This has slid under the radar of mainstream news sites but Google Chrome now has a proposal for DRM for the web. It’s basically a way for a website to ask a browser it’s running on a trusted browser or device.

It will help detect & prevent bot traffic or scrapers. But will also enable sites to detect & block ad blockers as well. A final nail in the coffin of the Open Web that made Google a trillion dollar company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999

Trump's Attack on Black Votes Was There the Whole Time, We Just Didn't Call It a Crime

https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/07/20/trumps-attack-on-black-votes-was-there-the-whole-time-we-just-didnt-call-it-a-crime/

H/t @emilymbender

""...Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender have echoed Cameron's concerns — they have long argued that AI systems like ChatGPT & Google Bard lack the capacity to comprehend the meaning or significance of the words they process..."

Excuse me Business Insider if there's any echoing to be done he is echoing OUR concerns not the other way around smh. One can always count on the discounting of women's expertise.

https://www.businessinsider.com/james-cameron-ai-scripts-regurgitated-word-salad-2023-7

You want ethical alternatives? Let’s build a campus where folks can work on them without worrying about how to exist day-to-day (or fund their early-stage development like VC does for surveillance capitalism).

The extent of what public funding is doing today is “Oh, looks like you’ve got some alternative functional, let’s pay you to add Feature X to it.”

Better than nothing?

Sure.

Best we can do?

Not by a longshot.

https://ar.al/2019/11/29/the-future-of-internet-regulation-at-the-european-parliament/

#EU #tech #alternatives #notForProfit #commonGood

Basically, what we’re saying to people today is:

You’re interested in tech and you want a nice home (or just any home) and stability? Go work at Google, Facebook, or some other surveillance capitalist.

What’s that? You want to work on free and open source? Sure, go work at IBM or Oracle… Oh… you don’t mean enterprise software? Tech to protect human rights/democracy? Not for profit hippie-dippie crap for the common good?

Oh, then suffer.

I mean, is it any surprise things are as they are?

Clearly, the #leaders of this #SchoolBoard are #cowards, as are all #racists:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ta-nehisi-coates-shows-up-to-sc-school-meeting-over-banning-his-book

If anyone is wondering how google is doing, it is giving incorrect answers to the query “How old is the Universe?”

Instead of serving up scientific consensus (just shy of 14 billion years) it is latching onto recent media coverage of a questionable study (tired light, time-dependent coupling constants) claiming a much larger figure.

Notably, it gives me the right answer from an incognito window. But elevating popularity metrics over scientific consensus is a real problem!

One suggestion: If you want the fedi to be a welcoming place, don't jump in to someone's mentions to explain the fedi UNLESS explicitly asked to do so.

"But...."

But nothing. This place will survive a little technical misunderstanding or misstatement.

It will not survive newcomers being bombarded with endless fedisplaining.