Ooh. Nice.
Ooh. Nice.
Am I missing something, maybe like merchants on Amazon or publishers on Steam trying to game the recommendations system one way or another, and poisoning its inputs?
It’s this. Monopoly and oligopoly players have little incentive to provide strong measures against data poisoning.
Amazon has been losing ground steadily against review data poisoning for many years, but (presumably) hasn’t seen a loss of profit, over it.
Neat.
As a SteamDeck player, does this mean I can start saying I use Arch, by the way?
A decent number of folks have still never seen “Primer”, since it was kind of an indie classic before it got a cult following.
It’s a a must watch because:
A. It’s just really well made. B. It’s delightfully mind bending.
On the stable channel, it seems like (from comparing notes with friends) a recent update introduced crashes into older games that did not crash previously. In my case, Proton is always involved.
You’re not wrong to give the benefit out the doubt and believe their PR person isn’t lying.
But I’m not inclined to give that benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust these folks farther than I can throw them. I don’t, myself, need proof, to believe they would try this crap.
And this is definitely evidence.
But without hard evidence I don’t believe random apps are just recording clandestinely in the background.
I certainly do. Malware attempts to record you is old news.
We have always assumed voice was off the table for practical reasons - voice recordings are expensive to decode and correlated usefully.
Cox has particularly deep pockets, which makes this interesting.
I do actually agree, this really could just have been a vendor bullshitting. Normally I would say Occam’s razor points there. But Occam’s razor points the other way, to me, when I consider that basically everyone I know has experienced a voice targeted ad.
The big ugly question is which apps are recording voices?
It might just be name squatting spyware. I haven’t seen confirmation that any do this, and I always assumed it was too expensive. Maybe it still is, but my guess is Cox isn’t the only ones who got that sale offer.
The creepy part is, if you’re not inclined to take Google, Amazon, and Meta at their word, then one wonders what other apps are recording voices…
Here’s the conspiracy part:
The conspiracy emerges when we look at these data points and squint a little.
Security researchers would’ve noticed this.
They did notice. Malicious apps that use everything they can to spy on you are old news.
To your point - this isn’t confirmation that any of the big players are listening directly. That would probably have been caught by security researchers, although it would be really difficult in Google’s or Amazon’s case, as they run proprietary software at a very low level.
The news here is two fold;
Cox got caught buying that data, and when confronted about it, Google, Amazon, and Meta all failed to deny that they also buy that data from those malicious app makers.
This is strong evidence that someone is routinely collecting that data. That’s news. We’ve suspected for awhile that, at minimum, the malware apps do. Occam’s razor says at minimum, we should now assume many malware apps are using microphone to collect speech and submit it elsewhere for analysis.
The unprovable part of this that smells much worse is: a kid in a basement writing malware does not have the computing power to turn tons of raw voice recordings into useful correlated data.
That kid needs an ally with a lot of computing power. Google, Meta, and Amazon all have a motive here and have the necessary computing power.
And all three worded their denials pretty carefully, I noticed.
In summary: Google, Amazon and Meta all deny that they directly access your microphone, and all three failed to actually deny purchasing voice data from third party apps that definitely do use your microphone and pair that with your ad targeting profile.
This is getting more attention because an internal slide deck from Cox Media Group was leaked. Based on rthe nature of leaks, it’s safe to assume that Cox isn’t the only organization up to this, they were just three least careful
So yeah, they’re listening to anyone who isn’t incredibly careful what apps they install and what permissions they give those apps.
Exactly as we all have suspected for years, while they gaslight us promising that they definitely don’t.
Notice that they’re still denying it, and trust that as you will.
They’re basically Steam Machines tailored more towards retro enthusiasts.
Styled to look like a Sega DreamCast
Priced from around £300.00 to £500.00
Would have been funnier if their date was surreally totally fine with it.
It’s fantastic, especially for non-gamers.
There’s a huge library of cozy games, and arcade games, and retro games, and adventure RPGs, exploration games, puzzle games that all run terrific on a SteamDeck.
The average randomly selected game from my Steam Library has run fine for me, on my SteamDeck.
If they ever make a smaller model with a clam shell to protect the screen, it’ll be the perfect game system.
Uhhh…well. that’s…um. sure. Someone could do that.
Yeah!
Wow. That’s going to make my SteamDeck way more fun.
Ironically, I had this issue a lot more often with my official licensed SteamDock than with a random USB C to HDMI adapter I dug out of storage.
“Gotta have standards.”
In the USA, if we did this, it wouldn’t be “to better reflect modern sensibilities.” but just because everyone in the entire American film industry does a lot less cocaine, now, on average.
Fun Internet fact: American films released in the 1980s with a PG or R rating are actually all just rated “who the fuck cares, put a rating on it all, and pass me that cocaine!”
Source: bullshit, but somehow more true than it ought to be…
He really committed to the part!
Yeah. I could figure out how to make a PC do all that, but I would rather pay for a Steam console that does all of that for me out of the box.