The major breakthrough here is a method for interfacing brain like organic tissue (that they had already developed) with electronic components. They’re using the brain tissue in a similar fashion as a neural network based AI and training it to relay signals to electronic components in response to certain stimuli, if I understood the article correctly; I skimmed quite a bit though.

Then run it in a container under a better distribution if you desperately need to put neofetch on your HTPC. Or run the other distro in a container under libreelec since I’m pretty sure it supports them.

It tracks anonymous statistics, without my express consent, for the benefit of a third party. I do not care if it exists to replace cookies, because I’m not even convinced that cookies need to exist at all anymore. What utility do they provide to the actual person using the browser that can’t be accomplished through some other more modern API? If the only functionality left to replace is tracking people then maybe just deprecate them and move on.

Telegram had credibility. It was being used by journalists to protect sources.

You can extend trust to individuals but do not apply that to companies or organizations if you care at all about what they’re doing with what you give them. Not everyone has some mythical tech privacy wizard on call to give them perfect advice every time they open an account on an app or website.

Even client side encryption is not infallible. The algorithm you use will eventually be crackable and probably sooner than you think. Nothing lasts forever.

The most foolproof way to ensure something remains private is to not put it on the internet at all.

If you can read and understand the code, sure. Otherwise you’re still just extending trust to someone perhaps less reputable than even the corporations who are dying to sell you out. For example, the back door some mysterious contributor slipped into xz recently.

My recommendation is to live life as if privacy on the internet did not exist, because it doesn’t.

Never trust a third party to keep your shit private. Especially if privacy is their main selling point.

Wow the head of AI for MS doesn’t know what the word freeware means.

If you disable it you can prevent Microsoft from force updating your windows 10 install to windows 11. Obviously a play to get people to buy new hardware for 11 but a useful anti feature I suppose until you can stomach switching to Linux.

One of our c suite went to a conference and got wowed by a booth that used cloud AI services to generate crypto on a refrigerator so now we’re also a cloud company.

There are tons of machine learning algorithm libraries easily usable by any relatively amateur programmer. Aside from that all they would need is access to a sufficient quantity of geographically tagged photographs to train one with. You could probably scrape a decent corpus from google street view.

The obtainability of any given AI application is directly proportional to the availability of data sets that model the problem. The algorithms are all packed up into user friendly programs and apis that are mostly freely available.

people do pay for discord though. that was the entire justification for Nitro and Server Boosts. they made $440 million in revenue in 2022. they aren’t publicly traded so there’s no way to compare that with expenses, but i’d be pretty surprised if they weren’t turning a significant profit.

I don’t foresee anyone with the kind of data needed to do more investigation releasing it to the public, so I doubt we’re going to be getting any satisfying answers to this. Microsoft may have an internal team combing through github logs, but if they find anything they’re unlikely to be sharing it with anyone but law enforcement agencies.

we know about the singapore VPN because they connected to IRC on libera chat with it. the only reason I can think people would believe they’re from hong kong is because of the pseudonym they used, but it’s not like that proves anything.

see link posted in another user’s reply: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor#irc

he was using a singapore VPN and had access to multiple sockpuppets. we know literally nothing else about them and anything you’ve heard to the contrary is baseless rumor.

leading theory is that it was a state-sponsored actor, but frankly even that much is speculation and which state is still way up in the air.

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well it depends on what the half in halfling is. if they’re half human already they could be three-quarterslings which doesn’t roll off the tounge very well.

Is a half halfling a quarterling?

It means they can’t make porn images of celebs or anime waifus, usually.