Research from a few years ago was able to measure gait (so a person’s height and build etc) from the wifi shadow of a single router.

I assume 3 is to get the super accurate placement.

These only work with ARM cpus I think

This is kind of misleading, China and Japan are kind of competing to see who can launch the new generation of 600km/hr maglev trains. Both have test tracks, both have clocked at 600km/hr, both have the actual lines under construction (Shanghai to Beijing, Tokyo to Nagoya).

Neither will likely run at 600km/hr, that’s mostly just dick waving.

Construction in Japan has slowed to a crawl and probably won’t be done until 2027 at least, and the Chinese CRRC is supposed to start this year but I don’t think they have any official service start dates.

Nah you can’t even use cash in a lot of post offices now.

Agreed, Scylla and Charybdis, as it is.

It’s not quite cut and dry as there’s also the recent decisions by the supreme court:

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith (2023) - “At issue was the Prince Series created by Andy Warhol based on a photograph of the musician Prince by Lynn Goldsmith. It held Warhol’s changes were insufficiently transformative to fall within fair use for commercial purposes, resolving an issue arising from a split between the Second and Ninth circuits among others.”

Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC (also 2023) - “The case deals with a dog toy shaped similar to a Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle and label, but with parody elements, which Jack Daniel’s asserts violates their trademark. The Court unambiguously ruled in favor of Jack Daniel’s as the toy company used its parody as its trademark, and leaving the Rogers test on parody intact.”

The aforementioned Rogers test was quoted in both decisions but with pretty different interpretations of the coverage of “parody.”

One thing seems to be the key: intent As long as AI isn’t purposefully trained to mimic a style to then it’s probably safe, but things like style LoRAs and style CLIP encodings are likely gonna be decided on whether the supreme court decided to have lunch that day.

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (1994) - This case established that the fact that money is made by a work does not make it impossible for fair use to apply; it is merely one of the components of a fair use analysis

This isn’t quite correct either.

The reality is that there’s a bunch of court cases and laws still up in the air about what AI training counts as, and until those are resolved the most we can make is conjecture and vague moral posturing.

Closest we have is likely the court decisions on music sampling and so far those haven’t been consistent, and have mostly hinged on “intent” and “affect on original copy sales”. So based on that logic whether or not AI training counts as copyright infringement is likely going to come down to whether or not shit like “ghibli filters” actually provably (at least as far as a judge is concerned) fuck with Ghibli’s sales.

Remember:

There’s no such thing as a perpetual license, there’s only “until we change our mind” licenses

The jimi-halloween trend from Japan but it’s /r/nosleep instead

Looking up more information about this I found a much less sensationalized analysis on this from the UofC:

https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/kids-no-phones-dinner-table-analyzing-peoples-republic-chinas-proposed-minor-mode

I think that was the draft proposal for this.

there are internet filters you can buy

Seems like that’s exactly what this is, it’s a mode that you turn on on the phone and it uses a government supplied list of vetted websites for the kid to visit.

Interestingly the way this feature set reads out is exactly the same way that Nintendo’s parental controls work.

I realize that this being the Chinese government, them keeping usage stats has connotations that go beyond the data itself… But in a country with a more liberal government I’d rather have them keep records of my kids’ internet usage than a private company. The idea being that you can pass protections around that data. (Not that that seems to be stopping the current US government so maybe that’s a pipe dream).

Ideal is, of course, completely on your own hardware (the device or your server at home), but between this and a system where Apple/Google/Nintendo does all this instead I’d prefer the government method.

Parents can invoke minors mode with a single click and set usage time limits. Devices set to minors mode will even remind users to take breaks, and collect stats so parents can make sure their offspring are surfing the web in an age-appropriate and socialist fashion.

This sounds awesome. This isn’t the weird shit like some states in the US have for determining if you can log into porn, or South Koreas weird government-login-page-in-everything scheme, it’s part of the parent’s family plan for their kid they can turn on/off.

I realize there’s worrying undertones (that already exist on the Chinese internet regardless) but the actual feature as-is seems like the ideal for this sort of thing.

It would! This is just an extra layer of data they can use to identify and infer!

Sooooo. This is actually scarier than it may seem…

You can tell what outlet or building a phone is plugged into sometimes by micro aberrations in power output.

Also interestingly you can kind of tell what webpages somebody visits by their phone’s power usage:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284567929_Current_Events_Identifying_Webpages_by_Tapping_the_Electrical_Outlet

edit: for stuff like this they kind of need existing power profiles to like compare against, so this is sometimes used to tell if you’re “at home” by identifying the charging profile of the charging apparatus you use at night etc.

It’s pretty scary what information you can infer from geolocational data, it’s why you should try your best to not use it as much as possible.

When an app asks for your location only give it the minimum geolocation and time if you’re absolutely sure it needs it (for delivery make sure there’s not a place you can manually enter the dropoff location first, etc).

Also, “fine location” is a much more invasive technology than people think. Apple and Google have giant databases of Wifi broadcast locations and associated positions, which is what gives you the “more accurate location.”

If you want to help do your part to mitigate that turn off your router’s SSID broadcast and make sure none of your devices attempt to “auto connect” to your wifi.

Aren’t there a lot of split units in Europe? Here I just needed an IR blaster to make my AC(s) “smart”.

And do what? Sentiment analysis on the conversation you were having?

Remember semantically aware models are still fairly new and even they lack the context for a particular field of text. That’s something even the new fancy LLMs struggle with.

Unnecessary when there’s way better targeted models trained on years of data that people willingly send as part of everyday smartphone use.

If you use android google grabs your GPS data regardless, you have to root and disable it.

Apple does the same thing but they didn’t have their pants occupied by third-party network’s fingers like google did until the pixel came out.

Google maps is basically a beacon for AdMob to target you nearly perfectly.

Also using “fine location” in any app grabs the nearby wifi list and sends it to Google/apple if it’s not cached.

Also most ad providers these days have made deals with major networks that let them tell what tower your IMEI pinged off of.

It’s why google tried to push android/ad IDs, way less info for the networks to advertise over, and it also put the tracking in their hands instead.