Spyke

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til

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TIL The US secret service trains in Tyler Perry's White House, because they can't get a new training facility funded

This is the relevant part of the article:

“That is why on several occasions, the agency has sent agents to train at an 80 percent-scale mock White House in Atlanta, built as a movie set by the filmmaker Tyler Perry. That was built in four months.”

Nothing more than that in the article. It is really just one part of the overall story about all the problems the secret service is having. So the point us they are underfunded?

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Do our phones listen to our conversations? The answer is complicated.

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A few things are very clear: 1. a phone with a voice assistant enabled has to listen all the time and 2. in order to train the voice assistant the data sometimes needs to be sent to the cloud and listened to by humans.

What is less clear is does this data ever get used for advertising. As you stated there are a number of reasons that make this unlikely.

Simple solution: disable your voice assistant. I do this today and I do not feel like I am losing anything. That said, with the pace AI is improving I can forsee a day when I would feel like I have to enable my voice assistant or I am losing some key functionality of my expensive smart phone service.

science

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‘Staggering’ number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk and more

Carl Sagan’s warning seems relevant:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...”

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Student dorm does not allow wifi routers

As someone who has administered networks and written policies like this the concern here is that you will run an open network that may be used for piracy, hacking, DDOS or to send bomb threats. Tracing down this type of behavior is required by law and allowing students to run open networks makes this near impossible.