Comment My CORRECTED link to his 2004 article, post-coffee (Score 4, Interesting) 22
My CORRECTED link to his original article, from 2004.
Comment My all-time favorite article of his, from 2004 (Score 4, Informative) 22
My all-time favorite article of Mr Cringely, from 2004, "How Mom, Pop, and Linux will take down SBC, Verizon, and the rest"
He is already very much missed.
Comment Re:The code generators work because they save work (Score 1) 100
[AI] has a tendency to use really convoluted logic which can be greatly simplified without changing the result.
Submission + - America PAC's VoteSafe.org is nothing but a honeypot (cybernews.com)
echo123 writes: Elon Musk’s bogus voter registration website is collecting extensive user data and selling it.
The website was funded by Musk and is operated by America PAC, a conservative political action committee founded in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The VoteSafe.org website has been promoted as a way for Americans to register to vote and check their registration ahead of the November midterm elections.
But MeidasTouch and Snopes found that despite presenting itself as a voter-registration resource, the site doesn’t actually register users to vote.
The site's privacy policy says America PAC can collect information, including:
Users' names
Dates of birth
Addresses
Email addresses
Phone numbers
IP addresses
Location
Information about how they interact with the site
It also permits the collection of "inferences" about users, including their preferences, characteristics, behavior, attitudes, and psychological tendencies.
The policy says the information may be shared with or sold to business partners for targeted marketing.
The website was funded by Musk and is operated by America PAC, a conservative political action committee founded in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The VoteSafe.org website has been promoted as a way for Americans to register to vote and check their registration ahead of the November midterm elections.
But MeidasTouch and Snopes found that despite presenting itself as a voter-registration resource, the site doesn’t actually register users to vote.
The site's privacy policy says America PAC can collect information, including:
Users' names
Dates of birth
Addresses
Email addresses
Phone numbers
IP addresses
Location
Information about how they interact with the site
It also permits the collection of "inferences" about users, including their preferences, characteristics, behavior, attitudes, and psychological tendencies.
The policy says the information may be shared with or sold to business partners for targeted marketing.
Comment Re:I'm still wondering (Score 4, Insightful) 224
You'll notice we "liberated" Venezuela's oil reserves for absolutely no goddamned reason, shortly before we started a war with Iran for absolutely no goddamned reason.
No, that's not true. The reason Trump went to war with Iran was to distract everyone from the Epstein files, which were gaining serious news cycle coverage at the time.
Comment Re: Fine TiVo you have there. Shame something migh (Score 1) 88
Back when I had a TiVo, this wasn't a thing. I cut the cord back in 2006 though -- linear tv is for old people.
If you cut the cord back in 2006, you are already old -- at least in the eyes of the youth.
Comment Re:Florida Man says (Score 1) 39
My vote (via the mod points I never have to give) is that this was the funniest, but I was looking for a "short putt" joke, as in Miami is not a "long drive" from the twisted universe of the game.
Comment Re:Fine TiVo you have there. Shame something might (Score 1) 88
Wasn't this single feature half the reason you use TiVo in the first place? The other half is just being able to record the show and watch it whenever you want.
Comment Re:Refreshing (Score 1) 31
Quite refreshing. Some new sick, scary idea, that I can not directly recall from any dystopian novel, but it would fit nicely into many of them. It's like a preludy to "Being Inc" from Lem's "Perfect Vacuum" (which is a collection of reviews of imaginary books, so it doesn't count). And what an endless opportunity for selling your life to whomever pays more. "Suggestions" like "how about movie X", "new restaurant Y", "buy product Z", etc. Sweet!
Won't someone think of the children? Seriously, kids these days immediately turn to AI for answers to everything, just like oldsters would easily google stuff from their 'smartphones'. And kids tend not to hesitate to upload so much of their personal information, which tends to stick around forever.
And companies get hacked by motivated actors using evolving tools and technology. What can possibly go wrong?
Comment Re:The long-term impact of this on the US (Score 2, Interesting) 195
The US spent 75 years becoming one of the best, if not the best, scientific countries in the world and now, in just a few short years, it's rapidly undoing much of that.
The Trump administration has been an anathema to science for reasons which I fail to comprehend. Can someone explain why this is? Is this just something fascist autocrats do?
Comment Re:Siri, kill Anthropic (Score 1) 70
Obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/350/
Comment Re:Microsoft, LOL (Score 1) 62
Yeah, letting China perform tech support for the DoD was probably the most boneheaded move ever. Bravo Microsoft
boneheaded and greedy
Comment Re: Do they have any business presence in NY? (Score 1) 56
This is not exactly uncharted ground here.
Here's a really good article from the 2021 NY Times when it was legal to bet in New Jersey but not in New York and people literally rode their bikes to place geo-fenced NFL bets on the bridge between the two states.
Comment Re:Not sure why they don't do what Google does (Score 1) 56
Didn't you have to pay a shitload of taxes though? There are usually penalties for extracting money out of a 401k. I didn't think there was a way to move them to something like a money market account without incurring those penalties
The GP might be of an age and income which lowers the tax bracket for withdrawals, and without penalties. This is kinda the point of having a 401k.
Comment Re:Another win for Linux! (Score 1) 69
It's not a question about immunity. It's a question about privacy
It seems to be a question of you not following the conversation, or did you reply to the wrong comment? This particular thread is about security.
OK, I could have phrased my reply better, but can't there be two perspectives? Security and Privacy? The Microsoft Corporation outed the guy using his Windows License ID.
