TikTok has been hit with a €345 million EU fine over the way it processes the personal data of children and teenage users, the first handed out by the bloc to the Chinese-owned social media platform.

Welcome to the world of gaming, where innovation meets eccentricity. Gamers, much like any other subculture, have their fair share of trends and products that, while well-intentioned, often land on the cringe-worthy spectrum. In this blog post, we're diving headfirst into the top 5 cringe-worthy items that you might find in a gaming setup. From gaming gloves that look like you're about to perform open-heart surgery to energy drinks that promise to turn you into a gaming superhero, prepare for a

ghostarchive
Original Discussion^[https://lemmy.world/post/5057297]

San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.

Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it's been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.

In the 00's every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.

That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we're well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.

At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don't know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don't look forward to hearing news about it. It's sad, man. We've lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

We're at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don't think most of us will like what the next era brings.

Most people know at this point that when searching for a popular software package to download, you should be very careful to avoid clicking on any of the search ads that appear, as this has become an extremely common vector for distributing malware to unsuspecting users.

If you thought that you could identify these malicious ads by checking the URL below the ad to see if it directs to the legitimate site, think again! Malware advertisers have found a way to use Google's Ad platform to fake the URL shown with the ad to make it appear like a legitimate ad for the product when in fact, clicking the ad will redirect to an attacker controlled site serving malware.

Don't click on search ads or, even better, use an ad-blocker so that you never see them in the first place!

cross-posted from [email protected]

California, the home to many of tech's biggest companies and the nation's most populous state, is pushing ahead with a right-to-repair bill for consumer electronics and appliances. After unanimous votes in the state Assembly and Senate, the bill passed yesterday is expected to move through a concurrence vote and be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

Some argue that bots should be entitled to ingest any content they see, because people can.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4975490

Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off

Unity has announced that starting on January 1st, 2024, it will implement a new pricing model that will charge developers based on how many times a game was installed.

Stability AI introduces their AI model for creating audio and music. You can try it out now: https://www.stableaudio.com/

cross-posted from [email protected]

I suggest you guys read the article before commenting or voting based on the title.

The new company, ChargeScape, will create a platform that can be used by both utilities and EV owners to benefit from the expected surge in mobile batteries plugged into the grid.

WordPress has published its latest transparency report which shows that it only takes action for a small fraction of the piracy takedown notices it receives. A whopping 86% don't result in any removals. This high rejection rate is mostly the result of "careless" incomplete notices sent by takedown companies, the report notes.

Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform WordPress, receives thousands of takedown requests from copyright holders.

For several years the volume of notices continued to increase, with a peak in 2018, after which the trend slowly went in the other direction.

This week, the company published its latest WordPress.com transparency report, revealing that it processed 2,412 takedown notices during the first six months of the year. That is a significant drop compared to a year earlier when over 3,321 notices were handled.

These data only apply to the number of DMCA notices that are directed at WordPress.com services. Each of these notices can contain multiple URLs, in some cases even dozens. In future, Automattic plans to release more granular data. Abusive and Incomplete Takedown Requests

Aside from the continued drop in takedown volume, the high rejection rate clearly stands out. Of all notices received, only 14% result in any content removals; the vast majority are rejected for a variety of reasons.

In the reported period, 77% of all notices were rejected because they were incomplete. An additional 9% was labeled as ‘abusive’ and dismissed for that reason. The remaining 14% was processed as usual.

The number of rejections is significantly higher than in the same period last year. According to Automattic, this is mostly due to more incomplete notices, which are often sent by specialized ‘removal companies’.

“Most of these incomplete notices were submitted through seemingly automated processes that are provided by content removal companies which often charge content creators to exercise their rights,” Automattic notes.

These ‘faulty’ notices also include requests to take down content that’s cached for other hosting providers, through WordPress’ Jetpack service, for example. Since WordPress is not the original host it doesn’t take action in response to these.

The high percentage of ‘faulty’ notices is a source of frustration for Automattic, which indirectly criticizes the companies that largely rely on takedown bots and automated processes.

Tumblr

Automattic also owns the blogging platform Tumblr, which it purchased in 2019. For this service, it releases a separate transparency report.

The Tumblr report shows a similar decline in DMCA takedown notices. In the first half of 2023, 2,278 takedown notices were sent to the platform, a significant drop from the 3,362 requests it received a year earlier.

A detailed breakdown shows that these DMCA notices targeted 2,369 posts and 11,146 pieces of other content. The majority of these notices, 78%, were valid and processed accordingly.

“This type of careless use of the DMCA makes it harder for platforms to efficiently process valid takedown notifications. In the past, we have highlighted similar problematic trends such as the negative impact of automated takedown notices submitted by bots,” the company writes.

All in all, the transparency reports show that the major DMCA takedown surge of a few years ago has subsided. However, Automattic stresses that it’s important to remain vigilant to ensure that content isn’t needlessly removed.

“For our part, we meticulously review each takedown notice we receive so that we can identify the validity, push back on abuse, and help our users understand their rights such as Fair Use,” Automattic writes.

This was a very interesting read.

I am not especially tech-literate and very clumsy. I want to buy a thinkpad that I can set up as a privacy machine. I mostly use my computer for web browsing and messaging and don't need something especially powerful, just something that can run bloated web pages easily and I won't have to think about again for at least half a decade.

Ideally, I want something around $300. Does anyone have recommendations for models to shop for? Anything the size of the T-Series would be adequate. I'm not a gamer or do video editing so no graphics card requirements.