Before you mistake the move as an act of resistance by those within the agency who are trying to keep the project alive, Direct File getting open-sourced was always part of the plan. The code was published in compliance with the SHARE IT Act, which requires agencies to share custom source code (though, of course, the Trump administration is not always motivated by following the law, so this wasn’t a given).

In a report published last year, the IRS explained its reasoning for making the code available publicly: “First, it would enable public scrutiny of that code and invite independent groups to assess its accuracy and report potential issues. Second, other tax administrators, both in states and internationally, could build upon and contribute to the IRS’s work, improving the robustness of the software over time and providing additional public value.”

But the changes go only so far in limiting the risks Recall poses. As I pointed out, when Recall is turned on, it indexes Zoom meetings, emails, photos, medical conditions, and—yes—Signal conversations, not just with the user, but anyone interacting with that user, without their knowledge or consent.

Researcher Kevin Beaumont performed his own deep-dive analysis that also found that some of the new controls were lacking. For instance, Recall continued to screenshot his payment card details. It also decrypted the database with a simple fingerprint scan or PIN. And it’s unclear whether the type of sophisticated malware that routinely infects consumer and enterprise Windows users will be able to decrypt encrypted database contents.

It’s fucked up: https://streamable.com/vaj7al

“Elon, we know exactly what that was, bruh.”

Their showcase reel is great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQElJP1AaS0

It’s more of a paint program, and it’s great if you have a pen and tablet. I haven’t tried out gimp for while, but it was more of a photoshop alternative at that time. I think Apple’s version of Krita would be Procreate, but Krita is free.

Krita.org does a nice job of showing of their work and so does Blender

They’re not flashy, but they definitely make me want to download them and check them out.

Nah, I just misunderstood.

I thought you meant lemmy world.

On your edit, how do you know this?

Edit: I’m more awake now. LW strips out tracking and dumb features (like PPA), buy I dont know if IF does the same. In short: Anyone using LW is still fine.

Hmmm, good point. The Caribbean Sea will now be known as the Sea of the Americas, lol. Idk, I was trying to unite everyone.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to post this somewhere else:

“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

Distraction from:

• closing down the Consumer Protection Agency, USAID, and the Education Agency
• cutting off funding to the universities
• stealing our student, treasury and health records while taking over the purse
• not following federal judge’s orders
• building an unregulated concentration camp in Cuba
• etc.

Edit: That’s why trump did it. All tech companies are in his hands now.

Really, we could just call it the Gulf of the Americas. That would be perfectly correct in every way.

If they’re hiding it, they know it’s illegal.

Meta allegedly concealed seeding

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed.

Narrator: It doesn’t.

I hope it works out, this is sorely needed.

This is great and what I was hoping the Fediverse would turn into.

I was just one person with an idea; an international village adopted it and helped it, making its message go wide.

I want to do this again, but with the Fediverse.

I could start with a 40 minute visual presentation for schools and organizations, demo it, and see where things go. The cool thing is that I’m fully fluent in English, Italian and French so I could do these presentations in 3 languages – wherever people would welcome me.

It’s not going to be easy. But it’s definitely going to be worth it.

Plus comcast and any phone company, specifically AT&T

Thanks for letting me know that Qwant is Bing. It’s hard as a typical person to find any info on search engines, so I appreciate the heads up.

I’ve been noticing that they’ve been getting worse and worse myself. I was recommenced Mojeek and Qwant, but I haven’t made the switch yet. I always forget to use them instead.