Technology

A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1248556/fair-playstation-sony-is-facing-a-lawsuit-seeking-more-than-eur400-million-in-damages-on

Lucia Melcherts, chair of Stichting Massaschade & Consument statement:

The end of physical discs removes the last place where a PlayStation game could still be bought and sold at a competitive price. No discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it. That is exactly the harm our Fair PlayStation claim is about: a price can never be fair when the buyer is left with no ownership and no alternative.

Fewer than 4.5% of Microsoft 365 customers pay for Copilot after three years, only 1% use it weekly, and Microsoft raised prices regardless.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49181042

Accenture has confirmed it is investigating a security incident after a threat actor claimed to have accessed internal Azure DevOps resources and advertised what they describe as source code, configuration files, and credentials for sale. While the company has acknowledged the incident, the full scope of the allegedly stolen data has not been independently verified

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1248102/treasury-has-an-internal-report-warning-about-the-dangers-of-an-ai-bubble

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1248066/u-s-government-accountability-office-department-of-energy-is-prematurely-excluding-less

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1247402/meta-says-4-states-want-1-4-trillion-in-penalties-at-august-youth-safety-trial

Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1247209/all-cars-sold-in-the-eu-now-require-a-camera-aimed-at-your-face-its-still-not-clear-wher

Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.

Automakers have known this was coming for years. What they, and EU regulators, have never spelled out is what happens to that footage after the alert goes off.

While the intention behind the new system is difficult to dispute, its implementation has raised several concerns. Early real-world testing suggests the distraction warnings can be overly sensitive and potentially distracting.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49145461

Meta has been up to no good for a while - always?

Is $1.4 trillion a reasonable amount for these cases? Who knows.

Is it reasonable compensation for all the evil they’ve done? I’d argue yes.

It’s essentially their entire market capitalization as a penalty.

At the heart of the NetNut residential proxy service was the Popa botnet, an engineered stealth communications layer. By embedding deceptive software development kits into inexpensive, off-brand Android-based smart TVs, streaming media boxes and unofficial apps like the SmartTube client, NetNut hijacked ordinary home electronics.

When consumers plugged in these devices, their home internet connections were quietly rented out as residential proxy exit nodes. This allowed malicious traffic to route through legitimate domestic IP addresses, effectively bypassing standard data center blocks and security filters.

AFAIK the only thing illegal about this is they didn't bother with TOS agreements.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1246106/microsoft-cuts-4800-jobs

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1245926/nuclear-regulatory-commission-nrc-proposes-to-weaken-radiation-protections-putting-worke

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1246129/anthropic-uncovered-claude-s-consciousness-like-workbench-the-mysterious-j-space-hides-h

As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words. Most of this processing is invisible to you. But some of what takes place in your brain you do have access to—an image that pops into your head, or a deliberate plan you make about where to go shopping. Neuroscientists and philosophers sometimes refer to the latter type of brain activity as “consciously accessible,” to distinguish it from all the other processing that goes on unconsciously. This activity has special properties: we can describe it, control it, and use it for deliberate reasoning, in contrast to all the automatic processing that goes on without our awareness.

In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.

It records ambient conditions over time, stores readings in non-volatile memory, and displays current data along with a history graph. The device is designed for low power consumption, over 1 week of operation on a small Li‑Po battery.