You cross a finish line.

Someone enters your bib number into a publicly accessible gallery. Within two minutes they have 72 high-resolution photographs of your face and body, your full name, age category, finishing time (which suggests your health status), and running club affiliation.

No login. No identity verification. No data protection mechanism triggered. They have no relationship with you whatsoever.

This is not a hypothetical. I tested it.

———

I've been reviewing privacy policies of major UK sporting event organisers.

Medical data collected without legal basis, international transfers undisclosed, no separate consent for facial recognition, no documented data processing agreements with photography providers.

Nobody has looked at this properly yet. The full data chain — registration, results, photography, facial recognition — creates a biometric identification pipeline that any member of the public can access.

The ICO hasn't issued sector-specific guidance. I've written up the analysis and invited them to take a look.

https://raffkarva.com/blog/posts/privacy/beyond-the-finish-line/

@openrightsgroup @privacyint @eff @pluralistic

#privacy #photography #FacialRecognition #blog #RaffsReflections

If you are running Google Chrome on Windows and wish to disable the illicitly downloaded 4 GByte AI model, here are the steps to go though:

Deleting the file (weights.bin) is often ineffective as Chrome will automatically re-download it upon relaunch unless the associated AI features are disabled.

Standard Settings: In Chrome, Go to Settings > System and toggle off On-device GenAI (or "On-device AI") Experimental Flags:

Enter chrome://flags in your Chrome address bar and disable the following:

#optimization-guide-on-device-model
#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano

After disabling the flags, you can manually delete the storage-heavy folder to reclaim space (roughly 4GB).

Press Win + R and paste:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Open your profile folder (usually named Default).

Find and delete the OptGuideOnDeviceModel folder.

As an experiment I have deleted just the existing weights.bin file and re-created a read-only 0 byte version. I can then monitor this to see if it's changed in the future.

Hopefully this will disable these illicit AI features and prevent it from being re-enabled in future.

#Windows #Chrome #Google #Weights.bin #AI #LLM

„Harbour Entrance II“ (2012)
Photo ©️ Dietmar Bachmann
📍Lausanne-Ouchy, Switzerland

#silentsunday #silence #tranquility #photography #minimalism #longexposure #minimalist #photo #lake #harbour #port #piles #water #stillness #stilllife #landscape #landscapephotography #Lausanne #Switzerland #phaseone #stillersonntag #Stille #Ruhe #Fotografie #Langzeitbelichtung #Minimalismus #minimalistisch #Foto #See #Hafen #Pfeiler #Wasser #Stille #Stillleben #Landschaft #Landschaftsfotografie #Schweiz

I'm hosting @Mastodon's first ever Discovery Week in just a few days. It's a chance for the public to weigh in on the future of online communities.

We'll be discussing topics like user-controlled algorithms, trust & safety, creator tools, and more. Your input will help steer Mastodon towards a more inclusive and impactful roadmap. Non-technical folks strongly encouraged to attend, and there's an async option if you can't make the live sessions!

https://app.hi.events/event/7599/mastodon-discovery-week-2026

#mastodon

Names of the containers that coins go into, their materials and sounds

Cash box is how we called them in the UK

Pinball machines have coin mechs at hip height and there's legs and air between them and the ground, they have a wide squat box that Americans call a cash pan. They were steel until the 90's and each manufacturer had a slightly different size that was infuriatingly juuust different enough from each other to be awkward. They don't hold much money compared to vids or fruities but you're gonna be in there to fix it all the time anyway so you might as well empty it out.

Every non-cocktail vid I've seen in the USA and all the Japanese imports have roughly similar size standardized box that's taller than it is wide, they call it a cash bucket or coin bucket and there's something very lovely about the idea of an actual Bucket Of Money that you can plunge your hands into and make that slishy sound. About the size of a shoebox turned on-end, can be steel or plastic. When it's full of quarters it contains A Fucking Grand. The difference between one thousand dollars and A Fucking Grand is that when it's in quarters in a cash bucket you can grunt it onto a creaking table and say "See that? That's a fucking grand" to the observing American who doesn't think that coins count as money.

UK generic chip shop JAMMA cabs of the late 80's to early 90's (my entry point to the guy-who-takes-the-money side of the arcade world) didn't have so much in the way of standardization around cash boxes and every one was different, although they were usually wood. Wood sounds the best of all. A pound coin dropping into a wooden box full of money is a wonderful sound. My favourite ever machine had a thick chipboard box and coins would bounce off the inner top edge of the front panel with a lovely "dok" kinda resonance. We also have more than one functional coin, our mechs take 10p 20p 50p £1 and £2 coins, so there could be Real Fucking Money in there. The biggest I ever saw was in a Videomaster cab and it was as tall as a US standard coin bucket but it was two thirds the depth of the machine and the entire inner width. Two keys to open the chamber of riches, two hands to pull out the wooden vault within. Never seen more than one-coin layer of riches on the bottom; filling it up would be new-car, down-payment-on-a-house money.

In conclusion: schlicknokTAKlokDOKtishclickaclick