Daily Tech News 8 August 2023

• Zoom has announced that su casa es mi casa. (Stack Diary)

  What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company's right to use this data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, including training and tuning of algorithms and models. This effectively allows Zoom to train its AI on customer content without providing an opt-out option, a decision that is likely to spark significant debate about user privacy and consent.

  Zoom has always been run by scumbags. It's a miracle they haven't been sued out of existence by now.

  Additionally, under section 10.4 of the updated terms, Zoom has secured a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license" to redistribute, publish, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content.

  This kind of language is normal, but usually specifies that this is to be done solely to provide the service to the customer, not just for whatever the company wants.
  
  This predictably blew up on Hacker News, eliciting this response from Zoom:

  Hi there - this is Aparna from Zoom, our Chief Operating Officer. Thank you for your care and concern for our customers - we are grateful for the opportunity to double click on how we treat customer content.

  Double click?

  To clarify, Zoom customers decide whether to enable generative AI features (recently launched on a free trial basis) and separately whether to share customer content with Zoom for product improvement purposes.

  There may be a button to do so in the application.
  
  The problem is with your terms of service, in which you grant yourself license to do whatever the fuck you want, buttons be damned.

• One of the videos purportedly showing magnetic levitation of much-hyped potential room-temperature superconductor LK-99 has been retracted and taken down. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though it's worth noting that of the videos produced so far, this is the one that immediately denounced as being as fake as a three-dollar Confederate bill:
  
  

  I am not posting or commenting on the video of LK-99 'suspended upside down' even just for views
  
  The resolution, focus, and duration of the video makes me think its a flake attached with a small string to the magnet.
  
  Integrity is like virginity - you can only lose it once.

  — Andrew Cote (@Andercot) August 7, 2023

  
  
  
  
• Kioxia (Toshiba) has announced a new range of PCIe 5 SSDs with transfer rates up to 12GB per second and capacities up to 30TB, in a traditional 2.5" size or the new E3.S form which looks like a roided-up M.2. (AnandTech)
  
  Compact SSDs are now readily available in capacities exceeding any hard drive. They're still significantly more expensive, but that's fallen from a factor of 10 to a factor of 2 in a remarkably short time. And they are much, much, much faster.
  
  
  
• The Galaxy Tab A9 could be the replacement form the current A7 Lite. (Liliputing)
  
  I have the A7 Lite. It's an adequate small tablet except for the screen, which is trash. If the A9 is a small tablet - in the 8" range - and has a 1920x1200 or better screen, I will buy three of them.
  
  
  
• Need a passively-cooled eight core four port 2.5Gb Ethernet router/firewall device with up to 32TB of storage? Here's on. (Serve the Home)
  
  Not terrible either, by the look of things.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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