Râu Cao ⚡ @raucao@kosmos.social

Cooking some temperature-appropriate slow food.

> We find that Amazon processes voice data to infer user interests and uses it to serve targeted ads on-platform (Echo devices) as well as off-platform (web). Smart speaker interaction leads to as much as 30X higher ad bids from advertisers. Finally, we find that Amazon's and skills' operational practices are often inconsistent with their privacy policies

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10920

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

TFW your GitHub user id is 842 (from 2008), but some people at Microsoft think that this is an appropriate new dashboard for you:

Current prepper status is just half-Asian household normie level.

People on birdsite still claiming that federation doesn't work is probably the silliest thing I will read today.

Today in "noone in the EU understands the EU": eBay's back-end is adding VAT to my article that I'm selling as a private seller within the EU, because my residential address is not in the EU, and they use that instead of the seller/article location in the article details.

So they're illegally charging VAT on it, pretending that it was imported into the EU, alleging it crossed the UK/EU border. And the staff can't do anything about it, because it's the software implementation that is wrong.

> If you are using ECDSA signatures for any of these security mechanisms, then an attacker can trivially and completely bypass them if your server is running any Java 15, 16, 17, or 18 version before the April 2022 Critical Patch Update (CPU).

https://neilmadden.blog/2022/04/19/psychic-signatures-in-java/

> US Blames Russia For Yemen Hunger Crisis, Praises Saudi Role

Matt Taibbi has set up a Substack incl. translation service for Russian writers who are now either out of work or being censored:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/editors-note-on-russian-dissent

Fun facts:

> Currently, some 85% of the industry’s components are, however, coming from China

> Blanco was not only referring to rare earths, but said “normal things” such as metallic shafts in turbines, 95% of which are sourced in China.

The EU decided to triple wind power generation by 2030. But European wind turbine manufacturers have been getting wrecked even before the current hyperinflation:

https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/were-all-in-trouble-wind-turbine-makers-selling-at-a-loss-and-in-a-self-destructive-loop-bosses-admit/2-1-1197217

If there only were a buyer of last resort, in order to make new deployments instantly profitable as well as long-term resilient...

Oh wait, there is! But the EU wants to literally ban it, because it competes with their infinite-growth-requiring, centralized currency.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Putin's price hike" is surely one of the most blatant and absurd propaganda terms in recent memory.

It's actually "Powell's printing orgy", which is the insane after party of "Ben and Janet's printing fest".

Today's official U.S. CPI number will be one for the history books, and it's still undercounting real price inflation.

Current phone is dying pretty badly and not really repairable. Toying with the idea of buying a refurbished Galaxy S9 and throwing e/os on it. Specs seem to be a good-enough compromise between the features I want, availability, price, and e/os compatibility.

Anyone knows of reasons why either the hardware or particular Android distro are a bad idea?

How's your April going?