Daily News Stuff 27 December 2024

• Browser extension Honey, which promises to save you money on everything you buy online, appears to be a scam. (Lifehacker)
  
  Honey claims to find you the best available discount codes for whatever you wish to buy. It doesn't. Honey makes deals with merchants to control the discount codes it provides so that you don't get the best one. Sometimes it finds nothing at all even when valid coupons exist.
  
  It also appears to change the affiliate cookie in your browser so that if you follow a recommendation, Honey gets the cut rather than the person who recommended the product. It does this whether it finds a coupon for you or not.
  
  Honey also offers the buyer a bonus where you receive part of that affiliate deal. In the example in the video you receive 2.5% of the affiliate payout, while Honey gets 97.5%, and the actual affiliate receives nothing at all.
  
  Honey was bought by PayPal in 2020 for $4 billion.
  
  
  
• Browser extension Pie may also be a scam. (YouTube)
  
  Well, it's an ad blocker with a shopping extension that promises to pay you money, which seems deeply implausible. A good ad blocker blocks ads, leaving no money for anyone, least of all you.

• The Cyberhaven browser extension, which does... Something, I don't know... Was also stealing your information if you updated it on the 24th or 25th. (Twitter)
  
  It's a legitimate extension of some sort, but an employee at Cyberhaven - a security company - got phished and hackers used his credentials to push nasty code into the most recent update.
  
  
  
• Also the Internxt VPN extension. (Twitter)
  
  
  
• Also VPNCity. (Twitter)
  
  
  
• Also Uvoice. (Twitter)
  
  
  
• Also ParrotTalks, a language learning app. (Twitter)
  
  
  
• The same researcher found attacks under way against several other browser extensions. (Twitter)
  
  This is the reasoning behind Google's Manifest V3 system for browser extensions, locking them down so that they can't steal all your personal data even if someone does manage to push out a trojan horse.
  
  The problem is that Manifest V3 also breaks long-standing plugin features, particularly with ad blockers.
  
  And Google makes its money from ads.
  
  
  
• An undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia has been cut. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's beginning to look a lot like Russia.
  
  
  
• The Fisker Ocean Extreme was actually a decent car. (Motor Trend)
  
  It's gone now. So is Fisker.
  
  
  
• Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed on a strict operational definition of AGI - artificial general intelligence. (Tech Crunch)
  
  AI is anything a computer does that isn't the direct application of a deterministic algorithm.
  
  AGI was termed to indicate humanlike intelligence.
  
  Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed that what it really means is AI that makes a profit. $100 billion in profits, to be precise.
  
  OpenAI is not expected to be profitable at all until at least 2029, so AGI will come some time after that.
  
  
  
• The upcoming AMD Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D will run at the same clocks as their non-3D counterparts. (Notebook Check)
  
  With Zen 3 and Zen 4 models, the extra cache chip sat on top of the (larger) CPU chip. Because this reduced thermal conductivity, these models had to run somewhat slower than the models without the cache chips.
  
  With Zen 5 the cache chip has been padded out with blank silicon and sits below the CPU die, solving the insulation problem.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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