Weekend Edition 40
Weekend Edition 40
FTC Goes After Amazon
AST Space 4G
AI News
Google Points Fingers at MSFT
Meta News
Twitter News
#weekendedition #FOSSNews #FTC #amazon #AI #cellsatellites #Google #Microsoft #Meta #Twitter #TechFreedom
Weekend Edition, FOSS News, Tech Freedom, AI, Big Tech
WE 1 – FTC Investigating Prime Dark Patterns
Now that Big Daddy Bezos/ Lex Luthor is out of the way, the FTC can slap Amazon around all they want. Have you ever tried to end your Amazon Prime subscription? It takes some doing, let me tell you. They have so many services bundled under the Prime brand, from shipping to music, to photos, to video, etc, that gets shown to users who try to end their subscriptions that it is difficult to navigate to actually get done what you meant to do. They strike me as desperate for Prime customers, when not only do they make it difficult to order anything without at least a “free trial” (I was sucked into this over 10 years ago), but then make it absolutely labyrinthine to actually end your subscription. This is wrong. This complaint alleges that there are engineers with a conscience, or at least who fear the color of law, who have tried to fix these issues, but either found their ideas slow-walked, ignored, or actively undone when efforts were made. Executives seem unwilling to move away from this manipulative model of doing business (perhaps because it is effective at making sure that people stay subscribed and hooked into their data-mining efforts) in spite of the fact that it is illegal. Perhaps they think that their legal team and lobby in DC can shield them from any real harm, here. I don’t know.
What do you guys think?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ftc-amazon-tricked-millions-into-signing-up-for-prime-subscriptions
WE 2 – AST BlueWalker 3 4G Satellite Tested
What is that? AST, a satellite communications firm has launched and tested their first 4G-capable solar-powered satellite. The BlueWalker 3 is a low-earth orbit satellite which is more or less a giant 4G cell tower in space. Back in April they tested voice capabilities via a trans-pacific phone call, from TX to Tokyo. This month, they tested data transfer speeds in rural Hawaii, and with off-the-shelf phones, were able to pull down 10 mb/s from the satellite. Sure, that isn’t earth-shattering speed, but it is far better in rural areas than what is currently available. These are improvements, to be sure, meant to cover about 300k sq mi per satellite. AST and AT&T are not to be the only names in the game, but are poised to be the first to offer it as a commercial service. There are others who are gunning to join the space-based mobile access game: Apple, SpaceX, and T-Mobile. How hot are these towers? They also say that they are planning to roll out 5G (which is cannot be the fastest mm-wave varieties, as the frequencies necessary to achieve that throughput couldn’t make it to earth from space anyway) soon, which really means mid-band 4G, but beam-formed and with multiple streams combined into one signal to boost throughput. In regard to mm-wave 5G, the current tech can’t even make it through a pane of glass, much less a brick wall, hell, too much moisture in the air can attenuate the signal to the point where it is pointless. Too many unanswered questions about WiFi technology and the effect of these frequencies on living tissue. On one hand, this is kind of cool, and if we could get the latency down and the throughput significantly higher (see Starlink), this could get all of those unsightly towers off of the ground, perhaps.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/asts-bluewalker-satellite-successfully-delivers-10mbps-download-speeds
WE 3 – AI News
3a – AI Battle Royale
UC Berkeley (UCB) founded the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS Org) to find out which of the LLMs is best currently. This research group is comprised of 10 Data science professors and students from UCB and UCSD (UC San Diego), as well as CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). This group has set up a blind testing arena where user prompts get sent to two of the models at once, so that the results show up side by side, and the user evaluates them. Unsurprisingly, the most advanced of the LLMs, GPT4, is the winner, but not by as much as you might think. There is an accessibility (aside from a raft of other things) issue, in that it is locked behind a $20/mo pay wall, where the others are freely available. They use the Elo rating system, which if you are a chess nerd, you’ll be familiar with. It is the comparative rating system used to rank players in chess and other similar games. Basically, it is a self-correcting rating system which will eventually produce accurate scores for the members of the dataset, whether chess players or, in this case, AI large language models. It is only 30 points ahead of Claude, which is waitlisted and has been developed by Anthropic.
I do not trust generative AI, but am not afraid of it, unlike many seem to be, including one of the professors overseeing this research group. His (Dr. Zhang’s) two issues are actually similar to mine, though: 1) he is concerned for data privacy and 2) incentives for human content creators to actually produce higher-quality content. I have been screaming about privacy in this regard since chatGPT burst onto the scene 8-9 months ago now. Not only can these tools access anything that is publicly available online, but you are giving it YOUR information whenever you use one, which it then incorporates into its own training algorithms. His second problem is one that I don’t know that I’ve thought about, but makes sense to me: if AIs can create admixtures of content which closely mimic human content, but said content is based on garbage articles and blog posts, then why should humans strive to produce anything better? Where’s the incentive to push oneself to make something truly good if some AI can mass-produce fluff pieces at will and bring the whole enterprise down several pegs while it is at it?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chatgpt-bard-or-bing-40k-people-voted-for-the-best-generative-ai-model
WE 3b – Thinking Like a Pirate? Don’t.
Apparently some enterprising individuals have taken to asking chatbots for Windows license serial numbers to activate Windows on their machines. Sometimes it works, but more often than not, it doesn’t. This article more or less advises you not to bother, and I would add that if you want a free OS, just make the switch to Linux. Most of your games and apps will probably work just fine, anyway (barring the Adobe Suite, MS Office, and a handful of popular games). Avoid the problem and the spying altogether by making the switch. Yes, it does have a learning curve, but I think you’ll find that it isn’t as steep as in years gone by. So why does the article say not to try the chatbot route to get a free activation code for Windoesn’t?
- It is not guaranteed to work, as apparently GPT 3.5 or 4 simply pulls generic installation codes (which MS so generously provides for free, so that you can test their OS, but not activate it to get full functionality). Even if it all works at first, the install works, and your system even activates, these free codes have been proven in the past to be phased out randomly, anyway.
- It is illegal. This is piracy, people. As much as I hate MS, I can’t encourage you to break the law.
As I was saying, though, unless you are tied down to one of these proprietary app suites or games, why stick with Windoesn’t, anyway, when they are only getting more and more invasive to your privacy as each new version is released? Why take the chance of being left out in the cold by a bad, or fraudulent code? Why risk fines or imprisonment for software piracy? Don’t do it. It isn’t worth it.
https://www.techradar.com/news/dont-ask-chatgpt-or-google-bard-for-a-windows-11-key-heres-why
We 4 – Google Whines About Microsoft Azure
Amid years of legal battles with regulators in the US, Europe, and India, Google has taken the opportunity provided by a general request from the FTC regarding anti-competitive practices from Microsoft’s corner of the Cloud space. So, like a problem child who sees an opportunity to point the finger and deflect blame from themselves onto another sibling (though MS has been historically far from being a golden child [remember the anti-trust cases of the 90’s and 00’s?]) who is not currently in as much trouble, Google takes advantage and fires off this series of allegations which have also been leveled against Google’s cloud division itself, repeatedly, over the last several years. I’ve talked about some of the fines which the giant has faced from different countries over their own practices, and how they make it very hard for you to leave their services once you start using them, whether through license agreements, proprietary software stacks or implementations. We know that Azure is very similar, as is AWS. ALL of the big boys pull these stunts to lock clients into their respective ecosystems. That needs to change. 10 years ago. Not today, not tomorrow, 10 years ago, at the beginning of the cloud revolution. These monsters need to be slain and dismembered so that a freer, more private internet can grow in their place. Let me give you a little advice: if you have an app or some other sort of web-based service, don’t use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud to handle the infrastructure. Easier said than done, as with any economy of scale situation, the smaller competitors often cannot keep up with prices or offerings in comparison with MS, Oracle (whom Google also singled out in its letter), AWS, or Google Cloud. However, most of the smaller outfits out there also tend to be more committed to fair competition, even if it hurts their bottom line. One such small provider is Altha Tech, out of Mt. Airy, NC. The owner, Jared Heath, is all in on FOSS wherever practical, and will never lock you in to exclusive or proprietary agreements.
WE 5 – Mainstream Social Media News
WE 5a – Meta Allows too Much Free Speech
Remember the Brazilian Election situation? The one where Lula (the overt communist) seems to have Biden’d the far more popular nationalist Jair Bolsonaro? Well there was a video calling for “insurrectionist action” back in January which Meta decided to leave “up” rather than censoring it, as it did with many similar posts in late 2020- early 2021 in regard to Resident Depends and Kneepad Harris “beating” President Trump in the 2020 US election from Depends’ basement. The article’s writer shows herself to be a good wokist drone by whining about how Facebook was a “home for right-wing conspiracy theorists and organizers” during the weeks between November 4 and January 6, allowing more than 650,000 posts questioning or organizing against the results of that (s)election. Lo and behold, I looked up a bio for the writer, and she writes for the NYT, WaPo, and other propaganda rags as well as writing about tech on Engadget. Impressive resume. No independent thought though.
WE 5b – Meta Plans Twitter Competitor to Integrate Tightly With Instagram
Elon is big mad about this. This new competitor will have an SSO with Instagram and be interoperable with mastodon and other ActivityPub decentralized platforms. This development process was commenced in January, and sounds like it will be ready by the end of the summer. This has triggered a public spat between Zuck and Musk which even has resulted in Musk suggesting that they should have a physical “cage match” in Las Vegas. That is hilarious. Two nerds trying to fight in some sort of MMA style. Probably even more awkward than the time when Linus Sebastian from LTT had a fight with one of his workers last year. Anyway… Such a stupid stunt, if it happens. At any rate, that is more or less the end of that story for now. We’ll see if anything more develops, here. Lol.
WE 5c – Twitter to Start Paying Google Again…
Well, well, well… Until Yaccarino came on board, there was probably going to be an even bigger mess internally at the dirty, blue bird. Most of their in0house tools were and have been hosted on the Google cloud infrastructure since 2018. This arrangement costs Twitter $200-300 million per year. Musk had been trying to cut costs, saw that, and said, we can do it ourselves, or something like that, and had refused to pay the bill since he bought the company last November. Yaccarino came in and is reworking the deal in a much broader partnership… Hmm, including Google ads on Twitter, among other things, including Google having the right to use the paid Twitter API. Google claims that it “struggled to get ahold of” Musk to talk about the back bills, etc, but now it would seem that all is hunky dory in big tech land again. Not much to say here, other than that Yaccarino does seem to be very good for Twitter in a business sense.
WE 5d – Will Elon Continue to Blow Up the Dirty Blue Bird?
Was this a Glass Cliff Hire with Yaccarino? Only time will tell. Elon will be Elon. He seems a bigger troll than Obi Wan and Dooku put together… Almost as big of a troll as DJT. Will this become another situation like Carly Fiorina at HP 10 years ago? Will Elon actually let her make his toy make business sense again, or will this Australian threat about hate speech on the platform become indicative of the death of the dirty blue bird? Only time will tell. What is a glass cliff hire? It is a situation when a company is in a bad place, then hires a female/+ minority to right the ship, so to speak, to take pressure off of the rest of the C-suite executives and board members who were actually the problem. As I said a few times already, the truth will take time to be shown, here. I don’t trust Elon, and certainly don’t trust this new WEF lackey CEO. Then again, it doesn’t matter much, as I never used the platform. I see that it has been a haven for the worst kinds of corruption, from pedophilia and other forms of exploitation to more general human trafficking and other dark things which were only exacerbated by the ways in which censorship has been wielded on the platform. I’d almost rather see it burn to the ground to be replaced by something more free and open. The problem with that is that that is probably too idealistic of me to expect or hope for, particularly without a massive change within humanity and the user base of social media in general, first.
What can we say? This last few weeks have been eventful, haven’t they? You understand what cloud computing is, right? Cloud computing = keeping and manipulating your data on someone else’s hardware. That is inherently lacking privacy, and can keep you in a bad deal if you sign up with one of the big guys (GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, or ORCL) to host and manage something like the backend for an app you are developing. They all do it. Google has caught more flack than the rest lately, though Amazon has gotten some regulatory tough love for it over in the UK as well, as has Azure. These giants see your data as a commodity, guys. I’ve said it many times, but it has come out again recently that MS snoops on your files in OneDrive and SharePoint by scraping your passwords from your MS account. Why are you still in that abusive relationship? Why allow yourself to continue being gas lit by these monsters? Learn to take control and regain your privacy piece by piece with Tech Freedom.
Back to the space-based cell phone service thing, though, I have to wonder what the amplitude of the waves has to be in order for the signal to travel over 300 miles. Those have to be some very powerful transmitters, since a typical cell tower can only reach a MAXIMUM of 75 miles, but most of the time can only reach UP TO 25 miles. Most are far closer together than that, though: 1-3 miles apart, and if you’re somewhere like downtown LA or NYC, that is more like .25- 1 mile effective range before it hands off the signal to a new tower. I also wonder about the latency of the data, or how much extra lag that would necessarily introduce to the equation. Cool, but too many unanswered questions in my mind.
I have to laugh at the comments made about there being “too much” free speech on Facebook/Meta in that piece on Engadget. It was well-written, but a junk premise. Will Elon and Mark duke it out in the octagon over Project 92? I doubt it, but all of this nonsense got us talking about the new product, didn’t it?
Does Yaccarino make business sense for Twitter? She seems to be making some good commonsense moves right now, but I trust her less than I trust Elon, so take that for what it is worth. Was she hired to actually right the ship, so to speak, or just to deflect from the owner’s antics and stunts? Only time will tell.