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15 votes
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Special Services Group is marketing spying capabilities to local police departments, including cameras that are hidden inside a tombstone, a baby car seat, and a vacuum cleaner
7 votes -
App tracking alert in iOS 13 has dramatically cut location data flow to ad industry
21 votes -
Sinkholed
12 votes -
My prediction about autonomous cars: Answers with Joe
5 votes -
Fifty countries ranked by how they’re collecting biometric data and what they’re doing with it
11 votes -
How to render 3D fractals using ray marching
5 votes -
Hackers are breaking directly into telecom companies to take over customer phone numbers
10 votes -
CES 2020 summary: Pork, driverless cars, new wearable sensors, folding computers, integrated tech
4 votes -
Stable lithium-sulfur battery could see smartphones run for five days
6 votes -
What are you using these days as an alternative to YouTube?
Hi, What platforms are you using in alternative to youtube (kinda like what tildes it to reddit)? Peertube seems amazing and all, but the lack of a centralized index of videos kills it for me
26 votes -
Apparently Samsung just put a removable battery in one of it's new phones
6 votes -
Wearable sleep trackers - recommendations?
Is there a good smartwatch/simile that monitors sleep and has excellent battery life (measured in weeks not hours)? I use the Withings (ex-Nokia) Steel HR, but it … kinda sucks. The bluetooth...
Is there a good smartwatch/simile that monitors sleep and has excellent battery life (measured in weeks not hours)?
I use the Withings (ex-Nokia) Steel HR, but it … kinda sucks. The bluetooth pairings very often lose sleep data, it's very inaccurate, the reporting sucks for non-24s, and the leather bracelet is of very poor quality, keeps breaking.
I really don't care for the fitness/step tracking which, as someone else here put it, thinks typing on a keyboard or eating is a step.
I also briefly tried an Oura (https://ouraring.com/), but I never got it to work and had to send it back.
I also don't care much for any of those "sleep quality" trackers that try to detect if I snore and what not. I can do sleep studies in my own time, I just want to have accurate stats on whether and when I am asleep.
6 votes -
Farmers are buying forty-year-old tractors because they're actually repairable
21 votes -
The AnitaB.org Pass It On Awards Program - Applications are open
6 votes -
"The Ego of Metrics" - Ben Grosser - Podcast - Twitter Demetricator
3 votes -
Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it
15 votes -
Information, photos, and demo of Intel's first discrete graphics card: the DG1, based on Xe graphics architecture
9 votes -
Style your Google Docs to look like WordStar
2 votes -
CES2020: Cyrcle Phone is round and has two headphone jacks
8 votes -
Tricky phish angles for persistence, not passwords
3 votes -
Twitter will put options to limit replies directly on the compose screen
5 votes -
Australia's bushfire emergency is being exploited on social media, as misinformation is spread through cyberspace via hundreds of thousands of posts.
News article: Fires misinformation being spread through social media This includes a prominent local billionaire, Andrew Forrest, who has pledged $70 million for bushfire relief: "I think there's...
News article: Fires misinformation being spread through social media
This includes a prominent local billionaire, Andrew Forrest, who has pledged $70 million for bushfire relief: "I think there's a multitude of reasons why the fire extent has bene so devastating. I think a warming planet would be part of that — [but] the biggest part of that is arsonists," he said.
13 votes -
The bot scare
5 votes -
Looking for drive backup/image program recommendations
Just want to back up my Win 10 drive to another local drive. Free options preferred. Thanks in advance.
5 votes -
UrbanFootprint: A SimCity-like tool that lets urban planners see the potential impact of their ideas
6 votes -
OldTimeyComputerShow: 24/7 of retro computer and gaming tv programs
14 votes -
Sonos, squeezed by the tech giants, sues Google
10 votes -
Are there any personalized recommendation engines/sites that you trust?
In the 2000s I used to use a service called last.fm (originally called Audioscrobbler) that would track the music I listened to and give me recommendations based on that. It was able to give me...
In the 2000s I used to use a service called last.fm (originally called Audioscrobbler) that would track the music I listened to and give me recommendations based on that. It was able to give me some really great personalized suggestions, but that came at the expense of me handing over significant amounts of personal data.
In prioritizing privacy, I feel like I've stepped away from a lot of the big recommendation engines because they're tied to data-hungry companies I am in the process of disengaging with (e.g. Goodreads is owned by Amazon). I can still find stuff I like, but it's often the result of manual searching that turns up popular recommendations that work for me, rather than less well-known or acutely relevant things. last.fm was good at giving me less "obvious" recommendations and would find music I was unlikely to find on my own. I want that, but for all of my media: books, movies, etc.
There's a second concern in that I also feel like I can't trust platforms like Netflix, who seem to prioritize their content over that of other studios. Their recommendations feel weighted in their favor, not mine.
What I want is an impartial recommendation engine that gives me high quality personalized suggestions without a huge privacy cost.1 Is this a pipe dream, or are there examples of this kind of thing out there?
1. I don't mind handing over some of my specific interest data in order to get good recommendations for myself and help a site's algorithms cater to others, as I get that's how these things work. I just don't like the idea of my interests being even more data for a company that already has thousands of intimate data points on me.
18 votes -
Firefox 72.0 release notes
13 votes -
Suspension of Cogent access to ARIN Whois
5 votes -
Unexplained drones are swarming by night over Colorado
9 votes -
Release of over 100,000 leaked documents from Cambridge Analytica has started, showing the company's work in sixty-eight countries
14 votes -
The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com
16 votes -
Tough, waterproof 3.5 mm cables
I'm looking for some very tough, ideally waterproof 3.5mm male to male cables. Does anyone out there have a recommendation?
4 votes -
reCAPTCHA: Is there method in monotony?
What started out as a little facetious in my own head leads me now to a serious question. Is there some meaningful reason why Google has to use a subsection of images for reCAPTCHA? I really...
What started out as a little facetious in my own head leads me now to a serious question. Is there some meaningful reason why Google has to use a subsection of images for reCAPTCHA? I really dislike having to do this and at the very least would appreciate some variation.
- Traffic Lights
- Buses
- Bicycles
- Cars
- Crosswalks
Is there something special about these things in this context? Is the visual noise they're usually associated with what makes them good candidates? Are Google just really into urban planning? Who knows...I'm hoping some Tilder smarter than I can help me out.
10 votes -
Inside a (3rd party) iPhone battery factory in China
3 votes -
1996 talk by Cliff Stoll about the future of computers and the internet
9 votes -
Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest 2020 looking for exhibitors, speakers, and volunteers
7 votes -
Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license: 'We've gone the wrong way with licensing'
9 votes -
Promiscuous cookies and their impending death via the SameSite policy
10 votes -
Anyone have any experience with eSIMs?
I have ordered a phone with an eSim this week and I have been reading a bit into it. As far as I know so far, you just have to download an app and you can just book some extra data as needed - it...
I have ordered a phone with an eSim this week and I have been reading a bit into it.
As far as I know so far, you just have to download an app and you can just book some extra data as needed - it seems especially cool because you can just book a local plan when you're abroad instead of getting a local sim card. Which can be more or less a hassle - 2019 I went to South Africa where it was pretty easy to get a sim card at the airport, 2018 I went to India, where it was a hassle.
I guess for people in the US this is not a problem? Some of my friends have global contracts, and I had that too when I was there via googles project fi. We don't really have an equivalent in GermanyI found the following pages in case anyone also wants to look into it
https://esimdb.com/ - this is an overview page about different esims
https://www.airalo.com/ - this is one specific offer that seems to be the cheapest for Germany, which is where I would try it, since I live here haha6 votes -
Our neophobic, conservative AI overlords want everything to stay the same
11 votes -
The Light Phone
20 votes -
On privacy versus freedom
9 votes -
How do you explain tech topics when your audience doesn't understand the details?
Hive mind: What advice would you give to someone who has to give a presentation to a non-technical person, and it's important that the listener actually understand the details? How do you go about...
Hive mind: What advice would you give to someone who has to give a presentation to a non-technical person, and it's important that the listener actually understand the details?
How do you go about it? Specific tips appreciated. Pretend it's for a friend you care about.
(This is for an article. Ideally we could refer to you by reference for context and credibility, eg "an IT security pro at a midwest insurance company" or "aerospace engineer" so please give some kind of identification to use).
12 votes -
How much better can smartphones really get?
13 votes -
Why it's already 2020
19 votes -
The battle to save America's undercover spies in the digital age
5 votes -
The lesson that market leaders are failing to learn form Xerox PARC
7 votes