Monthly Archives: March 2024

Capilouto announces his proposed changes to faculty senate. What it means for campus

Source: Latest News

Article note: They're going for full power consolidation, everyone not an appointed administrator becomes "advisory."

Attendees listen to a presentation during a University of Kentucky Board of Trustees meeting at the Gatton Student Center on the UK campus in Lexington, Ky., on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024.

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The Disney Plus-Hulu merger is way more than a streaming bundle

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Anyone else getting "Google+" vibes from this "Integrate everything into a common platform" rah-rah? It even has the same nomenclature.
A screenshot of Disney Plus on a TV, showing the Hulu tile.
It’s Hulu. In Disney Plus. | Image: Disney

As of today, Hulu is part of Disney Plus. Hulu still exists — it still even has its own app — but it’s also being bundled into Disney’s primary streaming service alongside all the company’s other content. Even the Disney Plus logo changed to integrate that iconic green Hulu hue.

From a product perspective, the Hulu integration is roughly what you’d imagine. Hulu is now a tile inside the app, next to Marvel and Pixar and National Geographic and the rest. The price hasn’t changed; it’s still US-only, and the app’s not going away. Hulu shows and movies will also show up in search results and recommendations; if you’re subscribed to Hulu, you’ll get everything seamlessly, and if you’re not, the app will try to convince you to sign up....

Continue reading…

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Updates to the OpenVMS Community Program

Source: Hacker News

Article note: VMS is _extremely_ interesting, but the licensing situation has always made it not-worth-dealing-with. This is not improving it _at all_. Especially a problem for historical systems, VMS for VAX/Alpha is (admittedly easy to obtain at this point) the interesting part for a section of the community.
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Authorities reportedly ordered Google to reveal the identities of some YouTube videos’ viewers

Source: Engadget

Article note: Probably drag nets with gag orders, sometimes based on intentionally placed bait, that get tens of thousands of people at a time are not really OK in a 4-th Amendment sense? Let's see if the government reigns itself in.

Federal authorities in the US asked Google for the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity of the accounts that watched certain YouTube videos between January 1 and 8, 2023, according to unsealed court documents viewed by Forbes. People who watched those videos while they weren't logged into an account weren't safe either, because the government also asked for their IP addresses. The investigators reportedly ordered Google to hand over the information as part of an investigation into someone who uses the name "elonmuskwhm" online. 

Authorities suspect that elonmuskwhm is selling bitcoin for cash and is, thus, breaking money laundering laws, as well as running an unlicensed money transmitting business. Undercover agents reportedly sent the suspect links to videos of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software in their conversations back in early January. Those videos, however, weren't private and had been collectively viewed by over 30,000 times, which means the government was potentially asking Google for private information on quite a large number of users. "There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators," authorities reportedly told the company. 

Based on the documents Forbes had seen, the court granted the order but had asked Google to keep it under wraps. It's also unclear if Google handed over the data the authorities were asking for. In another incident, authorities asked the company for a list of accounts that "viewed and/or interacted" with eight YouTube livestreams. Cops requested for that information after learning that they were being watched through a stream while they were searching an area following a report that an explosive was placed inside a trashcan. One of those video livestreams was posted by the Boston and Maine Live account, which has over 130,000 subscribers.

A Google spokesperson told Forbes that the company follows a "rigorous process" to protect the privacy of its users. But critics and privacy advocates are still concerned that government agencies are overstepping and are using their power to obtain sensitive information on people who just happened to watch specific YouTube videos and aren't in any way doing anything illegal. 

"What we watch online can reveal deeply sensitive information about us—our politics, our passions, our religious beliefs, and much more," John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Forbes. "It's fair to expect that law enforcement won't have access to that information without probable cause. This order turns that assumption on its head."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/authorities-reportedly-ordered-google-to-reveal-the-identities-of-some-youtube-videos-viewers-140018019.html?src=rss
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GM stops sharing driver data with brokers amid backlash

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: The announcement wording is ... suspiciously specific. They aren't selling data directly to two specific large brokers - are they selling data to the various brokers through a middle man or directly to the insurers now?
Scissors cut off a stream of data from a toy car to a cloud

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

After public outcry, General Motors has decided to stop sharing driving data from its connected cars with data brokers. Last week, news broke that customers enrolled in GM's OnStar Smart Driver app have had their data shared with LexisNexis and Verisk.

Those data brokers in turn shared the information with insurance companies, resulting in some drivers finding it much harder or more expensive to obtain insurance. To make matters much worse, customers allege they never signed up for OnStar Smart Driver in the first place, claiming the choice was made for them by salespeople during the car-buying process.

Now, in what feels like an all-too-rare win for privacy in the 21st century, that data-sharing deal is no more.

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Something exceptionally grim is happening on the Internet

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I'm really curious what it's going to look like if/when the bubble bursts on this "AI" chatterbot garbage tide. I'm not really a believer that it's possible to put technical genies back into bottles unless they become economically infeasible (and usually that has to be at least largely a physical-laws or market conditions thing, not just a legal thing, because computers and computer-mediated communication is international and accessible), but I think the required change of conditions to start another AI winter might be smaller than most folks imagine. Many of the profitable applications so far are fraud (fake reviews, fake publications, fake influencers, fake products, fake...) or fraud-adjacent ("Let's replace our support staff with chatterbots that can anthropomorphically regurgitate our FAQ page"), but it's not clear to me that the petty fraud is profitable enough (or at least that enough of the money is/can be going to the AI developer/operators) to sustain the massive compute requirements and the developers to design, train, and run models without the ongoing VC frenzy. VCs are largely dumb herd animals, and it wouldn't take that much loss-of-momentum (which seems to be happening) or regulatory condition changes (also likely) to spook many of them off, and I don't think even the Nvidia ouroboros can self-sustain without external cash injection.
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Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3M Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The headline may actually under-sell, for the attack to work as described they have to have more or less figured out the entire MIFARE Classic RIFD system's security model (which, to be fair, was already in shambles for like a decade) in addition to the specifics of Dormakaba's Saflok implementation.
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U.S. Justice Dept. Sues Apple, Claiming iPhone Monopoly in Antitrust Case

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Well, this is going to be interesting. They seem to be aiming realy high (even compared to the recent EU action), I wonder if the plan is to aim high and expect it to be argued down.

The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $3 trillion public company.

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Science fiction master Vernor Vinge dead at 79

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: Aw man, "True Names" and his Zones of Thought books ("A Fire Upon the Deep" and even more "A Deepness in the Sky") are things that I refer to all the time because they shaped how I think about the world.

Triple Hugo Award-winning author Vernor Vinge died Wednesday at 79.

Vinge sold his first science-fiction story in 1964, "Apartness", which appeared in the June 1965 issue of New Worlds.

In 1971, he received a PhD (Math) from UCSD, and the next year began teaching at San Diego State University.

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The post Science fiction master Vernor Vinge dead at 79 appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Web bloat means pages are 21MB+, some sites are harder to render than PUBG

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Fuckin' lol. And it's all tracking bullshit, ads, useless chrome, and implemented in broken javascript. Other than video delivery, the web was better before all this shit.
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