'Privacy. That's Apple,’ the slogan proclaims. New research from Aalto University in Finland begs to differ.

The researchers studied eight default apps, the ones that are pretty much unavoidable on a new device, be it a computer, tablet or mobile phone: Safari, Siri, Family Sharing, iMessage, FaceTime, Location Services, Find My and Touch ID. They collected all publicly available privacy-related information on these apps, from technical documentation to privacy policies and user manuals.

'Due to the way the user interface is designed, users don’t know what is going on. For example, the user is given the option to enable or not enable Siri, Apple's virtual assistant. But enabling only refers to whether you use Siri's voice control. Siri collects data in the background from other apps you use, regardless of your choice, unless you understand how to go into the settings and specifically change that,’ says Associate Professor Janne Lindqvist, head of the computer science department at Aalto.

'The online instructions for restricting data access are very complex and confusing, and the steps required are scattered in different places. There’s no clear direction on whether to go to the app settings, the central settings – or even both,’ says Amel Bourdoucen, a doctoral researcher at Aalto.

In addition, the instructions didn’t list all the necessary steps or explain how collected data is processed.

The researchers also demonstrated these problems experimentally. They interviewed users and asked them to try changing the settings.

‘It turned out that the participants weren’t able to prevent any of the apps from sharing their data with other applications or the service provider,’ Bourdoucen says.

Related: The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

follow-up Mastodon thread from the author: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

A video about the Minuteman ICBM's guidance computer by Alexander the ok.

He even made a simulator for it, in case you want to try out what it would have been like to program an ICBM's guidance computer in the 60's 😁

Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour.

The organization has exposed modern slavery, forced and child labour throughout the renewable energy supply chain, with evidence of state-imposed forced labour of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim majority groups in China in the making and supply of solar panels and other renewable technologies.

It has also shone a light on the slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt is mined by workers for its use in rechargeable batteries for laptop computers and mobile phones.

"We have an opportunity to build an economy that isn’t coming from colonial lines and yet, right now, a green economy absolutely will be built on forced and child labour," Forrest says.

“So the message really is, you cannot harm people in the name of saving the planet.”

Walk Free's latest Global Slavery Index estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery – either in forced labour or forced marriage – on any given day in 2021.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13091735

In November 2019, the US government’s National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), an influential body chaired by former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, warned that China was using artificial intelligence to “advance an autocratic agenda.”

Just two months earlier, Schmidt was also seeking potential personal connections to China’s AI industry on a visit to Beijing, newly disclosed emails reveal. Separately, tax filings show that a nonprofit private foundation overseen by Schmidt and his wife contributed to a fund that feeds into a private equity firm that has made investments in numerous Chinese tech firms, including those in AI.

Needs archive.is link!

Automattic purchases Beeper in $125 million deal; CEO to join

https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-joining-automattic/

A prototype is available, though it's Chrome-only and English-only at the moment. How this'll work is you select some text and then click on the extension, which will try to "return the relevant quote and inference for the user, along with links to article and quality signals".

How this works is it uses ChatGPT to generate a search query, utilizes WP's search API to search for relevant article text, and then uses ChatGPT to extract the relevant part.

Traditionally, one would have to periodically check the status of the dust filtering on a PC case, but that's not the case (pun intended!) with the Asus ProArt PA602. This chassis has a fancy infrared (IR) sensor behind the front-facing dust filter. Should this detect a set layer of dust covering the filter material, a small LED will illuminate on the side of the case. It's tastefully done. No alert on an LCD screen, no obnoxious sound. With this activated, you will know to clean the filter (and give the inside a quick air blast) next time the system has been shut down.

Quite a thoughtful case, apart from having the dust filter warning, it also has wheels to move it more easily.

But it does show also, is that even cases can innovate as well. I'd like to see more of these and maybe have the sensors also on the other dust filters (my case has one underneath as well), as IR sensors themselves are not very expensive to incorporate.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/this-asus-pc-case-monitors-your-dust-filter/

#technology #cases #dust

These keyboards rely on magnets and springs and activate by sensing changes in the magnetic field. Popularized by Dutch keyboard startup Wooting, these switches rely on the Hall Effect and have actually been around since the 1960s.

You can change how far you need to press down to register the keystroke, as well as for the release point.

The one thing you can’t change, though, is the switch’s resistance. Despite all the talk of magnets, that’s still handled by the spring inside the switch, after all (for the moment, until the xyz is released).

But interestingly, this also means with temperature differences, you may also have to "calibrate" your keyboard. The price point for the Akko MOD007B PC Santorini keyboard at around US$110 to $150 is certainly not more expensive than many mechanical keyboards.

See https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/07/magnets-are-switching-up-the-keyboard-game/

#technology #keyboards

Today, a different form of efficient design is eliminating “eyes on the street” — by replacing them with technological ones. The proliferation of neighborhood surveillance technologies such as Ring cameras and digital neighborhood-watch platforms and apps such as Nextdoor and Citizen have freed us from the constraints of having to be physically present to monitor our homes and streets.

When debates arise over the threat such technologies might pose to privacy, of both their users and the broader public, critics often focus on the power of large technology corporations to control our personal data.

But surveillance clearly provides benefits — and means of abuse — to far more people than Big Tech titans and law enforcement. These are wildly popular technologies among private citizens. We like to look at ourselves and to monitor others, and there are an increasing number of new technologies encouraging us to do just that.

This prompts some slightly different questions about the benefits and dangers of surveillance technologies: What kind of people are being formed in a world of everyday surveillance? What assumptions do they make about their neighbors and communities? What expectations do they have for privacy and visibility in their own homes and in their interactions with family members? How can they build relationships of trust without the reassurance surveillance offers of the behavior of others?

A CCTV company owned by the municipality of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, had sued the Slovenian Data Protection Authority (DPA) in order to block the release of municipal CCTV system data. But the ruling of an administrative court made it clear that making the CCTV system data available is in the public’s interest, not just because the system was paid for with public funds but also because the citizen have the right to know where and how the municipality is surveilling them.

During the hearings of this case, the municipally-owned company used several bad faith arguments to block the release of the data under the local FOIA law. First, they tried to shift the responsibility to the municipality, which previously named the company as the relevant actor. The company then claimed that the data set is too big to compile. Other ineffectual arguments used were: the release of the data will have negative consequences for crime prevention and that the data was not in the public interest.

Schleswig-Holstein, the northern German federal state, will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration. With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government has given the go-ahead for the first step towards complete digital sovereignty in the state, with further steps to follow.

The some 30,000 public employees will replace Microsoft Office with LibreOffice, Windows with a yet-to-be-determined Linux desktop distro, and use Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird, and the Univention Active Directory (AD) connector to replace Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook. The state also intends to replace Telekom-Flexport by an Open Source solution.

"The use of open source software also benefits from improved IT security, cost-effectiveness, data protection, and seamless collaboration between different systems," says Dirk Schrödter, digitalization minister for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

"We have no influence on the operating processes of [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries," he adds.

"We have a great responsibility towards our citizens and companies to ensure that their data is kept safe with us, and we must ensure that we are always in control of the IT solutions we use and that we can act independently as a state."

As The Document Foundation, the organization backing LibreOffice, put it, "The term digital sovereignty is very important here. If a public administration uses proprietary, closed software that can't be studied or modified, it is very difficult to know what happens to users' data."