News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

rockskon

Re:The Ford Privacy Promise: You're in Control of Your Data on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:41AM (#50348817)
When dealing with an industry and company that historically has trafficked heavily in deception and legal sleight-of-hand, this is not something that can simply be assumed.

Do they have contracts in place with every single entity they provide your personal data to, regardless of context, that they are not allowed to sell/exchange/give away said personal data to data brokers or insurance companies and that such an agreement must be made with any and every company that, in turn, acquires this data?

Oh! And lets not forget the ever-important derivative information.

Information derived from your personal information that Ford or any other car manufacturer collects that can still identify you should also be off the table for ever getting in the hands of data brokers or insurance companies under any context.

Re:The Ford Privacy Promise: You're in Control of Your Data on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:13PM (#50346711)
Do they sell the information to another entity that, in turn, will sell it to insurance companies or data brokers?
Re:The Ford Privacy Promise: You're in Control of Your Data on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:59PM (#50346586)
Features such as....?
Re:The Ford Privacy Promise: You're in Control of Your Data on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:58PM (#50346573)
They keep telling the public that. Their assertions do not have value without trustworthy data to back them up.
After their effort to take credit for the research of others last time, it's within OpenAI's best interests to go the extra mile to convince skeptics to not dismiss new research findings.
"In this video I'm going to..."

"Let me tell you why!"

"Is not X, it's Y!"

and so on. It's so tiresome. I can't stand AI scripts. It makes the entire video feel like a waste of my time.

That is empirically false as evidenced by the voluntary download rate of Facebook's permission updates on the App and Play Stores.

If people didn't care then why do so many companies have to coerce/deceive users into using their product?

Convenience my ass - the alternative to "convenience" is not participating in modern society, which isn't a decision at all.

We're in an uneasy truce with regards to mandatory backdoors.

They're not demanded because targets are just so easy to pop.

If we did secure software across the board with AI, there'd likely be a resurgence of calls for mandatory backdoors.

Re:What Would a Serious AI Product Look Like? on Monday September 28, 2026 @12:41PM (#49880775)
I'd argue the overwhelming majority of consumer-facing AI products aren't serious products to consumers.

I'm mostly referring to needless AI chatbots shoehorned into various places.

The military could just use different AI models for the purposes Anthropic does not want its models used for.

Purposes Anthropic already spelled out in contract form.

And now we have junior programmers that don't understand the code being generated and submit pull requests with garbage code.
Re:An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:59PM (#49835327)
Countries trying to impose their laws on other countries that affect residents of other countries seem like they're raising a question of territoriality.

Seems like that's a more appropriate venue for international discussions between governments to figure this out rather than a situation where each country is trying to pass laws that affect much of the rest of the world.

Re:An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @10:43PM (#49811010)
So why not apply the age verification check to known VPN services and leave residential IPs alone? Laws from one country can only apply to another country to only so much of a degree.

I did not limit my statement to "people providing their government ID are at risk" or some equivalent for a reason. Bootstrapping the service for accounts it flags as adult now completely leaves all future services who have no pre-existing userbase to behaviorally profile - facilitating an industry norm that age/ID verification should be expected going forward is, and I repeat, a risk to the safety and privacy of all users.

Don't strawman an argument next time as "uninformed" lest you reveal just how many false assumptions you were making in arriving at that conclusion.

Re:An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @09:53PM (#49810716)
This is the type of issue I was referring to, yes.

It will be trivial for pedophiles to figure out which accounts aren't tagged as verified adults.

And knowing how these sorts of dynamics work - it'll largely be children in third world countries that will be the primary victims of pedophiles in this manner.

Re:An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @06:16PM (#49808999)
Unacceptable.

There is no legitimate reason to impose age verification on users in jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.

It is a risk to the privacy and safety of all users on the platform - it provides an easier way for pedophiles to identify underage users and provides more doxable information.

Discord has no business making this decision on behalf of jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.

Are any of those people not investors?
Re:Your car is selling your data on Monday September 14, 2026 @03:03AM (#49692970)
Sometimes there's a fuse you can pull to disable the telematics (or whatever the heck a given car company calls it).
Re:LG strongly denies TV spying claims on Sunday September 13, 2026 @04:22AM (#49681405)
They were just bringing levity to an otherwise depressing topic.
What a fascinating video. What a treat to hear him talk.

Much of my excitement has been dying off due to the commercialization of the hacker community, the culture war, and the constant legislative losses for privacy and effective ownership of goods you purchase because they've code in them you often cannot legally circumvent the "digital lock" on.

I'm curious what can be done to get it back. It seems the more I care, the more I get jaded due to the constant loss of freedom with tech.

Re:Consumer Rights Wiki on Thursday August 20, 2026 @09:08PM (#49382430)
Do you have a specific example on the wiki you can cite for your grievance?
Re:Consumer Rights Wiki on Thursday August 20, 2026 @08:23PM (#49382111)
So long as it wasn't something that changed due to a firmware update after purchase, sure.

One of the most common grievances on ConsumerRightsWiki is when the terms of the sale seem to change after you've already purchased the product.

Re:Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @06:55PM (#49368224)
Because if you want to convince someone away from believing it's an addiction so severe it needs an act of government to address, presenting an argument that all-but-panders to their "people spend so much time on it that it must be an addiction!" priors is counter productive.
Re:Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @01:00AM (#49357052)
"You can stop smoking at any time"

"You can stop gambling at any time"

As much as I may agree with you, you need a different argument.

Re:I don't enjoy the Internet any more on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @01:36AM (#49341663)
"Too good of a product" is an odd way to put it when you could apply the same logic to slot machines.
Seems a bit premature to attribute that solely (or even primarily) to Flock.

It also begs the question of if there is a deterrent effect from cameras to commit homicide, couldn't that deterrent be achieved with a far less controversial technology?

Re:How to disable or avoid intrusive AI on Monday August 17, 2026 @03:04PM (#49336033)
Hard disagree. Checking the accelerometer to disable tactile functionality when moving would have been a more intelligent way to go about discouraging this behavior over mandating use of a historically unpopular technology (Siri) in order to use a popular one (Maps, Bluetooth music streaming).

This reeks of the metrics-gaming desperation that we've seen in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as well.

Shoehorn unpopular technology to gatekeep popular technology. Either way the consumer's quality of life goes down.

Nice strawman you're attacking. Kinda weird that you're arguing with yourself at this point.
Newer websites are filtered through what is acceptable from a corporate lens.

The old web culture can't exist because advertisers won't let it exist on modern platforms.

Additionally the spread of information is significantly less organic because of relentless pushes to use algorithmic feeds along with far worse distractions from content than there used to be.

Re:The next chapter of our AI momentum on Thursday August 06, 2026 @08:26AM (#49195730)
I noticed that website doesn't show the absolute numbers involved in search engine use.

And you ignored the part where I said "they use the default".

Re:The next chapter of our AI momentum on Thursday August 06, 2026 @08:25AM (#49195716)
That's for multiple reasons - many of them directly being Google's fault with intentional choices made towards this end.

Older »