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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Copyright applies to unfinished works, too. There are many reasons it might not protect an unfinished work, but those reasons are still relevant even for finished works.

    If someone steals your physical drawing, that’s theft. If they take a picture of it, then use the picture - or your picture + modifications - without your permission, particularly in a commercial work, then that’s copyright infringement, but not theft. If they steal your physical drawing and then take a picture and so on, then it’s both theft and copyright infringement.

    Most likely this wasn’t considered copyright infringement because the allegedly copied art isn’t copyrightable, e.g., game mechanics; or the plaintiff didn’t own the copyrights themselves and thus couldn’t sue (possibly the arts were still copyrighted by the original artists, having never been purchased; possibly they were stock assets that were re-purchased by the defendant). There are any number of reasons. However, “the work wasn’t published” isn’t one of them.

    On the other hand, it’s quite likely they were able to sue for theft of trade secrets for that very reason. And they might have chosen to do that simply because proving copyright infringement is much more difficult.








  • Your comment wasn’t in a meta discussion; it was on a post where they were venting about people complaining about them having a women’s only space. There was certainly no indication that the regular community rules didn’t apply, nor any invitation for men to comment.

    Commenting that it’s hostile for them to have a women’s only space might be ironic, but couldn’t possibly be good faith, in that context. And if the same mod banned you from multiple communities, then either it was out of line and you could appeal it, or it was warranted due to the perceived likelihood of you causing problems in those other communities and the perceived low likelihood of you contributing anything of value to them.

    Even now, you’re acting like the mod(s) banned you because of her / their emotions. You don’t see how that’s misogynistic?

    It makes logical sense for bad actors to be preemptively banned. Emotions have nothing to do with it.






  • It was already known before the whistleblower that:

    1. Siri inputs (all STT at that time, really) were processed off device
    2. Siri had false activations

    The “sinister” thing that we learned was that Apple was reviewing those activations to see if they were false, with the stated intent (as confirmed by the whistleblower) of using them to reduce false activations.

    There are also black box methods to verify that data isn’t being sent and that particular hardware (like the microphone) isn’t being used, and there are people who look for vulnerabilities as a hobby. If the microphones on the most/second most popular phone brand (iPhone, Samsung) were secretly recording all the time, evidence of that would be easy to find and would be a huge scoop - why haven’t we heard about it yet?

    Snowden and Wikileaks dumped a huge amount of info about governments spying, but nothing in there involved always on microphones in our cell phones.

    To be fair, an individual phone is a single compromise away from actually listening to you, so it still makes sense to avoid having sensitive conversations within earshot of a wirelessly connected microphone. But generally that’s not the concern most people should have.

    Advertising tracking is much more sinister and complicated and harder to wrap your head around than “my phone is listening to me” and as a result makes for a much less glamorous story, but there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of stories out there about how invasive advertising companies’ methods are, about how they know too much, etc… Think about what LLMs do with text. The level of prediction that they can do. That’s what ML algorithms can do with your behavior.

    If you’re misattributing what advertisers know about you to the phone listening and reporting back, then you’re not paying attention to what they’re actually doing.

    So yes - be vigilant. Just be vigilant about the right thing.


  • proven by a whistleblower from apple

    Assuming you have an iPhone. And even then, the whistleblower you’re referencing was part of a team who reviewed utterances by users with the “Hey Siri” wake word feature enabled. If you had Siri disabled entirely or had the wake word feature disabled, you weren’t impacted at all.

    This may have been limited to impacting only users who also had some option like “Improve Siri and Dictation” enabled, but it’s not clear. Today, the Privacy Policy explicitly says that Apple can have employees review your interactions with Siri and Dictation (my understanding is the reason for the settlement is that they were not explicit that human review was occurring). I strongly recommend disabling that setting, particularly if you have a wake word enabled.

    If you have wake words enabled on your phone or device, your phone has to listen to be able to react to them. At that point, of course the phone is listening. Whether it’s sending the info back somewhere is a different story, and there isn’t any evidence that I’m aware of that any major phone company does this.


  • Sure - Wikipedia says it better than I could hope to:

    As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.[11]: 25  In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power. An example that Andrews uses in his book is fewer than vs less than.[11]: 26  A descriptive grammarian would state that both statements are equally valid, as long as the meaning behind the statement can be understood. A prescriptive grammarian would analyze the rules and conventions behind both statements to determine which statement is correct or otherwise preferable. Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive.[11]: 26



  • You can run a NAS with any Linux distro - your limiting factor is having enough drive storage. You might want to consider something that’s great at using virtual machines (e.g., Proxmox) if you don’t like Docker, but I have almost everything I want running in Docker and haven’t needed to spin up a single virtual machine.


  • Copied from the post:

    You may have seen reports of leaks of older text messages that had previously been sent to Steam customers. We have examined the leak sample and have determined this was NOT a breach of Steam systems.

    We’re still digging into the source of the leak, which is compounded by the fact that any SMS messages are unencrypted in transit, and routed through multiple providers on the way to your phone.​

    The leak consisted of older text messages that included one-time codes that were only valid for 15-minute time frames and the phone numbers they were sent to. The leaked data did not associate the phone numbers with a Steam account, password information, payment information or other personal data. Old text messages cannot be used to breach the security of your Steam account, and whenever a code is used to change your Steam email or password using SMS, you will receive a confirmation via email and/or Steam secure messages.​

    You do not need to change your passwords or phone numbers as a result of this event. It is a good reminder to treat any account security messages that you have not explicitly requested as suspicious. We recommend regularly checking your Steam account security at any time at ​

    https://store.steampowered.com/account/authorizeddevices

    We also recommend setting up the Steam Mobile Authenticator if you haven’t already, as it gives us the best way to send secure messages about your account and your account’s safety.


  • You don’t have to finish the file to share it though, that’s a major part of bittorrent. Each peer shares parts of the files that they’ve partially downloaded already. So Meta didn’t need to finish and share the whole file to have technically shared some parts of copyrighted works. Unless they just had uploading completely disabled,

    The argument was not that it didn’t matter if a user didn’t download the entirety of a work from Meta, but that it didn’t matter whether a user downloaded anything from Meta, regardless of whether Meta was a peer or seed at the time.

    Theoretically, Meta could have disabled uploading but not blocked their client from signaling that they could upload. This would, according to that argument, still counts as reproducing the works, under the logic that signaling that it was available is the same as “making it available.”

    but they still “reproduced” those works by vectorizing them into an LLM. If Gemini can reproduce a copyrighted work “from memory” then that still counts.

    That’s irrelevant to the plaintiff’s argument. And beyond that, it would need to be proven on its own merits. This argument about torrenting wouldn’t be relevant if LLAMA were obviously a derivative creation that wasn’t subject to fair use protections.

    It’s also irrelevant if Gemini can reproduce a work, as Meta did not create Gemini.

    Does any Llama model reproduce the entirety of The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman if you provide the first paragraph? Does it even get the first chapter? I highly doubt it.

    By the same logic, almost any computer on the internet is guilty of copyright infringement. Proxy servers, VPNs, basically any compute that routed those packets temporarily had (or still has for caches, logs, etc) copies of that protected data.

    There have been lawsuits against both ISPs and VPNs in recent years for being complicit in copyright infringement, but that’s a bit different. Generally speaking, there are laws, like the DMCA, that specifically limit the liability of network providers and network services, so long as they respect things like takedown notices.