Reverse engineering an Android app for a Bluetooth connected car battery monitor with some startling discoveries
> TLDR
- A Bluetooth enabled battery monitor that records car battery voltages. The hardware requires a smartphone for pairing
- The product collects GPS co-ordinates, cell phone tower data and nearby Wifi beacons
- Location data is sent over the Internet to servers in Hong Kong and mainland China
- App store misleads consumers by stating that no personal data is collected or shared. Since the Android app requires location permissions to use the hardware device, users are effectively forced to continuously broadcast their physical location to 3rd parties in order to use the product.
> There are no legitimate reason for a car battery monitor application to track it’s user’s location. With over 100,000 downloads on Android alone, this raises significant privacy concerns
Discussion on HN.
Stealing from the YouTube comment section.
1- 1:27 Just putting money into a retirement account does not mean you are investing
2- 2:28 You can be financially independent even if you don't own a home
3- 3:57 savings should be something you do passively, not actively
4- 4:57 investing should not mean picking individual stocks
5- 6:17 spending less is not the same thing as saving
6- 7:30 budgeting is not the opposite of spending
7- 8:40 restricting your spending will not allow you to build wealth as much as bringing in more money
8- 10:03 keeping a running credit card balance is not good for your score
9- 11:11 almost everything is negotiable, including debt
10- 12:45 you shouldn't necessarily aim to get a tax refund
11- 13:50 even if you make a lot of money, your spending still matters
While news outlets are certainly drivers of fatigue, readers are not entirely off the hook. Research shows that negative headlines have more than a 60 percent higher click-through rate than positive ones—à la the old trope, “if it bleeds, it leads.”
I always feel that there are way more bad news than good news until now. I made a tally of the posts on the homepage of Beehaw right now and registered 14 as positive, 10 as negative, and 15 as neutral wrt my stance. It just seems like I actively focus more on the bad ones. Maybe I will try reading more positive ones.
To be fair, the developer said they welcome pull requests of alternative captcha implementations that's better than current implementation.
Also the admin had voiced their concern on GitHub.
What spammers want, how they do it, and how to prevent it
What do spammers want? The main motivation for spam is profit. Spam tends to be very lucrative, even when spammers are just peddling questionable products. That said, there are worse ways that spammers use for financial gain. One such way is phishing, that is, to get sensitive personal information, such as passwords or credit card information, from the user, by pretending to be an important or official source, such as a bank or an IT manager, or promoting a fake offer to grab the user’s attention. With the popularity of social media, there are even phishing techniques focused entirely on creating authentic-looking posts for this exact purpose. Another possible motive for spam is to turn your computer into a zombie. In computer science, a zombie is a computer that has been infected by a virus or a hacker and is now controlled remotely by the attacker, without the user being aware. These infected computers are then used for malicious intent, such as by being used to orchestrate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or even to spread more spam online via e-mail spam, ultimately getting more profit in the process. There are also spammers that seek to add links back to their own websites or to misleading offers, in a misguided attempt for higher search engine ranks to those websites. These attempts at linkbuilding are non-recommended SEO tactics that are frowned upon by Google, as they are attempts at tricking both search engines and users by dishonest linkbuilding. Whatever the case may be, spam ultimately boils down to malicious intent, either towards you, your site or your users.
I'm assuming lemmy's bug is acting up again lol. Anyway, I am also very excited about Sync.
Maybe you guys already know about the bot signup over lemmy.world. Now they are all over the lemmyverse. The top 20 fastest growing instances in the threadiverse are probably suffering from it. The top one, lemmy.podycust.co.uk, has 10k users with 7 total posts. The total user count of threadiverse is now 544k, compared to 270k on June 19. We may be facing 200k+ bots at this point. Also these instances are in the federation. If any admin of these instance abandons ship, this creates huge liabilities to the threadiverse.
Lemmyverse needs to figure out how to deal with this. But before that happens, do you guys think Beehaw should preemptively defederate these affected instances? Or could there be a better solution?
Surveys After each song, participants were asked to rank how much they liked the song (1 to 10), if they would replay the song (0, 1), recommend the song to their friends (0, 1), if they had heard it previously to assess familiarity (0, 1), and if they found the song offensive (0, 1). We also showed participants lyrics from the song and lyrics created by the researchers and asked them to identify the song lyrics to measure their memory of the song (0, 1).
I still think your concern is legitimate.
Abstract
Identifying hit songs is notoriously difficult. Traditionally, song elements have been measured from large databases to identify the lyrical aspects of hits. We took a different methodological approach, measuring neurophysiologic responses to a set of songs provided by a streaming music service that identified hits and flops. We compared several statistical approaches to examine the predictive accuracy of each technique. A linear statistical model using two neural measures identified hits with 69% accuracy. Then, we created a synthetic set data and applied ensemble machine learning to capture inherent non-linearities in neural data. This model classified hit songs with 97% accuracy. Applying machine learning to the neural response to 1st min of songs accurately classified hits 82% of the time showing that the brain rapidly identifies hit music. Our results demonstrate that applying machine learning to neural data can substantially increase classification accuracy for difficult to predict market outcomes.
So they use synthetic data to both train and test their model, this is because the original dataset contains only 24 songs.
Next, we assessed the bagged ML model's ability to predict hits from the original 24 song data set. The bagged ML model accurately classified songs with 95.8% which is significantly better than the baseline 54% frequency (Success = 23, N = 24, p < 0.001).
So the 97.2% accuracy is reported on the synthetic data. On the original one, it is 95.8%. But the authors do acknowledge the limitations.
While the accuracy of the present study was quite high, there are several limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our sample was relatively small so we are unable to assess if our findings generalize to larger song databases.
Researchers harness neurophysiology and machine learning for 97% accuracy in predicting future chart-toppers.
![Machine Learning Unlocks the Secret to Hit Songs](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/45402e6e-571f-4f7c-96b8-680b60338eef.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
> Why it matters: A recent study at Claremont Graduate University has applied machine learning to neurophysiological data, identifying hit songs with an astonishing 97% accuracy.
Read more: 'Neuroforecasting': How science can predict the next hit song with 97% accuracy.
Read the Research article.
Discussion on Hacker News.
Their prequel on Meta: A few thoughts about #Meta's #ActivityPub project (and whether we should instantly block it)
To recap: I'm also very, very suspicious of Meta and I know they don't have good intentions - I'm not suggesting that maybe they've changed and they will do things differently, to "give them a chance" first. I just don't think that declaring to block them makes much sense at this point in time. Maybe they will give us real reasons to block them once they launch their platform. But I'm not by principle against interacting with Meta users, as long as I can avoid Meta's ads, black box algorithm and data mining.
I guess you do need to know the domain name first to block it.
If the application is denied then the user will be removed.
You can try to access https://beehaw.org/u/Lugadi. Currently it's 404, which probably means that your application was denied. But you should be able to reapply though.
Wait, are you sure the handle is Lugadi
instead of Lugado
? Because https://beehaw.org/u/Lugado shows the user page. If you cannot login it probably means your application is still under review.
But these building blocks would need policy change to thrive. Projects like the Fediverse, for example, are not able to integrate with closed systems or compete with the massive concentrated resources of the likes of Facebook. A set of radical policy changes would therefore be needed to force big social media networks to interoperate, decentralize internally, open up their intellectual property (e.g. proprietary software), end forced advertising (advertising people are subjected to in exchange for “free” services), subsidize data hosting so that individuals and communities — not the state or private companies — can own and control the networks and perform content moderation. This would effectively strangle tech giants out of existence.
I guess there's only so much tech can do.
The defederated list does not include reasons and we can’t add it from Lemmy’s tools. The Lemmy instances we’ve defederated from memory are : Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml because they deny certain genocides, exploding-heads.com and lemmygrad.com because they are queerphobic, burggit.moe because they host child pornography.
This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.
Source: https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/
"Same bigotry, different religion"
They were posting from mastodon, I guess that's just by default.
Maybe collapsing the sticked threads would help?
It happened to my Pixel 4a.
Meanwhile, one of the US parties is trying to ban universal free school meals. Sad.
Hi bees! Great to be here with you guys.