Daily Tech News 8 July 2022

• You will own nothing and honestly we don't care whether you like it, part one: Sony is deleting movies "bought" via the PlayStation Store in Germany and Austria. (FlatPanelsHD)
  
  The alternative would be for them to pay to retain the license for products they ostensibly sold on to customers in perpetuity, and that is simply not on the cards.
  
  Nor is there any mention of refunds.
  
  
  
• You will own nothing and honestly we don't care whether you like it, part two: Google's "Democratic AI" is better at redistributing wealth than America. (Motherboard)
  
  Well, I would hope so. Though if it were worse, perhaps we could learn from it, because a key factor that makes America great is not redistributing wealth.
  
  Players in the game that tested this algorithm preferred it because it was a game and they didn't have to look at their paycheck each month and see what the government had stolen.
  
  On top of that, of course, is the fact that we've known for nearly a century that redistributing wealth doesn't work. Writing in 1926, JBS Haldane - himself a socialist - pointed out that socialism cannot possibly work on the scale of the modern nation state. San Marino or Andorra, maybe, but not much beyond that.
  
  If Google had a million players in that game, the redistribution would either be grossly and obviously unfair, or take far longer to calculate than playing the game itself, like ending a turn late in a game of Civilization, only worse.
  
  Or both. There's no solution to the problem, but it's always possible to make it worse.

• Florida once again has giant calamitous snails that spew parasitic brain worms. (Ars Technica)
  
  Their names are Nikki and Rebekah.
  
  
  
• Twitter says it removes over one million spam accounts per day. (Reuters)
  
  And a whole lot of innocent victims too.
  
  The company says that spam and bot accounts constitute less than 5% of the users who are presented with advertising, which is not what anyone was asking. I mean, that's good in that they are not defrauding the advertisers who pay to keep the whole mess running, or at least not much, but it doesn't answer at all how many spam accounts are active on the site.
  
  
  
• You will no longer need a Facebook account to use the Oculus Rift VR headset. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Instead you can simply use any Meta login.
  
  ...
  
  Meta is Facebook.
  
  
  
• QNAP. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Billions of years from now when the Sun has expanded into a red giant and boiled away Earth's oceans and atmosphere leaving a charred cinder, QNAP engineers will still be filing weekly disclosures of critical vulnerabilities and recommending that their users disconnect their devices from the internet.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:47 AM

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