• The Rise of "Little Tech": Small startups and SaaS vendors—often backed by Silicon Valley venture capital—are leading the charge in AI-powered workplace surveillance, embedding tracking tools into everyday HR and productivity software.
• Global Surge, Local Collapse: While countries like Brazil, Mexico, and India have privacy laws on paper, enforcement is weak, allowing both domestic and foreign vendors to deploy invasive technologies unchecked.
• Gig Workers as Guinea Pigs: Gig economy workers in sectors like delivery and rideshare are the frontline subjects of AI surveillance, subjected to real-time tracking, biometric scans, and even models that predict union activity.
• Surveillance Disguised as Care: AI surveillance is increasingly framed as a tool for safety, wellness, and productivity—masking coercive oversight in the language of health and efficiency.
• Privacy Theater: Many vendors offer copy-paste privacy notices while quietly retaining worker data indefinitely. In countries like Mexico and Colombia, some companies even conduct home visits and collect data on workers' families.
• Workers are Fighting Back: From sanitation workers in India to ride-hail drivers in Nigeria, workers are resisting algorithmic control—organizing protests, forming unions, and demanding AI transparency.

Archive.

The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.

Archive.

This kind of cross-platform tracking is unprecedented - and it’s especially surprising coming from two companies that serve billions of users worldwide

Hey devs, I recently wrapped the latest stable release of Tide42, a lightweight terminal-based IDE designed for speed, flexibility, and a clean coding experience — especially for those of us who live in the terminal.

Tide42 integrates tmux, nvim, and thoughtful Bash scripting into a seamless dev workflow with:

True 256-color support (color toggle with -c)

Elegant, fast session layout using tmux

Self-updating mechanism (--update) to pull the latest version from GitHub

Multi-distro install script for Debian, Arch, macOS (via apt, pacman, brew)

Respectful config handling – never overwrites your dotfiles

Simple interactive file launcher (tide42 )

Quiet mode for scripts (-q)

Try it out: GitHub: github.com/logicmagix/tide42 License: GPLv3 Clone, install, and run tide42 to get started.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/197387

Google is pausing the rollout of its AI-powered “Ask Photos” feature within Google Photos, which has been slowly expanding since last fall. “Ask Photos isn’t where it needs to be,” wrote Jamie Aspinall, a product manager for Google Photos, in a post on X responding to criticism, citing three factors: latency, quality, and user experience.

The experimental feature is powered by Google’s “most capable” Gemini AI models. Specifically, it’s a specialized version of its Gemini models that are “only used for Ask Photos,” according to Google.

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Aspinall said Google had paused the feature’s rollout “at very small numbers while we address these issues,” and that in about two weeks, the team would ship a better version “that brings back the speed and recall of the original search.

At the same time, Google also announced Tuesday that keyword search in Photos is getting better, allowing you to use quotes to find exact text matches within “filenames, camera models, captions, or text within photos,” or search without quotes to include visual matches too.

Google announced the feature last May at I/O 2024, and positioned it as a way to query your Photos app for common-sense questions that another human would typically have to help with — i.e., asking about which themes you’ve chosen in the past for a child’s birthday party, or which national parks you’ve visited.

“Gemini’s multimodal capabilities can help understand exactly what’s happening in each photo and can even read text in the image if required,” the company wrote in the announcement. “Ask Photos then crafts a helpful response and picks which photos and videos to return.”

It’s not the first time Google has paused the rollout of an AI-powered feature, as it competes in a quickly intensifying AI arms race against other tech giants and startups alike.

Last May, within weeks of debuting “AI Overview” in Google Search, Google paused the feature after nonsensical and inaccurate answers went viral on social media, with no way to opt out of usage. Two high-profile examples: The feature called Barack Obama the first Muslim president of the United States, and recommended users put glue on pizza to keep the cheese on.

And last February, Google rolled out Gemini’s image-generation tool with a good deal of fanfare, then paused the feature that same month after users reported historical inaccuracies, such as an AI-generated image depicting the U.S. Founding Fathers as people of color.

From The Verge via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/39876981

Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together so we can shoot them

Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they're off-limits for every other site.

The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning “a bunch of schizoposters” who believe “they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30700991

I still have an old ipod. So old it has no wireless ability. I want to use it in my car which doesn't have a cassette or cd player. It plugs into the car's usb port but the car radio "doesn't see it". Any tips on how to get it to work?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30693439

Rob is a web industry veteran, and his ideas are extremely relevant for the days we live in today. We need a refocus, and a sense of community in the design/web development world.

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A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea is offering a rare – and unsettling – glimpse into the extent of control Kim Jong Un's regime exerts over its citizens, down to the very words they type. While the device appears outwardly similar to any modern smartphone, its software reveals a far more oppressive reality. The phone was featured in a BBC video, which showed it powering on with an animated North Korean flag waving across the screen. While the report did not specify the brand, the design and user interface closely resembled those of a Huawei or Honor device.

It's unclear whether these companies officially sell phones in North Korea, but if they do, the devices are likely customized with state-approved software designed to restrict functionality and facilitate government surveillance.

One of the more revealing – and darkly amusing – features was the phone's automatic censorship of words deemed problematic by the state. For instance, when users typed oppa, a South Korean term used to refer to an older brother or a boyfriend, the phone automatically replaced it with comrade. A warning would then appear, admonishing the user that oppa could only refer to an older sibling.

Typing "South Korea" would trigger another change. The phrase was automatically replaced with "puppet state," reflecting the language used in official North Korean rhetoric.

Then came the more unsettling features. The phone silently captured a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a hidden folder that users couldn't access. According to the BBC, authorities could later review these images to monitor the user's activity.

The device was smuggled out of North Korea by Daily NK, a Seoul-based media outlet specializing in North Korean affairs. After examining the phone, the BBC confirmed that the censorship mechanisms were deeply embedded in its software. Experts say this technology is designed not only to control information but also to reinforce state messaging at the most personal level.

Smartphone usage has grown in North Korea in recent years, but access remains tightly controlled. Devices cannot connect to the global internet and are subject to intense government surveillance.

The regime has reportedly intensified efforts to eliminate South Korean cultural influence, which it views as subversive. So-called "youth crackdown squads" have been deployed to enforce these rules, frequently stopping young people on the streets to inspect their phones and review text messages for banned language.

Some North Korean escapees have shared that exposure to South Korean dramas or foreign radio broadcasts played a key role in their decision to flee the country. Despite the risks, outside media continues to be smuggled in – often via USB sticks and memory cards hidden in food shipments. Much of this effort is supported by foreign organizations.

they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year