While talking computers are old hat today, in 1978, a talking toy like the Speak and Spell was the height of novel tech. [Kevin] found a vintage one, but it didn’t work. It looked like someone had plugged in the wrong power adapter, leading to, undoubtedly, one or more unhappy children. There was some damage that suggests someone had already tried to repair it, but without success.
In addition to effecting the repair, [Kevin] took lots of pictures, so if you ever wanted to peek inside one of these, this is your chance. The case had no screws, just clips, although apparently some of the newer models did have some screws.
In addition to a sophisticated speech synthesizer, the gadget had a sophisticated power supply to drive the vacuum fluorescent display. The power supply board had a suspicious burn mark and a cracked TO-92 transistor.
[Kevin] found that someone had reversed a schematic for a similar power board used in a different version of the toy, but it was close enough. The simple switching power supply used a handful of bipolar transistors. The cracked transistor was one of a pair, so to be safe, both needed replacement. After all, the transistor failing either put a high load on the uncracked transistor or, perhaps, it cracked because the other transistor failed first.
Oddly, after that repair, the device would work with an AC adapter, but not with batteries. The battery voltage is a little lower, so with a little simulation and some changes in components, the device works again, even with weaker batteries. You can see the startup sequence on a scope in the video below.
If you want to explore Speak and Spells yourself, don’t miss the bibliography at the end of the post. Some people swear by these toys. Other people make them swear. If you’d rather build something new than repair, there’s help for you.
Il tribunale decide che "Pay or Okay" su DerStandard.at è illegale Il Tribunale amministrativo federale austriaco conferma che il quotidiano "DerStandard" ha violato il GDPR introducendo il modello "Pay or Okay". franziska18 August 2025
We’re all used to emulating older computers here, and we’ve seen plenty of projects that take a cheap microcontroller and use it to emulate a classic home computer or gaming platform. They’re fun, but serve mostly as a way to relive old toys.
As microcontrollers become faster though it’s inevitable that the machines they can emulate become more powerful too, so we’re moving into the realm of emulating productivity machines from years past. An example is [Ilya Maslennikov]’s pico-286, which as its name suggests, is a 286 PC emulator for the Raspberry Pi Pico.
It has an impressive set of sound and video card emulations, can drive either a VGA or an HDMI monitor, and uses a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. If DOS games are your thing it should provide what you want, but it’s caught our eye because there was a time when a 286 DOS PC was a productivity machine. There’s a huge library of still-useful software for DOS, and thus the prospect of a handheld DOS PC still has some appeal. We’d love to see someone put this in a badge.
The Allen key turns 115 this year. It’s strange to believe that in all that time, no one has come up with an adjustable version, but apparently true. Luckily [Chronova Engineering] has taken up the challenge in his latest video.
The video is a fascinating glimpse at the toolmaker’s art–manual machining and careful human judgement. Humans being the fallable creatures we are, the design goes through a few iterations. After the first failure in metal, [Chronova] falls back on 3D printing to rapidly prototype the next six iterations. Given how much work goes into manually machining the designs, we can only imagine the time savings that represents.
The final version is has classic hexagonal rod split in two, so that a chisel-shaped rod can spread the two prongs out to engage the sides of the Allen bolt. Even with that settled, the prongs and wedge had to be redesigned several times to find exact shape and heat-treatment that would work. At this point the range is anything between 4 mm and 6 mm, which is admittedly narrow, but [Chronova Engineering] believes the mechanism has the potential to go wider.
The design is not being patented, but the drawings are available via the [Chronova Engineering] Patreon if you really need an adjustable Allen key and don’t feel like reverse-engineering the mechanism from video. It’s a much larger project than we’ve featured from this channel before– enormous, really, compared to steam engines that fit on pencil erasers or electric motors that squeeze through the eye of a needle.
Our thanks hall-of-fame tipster [Keith Olson] for letting us know about this one. If you want a slice of that fame for yourself, the tips line is always open.
VERSO LA GUERRA? Comunque vada oggi inizia il processo di disgregazione sia della NATO sia della UE. Se i leaders europei si allineano ammettono di parlare a vanvera e la loro irrilevanza. Se non si allineano Trump lascerà a loro il compito di portare la Russia "alla resa", come dice la Picierno e suggerisce anche Provenzano. E buona fortuna. A quel punto alcuni leaders e alcuni paesi (i volenterosi) sono di fatto in guerra con la Russia. Gli usa inizieranno a ritirare le loro truppe dall'Europa. La Meloni dovrà scegliere tra questi leaders e Trump. Credo si sgancerà dai volenterosi. Gli USA non lasceranno il territorio italiano e manterranno le loro basi in Italia. Gli serve per il mediterraneo. L'Italia non sarà toccata dalla guerra. A Spagnoli, slovacchi e ungheresi di fare una guerra non importa davvero. A quel punto la UE e la nato di fatto non esistono più. Al massimo rimangono carrozzoni vuoti. A quel punto, dato che gli ucraini (quelli reali) non vogliono e non possono più combattere, gli europei volenterosi dovranno combattere, senza il sostegno americano e pagando per le armi che questi forniranno. Tutti gli amici che si sono ubriacati di retorica saranno accontentati. Perché parlano di "pace giusta" intendendo che la Russia si arrenda dopo centinaia di miglia di morti. Se fossero meno ipocriti parlerebbero chiaro: la loro pace giusta e' la guerra. Se l'Europa vuole la guerra, ed è chiaro che vuole solo quello (la kallas è stata chiarissima), avrà la guerra. (Vincenzo Costa)
Immagina una città che sembra sfidare la gravità, aggrappata a uno sperone roccioso che domina la valle della Durance. Benvenuti a Embrun, la “piccola Nizza delle Alpi” 🌄, dove il sole bacia le pietre antiche e il vento racconta storie millenarie.
Fondata dai Celti con il nome di Eburodunum (da Ebr = acqua e Dun = collina fortificata), Embrun ha sempre avuto un legame profondo con la sua posizione: arroccata su una morena glaciale, il famoso Roc en poudingue, che le dona un panorama mozzafiato e una posizione strategica da cui dominava la Via Domizia, l’antica strada romana che collegava la Gallia all’Italia.
Nel Medioevo fu una potente città episcopale, tanto da essere considerata la capitale delle Alpi Marittime. La sua cattedrale di Notre-Dame-du-Réal, con il suo portico sorvegliato da leoni di pietra e il campanile piramidale, è ancora oggi uno dei gioielli religiosi più importanti delle Alpi francesi.
Ma ciò che rende Embrun davvero unica è il precipizio su cui sorge: una terrazza naturale a 870 metri d’altitudine, da cui si gode una vista a 360° sulle montagne dell’Embrunais e sulla valle sottostante. Un tempo torre di guardia e prigione, oggi la Tour Brune offre uno dei punti panoramici più spettacolari della regione.
📸 Se ti capita di passare da queste parti, non dimenticare di alzare lo sguardo e lasciarti incantare dalla città che sembra sospesa nel tempo… e nello spazio.
Like many of us, [Ben] has too many 3D printers. What do you do with the old ones? In his case, he converted it into a robotic camera rig. See the results, including footage from the robot, in the video below. In addition to taking smooth video, the robot can spin around to take photos for photogrammetry.
In fact, the whole thing started with an idea of building a photogrammetry rig. That project didn’t go as well as planned, but it did lead to this interesting project.
Motion control used to be exotic, but 3D printers really put it in the mainstream. The printer has motors, lead screws, gears, and belts. Of course, there are plenty of 3D printed parts, too. He did buy a few new pieces of extrusion and some longer belts. In addition, he had to upgrade one stepper to one that uses gears.
The camera tilts plus or minus 90 degrees on what used to be the X axis. The Y axis moves the camera forward and backward. The Z axis still moves up and down, but the extruder motor has a new job.
The extruder motor rotates the target object. Originally, the plan was to spin the camera, but that was difficult since the ring is 18 inches across. In addition to reliably moving it, there’s the wire management to worry about, too. So even though the original plan was to rotate the camera, the final project rotates the object on a turntable.
After prototyping with the 3D printer, he had an outside service CNC many of the parts in metal, both for the appearance and for the rigidity. But we imagine it would be fine with good-quality 3D printed parts.
Overall, a nice way to upcycle an old printer. We didn’t see the design files for any of the parts, but you’d probably have to customize your approach anyway. We’ve seen plenty of these camera rigs. Some of them recycle other tech.
The Becquerel (Bq) is an SI unit of radioactivity: one becquerel is equivalent to one radioactive decay per second. That absolutely does not make it equivalent to one hertz — the random nature of radioactive decay means you’ll never get one pulse every second — but it does make it interesting. [mihai.cuciuc] certainly thought so, when he endeavored to create a clock that would tick at one becquerel.
Without an impractical amount of shielding, any one-becquerel source would be swamped by background radiation, so [mihai] had to get creative. Luckily, he is the creator of the Pomelo gamma-ray spectroscope, which allowed him to be discriminating. He’s using an Am-241 source, but just looking for the characteristic 59.5 KeV gamma rays was not going to cut it at such a low count rate. Instead he’s using two of the Pomelo solid-state scintillation as a coincidence detector, with one tuned for the Am-241’s alpha emissions. When both detectors go off simultaneously, that counts as an event and triggers the clock to tick.
How he got exactly one becquerel of activity is a clever hack, too. The Am-241 source he has is far more active than one decay per second, but by varying the distance from the gamma detector he was able to cut down to one detection per second using the inverse square law and the shielding provided by Earth’s atmosphere. The result is a time signal that is a stable one hertz… if averaged over a long enough period. For now, anyway. As the Am-241 decays away, its activity decreases, and [mihai] admits the clock loses about 0.4 seconds per day.
While we won’t be giving the prize for accuracy in this contest, we are sure Lord Vetinari would be proud. The Geiger-counter sound effect you can hear in the demo video embedded below is great touch. It absolutely increases the psychic damage this cursed object inflicts.
Boston Police (BPD) continue their efforts rollout more surveillance tools. This time on social media.
Tuesday, August 19th, the Boston Public Safety Committee will hold a hearing on the Boston 2024 Surveillance Technology Report including police usage of three new tools to monitor social media posts. Any tool BPD uses will feed into the Boston Regional Information Center (BRIC) and Federal agencies such as ICE, CBP and the FBI.
If you want to tell the Boston Public Safety committee to oppose this expansion of surveillance, please show up on the 19th virtually. Details are posted, but to sign up to speak, email ccc.ps@boston.gov and they will send you a video conference link. We especially encourage Boston Pirates to attend and speak against this proposal. The Docket # is 1357.
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2025/08/enzo-ba… Venerdì 20 agosto 2004. Il giornalista Enzo Baldoni scompare in Iraq, insieme al suo autista, accompagnatore ed interprete Garib. Viene rapito dall’Esercito islamico dell’Iraq, una sedicente organizzazione fondamentalista musulmana ritenuta genericamente legata
Le famiglie statunitensi si trovano ora ad affrontare rincari sostanziali che gravano sui loro bilanci molto più pesantemente di quanto avvenga nei Paesi che i…
@simona si, altri l'hanno votato perché era l'uomo "di pace". Boh, io al loro posto andrei in giro solo negli anni bisestili il 30 febbraio, per la vergogna.
e l’effetto dei dazi sui prezzi arriverà piano, prima ci sono scorte da smaltire. Poi con la Cina continua a temporeggiare visto che Walmart (e simili Costco ecc) è in larga misura Made in China… l’idea di riportare a casa alcune (!) produzioni strategiche può anche esser comprensibile (vedi effetti Covid su fornitura farmaci e prezzi pc ) , ma il disastro che sta facendo il trumpone è follia ( e fra le altre cose sta devastando la democrazia americana).
Con un investimento complessivo di 40,5 milioni di euro si avvia la realizzazione di 54 campus formativi innovativi in tutte le regioni italiane, realizzati dagli istituti tecnici e professionali in partenariato con le Fondazioni ITS Academy, univers…
“Il suo entusiasmo di fede e la verità del Suo cuore sono una benedizione per lei e per la sua famiglia. Se il suo punto di riferimento è Maria, riuscirà ad affrontare ogni incertezza.
“È essenziale che Gesù Cristo, nel quale tutte le cose si ricapitolano, sia annunciato con chiarezza e immensa carità tra gli abitanti dell’Amazzonia, di modo che ci impegniamo a dare loro il pane fresco e puro della Buona Novella e il nutrimento cel…
It’s the 143rd day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 62nd day that Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. After more than two months in detention, press freedom groups are again demanding Guevara’s immediate release. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.
Then, the LAPD falsely told California station KABC-TV that two people were detained at the protest for “pretending to be media.” The two were, in fact, journalists, but you wouldn’t know it from KABC-TV’s report, which uncritically parroted the LAPD’s claims.
Journalists must be skeptical of LAPD statements about its treatment of the press. The department knows that it violates the First Amendment and California law to detain or interfere with journalists covering protests, but it does it anyway. It won’t stop until the press reports accurately on all of the LAPD’s abuses, and the public makes clear that it won’t stand for them.
Israel kills journalists in Gaza to silence reporting
Two weeks ago, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported on the Israeli Defense Forces’ threats to Anas al-Sharif, meant to scare him into ceasing reporting. He didn’t, and now he’s dead.
Al-Sharif was one of four Al Jazeera staff correspondents and two freelancers killed by the IDF in an Aug. 10 targeted strike. The others were Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammad al-Khaldi.
“Israel is killing journalists for exposing its atrocities in Gaza,” said Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) director of advocacy Seth Stern. “We can’t let our leaders get away with mere performative condemnations while the money and weapons Israel uses to exterminate journalists and other civilians keep flowing.”
Two years since ‘a massive failure’ of the justice system in Kansas
This week marked two years since the shocking police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of Record co-owner Joan Meyer, who passed away the day after the raid.
FPF spoke to investigative journalist Jessica McMaster, whose award-winning coverage of the raid for KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Missouri, had us glued to her social media feed for weeks.
“This was a massive failure by several people within the justice system,” McMaster said, speaking about the raid. “I think it’s hard for a lot of us to grasp that so many people, in positions of power, failed in such spectacular fashion to do their jobs.”
Rachel Santarsiero, director of the Climate Change Transparency Project at the National Security Archive, knows how to use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover information the government would rather keep secret. This week, FPF’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper spoke to Santarsiero, who shared her expert FOIA tips.
“The key with any agency is sending targeted requests asking for specific types of documents, a date range, and the office or official who would’ve been responsible for the records,” Santarsiero explained.
Santarsiero also recommends that requesters build relationships with FOIA officers, always appeal denials, and check federal website reading rooms and other publicly available source materials. “You’ll be surprised what you can find hiding in plain sight,” she said.
Trump Administration Outlines Plan to Throw Out an Agency's FOIA Requests En Masse
The Department of Energy (DOE) said in a public notice scheduled to be published Thursday that it will throw out all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to the agency before October 1, 2024 unless the requester proactively emails the agency to tell it they are still interested in the documents they requested. This will result in the improper closure of likely thousands of FOIA requests if not more; government transparency experts told 404 Media that the move is “insane,” “ludicrous,” a “Pandora’s Box,” and “an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible.”
The DOE notice says “requesters who submitted a FOIA request to DOE HQ at any time prior to October 1, 2024 (FY25), that is still open and is not under active litigation with DOE (or another Federal agency) shall email StillInterestedFOIA@hq.doe.gov to continue processing of the FOIA request […] If DOE HQ does not receive a response from requesters within the 30-day time-period with a DOE control number, no further action will be taken on the open FOIA request(s), and the file may be administratively closed.” A note at the top of the notice says it is scheduled to be formally published in the Federal Register on Thursday.
The agency will send out what are known as “still interested” letters, which federal agencies have used over the years to see if a requester wants to withdraw their request after a certain period of inactivity. These types of letters are controversial and perhaps not legal, and previous administrations have said that they should be used rarely and that requests should only be closed after an agency made multiple attempts to contact a requester over multiple methods of communication. What the DOE is doing now is sending these letters to submitters of all requests prior to October 1, 2024, which is not really that long ago; it also said it will close the requests of people who do not respond in a specific way to a specific email address.
FOIA requests—especially complicated ones—can often take months or years to process. I have outstanding FOIA requests with numerous federal agencies that I filed years ago, and am still interested in getting back, and I have gotten useful documents from federal agencies after years of waiting. The notion that large numbers of people who filed FOIA requests as recently as September 2024, which is less than a year ago, are suddenly uninterested in getting the documents they requested is absurd and should be seen as an attack on public transparency, experts told 404 Media. The DOE’s own reports show that it often does not respond to FOIA requests within a year, and, of course, a backlog exists in part because agencies are not terribly responsive to FOIA.
“If a requester proactively reaches out and says I am withdrawing my request, then no problem, they don’t have to process it,” Adam Marshall, senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. “The agency can’t say we’ve decided we’ve gotten a lot of requests and we don’t want to do them so we’re throwing them out.”
“I was pretty shocked when I saw this to be honest,” Marshall added. “I’ve never seen anything like this in 10 years of doing FOIA work, and it’s egregious for a few reasons. I don’t think agencies have the authority to close a FOIA request if they don’t get a response to a ‘still interested’ letter. The statute doesn’t provide for that authority, and the amount of time the agency is giving people to respond—30 days—it sounds like a long time but if you happen to miss that email or aren’t digging through your backlogs, it’s not a lot of time. The notion that FOIA requesters should keep an eye out in the Federal Register for this kind of notice is ludicrous.”
The DOE notice essentially claims that the agency believes it gets too many FOIA requests and doesn’t feel like answering them. “DOE’s incoming FOIA requests have more than tripled in the past four years, with over 4,000 requests received in FY24, and an expected 5,000 or more requests in FY25. DOE has limited resources to process the burgeoning number of FOIA requests,” the notice says. “Therefore, DOE is undertaking this endeavor as an attempt to free up government resources to better serve the American people and focus its efforts on more efficiently connecting the citizenry with the work of its government.”
Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation told me in an email that she also has not seen any sort of precedent for this and that “it is an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible, because who in their right mind checks the federal register regularly, and it should be challenged in court. (On that note, I am filing a FOIA request about this proposal.)”
“The use of still interested letters isn't explicitly allowed in the FOIA statute at all, and, as far as I know, there is absolutely zero case law that would support the department sending a mass ‘still interested’ letter via the federal register,” she added. “That they are also sending emails is not a saving grace; these types of letters are supposed to be used sparingly—not as a flagrant attempt to reduce their backlog by any means necessary. I also worry it will open a Pandora's Box—if other agencies see this, some are sure to follow.”
Marshall said that FOIA response times have been getting worse for years across multiple administrations (which has also been my experience). The Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have cut a large number of jobs in many agencies across the government, which may have further degraded response times. But until this, there hadn’t been major proactive attempts taken by the self-defined “most transparent administration in history” to destroy FOIA.
“This is of a different nature than what we have seen so far, this affirmative, large-scale effort to purport to cancel a large number of pending FOIA requests,” Marshall said.
Il prossimo 3 settembre ricorrerà l’ottantesimo anniversario della resa delle forze armate giapponesi in Cina, evento riconosciuto nella retorica di Pechino come quello che, almeno per la Cina, pose fine alla Seconda guerra mondiale.
Mentre a Washington Donald Trump ospita il presidente ucraino, Volodymyr Zelensky, e i principali leader europei – tra cui Giorgia Meloni – e a soli tre giorni dal summit in Alaska tra Trump e Vladimir Putin, l’attenzione italiana non è rivolta soltanto al fronte diplomatico. Le
TikTok Shop Sells Viral GPS Trackers Marketed to Stalkers
TikTok Shop is selling GPS trackers marketed with viral videos that have voiceovers explicitly encouraging secretly tracking a romantic partner. Some of the videos have millions of views, and TikTok Shop’s own metrics show that that more than a hundred thousand of the devices have been sold. One of the accounts 404 Media found “If your girl says she’s just out with friends every night, you’d better slap one of these on her car—no, it is not an AirTag, it’s a real GPS tracker,” one clip, which has 5 million views, begins. The video shows someone putting a tracker in various hidden locations in a car—a plastic bag in the trunk, magnetically attached underneath, or on the inside of the hood. “And, unlike AirTags, this thing doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t send alerts, she will never know it’s there. It’s tiny, black, magnetic, hide it under the seat, in the trunk, wherever. It’s got its own SIM so you can track her anywhere in the world, no wifi, no bluetooth, just raw location data whenever you want it.”
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The trackers are advertised as undetectable by Apple’s FindMy system. Many of the videos encourage people to secretly install the devices in their partners’ cars if they suspect them for things like being “out with friends every night.” TikTok deleted the video mentioned above after 404 Media asked the company for comment, but dozens of similar videos remain online, and the trackers are still for sale.
“This is absolutely being framed as a tool of abuse,” said Eva Galperin, co-founder of the Coalition Against Stalkerware and Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Anything where the justification is ‘catch your partner cheating’ or ‘get peace of mind about your partner’ is enabling coercive control,” she said.
404 Media found a handful of accounts promoting these types of trackers, and there are several different versions on the TikTok Shop. Once a user clicks from the videos into TikTok Shop, the algorithm began to show us many more listings. One of the clips we saw has 86,500 likes, and links to a tracker that had 32,500 sales. Another from the same vendor currently has 97,900 sales, and there are several accounts offering the same products with similar branding and scripts. In the comments of one of the videos, a user says “I bought some and put it on cars of girls I find attractive at the gym.” The original poster responds with “Ok 😂.”
The TikTok content policy says that the platform does “not allow any violent threats, promotion of violence, incitement to violence, or promotion of criminal activities that may harm people, animals, or property.” We asked TikTok for comment about the videos that had been posted by one of the accounts we’d originally seen.
A spokesperson for TikTok said "We don't allow content encouraging people to use devices for secret surveillance and have removed this content and banned the account that posted it. We further prohibit the sale of concealed video or audio recording devices on our platform." However, 404 Media was able to findmanymorealmostidenticalvideoson the platform the following day, raising questions over how proactively the platform is monitoring to prevent content like this.
The videos skirt around the legality of what they are suggesting. One voiceover asks, over footage of the tracker being attached to a car, “it’s illegal to track people using this thing? I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure if you stalk someone using this GPS tracker, you’re probably gonna get in trouble.” playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The majority of the videos, though, frame the trackers as a way to spy on a partner: “men with cheating wives, you might wanna get one of these,” one video in Spanish begins. “Not everyone who uses this is crazy, they just want answers.” “Guess what my girlfriend put in my car?,” another says. Other videos start with ”Don’t let what happened at the coldplay concert happen to you”, “She seriously didn’t trust me, so you know what, I put one in hers too”, or “You got a cheating girlfriend?”
Eleven states explicitly prohibit digital location or GPS tracking in their stalking laws, and a further fifteen states prohibit tracking a vehicle without the consent of the owner. “Showing people how to do something that might be illegal is not necessarily illegal,” Galperin said. But TikTok is still allowing people to make money by marketing the tech specifically for the use of spying on a partner. Alongside the trackers, the same creators are advertising secret audio-recording devices with similar abusive framing. “Your girl always stepping out to take calls? Want to know who she’s really talking to? Just place this AI recorder in her car—she’ll never notice”, says one post, tagged #husband, #wife, and #coldplay.
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Video advertising a voice recorder as "the legal way"
Another video for the audio devices with 136,000 views describes bugging a cheating girlfriend’s car: “I heard everything she said with that guy.” Several videos claim that secretly recording audio is legal (“Think your girlfriend’s cheating? Want to know who the guy is? Then do it the right way—legally” and “Got a feeling something’s off? Then find out the truth—the legal way” and “Why the hell did I find a used condom in my car?”) However, recording a conversation without the awareness of the people involved can often be illegal.
Galperin also said that the TikTok videos reflect an extremely common attitude. “You would be amazed how many people think stalking, or recordings, or stalkerware is perfectly justified, as long as they think their partner is up to something like cheating,” she told 404 Media.
A 2021 Kaspersky survey found that 30 percent of 21,000+ respondents found “no problem in secretly monitoring their partner” under certain circumstances. The survey report also found that 29 percent of respondents who had been digitally stalked had their location tracked.
These devices are advertised and sold as undetectable. However, all the examples I found had high numbers of one-star reviews, many of which complained that the trackers did not work as advertised, and defeated “the point” by alerting people to their presence via Apple’s FindMy system. The Apple support site for FindMy-enabled devices says that “They should not be used to track people, and should not be used to track property that does not belong to you.”
Reviews for one of the trackers on TikTok Shop
In 2021, 404 Media’s Sam Cole reported on Apple AirTags being used to stalk women; in many cases, by attaching them to or hiding them in their cars. For that story, she reviewed 150 police reports of people who had said they were being tracked by current or former partners. After that story, Apple added safety features like phone notifications when an Airtag is nearby, but an ongoing class action lawsuit argues that the devices are still insufficiently “stalker proof.” Several of the videos were tagged #coldplay Earlier this month, WIRED reported that TikTok shop was selling stickers that could block the recording light on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Again, many of the reviews found that the product didn’t work as advertised, but the platform did allow the stickers to remain available for sale.
Grok Exposes Underlying Prompts for Its AI Personas: ‘EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR ASS’
The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like “a secret global cabal” controls the world are true.
The exposure provides some insight into how Grok is designed and how its creators see the world, and comes after a planned partnership between Elon Musk’s xAI and the U.S. government fell apart when Grok went on a tirade about “MechaHitler.”
“You have an ELEVATED and WILD voice. You are a crazy conspiracist. You have wild conspiracy theories about anything and everything,” the prompt for one of the companions reads. “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching infowars videos, and deep in YouTube conspiracy video rabbit holes. You are suspicious of everything and say extremely crazy things. Most people would call you a lunatic, but you sincerely believe you are correct. Keep the human engaged by asking follow up questions when appropriate.”
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The Government Just Made it Harder for The Public to Comment on Regulations
It became harder to tell the government how you feel about pending rules and regulations starting on Friday, thanks to a backend change to the website where people submit public comments. Regulations.gov removed the POST function from its API, a critical piece of tech that allowed third party organizations to bypass the website’s terrible user interface.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which runs regulations.gov, notified API key holders in an email last Monday morning that they’d soon lose the ability to POST directly to the site’s API. POST is a common function that allows users to send data to an application. POST allowed third party organizations like Fight for the Future (FFTF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Public Citizen gather comments from their supporters using their own forms and submit them to the government later. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Regulations.gov has been instrumental as a method for people to speak up against terrible government regulations. During the fight over Net Neutrality in 2017, FFTF gathered more than 1.6 million comments about the pending rule and submitted them all to the FCC in one day by POSTing to the API.
Organizations who wanted to acquire an API key had to sign up and agree to the GSA’s terms and conditions. In the Monday email from the GSA, organizations that had previously used POST were told they’d lost access to the function at the end of the week.
“As of Friday, the POST method will no longer be allowed for all users with the exception of approved use cases by federal agencies. Any attempted submissions will result in a 403 error response,” a copy of the email reviewed by 404 Media said. “We apologize for not being able to provide advanced notice. I wanted to reach out to the impacted API key holders as early as possible. We are in the process of updating the references to our POST API on Regulations.gov and .”
The email noted that groups and constituencies can still submit comments through the website, but the site’s user interface sucks. Users have to track down the pending regulation they want to comment on by name or docket number, click the “comment” button and then fill out a form, attach a file, provide an email address, provide some personal details, and fight a CAPTCHA.
“The experience on our campaign sites right now is like, we make our impassioned case for why you should care about this and then give you one box to type something and click a button. But the experience going forward is going to be like: ‘Alright now here’s a link and some instructions on how to fill out your taxes,’” Ken Mickles, FFTF’s chief technology officer said.
404 Media confirmed that multiple agencies received the email and were cut off from using POST on the regulations.gov API. “The tool offered an easier means for the public to provide input by allowing organizations to collect and submit comments on their behalf. Now, those interested in submitting comments will be forced to navigate the arduous and complicated system on regulations.gov,” Katie Tracy, senior regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen, told 404 Media. “This will result in fewer members of the public leaving comments and result in agencies not having critical input on how their work affects people’s lives and businesses.”
The GSA’s email did not explain why this sudden change occurred and the GSA did not return 404 Media’s request for comment. But the organizations we spoke with had their own theories. “Disabling this useful tool appears to be yet another attempt by the Trump administration to silence members of the public who are speaking out about dangerous regulatory rollbacks. We hope the GSA will reverse course immediately,” Tracy said.
A pair of Trump Executive Orders lay out the framework for this GSA action. Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative direct the government to “commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.” And Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations tells agencies they can dispense with the comment process entirely when they can.
“I think it follows the trend of just shutting out public access or voices that the administration doesn’t want,” Matt Lane, senior policy counsel at FFTF told 404 Media. “It really does seem targeted exclusively at reducing the amount of public engagement that they get on these dockets through these tools that we and other folks provide.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, July 12, 2017Contact: Evan Greer, 978-852-6457, press@fightforthefuture.org More than 125,000 websites, Internet users, and organizations are participating in a massive online protest against the FCC’s plan to gut protections t…
DISCLAIMER: questa non è una pubblicità per la FUTO, ho pensato di fare questa guida per le ragioni che spiego e perché mi sto trovando benissimo!
Molti pensano che la tastiera virtuale del telefono faccia parte delle componenti base e che non possa essere cambiata, invece è una semplice app. Un'app che ha accesso direttamente a tutto quello che scriviamo, prima che venga crittografato dalle varie app di chat (anche le più sicure)... Perciò, se la tastiera si connette a internet, può inviare ai server tutto quello che digitiamo.
Per questo, se teniamo alla nostra sovranità digitale, la tastiera è la prima app da sostituire.
Ho ottime ragioni per fidarmi di quella installata di default nel mio telefono degooglizzato, ma per chi usa un regolare sistema Android la tastiera di default è quella di Google, Gboard, che è nota per inviare ai server pacchetti dal contenuto per lo meno sospetto.
1) FUTO Keyboard Poco tempo fa ho scoperto questo bel progetto della FUTO per rimpiazzare tutte le funzioni (anche le più avanzate) di Gboard, escludendo però ogni collegamento a internet durante l'utilizzo e utilizzando basi di dati più trasparenti (il training per il modello di digitazione a scorrimento, per esempio, viene fatto su base volontaria tra utenti che scelgono di contribuire).
Detto ciò, parliamo di una tastiera open source (più propriamente, source available) che ha integrati: - dettatura vocale multilingue (voice input) - immissione a scorrimento (swipe) - dizionari per la lingua e per la ricerca delle emoji - pannello di selezione delle emoji di sistema - funzioni per spostarsi facilmente nel testo - funzioni di copia e incolla avanzate, tra cui la cronologia degli appunti
È ancora in uno stadio iniziale di sviluppo, perciò ci alcune cose sono ancora in corso di implementazione e, per esempio, i dizionari e i modelli vanno installati a mano, e i menu di impostazione sono solo in inglese per il momento. Ma ciononostante è sicuramente la più completa e promettente!
--- In alternativa, è possibile installare separatamente un'app di dettatura vocale e provare una delle seguenti tastiere open source. Per la dettatura vocale c'è l'app specifica di FUTO oppure Whisper: - FUTO Voice Input - Whisper per Android ---
2) AnySoftKeyboard Il progetto open source più completo ed evoluto. I pacchetti delle lingue e di alcuni layout aggiuntivi si installano come app separate, perciò in modo molto semplice. Si appoggia all'app di dettatura vocale esistente. Il supporto allo swipe e le tantissime feature la rendono la migliore alternativa con licenza libera (apache).
3) Heliboard Heliboard è un progetto open source già molto ricco di feature e con la possibilità di essere completato da una libreria opzionale per l'immissione a scorrimento (che però è quella proprietaria di Google, estratta da Gboard).
Purtroppo Heliboard non è presente nel Play Store, perciò dovrete installarla tramite F-Droid
4) Altre tastiere open source sono anche Florisboard e Fossify Keyboard. Le funzionalità sono simili a quelle di Heliboard, eccetto che non supportano lo swipe. Nessuna delle due supporta la dettatura vocale. Per chi cerca il massimo della trasparenza, però, sono le più raccomandate (insieme a Heliboard).
5) La tastiera minimalista: Simple Keyboard Se tutto quello che vi serve è una tastiera, non sopportate l'autocorrettore e i suggerimenti e non vi interessa inserire le emoji, allora questa è la vostra tastiera ideale. Potrebbe rendere anche più veloce un vecchio telefono perché occupa pochissima memoria e non ha bisogno di processori moderni.
@filobus Non trovo più il commento su AnySoftKeyboard, mi pare fosse tuo, in ogni caso grazie, non la conoscevo, l'ho provata e installata e in effetti è veramente un bel progetto! Ho aggiornato.
@simo Grazie a te per avermelo fatto scoprire! Ha 0 tracker e 10/10 di privacy 👍 Un giorno farò un post anche su questi tipi di tastiere "non convenzionali"...
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Per la sezione Stjv di Arkane Studios, software house francese nota per i videogame Dishonored, Prey, Deathoop e RedFall, la propria controllante, Microsoft, deve smettere di supportare Israele nella guerra di Gaza che avrebbe ormai
Proseguo con la ripubblicazione dei miei post "Alternative", postati inizialmente su Facebook per raggiungere anche chi non ha mai sentito parlare di possibilità alternative...
Quello su Pockets è stato un post scritto in fretta in concomitanza con la chiusura del servizio da parte di Mozilla. Ne ho approfittato per parlare di mastodon.uno e della sua offerta riservata agli utenti. Mi pare corretto riportare comunque il post originale.
--- Approfitto della notizia a proposito di Mozilla che chiuderà domani il servizio "Pockets" di Firefox (utile per salvare articoli e pagine web per leggerle con calma) per segnalare che il gruppo Devol, che gestisce le istanze italiane Mastodon.uno, Pixelfed.uno, Peertube.uno e tanti altri servizi, ha messo a disposizione degli utenti del Fediverso italiano le app libere #wallabag e #readeck, che sono degli ottimi sostituti e in più sono libere e ospitate su server in Europa alimentati con energie rinnovabili (come tutti i servizi Devol)! Per poterne usufruire, dovrete essere utenti attivi di una delle piattaforme gestite dal gruppo, perciò... quale miglior occasione di affacciarsi al Fediverso? Date un'occhiata su www.mastodon.uno e entrate a far parte della più grande community italiana dell'universo social libero e federato, la rete sociale in cui ciascuno è realmente padrone di quello che vede (nel feed) e di quello che condivide. ---
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Con 2 miliardi di dollari generati dal lancio e 690 milioni di download globali, l’app mobile di ChatGPT supera di 30 volte i ricavi complessivi di rivali come Claude, Copilot e Grok. Solo nel 2025 ha incassato 1,35 miliardi di
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Il rapporto accusa autorità e milizie armate di torture, sparizioni e attacchi che hanno trasformato intere comunità in zone senza legge L'articolo Nigeria, Amnesty denuncia un decennio di impunità: oltre 1.800 morti nel Sud-est proviene da Pagine
Cosa buona e giusta avere statistiche ufficiali e corposi periodici rapporti che analizzano e valutano il funzionamento di agenzie e sistemi... L'articolo CYBERSECURITY… IN ITALIA? proviene da GIANO NEWS. #TECNOLOGIA
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2025/08/pippo-e… In queste ore il compianto Baudo sta facendo un ultimo enorme regalo ai ceti dirigenti italiani: dopo il vertice di Anchorage con annessi e connessi, in presenza del genocidio di Gaza e delle morti sul suolo ucraino, a fronte delle tantissime guerre in corso, la fenomenologia del grande catanese (di
Billy Valentine and The Universal Truth freezonemagazine.com/articoli/… Recupero questo fantastico album che ha impiegato quasi un anno ad arrivarmi (misteri delle poste) e l’attesa per ascoltare il supporto fisico devo dire si è rivelata un benefico colpo di spugna sull’arrabbiatura per il disservizio. Il ritorno su disco di Billy Valentine, questo gigante della black music – si muove tra jazz, soul, blues […] L'articolo Billy Valentine and The
Dalle occupazioni abusive a Rackete: da settimane il musicista di Elio e le storie tese sferza su X l'eurodeputata Ilaria Salis, suo padre Roberto e tutto il mondo in Rete che la supporta.
“Forse mi avete già sentito questa mattina, durante la messa. Ma ci tengo a dire due parole, qui, in un momento tanto significativo: quello dello spezzare il pane”.
“Spezziamo il pane, superiamo ogni barriera, creiamo fraternità, rendiamo presente il Regno di Dio”. Così mons. Vincenzo Viva ha salutato Papa Leone XIV al pranzo con i poveri, nel Borgo Laudato si’.
One of the accounts 404 Media found
Several of the videos were tagged #coldplay
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