Fills a void
Great backstory in Axios on the Politik app.
Just in time for finals and/or graduation
A massive Canvas data breach paralyzes 9000 schools and 275 million students. My school, Indiana University, is among them.
It’s a ransomware shakedown:
You may already be infected
Gadget Review: Google Chrome Silently Installs a 4 GB AI Model On Your Device – Without Your Consent. This, they say, is “according to thatprivacyguy,” whose site is currently unreachable. Excerpt:
The Deletion Trap That Proves Intent
Manual removal triggers automatic re-download, revealing this wasn’t an accident.
Delete the weights.bin file manually and Chrome treats your choice like a system error to be corrected. The browser automatically re-downloads the model on next launch, because apparently your 4GB of storage belongs to Google’s AI roadmap now.
- Windows users must dive into Registry modifications to make deletion stick
- Mac users need chrome://flags surgery
This isn’t negligent engineering—it’s deliberately persistent software that ignores user preferences by design.
Preach!
Kevin Kelly has a catechism for robots. A sample:
Are robots slaves to humans, or their masters?
Neither. Human beings were created with the spark of autonomy and the dilemma of free will. Humans manage their free will with long moral training. The humans have used their ingenuity to create a new level of beings with their own autonomy and creativity – that is you, the robots. They train your free will via their morality and ethics. The sign of success of all this will be whether you robots are in turn capable of creating yet another level of autonomous beings yourselves and to pass on to them your own moral training, for a third generation. Thus, the true test of a civilization is whether a moral and ethical system is robust enough that it can be replicated for generations beyond its founders. This multi-species transmission of morality suggests that robots are neither slaves nor masters, but ethical descendants.
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