It’s an interesting dynamic where the ransomware groups have to be reliable and professional for their business model to work.

Oh wow, I did not read the source Reuters article and yeah it’s a Chinese project.

This is the kind of stuff that should make Americans evaluate whether their orthodox and somewhat parochial approach to “free speech” (the polemical definition as opposed to the broad concept) needs updating to reflect modern realities.

Even before AI and digitization, there were many examples of how an American interpretation of free speech was clearly lacking, but this AI spam and strategic methods used by russia/China are going to make these deficiencies a much more pressing matter.

I think there are times when it is more relevant, e.g. initial change from a feudal/agrarian model to industrialization. By all accounts this was perhaps the biggest, most impactful change in human history.

One could argue that we are now witnessing a similar transition with respect to the information age.

At any rate, this was a somewhat glib statement on my part. :)

This is a bit of cliche, but still relevant to our current times:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

Antonio Gramsci (Italian Marxist philospher from the turn of the century)

$700 dollars worth half decent?

Yeah, it did look like everything happens server-side. Still seems like a borderline scam.

CPU: Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon (Snapdragon 720G to be exact, they don't list it on their page though)
Memory: 4GB RAM
Storage: 32GB eMMC

They have a bunch of other HW too (LTE modem, camera, voice etc.), but this does look like one of those “legal” silicon valley type scams.

Their subscription service costs $24 a month? This is madness.

I am guessing this because the processing is done in the cloud? But then why the $700 price for the “AI Pin” device; what exactly does it do justify a $700 cost if processing is done in the cloud?

I was young in the 90s/2000s and it honestly felt like computing was a new stage for human progress.

I clearly wasn’t the only one. There was the “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

I think the moral of all this is that fundamentally technology doesn’t matter. If you don’t have the public structures to reign in the oligarchs, shills and liars, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Google had a privacy chief?

What exactly was he doing? Jacking off Pichai?

I wouldn’t go as far as making a big deal out of it, but it is funny.

Not happening at least for another 2 years.

With smartphones being “good enough” (even in the mid-range), they really need AI-focused marketing to try and push upgrades. Same with PCs and laptops.

I see, yes the tab bar was missing.

I admit this is something they need to work on.

What do you mean by multi-tab browsing.

I’ve used Firefox on Android tablets and while it does have a “phone app” UX to it, it works fine; specifically tabbed browsing is not an issue.

Guess, I will need to stop using Chrome unless I have no other option (I mostly use Firefox, but I occasionally use Chrome).

I hope you’re right. :)

With respect to the US regulatory/judicial actions, I find it difficult to believe that they will be sufficient to nudge the criminals towards genuine self-reflection and a desire to change their behaviour. Similarly, other criminals are likely see enforcement action as more of a “risk to be managed” as opposed to a strong incentive to re-evaluate their approach to criminal schemes.

This is of course not a US only problem, albeit there are countries were consumer rights and business criminality is less socially acceptable.

I didn’t interpret their argument as stating “the agency is wrong”. More like “we weren’t told this was wrong, we were one of the caught … so this claim should be dismissed.”

I would even go as far as saying that this is a sign of disrespect towards judicial processes.

This is a start, but the fact that they come up with this:

Executives had urged the court to dismiss the FTC’s claims against them. They argued that the FTC “singled them out ‘for an ‘unprecedented sanction’” when the agency had “only recently started prosecuting companies for using ‘dark patterns’” under Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA) and the FTC Act. They claimed that the FTC never alerted them to any wrongdoing before filing the lawsuit, so how could they have known they were violating the law?

Suggests that they are not being serious.

And I doubt the fine will be sufficient for them to re-evaluate their attitudes. What we need is full asset seizure (every last cent, home, car, everything) and to send them to do a decade as junior support personnel at a late stage Alzheimer’s care facility (my dad had Alzheimer, so I am not being callous for the sake of it).

They can also do 20 years in prison with no parole if they are too good for community service.

Until there are proper incentives for executives (e.g. full asset seizure and mandatory multi-year community service in roles such as junior janitor, junior hospice care specialist, live-in support for late stage alzheimer’s patients) that require them to take ownership and responsibility for their actions (or lack of thereof), this will continue.

Just look at the 2017 Equifax breach in the US:

Wikipedia background:

An Equifax internal audit in 2015 showed that there was a large backlog of vulnerabilities to patch, that Equifax wasn’t following its own timescales on patching them, that IT staff did not have a comprehensive asset inventory, that Equifax didn’t consider how critical an IT asset was when prioritising patches, and that the patching process worked on an ‘Honour system’. The report set out actions to improve the process, but the time of the breach, two years later, many of them had not been completed.

Equifax press release states that CIO and CSO can now enjoy retirement:

As part of the company’s ongoing review of the cybersecurity incident announced September 7, 2017, Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX) today made personnel changes and released additional information regarding its preliminary findings about the incident.

The company announced that the Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer are retiring.

Richard Smith, the CEO under whose watch this happened, got to retire at the ripe old age of 57 and got a nice bonus of $90 M

Richard Smith, 57, is the third Equifax executive to retire under pressure following the company’s massive data breach revealed earlier this month, putting the personal information of as many as 143 million people at risk.

But the CEO is still set to collect about $72 million this year alone (including nine months’ worth of his $1,450,000 salary), plus another $17.9 million over the next few years. That’s when the rest of Smith’s stock compensation hits a few important milestones or “vests,” allowing Smith to essentially put it in his bank account. Altogether, it adds up to a total potential paycheck of more than $90.1 million, according to Fortune’s calculations based on Equifax securities filings.

I think US consumers will manage. As non-American I find it strange that so few Americans seem to recognize that trade isn’t going to magically make the world a peaceful united place.

It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

A very interesting description. I only occasionally read HN via links from other sources, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of truth to your characterization.