Oh gods. I leave them everywhere 🤷
riskable
joined 3 years ago
If it's part of a fingerprinting lib, then they just fucked it up. Because the fingerprinting can be done in one ~16ms window of time when the script runs and then you can break down the audio objects and pretend nothing happened.
Honestly, this doesn't sound like spyware. More like absurd optimization. Here's why: Audio devices often go to sleep (to save battery) and can take a second or two to wake up. That's enough time that the end user will miss the first second or two of audio.
By keeping the audio outputting something (even if it's just silence), they can guarantee that their little (often hilariously terrible) product videos will play the way they expect (which is loud and startling, of course!).
This is just one of those stupid tricks that's bad for energy use but good for ignorant users who might complain that the first second of every AliExpress video is silent 🤷
The reason why I believe this to be the case is because there's really nothing unique or interesting to be learned from an audio output loop that's literally sending zeros through itself. If you wanted to use that to fingerprint a user, you wouldn't need to keep it active. You could pass a single zero (silence) through and be done.
Shit: Is this why people ask me random IT questions and suddenly vent about their lives in chat?
It's beyond "an arms race." AI has become a commodity that's everywhere and it's being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.
At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.
Someone cut above the rest‽
I did the math and these are the approximate real numbers:
- US: ~30 million
- World: ~105 million
That's active Linux desktops. That is, they're being used to browse the Internet regularly enough to make it into StatCounter.
They're just like any other data center, except bigger because that's more efficient than building a bunch of smaller ones.
AI data centers have a lot of GPUs and specialty hardware that use a lot of power, but they're still just big buildings with lots of computers in them. They just sort of sit there, with air conditioners running 24/7.
If they're not the huge "hyper scale" type, you end up with a situation like in the article: Where they had to cram too many cooling units in too tight a tight space (to make up for the fact that the data center wasn't built for its current workload).
Haha: What you state is logical and reasonable. That position would be easy to defend, if the legal system around copyright made sense.
Unfortunately, it isn't a logical system. You're trying to apply copyright law—which has now been ruled on in court, officially making training AI with copyrighted material Fair Use.
The problem is that the issue with ebooks is all about contract law. Not copyright.
When you "purchase" an ebook (which is a misnomer), you're actually signing a legally binding contract. A license, in effect, to use that copyrighted work for the sole purpose outlined in the contract. That outlined purpose expressly forbids using the work for anything other than you—the purchaser—reading it (usually on the platform they specify).
Having said that, many, many court rulings have found numerous license clauses like that to be unenforceable. That is, just because it's written in the contract, doesn't mean it's legal.
The courts have ruled—thanks to everyone's efforts fighting the MPAA, RIAA, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo in the 1990s and early 2000s—that everyone does have the legal right to "platform shift" whatever copyrighted works they own.
To get around that, those very same entities tried to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's rules about circumventing "copyright protection mechanisms" to try to make it illegal for people to platform shift their stuff anyway. That is, they added trivial encryption to all their platforms.
But it's even more complicated than that! Because Congress gave the Librarian of Congress the power to say when it's legal to circumvent such "copyright protections." For example, technologies that aid the blind (I.e. gotta decrypt that file for the program to read it out loud).
There's other exceptions and everyone fights to get more added whenever it comes up.
The key takeaway, though is that none of this complicated mess applies to physical books! So there ya go 😁👍
If you own a book, you can legally make as many copies of it as you want. As long as you're not distributing them, the courts treat that as a single effective copy.
Legal reasons: When you "purchase" an ebook you're actually just licensing it and nearly all ebook licenses exclude the ability to do anything with the ebook other than read it yourself.
They could get a commercial license to get big ebook libraries like Anthropic did, but they can't, really, because Anthropic paid for an exclusive license. Which means that if other AI companies want to compete, they sort of have to buy books in bulk and tear them apart to scan them.
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So 80% of this is total bullshit. Do we really care that data centers are causing mild increases in how much water a power plant is taking in from their local cooling ponds‽ That were built specifically for this purpose, so that potable water doesn't get used.
The real issue with data centers is how much power they use! Talking about their water consumption is a pointless distraction. It's a topic full of so much misinformation it just turns people away from the real problems once they realize it's bullshit. "If the water use reported in the media is bullshit, maybe the rest of it is too?"