Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181339

Not much drama here. Someone wrote a service that lets you follow a fediverse feed anonymously. Mastodon't, being a system designed by eternally online people, sports few different types of statuses. Public (followers see it, people on you instance see it, it gets fanned out to other instances), unlisted (it won't get fanned out) and followers, it only lands in timelines of people that follow you.

Said service "hijacks" the last category because the bot follows you, thus having access to it.

Seems like a non-problem? Because it is. But it won't stop people from malding and seething.

After checking Fediverse for some time, I might say with full authority of dramaposter: what an absolute human train wreck it is. It's not even funny for the drama, just shitlibs with 24/7 diarrhea about TERFs, Musk, Muskterfs and warring over "who makes the rules". What a terrible place.

People trying explain themselves: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/109585159213960986

Most goodlooking winbloats advocate

OP's reddit: /u/MoeDantes

The previous way to do this was to jailbreak your phone

Zhuowei Zhang shared his project on Twitter, which he calls a “proof-of-concept app.” According to Zhang, the app he developed uses the CVE-2022-46689 exploit to overwrite the default iOS font, so that users can customize the system’s appearance with a different font other than the default (which is San Francisco).

The CVE-2022-46689 exploit affects devices running iOS 16.1.2 or earlier versions of the operating system, and it basically lets apps execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The exploit was fixed with iOS 16.2, which also fixed a bunch of other security breaches found in the previous version of iOS.

Can't wait for Tim Apple to patch this. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, you'll be able to buy rent a new font from the store for your phone

Professor catches student cheating with ChatGPT: ‘I feel abject terror’

Welcome to the new age of academic dishonesty.

A college professor in South Carolina is sounding the alarm after catching a student using ChatGPT — a new artificial intelligence chat bot that can quickly digest and spit out written information about a vast array of subjects — to write an essay for his philosophy class.

The weeks-old technology, released by OpenAI and readily available to the public, comes as yet another blow to higher learning, already plagued by rampant cheating.

“Academia did not see this coming. So we’re sort of blindsided by it,” Furman University assistant philosophy professor Darren Hick told The Post. “As soon as I reported this on Facebook, my [academic] friends said, ‘Yeah, I caught one too.'”

Earlier this month, Hick had instructed his class to write a 500-word essay on the 18th-century philosopher David Hume and the paradox of horror, which examines how people can get enjoyment from something they fear, for a take-home test.

But one submission, he said, featured a few hallmarks that “flagged” AI usage in the student’s “rudimentary” answer.

“It’s a clean style. But it’s recognizable. I would say it writes like a very smart 12th grader,” Hick said of ChatGPT’s written responses to questions.

“There’s particular odd wording used that was not wrong, just peculiar … if you were teaching somebody how to write an essay, this is how you tell them to write it before they figure out their own style.”

Despite having a background in the ethics of copyright law, Hick said that proving the paper was concocted by ChatGPT was nearly impossible.

First, the professor plugged the suspect text into software made by the producers of ChatGPT to determine if the written response was formulated by AI.

He was given a 99.9% likely match. But unlike in standard plagiarism detection software — or a well-crafted college paper — the software offered no citations.

Hick then tried producing the same essay by asking ChatGPT a series of questions he imagined his student had asked. The move yielded similar answers, but no direct matches, since the tool formulates unique responses.

Ultimately, he confronted the student, who copped to using ChatGPT and failed the class as a result. The undergrad was also turned over to the school’s academic dean.

But Hick fears that other cases will be almost impossible to prove, and that he and his colleagues will soon be inundated with fraudulent work, as universities like Furman struggle to establish formal academic protocols for the developing technology.

For now, Hick says that the best he can do is surprise suspected students with impromptu oral exams, hoping to catch them off-guard without their tech armor.

“What’s going to be the difficulty is that, unlike convincing a friend to write your essay because they took the class before or paying somebody online to write the essay for you, this is free and instantaneous,” he said.

Even more frightening, Hick fears that as ChatGPT keeps learning, irregularities in its work will become less and less obvious on a student’s paper.

“This is learning software — in a month, it’ll be smarter. In a year, it’ll be smarter,” he said. “I feel the mix myself between abject terror and what this is going to mean for my day-to-day job — but it’s also fascinating, it’s endlessly fascinating.”

Oi, have your password sharing loicense? Didn't think so

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34137990

It's a shame, isn't it? That our language won't let the computer read our indentation (15:35)

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125843

https://stupidpol.site/h/slackernews/post/134262/twitter-api-hacked-user-database-being

https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/zuz2q1/here_we_go_twitter_api_hacked_celebrity_contact/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/hungary/comments/zuzi34/twitter_api_hacked_over_400_million_users/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/zuwu5l/twitter_api_hacked_user_database_being_sold_online/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/zuxryi/twitter_api_hacked_over_400_million_users/?sort=controversial

Translated drama

Today, he's the CEO of a $1.8 trillion company.

In 1993, he was just another middle manager doing Excel demos.

Satya Nadella worked at Microsoft for 22 years.

He climbed the ladder.

And is worth ~$700 million today.

There are many ways to win. pic.twitter.com/SBMhuT0Awz

— Brandon Arvanaghi 🐱 (@arvanaghi) December 22, 2022

True rags-to-riches and climbing up the corporate ladder story. But muh only rich people can become multimillionaires and billionaires.

How well have you all been keeping up this year?

postmaxx your solutions in here. @Platybells

Orange site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104400

Reddit

https://old.reddit.com/r/tech/comments/zt6xor/madison_square_garden_uses_facial_recognition_to/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/zt2pmh/madison_square_garden_uses_facial_recognition_to/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/newyorkcity/comments/zt1760/madison_square_garden_uses_facial_recognition_to/?sort=controversial

MSG Entertainment, the owner of the arena and Radio City Music Hall, has put lawyers who represent people suing it on an “exclusion list” to keep them out of concerts and sporting events.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Kelly Conlon, 44, a personal injury lawyer from Bergen County, N.J., was chaperoning her 9-year-old daughter’s Girl Scout troop on a trip into Manhattan to see the “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City Music Hall.

Before she could even glimpse the Rockettes, however, security guards pulled Ms. Conlon aside and her New York jaunt took an Orwellian turn.

“They told me that they knew I was Kelly Conlon and that I was an attorney,” she said this week. “They knew the name of my law firm.”

The guards had identified her using a facial recognition system. They showed her a sheet saying she was on an “attorney exclusion list” created this year by MSG Entertainment, which is controlled by the Dolan family. The company owns Radio City and some of New York’s other famous performance spaces, including the Beacon Theater and Madison Square Garden, where basketball’s Knicks and hockey’s Rangers play.

Its chief executive, James L. Dolan, is a billionaire who has run his empire with an autocratic flair, and his company instituted the ban this summer not only on lawyers representing people suing it, but on all attorneys at their firms. The company says “litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment” and so it is enforcing the list with the help of computer software that can identify hundreds of lawyers via profile photos on their firms’ own websites, using an algorithm to instantaneously pore over images and suggest matches.

Facial recognition technology is legal in New York, but lawyers have sued MSG Entertainment, saying the exclusion list is forbidden. The use of facial recognition technology to enforce it has raised an outcry not just from people turned away from Knicks games, but from civil liberties watchdogs, who called it a startling new frontier that demonstrated why the federal government should regulate the technology. The local grudge match has become part of a national debate over the specter of a privatized surveillance state.

“It’s a dystopian, shocking act of repression,” said Sam Davis, a partner at Ms. Conlon’s firm who was turned away from a Rangers game this month at the Garden.

The technology, which has grown more powerful and accurate in recent years, has been used sparingly by corporations because of privacy concerns. Retailers have deployed it to identify shoplifters; airports use it to check in travelers and usher them through security; and casinos rely on it to keep out gamblers they think may cheat. But using it to bar a company’s critics is unprecedented, said Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He called it a “major jump forward that needs to be treated as radical.”

“This is punitive as opposed to protective. It sets a precedent for other businesses to identify their critics and punish them,” Mr. Schwartz said. “It raises the question of what’s going to come next. Will companies use facial recognition to keep out all the people who have picketed the business or criticized them online with a negative Yelp review?”

MSG Entertainment officials called the technology a useful and widely used safety tool at many sports and entertainment venues, and noted that their New York City locations are near major transit hubs.

The Garden is already known for its tight security. There is always a heavy police presence in part because the arena is in the heart of Midtown Manhattan and built above Pennsylvania Station, the nation’s busiest rail terminal. The station is patrolled by law enforcement officers and sometimes soldiers on alert for terrorism. Fans attending events at the Garden go through screenings that can include metal detectors, bag searches and explosive-sniffing dogs.

“We have always made it clear to our guests and to the public that we use facial recognition as one of our tools,” the company said in a statement.

High-tech surveillance by government is already common in New York City. The Police Department relies on a toolbox that includes not only facial recognition, but drones and mobile X-ray vans, and this month the department said it would join Neighbors, a public neighborhood-watch platform owned by Amazon. Neighbors allows video doorbell owners to post clips online, and police officers can enlist the help of residents in investigations.

A city law introduced last year requires commercial establishments to notify customers when biometric technologies such as facial recognition are in use. Signs at Radio City Music Hall and other venues inform patrons that the technology is in place “to ensure the safety of everyone.”

While MSG Entertainment officials would not say which facial recognition vendor they use, several companies offer the ability to create a database and generate an alert when a known face is spotted by surveillance cameras.

The company’s use of the technology against Ms. Conlon, first reported by NBC 4, is “terrifying,” said Evan Greer, an activist with the digital rights group Fight for the Future. Ms. Greer has called for a ban on the use of facial recognition in places of public accommodation, such as retail stores, bars and event venues.

“We’re talking about a powerful corporation’s petty grievance,” said Ms. Greer. “But it’s just really scary to think about the ways this technology could enable powerful individuals, companies and institutions to target critics, business rivals, journ*lists, love interests — you name it.”

Madison Square Garden began scanning the faces of customers when it hosted the Grammy Awards in January 2018. MSG Entertainment officials said the surveillance remains in use primarily to identify people who could be security threats and that the watchlist included patrons who had broken rules at the company’s venues, whether by being violent, throwing things or engaging in other misbehavior.

The lawyer ban applies to all of the company’s spaces but it is using facial recognition only in New York, it said. MSG Entertainment also operates an event venue in Chicago, but it would not be able to use the facial recognition system in the same way there because Illinois has a unique state law prohibiting the use of biometric information without people’s consent.

In New York, the Dolan family’s companies have been a frequent target of lawsuits and were sued at least 20 times in State Supreme Court this year alone. Firms on the exclusion list represent people suing for everything from personal injuries to loss of season tickets, to complaints from stockholders over business deals.

The ruined date nights are piling up. In November, Alexis Majano, a lawyer at Sahn Ward Braff Koblenz, was escorted out of a Knicks game. Last week, Nicolette Landi, a personal injury lawyer, was unable to use the $376.83 tickets to a Mariah Carey concert at the Garden that her boyfriend had bought for her birthday.

Her firm, Burns & Harris, last week filed a lawsuit against MSG Entertainment in Manhattan Superior Court, saying the ban violates a state civil rights law that prohibits “wrongful refusal of admission” to an entertainment venue.

“It’s awful what they’re doing,” said Ms. Landi, 29, who added that she did not know about the ban, had no involvement with any case against the company and attended six events at Madison Square Garden in October before her photo was added to her firm’s website. “What if someone quit the firm? How do they prove they don’t work there?”

Officials of MSG Entertainment said the company sent notification letters about the policy to law firms twice in recent months.

“While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment,” the company said in a statement. “Attorneys will be welcomed back to our venues upon resolution of the litigation.”

In November, after a complaint about the ban from a law firm, the New York State Liquor Authority sent the Garden a letter advising it that such a policy could violate liquor laws.

The episode is just the latest controversy for MSG Entertainment’s chief executive, Mr. Dolan, who has publicly feuded with fans and former Knicks players at the Garden, which hosts hundreds of events a year, and is one of the world’s most famous arenas.

Mr. Dolan has threatened lifetime bans from the Garden on multiple occasions. Charles Oakley, a beloved former Knicks star, was handcuffed and ejected in 2017 after an altercation with security guards, and in 2019 Mr. Dolan said he would bar a fan for life after he yelled at Mr. Dolan to sell the Knicks.

As for Ms. Conlon, she missed out on the “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City. She does not practice law in New York and had no clients in cases against MSG Entertainment, but her firm — Davis, Saperstein & Salomon — is suing one of the company’s restaurants in a personal injury case.

She spent two hours walking around. Her daughter and the rest of the Girl Scouts enjoyed the show.

I'm second from left

I'm second from left