Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[wierd]

Without public exhibition of the analytics code, and routine auditing by 3rd parties, this sounds ripe for flagrant abuse.

[Maximum Spin]

Without public exhibition of the analytics code, and routine auditing by 3rd parties, this sounds ripe for flagrant abuse.

You say that like either of those things would help

[wierd]

It's not a magic bullet, no. (I am well aware of heartbleed, and how it was a problem in a FOSS product) It is certainly better than the alternative though, which is zero transparency at all, and zero ability to look into a suspect election result.

I would also like diagnostic data on my fingerprint as a "Show me the details!" button, where it expands the popup with some juicy data about what they collected, and how they interpreted it.

But pleebs dont need that. You should trust big brother citizen. He loves you.

[MorleyDev]

Google let you do that, at least: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

In Europe, GDPR means you legally can request all data about you be deleted, although it's...unclear how they want that to work with physical tape back-ups and the like (it probably means the death for them going forward).

But you're thinking in terms of "data attached to you", not "data gathered that involves activity you did". The kind of analytics being done doesn't need people, just behaviours. Just volumes of traffic and graphs to other traffic by volume and the like.

There isn't always a bit of data that "john johnson views carpentry and child rearing, how do we get him to vote Republican?" set of data, it's "500,000 people visited the news article on child endangerment, originating from the news article on a monkey that escaped from a zoo, and 25% of them came the Democrat website. That's a 250% increase over the visitors from the news article on care homes for the elderly from the Republican Website. What conclusions can we learn from this and how can push news in such a way that we get those Democrat website visits to vote republican?".

Again, lots of this kind of data is already gathered in an anonymised form where it's got no direct connection back to you (though you may be inferrable from the data).

[smjjames]

If their services suck, then I wonder how effective they actually were, given how much it was touted.

[smjjames]

They also just sacked their own CEO over the controversial videos, so, they have their own problems to deal with evidently.

[MorleyDev]

Footage of the Uber accident has been released: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43497364

Honestly, the time from her appearing out of the darkness to impact is so small that I'm doubtful a human could have avoided the accident either.

[Tack]

That’s terrifically murky.
I’m still a huge advocate for self-driving cars- but I wouldn’t be surprised if Uber decided to bump the gamma down before releasing it

[wierd]

Got another one that is hard to decide where it should be posted.

https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Belpoggi-Heart-and-Brain-Tumors-Base-Station-2018.pdf

Nutshell:  Very large animal model lifetime study of environmental level cellphone radiation exposure shows clear indication of increased rates of cancer presentation in rat model.

Several cellular companies are sure to fight this hard.

[smjjames]

Somewhat further detail: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/22/self-driving-car-uber-death-woman-failure-fatal-crash-arizona

Apparently the LIDAR that was supposed to detect an obstacle didn't even work at all and they're also calling it a complete failure of Ubers safety procedures.

It also sounds like the woman paid the price for Arizona promising fewer regulations, as callous as that sounds. The whole thing should be treated the same way as the space industry, if you even start cutting corners for profit over safety, people are liable to get people killed or even have an expensive rocket explode. Theres a reason why NASA developed such a safety conscious culture.

[Trekkin]

Theres a reason why NASA developed such a safety conscious culture.

Yes there is. His name is Gene Kranz.
We tend to forget how NASA changed after Jan.27 1967, or rather what it was like before, but there were a lot of ways they could have responded. Due credit needs to be given to the people who instituted that cultural shift before we act like it was at all inevitable.

[wierd]

It is often overlooked, the impact people who have enough nerve to tell the people with the purse-strings that they are wrong, and need to pay the extra money, in the face of immense financial and political football playing.

This is something sorely lacking today, to be sure.

[wierd]

Not involved with the study, cannot give an answer.

I just wanted to share that it was published.  There are other issues with the study as well, such as reputation of the group who performed it, and it being hawked by one of the "RADIATION BAAAD! IT GIVE ME ALLERGIES! *Slackjaw drooling*" type hyperbole types that rails on and on and on about how even minor exposure to radio waves causes them unbearble suffering and shit.

Still, they bothered, and even if it is pure hooey (which I find likely), it is still going to cause trouble for cellphone operators, as now they have to invest in counter research to refute the study on its findings through replication.

[wierd]

Most of the research and counter-research has focused on high intensity cellphone radiation exposure, rather than environmental levels. (Probably because the people doing the studies know that this radiation does not strongly react with water or tissue cultures [because if it did, it would attenuate quickly, and be useless for long distance communication...], and so need strong doses to get significant signals....)

That means those already invested counter-studies are not good fits to refute, as a small but significant signal for a specific kind of cancer could actually exist that was not found in prior studies, and the lifetime animal model study at lower concentration needs to be replicated to confirm or deny finding.

[McTraveller]

Yeah fun with statistics - for instance, have they actually kept all other factors constant (or equally distributed) between their sample groups?  Here's a fun one - do they routinely move their sample population around the lab so that, on average, each specimen spends the same amount of time in the same physical location?  Have they accounted for possible differences in food, water, etc. being from different batches?  Was the HVAC running the same rate throughout the entire test?  Do they have members of each population living in the same cells (heterogeneous residence) or do they segregate them by cage?

Trying to obtain a valid control is really really difficult when looking at decimal-dust kind of phenomena.  Either that or you have to track way more variables than most people track during such studies.  Basically - it's very difficult to remove bias from studies of this type, because there are almost always unconsidered (or even intentionally ignored) factors.