The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
I suspect that many people who take an interest in Internet privacy don’t appreciate how hard it is to resist browser fingerprinting. Taking steps to reduce it leads to inconvenience and, with the present state of technology, even the most intrusive approaches are only partially effective. The data collected by fingerprinting is invisible to the user, and stored somewhere beyond the user’s reach.
Meta buried ‘causal’ evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege
Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”
The blogosphere, in its many incarnations since the beginning of the web, didn’t happen on its own. In fact, it often happened in stark contrast to expectations for the web (consider the many times that the web has been declared “dead”). It happened through the concerted efforts of its greatest advocates. And if you’re reading this blog you’re probably one of them, and we can all make that effort together.
Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now.
The encyclopedia maker could have become a casualty of the Wikipedia era. But it has remade itself into a digital learning giant that is weighing going public.
By the time the last Encyclopaedia Britannica was printed, the company had already started its suite of websites and educational software. Now it sees a potentially even greater opportunity in the growth of generative A.I. tools, which the company says can help make learning more dynamic — and therefore more desirable.
Users of the conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend: the popular chatbot refuses to answer questions if asked about a %u201CDavid Mayer.%u201D Asking it to do so causes it to freeze up instantly. Conspiracy theories ensued %u2014 but a more ordinary reason may be at the heart of this strange behavior.
Like “old Twitter” The scientific community finds a new home on BlueskyAfter recent changes to Elon Musk’s X, a gradual migration turns into a stampede
“It’s just gone completely crazy,” says Mike Young, a science communicator in Denmark who gives social media workshops to scientists. He and his colleague Lasse Hjorth Madsen did an analysis in August mapping science communities on Bluesky. They found more than 20,000 influential scientists—people on the platform who were followed by at least 30 other scientists in the same network. When they repeated the analysis last week with an increased threshold of 40 scientist followers, the new number of influential scientists was almost 40,000. It is likely to be many times that now, Young says.
The fate of far-right website Infowars will be controlled by the Onion after the satirical news site emerged as the winning bidder of Wednesday’s private auction of the media company founded by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/11/14/infowars-auction-alex-jones-sandy-hook-the-onion/
The biggest social platforms are fond of reminding us about how they facilitate connections and help us communicate around the world. They are a little bit like a digital third place. And, just as you would not hang out somewhere that was actively trying to sabotage your ability to chat with your friends in real life, it is hard to know why you would do so online, either. Happily, where Google and Meta and X exhaust me with their choices, there are a wealth of new ideas that bring back joy.
By David M. Gross and Sophfronia Scott[2018 companion podcast interview with Sophfronia Scott online here.]
They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders. What they hold dear are family life, local activism, national parks, penny loafers and mountain bikes. They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix.
Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds
Opt out of PimEyes now, students warn
For Nguyen and Ardayfio, the point of the project was to persuade people to opt out of invasive search engines to protect their privacy online. An attempt to use I-XRAY to identify 404 Media reporter Joseph Cox, for example, didn’t work because he’d opted out of PimEyes.But while privacy is clearly important to the students and their demo video strove to remove identifying information, at least one test subject was “easily” identified anyway, 404 Media reported. That test subject couldn’t be reached for comment, 404 Media reported.
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