So a brand like McDonald’s will know if you’re hungry, eating the competition, and more. Yeah it’s weird, but will it make online ads better?

As abused as they are, internet users need to build up some healthy "buyer beware" instincts around the tradeoffs.

This shouldn't be on the users. The disparity in knowledge between the people running the services and the people using them is huge. The reason a lot of laws (in general) exist is to protect the vulnerable from harm, including harm they don't have the capacity to understand. I think that's an important facet of this debate. It's not just 'free market/free choice' etc. The harm involved in giving up your privacy isn't fully understood by many people so it's up to the law to protect them.

Media scholar Jonathan Taplin, author of the new book Move Fast and Break Things, on the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of digital platforms.     In 2014, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel famously proclaimed that “competition is for losers” in an essay published in the Wall Street Journal and in his book (also published in 2014) Zero to One. “If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly,” he advised entrepreneurs, expounding on his view that monopolies are good for innovation and, ultimately, for society at large.    Thiel’s proclamation has received a lot …

Un premier trimestre sans surprise

Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a holographic imaging process that depicts the radiation of a Wi-Fi transmitter to generate three-dimensional images of the surrounding environment. Industrial facility operators could use this to track objects as they move through the production hall.

Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.

The UK government is soliciting feedback from a handful of internet providers, but isn't consulting the tech industry or the public.

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun a criminal investigation into Uber Technologies Inc's use of a software tool that helped its drivers evade local transportation regulators, two sources familiar with the situation said.

There's two things that don't get mentioned much with this issue.

1. There's a second bug that allows non-root local users to provision AMT. "An unprivileged local attacker could provision manageability features"[1]

2. Access to AMT allows you to boot a recovery image, mount local drives, and do whatever you like with the included remote KVM.[2][3]

So, even if this is turned off, there are issues to address. If it's on, they have control of the whole machine, remotely. It's as bad as it can get.

Patch for severe authentication bypass bug won’t be available until next week.

SiFive is the first fabless semiconductor company to build customized silicon based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture.

Tired of the domination of x86, ARM, and other closed chip architectures, researchers created the open-source RISC-V architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010.

I have actually spent the past five years peeking into people’s insides. I have been studying aggregate Google search data. Alone with a screen and anonymous, people tend to tell Google things they don’t reveal to social media; they even tell Google things they don’t tell to anybody else. Google offers digital truth serum. The words we type there are more honest than the pictures we present on Facebook or Instagram.

Something similar has happened with Transmission's download DMGs being replaced on their servers [1] (twice! [2]) in recent memory.