An investigation by Proof News and Wired has revealed that "subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce". They all used a source of data called The Pile, a now obsolete "825 GiB diverse, open source language modelling data set that consists of 22 smaller, high-quality datasets combined together", collated by a non-profit called EleutherAI and distributed freely, to train their various AI models. Of course, EleutherAI didn't even bother to send any of the YouTubers a simple "hey do you mind if we include your subtitles in our data set?" message, they just went ahead and did it. Fuck getting consent, right?
Firefox 128 popped up last week and one of the new features is "privacy-preserving ad measurement", that Mozilla says is as "an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people". Sounds all well and good but Mozilla turned it on by default without telling anyone. You'd only have found out if you bothered to read the release log. Very shit move by Mozilla, but not surprising since they acquired an ad-tech company recently. Mozilla sadly seems incapable of finding an alternative way to fund their activities that isn't participating in the poison that is the advertising industrial complex.
You know how Google got bored of running a profitable normal business selling domain names and gave it to Squarespace? Well lots of people who had domains with Google still haven't bothered to set up a Squarespace account to manage their domain, so hackers are using an email address attached to the domain (easy to get via WHOIS) and making Squarespace accounts so they can take over management of the domain. Sounds bad, but the hacker needs access to the email account to verify the new account, yeah? Nope, Squarespace just asks you to enter an email, then make up a password and drops whoever does that first into the domain's control panel. Pathetic work Squarespace, zero stars.
I wrote about Mozilla's shenanigans above, but they aren't alone. Google got busted recently hard-coding into Chromium (the core of Chrome that's used by many other browsers, like Edge & Brave) a default extension that gives extra privileges to websites on google.com domains beyond what the user has allowed. It looks like it was used to monitor system processes (CPU, RAM, etc) on Google Hangouts/Meet, but who knows what else Google was slurping up? Over in WebKit land (aka Safari), they've announced Private Browsing 2.0, which on the surface sounds great as it automatically enables a bunch of privacy features but they couldn't resist themselves and "expanded Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) as a replacement for tracking parameters in URL to help developers understand the performance of their marketing campaigns even under Private Browsing". Fuck it all.
Samsung VR400G Transparent Blue VCR VHS Player (Retrospekt)
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