Komunitas
lemmy.world
it’s not really subjective, having a drm free download is like owning the thing, having it on steam is like borrowing it from someone fairly trustworthy, and having it on epic is like borrowing it from an asshole you’re on a decentralised, federated social media website. why are you arguing that more centralisation is a good thing? the comparison you’re making is nonsense. you don’t need to download an app or sign up for an account to listen to music drm free or to play drm free copies of games. you download the thing at the point of purchase and then you own it and you can do whatever you want with it. and that includes launching it from steam, which I do with a lot of my drm free games
Komunitas
kbin.social
As someone who recently created pivoted to Debian (for 12.0) from Windows , the website is quite the headache. I consider myself tech-literate, and have been around the internet long enough where RTFM was a rite of passage, but they really are asking a lot given how many different directions the manual went. I put about 20 minutes into it along with 10-15 minutes reading up on things that were not well explained and then just YOLO’d it. Also if 98% of people are installing via a flash drive and 2% are doing CD Rom installs, then cater towards the 98% in your instructions. Not only is the CD ROM examples more prominent, but they also end up leading to downloading the same .iso IIRC. Not saying to do away w/ the catering to obsolete technology, but maybe shift the conversation towards terminology and wording that end users can instantly identify with. It really is an example of someone updating an existing process repeatedly instead of taking a step back and seeing how things have changed over time. I suppose that’s the active theme for the entire website. The website is frustrating in that aspect. Speaking from experience, I’d venture that the majority of the traffic that is received from newbies following a YT tutorial where someone spells out where to go and what to click. Looking at the referenced video, it appears that have started to slowly make changes but there’s still work to be done. Reading this thread though, I can see how the web dev team came to their conclusion. A solid portion of this thread are people lauding a crap website like alumni who are extolling the virtues of hazing… “it was hard for me, it should be hard for everyone” or “There should be a bit of effort required to keep out the riff raff” etc.
Komunitas
piefed.social
This is not the OS fault: since you assumed risk to install Chrome, the OS assumed you trusted the application to operate without interrupting its functionality by asking you permission to download text, images and web content every time you loaded a web page. Its Chrome abusing this trust to download shit without tell you.
Komunitas
quokk.au
So you don’t have to give Reddit clicks: Dutch hardware, French open-source OS, no Google services. Apologies for repeating this in pretty much every topic on Fairphone and /e/OS, but there is a lot of misinformation about this. The Fairphone hardware and software is developed by a Chinese company called T2Mobile (this is no secret, it is in Fairphone’s documentation). Switching to /e/OS does not really change that, because they use the same kernel trees, binary firmware blobs, and device trees maintained by the same Chinese company. So you replaced opaque blobs coming from a South Korean company to those from a Chinese company and Qualcomm (pick your poison I guess). Besides that /e/OS does not really decouple you from Google. It starts talking to Google pretty much the moment you first set up the device [1]. The device will download proprietary Google SafetyNet blobs that run as part of the privileged microG. /e/OS also contacts Google for assisted GPS, eSIM provisioning, WideVine provisioning, etc. Then if you install certain Google Apps, /e/OS gives them elevated privileges, breaking the regular sandbox model. For instance, if you install Android Auto because you want to use it in your car, some of the dependencies (e.g. Google Maps) have privileged access [2]. It does not stop at Google, e.g. for speech-to-text, Murena does not have any scrupules uploading your voice to OpenAI (and hide it somewhere in the terms that no-one reads) [4]. Besides that, both Fairphone and /e/OS have a history of abysmal security. E.g., both used to sign system images with Android testing keys (which meant that malware could hide in your system image without you noticing). Fairphone is absolutely terrible at maintaining kernel trees - e.g. Fairphone 4 is still using a Linux version that has not been updated since 2020, Fairphone 6 is still on firmware blobs from June 2025 despite Qualcomm pushing out monthly fixes for vulnerabilities since then. The Fairphone 6 is also shipping a Linux kernel that hasn’t been updated since September 2024. Both the Fairphone stock OS and /e/OS are way behind on Android security updates. The Android Security Bulletins are only backports of security issues marked high or critical. On those they are typically 1-2 months behind and the ASB vulnerabilities are already known for 3 months by vendors due to Google’s new security embargo system. That means that Fairphone’s stock OS and /e/OS are usually 4-5 months behind on patching high/critical vulnerabilities. It is even worse for other vulnerabilities, which are commonly used as part of exploit chains. /e/OS and the stock OS are still on Android 15. Since they do not roll out other security updates than ASBs, it means that they are now 1.5 years behind in non-high/critical security updates (since Android 15 was released in September 2024). And then we haven’t even talked about shady things like the /e/OS App Lounge getting F-Droid packages [3] through a MITM server (cleanapk) for at least 6 years now that often serves outdated package versions. To make it more fun, they do not want to reveal who is actually maintaining this service. Similarly, hardware security is not great. In contrast to your old S24, the Fairphone 6 does not have separate secure enclave. They only use TrustZone, which basically uses the same CPU/RAM for the TEE (the OS gets isolated by secrets running it in a VM-like environment). TrustZone is vulnerable to side-channel attacks and PINs are easily brute-forced (so, on Fairphone you probably want to use a long passphrase). Some people will say: who cares, I’m not the target of a state level actor. Remember that in the days of Cellebrite, etc. device security is important to anyone who ever goes to a demonstration or crosses international borders. I understand that everyone is looking for European alternatives, please think twice if you want to replace them by Chinese blobs, very outdated software, and a security disaster. [1] https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-nicht-zwangslaeufig-sicher-custom-roms-teil6/ [2] https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm [3] https://forum.f-droid.org/t/e-foundation-using-f-droid-with-middle-man-website/7162 [4] https://forum.fairphone.com/t/e-os-betrays-users-privacy-openai-being-integrated-directly-into-core-os/119381
Komunitas
social.packetloss.gg
They can do whatever they want. Operating systems are effectively divided into two partitions, privileged kernel space and user space. When you run a kernel level anticheat what you’re really doing is running a custom program in the kernel space. It effectively becomes part of Windows. This means that anything that an operating system can instruct hardware to do, that program can do. It can read your files, check your email, print letter you wrote to your crush in Word but “deleted” because it was embarrassing, log every key you type, turn on your webcam, listen to the microphone, download explicit or illegal imagery, upload your hard drive to the NSA, disable your computer fans, etc You really only want to run this stuff if it’s from a trustworthy vendor and even then it’s completely defensible to object to running one of these programs. Currently these things have yet to be caught doing any of these things, but that’s because they haven’t been instructed to, not because they can’t.
Komunitas
pawb.social
It stands for digital rights management, and basically it’s anything that attempts to manage how you use your hardware. For example, Keurigs that use the qr code to tell the size of the pod are an example of DRM - they attempt to keep you from using 3rd party pods (I think they walked this back). It’s also a great example of how it’s more an annoyance that makes the product worse than anything else - you could tape an “official” pod wrapper to the top and it will work with any pod. It also makes it less sanitary and if the wrapper shifts it introduces extra steps between you and your coffee, which should be a criminal offense It’s next to impossible to fully control a device in someone else’s hands. YouTube videos use DRM, but you can find plenty of ways to download them in an open format anyways. The exception is when they call out to a remote server - a lot of video games do this (unfortunately even single player games do this a lot now). They might check for ownership before you start the game, but lately they’ve been drilling holes in the security of your computer so they can make sure you haven’t modified it (even for single player games!), which should also be criminal. This is much harder to crack, but it can still be done. Then you get to DRM that runs on both sides, which is what this proposal is. They basically want a 3rd party “attester” to verify that your browser is “legit” (what they mean by that is kept pretty vague). Then, when you access a site, the site checks your request, confirms with the attester that your browser is “legit” and will run their code on your machine as written, and if the attester doesn’t give the all clear they send you an error page instead of the site you asked for. So let’s go through some of the concerns I have after reading through the proposal: Many sites decide Firefox, as the only major browser not based off Google’s browser engine, isn’t “legit”. Already, some sites block Firefox, so this is very likely Anyone can set up an attester, but sites can decide which they trust. The attester has a lot of access to data which can positively identify you, but they’re only supposed to send a bit of it. If Facebook decides they only trust their own attester, they’re probably not going to pass up collecting as much data as they can. That could include everything from the phone you have, the apps you have installed. Facebook doesn’t need to know where I bank, but if their attester becomes standard, they might get that info even if I never use a Facebook product. Or, all attesters might decide to sell data as their business model The only privacy considerations seem to be “we had privacy advocates in the group that drafted this proposal”. If this is true, I’m not sure who they were, because privacy didn’t come up too often There’s zero reason for this to exist, except to lock down our devices. This benefits corporations - it offers absolutely nothing to users. There’s no way it could ever offer anything to users. . All it does is let websites block users based on vaguely defined criteria - it’s a proposal so the details are vague, but the most generous reading would be that they could restrict you based on browser, the least generous reading means everyone could tell you to uninstall a competitor’s app before you can use theirs (and selling every scrap of information about you imaginable)
Komunitas
lemm.ee
this is obviously talking about their web app, which most people will be using. In this special instance, it was clearly not the LLM itself censoring the Tiananmen Square, but a layer on top. i have not bothered downloading and asking deepseek about Tiananmen Square. so i cannot know what the model would have generated. however, it is possible that certain biasses are trained into any model. i am pretty sure, this blog is aimed at the average user. while i wouldn’t trust any LLM company with my data, i certainly wouldn’t want the chinese government to have them. anyone that knows how to use (ollama)[https://github.com/ollama/ollama] should know these telemetry data don’t apply to running locally. but for sure, pointing it out in the blog would help.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I don’t use Android or iPhones because of privacy concerns. I got into an accident over a year ago and have been in horrible pain. My employer has contracted with some healthtech company, Hinge Health, which provides videos and instructions to help people reduce pain. They have no website, of course, and only have an Android App or iPhone App. I kept ignoring their emails spamming their product, despite really needing it, but then they said if I signed up I could get a free massager. This would really help me. So I signed up using the web, thinking things had possibly changed and added web features, and after that they told me I had to download the App and do a lesson to get the massager. I expressed my frustration to them and said I couldn’t do it. I am poor, I don’t have a smart phone nor do I want one. I told them this hoping they would give me the messager. Instead, they said they could send a free tablet to help. I was like, great, thinking I’d turn off bluetooth, nearby device permission, location, and connect to WiFi only to a pihole to preserve some of my privacy, get a massager, and be in less horrible pain. When the tablet arrived, it’s a Lenovo TB310FU or Tab M9. It was a beautiful tablet. So I turn it on and their corporate logo shows up, which was slightly concerning. Then the tablet loads and there is their Hinge App, a Chrome Browser, and Settings, and that’s it. I made sure to turn off location, turn off WiFi, not connect to anything, and keep bluetooth off, although in the 5 seconds before that happened I’m sure it collected data on all nearby networks and devices. Then I go into the settings to try to figure out what’s happening. There’s an admin account attached and also an app called Esper. For Esper, it can’t be uninstalled and it has access to location, nearby device permissions, bluetooth, and every permission that is available and none of them can be turned off. Esper is listed as an admin App. I also am unable to reset the tablet and it said “Blocked by your IT administrator.” Since I am using a health device, it felt extraordinarily invasive to me. I do not trust big tech or health tech to keep my data safe, I’ve had data breaches before, and I also don’t entirely understand why this company needs to know my nearby devices if it’s just for health. Even though I made it clear I reserve my HIPPA rights and opt out of research, those are still on. What was frustrating is this was presented to me in a way in which I thought it was a free tablet. After I got it and looked at it more, I wasn’t sure whether it was free or not or if they thought they were letting me borrow it and they expected it to be returned. I also wonder if they are giving the tablet to me for free and somehow monetizing marketing data. I contacted them about returning it, since I didn’t feel comfortable with them having root access to a Tablet that collect data and interact with other electronics nearby when it’s a health device. They said they understood and would send something to return it. The Esper Device Management also access “physical activity” upon turning it on, which seems invasive and I can’t turn that off. Keep in mind, I haven’t even opened the Health App. I have two concerns. 1) I am actually still in pain. It would have been nice to use this Hinge App in an isolated environment where I didn’t feel like it was collecting nearby devices information and GPS coordinates and other things which didn’t seem related to health issues. 2) This tablet may have already collected information through bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, etc, and although I haven’t connected it to the Internet, if I send it back to them then that information can go into their network, which I really didn’t want and never would have agreed to. So, my main question is whether I can use something like adb in a terminal to get into this app and break Esper, root it to something like Calyx or Bliss, and use the App without permissions being enabled in the OS like this to reduce my pain. Would this be possible? I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole if it’s a waste of time. I would also be happy if I could just wipe the tablet prior to returning it. I would also have to check with the company to see if it’s even allowed to root it. This is a company that is also contracted through my employer and I am worried if I do anything that they don’t like, it could cause trouble with my employment, but it seems unlikely. The other thing is whether there is a way to delete any data Esper stored. I am not able to “Erase all data” and when I try it says “Blocked by your IT admin.” So it seems totally managed. And I never would have agreed to this had I known this was a managed device and I also can’t purge it of collected data that isn’t related to health that I didn’t consent to being collected. This is just so frustrating because I really am in a lot of terrible pain, but I really go out of my way to never use any Google or Apple products in my personal life because of privacy concerns, and I thought I could make an exception but limit it and it turns out it’s 1000 times worse than a normal tablet. Am I overreacting? I told them I would send it back, but it now likely has nearby device data and information about my personal network and other info I did not want to share and I can’t delete it, nor do I even know what was collected.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Yeah lol the URL doesn’t match the page title which doesn’t match whatever wosonhj.com is. According to their DNS, some Chinese organization. It links to a fake version of libgen populated with ads (And sadly instead of re-hosting all 550+ TB of libgen for downloads they force the downloads through libgen’s servers while throwing ads on top of their fake UI) It links to a fake version of sci hub populated with ads (Most of these all flowing into mobang.top, another throwaway url with Chinese DNS) I’m sure it’s a helpful site, but I’d recommend people accessing it: Don’t use your actual personal email Don’t reuse a password you’ve used elsewhere Access it through a VPN so your IP isn’t exposed Ensure you are running malware protection (the built in malware protection on windows or mac is likely fine) (and otherwise yes, I know you use arch, and if you use nix you’re too busy modifying one of your .nix files to even read this) Anything you download, upload to https://www.virustotal.com just to be safe Realistically you should follow steps 1-5 for most online services, but here we are
Komunitas
rss.ponder.cat
Time for some good news for a change: After blowing past two million copies sold in just two days, the devs of climbing game Peak have shown some love to fellow mountaineering sim Cairn, and it seems to have paid off big time. The mutual love fest began on X, “The Everything App,” with Cairn developers The Game Bakers showing a clip featuring Peak’s Bing Bong implemented as an item in Cairn. Bing Bong is an already-memefied plushie you have to carry from the beginning of Peak all the way to the end for an achievement. It’s reminiscent of Gnome Chompski the Garden Gnome from Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Cairn might be peak https://t.co/yrIGeMiGRLJune 26, 2025 Peak co-developer Landfall Games responded by declaring that “Cairn might be peak.” The next day, June 27th, The Game Bakers announced that Cairn had surpassed 500,000 downloads of its demo. Cairn is a quality game on its own to earn such attention, but the love from Landfall, plus Peak bringing so much attention to climbing games, was no doubt helpful. It’s great to see Peak’s success bolstering a fellow independent developer, and they’re very different sorts of climbing game. Both have a simulationist, survival focus on fatigue, resource, and weight management, but while Peak leans into co-op slapstick, Carin is a singleplayer, more meditative sort of game. It’s also laser-focused on the mechanics of climbing itself, with players needing to manually move each limb to set hand and footholds. It’s way more intuitive than it sounds, though—slightly reminiscent of QWOP, but nowhere near as frustrating. PC Gaming Show editorial director Jake Tucker said Cairn might be the best climbing game he ever played. You can check out Cairn’s demo for yourself on Steam ahead of its November 5 release, while Peak can be had for a mere eight bucks on Steam. You can check out PCG news writer Elie Gold’s 86% review of Peak if its explosive success hasn’t sold you on the game yet. 2025 games: This year’s upcoming releasesBest PC games: Our all-time favoritesFree PC games: Freebie festBest FPS games: Finest gunplayBest RPGs: Grand adventuresBest co-op games: Better together From PCGamer latest via this RSS feed
Komunitas
rss.ponder.cat
Download this image here. Hi, all, and happy Friday. This has honestly felt like one of the longest weeks of my life. I suspect I’m not alone. It’s not just the (continued) loss of my beloved cat, for me. It’s that it feels like the news—mostly bad—is accelerating at an almost impossible-to-believe rate. So much is happening, and a large majority of it is unbelievably dark. The forces of evil seem to be gaining footholds everywhere. My inbox is absolutely inundated with articles bearing alarming headlines—it’s an absolute deluge of grimness. And yet, here all of us are. We are still showing up. We are still in this fight. Each of us is tired, each afraid, each heartbroken, and yet we wake up each day and make a conscious decision to return to battle. Why? Because we know the stakes. We love humanity, we love our children, and we love each other. And we refuse to let the forces of greed and oppression win. Sometimes, these days, our side reminds me of the residents of Whoville. Remember how, in Dr. Seuss’s poem, they hold hands and sing Christmas carols, even after the Grinch has stolen all of their gifts? The sound of that singing, fictional though it may be, keeps ringing in my ears. For collectively, we are doing the same. We are insisting on joy. We are clinging to community. We are cleaving to a vision of unity even when powerful forces are trying to stop us from doing so. This isn’t just beautiful—it’s how we will prevail. So while the Supreme Court issues disastrous rulings, Fox News spews lies, and Republicans foment racism and hate, we will keep doing what we do. We will stand steadfastly on the side of right. We will help those targeted by this regime. We will repeat the truth to whomever will listen. We will love. We will care. We will honor those who came before us in this fight. We will continue their work no matter what our chances of success. Because that’s what patriots do. This is harder than we expected it to be —and we knew it would be brutal. But for one day more we can return to the front, knowing that not just our country but the world is depending on our courage. It feels bleak as hell right now, but feelings aren’t what determine the future. Our actions are. So let’s keep acting like patriots until this thing is won. Call Your Senators (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is ______. First, I want the Senator to support Tim Kaine’s War Powers resolution when it comes up for a vote. Donald Trump and his administration launched an attack on Iran without Congressional approval and then lied about what they achieved. He’s out of control. The Senator must support the Resolution. Second, I’m upset about the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday allowing states to block Medicaid recipients from using Planned Parenthood. And I’m extremely upset that Republicans are trying to defund Planned Parenthood in their vicious budget bill—which I oppose, by the way. Defunding or otherwise limiting access to Planned Parenthood would put over a million patients at risk of losing access to health care. It’s chaotic, cruel, and dangerous. Congress needs to stop these attacks and support access to Planned Parenthood. [H/T] Finally please tell the Senator to vote no on Emil Bove. He’s a fundamentally dishonest and corrupt person and cannot be confirmed as a judge. Thanks. Call Your House Rep (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______. I understand that the Trump administration plans to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia as soon as he’s released on bail. So let me get this straight: They wrongly deported him because of an administrative error, then refused for months to bring him back despite court orders to do so, then finally brought him back so they could criminally prosecute him on made up charges, and now that a judge has shown those charges to be nonsense they’re going to deport him—again with no due process? Why is Congress not stepping in to protect this man? And more importantly, what has happened to due process in our country? I’m appalled at the Trump administration’s abuse of Abrego Garcia and so many others. Congress needs to stand up for the Constitution and stop these abuses now. Thanks. Extra Credit ✅ As you likely know, Rep. Al Green brought up a privileged resolution to impeach Trump over his illegal bombing of Iran. It failed to pass, partially because 128 Democrats voted to table the resolution. Please see if your rep was one of them, (again, because they were voting on whether or not to table the resolution the AYE votes are the bad ones), and if so call and say this: I’m calling because I understand that the representative voted against impeaching Donald Trump this week. I am flabbergasted. To say that that was the wrong vote is a massive understatement. Trump has already committed at least 19 impeachable offenses. Nineteen! He’s a disgrace. I feel totally betrayed by the representative’s vote and expect him/her to make a better choice next time. Thanks. If your rep is a Democrat and they voted AGAINST tabling —and therefore FOR impeachment—please call and say: I’m calling to thank the representative for voting the right way on Rep. Green’s impeachment resolution. I’m horrified that more Democrats didn’t support it but I’m glad s/he did. I expect him/her to keep voting for impeachment every time it’s brought up. Trump has committed 19 impeachable offenses so far and every day it gets worse. The fact that Congress is allowing him to stay in office is an outrage. Thanks. Get Smart! 📚 My friend wrote a great post called “How to Protect your Neighbors From ICE Raids.” Please read, please share, and please use his instructions to help make sure that if your locality has a 287g agreement, they repeal it. Let’s Address This with Qasim RashidHow To Protect Your Immigrant Neighbors From ICE RaidsThe Trump regime is doing everything in its power to target immigrants, create fear, and fabricate excuses to deploy the military on immigrants and on U.S. born citizens…Read more15 days ago · 416 likes · 28 comments · Qasim Rashid, Esq. Give 💰! Sister District has announced their second wave of endorsed candidates for 2025. These progressive incumbents and challengers will be critical to protecting Virginia’s Democratic Majority in the State Legislature. Sister District is one of the best organizations out there helping great candidates win in state legislative elections. They have a stellar track record and their endorsees are always incredible. This is a really great place to give. Support the entire wave 2 candidate slate HERE. Win Races! 🗳 Remember, you can phone bank to help Abigail Spanberger win the governor’s race in Virginia several days a week with the Grassroots Dems HQ. We need big wins in November badly, y’all. Please take a shift! They’ll train you! Sign up here. Resistbot Letter (new to Resistbot? Go here! And then here.) 💻 [To: your Senators] [H/T] [Text SIGN PESGRU to 50409, or to @Resistbot on Apple Messages, Messenger, Instagram, or Telegram] (Note that for the most effective RESISTBOT it’s best to personalize this text. More about how to do this here. But if you’re short on time just send it as is using the above code.) As your constituent, I urge you to vote NO on the nomination of Emil Bove to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The integrity of our judiciary rests on judges who can be trusted to honor the Constitution and faithfully administer equal justice under law. Bove falls far short of that standard. In his brief tenure at the Deputy Attorney General’s office over the past five months, Bove has allegedly engaged in multiple unprecedented abuses of power. He reportedly led an effort to identify and purge FBI agents and federal prosecutors involved in cases regarding the January 6th insurrection. Bove allegedly pushed a “bargain” to extract public policy concessions from the Mayor of New York City in exchange for dropping a corruption prosecution that could be resumed later, leading to resignations in protest by senior DOJ attorneys in both New York and Washington. Just this week, a DOJ whistleblower wrote that Bove plotted to defy, circumvent, and lie to federal courts regarding illegal deportations. In all three of these recent and well-documented cases, Bove’s alleged conduct demonstrates a disqualifying degree of bad faith toward the Constitution that all lawyers and all government employees swear to protect. Many honorable jurists of different ideologies and parties serve with integrity, but it is the Senate’s duty to ensure only nominees of good character are confirmed, and that those who abuse their power are not rewarded. Bove thoroughly fails this test. For all of these reasons I beg you to vote no on Bove’s nomination. Thanks. OK, you did it again! You’re helping to save democracy! You’re amazing. Talk soon. Jess Chop Wood, Carry Water is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Share Leave a comment From Chop Wood, Carry Water via this RSS feed
Komunitas
rss.ponder.cat
Apple has introduced new App Store changes in the EU in an attempt to avoid being further penalized under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). On Thursday, the company announced a new tier system for its Store Services fee that’s applied to purchases made outside apps, and it will only give developers access to the full set of App Store features if they give Apple a larger commission. Tier 1 of the Store Services fee will provide developers with only basic App Store features for a cheaper, 5 percent commission on in-app purchases, including app reviews, privacy nutrition labels, and access to Apple Support. This tier lacks many of the features developers benefit from on the App Store today, including automatic app updates, automatic app downloads, and other tools that could help developers promote their app. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose lawsuit against Apple resulted in a court order preventing Apple from taking a commission on purchases made outside the App Store in the US, has already called out limitations for developers who choose the cheaper tier. View Link For full access to the App Store features, developers will need to use Tier 2 of the Store Services fee, which comes with a 13 percent commission. Apps on the App Store will be on Tier 2 by default, but developers can move their apps to Tier 1. Apple is also introducing a new fee: the Core Technology Commission. With the update, Apple will take a 5 percent commission on outside purchases made in apps distributed on the App Store. However, developers who signed on to Apple’s alternate business terms will continue to pay the Core Technology Fee (CTF), a €0.50 per download fee that applies to apps for each annual install over 1 million. The iPhone maker says that on January 1st, 2026, it’s going to move to a “single business model” for developers in the EU. That means it’s going to transition the Core Technology Fee to the 5 percent Core Technology Commission on digital goods and services sold on the App Store and alternative marketplaces. The changes come in response to the €500 million (about $570 million) penalty the EU served Apple with on April 23rd after ruling that its App Store “anti-steering” practices — which restrict how developers can direct users to make external purchases — violated DMA rules. Apple will face interest payments on the $570 million fine if it fails to pay it by next month. The EU also issued preliminary findings for a separate DMA probe into Apple’s Core Technology Fee and other restrictions for alternative iOS app stores, ruling that Apple failed to demonstrate they were “necessary and proportionate.” Apple still plans on appealing the penalty. “The European Commission is requiring Apple to make a series of additional changes to the App Store,” the company said in a statement to 9to5Mac. “We disagree with this outcome and plan to appeal.” Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. The EU Commission will now assess the changes that Apple has proposed before making a final decision on additional non-compliance fines. From The Verge via this RSS feed
Komunitas
rss.ponder.cat
Vaccine experts in the United States have long considered the case on thimerosal closed. A chemical preservative that stamps out contamination in vaccine vials, thimerosal was removed from most U.S. shots more than two decades ago over worries that its mercury content could trigger developmental delays. But those concerns—as well as baseless claims that thimerosal causes autism—have been proven unfounded, many times over. “We took care of this 20 years ago,” Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University, told me. That’s not how anti-vaccine activists see the compound. Even the strongest data supporting thimerosal’s safety have not quelled the concerns of those who insist on the chemical’s harms. And now the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, has signaled that thimerosal’s presence in vaccines should remain open for debate. The panel is scheduled on Thursday to discuss the compound, which is present in a minority of flu shots in low or trace amounts, and vote on how vaccines containing it should be used. The panel that will meet this week is more skeptical of vaccines than any version in ACIP history. Earlier this month, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly dismissed all 17 existing members of the panel—among them, some of the nation’s foremost experts in vaccinology, infectious disease, pediatrics, and public health—and replaced them with eight new members who largely lack expertise in vaccines and, in several cases, have espoused anti-vaccine viewpoints. This new panel will hear a presentation on thimerosal not from a career vaccine scientist—as is usual ACIP practice—but from Lyn Redwood, one of the first vocal advocates of the false notion that thimerosal causes autism and the former president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy chaired until 2023. ACIP’s charter is to evaluate the data and guide the country’s approach to vaccines. By reopening the case on thimerosal, Kennedy’s handpicked committee has already chosen to entertain a classic anti-vaccine talking point. If the new ACIP’s vote further limits the use of vaccines containing the compound, it will also show, from the get-go, how willing it is to disregard evidence. A multitude of studies, going back more than 20 years, has shown that thimerosal has no link to autism. Children who have received thimerosal-containing vaccines aren’t at higher risk of developing autism. Nor has removing the compound from much of the vaccine supply in multiple countries—including the U.S.—decreased autism rates. Instead, autism rates have gone up. (Experts who study autism attribute that rise largely to more awareness and more sensitive diagnostics; Kennedy, meanwhile, insists, without evidence, that the uptick is the work of an “environmental toxin” that “somebody made a profit” on.) But around the turn of the millennium, experts felt pressured to remove thimerosal from vaccines, especially those targeted to young children. After studies had linked chronic exposure to high levels of mercury found in fish and whale blubber to developmental delays, scientists began to worry about the element’s effects on the young brain. The FDA kick-started a campaign to suss out the mercury content of the products it oversaw. By 1999, researchers had pinpointed thimerosal as suspect: The levels of the type of mercury found in vaccines containing the compound seemed, at the time, worryingly high, Walter Orenstein, who directed the U.S.’s National Immunization Program from 1988 through 2004, told me. “So there were concerns that it might be harmful to children.” (Autism, notably, wasn’t a consideration.) No research proved that harm, but the fears seemed theoretically legitimate. “It put us in a very difficult position,” Orenstein said. The studies necessary to thoroughly test whether the thimerosal in vaccines was toxic could take years; in the meantime, kids could suffer unnecessarily. Some experts argued that keeping thimerosal in the vaccine supply wasn’t worth the risk to children’s health—and to public trust in immunization. If the FDA publicized its findings on mercury and the government didn’t take action, “we would look pretty stupid or unconcerned,” Neal Halsey, who was at the time the chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases, told me. Plus, thimerosal’s role in vaccines wasn’t technically essential: Its main use was to stave off harmful contamination in multidose vaccine vials, which clinicians repeatedly dip into; with some tinkering, many manufacturers would likely be able to sub in other preservatives, or switch to pricier single-dose containers. So in 1999, the government and the AAP asked pharmaceutical companies to get rid of the thimerosal in their vaccines as quickly as they could—and advised health-care providers to delay giving the hepatitis B vaccine, which contained the compound, to low-risk newborns. As it turned out, the compound never posed serious danger. The form of mercury in thimerosal is different from the one found in fish; scientists soon determined that it was excreted from the body faster—which meant that it didn’t pose equivalent risk. No major problems in childhood development could be linked to thimerosal-containing vaccines. At the time of the original decision, “if we’d had full knowledge, we wouldn’t have done it,” Orenstein told me. Thimerosal was, and is, safe. But that wasn’t the message that anti-vaccine activists took away. Instead, they seized upon the government’s decision as an admission of guilt; multiple mercury-focused anti-vaccine activist groups sprang up. Some of them began to insist, without evidence, that thimerosal caused autism; among the most prominent advocates for that claim was Kennedy himself. The fervor around autism “caught us all by surprise,” Halsey told me. “That’s not what our concern was in 1999.” And yet, those fears ballooned. In the mid-aughts, several states restricted thimerasol-containing vaccines for children and pregnant women. In some parts of the country, the misinformation yielded misguided treatments: In 2005, a family in Pennsylvania had their 5-year-old autistic son injected with a mercury-chelating chemical in hopes of curing his condition; less than an hour later, the boy died of a heart attack. By 2001, thimerosal had been removed from most vaccines for Americans under 6. But the compound’s disappearance had costs. Multidose vials are an especially cheap, efficient way to package vaccines; blacklisting thimerosal made many shots more expensive, Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me. The speed of the decision spurred confusion too. Shaken by the call to remove thimerosal, some hospitals stopped offering the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns entirely; shortly after, a Michigan baby on a delayed vaccination schedule, born to a mother infected with the virus, died. Certain scientists, including Offit, still consider the removal of thimerosal a mistake, not least because it made vaccines appear more suspicious. In a press release at the time, the AAP noted that “the current levels of thimerosal will not hurt children, but reducing those levels will make safe vaccines even safer”—a statement that appeared to validate thimerosal’s dangers. In an attempt to preserve public trust, the government instead broke it, Offit said. “They were meeting the anti-vaccine activists halfway.” Now ACIP seems poised to make a concession to those same anti-vaccine groups. “The fact that it’s come up again is reason for some people to say, ‘Well, there was an issue,’” Edwards told me. In response to a request for comment, an HHS spokesperson said, “The new ACIP committee is committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense. Its recommendations will be grounded in data, not ideology or opinion.” The spokesperson did not address questions about thimerosal specifically or the evidence for once again bringing it under scrutiny. But the experts I spoke with weren’t optimistic about the forthcoming discussion. In the past, any question the committee voted on was usually published weeks in advance, and subcommittees including ACIP members, CDC officials, and independent subject-matter experts vetted evidence and discussed policy options in advance of meetings, Grace Lee, a Stanford pediatrician who formerly chaired ACIP, told me. The new ACIP panel has had no time for that level of preparation. At least one new member, Vicky Pebsworth, has also argued that thimerosal-containing vaccines are dangerous for children and pregnant people in an article published by Children’s Health Defense. The exact proposal that ACIP will vote on hasn’t yet been made public, either. But materials now posted to the CDC’s website hint at the question the group might consider. Redwood’s presentation, which was officially added to the agenda just a day before the start of the meeting, includes a series of slides that largely ignores the strong evidence supporting thimerosal-containing vaccines’ safety, misrepresents at least one study, and concludes that “removing a known neurotoxin from being injected into our most vulnerable populations is a good place to start with Making America Healthy Again.” In an unusual move, though, the materials pertaining to Redwood’s presentation also include a CDC report—titled “CDC background briefing material,” flanked with asterisks—that reiterates thimerosal’s safety, and the evidence that debunks a link to autism. (Redwood, Pebsworth, and the CDC did not respond to a request for comment.) Even Senator Bill Cassidy—the chair of the Senate’s health committee, who helped secure Kennedy’s confirmation—seems to be having doubts about these developments. On Monday, he wrote on social media that the new ACIP lacked the expertise to make sound decisions about vaccines, and called for the meeting to be delayed “until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation.” (A spokesperson for Cassidy did not respond to a request for comment.) If ACIP does vote to remove recommendations for remaining thimerosal-containing vaccines, it could create practical problems, Halsey told me. Even though only a minority of flu vaccines would be affected, forcing manufacturers to alter their products on a tight timeline could make it harder to prepare for annual vaccination campaigns. Lower-resourced regions might also struggle to afford single-dose vials. But the bigger issue with that decision would be this new committee’s brazen disregard for decades of evidence on thimerosal’s safety. The original discussion to remove thimerosal was contentious but understandable: a precaution taken in a vacuum of information. This time around, though, the experts have long had the knowledge they need—enough of it that there should be no discussion or vote at all. From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
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Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem. A fair warning here: I’ve never actually used a dating app — the algorithm that matched my wife and I was the university housing lottery, which put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000. And my wife is now a divorce lawyer, so playing around with these apps seems a little bit risky. So I always end up approaching conversations about dating apps a little bit removed. Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here! I asked Justin what it’s like to be the married CEO of a dating app company who doesn’t use his own product anymore, especially as his own personal romantic journey is very intertwined with Hinge. The entire idea of the company and how it has evolved over the years connects to Justin’s own life and his decision to reconnect with his college girlfriend, just a month before she was supposed to marry someone else. The story is so unbelievable that it was turned into an episode of Netflix’s Modern Love. You’ll hear Justin explain how that experience connects to the company’s values, culture, and his vision of what Hinge is really for — and how all of that is geared toward helping people find lasting connections. Hinge bills itself as the app that’s “designed to be deleted,” and that, of course, is in deep tension with how mobile apps and services grow users and revenue. Then there is the AI of it all. Hinge, as part of Match Group, is using AI both internally and within its product, just as Tinder and other competitors are. There’s AI coaching features to help you improve your profile, pick better photos, and even catch an inappropriate message before it gets sent. But pull the string on all these ideas, and you get to a place where people might be talking to AI all the time, even falling in love with it, or having AI agents dating each other before meeting in person. Justin had some pretty strong feelings about the importance of centering real human connection and encouraging people to put their phones down and go out on dates in the real world. Justin also called the idea of AI companionship “playing with fire” and compares those relationships to junk food. There’s a lot more in this conversation. We got on the topic of the Trump administration and how seriously Hinge takes the privacy of its users’ data during an unprecedented crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights. We talked briefly about Apple and its App Store restrictions, now that companies like Epic Games and Match Group are free to send people to the web to process in-app purchases. Hinge has some plans that you’ll hear Justin get into near the end. There’s a lot going on in this one; you might even fall in love. Okay: Hinge CEO Justin McLeod. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Justin McLeod, you’re the founder and CEO of Hinge. Welcome to Decoder**.** Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve got to tell you, this is one where I feel like Jane Goodall or a sociologist of some kind. I’m old. I’m married to a divorce lawyer. I can’t even download this app. It’s too risky. I’m watching through the looking glass here. I asked my younger staff for their Hinge feature requests. Don’t worry, I’ve got a million of those. Great. Excited to hear those. When TaskRabbit comes on Decoder, I’m like, “I booked a TaskRabbit.” This is very different. When was the last time you actually used Hinge as a user? Over a decade ago. Wow. Yeah. What’s that like? What’s it like trying to run this team? Is it all just data driven for you, because there’s a real element of dogfooding here. Yes, definitely. We have a lot of single people on our team at Hinge, so there’s a lot of internal dogfooding for sure, and a lot of opinions. I think that the relationship is different. So, I started the company in 2011, and I was single at the time, and I was single for the first four years of Hinge, and then, long story: I got back together with my college girlfriend, and we’ve been together for the last 10 years, married with kids and all. Did you get back together on Hinge? We were together. I tried to get her back. She said no. I started Hinge in response to that. And then someone whom I met on Hinge inspired me to go back. She was about to get married to someone else. She was living in Switzerland. I flew over a month before the wedding. She called off her wedding and moved back to New York, which led to the whole reboot of Hinge. The whole story is very interconnected. I feel like I should throw out my questions. We should just do an episode of Call Her Daddy or something like that. That sounds very complicated. Yeah, it’s been a ride. An incredible ride, and very intertwined with Hinge. But back to your question, I think that we can overweight our own personal experience a bit, especially as the CEO of the company. What I found over time is that people have a wide array of very diverse experiences, and to some extent, I think it actually helps that I’m not in there overweighting my own niche feature requests that would matter to me but not to the whole population. So the app has evolved. It’s more about helping others than it is about helping myself, which was probably the original idea of Hinge. How do you think about the connection between what the data is telling you, the data about what Gen Z daters are doing versus millennial daters, which is the cohort you started with, versus the very emotional experiences people have on this platform, which are out of your control? Eventually, you’ve got to take the meat sack to the bar and look at the other person and not fuck it up, right? Hinge can’t solve that problem, but that’s the heart of the whole enterprise. How do you connect those two in your brain? This is a very complex, nuanced industry. I think sometimes people look at their Hinge feed and they’re like, “Why doesn’t this understand my taste as well as my TikTok feed does?” People don’t quite understand that people aren’t products; they’re not infinite copies of everyone.They don’t always behave the same. Your videos on TikTok don’t have to like you back. There’s just a lot of nuance to getting this right. And you’re right. A fair amount of this comes down to the people on the platform. So what we’re trying to do is to [not only] build a great product but also an environment and a community where people are encouraged to be intentional and authentic, and attract users who are looking to find their person. So that’s definitely the art and the nuance of trying to build a dating app like ours. One of my big criticisms of social media apps right now in 2025 is they’ve all become marketing platforms in some way. At the end of the rainbow, Mr. Beast is trying to sell you an energy bar. That’s what they’re for. And smaller creators are trying to get their first-brand deals or whatever. But there’s a real organization around just marketing. And the platforms try to encourage people to create content for a whole number of reasons, but their reason for being is advertising spend, and then a lot of the content creation on the platform happens for marketing purposes. You can just see how it goes. Hinge and other dating apps are different. You’re trying to incentivize content creation. You’re trying to get people to talk about themselves, to talk to each other. The goal is to market yourself. How do you divorce that from the actual thing you’re trying to do, which is to have people fall in love and get into stable relationships? Well, it’s very much about what you’re optimizing for. And you’re right; social media is ultimately optimizing for engagement, retention, and time in app. That is the lifeblood of any of these companies. How long can they keep you sucked in? That is their objective, and so everything is built around that. And we’ve seen what the consequences of that are. They’re pretty dire. I think Hinge is almost the polar opposite of that. We’re trying to get you to spend less time on your phone and more time out in real life on dates. It’s interesting. When I started Hinge back in 2011, as venture capitalists looked at our business they asked those questions around engagement and retention. They were looking at social media, and they’re like, “What’s your daily over monthly? How much time are people spending in the app? How many sessions per day?” We were optimizing for those things, because that’s what VCs were asking about. That’s how we were raising money. Then Hinge did a pretty big pivot in 2015, when I let go of half the company and we rebooted from scratch, because we felt as if we’d really lost our way. We’d become more of a piece of entertainment that was just about getting people more matches and more activity, and getting them back every day. We’d lost sight of what we were trying to do, which was to have people come to us to find a relationship. We weren’t really optimized around that anymore. When we did that pivot in 2015, the biggest change we made was to stop focusing on the competition. We started focusing on the customer, and we made our North Star metric actual great dates. We introduced the “We Met” survey, where we asked people we suspected had gone on a date if they did in fact go on that date and whether it was good. Everything became oriented toward optimizing for that. That ended up creating a very, very different experience. That actually became the primary differentiator of Hinge. A lot of the other apps in the industry were based on engagement and retention and just getting people back; they were more like entertainment platforms. Hinge became a utility. We started growing through word of mouth, and today we’re the fastest-growing, and in fact the only growing, major dating app. We grew 40 percent last year, while other dating apps are shrinking, because we built a very sustainable business model that delivers on value. The lifeblood of our company is getting more users out on dates, so they tell their friends and then their friends come and join Hinge. The interesting thing about that business model is it’s in the tagline of the company. I always laugh when you all put out a press release, because it says, “Hinge, the app designed to be deleted,” and then a little trademark logo follows every time it’s mentioned, which is just very funny. I appreciate that you have to do it, but it just makes me laugh every time. That means you’re trying to graduate users. You’re a utility, you pay until you’re done, and then you’re out. Yeah, precisely. It means you constantly have to find new users. You basically have a different churn problem. How do you think about that life cycle? We think about it in terms of good churn. We want people turning off the app for the right reason. We don’t want people turning off the app because they gave up too early or because they don’t like Hinge. We want people turning off the app because they found someone, ideally on Hinge. What does it mean to find somebody on Hinge? Like you’re married? You’ve gone on three dates? It’s different for different people. When we did the reboot, our core market was definitely 25- to 35-year-olds, and very much people who were, I would say, looking to find their person and get off the app. Now our fastest-growing segment has been 18- to 25-year-olds, and they’re at a different phase in their lives. It was pretty interesting. When we saw that segment starting to grow, it came as almost a surprise to us. I think what attracted these younger daters wasn’t so much a focus on finding a long-term relationship, or a marriage partner today; it was very much about the authenticity and vulnerability and intimacy they found on Hinge, and a moving away from platforms that felt very gamified and flat to something that felt very human and intentional and authentic. So we think about our daters as having a journey mindset. They’re headed in a direction, they’re on a journey of self-exploration. They don’t want to waste their time on bad dates, but they aren’t necessarily looking for their marriage partner today, and that’s totally fine. We’re just looking to help people get off the app and out on great dates, and form intimate connections in real life. But there’s a difference between getting off the app and going on great dates, and then deleting the entire thing, right? Forever, yes. There’s one exit ramp that is very different from another exit ramp. Not to keep comparing it to social media, but again, I feel as if I’m just viewing this from the outside, so it’s all metaphors for me. Mark Zuckerberg is terrified that young audiences will just abandon his core app, or whatever the core social media dynamic is at the time. This is why he bought Instagram. You can read his emails over the course of these trials. He’s like, “There’s another mechanic. I need to buy it before they overtake us.” Zuckerberg keeps going down the line, whether that’s Stories or Reels or whatever the next thing is. You have the same problem, only you don’t get to keep the old users on the old mechanic. You don’t get to run Facebook and buy Instagram. How do you think about reinventing the app for that new, younger cohort that has different dynamics on the internet? We always stay in tune with where the culture’s going. I think it’s just imperative, because, you’re right, we can’t rely on only a legacy user base. So we have to stay on top of culture and where it’s going, and then continually evolve the app accordingly. Right now, a big focus is on AI, and how we can increase the effectiveness of the app in a couple of different dimensions. We’re actually finding, for example, the extent to which coaching has become really, really important right now. Especially during the pandemic, we saw social skills atrophy. People felt less comfortable meeting up with others in real life and interacting. So we’re helping people create their profiles, write their prompts, things like that. Another big thing that came out during the pandemic was more of a focus on voice, and adding voice prompts, which I think is, again, an example of our moving where the culture goes. So we’re always making these kinds of tweaks to continually keep the app fresh. Do you feel the same existential pressure? There’s this idea that some cohort of people will delete the app — the old millennials will be married or tired or whatever it is they’re going to do, and you’ve got to go get a bunch of new Gen Z users or Gen Alpha users, which is frankly terrifying. How do you think about, “Okay, we’ve got to break the old model, because it’s existential for us if we don’t capture the younger user,” or is it more of a gradation? If you look at the relatively brief history of this industry starting in the ‘90s, there’s only been one major disruption moment, which was around 2012. So you had the birth of the industry in the late ‘90s, where you had Match and eHarmony come on the scene, and then they dominated from 1996 to about 2014. It was actually a much smaller niche industry at the time. The users were older, people who felt as if they’d really struggled to find someone in real life. Then you had the mobile dating apps come on because of a few different technologies that started to come online all together — one was mobile, one was the cultural change of everyone having a social media account. Another was data-processing power and moving away from the world of searching for people to a world of a feed of relevant people, one after another. That created a pretty big paradigm shift, where suddenly technology enabled an entirely new type of experience that it was hard for the old incumbents to mirror. They tried to pivot to mobile, but they couldn’t unseat themselves from their way of thinking about the world. It resembles a very classic disruption problem. I think the next opportunity for that kind of disruption is going to be a big technology shift. We haven’t seen that up until very recently. Like with VR, AR, and other technologies like that, I just don’t see those working until they’re deeply adopted by 70 percent to 80 percent of the population, and that’s when I think it will really become something that people start using for dating. AI I think is a very different story, and it’s unclear at this point whether it becomes a disruptive force for the current players or whether it becomes more of an evolution. Obviously, Hinge has a tremendous amount of data we can use to train AI models. We’re seeing huge gains in our ability to match people up more thoughtfully given the tools, and at the same time we could introduce very new paradigms for dating. I want to talk about AI with you, but you mentioned Match, so I think this is a good time to get to the Decoder questions. You’re part of Match Group. You sold to Match Group, and now Match Group owns all of the dating apps minus one, which is a little contentious. It doesn’t own Bumble. There’s a lawsuit. We can set that aside. What’s it like being part of Match Group? When you sold your company, what was that decision like for you? Honestly, at the time we were in a tough position as a company. I’d done the reboot, and we were about a year into that reboot experience, and we had not really cracked the code yet. There were green shoots there that made me believe and made, I would say, the trained eye believe that there was really something there. But VCs just saw that we were popular, and then we tore down our business, and we restarted, and we started to rebuild again. There wasn’t a lot of juice there. So we went with a strategy of recognizing the value of what we were seeing, including massive increases in effectiveness, women coming to the platform in a much higher proportion than on other dating apps. So that was very interesting to Match. And so we received a strategic investment from the company in 2017, and that gave it a path to buy the rest of the company, which it did at the end of 2018. What’s that structure like inside of Match Group now? It’s evolving. There’s a brand-new CEO, Spencer Rascoff, who just started, and I think he’s taking a fresh look at some of that. But up until recently, and still today, the company operates pretty independently. We’re in New York. We pretty much have our own space. We have our own product teams, our own engineering teams, our own marketing teams that operate very independently. We share learnings across the platform. We use shared services like accounting and legal and things like that. But for the most part, the company has its own independent culture, its own independent mission, product road maps, marketing strategies, all of that. You said you shared some central services, like accounting and finance. Is there any product or data that you’re sharing? We certainly share learnings. Especially on things that we don’t really want to compete on, such as safety or monetization or things like that. So there’s certainly that, and there’s sharing for safety purposes. Those are the main ways we share. So if you’re a young and carefree single on Tinder, and you graduate to Hinge, you don’t get to just bring your data along for the ride? [Laughs] No. Again, I’m just looking from the outside. Tinder is interesting. The CEO of Tinder just stepped down. Your new CEO at Match, Spencer, stepped in to run Tinder for a minute. In any normal circumstance, you would be on the attack. If Tinder wasn’t part of the same company as you, this would be a moment to say, “Okay, there’s some strategic weakness over there. We’re going to go get them. We’re going to put the screws on.” Are you allowed to do that inside Match Group? So first of all, I’ll just say that we don’t really think too much about Tinder as Hinge’s competition. We think about Tinder in a very different psychographic mindset. You come to Hinge because you want to really take your time, be intentional, be thoughtful, find your person. Tinder has a much more casual, younger, “anything can happen” mentality. And so that was a very intentional portfolio strategy decision that Match made back when it acquired us. So no, we don’t think about it like that. That’s why I asked about the data and the lifecycle question. There’s a time in your life where you might use Tinder, there’s a time in your life where you might use Hinge. It seems from the overall umbrella company perspective, you want to move that user around your family of apps, but it doesn’t seem as if that’s actually happening at the top level. Yes. From the outside that would make sense. It’s a bit nuanced, because there are very different brand reputations. We like to think of Hinge pretty independently, and I think so do our users. So there’s no pop-up on Tinder that’s like, “Maybe, it’s time to cool it and download Hinge”? There’s not. [Laughs] Okay, feature request for you. What’s your org chart like? How is Hinge structured? That’s also been evolving over time, and we’re still a relatively small company. We have about 350 employees. If I think about the evolution of Hinge growing from one person to the first 100 to 150 people, originally, it was very centrally run. There was tight coordination. A lot of direction came directly from me and my executive team. Then as we started to grow beyond 100 people, I would say a lot of the technology was relatively stable. Like with social, mobile, big data, the question became, “How do we keep optimizing and iterating around this?” We became a pretty decentralized organization, where we had principles around pushing decision-making down to the lowest levels possible, keeping it really on the front lines. We had pretty independent cross-functional product teams that would work on their individual little missions or surfaces. We oscillated back and forth between that. People felt they had a lot of autonomy. That was the main ethos of the company. And then I think with AI over the last couple of years, we felt like, “Whoa, we really need to make a pretty big shift.” Like I said, the risk of disruption is high, with very big opportunities to shift the product experience in a new direction. It now requires pulling decision-making back in toward the center a bit, and giving a much clearer strategic direction to the team, so that we’re all working in concert toward one thing. Because the whole app really has to move together. Different parts of the app have to talk to each other in ways that when we weren’t going through much change, wasn’t as essential. That said, we still have very highly cross-functional product teams where product managers sit with a dedicated designer, researcher, data scientist, and tech lead to attack very mission-oriented problems. You mentioned “surfaces” and “missions.” Are those expressed as just the tabs at the bottom of the app? Is that how they’re broken down, or are they actual user journey missions? That’s what I mean — surfaces versus missions. I think we’ve gone in different directions. There’s never really a clear line of one versus the other. Do you own the Discover tab, where users just discover new people, or is your job to help people find the right person? In that case, you have to think more cohesively about operating across different surfaces or parts of the app. Now we think about our teams operating less as individual surface units and more as part of a cohesive dating-outcomes team, where people feel a bit more flexible moving around to different surfaces. How do you think about assigning product managers to those teams? Because PMs, at least in my experience, are like, “I own this square, and I will mess with this square to make this number go up as much as I can.” But “I can mess with all the squares” is really hard, right? Yes, that’s why we have strong directors at the VP level who oversee an overall mission the way that a head of dating outcomes or a head of growth, who’s coordinating a set of product managers, would. And again, we ask our PMs. Their primary identity is as a dating outcomes PM, not as a discover PM, or a profile PM, or something like that. And while day to day most of their work may focus on the profile and identity work, they see themselves as very much operating as part of this team. That feels like something you evolved to. You’re a relatively young founder. I think you founded the company right out of Harvard Business School. How has your decision-making framework evolved? How do you make decisions? That’s also hugely evolved. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned through doing it all the wrong ways first and then eventually getting to the right way. When you’re a founder and you have a small team of 10, 20, or 30 people, you’re just making decisions by the seat of your pants. What feels good? What feels right? You’re just using your own gut. As we started to get toward 100 people or so, what I noticed was I would be making different decisions on different days that weren’t always consistent. They were based on my mood that day or whatever data was in front of me or what I had last read or whatever. I was just finding I was getting pretty inconsistent. So what I started trying to do was to write down my whole management algorithm. I started putting it in a Google Doc, like “Here’s how I make decisions, here’s what I believe is true.” I started publishing that to the whole company, so everyone could just read it. We would be just very transparent about how we made decisions. It was around the time that I think I read Ray Dalio’s book Principles, and got super dialed in on how we make decisions. What are our principles, and what do we believe is true? Then I opened it up so everyone could comment on it. We would have long debates in the comment margins of a Google Doc to consider everything from our product-strategy principles to whether Hinge should have a dress code. Literally anything. It was all just there so that everyone could debate it. We had hundreds of principles, and then as the company got even bigger and we got to 300 or 400 people, it was very hard. One, you just can’t have these endless debates in Google Docs anymore. Also, the principles started to stabilize. There wasn’t as much debate and churn anymore, and then it actually became an exercise in distilling down the most essential things to communicate about our culture. I worked a couple of years ago to write an internal book called How We Do Things, which distilled it all down to four or five principles. For example, what are the most fundamental things to understand about how we make decisions here? And then individual teams and individual projects would then write their own principles that were more specific to what they were doing at any given time. One of our meta principles now is “decide with principles,” meaning that we don’t want decisions getting made based on some random person’s opinion that if tomorrow this person leaves the company and we hire someone else, they’re going to come in with a completely different set of ideas about how to do something. We really try to define our principles first, agree on those principles, and then see how our work maps to them. I’m happy to talk about what the other three principles are if you want, but that’s the framework we use to make decisions now. Yeah, talk about them a little bit. There’s a beautiful website, we’ll link to it. It has storytelling, it’s well done. But tell people what the other three principles are. So the next one is “love the problem.” What I would notice is we would get an inclination around a user problem, which maybe was not even validated 100 percent. Then we’d start getting feature ideas, and we’d get very attached to a feature, and sometimes the feature would drift and not even be solving the original problem. What I found was, if you want to build breakthrough innovative product features and products, you have to spend extra time with the problem to really understand the why behind the why behind the why of of it. You need to ask, “What’s really going on here? Can we really get deep into our users, into the data, into our users’ experiences?” You have to go to that level to get insight that just isn’t available on the surface, and then stay really committed to that problem. And that’s what, again, allows for innovation. I think for a lot of Silicon Valley, the strategy is just to throw feature ideas against a wall and see what sticks: “Let’s see if this works. Oh, it doesn’t work, throw that out, let’s try something else.” When you have a lot of deep conviction around a user problem, and you really know you want to solve it, then you have the resilience to try and try again to solve that problem, even if your first or second iteration doesn’t make it. So one of the most foundational of our principles is, “love the problem.” Fall in love with the problem, don’t fall in love with the solution, as you must be willing to give up the solution at any given time if it’s not solving the core problem that you’re trying to solve. So that is “love the problem.” Next is “keep it simple,” meaning that I think the best solutions are always the most elegant solutions. Overall, we want to keep the product very simplified and minimal. Our colors are black and white. If you look at the Hinge product today, it’s very clean, it’s very simple. We’re always stripping away features that don’t make sense and just recognizing that there’s complexity. There’s a cost to complexity every time you add a feature. So even if you add a feature, if it’s only marginally beneficial, the cost of the complexity and maintaining that feature versus the marginal benefit it adds will end up gunking up the app over time and slowing you down over time. That’s a hard conversation to have with product managers, because they’ll work for months on a feature and they’ll ship it and say, “Yeah, it didn’t harm the user base, we like it, and it even moved this metric over here by 2 percent.” And you’re like, “Well, the cost of complexity is high, and so we need to focus on things that are actually going to have a major impact.” Are you all the way two features out for every feature in? Do you think about it that way? I know some founders do. I haven’t heard that before. I don’t necessarily think that way. But I do believe in constantly reevaluating what’s in the app, asking what needs to stay, and having a high bar for building a new feature. So does it actually accomplish what we need it to accomplish, and is the complexity worth the cost? So that’s the third one now. The fourth, the last one, is “tend to trust.” I just find that trust is the lifeblood of an organization. You have to do a lot of work to proactively cultivate and tend to trust by creating strong interpersonal relationships, by creating lots of opportunities for transparency at the organization. We have always been very, very transparent about where the organization is headed. So much so that we had to make all Hinge employees Match Group insiders so they couldn’t trade Match Group stock except during trading windows, because we would be so transparent about where we were, what our financial position was. Everyone should know that all the way down to any position at the company. I think the trust that you create both interpersonally and from the leadership on down to the rest of the organization is absolutely essential. It just saves you a lot of headaches when it comes to internal politics and all those types of things. Let’s put this into practice. You obviously made a big decision to refocus on AI. How did that come about? Did you wake up one day and say, “Oh boy, it’s happening”? Was it that Match Group put out a press release with OpenAI saying, “We’re going to work together”? Did you read that and say, “I got to figure this out”? How did this come about? Certainly the release of whatever version of ChatGPT that sent shockwaves through the world was a pretty big wake-up call. Obviously, we’d already been using machine learning and things like that in the interest of safety, and in our algorithms, our recommendation algorithms. But I think the shot across the bow that came from the release of ChatGPT [with GPT-3.5] was what really woke us up to the potential capabilities here and to realizing that this could be a major disruptive force in a way that we hadn’t really seen since we started Hinge. It took a bit for us to get our strategy clear about what our thesis was on how this was going to affect matching and dating in the future. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but I think we have a pretty clear thesis now, and we’ve started to organize the company around that thesis. What’s the thesis? That there’s two main vectors that AI is going to impact: dating and matchmaking. I think the big story is AI is going to move Hinge much closer to the experience of working with a personalized matchmaking service, and away from the experience of feeling that you are joining a social platform on your own as you try to find your person. So what does that mean? Two big pieces. One is personalized matching, and the other is effective coaching. On the personalized matching front, we should be able to move much further beyond the world we are in today, which is our users speaking to us in essentially Morse code as they try to communicate to us what they like and what they don’t like. The idea is that they would be able to speak much more directly to us with “here’s what I’m looking for, here are my values, here’s my personality, here are my interests.” It means Hinge being able to listen to them and hear their preferences, and even integrate things like relationship science into the app to better understand what types of people are compatible and what types of people are not long-term compatible, and introduce them to a much more curated, higher-quality, less-quantity list of people, where they have much more trust that if you’re introducing them to this person, this is probably someone they want to go out with. We’ve already seen big gains, by the way, just by using the power of LLMs to drive more of our recommendation systems using the data we already have. But we released a new algorithm a couple of months ago that increased matches and dates by like 15 percent, and that’s just using the same data. But now we can start to use much more of that unstructured, nuanced data, with people talking to us in their own voice about who they are and what they want, which we can use very effectively. So that’s the whole personalized matching front. Then there’s the effective coaching front. A lot of our users struggle to get out on that first date, and they often don’t know why. I have friends who are incredible people, and they’ll ask me to take a look at their Hinge profile. I’m flabbergasted that this is their attempt at putting themselves out there. So we’re starting with pretty basic things. Hinge has these prompts, which are short questions designed to get you into a conversation, and you put them on your profile. A lot of people write great responses to prompts, but a lot of people write not-so-great responses, often just one-word answers that just don’t work. We found it’s just incredibly effective to have trained an AI model on good-prompt responses and give people feedback. And it’s mostly like, “Can you say more about that?” [Laughs] Don’t just put “no.” Yeah, and to be a little bit more specific and tell a little bit of the story. Good answers invite another question back, or get a conversation going. So we can give people those nudges so they write good prompts, so that they choose good photos. We have a team called Hinge Labs, which is always looking at why some people succeed, and why some people don’t on the app. Some of it is, again, simply building product features that help solve those problems, but another part of it is just giving guidance and notes about how they can be using the product better. We have traditionally published those in date reports, and we publish them in the press and we place them in the help center. But for the most part people just don’t read them. But the idea that we can take this body of knowledge we have about how to succeed on Hinge, and then look at how our users are using Hinge, and then deliver the right piece of advice at the right time to the right user, I think is going to be pretty transformative for a lot of people. There’s a pretty fine line between that and what I see lots of people already doing all day long, which is just talking to ChatGPT, just hanging out. We had Eugenia Kuyda, the CEO of Replika, on the show, and she said, essentially, “My plan is people are going to date AI bots that will coach them up into being fully formed people, then we’ll release them into the dating pool, and they will have confidence and self-assuredness.” Again, there’s a fine line between prompting someone and coaching them inside Hinge, and we’re coaching them in a different way within a more self-contained ecosystem. How do you think about that? Would you launch a full-on virtual girlfriend inside Hinge? Certainly not. I have lots of thoughts about this. I think there’s actually quite a clear line between providing a tool that helps people do something or get better at something, and the line where it becomes this thing that is trying to become your friend, trying to mimic emotions, and trying to create an emotional connection with you. That I think is really playing with fire. I think we are already in a crisis of loneliness, and a loneliness epidemic. It’s a complex issue, and it’s baked into our culture, and it goes back to before the internet. But just since 2000, over the past 20 years, the amount of time that people spend together in real life with their friends has dropped by 70 percent for young people. And it’s been almost completely displaced by the time spent staring at screens. As a result, we’ve seen massive increases in mental health issues, and people’s loneliness, anxiety, and depression. I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, that most people don’t have enough friends. But he said we’re going to give them AI chatbots. That he believes that AI chatbots can become your friends. I think that’s honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, that it’s someone there to say all the right things to you at the right moment The most rewarding parts of being in a friendship are being able to be there for someone else, to risk and be vulnerable, to share experiences with other conscious entities. So I think that while it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people feel less healthy and mo re drained over time. It will displace the human relationships that people should be cultivating out in the real world. How do you compete with that? That is the other thing that is happening. It is happening. Whether it’s good or bad. Hinge is offering a harder path. So you say, “We’ve got to get people out on dates.” I honestly wonder about that, based on the younger folks I know who sometimes say, “I just don’t want to leave the house. I would rather just talk to this computer. I have too much social pressure just leaving the house in this way.” That’s what Hinge is promising to do. How do you compete with that? Do you take it head on? Are you marketing that directly? I’m starting to think very much about taking it head on. We want to continue at Hinge to champion human relationships, real human-to-human-in-real-life relationships, because I think they are an essential part of the human experience, and they’re essential to our mental health. It’s not just because I run a dating app and, obviously, it’s important that people continue to meet. It really is a deep, personal mission of mine, and I think it’s absolutely critical that someone is out there championing this. Because it’s always easier to race to the bottom of the brain stem and offer people junk products that maybe sell in the moment but leave them worse off. That’s the entire model that we’ve seen from what happened with social media. I think AI chatbots could frankly be much more dangerous in that respect. So what we can do is to become more and more effective and support people more and more, and make it as easy as possible to do the harder and riskier thing, which is to go out and form real relationships with real people. They can let you down and might not always be there for you, but it is ultimately a much more nourishing and enriching experience for people. We can also champion and raise awareness as much as we can. That’s another reason why I’m here today talking with you, because I think it’s important to put out the counter perspective, that we don’t just reflexively believe that AI chatbots can be your friend, without thinking too deeply about what that really implies and what that really means. We keep going back to junk food, but people had to start waking up to the fact that this was harmful. We had to do a lot of campaigns to educate people that drinking Coca-Cola and eating fast food was detrimental to their health over the long term. And then as people became more aware of that, a whole personal wellness industry started to grow, and now that’s a huge industry, and people spend a lot of time focusing on their diet and nutrition and mental health, and all these other things. I think similarly, social wellness needs to become a category like that. It’s thinking about not just how do I get this junk social experience of social media where I get fed outraged news and celebrity gossip and all that stuff, but how do I start building a sense of social wellness, where I can create an enriching, intimate connection with important people in my life. [Content truncated due to length…] From The Verge via this RSS feed
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This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Al Williams caught up after a week-long hiatus. There was a lot to talk about, including clocks, DIY USB cables, and more. In Hackaday news, the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest is a wrap. Winners will be announced soon, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, how’d you like a free ticket to attend Supercon? Well, free if you submit a talk and get accepted. November is right around the corner, so get those talks ready. Hackaday is a big fan of the NOAA Polar sats, and it looks like they are on their last figurative legs. The agency has left them up for now, but won’t be keeping them in shape, and if they misbehave, they may be neutralized for safety. Since Elliot was off, Al supplied the sound, and in a bout of karma, Elliot had to do the guessing this week. How’d he do? Not bad, but there’s room to do better. If you do better, there could be a coveted Hackaday Podcast T-shirt in your future. Moving on the hacks, the guys were interested in magnets, clocks, cables, 3D printed machine tools, and even old moonbase proposals. For the can’t miss articles, Al took the bifecta, since Elliot picked a piece on the machine that generated laugh tracks in the latter part of the 20th century and Al shamelessly picked his own article about the role of British ham radio operators during WWII. Miss anything? Check out the links below and catch up. As always, drop a comment and tell us what you think about the week in Hackaday. Download in DRM-free MP3 unencrypted and oxygen-free. Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast Places to follow Hackaday podcasts: iTunesSpotifyStitcherRSSYouTubeCheck out our Libsyn landing page Episode 325 Show Notes: News: 2025 Pet Hacks ContestNOAA Polar Satellites What’s that Sound? Know what the sound was? [Elliot] got close! Let’s see if you can do better. Interesting Hacks of the Week: Iron Nitride Permanent Magnets Made With DIY Ball MillThis Thermochromic Clock Is A Ray Of Sunshine What Happened To Duracell PowerCheck?The Most Trustworthy USB-C Cable Is DIY All About USB-C: Cable TypesA Concentric Clock With Multiple ModesCompound Press Bends, Punches And Cuts Using 3D Printed PlasticHistory Of Forgotten Moon Bases Quick Hacks: Elliot’s Picks: Expanding Racks In The Spirit Of The Hoberman SphereThe Switch 2 Pro Controller: Prepare For Glue And Fragile PartsWatkin’s Tower: London’s Failed Eiffel TowerBhangmeterV2 Answers The Question “Has A Nuke Gone Off?”Al’s Picks: Building A Cyberpunk Modular KeyboardSplit Keyboard Uses No PCBLED Probe: A Smart, Simple Solution For Testing LEDs Can’t-Miss Articles: Just For Laughs: Charlie Douglass And The Laugh TrackCrowdsourcing SIGINT: Ham Radio at War High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed
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Until last week, the future of vaccination for human papillomavirus, or HPV, in the United States seemed clear. For several years, a growing body of evidence has suggested that just a single dose of the vaccine may be as effective as two are, offering decades of protection against the virus, which is estimated to cause roughly 700,000 cases of cancer each year. More than 50 other countries have already adopted the one-dose schedule, and many experts hoped that the U.S. might follow suit this year. The decision rests, primarily, on the deliberations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a vaccine-advisory committee to the CDC. ACIP was initially expected to put to a vote, as early as next week, the questions of HPV-vaccine dosing and, simultaneously, whether to strengthen the recommendations that advise vaccination starting at 9 years of age. Several experts told me that they had tentatively expected both motions to pass, making HPV vaccination easier, cheaper, and quicker. The HPV vaccine is one of the most powerful vaccines ever developed: It is unusual among immunizations in that it durably prevents infection and disease at rates close to 100 percent. If it was deployed more widely, “we could see the end of cervical cancer,” Kirthini Muralidharan, a global-health expert and HPV-vaccine researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. That was before Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, abruptly dismissed all 17 members of ACIP. Among their replacements—each apparently handpicked by Kennedy—are several researchers who have spread misinformation about vaccines or been embroiled in litigation against vaccine manufacturers; at least one of the new members has exaggerated the harms of the HPV vaccine specifically. Now the anticipated votes on the vaccine, among other immunizations, have been removed from the proposed agenda for ACIP’s coming meeting, leaving the fate of the vaccine far murkier. ACIP has, for decades, been one of the world’s most respected expert panels on vaccines. The group’s charter is to rigorously evaluate the evidence on the immunizations that the FDA has green-lighted. The advice it gives the CDC then helps devise the official immunization schedule that guides how insurers cover vaccines, how states mandate immunizations in schools, and how primary-care physicians advise their patients. Only under the rarest of circumstances has a CDC director rejected the committee’s advice. Effectively, the members of ACIP “decide who gets the vaccine, at what age, and how many doses,” Noel Brewer, a vaccine expert and health-behavior researcher at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, who served on ACIP until last week, told me. The group’s rigorous, data-driven approach is a primary reason the HPV-dosing strategy has yet to change. In particular, the committee was awaiting formal results from a large clinical trial in Costa Rica that has been comparing dosing strategies in adolescent girls. So far, the data, recently presented at a cancer conference, suggest that one dose is just as effective as two, the current CDC-backed regimen. Earlier this year, the ACIP working group focused on HPV vaccines was leaning toward supporting the dose drop, Brewer, who was part of that group, told me. The proposal to routinely recommend the vaccine as early as 9 years of age, he added, seemed likely to pass, too. (Currently, the CDC allows for HPV vaccination as early as 9 years of age, but only actively recommends it starting at 11 years of age.) Those amendments to HPV-vaccination guidelines would make the shot simpler to get, for a wider range of children—which could dramatically increase its uptake, Gretchen Chapman, a health-psychology researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me: “The more you can make getting vaccinated easy and convenient, the higher vaccination rates will be.” Only about 60 percent of 13-to-17-year-olds in the U.S. are up-to-date on their HPV shots—a gap that public-health experts consider a major missed opportunity. That the shot can almost perfectly prevent infection and disease for decades is “like the fantasy we have of vaccines,” Brewer told me. Its rock-solid protection “just keeps rolling.” But the new ACIP may see matters differently. Kennedy has yet to fill the committee’s roster, but his initial picks include individuals who appear to have a beef with HPV immunization. One member, Vicky Pebsworth, co-wrote an analysis detailing adverse events following HPV vaccination for an anti-vaccine organization, which she serves on the board of. Another new member, Martin Kulldorff, provided expert testimony in cases against the drugmaker Merck over its Gardasil vaccine, the only HPV shot available in the U.S., and received thousands of dollars from plaintiffs who accused the company of downplaying the vaccine’s risks. (A judge in North Carolina overseeing one of those cases ruled in favor of Merck; another, in Los Angeles, is going to trial later this year.) And Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has himself been instrumental in organizing the litigation campaign against Merck—and has described Gardasil as “the most dangerous vaccine ever invented.” (Under pressure from senators, Kennedy has said that he will relinquish any proceeds from these lawsuits to his son.) He has also falsely claimed that the HPV vaccine—which data show has dramatically reduced rates of cervical cancer in the U.S. and elsewhere—“actually increases the risk of cervical cancer.” (HHS, the CDC, Pebsworth, and Kulldorff did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, the current ACIP might see fit to soften the existing guidelines, or even advise the CDC to remove the vaccine recommendations for certain groups. If it does, those decisions could prompt insurers to stop covering the vaccines, or disincentivize health-care providers from offering them to families. The committee could also remove the vaccine from the Vaccines for Children program, which provides shots to kids whose parents cannot afford them. (An initial agenda for the ACIP meeting scheduled to start on Wednesday initially included a recommendation vote for the HPV vaccine, as well as a vote on its status in Vaccines for Children; those items no longer appear in the CDC’s draft agenda.) A few of the experts I spoke with raised the possibility that this new ACIP might still amend the HPV-vaccine recommendation to a single dose, but with a different rationale: not because the members are swayed by the data on its effectiveness, but because they’d support any option that cleaves a vaccine dose from the immunization schedule. Kennedy, too, seems likely to back such a move. “Any window to roll back the number of times a child receives a vaccine injection? He’s going to push for,” Alison Buttenheim, a behavioral scientist at Penn Nursing, told me. The net effect might at first seem the same: Fewer doses of the HPV vaccine would be on the schedule. But the reasoning behind a decision can matter just as much as the end result. Robert Bednarczyk, an epidemiologist and vaccine researcher at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, pointed out that, although much of the evidence so far has pointed toward one dose being enough, the case isn’t yet a slam dunk: Some of the trials investigating the single-dose strategy are using different formulations of Gardasil, or non-Gardasil brands, which may perform differently. (The Costa Rica trial, notably, does include the same Gardasil recipe used in the U.S.) And some experts still wonder if the protection offered by a single shot may fade faster than a double-dose regimen—a more challenging aspect of vaccine protection to assess without many years of follow-up. If that’s the case, prematurely dropping the second dose could later force the U.S. to add a shot back into the vaccine schedule—a confusing message that could erode trust. The last thing the country needs now is “another hit to public confidence around vaccines,” Bednarczyk said. How Kennedy and his allies publicly justify these choices, then, matters quite a bit. Vaccines, on the whole, are now being billed by the government not as vital, lifesaving tools, but as unnecessary risks, deserving of additional scrutiny. Of the multitude of vaccines on the childhood-immunization schedule, many people already see HPV “as the troublesome one,” Brewer told me. Its ability to prevent cancer has been underemphasized; some critics have stoked unfounded fears that, because the vaccine guards against a sexually transmitted virus, it will increase promiscuity. And unlike other vaccines recommended in the early adolescent years, such as the meningococcal vaccine and the Tdap booster—which are required by most or all states for entry into secondary school—HPV is mandated for preteens in only a handful of jurisdictions. All of these pressures make the vaccine more vulnerable to being rejected, Chapman told me. And should Kennedy’s new vaccine team openly discard HPV doses primarily for the sake of dropping a shot, that could set a precedent—for removing other vaccines from the schedule, in part or entirely. From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
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This is today’s edition of The Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why it’s so hard to stop tech-facilitated abuse After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their home—to “watch what we were doing,” she says, while he went to work. She’d turn them off; he’d get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found ways to monitor her behavior. One Christmas, he gave their youngest a smartwatch. Gioia showed it to a tech-savvy friend, who found that the watch had a tracking feature turned on. It could be turned off only by the watch’s owner—her ex. And Gioia is far from alone. In fact, tech-facilitated abuse now occurs in most cases of intimate partner violence—and we’re doing shockingly little to prevent it. Read the full story. —Jessica Klein This story is from the next print edition of MIT Technology Review, which explores power—who has it, and who wants it. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 25, so subscribe & save 25% to read it and get a copy of the issue when it lands! Why AI hardware needs to be open —by Ayah Bdeir, a leader in the maker movement, champion of open source AI, and founder of littleBits, the hardware platform that teaches STEAM to kids through hands-on invention. Once again, the future of technology is being engineered in secret by a handful of people and delivered to the rest of us as a sealed, seamless, perfect device. When technology is designed like this, we are reduced to consumers. We don’t shape the tools; they shape us. However, this moment creates a chance to do things differently. Because away from the self-centeredness of Silicon Valley, a quiet, grounded sense of resistance is reactivating. Read the full story. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business In China, people are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away. Our story about this trend is the latest to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Iran is going offline to avoid Israeli cyberattacksA government spokesperson said it plans to disconnect completely from the global internet this evening. (The Verge)+ How attacks on Iran’s oil exports could hurt China. (WSJ $)2 Trump is giving TikTok another reprieve from a US banIt’s been a full five years since he signed the original executive order telling Bytedance to sell it. (CNN)+ Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok. (MIT Technology Review)3 Conspiracy theories about the Minnesota shooting are all over social mediaWhenever there’s an information vacuum, people are all too keen to fill it with noise and nonsense. (NBC) + The shooting suspect allegedly used data broker sites to find targets’ addresses. (Wired $)4 Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft are starting to boil overOpenAI has even threatened to report its formerly close partner to antitrust regulators. (WSJ $)+ Here are the concessions OpenAI is seeking. (The Information $)+ Inside the story that enraged OpenAI. (MIT Technology Review) 5 California cops are using AI cameras to investigate ICE protestsAnd sharing license plate data with other agencies, a practice some experts say is illegal. (404 Media)+ How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans. (MIT Technology Review)6 Social media is now Americans’ primary news sourceIt’s overtaken TV for the first time. (Reuters)+ They watched more TV via streaming than cable last month, too. (NYT $)7 Weight loss drugs may not work quite as well as hopedResearchers analysed data from 51,085 patients and found bariatric surgery delivered better, more sustainable results. (The Guardian) **8 What is AI doing to reading? **Here’s what we stand to gain—and lose—when we outsource reading to machines. (New Yorker $) 9 India is relying on China to build up its EV marketIt’s taking a drastically different course to the US. (Rest of World)+ Why EVs are (mostly) set for solid growth in 2025. (MIT Technology Review)**10 People are building AI tools to decipher cats’ meows **Bet at least half of them are “feed me.” (Scientific American $) Quote of the day “Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?” —Remarks made by federal judge Williams G. Young this week as he voided some of the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health grants, saying they were discriminatory, the New York Times reports. One more thing STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics.But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computing’s purported home turf might not be so safe after all. Read the full story. —Edd Gent We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) Wait a minute, Will Smith was offered a role in Inception? Much to think about.+ No pain, no gain? Not necessarily.+ John Waters, you really are one of a kind.+ Say it ain’t so—I refuse to believe that young love is dead! From MIT Technology Review via this RSS feed
Komunitas
rss.ponder.cat
Source and more info Hi, all, and happy Tuesday. OK, I know it’s an absolutely bonkers news moment, so let’s start by taking a few deep breaths. Really. Let’s stop. Let’s breathe. Let’s think of something we’re grateful for. It’s so important that we not flood ourselves with stress hormones. It is wild that we’re dealing with this much drama, fear, and outrage on a daily basis, my friends. You’re not crazy for feeling like it’s too much. It really is. A few examples just from today: the Senate bill is out, and on Medicaid it’s worse than the House version. NYC Comptroller Brad Lander was just arrested by ICE. Trump is threatening to drag us into a war with Iran. Mike Lee hasn’t apologized (although he’s deleted his horrific posts.) Trump was going to stop ICE from abducting farm, hotel, and other vital workers, but now he’s not again. It’s just insanity all around. What do we do amidst this maelstrom of misery? How survive? How succeed? We keep walking, one step at a time. We take right actions. We build community. We double down on love. We practice self care. We look for the helpers, and we help them. We do, in short, the opposite of what our opponents are doing. We also stay incredibly, relentlessly loud. Because remember, friends, NONE OF THIS is popular. In fact, You Gov dropped new polling this morning (see graph above) and Trump’s approval is absolutely plummeting in every single area. This is the caption from You Gov’s tweet: NEW Economist/YouGov Poll Net approval for Trump at the start of his 2nd term vs. when last asked for his handling of… Jobs & the economy +12 | -12 Inflation/prices +6 | -22 Immigration +11 | -8 Abortion -4 | -14 Crime +12 | -1 Those are massive, massive drops. A nineteen point drop on immigration alone! A twenty-four point drop on jobs and the economy! A 28-point drop on inflation and prices! Wow! And, whole not covered in this poll, Trump’s Big BS bill is faring just as badly. It is wildly, wildly unpopular. Pretty much the only people who don’t disapprove of it are those who haven’t yet heard about it. (It’s our job to clue them in.) While these abysmal numbers may seem like scant consolation, we should take comfort in them. Trump is growing weaker by the day. A majority of Americans loath him—heck, even Trump voters are starting to sour on him. The less popular he is, the more likely it’ll be that Republicans distance themselves from him. That means our chances of stopping his agenda improve, if only slightly. It’s not much, but it’s what we’ve got and it could grow into a meaningful advantage. So let’s celebrate Trump’s plunging popularity and make sure everyone knows about it. We’re in the thick of it, folks. It’s hard, it’s tiring, and it’s overwhelming. But knowing I’m in it with you makes me certain that we will prevail. I hope you feel the same. Now let’s get to work. Call Your Senators (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is ______. I know the Senate is voting on the GENIUS Act as soon as today. I strongly oppose this bill in its current form. It does nothing to stop Trump from using stablecoins to corruptly profit off the presidency. Please tell the Senator to vote no. I also just learned that the Senate version of the reconciliation bill cuts Medicaid even more than the House version AND includes a massive new attack on public lands. It also still kills most clean energy tax credits, has vicious cuts to SNAP, student loans, and affordable housing, and defunds Planned Parenthood. It also gives a huge amount of money to ICE. No way. This bill is awful, cruel and stupid. It explodes the deficit, hurts average Americans, destroys the environment, and does it all so rich people and big corporations can have more tax cuts. Please oppose it, and do everything in your power to stop it. Thanks. Call Your House Rep (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______. I’m hugely alarmed that Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, was just arrested by federal agents. What the hell is happening in our country? The now constant arrests of Democratic lawmakers are outrageous and unacceptable. We don’t live in a dictatorship, and, as this Saturday’s protests proved, we don’t want to. ICE is out of control. Kristi Noem needs to resign, Lander needs to be released, and the arrests need to stop. Please ask the Congressmember to make a statement saying as much. Thanks. Extra Credit ✅ While the Trump admin attempts to spread fear in Los Angeles and across the country, Congress is inching closer to handing Trump exactly what he wants: billions of dollars toward funding immigration raids like the ones in L.A., while cutting vital health, education, and nutrition programs. There are many reasons to detest this bill, but taking money from the American people to fund the deprivation of our collective liberties is certainly one of them. The National Immigration Law Center created an easy form here for folks to call on the Senate to reject this harmful budget and to invest in communities instead. And for immigrant readers who are hoping to learn more about their rights while protesting, the NILC offers this resource. Get Smart! 📚 Senate Democrats are holding spotlight forums to draw attention to the Trump administration’s harmful policies and the impact on Americans. There’s one today! Tuesday, June 17, 3 p.m. ET. (Yes, late notice, sorry!) The Big Beautiful Betrayal—Working Folks Pay While the Mega Rich Profit Co-Hosted by Senators Kaine and Murphy A livestream of the forum is available here. Messaging! Messaging! Messaging! 📣 A couple of important messaging items on the Big BS Bill: Navigator is out with new polling this morning finding that: A majority of Americans now oppose the House-passed Republican budget plan, including a majority of independents. Highlighting that the tax breaks in the bill would mainly benefit those who are already wealthy increases opposition by nearly 20 points. Majorities across the political spectrum say they could not support an elected official who votes to give tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations. I did a video yesterday highlighting that this is the most regressive tax plan in 35 years (it’s based on this must-read NYT report). You can watch it here (on Youtube) or here (on my Facebook page). Sen. Warren’s comms team has given me access to their awesome slide carousel about what’s in the bill. You can see what it looks like when it’s posted on her account, and then if you want to post it, too, you can find and download all the slides here. Don’t forget she also has this great one-pager to share. Grab Your Wallet! 💳 Ugh. When T-Mobile—my carrier—launches its “T-Satellite” program this July in partnership with Starlink, Elon stands to gain billions. Please sign the Tesla Takedown coalition petition to demand that T-Mobile live up to its pledge to be “an even greater force for good” and cut ties with Elon Musk. I assured them that if they failed to act I and my family would move our service to CREDO, and I mean it. I hope you will follow suit! Resistbot Letter (new to Resistbot? Go here! And then here.) 💻 [To: all 3 reps] [H/T ] [Text SIGN PBWVKE to 50409, or to @Resistbot on Apple Messages, Messenger, Instagram, or Telegram] (Note that for the most effective RESISTBOT it’s best to personalize this text. More about how to do this here. But if you’re short on time just send it as is using the above code.) The decision by Secretary RFK Jr. to fire the entire CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replace them with individuals who have promoted anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories is deeply disturbing. It is so egregious that the AMA has called for a Senate probe into these suspicious firings. Appointing figures like Dr. Robert Malone and Vicky Pebsworth, who have spread unfounded claims about COVID-19 vaccines causing AIDS and hypnotizing Americans, represents a dangerous embrace of pseudoscience over evidence-based medicine. This panel plays a vital role in setting vaccine policy based on rigorous scientific research and data. Undermining its credibility by stacking it with anti-vaccine advocates lacking relevant expertise threatens to erode public trust in lifesaving immunizations. The new appointees, several of whom were involved with the misinformed Great Barrington Declaration, have repeatedly downplayed the risks of vaccine-preventable diseases and the effectiveness of measures to combat the spread of infectious illnesses like measles and COVID-19. Ensuring the ACIP remains an impartial body of leading medical and scientific experts is critical to maintaining robust vaccination programs that protect public health. Congress must take decisive action to remove Secretary Kennedy and his unqualified panel members in favor of individuals committed to following the scientific consensus and global best practices around vaccines. The consequences of allowing fringe ideologies to dictate national vaccine policy could prove catastrophic. Rigorous evidence and peer-reviewed research, not conspiracy theories, must guide this crucial decision-making process. OK, you did it again! You’re helping to save democracy! You’re amazing. Talk soon. Jess Chop Wood, Carry Water is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Share Leave a comment From Chop Wood, Carry Water via this RSS feed
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Nobody is immune to it, but it’s a lot less common for sketchy websites to provide malware downloads specifically targeting Linux PCs. The market share is nonexistent, the average user is more technically inclined, and the desktop environment ecosystem is full of variations that make it difficult to develop a one-size-fits-all solution. It simply isn’t worth it for most malware creators to focus on Linux desktops. Servers are a different story, but that malware is planted by humans or automated intrustion tools. That being said, none of this precludes stupidity. If somebody downloads Oppenheimer-1080p.mkv.exe and opens it in WINE, you can bet your ass that the ransomware malware will do its job just fine.
Komunitas
fedia.io
Others are answering what you technically asked, but I think that’s not what you’re looking for. What you need is a ‘live USB version’, you run it from a usb stick and can try it without installing anything in your main drive. Here is the link to the page with the links in mxlinux.com. Now you have to make another decision, which desktop you want to use. Mx Linux’s got three, xfce (known for being less demanding on resources), kde (bit windows-like, not that resource hungry either. It’s worth a try), and Fluxbox (I don’t know anything about this one). You might as well download and try the three of them. Just flashing them to the usb to try another. Now the process. First you need one or more iso files (downloaded from trustable sources like the one from mxlinux.org itself, you also can check the checsum, but maybe too nerd just yet), a USB stick (probably 16gb or even 8 could be enough, but I’m not sure exactly. Pick a fast one if you can, it’ll feel quite snappier. THE DATA IN THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST), and Rufus (this is a program to flash the iso into the usb stick). Now read the pages I linked, and maybe follow the links there for explanations, I cannot tell you how to use rufus since it’s been ages since I’ve touched it, but it’s not so hard. May get a couple tries to flash the iso into a bootable usb (meaning the computer can boot or start running the os in that drive) but you’ve got this! Run rufus and flash one of the isos into the usb stick. Now try to boot it. Look up how to get into your ‘boot menu’ (preferable if available, and it works. But it might not…) or ‘bios setup’ on the internet. It depends on the brand and model. You’ll have to turn it off, and push some key just immediately after turning it on again, with your flashed usb stick plugged. If we’re lucky you must see some text menu that lets you chose it to boot, and you’ll be running Linux in a few seconds, hopefully. Now when you’re ready to install one of them into your computer’s drive you have two options, dual booting keeping windows and putting also Linux for which you’ll need a free partition or ssd for it, or if you are convinced of getting rid of windows for good just chose the easy formatting options while installing and that’ll be it (THE DATA IN THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST). If something doesn’t go as planned or you have any doubts don’t hesitate to make follow up questions, it’s normal if you have to repeat some steps or search the internet to troubleshoot something, but Linux has become super easy to install and use (it really is much worse with windows or Mac…) so good luck and welcome to Linux!