Google squashed most of the competition in a lot of sectors, and the few remaining competitors aren't any better often.
Aside, even if you do not actively use google, google will still be in your life, by tracking and selling you. Already there is realistically no way to entirely "ungooglify" your life as long as you live and partake in some modern western society.
And soon it seems, you will be using a Google browser because you have to, because your bank or employer website or whatever will require their web "attestation" DRM, and will not accept your Firefox, Brave, Chromium, Vivaldi, Opera or whatever attestation.
And if you're hoping for other attestation vendors... Try streaming anything that needs a subscription without using Google's widevine DRM. You will be surprised on how few options there are, not just in implementations but in streaming services that support anything besides Google's widevine.
Google and probably Microsoft and Apple will be big enough browser vendors to be widely supported "attested environments" and attestation providers. Everybody else will bite the dust on that front.
E.g. "x% of websites do not accept Firefox's attestation" will drive more users away from Firefox, and that in turn will lead to even fewer websites supporting Firefox attestation because why spend the dev resources to support it with that measly market share when people can just use one of the big browsers?!
And google knows this very well, from the "works best/only in Chrome" to widevine. They were even able to make MS abandon their browser engine and jump on the google engine train, after all.
This to me is very clearly an antitrust issue that needs antitrust suits and regulation.
While most people don't care enough to do this, it isn't as hard as people might expect to drastically reduce use of Google products.
The sacrifice is almost entirely on convenience unless you're employment depends on it. Use Firefox, install some basic ad blockers, and don't use Gmail or Google maps. That definitely won't be totally de-googked but it goes pretty far.
If Google does force through this attestation model that's a different story. Though that is effectively Google killing the internet if companies decide to use the feature. Thankfully we survived without the internet for a long time, we can go back to going in person to our bank or calling them on the phone.
Right. The point is: it absolutely does NOT measure what it claims to measure, i.e. truthfulness.
You can detect indicators of stress... or hot weather... or stage-fright (admittedly a form of stress)... or too much caffeine... or an underlying (maybe undiagnosed) medical condition, etc. So it does not even necessarily measure "stress".
It's about as useful as the so called "fruit machine" which they used to test for homosexuality[0], in that it is utterly useless while at the same time can be quite ruinous for people. People have been fired over polygraph "fails", and while not admissible in courts, people probably have been fingered for crimes after they failed polygraphs. Also, criminals have gone free after passing polygraphs[1].
>But everyone knows that it's not very reliable in almost every circumstance it's used.
You and I may know that. But a lot of people actually do not. That's why it's still used. Either because people administering those tests think it's "good science", or because those people administering it know that while it's all bullshit the person they are testing might not know that and break down and admit to things. Remember that fake polygraph on the show The Wire, which was just a copier they strapped to the suspect. If I remember correctly that was based upon true events.
A quick google shows e.g. you can hire "polygraphers" to e.g. "test" if your partner was unfaithful, making claims such as: "However, assuming that you have a good polygrapher with a fair amount of experience in working with betrayal trauma, you're going to get results that are at least 90% accurate or better."[2]
The US (and probably a lot of other) government(s) like their polygraphs very much, too[3].
> you can often tell (i.e. with better accuracy than chance) whether or not a subject is able to give a confident, uncomplicated yes-or-no to a straightforward question in a situation where they don't have to be particularly nervous
Uhmm, if somebody sat me down in a room, strapped all kinds of "science" to my body and then asked me questions, I'd be quite nervous regardless of whether I am truthful or not. In fact, I'd be even more nervous knowing it's a polygraph and bullshit, because I cannot know if the person administrating it would know that too.
If that somebody then asked me "Have you ever killed a prostitute?", or "Have you ever colluded with the enemy?", or "Have you ever cheated on your partner?", or "Have you ever stolen from your employer?", for example, my stress would certainly peak despite being able to confidently and truthfully answer "No!" to all of those questions. And I am sure the polygraph would "measure" my "stress".
[1] E.g. the Green River Killer Gary Ridgway passed a polygraph, so the police turned their resources to another suspect who failed the polygraph. That was in 1984. Ridgway remained free until his arrest in 2001. He killed at least 4 more times after the investigation stopped focusing on him after that "passed" polygraph.
Sure. Or it could just the kind of mistake that is being made all the time. I remember for example facebook taking itself offline[0], or cloudflare taking itself offline[1]. And of course pre-Musk twitter is well known itself to regularly have had significant incidents.
This new twitter incident could well be a result of layoffs and the resulting loss of institutional knowledge, but that's hardly a foregone conclusion.
They've pretty obviously had an increase in service problems since the culling. Most services this size very rarely have outages. You had to go back to 2021 for facebook. Twitter has had several major outages since Musk's purchase.
Twitter also has made a lot of changes in the past few months. I don't recall a time in recent history where they've made so many changes so rapidly. Arguably not all for the better but "move fast and break things", right?
Twitter had a code freezenfrom the time of culling until January roughly. They appeared to make a lot of changes due to botched launches, e.g. they released checkmarks for sale, reversed it and re-released it. Does that count as 3 changes, or one half-baked one?
It could all be part of Musk’s plan. Make people upset that they can’t use the website properly, and then offer a paid service that provides them with a working version?
Why would it be abuse if you just asked for the data to be deleted? As long as you do not misrepresent things and do so politely, of course.
If Disney wants to spent time and money and reputation to figure out if they legally need to delete the data they collected about you and only do so when that's the case, then that's their choice. Same as it was their choice to collect data in the first place.
If they instead want to be nice and consumer-orientated, as they like their public image to suggest, or at least save some bucks, then they will hit the delete button. They gotta have such button by now anyway for legal requests from Californians.
Farmers have to put in constant work to generate revenue. "IP" revenue too often entails create-once-earn-forever. However, "IP" often has a higher upfront investment attached to it, and often is not (as) "scalable", unlike farming.
What I am trying to say is that both things are very different in details where it matters, so I think this is a rather flawed analogy.
Maybe a closer analogy would be landowners who rent out land. Should a person who bought land 10 years ago be able to generate revenue from renting it to a farmer?
Exif itself defines three main times: DateTime, DateTimeOriginal, DateTimeDigitized.
To add insult to injury, each has an additional SubsecTime*
Then you have in the GPS tags: GPSTimeStamp, GPSDateStamp
And those are just the common tags...
Next question is, what format do these tags use. DateTime, while it's supposed to be "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS", is generally a free-for-all in practice when it comes to the order of the date components, the format of the components, or what separator to use.
I've seen software write DateTimes e.g. like "1-12-23/1:13pm" instead of "2013:01:12 13:13:00". Whether it was actually M-DD-YY or D-MM-YY, etc in this case is more of guesswork when all the values are below 12 :P
And if I remember correctly there was one piece of software which wrote UTF-16-BE strings instead of the mandated ASCII.
As others have mentioned, the time range of when the data was scraped seems to be end of 2021 to start of 2022, maybe into mid 2022. If correct, that was certainly before Elon Musk took over, probably even before he made his initial offer.
The problem with that is that the skipped data will still be present and therefore easy to recover if you know what you're looking for. That may "leak" seconds worth of video (and audio) the user may have thought was removed. And those seconds may contain something sensitive, e.g. a pan over some confidential information on some paper or screen, or genitals, or whatever.
In my German circles, that spot has been covered by whatsapp for a long while now. It never has been instagram or anything else really. For me it went from studivz (long defunct German "facebook" for university students, didn't last long), via facebook (for a short while, and due to lack of alternatives) straight to whatsapp, and has stayed there ever since, with the exception of some photography interested people sharing larger sets of photos on flickr at times, and some dating/sexting happening on snap (but most of that still was/is on whatsapp). Instagram was always understood as a place where you go if you want to see celebs, influencers and the "wannabes".
Granted, I am a bit older, a millennial (as much as it hurts me to admit) and an older one at that, but I regularly take the tram in my city at times when all the teenagers are going to school or coming from school, and you can see a damn lot of whatsapp on all those phone screens, a lot of tiktok, and a good amount of discord.
It sure can be a problem when people initialize stuff with nonsense to avoid running into nullable warnings. However, accidentally running into null pointer exceptions is still worse than people deliberately footgunning themselves with bad workarounds.
I feel C#'s nullable has helped me personally to avoid a lot of potential bugs and also changed the way I write code in a lot of places - like creating `bool Try...(..., out var)` style APIs instead of "old school" returns-null/throws style stuff, which I think make a lot of code cleaner and more easy to read.
Sometimes nullable can get a little messy and annoying, especially when retrofitting old code to make use of it without breaking existing APIs, and all in all the way C# does it is a clear net win in my opinion.
I think you have to separate nullable types from the global nullable directive. The global nullable directive will just make people return nonsense like the trend some years ago when people started to return empty lists instead of null.
Google squashed most of the competition in a lot of sectors, and the few remaining competitors aren't any better often.
Aside, even if you do not actively use google, google will still be in your life, by tracking and selling you. Already there is realistically no way to entirely "ungooglify" your life as long as you live and partake in some modern western society.
And soon it seems, you will be using a Google browser because you have to, because your bank or employer website or whatever will require their web "attestation" DRM, and will not accept your Firefox, Brave, Chromium, Vivaldi, Opera or whatever attestation.
And if you're hoping for other attestation vendors... Try streaming anything that needs a subscription without using Google's widevine DRM. You will be surprised on how few options there are, not just in implementations but in streaming services that support anything besides Google's widevine.
Google and probably Microsoft and Apple will be big enough browser vendors to be widely supported "attested environments" and attestation providers. Everybody else will bite the dust on that front.
E.g. "x% of websites do not accept Firefox's attestation" will drive more users away from Firefox, and that in turn will lead to even fewer websites supporting Firefox attestation because why spend the dev resources to support it with that measly market share when people can just use one of the big browsers?!
And google knows this very well, from the "works best/only in Chrome" to widevine. They were even able to make MS abandon their browser engine and jump on the google engine train, after all.
This to me is very clearly an antitrust issue that needs antitrust suits and regulation.