A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).
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“The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto.”
“By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users’ private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients). … In August 2013, Facebook provided Netflix with access to its so-called “Titan API,” a private API that allowed a whitelisted partner to access, among other things, Facebook users’ “messaging app and non-app friends.””
Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit | Ars Technica
“In 2001, a poet named Bart Droog began attending the funerals of people who had no one to attend them and honoring the dead with a poem based on whatever was known about their life. A year later, Dutch poet and artist Frank Starik took the idea even further, launching The Lonely Funeral project to ensure that someone who cares consciously acknowledges the life of a person who has died. The idea was to create a network of poets who would find out whatever they could about the person, write a custom poem about their life and read it at their funeral. As of 2018, over 300 “lonely funerals” had been attended by poets in Amsterdam and Antwerp (where Flemish poet Maarten Inghels launched a Lonely Funeral project seven years after Starik’s).”
“We find that for 2016–2021: (i) per coin climate damages from BTC were increasing, rather than decreasing with industry maturation; (ii) during certain time periods, BTC climate damages exceed the price of each coin created; (iii) on average, each $1 in BTC market value created was responsible for $0.35 in global climate damages, which as a share of market value is in the range between beef production and crude oil burned as gasoline, and an order-of-magnitude higher than wind and solar power. Taken together, these results represent a set of sustainability red flags. While proponents have offered BTC as representing “digital gold,” from a climate damages perspective it operates more like “digital crude”.”
“Leaked documents show Tory executives discussed exploiting members’ personal data to build a mobile phone app that could track users’ locations and allow big brands to advertise to Conservative supporters. The party would take a cut of sales. The project was considered over several months last year, with the aim of launching the “True Blue” app in time for the party’s conference in October. The idea was developed by the boss of a cryptocurrency firm with a string of failed businesses behind him. Yet senior Conservative officials appeared so captivated by the plan that they prepared to provide the party’s database of members in order to move the proposal forward.“
“A new tool from OpenAI that can generate a convincing clone of anyone’s voice using just 15 seconds of recorded audio has been deemed too risky for general release, as the AI lab seeks to minimise the threat of damaging misinformation in a global year of elections.”
OpenAI deems its voice cloning tool too risky for general release | OpenAI | The Guardian
WATCH
EXPLORE
Make some melodies for free via MusicalBox.
Eyecandy is an exhaustive visual technique library.
Meow.Camera is a collection of livestreams of automatic feeders for streetcats in Japan.
Convert any web pages into markdown with images via markdowndown.vercel.app
Very clever little free tool to upload an image then add tilt and zoom: blurmatic.com
The ‘Creativity Pioneers (micro – up to €5,000) Fund‘ is from the Moleskine Foundation and is open (deadline is 27th May 2024, 11:00 pm CET).
Currently, this site boasts that they’ve “analysed 5667 AI Tools and identified their capabilities with OpenAI GPT-4, to bring you a list of 30257 tasks of what AI can do today.”
If you’re getting your head around automating AI and other platforms to craft / distribute content then check out this LinkedIn video.
Tim Berners-Lee gives predictions for future:
– Prediction 1: Everyone will have a personal AI assistant
– Prediction 2: We’ll take true ownership of our data across all platforms — including VR
– Prediction 3: A Big Tech company could get broken up