Technology

I've been with Mint for over a decade at this point, and I had a T-Mobile 5G gateway in the van, so I'm posting as someone who's used both services.

Were I still in the van, I'd jump on this, as I'm on the $15/month Mint plan, and T-Mobile 5G internet was $50/month. The former is the lowest tier (6GB), and the latter was lucky to hit 200Mbps but never went out in a storm.

Good prices on prepaid mean a chunk of change all at once, but it's so nice not to have a monthly phone bill.

Anyway, not an ad, just figured this could save someone some money.

Computer monitoring software can vary quite a lot, so comparing products purely by the number of features can be misleading.

If I were choosing one, these are the things I'd want to check first:

1. What exactly can it monitor?
Activity logs, websites, applications, screenshots, and other forms of usage data can provide very different levels of visibility.

2. What can actually be controlled?
Monitoring is only part of the equation. Website filtering, application restrictions, and scheduled access can be more useful depending on the situation.

3. How does it handle privacy?
More visibility also means more responsibility. I'd want to understand what information is collected, who can access it, and how users are informed about monitoring.

4. Does it work on the devices you actually need to manage?
Feature availability can differ between operating systems, so general compatibility isn't enough. I'd check whether the specific features I need work on my devices.

5. How does the pricing work?
Device limits and licensing models can make a product that looks inexpensive initially much more expensive when managing multiple devices.

I've been looking at a few products in this category, and SentryPC is one example that combines several monitoring and device-management features.

For anyone comparing SentryPC with other options, this detailed SentryPC feature and pricing breakdown may also be useful.

I'm more interested in what people who have actually used this type of software consider essential.

What is the one feature you would check before anything else?

I’ve been thinking about how much control people actually need over screen time.

There are plenty of tools that can limit when a device can be used, block certain websites, restrict applications, or provide reports about usage. On paper, having more control sounds better.

But I wonder if there is a point where too many controls make the system harder to manage rather than more useful.

For example, a simple daily time limit might be enough for one situation, while another might benefit more from scheduled access, application restrictions, or website filtering.

There’s also a difference between knowing how a device is being used and trying to control every aspect of that usage.

I’m curious what people think:

If you could keep only three screen-time or device-management controls, which three would you choose—and why?

Impacted Versions: GitLab CE/EE: all versions from 7.0 before 18.11.13, 19.0 before 19.0.10, 19.1 before 19.1.9, 19.2 before 19.2.9, 19.3 before 19.3.6, 19.4 before 19.4.3, and 19.5 before 19.5.1 —https://docs.gitlab.com/releases/patches/patch-release-gitlab-19-5-1-released/

Oct 20 (Reuters) - Anthropic's net loss widened sharply to $80.7 billion in the first half of this year, in large part due ​to a rise in the fair value of bonds convertible into shares of the ‌AI startup, according to a draft prospectus for a planned initial public offering that was reviewed by Reuters.

The San Francisco-based company is expected to go public in November and some investors are now weighing a lower valuation of around $1.5 trillion ​following its latest financial disclosures, Reuters reported last week.

Its first-half loss, widening from a loss of $13 ​billion a year earlier, included a $72 billion accounting charge reflecting an increase in the ⁠estimated value of bonds that could eventually convert into Anthropic shares, rather than cash costs tied to ​its operations, the document said.

The disclosures underscore the hefty costs of the AI race even as investors ​give greater scrutiny to whether the vast sums being poured into chips and data centers will generate sufficient returns.

Computer monitoring software can do much more today than simply record what someone does on a computer.

Depending on the software, administrators can monitor activity, review screenshots, restrict websites and applications, set time limits, and sometimes manage devices remotely.

But I'm curious where people draw the line.

For a parent, website filtering and screen-time controls might be the most useful features. For a business, activity visibility, application restrictions, scheduling, and centralized management may matter more.

At the same time, more monitoring isn't necessarily better. There's a legitimate privacy question around how much information should be collected, who can access it, and how clearly users are told about the monitoring.

If you were choosing computer monitoring software today, which features would you consider essential, and which would you consider unnecessary or too intrusive?

Remote computer management sounds simple until you actually have to manage several devices.

Being able to connect to a computer remotely is useful, but I think the more important question is what you can actually do once you're connected.

For example, useful controls might include:

• Seeing whether a device is being used
• Managing applications
• Restricting certain websites
• Setting usage schedules
• Reviewing activity when something goes wrong
• Applying changes without physically accessing the device At the same time, there is a trade-off. The more control an administrator gets, the more important privacy, transparency, and sensible permissions become.

For people who have actually used remote-management or monitoring software, which feature made the biggest practical difference for you?

And which feature sounded useful on paper but turned out not to matter much in real use?

Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.

exploiting compromised certificates requires an active adversary-in-the-middle attack, meaning the attacker must act as a proxy between two TLS parties and receive encrypted traffic, decrypt it, reencrypt it, and send it to the other party. Such capabilities, in some cases, are usually limited to only the most well-resourced attackers. People with control of a local network—at a coffee shop, university, or other organization—face much less of a challenge.

https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.

Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services^[oh, the humanity!] if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta’s terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

“While journalism isn’t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account^[a k a Stockholm Syndrome after Facebook decided linking out was costing them ad dollars], including Nieman Lab,” the lab said.

Specifically, the updated terms say:

You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.

Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it’s inferred from a single use of the word “train” and references to automated scraping and crawling.

Meta’s spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans^[narrator: They do] to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

However, should courts affirm that AI training on non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta’s stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/77050659

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/77059238

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/77146495

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/77059516

Am I the only one who understands what a scam anti-virus/anti-malware are? Ya know it's not just these tools, but a lot of the VPN providers out there too. It's one thing when your providing a genuine service that's advertising a degree of pseudo-anonymity, protection from malicious ISP actors your basically forced to go through due to duopolies and shitty politicians, etc, but another when your lying through your teeth and spying/tracking the very customers you sold yourself as protecting.

Anti-virus is very much like that particularly where Microsoft is concerned. They produce a buggy insecure product, then basically make up a 'solution' that isn't effective rather than issuing a recall and fixing design flaws.

Then bringing it to GNU/Linux serves no point other than to satisfy organizational/institutional requirements and probably justify charging some fee or creating barriers for end-users to use GNU/Linux on corporate and school networks (think colleges requiring you to install special software that checks to make sure your system has anti-virus on it, in theory to prevent viruses from spreading via the school/corporate network... but the software required and the software to check BOTH are malicious and of which neither have source code available to the end user so who knows what they're even doing exactly... not to mention in practice this is only an issue for Microsoft Windows users, but Microsoft wants this nuisance to apply to GNU/Linux users as they don't want GNU/Linux to be perceived as easier to use, which it is... in the past schools have often just whitelisted GNU/Linux users from having to install such software as viruses don't genuinely exist outside of impractical demonstrations on GNU/Linux).

CoreWeave Inc.’s bonds have plunged to levels that typically indicate distress, in a swift move that has caught the attention of Silicon Valley leaders including Chamath Palihapitiya and Elon Musk.

The AI cloud-computing provider’s unsecured debt due in 2032 traded below 80 cents on the dollar on Wednesday, according to Trace pricing data. That’s widely considered the threshold for when a borrower is financially strained.

At that price, the bonds yield more than 15% — a figure noted by Palihapitiya that led Musk to respond “yikes” on his social media platform.

“If CoreWeave is borrowing at 9% and the best return they can get off of that is a 5% return, it doesn’t matter how much they scale,” he said.

Raven, previously called GeoSpy, lets cops figure out what specific Airbnb or Zillow property a photo was taken in.

An AI company now lets cops take a photo and nearly instantly figure out what specific home it was taken in, using only clues in the photo itself, and is clearly pulling data from sites like Zillow and Airbnb.

YouTube Short by 404 Media about this article/topic

The company sent an AI recruiter to interview me, so I sent an AI to represent me. Then I sat in the meeting and watched the two of them discuss my career.

A cyberattack, affecting at least 400 French supermarkets overnight, raised refrigerator temperatures to more than 122°F (50°C) in some cases, forcing millions of dollars’ worth of food to be discarded Monday.

“The weaponization of food has become a reality,” the EU commissioner for agriculture said. The scale of the hack demonstrated “a certain level of sophistication,” a cybersecurity consultant told AFP.

The Élysée has recently called to harden France’s digital infrastructure amid rising security breaches. Monday’s attack may have been continental — a Dutch supermarket chain operating in several countries reported network outages at distribution centers Monday, with one source telling Dutch broadcaster RTL, “You’re going to see huge gaps on the shelves in the coming days.”

Well, here we go! Maybe being able to monitor and control temps offsite wasn't the best of ideas.

UPI has a fuller story here.