ReHacked vol. 344: What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading, ISS in Real Time and more
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading | F-Droid #opensource #bigcorp #software #copyrights
Developer verification is an existential threat to free software distribution platforms like F-Droid as well as emergent commercial competitors to the Play Store. We are witnessing a groundswell of opposition to this attempt from both our user and developer communities, as well as the tech press and civil society groups, but public policymakers still need to be educated about the threat.
To learn more about what you can do as a consumer, visit keepandroidopen.org for information on how to contact your representative agencies and advocate for keeping the Android ecosystem open for consumers and competition.
If you are an app developer, we recommend against signing yourself up for Google’s developer registration program at this time. We unequivocally reject their attempt to force this program upon the world.
Over half of all humankind uses an Android smartphone. Google does not own your phone. You own your phone. You have the right to decide who to trust, and where you can get your software from.
Make a donation - support Ukraine. Щира подяка. Разом до перемоги!
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Keep Android Open #android #opensource #copyrights
What this means for your rights
➤ You, the consumer, purchased your Android device believing in Google’s promise that it was an open computing platform and that you could run whatever software you choose on it. Instead, starting next year, they will be non-consensually pushing an update to your operating system that irrevocably blocks this right and leaves you at the mercy of their judgement over what software you are permitted to trust.
➤ You, the creator, can no longer develop an app and share it directly with your friends, family, and community without first seeking Google’s approval. The promise of Android — and a marketing advantage it has used to distinguish itself against the iPhone — has always been that it is “open”. But Google clearly feels that they have enough of a lock on the Android ecosystem, along with sufficient regulatory capture, that they can now jettison this principle with prejudice and impunity.
➤ You, the state, are ceding the rights of your citizens and your own digital sovereignty to a company with a track record of complying with the extrajudicial demands of authoritarian regimes to remove perfectly legal apps that they happen to dislike. The software that is critical to the running of your businesses and governments will be at the mercy of the opaque whims of a distant and unaccountable corporation.
Context engineering | Chris Loy #ai #llm #longread
In-context learning
As LLMs got smarter and more reliable, we were able to feed them more complex sequences of tokens, covering different types of structured and unstructured data. This enabled LLMs to produce completions that displayed "knowledge" of probable token sequences based on novel structures in the prompt, rather than just remembered patterns from their training dataset. This mode of feeding examples to the LLM is known as in-context learning because the LLM appears to "learn" how to produce output purely based on example sequences within its context window.
This approach led to an explosion of different token sequences that we might programmatically include within the prompt:
- Hard-coded examples, taken from our knowledge domain (documentation, past examples of good output from human or generated sources, toy examples) to encourage predictable output.
- Non-text modalities, with tokens that represented images, audio, or video, that were either directly part of the context window, or first transcribed to text and then tokenised.
- Tool and function calls, defining external functions that the LLM could tell the caller to invoke to access data or computation from the outside world. -Documents and summaries, returned via "RAG" from data sources, or uploaded by users, to feed knowledge into the LLM that lay outside its training dataset.
- Memory and conversation history, condensing information from prior chats, that allowed continuity between a single user and the "chatbot" over multiple conversations.
Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking - Ars Technica #security
The screenshot includes data on the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, Pixel 8, and Pixel 9 family. It does not list the Pixel 10 series, which launched just a few months ago. The phone support is split up into three different conditions: before first unlock, after first unlock, and unlocked. The before first unlock (BFU) state means the phone has not been unlocked since restarting, so all data is encrypted. This is traditionally the most secure state for a phone. In the after first unlock (AFU) state, data extraction is easier. And naturally, an unlocked phone is open season on your data.
ISS in Real Time #space #engineering #rabbithole
A real-time journey onboard the International Space Station
Criminal complaint against facial recognition company Clearview AI #privacy
<...> noyb has filed a criminal complaint against Clearview AI and its managers. The facial recognition company is known for scraping billions of photos of Europeans and people around the world on the internet – and selling its facial recognition system to law enforcement and state actors. Several EU data protection authorities have already imposed fines and bans on Clearview AI. But the US company simply ignores these actions – given the lack of enforcement.
eurollm.io #ai #eu #digitalsovereignty
Large language model made in Europe built to support all official 24 EU languages.
Austrian Ministry Kicks Out Microsoft in Favor of Nextcloud #software #eu #opensource #digitalsovereignty
The ministry implemented a hybrid setup rather than a complete rip-and-replace approach. At the time this project began, BMWET was already in the process of adopting Microsoft 365 and Teams, so a full reversal wasn't feasable.
Instead, Nextcloud now handles all internal collaboration and secure data management, while Microsoft Teams remains available specifically for external meetings (read: for people who haven't moved away from Teams).
The ministry also worked with Nextcloud partner Sendent to integrate with Outlook, allowing employees to continue using familiar email and calendar workflows.
As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
To ensure a smooth transition, BMWET invested heavily in preparing its workforce. The ministry ran an extensive information campaign that included training sessions, instructional videos, and a detailed internal wiki covering everything employees needed to know about the new platform.
Pyrex catalog from from 1938 with hand-drawn lab glassware #design #history #pdf #rabbithole
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