CHOICE had a look at the privacy policies of the 10 most popular car brands in Australia and found that it's a goddamn mess. Kia, Hyundai and Tesla are the worst offenders, sharing voice recognition data - "sensitive data" under privacy law that requires explicit consent before it can be collected and shared - with third parties by default. CHOICE wants privacy law updated so data collection and sharing from vehicle connected services to be opt-in by default, not opt-out. Subaru, Mitsubishi and Isuzu cars don't have this problem because they don't offer connected services in Australia.
Ripped straight from the New York Times: "John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for discoveries that helped computers learn more in the way the human brain does, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence. The award is an acknowledgment of A.I.'s growing significance in the way people live and work. With their ability to make sense of vast amounts of data, artificial neural networks already have a major role in scientific research, the Nobel committee said, including in physics, where it is used to design new materials, crunch large amounts of data from particle accelerators and help survey the universe".
Rockstar is releasing Red Dead Redemption for PC on October 29th. I could have sworn it was already on PC, but apparently not, just the more recent Red Dead Redemption 2! Not only are they bringing RDR to PC, they've giving it some love with "PC-specific enhancements including native 4K resolution at up to 144hz on compatible hardware, monitor support for both Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9), HDR10 support, and full keyboard and mouse functionality" plus "support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 3.0 upscaling technologies, NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation, adjustable draw distances, shadow quality settings, and more".
Ben Wood and Matt Chatterley over in the UK have a mobile phone museum. It consists of 2,800 unique devices, takes donations and puts a nice high quality image of all their phones up on a website. It makes me happy knowing there's someone out there collecting this stuff. I don't know what purpose it serves, but these devices are such a part of our lives it feels like it's worth the effort just to keep one of each for posterity or nostalgia at the very least.
Apollo 17 Hasselblad image from film magazine 147/A - Rev12, EVA-1 (Project Apollo Archive)
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