If, for example, I want to return a game in accordance with the rules and they won’t let me, I’m not gonna lawyer up and sue them from the other side of the Atlantic.

While supposedly being a lot cheaper than litigation, arbitration isn't free either. Besides, arbitration makes it near-impossible to appeal a decision, and the outcome won't set binding legal precedent. Furthermore, arbitration often comes with a class action waiver. Valve also removed that from the SSA.

I'm far from an expert in law, especially US law, but as I understand it, ~~arbitration is still available (if both parties agree, I assume), it's just not a requirement anymore~~ [edit: nevermind, I didn't understand it]. I'm sure they're making this move because it somehow benefits them, but it still seems to me that consumers are getting more options [edit: they're not] which is usually a good thing.

I think they vastly underestimate how many things Meta tracks besides ad tracking. They're likely tracking how long you look at a given post in your feed and will use that to rank similar posts higher. They know your location, what wifi network you're on and will use that to make assumptions based on others on the same network and/or in the same location. They know what times you're browsing at and can correlate that with what's trending in the area at those times, etc.

I have no doubt that their algorithm is biased towards all that crap, but these kinds of investigations need to be more informed in order for them to be useful.

The article mentions that one woman (Stefany González Escarraman) went for a restraining order the day after the system deemed her at "low risk" and the judge denied it referring to the VioGen score.

One was Stefany González Escarraman, a 26-year-old living near Seville. In 2016, she went to the police after her husband punched her in the face and choked her. He threw objects at her, including a kitchen ladle that hit their 3-year-old child. After police interviewed Ms. Escarraman for about five hours, VioGén determined she had a negligible risk of being abused again.

The next day, Ms. Escarraman, who had a swollen black eye, went to court for a restraining order against her husband. Judges can serve as a check on the VioGén system, with the ability to intervene in cases and provide protective measures. In Ms. Escarraman’s case, the judge denied a restraining order, citing VioGén’s risk score and her husband’s lack of criminal history.

About a month later, Ms. Escarraman was stabbed by her husband multiple times in the heart in front of their children.

It also says:

Spanish police are trained to overrule VioGén’s recommendations depending on the evidence, but accept the risk scores about 95 percent of the time, officials said. Judges can also use the results when considering requests for restraining orders and other protective measures.

You could argue that the problem isn't so much the algorithm itself as it is the level of reliance upon it. The algorithm isn't unproblematic though. The fact that it just spits out a simple score: "negligible", "low", "medium", "high", "extreme" is, IMO, an indicator that someone's trying to conflate far too many factors into a single dimension. I have a really hard time believing that anyone knowledgeable in criminal psychology and/or domestic abuse would agree that 35 yes or no questions would be anywhere near sufficient to evaluate the risk of repeated abuse. (I know nothing about domestic abuse or criminal psychology, so I could be completely wrong.)

Apart from that, I also find this highly problematic:

[The] victims interviewed by The Times rarely knew about the role the algorithm played in their cases. The government also has not released comprehensive data about the system’s effectiveness and has refused to make the algorithm available for outside audit.

This is such a fun and insightful piece. Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it never will.

It's not Mozilla's CEO that's doing anything shady here, it's a partner company, OneRep.

Edit: And Mozilla is breaking up with OneRep because of it. (Just in case someone had missed that part.)

LibreWolf is a very decent Firefox fork. Open Source is great because bad CEOs can't really threaten the source code.

Not saying this one is bad though — I have no idea. The last one was raking in $7 million/year which is less than ideal for an open source project.

Did you read the article? She's not saying that she didn't know that measles are dangerous, she's saying that she thinks people would vaccinate more and sooner if they knew the potential delayed effects of measles. Her son died 4 years after catching it and he wasn't vaccinated at 2 because he was on a delayed vaccination program (it doesn't say why). It's a super tragic story really and it doesn't seem like she's anti-vax or anything like it, quite the opposite.

Great. I'm looking forward to hearing all the Apple zealots change their tune on side-loading from "iOS is more secure because it doesn't allow side-loading " to "side-loading is amazing, I'm so glad Apple invented it!"

It's most likely resembling NSA code because it's using EternalBlue which was leaked back in 2017 by ShadowBrokers. The title of the article is misleading/click-baity. (No offense to the OP, I know you just used the title from the article.)

Downgraded my new desktop computer from Win11 to Win10 this weekend. Still considering if I shouldn't just go back to Linux now that Valve has made gaming on Linux viable...

Oh, this is great... And because the ChatGPT transcript is highly ranked on Google, it's almost certainly going to be used for training ChatGPT. A feedback loop of shitty information. Praise ChatGPT!

Good find, albeit a bit horrifying.

I wonder what the GDPR implications of this is. As far as I understand, even free, privately run services are required to abide by GDPR and offer data insight and deletion. They're also required to state clearly what happens to user data.

Edit: Apparently people have varying takes and feelings on what the GDPR does and does not say, so I urge you to please read the summary of GDPR data privacy here: https://gdpr.eu/data-privacy/ as well as the summary of what constitutes personal data here: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ It's easier to have a good and fruitful discussion if we talk about what the GDPR actually says.