Uh, as someone who does malware analysis, sandbox detection is not easy, and is certainly not something that a non-malware-developer/analyst knows how to do. This isn’t 2005 where sandboxes are listing their names in the registry/ system config files.

There is leaked Windows source code online… Is that also freeware for me to train an OS-building model on?

Hell yeah! Nothing good comes from their new model, nor the advertiser-friendly focus of SD3. They were good for pushing the open-source ecosystem forward, but clearly their Capitalist masters have come calling, and they’re enshittifying.

If my brother were still there, I’d say, “yes, please”.

Whales

Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There’s a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes…

But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.

The author focuses on the danger of startups dying out and therefore bricking your devices, but another major problem with startups is that they are VC-backed, and those VC investors are expecting the exact same unsustainable growth that the incumbent “market leaders” are chasing in their enshittification journeys. When the startups don’t die, they will also ‘have’ to enshittify, to satisfy investors.

It’s not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.

Sadly, this is the impossible part. Policymakers (at least in the US) will never prioritize consumers over companies.

Honestly, the best we can ever hope for is a law mandating that it’s no longer illegal to modify your tech if the company who operates it dies, or shuts down the backend server infra, but this will be opposed by basically every company out there (including if not especially video game companies, who won’t want to potentially have to allow people to develop and operate private servers for defunct MMOs).

Yeah, this isn’t going to get any easier. Right now KSA is mostly blaming “unauthorized” pilgrims, saying that they did not have any air conditioned hotel rooms to escape the heat in, but I think given the very wide range of reported countries affected, they are just minimizing anger.

The Middle East is going to get more and more dangerously hot, and I’m worried this is going to start being more normal during Hajj.

Yep, people sadly are bad at extrapolating how restrictions on something they dislike can be cross-applied to limit things they don’t dislike, by others.

Businesses are not moral entities, and the sooner people stop expecting them to be, the sooner people can start pushing for regulations that control and limit them, instead of trying to “work with” them.

People often decry accelerationism, but the reality is that the slow-boiled frog is the one that sits and dies. Chipping away at freedoms, consumer protections, product benefits, etc is all less likely to spark backlash than when they drop sharply in a short time.

That doesn’t mean you should help to make things worse, but it does mean that you may want to reconsider constantly mitigating every bad thing that others are doing, rather than letting them shoot themselves in the foot. When people are being hurt, help them. When people are being inconvenienced, let them get angry.

The EFF’s response is right on the money, as usual:

Communications platforms are not comparable to unsafe food, unsafe cars, or cigarettes, all of which are physical products—rather than communications platforms—that can cause physical injury. Government warnings on speech implicate our fundamental rights to speak, to receive information, and to think.

There is no scientific consensus that social media is harmful to children’s mental health. Social science shows that social media can help children overcome feelings of isolation and anxiety. This is particularly true for LBGTQ+ teens.

We agree that social media is not perfect, and can have negative impacts on some users, regardless of age. But if Congress is serious about protecting children online, it should enact policies that promote choice in the marketplace and digital literacy. Most importantly, we need comprehensive privacy laws that protect all internet users from predatory data gathering and sales that target us for advertising and abuse.

This warning label announcement just feeds into the right-wing “tech platforms bad, full of librul thought, must protect the kids by surveilling everyone and blocking the harmful (minority-focused) content” agenda.

Keep in mind that this is not happening in a vacuum; many states have already put in place age-verification for sites they deem ‘harmful’ (and California is considering one as well, so it’s not just braindead red states getting in on the surveillance action), and this directly makes the argument that social media spaces (and the speech on them) are harmful, and should be subject to government approval.

I’m confused. Are Feiglin, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich not Israeli?

Him quoting Hitler isn’t even the main issue in this case (to me), it’s really what he’s using the quote to justify, which is the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine/ Gaza, which is, as the article demonstrates, a much more broadly-held viewpoint among Israelis, including ones who unarguably do have a lot of political power.

Lastly, if there are not a lot of public quotes condemning this coming out of Israel, for them to quote, isn’t that itself kind of a problem?

Just because something is built out of love does not make it safe, and attestation is about safety. You wouldn’t trust an un-attested surgical device, just because there’s a really positive community around its design.

Signal is a life-or-death app for some people.

This is an extreme acceleration of what is happening in the US as well. Any time employment or compensation is based on research outcomes, it is by definition a monetary incentive to doctor your outcomes.

In China this was down to their ranking system and grant eligibility. In the US this usually happens inside companies (see literally the entire history of DuPont and the research they did, or all the research that is funded by Nestle or Petrochemical companies), or in order to secure or keep tenured positions, or retain grants.

Good research needs to be publicly-funded, and devoid (as much as possible , from a methodological standpoint) of desired outcomes.

If nothing else, it’s useful to see the double-standard laid so bare.

8,700 child casualties in a 7-year period when there is ostensibly no war going on, but that’s not enough to condemn them.

Noticably, that works out to a little more than 1,200 casualties a year, just of children, meaning adult women and men were not even counted.

But of course that specific number is only shocking, and only justifies defensive action, when Hamas does it.

It was always just a distraction to divert news from asking who was stopping aid getting in, by giving them a narrative about “need to build this pier first”. Sleight of hand for propagandists to exploit.

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Not only humans can use language to impart abstract concepts. Crows have been observed sharing information about danger to crows who are not present to witness the danger themselves, but then successfully recognize it in the future. They’ve also been found to be able to create tools they have not seen before in order to solve problems.

Koko the gorilla was also famous for her abstract thinking. Others species include dolphins and elephants, and obviously we haven’t tested most species out there.

I can’t tell if China wants to be Texas, or Texas wants to be China?

*Sips tea* “Nationalism.”

They just need to gamify it. Have a “Verified Accurate Alt-Text Submissions” leaderboard or something.