Those weird kiosks at NSW Clubs that scan your face and make a copy of your drivers licences are made by a mob called Outabox and it appears they didn't pay the Filipino developers that actually built the system. To bring attention to their unpaid plight, they've made a website called haveibeenoutaboxed.com where you can pop in a first and last name to see if your data is stored in Outabox's database that the Flipino developers have full access to. That's right - millions of "facial recognition biometric, driver licence scan, signature, club membership data, address, birthday, phone number, club visit timestamps, slot machine usage" records are all in an unencrypted database a bunch of random developers have unrestricted access to, and those developers are pissed off. Dunno what happens next, but I doubt it's good.
The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel, Mercury News, Denver Post, Pioneer Press, and Orange County Register have all sued OpenAI and Microsoft for "taking the Publishers' work with impunity and are using the Publishers' journalism to create GenAI products that undermine the Publishers' core businesses by retransmitting their content — in some cases verbatim from the Publishers' paywalled websites — to their readers". Meanwhile, the Financial Times has done a deal with OpenAI so that "ChatGPT users will see summaries, quotes, and links to its articles", presumably with some sort of financial compensation for the Financial Times.
It was already guesstimated that Google pays Apple billions of dollars in return for being the default search engine in Safari, which is also the default browser on all of Apple's products. Now we have confirmation that in 2022 Google paid Apple US$20b for that privilege, thanks to unsealed court documents in the US Justice Department's ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Google. I don't know how anyone can think these payments are a good thing that should continue. Maybe it's not illegal, but the optics are horrible considering Apple and Google are the only two options in the smartphone market (lol competition), let alone Google having a search engine monopoly that they solidify by paying vast sums of money to keep competitors away. It absolutely stinks.
404 Media has once again delved into the bizarre world of AI generated images on Facebook. This time its the algorithm placing "AI-generated images of starving, drowning, amputated, bruised, and otherwise suffering and mutilated children" into people's feeds totally unprompted. Go look at the images, it's fucked up. The kids are usually holding up signs saying "today is my birthday, please like". They are very obviously fake and AI-generated, but they get tens of thousands of likes and people comment on them with "happy birthday". It's Facebook distilled to its core essence. Engagement bait taken to the extreme in order to build a following then pivot to scams that prey on the type of idiot that comments on this nonsense. An idiot exploitation machine that happens to have some useful stuff hidden in its massive turd.
Features an diagram of a woman sitting at a computer desk with annotations describing the correct set up for a workstation. Background is black with a red grid pattern. (National Library of Australia)
📻 13th Floor - Mondo Generator
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