RegW

... and just a by-product of chicken production at that. Gotta eat more chickens to save the oceans.

Surely there is still some merit in having competition in the market place?

Oh, I remember the joy I felt when Phil Collins finally f'd off to Switzerland.

I can't wait for Ed Sheeran to follow him - clearly we need to more to make those pips squeak.

I don't think they have ever pretended not to be a platform that gathers data about users.

I'm not in the EU but I am in Europe. It was on for me.

From my reading of the article, this is Linkedin (an American company) that has decided to collect data about Europeans - the EU is not involved. Linkedin has decided that making it opt-out is covered by "legitimate interests". So I guess the real issue here is that the rest of you just don't get the option - you are included anyway.

I was once contracting at an ISP/telco in the naughties. While working on a UI to obtain PAC codes and transfer phone numbers, I was coding a modal confirmation dialog, when I almost unconsciously translated the specified "You sure" into "Are you sure?".

The QA guy kicked it back. So I took it a manager to get the spec corrected. The manager said to just follow the spec as written. No, I couldn't add a question mark. Apparently the company used language like this to appear "down with the kids".

I hadn't realised I had got so out-of-touch. So I went away and did as I was told. Oh well - I'm still here, but the telco isn't.

Strange - I don't get this in Firefox. I wonder if its because I'm in the UK or perhaps Privacy Badger is blocking it.

Well, he has labelled other people as pedophile before.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50641397

> I think Copilot made that up.

Hmm, I guess I was suspicious. It's like the old bloke at the end of the bar, who always wants to have something interesting to say.

Copilot says: "This chair, located directly to the left of the Speaker’s chair, remains vacant as a symbolic reminder of the time when the monarch’s messenger or royal representative would sit there."

... but I can't find a link to support this.

Apparently not - provided for the king to use when he's putting his crown on before the state opening of parliament.

https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/pal...

No. No. No.

Microsoft need to update the spec for all new personal computers to include mandatory pre-load hardware. This would have a secondary CPU, RAM and storage used for pre-loading licensed Office products before your laptop boots. AI would analyse your usage patterns and fire-up Office for you before you even get to work in the morning.

Perhaps, this could even allow you to have Office on-hand, ready-to-use on its own hardware module, while you develop Linux application on your main CPU.

Further down the line. Someone see an opportunity to provide access to compatible modules in the cloud, allowing re-use of older incompatible hardware. But there would be the danger that service (without the support of MS), may go bust, leaving those users without their mandatory instant access to licensed Office products, forcing upgrades to even newer hardware.

Imagine the gravel rash if all goes pear shaped.

> I can't pick my own domain when using Gmail, and still works just fine.

I do. I've used my own domain with GMail for many years. I moved it there from another provider when Google were giving such things away for free to beta users.

Perhaps I should move on again and avoid the big data kleptomania.

Ah! There is a deity.

Mobile app? You must be joking - work occupies too much time as it is! But yes, you are correct it is now there under Setting -> General -> Suggested replies -> Off.

Certainly not! That would be a faux pas.

Currently next to the send button in one of my Teams chats are the suggested responses: "I look forward to it", "Haha, no problem" and "Haha, I know".

I assume some sort of AI is involved, but I not sure who would ever want to say such things, and my great fear is that one day my motor skills will let me down and I click one of these inane buttons.

I've sent the suggestion (many times) that they put in an option to let me turn this off, but they obviously haven't got around to this one yet. So I don't think that we can expect the opt-out options suggested by the article any time soon.

Proprietary software is just one part of this issue. There seems to be a growing trend in attempting to entrap a servile subscriber base within your own walled enclosure.

To be successful you need to keep your buyer unaware of the trap until they have too much invested within your walls to cut their losses emotionally. Here the poster has bought a high cost camera (even at a discount) without realising there would be an on-going recurring cost.

Expensive propriety hardware, tied to propriety software, tied to an online account with telemetry, where nothing works without all the other bits is a wonderful trap. It works great for John Deer and I guess will soon be coming with your next vehicle.

Personally, someone bought me a Fitbit Sense 2 watch for Christmas. It can't even be used as a watch until you have signed in with a Google account and "consent to Google using my health and wellness data". Of course you don't get to see this before you break the seal on the box. And although the watch gathers lots of your data, you can't see it until after it has been upload to Google, and some of it is only available once you have signed up for Fitbit Premium.

But wait, it gets better. The time on the default watch face is tiny (for an old fart like me). I could download a larger one, if I signed up for Fitbit Premium. I could sign up to download the developer kit and write my own for free (a new watch face is a simple example). However, if I go too far and accidentally break the data collection, they reserve the right to suspend my accounts and turn my £200 "watch" into a brick.

I am still deciding if I can return my sanity using a hammer.

Not always anywhere.

Sometimes there is just an assumption that you will know that they want it.

I think it was in a book by Grady Booch that I read something like:

No one would ask an architect to add a third basement to an already complete skyscraper, but it happens in software all the time.

Well I would guess its an app. Spend some money and make a pretty, shiny or even actually useful app. Market it. Get people to download and install it (possibly for free), and ask for permission to access the microphone.

If this is the case I'm not sure what the fb/google/az connection would be. Perhaps, they could be buying the resulting data.

It would sort of makes sense if you installed a voice-note taking app and it asked for access to the microphone. However, when you are not using that app - is it still using the microphone? Who knows? I do get somewhat irritated with Android's inability to report which apps are doing what at any particular moment.

I suppose it would be relying on being trained on code that followed good practice. If this is true then we might suppose that this API isn't following good practice. However, a gigantic feedback loop is appearing on the horizon.

The AI of tomorrow will be trained on the output of AI today.

(Somewhere in my memory, I hear an ex-boss saying "Well that's good - isn't it?")

It's great to see this sort of stuff still goes on.

In 2000 (I think), I put 2 Java Applets into the 5k competition. One a maze game with a thousand rooms (10x10x10), the other a spelling checker that checked the contents of an input field against a word list. Both were quite poor and I didn't do well.

The general standard was really impressive. I remember that there was pretty good chess game done in Javascript.

https://www.the5k.org/about.php

On reflection, I think a more likely explanation is that Facebook just harvested, used and shared your WhatsApp metadata. Metadata analysis doesn't seem to count as an invasion of privacy in the modern world.

So while you and your friend chatted about this college, perhaps your friend googled it.

FB might then share with Google that you connected with your fiend at that particular time, and Google connected your exchange with the search.

Of course this assumes there is some way to tie your FB and Google accounts together - like matching up shared FB & Google tracker journeys across the internet.

In Antonio Garcia Martinez's 2016 book "Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine", he talks about a deal done between Google and Facebook to exchange data. So I'm pretty sure that would be happening.

Not so sure about Facebook analyzing your WhatsApp traffic, because they make such a big thing in their advertising about the secure end-to-end encryption and privacy. Surely they would get roasted if it was found not to be true. Of course it's always possible with a closed source app.

The technique discussed in Darknet Diaries episode 146 (about the ANOM phone) involved duplicating the message to [an] archive endpoint. It mentions Google providing text archival as a service for company phones, and it seems this also happens for WhatsApp. However, are Facebook also purloining your private WhatsApps? Are they using them to target you? Who can say?

https://www.waterstones.com/book/chaos-monkeys/antonio-garci...

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/146/

https://www.telemessage.com/mobile-archiver/whatsapp-archive...

Well it's not as rampantly inciting as "is Evil".

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2160788/why-extends-is-evi...

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2161183/why-getter-and-set...

Interestingly the option has a link to an explanation on how it works. Which was handy as I couldn't get past the German cookie dialogue on the original article.

I guess the question is whether the aggregation services can be persuaded by clever attribute manipulation to give the ad site a near unique report for a user across many sites.

<https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...>

<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap>

<https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...>

A long time ago - may be 15 years ago, I got really bored of listening to an hour of drive-time news on the radio twice a day. I then discovered podcasts, so I bought an MP3 player and wired it through my car stereo.

I found downloading podcasts manually a bit of a faff. So I wrote a bash/curl/xsd script to rattle through a list of RSS feeds, download new episodes and create a playlist. It ran on my laptop at home or work and plonked the result on my MP3 player via USB.

Now, years later, the script is essentially the same. Except it runs under termux on my phone, and VLC broadcasts the playlist direct to my car or home stereo via bluetooth.

> ... a thin outer layer of negative mass ...

Brilliant! My antigravity boots are nearly here.

I'm using 10 - it doesn't work for me.