three minutes? I take it you are not a mega corporation with 150k engineers, millions of servers, and thousands of different computer configurations which may or may not detect a problem immediately, but only after a few months due to a freak occurrence which happens only every seven months, or possibly years...
At least they don't own anymore the terrifying dancing terminators from Boston Dynamics
Loopholes that are a little bit too convenient sometimes get a massive usage. It might have been that somebody figured out that unlimited EU-wide packages sold in Malta were the cheapest way to backup the internet to a new data center or something similar...
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