overview for cura

27

Discovering that your Bluetooth car battery monitor is siphoning up your location data (doubleagent.net)

submitted 2 years ago by cura@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

2 comments fedilink

TLDR

A Bluetooth enabled battery monitor that records car battery voltages. The hardware requires a smartphone for pairing
The product collects GPS co-ordinates, cell phone tower data and nearby Wifi beacons
Location data is sent over the Internet to servers in Hong Kong and mainland China
App store misleads consumers by stating that no personal data is collected or shared. Since the Android app requires location permissions to use the hardware device, users are effectively forced to continuously broadcast their physical location to 3rd parties in order to use the product.

There are no legitimate reason for a car battery monitor application to track it’s user’s location. With over 100,000 downloads on Android alone, this raises significant privacy concerns

Discussion on HN.

The Good News Effect in c/news@beehaw.org

[–] cura@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

While news outlets are certainly drivers of fatigue, readers are not entirely off the hook. Research shows that negative headlines have more than a 60 percent higher click-through rate than positive ones—à la the old trope, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

I always feel that there are way more bad news than good news until now. I made a tally of the posts on the homepage of Beehaw right now and registered 14 as positive, 10 as negative, and 15 as neutral wrt my stance. It just seems like I actively focus more on the bad ones. Maybe I will try reading more positive ones.

1

Heads Up! Bots are coming. (fedidb.org)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by cura@beehaw.org to c/support@beehaw.org

0 comments fedilink

Maybe you guys already know about the bot signup over lemmy.world. Now they are all over the lemmyverse. The top 20 fastest growing instances in the threadiverse are probably suffering from it. The top one, lemmy.podycust.co.uk, has 10k users with 7 total posts. The total user count of threadiverse is now 544k, compared to 270k on June 19. We may be facing 200k+ bots at this point. Also these instances are in the federation. If any admin of these instance abandons ship, this creates huge liabilities to the threadiverse.

Lemmyverse needs to figure out how to deal with this. But before that happens, do you guys think Beehaw should preemptively defederate these affected instances? Or could there be a better solution?

1

Machine Learning Unlocks the Secret to Hit Songs (nexlumina.com)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by cura@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

3 comments fedilink

Why it matters: A recent study at Claremont Graduate University has applied machine learning to neurophysiological data, identifying hit songs with an astonishing 97% accuracy.

Read the Research article.

Discussion on Hacker News.

@panos@calckey.social on the Fediverse & Meta's Threads in c/technology@beehaw.org

[–] cura@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Their prequel on Meta: A few thoughts about #Meta's #ActivityPub project (and whether we should instantly block it)

To recap: I'm also very, very suspicious of Meta and I know they don't have good intentions - I'm not suggesting that maybe they've changed and they will do things differently, to "give them a chance" first. I just don't think that declaring to block them makes much sense at this point in time. Maybe they will give us real reasons to block them once they launch their platform. But I'm not by principle against interacting with Meta users, as long as I can avoid Meta's ads, black box algorithm and data mining.

I guess you do need to know the domain name to block it.

*Permanently Deleted* in c/support@beehaw.org

[–] cura@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

~~You can try to access https://beehaw.org/u/Lugadi. Currently it's 404, which probably means that your application was denied. But you should be able to reapply though.~~

Wait, are you sure the handle is Lugadi instead of Lugado? Because https://beehaw.org/u/Lugado shows the user page. In this case, if you cannot login it probably means your application is still under review.

Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is in c/technology@beehaw.org

[–] cura@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The defederated list does not include reasons and we can’t add it from Lemmy’s tools. The Lemmy instances we’ve defederated from memory are : Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml because they deny certain genocides, exploding-heads.com and lemmygrad.com because they are queerphobic, burggit.moe because they host child pornography.

https://beehaw.org/comment/300942

Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout in c/technology@beehaw.org

[–] cura@beehaw.org 44 points 2 years ago

This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.