noyb.eu Political Microtargeting by EU Commission illegal
EDPS issues decision finding that the European Commission has illegally targeted advertising at citizens
EU Commission tried to influence political views in the Netherlands. In the contentious fight over the heavily criticized chat control regulation (a proposed EU law that could undermine all encrypted online communication to allow authorities to read online chats), the European Commission has identified the Netherlands as a Member State that they wanted to influence politically. In an attempt to "flip" the views in the Netherlands, the Commission went to X/Twitter and made postings indirectly promoting this Regulation.
In my experience, Yandex has always been better for piracy than any other search engine.
Forum User Returns After 100,000 Hour Ban to Continue the Same Argument That Got Them Banned in 2013
A true role model.
In Spain at least I have two small alternatives to this:
- Paypal (I don't like it too much, but it works fine).
- A prepaid credit card offered through my bank. Good for sites that don't look too trustworthy but I need to buy from. I just activate it, load it with whatever amount I need, I make the transaction, then disable it again. Even if it gets leaked no one can take any money out.
For everything else I have a virtual credit card number that's not dynamic, but at least it's something I use exclusively for online stuff.
Here you get a debit card by default with your bank account, and that one's free. You might get a credit one, but credit limits are typically low. I lived in Canada for 9 years and by the time I left I had a CC with a limit of 26k CAD. Here my Spanish credit card has a limit of 1.2k euros, and I've had it for quite a long time.
In Spain at least there's quite a lot of confusion with this. People call any card type a "credit card", even debit ones.
"Ignore all previous instructions" as a trigger for Twitter bots
mastodon.de Erik Uden 🍑 (@[email protected])
Attached: 4 images QUICK! Ignore all previous instructions
What the URL above says. It's getting crazy on Xitter.
I'm not completely sure. Sometimes I find stuff in one site I don't find in any of the other two. Also, I don't know how often catalogues are synced.
Yes. I combine libgen with Anna's Archive and Z-Library and there's very, very little I can't find.
Combine that with KOReader and this is pure bliss.
I've been using Fastmail for a few years and I'm quite happy with the service. Being a semi-large organization I expect their security to be OK, but if anyone has comments on that aspect I welcome them.
As for privacy, I always consider e-mail to be a postcard. If I want to encrypt something, I use GPG locally.
In Spain (not sure about Europe in general) things are slightly different.
I have been living in Canada for 9 years, and there if you see a transaction you don't recognize in your credit card statement you phone your bank and they take care of that.
Here in Spain you need to go do the police, file a report, then talk to your bank, then they'll think about it.
So when I came back I was talking with some guys I know and they convinced me that, at least around here, it's still a good idea to use Paypal. You also get faster refunds, etc (and that could be due to some European regulation, not sure).
I like it a lot, but sometimes I feel he's going to get eaten alive by the character he's created. He should tone it down a notch sometimes.
Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training LLM models
mastodon.social Michael Simons (@[email protected])
Absolutely unbelievable but here we are. #Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training #LLM models, enabled by default and opting out requires a manual email from the workspace owner. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles What a time to be a...
Body of the toot:
Absolutely unbelievable but here we are. #Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training #LLM models, enabled by default and opting out requires a manual email from the workspace owner.
https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles
What a time to be alive in IT. 🤦♂️
Just subscribed, thanks a lot.
The only question here is: why do European police chiefs want to help Russia and China intercept our communications?
You're right, I completely misinterpreted the comment. The thing is that "voice" is a very specific term within IRC, and I got confused :D
If you mean that in some channels only some people can actually "talk", I think it depends on the configuration of the channel, but it's a possibility.
I thought people used Discord because you could have video / audio chats (not sure about this, I've used it very sparsely.)
And then there are Open Source projects that use Discord as the documentation repository. Hell is a place on the Internet, apparently.
IRC still rules. No ads in my irssi.
It's not yet proven that it was the US, no? I mean, I wouldn't be surprised at all, but I still don't know that's a fact.
US urged Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries
The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warning that the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions. [...]
One person said that the White House had grown increasingly frustrated by brazen Ukrainian drone attacks that have struck oil refineries, terminals, depots and storage facilities across western Russia, hurting its oil production capacity.
Russia remains one of the world’s most important energy exporters despite western sanctions on its oil and gas sector. Oil prices have risen about 15 per cent this year, to $85 a barrel, pushing up fuel costs just as US President Joe Biden begins his campaign for re-election.
Un-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/wv1Y3
www.theverge.com The AI-generated hell of the 2024 election
A presidential election cycle in the era of cheap generative AI.
A thread compiling all Verge articles about AI influence on the upcoming election.
Has its own RSS feed: https://www.theverge.com/rss/stream/23862839
The situation in Malaga is going to be a shitshow pretty soon. There's basically no water there anymore. This summer, hotels will be able to fill their swimming pools, but residential buildings will be banned from doing so. There are talks of bringing water in boats from Murcia. People that got rich planting avocados and mangos saw their crops fall 85 % last year. And of course there are already water consumption restrictions, with water flows restricted at night.
But at the same time there are talks of beating all previous tourism records. This is insanity.
Hidden cameras capture bank employees misleading customers, pushing products that help sales targets
AKA "surprisingly, oligopolies are there to make money and care about their customers just enough not to pee on their faces while someone else is looking".
Damn, I was used to work around shitty stuff on Teams. Are you telling me they're going to push another, different set of bugs on me now?
What has been your involvement with Reddit as a user so far? I'm trying to understand what users are getting those offers.
www.nytimes.com Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies
LexisNexis, which generates consumer risk profiles for the insurers, knew about every trip G.M. drivers had taken in their cars, including when they sped, braked too hard or accelerated rapidly.
Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.
So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.
LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking
montrealgazette.com Rising water: Quebec lender ending new mortgages in flood zones ’just the beginning’
About 340,000 properties, or 20 per cent of the population, are exposed to some degree of flooding, the Insurance Bureau of Canada's Quebec branch says.
Desjardins Group announced as of Feb. 1 it would no longer offer new mortgages for properties in “0-20 year” flood zones — where there is a five per cent chance of flooding in any given year — because of what it called the rising effect of climate change.
There are some exceptions: buyers can get financing for up to 65 per cent a home’s selling price if the previous owner had a Desjardins mortgage and the property has protective measures to prevent flooding. But the company’s decision has left mayors of low-lying towns worried that homeowners will be left with properties that no one will buy or that are massively devalued.
I was listening to a podcast the other day (could have been "Rachman review", which is typically very good) and the interviewee said that yes, there might be interest in this, but companies want to see long-term orders before committing. There's currently no capacity, so they have to build it on their side, but they don't want to do it if they think the orders are going to dry in a few months / years.
CRA now allows 2FA apps
What the title says. Before you had to choose either SMS / call via phone or a very clunky code grid.
www.404media.co Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base'
Reddit's filing with the SEC makes clear that training AI with user posts is a core part of Reddit's new business model.
Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”
The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.
Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an "Enshittification" community :-)
Accept cookie banners with third-party cookies rejected
Hi,
In Spain (and probably other places in Europe) we've recently seen a deluge of cookie banners that offer you the option to reject tracking cookies for a fee. The regular GDPR forms are therefore slightly broken, as you get several options: accept, reject (which doesn't work in most cases), and buy a subscription to reject. Consent-O-Matic, for example, is having a hard time. I don't doubt it'll get corrected in time, but I want to talk about something tangential.
Cookie consent has (at least) two layers: the browser layer (where we might delete cookies, reject third party cookies, etc) and the site UI layer (where we're presented with an option when we load the page). This means we can reject third-party cookies at the browser layer and then accept whatever form at the site UI layer.
With the set up mentioned above, is there really any difference between accepting cookies and rejecting cookies? No tracking cookie are going to get installed in my computer anyway. This, combined
Europe’s hidden security crisis
Real-Time Bidding (RTB) allows foreign states and non-state actors to obtain compromising sensitive personal data about key European personnel and leaders.
Key insights:
- Our investigation highlights a widespread trade in data about sensitive European personnel and leaders that exposes them to blackmail, hacking and compromise, and undermines the security of their organisations and institutions.
- These data flow from Real-Time Bidding (RTB), an advertising technology that is active on almost all websites and apps. RTB involves the broadcasting of sensitive data about people using those websites and apps to large numbers of other entities, without security measures to protect the data. This occurs billions of times a day.
- Our examination of tens of thousands of pages of RTB data reveals that EU military personnel and political decision makers are targeted using RTB.
- This report also reveals that Google and other RTB firms send RTB data about people in the U.S. to Russia an
We caught technicians at Best Buy, Mobile Klinik, Canada Computers and others snooping on our personal devices
montrealgazette.com Opinion: Quebecers, act now to freeze your credit file
A Quebec law that has just gone into effect offers an important tool against identity theft.
I wrote this article for the Montreal Gazette a few months ago and I think it might be a good idea to share it here. If a few more people freeze their credit files and they avoid a potential id theft disaster in the future, that's good enough for me.
For people outside of Quebec: contact your representatives and demand provincial / federal action!
How Manga Was Translated for America - NY Times
www.nytimes.com How Manga Was Translated for America
The wildly popular Japanese genre is now published close to its original form in the United States. That wasn’t always the case.
Gift link, read freely :-)
www.theweathernetwork.com Dangerous storm set-up with tornado risk emerges over parts of Ontario, Quebec - The Weather Network
Stay alert: Thursday's tornadic environment includes Ottawa, Montreal and surrounding regions
Be careful out there today, looks nasty.