Daily Archives: October 4, 2022

plant controls machete

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plant machete

This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete. In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on input from the plant. Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.

Source: plant machete — David Bowen

Why Reddit Is Losing It Over Samsung’s New Privacy Policy – it’s an incredible data grab

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Samsung recently updated it privacy policy for all users with a Samsung account, effective Oct. 1. One Redditor read the policy, did not like what they saw, and shared it to r/android, highlighting what they consider to be the doc’s worst policy points. The thread blew up, with Android users aplenty decrying Samsung’s new policy. But why is everyone so pissed off, and is any of it worth worrying about? Let’s explore.

Samsung’s privacy policy is a bit creepy

From the jump, the new policy doesn’t look good. In fact, it appears downright invasive. There are the standard data giveaways we’ve come to expect: When you create a Samsung account, you must give over personal information like your name, age, address, email address, gender, etc. Par for the course.

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However, Samsung also notes it will collect data such as credit card information, usernames and passwords for third-party services, photos, contacts, text logs, recordings of your voice generated during voice commands, and location data, including precise location data as well as nearby wifi access points and cell towers. It might come as a surprise to know a company like Samsung can keep your chat transcripts, contacts, and voice recordings, but there’s precedent: Apple found itself in hot water when third-party contractors revealed they were able to listen in on audio recordings from Siri requests, which included all kinds of personal conversations and activities.

Samsung also tracks your general activity via cookies, pixels, web beacons, and other means. The company claims this tracking is done for a variety of reasons, including remembering your information to avoid you having to retype it in the future, and to better learn how you use their services. To achieve these goals, it collects just about everything there is to know about your device, including your IP address, device model, device settings, websites you visit, and apps you download, among many others. The policy does remind you to adjust your privacy settings if you’re uncomfortable with this default tracking (as if anyone wouldn’t be).

The company says it has a lot of uses for this information, including ad delivery, communication with customers, enhancing their services, improving their business, identifying and preventing fraud and criminal activity, and to comply with “applicable legal requirements.” Further, they reserve the right to share your information with “subsidiaries and affiliates,” “business partners and third-parties,” as well as law enforcement and other authorities. In short, depending on the circumstances, your Samsung data could end up in the hands of a lot of third parties.

But that’s not everything. Under the “Notice to California Residents” section is where the juiciest policies emerge. While most of the info is the same, if broken down in a different way, there is one additional note about data Samsung collects: biometric information. The company doesn’t elaborate, but this entry implies Samsung obtains data from face and fingerprint scans, when traditionally, this information is stored on-device. Apple, for example, doesn’t have access to your face scans on your iPhone. Obviously, this is potentially concerning.

In addition, the California Residents section also discusses what data Samsung sells to third parties. Samsung says in the 12 months before this new policy went into effect, it may have sold data of yours, including device identifiers (cookies, pixel tags, etc.), purchase histories or tendencies, and network activity, including how you interact with websites.

[…]

If you’re eyeing your Galaxy Z Flip with newfound skepticism, I don’t blame you. Unfortunately, if you dive into the privacy policies for most of your other tech, you’ll be similarly disturbed. Samsung is hardly the only collecting, sharing, and selling your data.

One Redditor does make a great point about the redundancy of privacy violations here. Sure, Google might have similar policies in place, but since Samsung runs Android, you’re really dealing with two meddling companies instead, not one:

Considering the prices for their hardware, the un-removable bloatware that is generally inferior to the Google software, and anti-Right-to-Repair campaigns (and reflections in their hardware), I see no reason to buy their phones over Google’s. I’ll have just one company with intrusive insight into my personal device at a time, thank you.

[…]

Source: Why Reddit Is Losing It Over Samsung’s New Privacy Policy

The Onion defends right to parody in very real supreme court brief supporting local satirist vs Police who were made fun of

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The Onion, the long-running satirical publication, has filed a very real legal document with the US supreme court, urging it to take on a case centered on the right to parody. And in order to make a serious legal point, the filing does what the Onion does best, offering a big helping of total nonsense.

Claiming global Onion readership of 4.3 trillion, the filing describes the publication as “the single most powerful and influential organization in human history”. It’s the source of 350,000 jobs at its offices and “manual labor camps”, and it “owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily”.

With such power, why does the Onion feel the need to weigh in on a mundane court case? “To protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality,” the filing asserts. “The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”

The outlet is concerned about the outcome of a case it describes in a headline: “Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook”. It sounds like an Onion headline, the filing points out, but it’s not.

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In 2016, Anthony Novak was arrested for making a Facebook page that parodied the local police page. He was charged with disrupting a public service but was acquitted. The next year, he sued the department, arguing it was retaliating against him for using his right to free speech, as Cleveland.com reported.

In May, a US appeals court backed the police in the case, a finding Novak’s lawyer said “sets dangerous precedent undermining free speech”. Last week, Novak appealed against the case to the supreme court, leading to the Onion’s filing – what’s known as an amicus brief, a filing by an outside party seeking to influence the court.

In one of its less amusing sections, the brief argues that the appeals court ruling “imperils an ancient form of discourse. The court’s decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face.”

The filing highlights the history of parody and its social function: “It adopts a particular form in order to critique it from within”. To demonstrate, the Onion cites one of its own greatest headlines: “Supreme court rules supreme court rules”.

The document serves as a rare glimpse behind the comedy curtain – an explanation of how jokes work – even as it serves as a more traditional legal document, pointing to relevant court cases and using words like “dispositive”.

The city of Parma has until 28 October to provide a response in a case that would be heard next year if the high court opts to consider it.

In the meantime, “the Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks”.

Source: The Onion defends right to parody in very real supreme court brief supporting local satirist | US supreme court | The Guardian