It’s a Firefox extension.
3,465 karma · joined August 28, 2015
But I do wish Mozilla would make a version of Firefox available for people that just want a fully-FOSS browser.
The efforts of various GNU+Linux distributions to do this (Icecat, Abrowser) are fantastic, but ultimately it’s too difficult for me to judge how quickly they can act on security issues to feel comfortable using them.
I’d have no problem sending telemetry data back if I could get a browser binary with Widevine DRM, Pocket etc. completely removed.
I’d also be more inclined to send Mozilla cold hard cash.
Probably handled by the TPM they upsold you for security.
I heard about Monkey Brains from a pal. From a quick search, the only comparison site that seems to mention them is Yelp.
In SF both Monkey Brains and Sonic are excellent, pro-Net-Neutrality, pro-privacy ISPs who offer non-exploitative contracts for internet access which is unfiltered, blazingly fast, and incredibly cheap!
Thank you for the suggestion. We likely have different ideals about what a healthy version of the future looks like.
> ...selling your information to third parties...
Not what I said. Google’s business model is to extract and store as much information about consumers as possible, enrich and correlate it, and then financially exploit it. Currently the best way they’ve found to do that is targeted advertising.
By doing so, they make this extremely revealing data available to every government in every jurisdiction in which they operate, which is pretty much all of them. They work to normalize this surveillance as inevitable and unstoppable.
Additionally, while it would currently run counter to their business model to sell raw data, there’s nothing to legally stop them, if that business model should change.
Just like Facebook, Google are now very close to market saturation. To keep growth up, they’ll need to increase revenue per user. How will they do that? We don’t know. But there’s a relatively high chance that I’ll like it even less than what they’re doing now.
> ... dumb
:)
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
It seems possible!
I do. I’ve beeen gradually winding down my account, and will soon feel even better than I did when I got rid of Comcast.
Check out the Credit Unions in your area. They’re usually great!
What are those communities like? What’s the benefit compared to Reddit/wherever else?
Don’t host your own email server unless you want maintaining it as a hobby. Fastmail, Kolabnow (my nerd-deluxe choice; OpenPOWER CPUs, 100% Free Software and green energy, Swiss jurisdiction) etc. are great.
Buy a domain, gradually move accounts over when you use them at a desktop, it takes about 30 seconds. Or, even better, just let them die and set up a new one if you ever need it.
It’s not instant, but it’s very possible, and not even that difficult.
Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really nice things about it is that it uses open standards (regular unauthenticated HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like:
wget --recursive --span-hosts --no-directories --accept '*.pdf' --quiet \
--execute robots=off https://sci-hub.tw/$DOI
Only if <gun maker> was specifically marketing their hunting rifle to be aimed at members of the public, and for the trigger to be frequently pulled. Happily, gun-makers are far more responsible than that.
> It's a tool, you're responsible for how it is used, not the manufacturer
Not so. Private businesses can refuse to offer services largely as they wish, and AWS frequently do, based on their terms of service.
For example, you are not permitted to run a web-scraper or open mail relay on EC2. You are not permitted to host bestiality on S3. None of these things are illegal. But Amazon have taken the stance that they just don't want them to happen on AWS.
I am of the view that mass facial recognition poses more problems for society than running web-scrapers.
Many civil liberties organizations have serious concerns about the use of facial recognition for law enforcement, including pro-industry organizations such as the EFF[0]. This is not some new reaction; they have had Know Your Customer guidelines about terms for ML for states since 2011[1].
Even competitors who are incentivized to sell facial recognition tech to LEAs are warning that it's a bad idea for society, with serious and likely lethal implications. Here's the CEO of facial recognition startup Kairos[2].
> ...the confidence level would be tweaked by Law Enforcement
This is a large part of the problem. If you don't think so, then we simply have very different visions of the future that we want to live in, and must agree to disagree.
[0] https://www.eff.org/wp/law-enforcement-use-face-recognition
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/it%E2%80%99s-time-know...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/facial-recognition-softwar...
He attempts to refute one unverifiable Rekognition configuration with another.
They used the default settings, and a training set which seems extremely likely to be used in ‘LEA-production’
Any user, including LEAs, is free to use which ever configuration options they like.
The criticism with the most statistical implications is the confidence level used. The ACLU were clear they they used the defaults. I can take at face value that moving from 80% to 99% confidence on a sample of 500 faces could produce 0 false positives. However, on the faces of the tens/hundreds of thousands of people that might move through the center of town on any given day, the implications for causing ordinary people serious harm are large.
I am personally shocked that Amazon are willing to “recommend” law enforcement actions at any level of confidence, from an unintrospectable machine learning system.
Did they? This blog post describes some implementation choices which could make their false positive rate lower.
It reveals no information about how Rekognition is being deployed by LEAs, and there’s no meaningful regulation or oversight about how that happens.
We can’t tell what the assumptions and implementation choices of local police departments are, because that’s top secret information. Most people acting on the predictions have no idea what they are, let alone the implications.
It’s fine to ding the ACLU study on methods —- you can, because they published some.
No-one would argue that a toy model based on members of Congress is representative of the public at large. But it’s more representative that a press release from a company that are trying to normalize and monetize mass surveillance via facial recognition.
The point is that all of these decisions are unregulated, and complicated systems are being put into the hands of people who have very different professional backgrounds (and incentives) to Applied Machine Learning Engineers.
- Just because it’s possible to use a better or more representative data set, it doesn’t mean LE agencies can or will
- Just because a particular confidence interval is more suitable, doesn’t mean it will be used. What if there’s pressure to hit targets? What if a senior cop sits on the sys admin’s desk and tells the them that “We’ve really gotta nail this guy. He’s armed, dangerous, and on the run”.
- What if cops are radioed and told that a man who HQ are 95% sure is the armed killer is in the car/room/office ahead? How will the LEO react and behave when approaching the suspect, based on that information? What if 10k faces from CCTV were put through the system to get that match? What if there are 10 other officers drawing their pistols approaching 95% matches for the same subject at the same time?
These are all difficult questions for statisticians and ethicists to answer. We should not be forcing these decisions on LEOs to deal with in real time.
And I, personally, would prefer to live in a free country without facial recognition cameras pointing at me.
There is no democratic consent for any of this.
I’m yet to depend on any of them, but projects I’ve been eying up are:
- Airsonic as a Spotify replacement (FOSS iOS clients)
- Kodi as a smart tv/box replacement (had this for a while, worked great!)
- NextCloud to host files (generally allergic to php, but too scared of iOS binaries from China to trust the superior SeaFile)
Not quite as slim, but to me at least, cooler.
Made in Berlin!
What if EM threatened to ruin you for reading them?
Admittedly I know nothing about the conduct or credibility of the blogger, but to me, “a guy on the Internet” is more credible than EM at the moment.
If you are a hiring manager, and this is policy, refuse to disrespect the experts you are hoping to entice.