Samsung's copped a $14m fine from the Federal Court for "misleading consumers about the suitability of various Samsung Galaxy phones to be submerged in pool or sea water". We've all seen Samsung's ads where phones would fall in pools or in the ocean, only to be extracted from their liquid hell and used by a beautiful person as if nothing happened. Like most advertising, it's bullshit and Samsung admitted "that if the Galaxy phones were submerged in pool or sea water there was a material prospect the charging port would become corroded and stop working if the phone was charged while still wet". Suck shit Samsung.
Italy has banned the use of Google Analytics. By default Google Analytics collects IP addresses and sends that data to the USA where "US-based governmental and intelligence agencies may access the personal data being transferred without the required safeguard" - A big no-no in the EU's GDPR set of laws. The Italian Italian Data Protection Authority is giving all Italian websites a 90-day grace period to stop using Google Analytics (there doesn't seem to be a way to ensure the data collected stays in the EU) until they start doing ad-hoc inspections and crack some skulls. Italy isn't the only EU country with a beef against Google Analytics, Austria and France have the same issue.
Meta is now getting Americans that try to "edit their date of birth on Instagram from under the age of 18 to 18 or over" to "verify their age using one of three options: upload their ID, record a video selfie or ask mutual friends to verify their age". They have a post explaining "how Meta uses AI to better understand people's ages on our platforms", justifying the use of AI face scanning because not everyone has government ID. I'll be shocked if there isn't a massive scandal involving this feature in the next few weeks. The social vouching feature is weird too - you ask 3 mutual followers over the age of 18 to promise you are also over 18 and Meta considers that as good as government ID. Hey kids, give me $5, follow me and my 2 other mates and we will vouch for ya!
If you hang around programmers you've likely heard about GitHub's Copilot feature coming out of beta. It uses OpenAI to generate code for you. Write a comment explaining what you want and Copilot suggests code to make it happen. Check out this random demo I found on YouTube of Copilot assisting with making a website. It works, but professional programmers shouldn't be worried about their jobs, at least not as worried as professional writers (cough). There's an argument going around that GitHub/Microsoft is "stealing" open source code and making money off it by training the AI against open source code and not giving any attribution or sharing their own code.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
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