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Android malware 'Necro' infects 11 million devices via Google Play
  • This is Kaspersky, so the only answer you're going to get from them is "use Kaspersky Premium".

    The only non-Play apps they mention in their report are modified versions of otherwise-clean apps (like Spotify or Minecraft). They didn't mention anything on F-Droid or other app stores.

  • PSA: Don't just eat peanut butter
  • That doesn't seem like a lot. I've certainly gone extended periods eating more than 150g (~5.3 ounces) of nuts per day. I thought nuts were a healthy snack, and often my only breakfast is a bunch of cashews or almonds.

  • Is Pixel 9 worth it? (instead of Pixel 8)
  • If anyone is, I hope they're running a third-party ROM like GrapheneOS, because Google ended software support last year.

    Google increased their support window after the 5, so the 6 is still good for another couple years of security updates.

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  • I understand that etymologically, it makes perfect sense to pronounce daemon the same as demon because it's the same word. But I'll never stop pronouncing it day- instead of dee-, as if it's a Ferengi captain.

  • TIL about Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
  • If anything, it demonstrates that the law has mathematical validity. Fact-checking simply requires more work than making shit up. Even when AI gets to the point where it can do research and fact-check things effectively (which is bound to happen eventually), it'll still be able to produce bullshit in a fraction of that time, and use that research ability to create more convincing bullshit.

    Fact-checking requires rigor. Bullshit does not. There's no magic way to close that gap.

    However, most social media sites already implement rate limits on user submissions, so it might actually be possible to fact-check people's posts faster than they are allowed to make them.

  • Shit just hit the fan, and you need to bunker down in your home. What's the first thing you start wishing you'd stocked up on?
  • A portable solar generator and batteries would be very valuable. Smartphones are immensely useful even without internet access. You could even get a meshnet going for medium-scale communication if other people in your area are similarly equipped. No power grid required.

  • Microsoft to Revive Nuclear Plant on Three Mile Island to Handle AI Processing
  • "Nuclear" sounds scary but it doesn't have to be and generally isn't. There are currently 94 active nuclear reactors in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States

    IMHO, the correct take on "<blank> uses enormous amounts of energy" is "yes, we do need to invest more in renewable and clean energy". Anyone who didn't have their head in the sand could have known that last century. This is only a problem now because our political leaders have failed us, year after year, decade after decade.

  • Why wordfreq will not be updated - AI spam
  • I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic

    I'd assume bad actors (or at least chaotic neutral actors) are slurping up the entire fediverse already. It is trivial to do, and nobody would know.

    I mean, the whole point is that anyone can spin up a server and federate with others. I could start my own server, which would by default federate with almost all other servers. That means I wouldn't even need to write a scraper. All that data would be sent straight to my server. All I need is access to my own database at that point. With Lemmy, I'd even get users' upvote/downvote history, which is not visible in any clients AFAIK. The only barrier would be to subscribe to communities on different servers to kickstart federation.

    As long as you don't run obvious spam/bot accounts, nobody would block your instance.

    Alternatively, if you want to write a scraper, that's also pretty easy. Most servers are publicly accessible. Every community has an RSS feed. You don't even need an account in general. Again, the whole point is to be open and accessible, in contrast to closed-off data-misers like Facebook, Reddit, and X.

    The fediverse is friendly to users, with very little regard for what those users might do. I believe this is the correct philosophy, but I won't pretend that it doesn't leave us open to bad behavior.

  • T-Mobile and OpenAI Join Forces to Revolutionize the Customer Experience with First-Ever Intent-Driven AI-Decisioning Platform
  • With secure access to T-Mobile data

    I've lost count of how many major data breaches T-Mobile has had. This verge article from last year puts the count at 9 since 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/2/23707894/tmobile-data-breach-april-personal-data-pin-hack-security

    How long will it take for someone to get it to reveal data that's supposed to private? Considering OpenAI's best defense against this is "please stop or we'll ban you", I'm guessing it'll be day 1.

  • Orbit by Mozilla
  • This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.

    It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.

    Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.

  • Orbit by Mozilla
  • If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”

    Then that would also be an oxymoron.

    Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.

  • Image thumbnails broken after latest update

    Edit: This appears to have been fixed already with another backend update. Leaving the post below as-is.

    Current version in the footer: UI: 0.19.0-rc.11 BE: 0.19.0-rc.10

    Starting today, most image thumbnails and pictrs links will not load. I tried clearing cookies and I tried in three different browser engines (Firefox, Chromium, Safari).

    If I try to open one of the image URLs directly in my browser, it shows {"error":"auth_cookie_insecure"}.

    Interestingly, images will load correctly if I am NOT logged in. Why are the pictrs URLs even checking cookies when they do not require auth? Is that new behavior in this version of Lemmy?

    Here is an example post: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/8482278

    And an example direct image URL from that post: https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/c8556f4f-d33c-4cac-86f3-975726ea69ec.png

    I am interested to know if others are seeing the same issue. I have not exhaustively tested different cookies settings in my browsers, so it's possible some anti-tracking privacy settings are interfering with this behavior.

    Worth noting is that the Eternity app on my phone continues to work. I did not even need to log out and back in today, like I did in my browsers.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)GE
    GenderNeutralBro @lemmy.sdf.org
    Posts 3
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