So, we're expected to believe the insurance companies were paying GM twenty million for that data out of simple curiosity?

If they were simply doing aggregate metrics, the data wouldn't have involved the driver's names. That's a thing one should definitely not be including when one has already been telling the victims it won't be shared.

It seems more to me like the data brokers were interested in paying GM a bit of money because to the data broker it "would be cool" if their customers could literally purchase a map of a their target's comings and goings, in addition to every other bit of data they hoover up. But hey, clearly it's not an Orwellian surveillance state if the gov't has to pay a small subscription fee for it.

Dude, if you can find a copy of The Doomsday Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_(film)) the most powerful part of the anthology is basically exactly this. See also specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's probably one of my top five favorite things in my video collection of speculative fiction.

Well, probably not, but someone did make a film (called The Doomsday Book) that had as one of its parts an artificially-intelligent robot called In-myung at a monastery that had discovered that it had reached enlightenment and could no longer continue. The film was an anthology in three parts and this was probably the most intense one of all because the 'bot was being interrogated as to their claims and dropping truth bombs the whole time. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It's unfortunately not available for streaming anywhere that I'm aware of, which is a real shame because it's super-relevant to this.

Not exactly. What they don't mention is that this requires the Location Services permission, which you, as a user, have to explicitly accept.

If you've got an Android phone I'm sure you've seen this dialog before. Even Maps has to ask the first time you run it.

There's definitely some incompetence involved in the app, but for entirely different reasons. Pulling code from a live github repository is probably pushing dangerously close to violating Google's app policies, since whatever the hell it is downloading from there isn't something Google can police effectively to prevent malware making its way into the phone. But hey, Github is totally secure and has never been hacked before, right?

The bizarre thing is that they're acting like this is something that was deeply hidden.

Hint: Apps that don't ask you--very overtly--for permission to use GPS can't use GPS. When something asks, and you think it's sus, say no and just uninstall the app.

You're in far more danger of harm by being exposed to the actual content being published from the White House than you are the app itself.

What a great way to announce to the world that you know absolutely nothing about the matter on which you are speaking.

...but why? Haven't people figured out by now that cPanel needs a very serious and very careful going over before being run on anything more powerful than a personal massager? It might be "easy" but people are trading an hour of reading for extreme amounts of pain at some random point in the next 3 years.

Please qualify how this is "bad" for people who have no connection to the facility at all.

No, mainly they're making a lot of assumptions about what a "data center" means in the absence of any actual facts or specific details. That is a bit of a problem.

The majority of data centers are using glycol for cooling. They simply do not use a significant amount of water. Even their sprinkler systems are generally dry-pipe. About the only water they use is tfull of docium he usual kitchenette and bathroom facilities. Even the few facilities that actually do water cooling aren't being wasteful about it because water ain't free, either. Yet now for some bizarre reason, tons of people who not only don't work in data centers but can't even be bothered to do some math to think about what it would look like to evaporate thirty olympic swimming pools in one day are convinced that data centers everywhere are in the habit of destructively consuming vast quantities of water. By the same standard, your typically water-cooled gaming rig "uses" 1,500-2,000 liters of water every day. Their walls must literally melt away unless they use a thick latex paint.

They're not "driving up" electricity rates because they're paying the same rate as anyone else. If your utility has to raise rates because demand goes up, your city has already failed at managing resources effectively. Sometimes there's going to be a need to spend money to increase capacity for the local grid, and most DC operators aren't going to really flinch at footing that bill (nor would it be reasonable for a municipality to sign off on absorbing the cost of that).

Sure, there's not a lot of manpower involved in running a datacenter, but there's also just about zero crime, and nowhere else is likely to be so very carefully avoiding ever troubling the local fire department. In general, even the property taxes these places generate is still going to be a net-positive because running a properly-managed data center is typically a pretty drama-free LOB that can pay its bills on time.

Blocking them outright is simply stupid. One might as well decide to ban building any new gas stations (which tend to have even fewer people staffing them) because they're chock full of carcinogens. ...but you know, if you already had several data centers and you wanted to say, hobble future competition, it would be pretty easy to spin up a bunch of bots that do nothing but spew scary-sounding nonsense until all the panicky popcorn-eaters are repeating that nonsense, and voila, everyone has to come to your facilties for colocation because somehow increased demand isn't being met with increased competition. If you were a hostile nation state seeing a possible advantage in altering the future landscape a bit, the cost of such a campaign would practically be pocket change. But by all means, let's all jump up and down and start banning things based on what wouldn't pass muster as third-hand gossip.

So, tell us. Which data centers have you worked in in the past? ...or even been to. ...or so much as seen from a distance.

Don't be a fool. "Secret Pedo Island" wasn't a theory that someone simply made up--it was a thing because actual victims were talking and people were acting like it's just a wild conspiracy theory because quite a bit of money and time was being spent on discrediting and gaslighting the victims.

This missing scientist business was something that is entirely a work of fiction, purpose-built to make more excuses for why the FBI was still not investigating Secret Pedo Island. While they're claiming they're investigating a complete fabrication, they're going to continue to refuse to talk about why Kash Patel himself signed off on paperwork shutting down the investigation that we've now seen has wildly more than enough evidence and testimony that there certainly should have been more than just two arrests.

Good luck getting a judge to agree they had a "clean room" implementation performed by an AI that was trained on the very code it's supposed to be "re-inventing".

...and any minute now the same ruling about AI-generated art is likely to come down pertaining to programming, because copyright was meant to provide actual human artists with encouragement and protection for their craft by giving them the exclusive right to exploit their work throughout their lifetime and generally the lifetime of their children. Bots don't get afforded that same protection because they can't starve to death and they can never actually die, and programming is still both science and art (which is the only reason code is copyrightable).

It seems really hypocritical to me that a Republican is saying "We cannot have AI bots that are advising people on how to kill others." when it seems like it was only two weeks ago they were using Anthropic's tech for exactly that and got very, very angry when Anthropic suggested they didn't want people using them to plan military attacks against other nations.

AI won't care that it needs to decompile binaries, but humans will.

What they're doing will have the opposite effect of what they apparently want.

It's mostly bots and trolls, not actual users like normal people think of the term.