No. At least not in the way most people expect.

It does block some tracking and ads that Chrome alone allows or explicitly adds. But it simply shifts that tracking to Brave. The idea was that you'd still get the benefits of that tracking by giving all of your data to Brave instead. I honestly never was convinced by this considering your data is still being sold, just by a different company so it doesn't sound much better to me. Supposedly, according to them, Brave is more trustworthy and gives you more control over what they track and sell, but I don't trust that business model. There's no real incentive for them to do what they said they would.

I think it's safe to say that all of the LLMs have been training their systems on any site they can get their hands on for some time. That's why apps like Anubis exist trying to keep their crawlers from killing their bandwidth since LLM companies have decided to ignore robots.txt, copyrights, licenses, and other standard practices.

Usage is rising because corporate executives started getting kickbacks and thinking they could cut staff by implementing it. But developers who have actually had to use it have realized it can be useful in a few scenarios, but requires a ton of review of anything it writes because it rarely understands context and often makes mistakes that are really hard to debug because they are subtle. So anyone trying to use it for a language or system they don't understand well is going to have a hard time.

Signal isn't that kind of app. It protects your data in flight, but only has minimal protections after the recipient gets the message. It's a whole other game to protect data at the endpoint. If you can't trust your recipients to protect data, then you shouldn't send them data needing protection. In order to do that you need control over all levels of the device receiving the data, hardware, operating system, file system, and software. Anything else will always leave openings for data at rest at tge destination to be compromised by untrustworthy recipients.

Not a new thing, and I can definitely see good uses for this information. What they should have done is made it so that the one being tracked gets a log and real time notification any time someone is tracking them. This would alleviate some of the toxic spying behavior simply by making it transparent rather than covert.

Even if Copilot was suspended, the idea was put into the heads of managers and executives. My work laptop current has three applications constantly locking files as they track everything I do and every file that gets touched and upload it all to the servers. Git now takes a ridiculous amount of time to check in and push files since it creates tons of small changes to the cached files that a the tracking applications block further changes or uploads until they can record the information. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute to check in a single small file. Something that used to take a second or two at most. Worst part is if I'm in a WebEx meeting, the fighting over caches in it and git and any other processes,often causes deadlocks that crash the machine. I'm constantly apologizing for being late for meetings because the laptop crashed and had to reboot. It's gotten to the point that they finally gave me a much faster laptop rather than just excluding cache and git folders and such from the tracking because the people who want literally everything tracked don't know what cache or git is, much less how much useless data they're gathering or how the AI that analyzes it all is going yo get distracted by the garbage and not find any useful data anyway. Microsoft needs to get in the game to push the others back out.

Yeah. They can't get Mastodon moderators to suppress negative publicity like they can on Reddit and other platforms.

I mean it's kind of like the "humans evolved from monkeys" or whatever primate you want to substitute for monkey. No, they branched off from a common ancestor though.

I mean lots of people get mixed up between BSD, Linux, UNIX, and all the variations over the years. Is MacOS a version of Linux? No. Is a human a type of ape? No. Are MacOS and Linux way, way closer than either are to Windows, hell yes. Just like people are way closer to being monkeys than swallows. There's a lot of mixed breeding in both examples and a lot of total incompatibilities as well.

But the shithead exec is supportive of fascists which means privacy is secondary to the desires of the current regime. That's just a standard part of fascism. And if the current regime is allowing untested backdoor code to be inserted in the Treasury department and NASA and the CDC and most major social media to strip out protections for people they don't like, climate change, etc. Just imagine what someone who actually supports them ideologically would be willing to do.

$20 to unlock the API killed it for me. If it has a built in way yo lock it down, it's not an open platform and is a great way for bugs to brick a device.

Also Google on 2008: "By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage."

Problem is this means that things we were hoping to get like having hormone replacement therapy actually approved by the FDA for use for transgender care will not happen and any enforcement of anti-discrimination or laws against hate speech at the federal level will no longer apply to trans and non-binary people. This will allow, for example, insurance companies to not have to cover transgender care. There is already a huge waiting list for people who are seeking care in the US due to the lack of specialists (myself included), so that list is likely to get longer. And likely any doctors who might have been planning to take up transgender care specialties may have their programs lose their funding. It's a huge impact to a lot of areas of government and many industries to have the federal government not recognize transgender care as valid and not recognize non-binary people like me as people at all.

Also, I'm fortunate enough to live in a state that is friendly to transgender and non-binary people, but my employer is not based here, so the insurance I have doesn't have to obey local laws that don't allow for blanket policies banning coverage of transgender care. So, the federal laws do matter.