BreakDecks

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Technology in Microsoft wants to hide the 'Sign out' button in Windows 11 behind a Microsoft 365 ad

The Quest is Android based, which is Linux based, so kinda if you're cool with two layers of megacorp between you and the kernel.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Privacy in Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules

I hate Siri, but you can do a "Hey Siri, whose phone is this?" and it will force PIN unlock. Great if you aren't able to physically touch the phone.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Technology in Whistleblower 'would not' put family on Boeing 787 jet

But without planes and their deadly propellers, where will we push Nazis?

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Technology in Whistleblower 'would not' put family on Boeing 787 jet

Boeing isn't an airline...

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Privacy in NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden

The NSA violates the laws of the US. What makes you think they care about other countries' laws?

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Privacy in NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden

Good thing that all of the giant monolithic internet companies that the NSA will be using for surveillance are used exclusively by Americans. The NSA isn't interested in foreign intel anyway. /s

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Technology in Big Tech Is Faking AI

I submitted a few weird requests to mturk just to see how it works. I was able to read a bunch of magazines for cheap by paying people $0.01 for every two scanned pages of any magazine that was no older than 3 editions old.

I ended up with a ton of random digitized magazines, and ended up learning a lot about the kinds of people who do mturk tasks from the magazines they scanned. Seems to mostly be bored housewives, at least 10 years ago when I did this.

I paid for my experiments with the ~$50 I earned from doing mturk tasks myself, and let me tell you, it was miserable stuff. Sub-minimum wage drudgery... At least I suffered myself what I made others suffer with my stupid tasks, and all I got out of it was a bunch of articles I didn't actually want to read.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Technology in Big Tech Is Faking AI

Anything can be an AI if the marketing department decides to call it AI.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Privacy in Got tracked down for my school reunion

Then give it to them. Address books, physical and digital, are nothing new.

Some of us don't want just anyone with something to say showing up in our inboxes.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Technology in ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC’s Internet rules, critics say

I have a hard time believing that since TikTok is such a popular mobile app, and 4G users are going to have a minimum of 200ms latency over-the-air.

5G does offer much faster over-the-air latency of only 1ms, but if TikTok were to become unusable if the latency between tower and server exceeds 1ms, I would expect to hear widespread complaints about that, as the vast majority of users aren't going to have <2ms latency between them and the server. Pinging TikTok.com from my 5G handset (in a major metro area) shows a latency of 80ms. Admittedly, AWS and GCP, where TikTok hosts content primarily for US users, likely has better latency. My personal experience with those platforms doesn't suggest that it would be that good- pinging the cloudfront CDN endpoints associated with my account, I get latency between 40-60ms.

Besides, video streaming shouldn't be affected by latency, only throughput. TikTok videos are just MP4 files on a CDN, as long as you can download them faster than you can play them, high latency shouldn't even be noticeable to the user, outside of initial load times for latency exceeding a few hundred ms (up to a second or so delay if establishing a fresh TCP connection, depending on the latency).

Maybe TikTok Live could be an issue, but its a one-way channel so a delay shouldn't be noticeable like it would be with a 2-way teleconference. Maybe if there was high jitter or packet loss, the stream could have extremely low quality.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Technology in ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC’s Internet rules, critics say

I would guess that since it mentions teleconferencing and gaming, that they want to create low-latency fast-lanes.

But they also mention TikTok, so I am not completely sure that they are referring to latency.

This article isn't very good at explaining what they're talking about on a technical level.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Fediverse in George Takei looks like good company on the Fediverse, agreed ?

Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Privacy in Got tracked down for my school reunion

They would need your contact info for that...

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Privacy in Manually opting out of data brokers' databases

I have had a lot of success.

First I went through this list and filled out lots of opt-out forms: https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List

Then I emailed everyone on this (dated) list: https://github.com/privacybot-berkeley/privacybot/blob/master/app%2Fservices_list_06May2021.csv

I got a lot of follow up emails suggesting that my requests were honored, or having me do follow up steps to have my request honored. Only two pushback emails suggesting that they don't have legally respect my opt out, to which I provided them a strict do-not-contact request that hopefully encourages them to do nothing with any data they might have on me.

It was a huge amount of effort (~50 hours), but my private info was nearly ungooglable a couple of weeks after I finished.

After seeing a huge difference, I then signed up for DeleteMe, and compared to a few friends of mine who never did their own work before signing up, my quarterly reports are extremely sparse. Hopefully it's easier for them to play whack-a-mole with my data since I did lots of the initial work.

So far I can't find anything about myself I wouldn't want to see on any search engine. If I did, I would just find the opt out page and try to nip it in the bud.

BreakDecks , 2 months ago to Fediverse in Open source Substack rival Ghost may join the fediverse | TechCrunch

It's doing quite well and you're the only person I've ever seen take offense to the name, so I guess you'll just have to cope with spooky newsletters 👻