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"The dating website sample was provided by a popular dating website in 2017. It contains profile images uploaded by 977,777 users; their location (country); and self-reported political orientation, gender, and age."

It doesn't sound like people were consenting/aware that they'll endup on a facial recognition study.

But I'm not even surprised dating website would sell their such data


It's likely that users did consent when they checked the "I've read the terms and conditions" checkbox when signing up.


It's possible that the dating website got 1 million users and couldn't find product market fit. They then pivoted to selling their users data.


There are plenty of scraped dating website datasets lying around.


Yes, but I suppose you can't use them in a publication on Nature if they are scrapped illegally.

This dataset directly from the dating website


Ha. Hahaha. I wish. I'm sorry to laugh, but a ton of ML papers are based on illegally-scraped datasets of one form or another, unless they use strictly blessed datasets (Imagenet2012 being the gold standard mostly-useless-in-the-real-world dataset).

OpenAI's Jukebox is based on illegal large-scale gathering of copyrighted material, for example.


What does "scrapped illegally" mean?

I've never encountered this term. I can see how scrapping might be a violation of some websites terms of use, but I've never seen "scrapped illegally" used. Do you have any examples?


- I have personal information on linkedin

- I have agreed with LinkedIn that they may use my personal information for a set of well-defined uses (basically things on the LinkedIn website/service, and some 3rd party services they use to run the website/service).

- LinkedIn promise that they will not share my identifiable personal information with 3rd parties for any use

- LinkedIn's terms of use state that nobody may scrape personal information from their website without their consent. This is how they enforce the previous promise to me

- Some business comes along and scrapes my personal information for their own business use.

- That business knows that LinkedIn prohibit this, and they know that I have only consented for my personal information to be used for LinkedIn itself.

- This is probably "unlawful" (as they're interfering in my contract with LinkedIn), and certainly violating my GDPR rights. Sadly, it's hard to point at a specific example as guidance doesn't have a section titled "Can I ignore individual's explicit opting out of my usage?".

Hence, illegal scraping, as willing violating the GDPR is illegal.

Just to head-off the very common response: Personal, individual, use is not covered by the GDPR. So there is nothing wrong with you going and using my LinkedIn data for any personal reasons. The moment you try to use it for business purposes though, that's illegal.


Just like the US isn't the entire world, neither is EU.


Well, pictures of faces could be considered personal data per GDPR. Scraping that data without each person's approval could be illegal regardless of any terms of use.


1) Web scraping is not "illegal"

2) I haven't the slightest clue why you think scraped data can't be used in a publication - some results from first page of Google Scholar:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004209802091819...


I believe Valve is working on Flatpak sandboxing for games. If this happen that would be one more reason to game on Linux instead of Windows.

It's not as good as open source but let's be real, you'll never get AAA open source games.

Games don't need to access personal data (such as contact, phone number, photos, files, private messages, etc.) so with strong sandboxing I guess it could be a okay solution privacy-wise


I already run Steam in Docker for this reason, with its own home directory mounted as a subdirectory of my real one. Even before games swiping my homedir I was worried about Steam wiping my homedir, as it's already done once in the past. [1]

Though ironically that means I can't use the new Proton runtime thing ("Soldier runtime" I think?) that sandboxes games via user namespaces, because my distro doesn't build the kernel with userns support so it would require me to give the Docker container more privileges.

[1]: https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671


> It's not as good as open source but let's be real, you'll never get AAA open source games.

Free software philosophy (the "F" in "FOSS") allows the art and data files (levels) of a game to be proprietary, while keeping the code open-source. Sell the game itself, code comes for free.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/funding-art-vs-funding-softwa...


To the best of my knowledge Valve's container system has no relation to Flatpak.


I think it does :

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3797

"Recent versions of Steam can optionally put each game in its own container, using a Flatpak-derived tool named pressure-vessel."


Maybe the Valve Index works through SteamVR ?

For oculus it won't work because it requires the oculus windows app.

(Even when you use SteamVR with an Oculus, actually it's using Oculus app behind)

There are also some projects to reverse-engineer / implement open tracking for VR headsets : https://monado.freedesktop.org/#supported-hardware


"Future plan"... it's been years and it's still "future plan".

I want to buy AMD because they are more open than Nvidia. But Nvidia supports CUDA day one for all their graphic cards and AMD still don't have rocm support on most of their product even years after their release [0]

Given AMD size & budget, the reason why they don't hire a few more employee full time on making rocm work with their own graphic card is beyond me.

The worst is how they keep people in waiting. It's always vague phrases like "not currently", "may be supported in the future", " "future plan", " we cannot comment on specific model support ", etc.

AMD doesn't want rocm on consumer card ? Then say it. Stop making me check rocm repos every week to get always more disappointed.

AMD plans to support it on consumer card ? Then say it and give a release date : "In May 2021 , the RX 6800 will get rocm support, thanks for your patience and your trust in our product".

I like AMD for their openness and support of standards, but they are so unprofessional when it comes to Compute

[0] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887


> why they don't hire a few more employee

The reason is that it would take more than a few more employees to provide optimized support across all GPUs. If nothing else, it's a significant testing burden.


I really don't want to buy Nvidia, but AMD really isn't an alternative if you do anything outside of gaming...


It makes me think about this concept https://desktopneo.com/ . While not perfect, there are definitely some interesting ideas


This is a professional open source game engine freely available to all thanks to a few dev that accept being totally underpaid when they could get the highest salaries of the industry at big companies.

I think we owe at least them the right to express themselves in a small paragraph. Anyone offended by that, is free to go back abusing their users addiction in another game engine that better fit their "view" of the world.

Open source has a societal/education/ethical role to play. Mozilla is not only making Firefox but also writing about privacy ethics. So It could totally make sense for Godot to do the same about game ethics


Go to Menu -> Customize.

Tick "Title Bar"

Drag & Drop the "search" widget aside your URL bar

Drag & Drop the Five buttons you mention where you want

You're welcome.

(for the status bar URL link preview on hover it's already the case by default)


However, the status bar is no longer persistent, but only appears when hovering over a link. Also in the past you used to be able to control the text in the status bar via the window.status variable in JavaScript. This was disabled as it was used for malicious purposes (faking link destinations and misleading users by putting page-controlled content in the browser chrome), and after that there didn’t seem much point to wasting 20–30px of precious vertical space all the time.

I would also note that the address bar and search box got merged for a good reason, because their functionalities steadily converged over time as the address bar became more powerful and useful. You can still have them split if you really want, but it is unlikely to actually benefit most people.


And have it all reverted at random because well "there seems to be along time since you last used Firefox, do you want to lose all your configurations? Yes. Later."


Each time I see that prompt I have to pause and consider the otherwise wacky theory that there evil forces trying to cripple Mozilla from the inside.

Why. Just why.


It's hard to try to come up with another explanation, to be honest. When I try imagine how incompetence can explain everything that's happened with Firefox in the past several years, it feels like I'm going for the gold in the mental gymnastics world championship.


I dunno. Software often have very unintuitive features, like the problem of closing with CTRL-Q on Linux, that looks like a "damn, why did they put it there on the first place", but actually is something GTK does if you follow the guidelines (what goes to show that most software doesn't follow them).

My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.


>My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

I think this is actually a good feature, one of the few introductions which I think if worthwhile, even if the implementation is a bit lacking.

You have to balance the user being able to see the message with not annoying them, and it's not difficult to achieve.

Configuration bloat is a real problem in most applications which allow third-party extensions, and I've seen some stunning examples of extensions bloat on some people's computers, Chrome users included. On the other hand, when I question it, they tell me, "I use all those!"

This article I came across here on HN really enlightened me: https://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html


Hum... Keep in mind that there is no option to not erase your configurations. And that "configurations" has a very bread sense, including everything from about:config settings, themes, extensions, history, cache, cookies, saved passwords, and even for a short period including bookmarks (thankfully that one they stopped erasing). And, by the way, Firefox will revert from a backup if you are logged in into an account, what is probably the reason the devs didn't nuke this by themselves, but also leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories and user enragement.

Having a button somewhere where the user can go and reset those things is ok. But keeping pestering them until they click on the button is really not.


Thanks for clarifying that, I have seen the dialog before, but never investigated what it actually does.

It sounds like something which started out as a good idea and was then steered into user abuse territory.


Thank you for your reply. Your suggested solutions are not complete, however.

The status bar is not persistent.

Also, for whatever reason, the URLs displayed in the status bar are cut off with an ellipsis, even when they would fit inside the window.

The menu bar -- File, Edit, View, etc. -- is still not displayed. And when it is displayed, the keyboard accelerators are not. I do realize this is in part the window manager and OS's accomplishments.

By the way, most of the actions you described are not even possible without using the mouse. Firefox, and most desktop applications, used to be 100% accessible without using the mouse. (Mac has always been an exception, but it was covered 100% on Windows and close to complete on GNU.)


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