DigitalDilemma

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • More information: It’s been rolling out to Android 9+ users since November 2024 as a high priority update. Some users are reporting it installs when on battery and off wifi, unlike most apps.

    App description on Play store: SafetyCore is a Google system service for Android 9+ devices. It provides the underlying technology for features like the upcoming Sensitive Content Warnings feature in Google Messages that helps users protect themselves when receiving potentially unwanted content. While SafetyCore started rolling out last year, the Sensitive Content Warnings feature in Google Messages is a separate, optional feature and will begin its gradual rollout in 2025. The processing for the Sensitive Content Warnings feature is done on-device and all of the images or specific results and warnings are private to the user.

    Description by google Sensitive Content Warnings is an optional feature that blurs images that may contain nudity before viewing, and then prompts with a “speed bump” that contains help-finding resources and options, including to view the content. When the feature is enabled, and an image that may contain nudity is about to be sent or forwarded, it also provides a speed bump to remind users of the risks of sending nude imagery and preventing accidental shares. - https://9to5google.com/android-safetycore-app-what-is-it/

    So looks like something that sends pictures from your messages (at least initially) to Google for an AI to check whether they’re “sensitive”. The app is 44mb, so too small to contain a useful ai and I don’t think this could happen on-phone, so it must require sending your on-phone data to Google?




  • It’s not that we “hate them” - it’s that they can entirely overwhelm a low volume site and cause a DDOS.

    I ran a few very low visit websites for local interests on a rural. residential line. It wasn’t fast but was cheap and as these sites made no money it was good enough Before AI they’d get the odd badly behaved scraper that ignored robots.txt and specifically the rate limits.

    But since? I’ve had to spend a lot of time trying to filter them out upstream. Like, hours and hours. Claudebot was the first - coming from hundreds of AWS IPs and dozens of countries, thousands of times an hour, repeatedly trying to download the same urls - some that didn’t exist. Since then it’s happened a lot. Some of these tools are just so ridiculously stupid, far more so than a dumb script that cycles through a list. But because it’s AI and they’re desperate to satisfy the “need for it”, they’re quite happy to spend millions on AWS costs for negligable gain and screw up other people.

    Eventually I gave up and redesigned the sites to be static and they’re now on cloudflare pages. Arguably better, but a chunk of my life I’d rather not have lost.









  • It won’t be that simple.

    For starters, you’re assuming t-zero response. It’ll likely be a week before people worry enough that LE isn’t returning before they act. Then they have to find someone else for, possibly, the hundreds or thousands of certs they are responsible for. Set up processes with them. Hope that this new provide is able to cope with the massive, MASSIVE surge in demand without falling over themselves.

    And that’s assuming your company knows all its certs. That they haven’t changed staff and lost knowledge, or outsourced IT (in which case they provider is likely staggering under the weight of all their clients demanding instant attention) and all that goes with that. Automation is actually bad in this situation because people tend to forget how stuff was done until it breaks. It’s very likely that many certs will simply expire because they were forgotten about and the first thing some companies knows is when customers start complaining.

    LetsEncrypt is genuinely brilliant, but we’ve all added a massive single point of failure into our systems by adopting it.

    (Yeah, I’ve written a few disaster plans in my time. Why do you ask?)




  • The bar chart might be more useful if they weighted the source with its number of users. Facebook isn’t 7 times more hateful than Telegram. It has around 3.5 times as many users - but also the two are used very differently. I use Telegram, but only as a free messaging platform for automated alerts.

    Then there’s the algorithms, which tend to feed you what you engage with and from those connections you’ve made on it. The exception recently is X which has a very strong political bias and has turned into something that pushes hate very strongly.