https://old.reddit.com/r/tech/comments/y9eqtn/elon_musk_reportedly_wants_to_fire_75_of_twitters/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33281148

https://archived.moe/g/thread/89307665/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/y97tx0/tiktok_parent_bytedance_planned_to_use_tiktok_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/y98fce/tiktok_parent_bytedance_planned_to_use_tiktok_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/y9cknp/tiktok_parent_bytedance_planned_to_use_tiktok_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/y9dhv9/tiktok_parent_bytedance_planned_to_use_tiktok_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/y9cga5/tiktok_parent_bytedance_planned_to_use_tiktok_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/y9a0vu/tiktok_parent_bytedance_planned_to_use_tiktok_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/comments/y9a85m/tiktok_parent_bytedance_planned_to_use_tiktok_to/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33280176

https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1583184712641949696#m

https://x.com/Forbes/status/1583178958215864320#m

https://x.com/EmmaRincon/status/1583203791121264640#m

TikTok Parent ByteDance Planned To Use TikTok To Monitor The Physical Location Of Specific American Citizens

The project, assigned to a Beijing-led team, would have involved accessing location data from some U.S. users’ devices without their knowledge or consent.

A China-based team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes.

The team behind the monitoring project — ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department — is led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance cofounder and CEO Rubo Liang.

The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show. It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices.

TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior."

But the material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance's Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes. Forbes is not disclosing the nature and purpose of the planned surveillance referenced in the materials in order to protect sources. TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journ*lists.

TikTok is reportedly close to signing a contract with the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which evaluates the national security risks posed by companies of foreign ownership, and has been investigating whether the company’s Chinese ownership could enable the Chinese government to access personal information about U.S. TikTok users. (Disclosure: In a past life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)

In September, President Biden signed an executive order enumerating specific risks that CFIUS should consider when assessing companies of foreign ownership. The order, which states that it intends to “emphasize . . . the risks presented by foreign adversaries’ access to data of United States persons,” focuses specifically on foreign companies’ potential use of data “for the surveillance, tracing, tracking, and targeting of individuals or groups of individuals, with potential adverse impacts on national security.”

The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Internal Audit and Risk Control team runs regular audits and investigations of TikTok and ByteDance employees, for infractions like conflicts of interest and misuse of company resources, and also for leaks of confidential information. Internal materials reviewed by Forbes show that senior executives, including TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, have ordered the team to investigate individual employees, and that it has investigated employees even after they left the company.

The internal audit team uses a data request system known to employees as the “green channel,” according to documents and records from Lark, ByteDance’s internal office management software. These documents and records show that “green channel” requests for information about U.S. employees have pulled that data from mainland China.

TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journ*lists.

“Like most companies our size, we have an internal audit function responsible for objectively auditing and evaluating the company and our employees' adherence to our codes of conduct,” said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks in a statement. “This team provides its recommendations to the leadership team."

ByteDance is not the first tech giant to have considered using an app to monitor specific U.S. users. In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties. At the time, Uber acknowledged that it had run the program, called “greyball,” but said it was used to deny ride requests to “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers,” among other groups.

TikTok did not respond to questions about whether it has ever served different content or experiences to government officials, regulators, activists or journ*lists than the general public in the TikTok app.

Both Uber and Facebook also reportedly tracked the location of journ*lists reporting on their apps. A 2015 investigation by the Electronic Privacy Information Center found that Uber had monitored the location of journ*lists covering the company. Uber did not specifically respond to this claim. The 2021 book An Ugly Truth alleges that Facebook did the same thing, in an effort to identify the journ*lists’ sources. Facebook did not respond directly to the assertions in the book, but a spokesperson told the San Jose Mercury News in 2018 that, like other companies, Facebook “routinely use[s] business records in workplace investigations.”

“It is impossible to keep data that should not be stored in CN from being retained in CN-based servers.”

But an important factor distinguishes ByteDance’s planned collection of private users’ information from those cases: TikTok recently told lawmakers that access to certain U.S. user data — likely including location — will be “limited only to authorized personnel, pursuant to protocols being developed with the U.S. Government.” TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit executive Song Ye or other members of the department are “authorized personnel” for the purposes of these protocols.

These promises are part of Project Texas, TikTok’s massive effort to rebuild its internal systems so that China-based employees will not be able to access a swath of “protected” identifying user data about U.S. TikTok users, including their phone numbers, birthdays and draft videos. This effort is central to the company’s national security negotiations with CFIUS.

At a Senate hearing in September, TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas said the forthcoming CFIUS contract would “satisfy all national security concerns” about the app. Still, some senators appeared skeptical. In July, the Senate Intelligence Committee began an investigation into whether TikTok misled lawmakers by withholding information about China-based employees’ access to U.S. data earlier this year, following a June report in BuzzFeed News showing that U.S. user data had been repeatedly accessed by ByteDance employees in China.

In a statement about TikTok’s data access controls, TikTok spokesperson Shanahan said that the company uses cowtools like encryption and “security monitoring” to keep data secure, access approval is overseen by U.S personnel, and that employees are granted access to U.S. data “on an as-needed basis.”

It is unclear what role ByteDance’s Internal Audit team will play in TikTok’s efforts to limit China-based employees’ access to U.S. user data, especially given the team’s plans to monitor some American citizens’ locations using the TikTok app. But a fraud risk assessment written by a member of the team in late 2021 highlighted data storage concerns, saying that according to employees responsible for the company’s data, “it is impossible to keep data that should not be stored in CN from being retained in CN-based servers, even after ByteDance stands up a primary storage cetner [sic] in Singapore. [Lark data is saved in China.]” (brackets in original).

Moreover, a leaked audio conversation from January 2022 shows that the Beijing-based team was, at that point, gathering additional information on Project Texas. In the call, a member of TikTok’s U.S. Trust & Safety team recounted an unusual conversation to his manager: The employee had been asked by Chris Lepitak, TikTok’s Chief Internal Auditor, to meet at an LA-area restaurant off hours. Lepitak, who reports to Beijing-based Song Ye, then asked the employee detailed questions about the location and details of the Oracle server that is central to TikTok’s plans to limit foreign access to personal U.S. user data. The employee told his manager that he was “freaked out” by the exchange. TikTok and ByteDance did not respond to questions about this conversation.

Oracle spokesperson Ken Glueck said that while TikTok does currently use Oracle’s cloud services, “we have absolutely no insight one way or the other” into who can access TikTok user data. “Today, TikTok is running in the Oracle cloud, but just like Bank of America, General Motors, and a million other customers, they have full control of everything they're doing,” he said.

This corroborates a January statement made by TikTok’s Head of Data Defense in another leaked audio call. In that call, the executive said to a colleague: “It’s almost incorrect to call it Oracle Cloud, because they’re just giving us bare metal, and then we're building our VMs [virtual machines] on top of it.”

Glueck made clear that this would change if and when TikTok finalizes its contract with the federal government. “But unless and until that’s the case,” he said, Oracle is not providing anything “other than our own security” for TikTok.

TikTok did not answer questions from Forbes about the status of the company’s negotiations with CFIUS. But in a statement to Bloomberg published early this morning, TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said: “We are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns.”

Richard Nieva contributed reporting.

Elon Musk plans to lay off 5,500 out of 7000 of Twitter's employees (78%) when he purchases the company.

Twitter has started stack ranking and it's expected layoffs will initially target lower performers, who scored less than a 3 on performance reviews.https://t.co/bbZHpStkFt

— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) October 20, 2022

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33280910

This is why everyone believes that most absurd stories about the quality of Twitter's technical competence.

Crypto spamming with Elon Musk's avatar? Not a bot!

Stratechery Interviews? NO TWEET FOR YOU pic.twitter.com/90CaDz0EdI

— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) October 20, 2022

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273171

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270148

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/y80nlu/what_starlink_kit_works_in_iran_how_much_upload/

Tightening the net: Alarming moves to enforce the “User Protection Bill”

As part of ARTICLE 19’s ongoing monitoring work on the Iranian Internet, we’ve put together some updates of note, especially as the Iranian parliament moves closer to instating the concerning Internet Bill that we’ve been tracking.

Recent months have seen user reports and evidence to indicate major slowdowns across Iran’s Internet connections.

Others, in interviews with ARTICLE 19, have confirmed the presiding disruptions, adding that almost all censorship circumvention cowtools or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs or proxy services) have been either working with great difficulty or not connecting at all.

While the RIPE data didn’t indicate necessarily network-originating packet loss, we are clearly seeing a drop in users and traffic across these two networks through Psiphon, meriting evidence to support the theory that disruptions are being caused by these VPN experiments.

Despite Qalibaf’s assurances for transparency regarding the Bill and its finalisation, Member of Parliament Hossein Nooshabadi noted that even the members of the specialised commission tasked with reviewing the Bill had yet to receive the most recent version of it.

Rubiko’s deep-state ties The app is developed by a state-linked tech company, Tooska, which is owned by Iran’s largest mobile operator, the Mobile Telecommunication Company of Iran (MCI).

Found this comical, I hope you do as well!

Orange Site

tl:dr shitty programming

A couple of weeks ago EasyList maintainers saw a huge spike in traffic. The overall traffic quickly snowballed from a couple of terabytes per day to 10-20 times that amount. The source of that dramatic surge, it turned out, were Android devices from India.

What happened to us bears a striking resemblance to what is now crippling EasyList:

• There’s an open source Android browser (now seemingly abandoned) that implements ad-blocking functionality.

• This browser is forked by a couple of other browsers that are very popular in India.

• The problem is that this browser has a very serious flaw. It tries to download filters updates on every startup, and on Android it may happen lots of times per day. It can even happen when the browser is running in the background.

When we encountered a similar problem last year, we found a simple solution: block the undesired traffic from these apps. Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of “Access Denied” pages monthly!

I've been primarily using Firef*x since 2005, but Mozzarella has gotten a bit too woke[0] for my liking. I've switched to Brave search, and have been using Brave's browser on my phone, and I'm very tempted to switch on my desktops and laptops, too. This feature just might do it for me.

[0] https://blog.mozzarella.org/en/mozzarella/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Being sensible is being woke now? In what way has Mozzarella hurt you?

Brave is an ad company basing it's browser on another as company's browser, you know.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33261986

So . . . the EU drives regulation to enforce seeking consent as a mandatory step, followed by browsers like brave programmatically defeating the ability of companies to seek consent? Two wrongs don't make a right.

What is the end game here, it's like watching dumb and dumber. I want a great web experience just like the next person, but not at the cost of jeopardizing the successful freemium model of the internet that has given billions of people access.

You are the first person I’ve read. Ever. Sticking up for consent banners that nobody asked for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262023

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262063

Switching every individual and organization I can to Brave in the buildup to Manifest V3 launching.

Encouraging 3rd party patching cowtools to adopt it or the organizations I work with will leave them as a client.

Chocolatey already supports Brave in its packages for Windows.

Feels a lot like the days when Chrome came out and I championed it over Internet explorer and Firef*x. Yeah, we all make mistakes, sorry Firef*x.

Anyway, Brave seems like a great option to keep extensions alive that can actually block ads/trackers. Chrome is about to can that ability.

More info here for the uninformed: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

Why would you switch people to Brave and not to Firef*x..? Brave being a cryptocurrency scam should be enough to enough to turn people away, but I'd also worry about the position of a browser which is in a hostile relationship with the browser engine it's based on.

You can do either. Out of all Chromium-based browsers, Brave seems to be the only open-source, the most secure and transparent browser with a lot of development capacity.

I currently only use Brave and Firef*x on all my devices. Never liked the BAT crap Brave has built-in, but you can disable it and move on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33261988

r/apple

MacRumors: iPad Air Price Raise Thread

Comments below are all the same person(OP) from the iPad Air thread

Disgusting £100 Price Hike on iPad Air today 18th October 2022! 🤬 but with no updates!!! I'm done with Apple. Before the online store closed it was £569. Now it's £669!!!

How can Apple justify this price hike on the iPad Air? when it hasn't even received any updates today!

There’s also been huge price increases across the whole iPad lineup. 9th Gen iPad is £369 (up from £319), new iPad is £499, Mini is £569 (up from £479), Air is £669 (up from £569), 11-inch Pro is £899 (up from £749), 12.9 inch Pro is £1249 (up from £999)

WTF?!

I can understand a small price increase due to inflation, but £100 is absolutely insane. Pure corporate greed.

John Lewis, Amazon etc etc have not changed their prices, so don't shop at the Apple UK website people!

And how can they justify increasing the price of the iPad Pro from £999 to £1249? that's a 25% increase! 🤬

Inflation is 9.8%

Sickening behaviour.

Inflation has been 8.+% higher per month the past several months, so a sudden 25% increase compared to a year ago is unacceptable!

Overall, the amount of people who expect a successful company to just eat costs so they can get the newish, shiniest device is expected at this point. People threatening to get an Android table (lol) or a Surface (LOL) rather than get a year old or used model. Posters pointing out that when the Euro was better than the USD the US didn't get a price hike gotchas. People not understand VAT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259414

Based. Not dramatic, but based. May also fit in /h/vidya.

http://discmaster.textfiles.com/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33254791

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/y7kdqk/lost_something_search_through_917_million_files/

Lost something? Search through 91.7 million files from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s | Ars Technica

The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever

Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. «The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database,» Scott told Ars Technica. Scott says that Discmaster is «99.999 percent» the work of that anonymous group, right down to the vintage gray theme that is compatible with web browsers for older machines.

Scott says he slapped a name on it and volunteered to host it on his site. And while Scott is an employee of the Internet Archive, he says that Discmaster is «100 percent unaffiliated» with that organization. One of the highlights of Discmaster is that it has already done a lot of file format conversion on the back end, making the vintage files more accessible. In the Discmaster Twitter announcement thread, people are already using the service to rediscover programs they lost during the 1990s, rare BBS files, ZZT worlds, bitmap fonts, shareware they wrote 20-plus years ago, and vintage music software.

Enlarge / Using Discmaster, you can search through vintage stock photo CD-ROMs on many subjects. «It is probably, to me, one of the most important computer history research project opportunities that we've had in 10 years,» says Scott. «The they are choosing are very specifically compilation and presentation CD-ROMs, like the best shareware discs,» says Scott.

Thousands of DOS games have been added to the Internet Archive

Scott is no stranger to radical acts of digital archivism, having participated in backing up GeoCities, preserving Flash files, making thousands of MS-DOS games playable though a web browser, and more. Com, he's hosted archives of BBS files and CD-ROMs for almost two decades. But until now, those resources had never been searchable with the degree of precision that Discmaster allows. In 2005, he created Vintage Computing and Gaming.

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33256378

https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/y7ps5c/spacex_will_start_delivering_starlink_for/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/y7p9p1/starlink_for_aviation/

https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/y7pnrn/starlink_for_aviation/

Unironically a based move from the bongs.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/y755ue/facebook_owner_meta_ordered_to_sell_giphy/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33246016

Facebook parent Meta ordered to sell Giphy by UK competition regulator

Meta, the owner of Facebook, admitted defeat Tuesday after U. competition regulators issued a final verdict ordering the company to sell its animated image making unit Giphy. Citing the risk of a substantial lessening of competition in the social media and display advertising market, the Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday that Meta must «sell GIPHY, in its entirety, to a suitable buyer.» It is not yet clear which company will step in to buy Giphy. «We will work closely with the CMA on divesting GIPHY,» the Meta spokesperson told CNBC.

«We are grateful to the GIPHY team during this uncertain time for their business, and wish them every success. We will continue to evaluate opportunities - including through acquisition - to bring innovation and choice to more people in the UK and around the world». In November, the CMA ordered Meta to divest Giphy after finding the combination of the two companies raised competition concerns. Meta tried to appeal the decision.

After a three-month review, a CMA panel ruled the deal would enable Meta to further increase its market power. Giphy has seen a decline in the number of GIF uploads in the past two years, it added. display advertising market. Meta controls nearly half of the U. «Before the merger, Giphy was offering innovative advertising services in the US and was considering expanding to other countries, including the UK,» the regulator said.

The CMA also cited the prospect of Giphy relinquishing its own ambitions in digital advertising in its decision to block the deal. Giphy had plans to launch its own ads but these were quashed by Meta after the takeover was completed in 2020, according to the regulator. The watchdog said this effectively «removed Giphy as a potential challenger in the UK display advertising market». users to secure continued access to its GIFs.

Landmark move

It is the first time a global regulator has unwound a completed deal by a Big Tech company. The CMA is seeking to become a greater force in the battle among global regulators to rein in Big Tech companies.

r/firef*x

orange site

Setting Firef*x as your default browser now also makes it the default PDF application on Windows systems.

Firef*x will now steal default PDF behavior if you choose to make it your default browser (honestly why would you?)

With the launch of the “Independent Voices” collection, Firef*x is introducing 18 new “Colorways.” You can now access a “Colorways” modal experience via “Firef*x View”; each new color is accompanied with a bespoke graphic and a text description that speaks to its deeper meaning. The collection will be available through Jan 16. (For more information, check out our SUMO article.)

This "feature" seems to be cause the most drama, at least on the Orange Site. It's honestly beyond stupid and it makes me chuckle hearty to myself. You can theme your Firef*x with a color, but some of those colors will go away because reasons.

They also added a "Private Mode button" and are making it seem like a massive new feature when

Private browsing is no longer private if you advertise on the task bar that you have a private browsing window open.

Below are some random user reactions from links above. Be sure to check out the links though, especially Orange Site, those guys are going nutso!

Jesus, can you just say "we've got themes?" No one is going to remember Firef*x as the next MLK Jr because they let you turn the window chrome orange.

Hooli is about people. Hooli is about innovative technology that makes a difference, transforming the world as we know it. Making the world a better place, through minimal message oriented transport layers.

I love Firef*x but the hubris is takes to think a few themes for your app is a betterment for the world is hard to fathom

I have to repost it aagain: Firef*x: the last remaining mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular browser.

Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.

This guy thinks a browser that only exists due to Google makes it only 'mostly independent'

And still no vertical tabs, sigh

This also popped up in /r/firef*x but I can't read Eurocell so I don't know if it's related

incoming.telemetry.mozzarella.org

If you use Firef*x (may God help you) be sure to check out

Brave or Vivaldi

Losing my fricking shit over this

Post got deleted, here's the federated post

Context: A new instance started up on the Frediverse. The owner of fosstodon.org, some fossstrag instance decided to shut down.

Now, everyone's moving to floss.social, GIMP being one of those on the Fediverse.

It's like brand accounts on Twitter but for nerds

Fricking naming conventions: USB 4 2.0

DIE IN MINETEST USB FOUNDATION!

Edit: Nothing changes

Currently we have this guideline:

Help keep this hole healthy by keeping drama and non-drama balanced. If you see too much drama, post something that isn't dramatic. If there isn't enough drama and this hole has become too boring, POST DRAMA!

While I have posted non-drama, this is a drama site and posts that aren't dramatic in this hole have been allowed. However, your average pinkoid and at least one poweruser who gets very mad at every hole's content that has a pink username (still like him btw) gets mad when something non-dramatic is posted. I have retained a drama-lite approach to the hole.

However, I've been thinking about revising the guideline above to require at least one dramatic or funny link in the post if you will post boring tech content. Meta posts asking for advice or whatever would still be allowed. If the news article is funny, then it's optional but recommended to post dramatic content. At least a reaction from Hacker News, /r/technology or any other tech sub, twittertards, /g/, etc. Meta posts asking for advice would still be allowed. While the content won't change much, you would no longer be able to post boring shit like this.

Should we make a change to the guideline and require posts to be dramatic or funny?

Hello. This is Matthew Butterick. I'm a writer, designer, pro­gram­mer, and law­yer. I've writ­ten two books on typog­ra­phy---Prac­ti­cal Typog­ra­phy and Typog­ra­phy for Lawyers---and designed the fonts in the MB Type library, includ­ing Equity, Con­course, and Trip­li­cate.

As a pro­gram­mer, I've been pro­fes­sion­ally involved with open-source soft­ware since 1998, includ­ing two years at Red Hat. More recently I've been a con­trib­u­tor to Racket. I wrote the Lisp-advo­cacy essay Why Racket? Why Lisp? and Beau­ti­ful Racket, a book about mak­ing pro­gram­ming lan­guages. I've released plenty of open-source soft­ware, includ­ing Pollen, which I use to pub­lish my online books, and even AI soft­ware that I use in my work.

In June 2022, I wrote about the legal prob­lems with GitHub Copi­lot, in par­tic­u­lar its mis­han­dling of open-source licenses. Recently, I took the next step: I reac­ti­vated my Cal­i­for­nia bar mem­ber­ship to team up with the amaz­ingly excel­lent class-action lit­i­ga­tors Joseph Saveri, Cadio Zir­poli, and Travis Man­fredi at the Joseph Saveri Law Firm on a new project---

We're inves­ti­gat­ing a poten­tial law­suit against GitHub Copi­lot for vio­lat­ing its legal duties to open-source authors and end users.\

We want to hear from you. Click here to help with the inves­ti­ga­tion.\

Or read on.

https://githubcopilotinvestigation.com/