Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 1) 107
Ah interesting, never seen that before! I've just turned it on to see how annoying it is.
Ah interesting, never seen that before! I've just turned it on to see how annoying it is.
Chrome does require authentication for every password retrieval. It uses Windows Hello as well so in theory you don't even have a password to intercept since something like facial recognition authentication via a FIDO2 handshake is what ultimately allows Chrome to fill a single password on a single site.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'auth' here, but on my PCs (Windows 10):
It does require auth for passkeys, I think every time, but not for regular saved passwords in the browser. I have Windows Hello set up for a couple passkeys and I have to auth via Hello when I use them.
But I have regular saved passwords for almost every other website I use routinely and am not prompted to auth via Hello for that. My understanding is that for these, the auth/unlock is done once at user login and then the session has access to the unencrypted passwords.
(I posted elsewhere in this thread about Chrome using DPAPI as of 2024 - this was news to me so it's possible I'm just way out of date).
Been trying to figure out how Chrome does this because my recollection was that Chrome had the exact same problem - I remember making a similar point to you in forum threads a couple years back with people complaining about it then.
It looks like in 2024, Chrome added support for something called the Data Protection API (DPAPI), which provides some mitigation against arbitrary memory reads:
App-Bound Encryption relies on a privileged service to verify the identity of the requesting application. During encryption, the App-Bound Encryption service encodes the app's identity into the encrypted data, and then verifies this is valid when decryption is attempted. If another app on the system tries to decrypt the same data, it will fail.
Because the App-Bound service is running with system privileges, attackers need to do more than just coax a user into running a malicious app. Now, the malware has to gain system privileges, or inject code into Chrome, something that legitimate software shouldn't be doing. This makes their actions more suspicious to antivirus software â" and more likely to be detected
It's not clear from my quick read if this defends against this class of "attack" in all cases but it reads like it might provide at least some protection?
If that is the case, it of course raises the question why Microsoft - who created DPAPI in the first place - wouldn't use that same service in the same way. (i.e. maybe it just sucks and they know it's a waste of time
Clink also worth a look: https://chrisant996.github.io/...
Except in this environment they'll just raise a few extra billion dollars and buy all the water anyway and price out anyone that is not a VC funded AI company
It makes more sense as a dialogue if we think of it not so much as a one-to-one conversation, but more like an ongoing, global discourse. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum, and they are--generally speaking--not made for a single specific individual to watch. The artist is informed and shaped by their experiences.
I frame it this way because I want to move away from the "maker"/"viewer" framework--this dichotomy of the creator of an experience versus those who experience the creation. There is a kind of feedback at play that is intrinsic to the ability to create art and to enjoy it. We even see this in cinema--the works of actors (which roles they choose, how they play those roles) are invariably influenced by the culture and sentiments that surround them.
In a strict sense, you are right--it's not as if the artist is directly engaging in a back-and-forth literal conversation. But I think that a more encompassing point of view is useful for contextualizing why generative AI being propped up as "art" is so offensive to some. It doesn't feel "real" to us, and it isn't because the tool is "artificial"--we have computer animated films, for instance. It's because it feels disengaged from that feeling of human connection.
is not, as many would have you believe, to be found solely in its consumption or appreciation.
Art is a dialogue. It is a conversation between humans--those who feel joy and pain, sorrow and hope; and it is the embodiment of creative expression in which the artist, for all their imperfections and struggle, brings into being something that marks existence--as if to say, "I was once here, in this space that you now observe."
And that is not necessarily pretentiousness or egocentrism. Art is born from a desire to connect with others, across space and time.
The intrinsic problem of "generative AI" as it is presently utilized as a vehicle of artistic expression is that, overwhelmingly, it fails to create a true dialogue, in much the same way that using a chatbot amounts to speaking with nobody but yourself. There may be a director and other humans who are prompting the AI and exerting control over the output, but the lack of human actors and cinematographers means that the result can only ever be a simulation of art, not art itself. It is not until we can create artificial consciousness--machines that experience human emotions and concept of self--that we can ever say that their status can transcend that of mere tools and their product might become art. To be clear, I am not suggesting we should attempt to do so. But what we have today is very, very far away from this.
Maybe a simulation is enough for most people, who think of popular media as nothing more than transitory stories to consume, discard, and forget. That the audience may not have the capacity to respect art as a process, by failing to distinguish what it is and is not, does not invalidate the artist, no more than someone who doesn't understand mathematics or computer programming can decide that it is not worth learning or doing.
The reason why there is a lot of pushback against AI has to do with the preposterous notion that it can (and therefore, should) serve as a substitute for human creativity. Of all of the things that such sophisticated computational models could be used for, the last thing that I would want it to do for me is my thinking and feeling. We should be using technology to make our lives easier and give us more freedom to express ourselves creatively, not less. People who are using it to simulate art have entirely missed the point of why we make art in the first place. Creative expression is not a chore like washing my dishes and scrubbing my toilet bowl. Yes, making art is sometimes painful and difficult and challenging. But that struggle is not something to be eliminated. It is meant to be overcome.
AI apologists--at least, nearly all of those I have met--are, in my view, nearly entirely lacking in understanding of what makes living worthwhile; and those who do understand are intentionally and cynically promoting AI because they stand to gain financially from this position.
Google Assistant has supported this for like a decade via "hey Google, note to self"
FWIW I live in Queensland and we have several zones which use average speed over distance. There are still plenty of stationary point-in-time cameras but a bunch of average zones. Most recently I think was in some of the tunnels in Brisbane.
Middle of the day here in Queensland, Australia - renewables are providing 63.2% of our total energy
This is a shock to clueless CEOs who have never spoken to anyone forced to buy Chromebooks outside of enterprise agreements where nothing matters to either side except the number of zeroes on the invoice.
Our small business has had about 30 people on Chromebooks for about five years now. These have, generally, been great - most of them cost less than AUD$700, though they've gotten more expensive.
We've been buying Intel i5 CPUs with 8GB of RAM. These run most stuff with no problems.
But in true PC style, what the manufacturers have done is make a billion different models with different specs such that there is actually a dramatic difference in performance between them. You can buy something with an AMD CPU with 4GB of RAM and it's a piece of shit - but you won't know until you get it home and try it, because you just bought "a Chromebook".
We started buying i7/16GB models from Dell - these ones fly and are great. But then they simply stopped selling them. For two years they couldn't tell me what their Chromebook strategy was, because they only care about schools.
I think Apple will clean up here by making it simple - there are a small handful of models that are easily differentiable. They're Apple branded so they will be immediately more coveted than a random Chromebook thing.
I'll be buying some of these to replace our aging Chromebooks for sure. Keen to see how they go.
It's a shame because the i7/16GB Chromebooks are awesome to use.
If you can't get your work done in the first 24 hours, work nights.