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Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp

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    M
    FYI- insurance company data breaches impact more than just customers. I had my identity stolen a few years ago because a small car insurance company I've never heard of was able to buy data on me from my state's government to build a potential customer profile, and then they got hacked. I would assume Aflac has data on just about everyone in the US.
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    S
    Nobody fucking cares.
  • 636 Stimmen
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    D
    theyll only stop selling politicians and block that
  • How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest?

    Technology technology
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    D
    So first, even here we see foundation money and big tech, not government. Facebook, Google, etc mostly love net neutrality, tolerate encryption, anf see utility in anonymous internet access, mostly because these things don't interfere with their core advertising businesses, and generally have helped them. I didn't see Comcast and others in the ISP oligopoly on that list, probably because they would not benefit from net neutrality, encryption, and privacy for obvious reasons. The EFF advocates for particular civil libertarian policies, always has. That does attract certain donors, but not others. They have plenty of diverse and grassroots support too. One day they may have to choose between their corpo donors and their values, but I have yet to see them abandon principles.
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    jjlinux@lemmy.mlJ
    And that's fine. I agree. Becoming consumist hoarders is what got us to where we're at. Or rather, what allowed companies and institutions to take us here.
  • OpenAI plans massive UAE data center project

    Technology technology
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    V
    TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.
  • CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

    Technology technology
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    S
    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/
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    J
    Apparently, it was required to be allowed in that state: Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it's entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn't actually have grounds to deny it. No jury during that phase, so it's just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions. It's gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted. From: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18471175 influence the sentence From what I've seen, to be fair, judges' decisions have varied wildly regardless, sadly, and sentences should be more standardized. I wonder what it would've been otherwise.