Technology

An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users’ messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service’s creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.

https://archive.fo/4HwJt

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19487003

Lots of reasons to be looking at the framework Canada just published for consumer-driven (open) banking, but I thought this was a gem:

from "2.10 A Single Technical Standard"

...The Framework will significantly decrease the risks of personal data being compromised by bad actors and mitigate security, privacy, and liability risks for consumers and participants. This is achieved through the use of APIs, a type of software that acts as secure data “pipes” to enable different products and services to communicate in a consistent manner.

If an API is a pipe, is the Internet a series of tubes?

Let’s have a look at the very first commercial computer with a graphical user interface, called Xerox Star, which was the successor of the Xerox Alto! What did its marvelous GUI look like? Was it ground-breaking and easy to use as we’d expect? Or, perhaps, was it too ahead of its time? Well then, let’s find out!

Disponibile anche in 🇮🇹

But Hirai also began to think about the work he knew lay ahead. The Ocean Link was one of a small number of ships that maintain the subsea cables that carry 99 percent of the world’s data. Positioned in strategic locations around the planet, these ships stand ready to sail out and fix faults the moment they are detected, and most of the time, they are more than equal to the task. But earthquakes, Hirai knew from experience, were different. They didn’t just break one cable — they broke many, and badly. If what he feared had happened, Japan risked being cut off from the world in its moment of need.

Oooff ... I don't think it's like MKBHD to come down so hard on a product. But this thing seemed weird (and probably dumb) when it was launched and so I guess this lines up.

Not that a wearable assistant doesn't make some sense, but some former Apple higher ups who think they're good enough to disrupt the smartphone market by ... checks notes ... relying entirely on other companys' new/untested/problematic/maybe-just-shit AI services and pretending that all of the other "smart" devices we have just don't exist in some sort of volley in the ongoing platform wars ... really does kinda epitomise all of shittiness of the current tech world.

US preparations for a "better future". This while we are al limit to an Kessler Syndrome, see

https://www.livescience.com/space/russian-satellite-narrowly-avoids-collision-with-us-spacecraft-and-nasa-could-do-nothing-to-stop-it

Spaceforce now launching weapom systems to destroy "spysats comunists", what can go wrong?

I know there's some controversy surrounding Brave as a company, and I'm not a fan of everything they do, but the goggles feature in their search engine is a really interesting attempt to give users more control over their search results.

The tool allows you to re-rank your search results according to custom rule sets. Each rule contains a regex style string to check against webpage URLs, and an instruction for what to do when a match is found. There are four basic types of instruction:

1. Exclude matching URLs from your search results.
2. Boost matching URLs so they appear higher in your search results than they otherwise would
3. Downrank matches, causing them to appear lower in the results than they otherwise would.
4. Highlight matches so they stand out in the list of results.

Brave has provided some premade rule sets (called goggles) that you can use right away, such as one that automatically removes all pinterest links, or another that boosts posts from tech related blogs. It's also relatively straightforward to create your own goggles, which you can either keep private or make public for others to find and use as well.

If you want to try it out for yourself you can go to search.brave.com and do a normal search for whatever you want. Then, on the results page, click the little "goggles" button just below the search bar. You'll be presented with a variety of premade filters along with a "discover more" button which sends you to a page with more information and filter options.

First launches July and Octubre 2024 - see also https://rocketstar.nyc

The algorithms that Big Tech designed - and the genocide they assisted. The Listening Post explores how Israel’s killing campaign of Palestinians has relied on artificial intelligence to choose its targets. A dystopian nightmare serves as a marketing campaign for technology flawed by design, and deepens the global digital divide.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14392924

WhatsApp is getting an AI chatbot because of course it is