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180709714
comment
bybill_mcgonigle
ary 31, 2026 @01:04PM
(#65961116)
Attached to: WhatsApp End-to-End Encryption Allegations Questioned By Some Security Experts, Lawyers
The protocol is good.
The client? Who knows. The Facebook version of the Double Ratchet includes "Abuse Reporting" to complain to the manager about a message you got.
Could a closed client accept some secret message to cause the recipient to narc on the sender? It could, but that doesn't mean it does.
Which version of which algorithm, precisely, is used in each version of their chat apps? Who knows.
Why is anybody who needs secure comms using a closed source client? Who knows.
180694462
comment
byShanghaiBill
y 29, 2026 @06:57PM
(#65957818)
Attached to: ArXiv Will Require English Submissions - and Says AI Translators Are Fair Game
If AI translation is good enough ...
Pure AI isn't good enough, and that isn't what most people will submit.
AI makes mistakes and humans make mistakes, but they make different mistakes. Humans make grammar and word choice mistakes much more often than AI, while AI makes factual mistakes.
A researcher can run the original through an LLM to produce a well-written, grammatically correct translation. Then they read it and correct the factual errors. Researchers who can't write English well can usually still read it well enough to catch factual errors.
180690526
comment
byG00F
26 @03:57PM
(#65957496)
Attached to: Windows 11 Has Reached 1 Billion Users Faster Than Windows 10
95/98 where good. NT was great. xp, 2000, 2003 was good. windows 7 had some reason but was largely good. windows 8 trash, windows 10, well not as bad as 8, and somehow upgrading to it was at least not as bad as 11..... and 11 was kind of better than 8. Oh yea, vista was garbage.
But 10, and 11 forced MS online only accounts and onedrive and all the spyware and store front crap.... If the Gov was only as corrupt as they where in 90s they would have been taking to cort a dozen times over.
180688994
comment
byVoyager529
29, 2026 @01:43PM
(#65957150)
Attached to: Nothing CEO Says Company Won't Launch New Flagship Smartphone Every Year 'For the Sake of It'
The Nothing Phone 3 was more than a bit controversial in its design. While all of the previous phones had "Glyphs" (individually addressable LEDs on the back that could be used for specific notifications or just to look cool), the NP3 ditched them in favor of the "Glyph Matrix", a small cluster of LEDs that made a small display. One may justifiably argue that these things were gimmicks, but they were a clear differentiator for the company.
The NP3 was also considerably more expensive than the NP2, and it wasn't like Nothing put both sets of lights into the hardware, so a measurable number of Nothing loyalists decided to sit out the NP3. That a lot of the promo materials of the NP3 focused on new AI features probably wasn't much help, either - it was pretty clear from the announcements that it was likely to be the worst of both worlds - those who wanted AI on their phones were likely to get better implementations of those functions from less expensive Pixel phones, while those who didn't want them would be stuck paying for their development.
While their main markets are in Europe and India, the US market is still pretty messy for them - they don't have a distribution agreement with any of the carriers, they're not sold retail anywhere in America, and their modems lack a number of 5G bands, including T-Mobile's lower frequency bands that provide coverage in rural areas, and there's no support for Verizon's mm-wave bands for densely populated areas...AT&T is a whole headache with them, too.
So, my guess is that they're letting people know that there's no Phone 4 coming out this year, in order to entice purchases to work through their initial production runs. Specifically, my guess is that they're trying to encourage Phone 1 and Phone 1(a) owners to upgrade this year; they've had their phones for quite a while now, so the hope is likely to kill two birds with one stone - encourage the holdouts not to wait until 2027 and instead buy phones that they might be on the fence about buying.
180686334
comment
byShanghaiBill
y 29, 2026 @10:21AM
(#65956596)
Attached to: French Lawmakers Vote To Ban Social Media Use By Under-15s
If they do this in America ...
America already does it. Several states ban social media for teens. Utah was first. Other states followed.
will they do it with the same caution and thoughtfulness I wonder?
Most states with bans leave it up to the tech companies to figure out how to verify age.
180681122
comment
bybill_mcgonigle
uary 28, 2026 @06:37PM
(#65955508)
Attached to: Supreme Court To Decide How 1988 Videotape Privacy Law Applies To Online Video
I even hear Zoomers say, "roll the tape," on podcasts where they're about to offer some analysis of or commentary on a video file or stream.
Words have usage that often extends beyond an original concrete origin.
180679966
comment
bycayenne8
8, 2026 @02:45PM
(#65954994)
Attached to: 'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis
If you wanna lay out a bit of $$ for Mac Studio minis....you can link up to 5 of them high speed and run some BIG ass models.
See HERE on YouTube.
180679862
comment
bycayenne8
8, 2026 @02:34PM
(#65954970)
Attached to: 'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis
You gotta have a bath in the airport bidet.
Never heard of an airport bidet...that's only slightly less strange sounding that the OP wanting to somehow bathe at an airport....
:O
180679842
comment
bycayenne8
8, 2026 @02:32PM
(#65954968)
Attached to: 'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis
If I hadn't gone to the airport early to take a bath,
Take a bath at an airport?!?!?
Putting aside the very idea of bathing at an airport being weird....WTF would you bathe AT an airport?
Hell, I hate to just sit and take a shit at an airport and only do that if I can't possibly wait.....cant' imagine bathing? Soap? Shampoo? And where is a tub?!?!
180679478
comment
byVoyager529
28, 2026 @01:25PM
(#65954808)
Attached to: Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet
...not at the top, making decisions with executives, but customer facing, as an Apple Genius or CSR on the phone for Comcast. I won't take any of this crap seriously until he's had some time working with the general public, and helping them understand technology as it currently exists, forced to have five times more patience than most of the people he'll interact with...because then, and ONLY then, will he have enough understanding to figure out how we got here, and what the costs will be.
Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago
I've been disappointed far more than a decade. Tim's not special.
he's thrown everything at a project that completely shifts the way data is held on the web, known as the Solid (social linked data) protocol. It's activism that is rooted in people power -- not unlike the first years of the web.
And for ten years, basically nobody uses it. Sure, blame the EEEEVILLL corporations, and there's certainly at least some validity to doing so...but over the past decade, I'm hard pressed to point to a SINGLE peer-to-peer or user-hosted solution that has taken a meaningful hold. There's a reason a whole lot of people let Google and Apple and Microsoft handle all their important data, and it's not because it's impossible to self-host most of it...it's because most people use their computers as a necessary means to an end, whereas Tim focuses on the computer network as an end in itself. That focal shift has massive implications regarding what people will and won't do to retain access to their data.
This version of the internet would turbocharge personal sovereignty and give control back to users.
And it's still completely possible to spin up a LAMP stack on an old PC, and host one's own website or social network or chat server or mail server for free....nobody *forces* users to use Godaddy or Facebook or WhatsApp or Gmail...so the issue isn't corporations holding users back, and SOLID isn't going to solve these fundamentals...
Berners-Lee has long seen AI -- which exists only because of the web and its data -- as having the potential to transform society far beyond the boundaries of self-interested companies. But now is the time, he says, to put guardrails in place so that AI remains a force for good -- and he's afraid the chance may pass humankind by.
That only works if it's truly democratized, but that only works if we start doing even more insidious things...like deciding that OpenAI and friends *can't* buy any more hardware, and that taxpayer dollars *must* be used to buy everyone a $4,000 Nvidia DGX Spark, and that AI software and models *must* be FOSS...that may not be the perfect example, but if we're going to avoid "self-interested companies", then it necessarily means that users must be able to run their own AI models on something, and a relatively small percentage of citizens have computers capable of running AI models...so if it's optional, it's abundantly clear that most users will opt to let OpenAI continue running ChatGPT and paying them rent to use it, so the only way to enable the level of democratic use of AI being envisioned here is through a level of force...
Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s, when the .com space was "pounced on by charlatans."
Yes, because regular people don't own domain names, including .com, or are prevented from doing so? One *could potentially* argue that retaining the limits on the internet to libraries and universities and government organizations would have some advantages, but it also would keep the internet's utility limited to being an encyclopedia people would have to drive to utilize; the internet - and Tim himself - wouldn't be relevant if there wasn't commercialization. Yes, it absolutely brought us Cloudflare and Microsoft365 and AWS and Meta...but it also brought us Geocities and Wordpress and Soundcloud and the ability to do the sort of real-time grassroots sharing that would have been impossible without the commercialization of the internet.
The 2016 US elections, he said, revealed to him just how toxic his creation could become.
Oh Tim..."toxicity" has been a part of the human condition for millennia, long before the internet and ever since...if 2016 was revelatory in any way, shape, or form, then it's an even more damning revelation that Tim has needed to work in customer service for an even longer period of time. Even if one wants to limit it to the internet, ask Google for a copy of the Dejanews archive and see what Usenet was like in the 90's...there was PLENTY of toxicity to be had, and that's just what was archived - it's doubtful that any IRC logs survived, but they'd be no better. There was plenty of hateful messaging on Geocities and Angelfire and BBSes...if Tim ignored that because he spent his time in his ivory tower with all of the academics and intellectuals who were above such nonsense, then it just goes to show that he's been out of touch for far too long.
A corner of the web, he says, has been "optimised for nastiness" -- extractive, surveillance-heavy, and designed to maximize engagement at the cost of user wellbeing.
...and the solution is SOLID? Eventually, one will get popular enough to have the most members (likely the one with the most nude photos), and it will be differently-centralized...even if we agree that the attention-optimizing algorithms are harmful (and we do), the options are either a deluge of spam, or someone deciding what isn't spam...and again...centralization. Alternatively, it'll end up being a bunch of small communities and echo chambers, likely flocking around the idea that "[group] is bad", and the problem ends up remaining.
His answer is Solid, a protocol that gives users control through personal data "pods" functioning as secure backpacks of information.
Okay....and how is this better than anything else that already exists, and how does it solve any of the fundamental problems that Internet 1.0 revealed? If people can share data, they can interact unkindly toward each other. You can't fix that with technology.
The Flanders government in Belgium already uses Solid pods for its citizens.
And that's helpful...how? A small regional government uses SOLID pods, and do their citizens use them? Do they use them beyond what is necessary for government interaction? Do the citizens like them, or is it Yet Another App they are forced to use?
On AI, his optimism remains dim. "The horse is bolting," he says, calling for a "Cern for AI" where scientists could collaboratively develop superintelligence under contained, non-commercial oversight.
And where is the line between "shell script" and "AI", Tim? And even if that's perfectly implemented, why would the corporations listen to the noncommercial oversight entity?
It seems like Tim still hasn't learned that "man is basically good" is the foundational, fundamental flaw that has undermined every attempt to get people to work together, at scale, over time. Human nature prevents any good system from remaining good, because eventually a not-good person will attempt to utilize the system, and limiting a system so "only good people can use it" is a way to ensure that "bad people" eventually decide who is a "good person".
So Tim, thanks for the modern internet. Spend some time giving customer service to people at the Apple Store, and you'll realize why Apple and Google and Microsoft and Meta and OpenAI have so much data, and why people willingly choose to use these services, even when it goes against their long-term interests.
180679226
comment
byroman_mir
28, 2026 @12:40PM
(#65954678)
Attached to: Amazon Cuts Another 16,000 Jobs
The economy started collapsing once the government introduced such concepts that allowed it to get to the point of the collapse. 2007 was a result of a number of wrong and bad decisions, it was not the cause. The cause is the government expansion, printing of paper money, federal reserve controlling and manipulating interest rates to be below what market would set, various rules, laws, regulations and taxes that prevent formation of capital and of businesses and promote outsourcing manufacturing.
What we are observing now is just many lines of bad decisions coming together into a single point, everything is being focused together and comes into light.
The reasons for all of this is corruption bottom up and top down, it is people expecting free shit to be handed out by government, expectations are that some people will pay for others, it doesn't matter if we are talking about income taxes, bank bailouts, housing subsidies, various rules and regulations, it is just a culmination of the effects of all of these causes.
180678708
comment
byVoyager529
28, 2026 @10:47AM
(#65954460)
Attached to: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp To Test Premium Subscriptions
Instead, offer a model where we pay directly, and give us control of our own data again.
Any other deal is pointless.
The problem is that even *this* deal is pointless.
I'd gladly pay $10/month or something (maybe $15/month for FB/IG/WA together) to get the "no ads, no tracking" option...but the problem is that I'd never take them up on the offer, because the only means of verification that would be granted that the data isn't being collected anyway is, "trust me, bro". There's no means of independent verification that Meta wouldn't be keeping two-sets-of-books, so that paying customers truly aren't present in the first set...but if I stop paying...they start tracking me again and ignore the data available during the subscription term?
It's super unclear how the company that ended up on the working end of Cambridge Analytica would be able to prove that data wouldn't be collected and utilized during the subscription term...and even if they somehow did, they'd have to market the service without being uncomfortably transparent about the level of data collection they perform on free-tier users.
The problem isn't even Facebook (where anyone still there tolerates the amount of data collection), it's on WhatsApp. Supposedly, it's all E2EE, so Meta can't leverage the chat threads or video calls or voice memos to feed into their AI meat grinder...but for an app that's free, no ads, and supposedly-no-data-collection, they'd either have to inject ads (with generic ones, or possibly localization-only ads, instead of hyper-targeted ads), to then say "pay us to make the ads go away"...or they'd have to admit that the data they've pinky-promised doesn't end up in the ad-revenue meat grinder...is, in fact, being fed to the aforementioned meat grinder.
So...I doubt the "pay for no tracking" option would be terribly profitable - those who care won't trust it enough to pay, and those who don't care won't pay for it. The only reason Meta would possibly offer such a service is if the goal is to have it fail intentionally, so that they can demonstrate in court that users prefer to be tracked than to pay.
180669384
comment
byG00F
6 @10:08PM
(#65953782)
Attached to: Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold Will Cost $2,900 in the US
its not free.
Granted sometimes it makes sense to staywith them since there is no competition and they all rape you hard but still those prepaids are a lot cheaper, especially when you include they all charge like $5-10 per line/month for the privilege of not hooking your bank account.
If it was up to me, I wouldnt even have a f**** cell phone. , at least not a plan. Keep mine / the keyboard and replaceable ssd and battery just so I can do maps and wifi usage.
180668022
comment
byG00F
6 @07:37PM
(#65953694)
Attached to: Amazon To Pay $309 Million To US Shoppers In Settlement Over Returns
if you're someone to buy items and then return them (e.g., you buy a piece of clothing in 3 sizes to return 2), they will flag you from returns.
How else are you suppose to buy clothing at costco?
180666808
comment
byalta
6 @03:43PM
(#65953094)
Attached to: Doomsday Clock Ticks To 85 Seconds Before Midnight, Its Closest Ever
i had to look it up, it was earlier than I thought, I was thinking late 60's. But then again, kennedy was killed earlier than i thought too. I was born in 76...
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