Spyke

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Google’s Unannounced Update Scans All Your Photos—One Click Stops It

it collects call logs, contacts, location, your microphone, and much more

From my cursory look at the APK this looks to be complete misinformation. The app has no permissions beside accessing the Internet and reading some basic device status information. It is not a system app either, so it cannot elevate its privileges beyond that. Therefore it can already do less than most other Google apps you have on your phone.

There's one main service that's exposed: the ClassificationApiService. Further, a machine learning library included - most likely for local/offline inference. And that all makes sense if you read what Google has to say about the app:

Sensitive Content Warnings is an optional feature that blurs images that may contain nudity before viewing, and then prompts with a “speed bump” that contains help-finding resources and options, including to view the content. When the feature is enabled, and an image that may contain nudity is about to be sent or forwarded, it also provides a speed bump to remind users of the risks of sending nude imagery and preventing accidental shares.

Now all that said, Google should definitely communicate the intent of these applications better, and not silently install some suspicious looking app without consent. But if Google wanted more data from you - most of the time they can just ask you to share it - Where do you store your contacts? How do you share files with your other devices?

In any case I do think that this sort of client side scanning is still concerning, since it's now just one step away from forwarding images that trigger the classification service to law enforcement.

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Why SSD prices are skyrocketing, and why they'll get worse in the near-term

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I think RAM manufacturers over increased production capacity in 2020 and got hurt by that - so maybe the industry will not adjust as flexibly this time for fear of these investments not paying off

The origins of today’s cycle, says Coughlin, go all the way back to the chip supply panic surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. To avoid supply-chain stumbles and support the rapid shift to remote work, hyperscalers—data-center giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—bought up huge inventories of memory and storage, thus boosting prices, he notes.

But then supply became more regular and data-center expansion fell off in 2022, causing memory and storage prices to plummet. This recession continued into 2023, and even resulted in big memory and storage companies such as Samsung cutting production by 50 percent to try to keep prices from going below the costs of manufacturing, says Coughlin. It was a rare and fairly desperate move, because companies typically have to run plants at full capacity just to earn back their value.

After a recovery began in late 2023, “all the memory and storage companies were very wary of increasing their production capacity again,” says Coughlin. “Thus there was little or no investment in new production capacity in 2024 and through most of 2025.”

https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage