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Category Archives: E-Commerce

Streaming subscription fees have been rising while content quality is dropping

Ars Technica: “Subscription fees for video streaming services have been on a steady incline. But despite subscribers paying more, surveys suggest they’re becoming less satisfied with what’s available to watch. At the start of 2024, the industry began declaring the end of Peak TV, a term coined by FX Networks Chairman John Landgraf that refers… Continue Reading

The chatbot optimisation game: can we trust AI web searches?

The Guardian -“…Looking into the sort of evidence that large language models (LLMs, the engines on which chatbots are built) find most convincing, three computer science researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found current chatbots overrely on the superficial relevance of information. They tend to prioritise text that includes pertinent technical language or is… Continue Reading

Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election

ProPublica: Reporting Highlights Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish. Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 26, 2024

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 26, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and… Continue Reading

The Boomer Stuff Avalanche

Business Insider ungated – “Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated…In some ways, this is a timeless problem — every generation accumulates things, and younger generations rebel against older generations’ tastes. But the sheer size of the current problem is unprecedented given that baby boomers are an extra-materialistic breed.… Continue Reading

15 Best Amazon Alternatives For Ethical Online Shopping

goodgoodgood [June 2022] Amazon, the company that catapulted founder Jeff Bezos to billionaire status (and to the edge of space), has long been touted as environmentally unfriendly; the company emits the same level of carbon emissions as the country of Norway, according to a report released by Amazon in 2019. Its impact on the environment,… Continue Reading

VISA Biannual Threat Report Fall 2024

This report provides an overview of the top payments ecosystem threats within the past six-month period (January – June 2024) as identified by Visa Payment Fraud Disruption (PFD). In the December 2023 Biannual Report, Visa PFD noted an interesting shift in threat actors’ organization, access to tools, and target choice, with threat actors increasing in… Continue Reading

Anthropic’s new AI model can control your PC

TechCrunch: “In a pitch to investors last spring, Anthropic said it intended to build AI to power virtual assistants that could perform research, answer emails, and handle other back-office jobs on their own. The company referred to this as a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching” — one it believed that could, if all goes according… Continue Reading

Musk and the federal government

Via Next Draft: What’s in it for Musk (and a handful of other billionaires funding the entire Trump operation)? Well, let’s narrow the answer down to this: Everything. Franklin Foer in The Atlantic( Gift Article): What Elon Musk Really Wants. “Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the… Continue Reading