Technology

This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."

https://archive.ph/4LbGN

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14597237

Honda launches China-specific EV lineup, partners with Huawei · TechNode

An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users’ messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service’s creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.

https://archive.fo/4HwJt

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19487003

Lots of reasons to be looking at the framework Canada just published for consumer-driven (open) banking, but I thought this was a gem:

from "2.10 A Single Technical Standard"

...The Framework will significantly decrease the risks of personal data being compromised by bad actors and mitigate security, privacy, and liability risks for consumers and participants. This is achieved through the use of APIs, a type of software that acts as secure data “pipes” to enable different products and services to communicate in a consistent manner.

If an API is a pipe, is the Internet a series of tubes?

Let’s have a look at the very first commercial computer with a graphical user interface, called Xerox Star, which was the successor of the Xerox Alto! What did its marvelous GUI look like? Was it ground-breaking and easy to use as we’d expect? Or, perhaps, was it too ahead of its time? Well then, let’s find out!

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But Hirai also began to think about the work he knew lay ahead. The Ocean Link was one of a small number of ships that maintain the subsea cables that carry 99 percent of the world’s data. Positioned in strategic locations around the planet, these ships stand ready to sail out and fix faults the moment they are detected, and most of the time, they are more than equal to the task. But earthquakes, Hirai knew from experience, were different. They didn’t just break one cable — they broke many, and badly. If what he feared had happened, Japan risked being cut off from the world in its moment of need.

Oooff ... I don't think it's like MKBHD to come down so hard on a product. But this thing seemed weird (and probably dumb) when it was launched and so I guess this lines up.

Not that a wearable assistant doesn't make some sense, but some former Apple higher ups who think they're good enough to disrupt the smartphone market by ... checks notes ... relying entirely on other companys' new/untested/problematic/maybe-just-shit AI services and pretending that all of the other "smart" devices we have just don't exist in some sort of volley in the ongoing platform wars ... really does kinda epitomise all of shittiness of the current tech world.