Proton Blog: “Using Google Photos to store and share your pictures means allowing the company to see, analyze, and process them. Many people concerned about their privacy have taken steps to move away from the Google ecosystem, despite the company’s efforts to hide its surveillance-based business model. Apart from privacy concerns, Google made promises about… Continue Reading
“The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate. That’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson, and it’s super-relevant to our situation today. Our schools aren’t doing enough to create an educated electorate, and most of our journalists are doing a terrible job. This is terrifying, because the 2024 elections could be the… Continue Reading
Wired – Security researcher Bill Demirkapi found more than 15,000 hardcoded secrets and 66,000 vulnerable websites—all by searching overlooked data sources [unpaywalled]: “If you know where to look, plenty of secrets can be found online. Since the fall of 2021, independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi has been building ways to tap into huge data sources,… Continue Reading
WSJ via MSN: “Banks, insurance providers and airlines still find uses, including artificial intelligence, for the large computers that have been around for decades The industrial-strength mainframe computer, invented decades ago for heavy-duty data processing, is proving its staying power even as next-generation artificial intelligence takes center stage. The two are interconnected: Banks, insurance providers… Continue Reading
Cooper, A. Feder and Grimmelmann, James and Grimmelmann, James, The Files are in the Computer: On Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI (April 22, 2024). Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4803118 – “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft alleges that OpenAI’s GPT models have… Continue Reading
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: “Households accumulated more liquid assets beginning in 2020 than would have been expected without the pandemic. These “extra” liquid assets have dissipated, but their evolution has differed significantly by income group. While middle- and lower-income households hold substantially less liquid wealth than implied by pre-pandemic projections, the level for… Continue Reading
AP: “U.S. health officials on Friday approved a nasal spray to treat severe allergic reactions, the first needle-free alternative to shots like EpiPen. The Food and Drug Administration said it approved the spray from drugmaker ARS Pharmaceuticals Inc. as an emergency treatment for adults and older children experiencing life-threatening allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis. Anaphylaxis… Continue Reading
The New York Times – article and visualizations [unpaywalled]: “Earth’s warming could trigger sweeping changes in the natural world that would be hard, if not impossible, to reverse. Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The… Continue Reading
Jessamyn West, Librarian.net – “Public.work is a search engine for public domain content.” The site claims to have over 100,000 public domain images. This in and of itself is not that special, but the interface is. It’s gorgeous, a fun and engaging discovery layer where every search becomes a URL that can be shared [example]… Continue Reading
New Report: Data Defense: Evaluating People-Search Site Removal Services – “Seven years ago, I typed my own name into a search engine and was horrified to learn that my name, age, home address, and phone number were publicly posted by multiple people-search sites without my knowledge, let alone consent. Shortly after finding my own data… Continue Reading
TechCrunch: “Flighty’s popular flight-tracking app can now predict delays using machine learning Popular flight-tracking app Flighty is releasing a new version on Tuesday that uses machine learning and aviation authority data to provide early warnings of delays and give users the exact reason behind delays. With the launch of Flight 4.0, the app tracks the… Continue Reading
Via Ben Amata: A Trump presidential library exists and appears to be only digital – The Donald J. Trump Presidential records are governed by the Presidential Records Act (PRA). Under the provisions of the PRA, Trump Presidential records are not available to public access requests for the first five years after the end of the… Continue Reading