11 posts tagged ‘Tech’
ShredOS is an entire OS just for destroying data
Boing Boing,
Want to utterly wipe a drive? ShredOS will do it for you. Install it to a USB stick, boot from said stick, and let it annihilate all those ones and zeroes. READ BOING BOING AD-FREE! ShredOS is a USB bootable (BIOS or UEFI) small linux distribution with the sole purpose of securely erasing the entire contents of your disks using the program nwipe. — Read the rest The post ShredOS is an entire OS just for destroying data appeared first on Boing Boing.
Did you remember to turn your computer off before midnight?
It is one now quarter of a century since you were expected to turn your computer off before midnight, like a digital Gremlin. The stickers may still be found on eBay for reasonable prices. The stickers' authenticity can hardly be guaranteed; if you still have a Packard Bell PC, it might now be worth more than you paid for it. — Read the rest The post Did you remember to turn your computer off before midnight? appeared first on Boing Boing.
LLMs make good analysts, bad oracles
kbps,
I’m not an AI apologist by any means, but I’m frustrated by the muddled way LLMs have been marketed, portrayed, and used. I want to focus on the utility of them here, rather than the moral or legal implications of using copyrighted content to feed their corpora. One of the first things we started doing […]
Apple TV+’s takeover of the Apple TV app Home Screen
Part of what used to be great about the Apple TV is that — unlike an Amazon Fire TV, for instance — Apple didn’t really have specific content it was trying to push on you. Sure, it might suggest that you rent or buy a movie from iTunes instead of from Amazon; and it would […]
The worst tech you can buy in 2023
Brian Merchant hails the worst tech of 2023, an anti-gift guide for the holiday season that "sits atop an intersection of so many discouraging trendlines that I can't help but get depressed by them." The authority-friendly Amazon Ring doorbell, which looks out but sees within, is a solid pick—as is well-hacked ethnicity-testing site 23andMe, also authority-friendly. — Read the rest
Elon Musk’s Poisoned Platform
The New Yorker,
Users and advertisers are fleeing X after Musk’s message supporting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But the platform seems destined to die a slow death.
Seed investment: Andreessen Horowitz backing AI startup linked to nonconsensual porn of real people
Andreessen Horowitz is a key investor in Civitai, an AI image-generating service that reportedly profited from nonconsensual porn generated using its platform. 404Media's Emanual Maiberg reports that job listings exposed the link, and that the company did not respond to inquiries. — Read the rest
Tens of thousands of old phones linger in vintage seller's inventory
Phoneco, a mom-and-pop seller of analog technology, has tens of thousands of classic rotary phones in stock and they aren't shifting. Their inventory exploded in 1991, when the Knappens purchased 13 semi-trailer loads of phones from the Turtle Lake business after the owner died. — Read the rest