Daily Archives: 2026-08-26

Ring says its new encryption limits what it can give police

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Sooo, what's the completely privacy breaking loophole? Interception requests can hold the key after the next time a routine process silently and automatically queries the key from the user?
All Ring cameras will soon use TAKE encryption by default. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Ring has a new way to protect your videos. It's developed an encryption method called TAKE, short for Throw Away the Key Encryption, that the Amazon-owned company says will protect your videos without traditional end-to-end encryption. TAKE limits when and why Amazon's cloud can access those videos, while still providing features like smart alerts for people and packages, AI-powered video search, and video descriptions.

The feature is rolling out gradually starting in September, regardless of whether you have a subscription, and will become the default encryption for all Ring customers.

TAKE arrives during a year of intense scrutiny for R …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Digg v4 and lessons not learned

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: "All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again"

Digg basically became a front page for Reddit as it circled the drain

Digg was a high flying news aggregation site from the early web 2.0 era that still exists today, but really in name only. It serves as a cautionary too for why high profile websites tend not to make major changes overnight. A major update, Digg v4, introduced August 25, 2010, caused the site to implode over the course of about 6 weeks during the late summer of 2010. Contemporary tech CEOs would do well to read up on it lest they repeat history.

Digg went from concept to being worth $200 million in about three years and was more popular than Reddit, which is now a $15 billion company. One ill fated change wiped out 90% of its value and its user base in a matter of six weeks.

If you ask someone to define Digg in six words or less, here’s what they would likely say: The thing we used before Reddit.

Today, Reddit claims to be the front page of the Internet. Arguably, during Digg’s heyday, Yahoo was still the front page of the Internet, but Digg was the heir apparent.

See more on The Silicon Underground.

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Bill Gates: The turbulent AI era is here

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The "If the AI optimists(? maximalists?) are right and it's going to do all the labor" conversation is always bizarre, because all the answers are horrific. Plus, you can never tell if the ulterior motive is just spurring more FOMO investment in AI to keep the bubble going, or any sort of actual humanist interest. The Jackpot (Gibson, 2014) model of slow civilizational collapse from bad resource stewardship while the oligarchs fight over the remnants is not a win condition. The Iron Heel (London, 1908) model of "Mass poverty except a tiny band of ascendant extractive oligarchs." followed by "We get fully automated luxury communism by eventually violently reverting centuries of extractive, wealth concentrating tendencies" is not a win condition. The Diamond Age (Stephenson, 1995) model of "The low barrier to automated coercion and violence ruins everything for everyone" is not a win condition. We can't (to mix metaphors) put the torment nexus back in the bag, but the discussions (especially inside socially acceptable parameters) are never productive.
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