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Last Notes

2025-04-04 19:54:20 UTC

>European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday.
>
>The European Commission determined last year that Elon Musk's social network violated the Digital Services Act. Regulators are now in the process of determining what punishment to impose.
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>"The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes," the NYT report said, attributing the information to "four people with knowledge of the plans." The penalty is expected to be issued this summer and would be the first one under the new EU law.
>
>"European authorities have been weighing how large a fine to issue X as they consider the risks of further antagonizing [President] Trump amid wider trans-Atlantic disputes over trade, tariffs and the war in Ukraine," the NYT report said. "The fine could surpass $1 billion, one person said, as regulators seek to make an example of X to deter other companies from violating the law, the Digital Services Act."

2025-03-26 19:35:42 UTC

>Interest in LibreOffice, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, is on the rise, with weekly downloads of its software package close to 1 million a week. That’s the highest download number since 2023.
>“We estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but it’s important to note that we respect users’ privacy and don’t track them, so we can’t say for sure,” said Mike Saunders, an open-source advocate and a deputy to the board of directors at The Document Foundation.
>LibreOffice users typically want a straightforward interface, Saunders said. “They don’t want subscriptions, and they don’t want AI being ‘helpful’ by poking its nose into their work — it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,” he said.
>
>There are genuine use cases for generative AI tools, but many users prefer to opt-in to it and choose when and where to enable it. “We have zero plans to put AI into LibreOffice. But we understand the value of some AI tools and are encouraging developers to create … extensions that use AI in a responsible way,” Saunders said.

2025-03-26 16:35:23 UTC

>One of the most basic tenets of cybersecurity is that you must “consider your threat model” when trying to keep your data and your communications safe, and then take appropriate steps to protect yourself.
>
>This means you need to consider who you are, what you are talking about, and who may want to know that information (potential adversaries) for any given account, conversation, etc. The precautions you want to take to protect yourself if you are a random person messaging your partner about what you want to eat for dinner may be different than those you’d want to take, if, hypothetically, you are the Secretary of Defense of the United States or a National Security Advisor talking to top administration officials about your plans for bombing an apartment building in Yemen.

2025-03-25 18:01:01 UTC

>Papua New Guinea's government has shut down social media platform Facebook, in what it describes as a "test" to mitigate hate speech, misinformation, pornography and "other detrimental content".
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>The test, conducted under the country's anti-terrorism laws, began on Monday morning and has extended into Tuesday.
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>Facebook users in the country have been unable to log-in to the platform and it is unclear how long the ban will go on for.
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>The government's move was not flagged ahead of the "test" on Monday — a move opposition MPs and media leaders have described as "tyranny" and an "abuse of human rights".
>Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform in the country, with an estimated 1.3 million users, or about half of the country's estimated 2.6 million internet users.
>The platform is a critical tool for public discourse in the country, with many highly active forums used to discuss PNG politics and social issues.
>
>Yet, the government has been highly critical of Facebook with the platform often blamed for helping spread misinformation, particularly in light of a recent spate of tribal killings in the country.

2025-03-12 19:38:08 UTC

>Manufacturers are slowly starting to listen to what car journalists and owners have been complaining about for almost a decade: Cramming all the car’s functions into a touchscreen is an inferior solution to having dedicated physical controls for key tasks.
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>Among the manufacturers known to be switching back to buttons is Volkswagen, whose latest vehicles have gone touch-control-crazy with functions either buried inside a touchscreen menu or relocated to an annoying haptic feedback panel.
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>We’ve known for a while that Volkswagen was considering putting back some buttons in its cars, but the manufacturer never officially acknowledged this. Now VW’s design boss, Andreas Mindt, has admitted to Autocar that this approach was a mistake and that the automaker is backtracking on this trend.
>
>“From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen,” Mindt told Autocar. He added, “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We will never, ever make this mistake anymore. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing anymore. There's feedback, it's real, and people love this. Honestly, it's a car. It's not a phone.”

2025-03-12 15:49:08 UTC

>A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users by second-hand smartphone marketplace SellCell found that 73% of iPhone users and a whopping 87% of Samsung Galaxy users felt that AI adds little to no value to their smartphone experience.
>
>SellCell only surveyed users with an AI-enabled phone – thats an iPhone 15 Pro or newer or a Galaxy S22 or newer. The survey doesn’t give an exact sample size, but more than 1,000 iPhone users and more than 1,000 Galaxy users were involved.
>Further findings show that most users of either platform would not pay for an AI subscription: 86.5% of iPhone users and 94.5% of Galaxy users would refuse to pay for continued access to AI features.
>From the data listed so far, it seems that people just aren’t using AI. In the case of both iPhone and Galaxy users about two-fifths of those surveyed have tried AI features – 41.6% for iPhone and 46.9% for Galaxy.
>
>So, that’s a majority of users not even bothering with AI in the first place and a general disinterest in AI features from the user base overall, despite both Apple and Samsung making such a big deal out of AI.

2025-02-28 20:56:15 UTC

>European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) — an independent and well-regarded safety body for the automotive industry — is set to introduce new rules in January 2026 that require the vehicles it assesses to have physical controls to receive a full five-star safety rating.
>While Euro NCAP testing is voluntary, it is widely backed by several EU governments with companies like Tesla, Volvo, VW, and BMW using their five-star scores to boast about the safety of their vehicles to potential buyers.
>“The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes,” said Matthew Avery, director of strategic development at Euro NCAP, to the Times. To be eligible for the maximum safety rating after the new testing guidelines go into effect, cars will need to use buttons, dials, or stalks for hazard warning lights, indicators, windscreen wipers, SOS calls, and the horn.
>The Euro NCAP’s safety guidelines aren’t a legal requirement, however, car makers take safety ratings pretty seriously, so any risk of points being docked during such assessments is likely to be taken into consideration.

2025-02-28 18:20:00 UTC

>Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users' personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn't fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users' personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
>
>>Does Firefox sell your personal data?
>>
>>Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.
>
>That promise is removed from the current version. There's also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you, and we don't buy data about you."
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>The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define "sale" in a very broad way:
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>>Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
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>Mozilla didn't say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.

2025-02-28 18:17:33 UTC

2025-02-19 20:03:36 UTC

>Protector, an app that lets you book armed goons the same way you’d call for an Uber, is having a viral moment.
>Protector lets the user book armed guards on demand. Right now it’s only available in NYC and LA. According to its marketing, every guard is either “active duty or retired law enforcement and military.” Every booking comes with a motorcade and users get to select the number of Escalades that’ll be joining them as well as the uniforms their hired goons will wear.
>Protector is currently “#7 in Travel” on Apple’s App Store. It’s not available for people who use Android devices. Sorry Google phone fans, if you want your own armed goons you’ll have to resort to more traditional methods of goon employment.
>The marketing for Protector, which lives on its X account, is surreal. A series of robust and barrel-chested men in ill-fitting black suits deliver their credentials to the camera while sitting in front of a black background. They’re all operators. They describe careers in SWAT teams and being deployed to war zones. They show vanity shots of themselves kitted out in operator gear. All of them have a red lapel pin bearing the symbol of Protector.
>Who is this for, you might ask? A video posted on January 6, 2025, that runs just over two minutes gives the game away. It opens with a photo of assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. “We’re going to run through a scenario to demonstrate, where if a Protector had been present, crisis could have been averted,” the Protector says in the video. He then runs through several fantasy versions of the assassination where a Protector is on hand to prevent the assassin from killing the CEO.

2025-02-14 17:47:50 UTC

>Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.
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>Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with "exclusive content or private areas" that Reddit users would pay to access.
>
>When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create "content that only paid members can see," Huffman said:
>
>>It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming... We're working on it as we speak.
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>When asked about "new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025," Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”
>
>Reddit's paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available.
>Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform. The push for ads follows changes to Reddit’s API policy that, in part, led to the closing of most third-party apps used for accessing Reddit. Reddit makes most of its revenue from ads and can only show ads on its native apps and website.
>
>Reddit started testing ads in comments last year, with COO Jen Wong saying during an AMA that such ads are in “about 3 percent of inventory.” The executive hinted at that percentage growing. Wong also shared hopes that contextual advertising, or ads being shown based on the content surrounding them, will be a “bigger part of” Reddit’s business by 2026.

2024-10-22 20:25:22 UTC

>Elon Musk may have personally used AI to rip off a Blade Runner 2049 image for a Tesla cybercab event after producers rejected any association between their iconic sci-fi movie and Musk or any of his companies.
>
>In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, lawyers for Alcon Entertainment—exclusive rightsholder of the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 movie—accused Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon's copyright to benefit financially off the brand association.
>Alcon said it would never allow Tesla to exploit its Blade Runner film, so "although the information given was sparse, Alcon learned enough information for Alcon’s co-CEOs to consider the proposal and firmly reject it, which they did." Specifically, Alcon denied any affiliation—express or implied—between Tesla's cybercab and Blade Runner 2049.
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>"Musk has become an increasingly vocal, overtly political, highly polarizing figure globally, and especially in Hollywood," Alcon's complaint said. If Hollywood perceived an affiliation with Musk and Tesla, the complaint said, the company risked alienating not just other car brands currently weighing partnerships on the Blade Runner 2099 TV series Alcon has in the works, but also potentially losing access to top Hollywood talent for their films.
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>The "Hollywood talent pool market generally is less likely to deal with Alcon, or parts of the market may be, if they believe or are confused as to whether, Alcon has an affiliation with Tesla or Musk," the complaint said.
>
>Musk, the lawsuit said, is "problematic," and "any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account."
>If Tesla and WBD are found to have violated copyright and false representation laws, that potentially puts both companies on the hook for damages that cover not just copyright fines but also Alcon's lost profits and reputation damage after the alleged "massive economic theft."

2024-10-21 19:55:28 UTC

>In a letter Friday to Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said the plans — which involve using facial recognition tools in digital displays to target advertising to customers and collect information on them — potentially pave the way for biased pricing discrimination.
>
>“Studies have shown that facial recognition technology is flawed and can lead to discrimination in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Tlaib wrote in the letter, which was posted on social media Tuesday. “The racial biases of facial recognition technology are well documented and should not be extended into our grocery stores.”
>
>Kroger is the largest grocery store chain in the country with nearly 3,000 stores and $3.1 billion in profits in 2023. Kroger and other retailers already use electronic shelving labels instead of paper labels to rapidly adjust prices based on a variety of factors, including time of purchase, where a grocery store is located and other data.
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>The plan to use facial recognition technology could allow the retailer to build individual profiles on customers, based on data like their gender and shopping habits.
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>In an August letter sent to McMullen about the same plans, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bob Casey (D-PA) said they were concerned about the chain building “personalized profiles of each customer, and then use those profiles ‘to determine how much price hiking each of us can tolerate,’ quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag.”
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>The use of facial recognition tools in Kroger stores also raises concerns about how Kroger intends to “adequately” safeguard customer data, the Warren and Casey letter said.

2024-10-09 15:06:18 UTC

>Neowin noticed that Microsoft has updated a help document about what it means if you’re using an unsupported version of Windows (spoiler alert: if you’re online at all, it’s a huge security risk), which currently means PCs running Windows 8.1 (or 8) and Windows 7, or earlier.
>
>It’s worth noting, however, that this will also be the case for Windows 10 devices in a year’s time if their owners don’t take any action, as the end of support rolls around for that OS in October 2025.
>
>Microsoft’s article takes the form of a short discussion followed by a FAQ, and the main update applied to the document pertains to the options for staying supported with Windows, with a new choice added here: ‘Recommended: New PC with Windows 11.’
>
>So, this is Microsoft’s primary recommendation if your unsupported PC isn’t up to scratch, hardware-wise, for Windows 11 – get a new computer.
>Given that, it’d be nice to see Microsoft working towards a solution in respect of somewhat newer PCs, which goes somewhere down the path of tackling some of the alarming stats we’ve heard about the number of Windows 10 machines heading to landfill in the future. This is a potential environmental disaster that could see hundreds of millions of PCs lumped unceremoniously on the scrapheap.
>
>And ever since those concerns have been raised, we haven’t heard anything from Microsoft as to how they might be mitigated. What Windows 10 users (who can’t, or won’t, upgrade) can do is pay for extended support beyond October 2025 – but that could turn out to be an expensive way to go, particularly beyond the first year if Microsoft’s previous pricing in these schemes is anything to go by.
>
>Logically, then, Microsoft needs to be looking at a way of keeping Windows 10 alive – for those totally blocked by Windows 11’s more demanding requirements on the security front and elsewhere – which works out to be way more cost-friendly for users, in an effort to save what might be a much heavier price to pay for the planet. In short, ‘buy a new PC’ will soon not be the answer we need frontloaded here, and pushing folks to make a purchase of a new computer is already a very dubious first port of call given what we’re facing down the road.

2024-08-07 19:39:13 UTC

>Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox's revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser's default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla's ability to keep things "business as usual."
>United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
>Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company's actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search "partners completely," which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
>Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
>The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new "vision" of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google's money suddenly dried up.