The Pew survey found 76 percent of respondents voicing “a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.” That’s up a bit from last year, but still down from prepandemic measures, to suggest that an additional one in 10 Americans has lost confidence in scientists since 2019.
The Pew survey’s results, however, show this propaganda worked on some Republican voters. The drop in public confidence in science the survey reports is almost entirely contained to that circle, plunging from 85 percent approvalamong Republican votersin April of 2020 to 66 percent now. It hardly budged for those not treated to nightly doses of revisionist history in an echo chamber—where outlets pretended thatmasking, schooland business restrictions, and vaccines, weren’t necessitiesin staving off a deadly new disease. Small wonder that Republican voters’excess death rates were 1.5 timesthose among Democrats after COVID vaccines appeared.
Amanda Montañez; Source: Pew Research Center
Instead of noting the role of this propaganda in their numbers, Pew’s statement about the survey pointed only to perceptions that scientists aren’t “good communicators,” held by 52 percent of respondents, and the 47 percent who said, “research scientists feel superior to others” in the survey.
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it matches the advice in a December NASEM report on scientific misinformation: “Scientists, medical professionals, and health professionals who choose to take on high profile roles as public communicators of science should understand how their communications may be misinterpreted in the absence of context or in the wrong context.” This completely ignores the deliberate misinterpretation of science to advance political aims, the chief kind of science misinformation dominating the modern public sphere.
It isn’t a secret what is going on: Oil industry–funded lawmakers and other mouthpieces have similarly vilified climate scientists for decades to stave off paying the price for global warming. A study published in 2016 in the American Sociological Review concluded that the U.S. public’s slow erosion of trust in science from 1974 to 2010 was almost entirely among conservatives. Such conservatives had adopted “limited government” politics, which clashes with science’s “fifth branch” advisory role in setting regulations—seen most clearly in the FDA resisting Trump’s calls for wholesale approval of dangerous drugs to treat COVID. That flavor of politics made distrust for scientists the collateral damage of the half-century-long attack on regulation. The utter inadequacy of an unscientific, limited-government response to the 2020 pandemic only primed this resentment—fanned by hate aimed at Fauci—to deliver the dent in trust for science we see today.
Flying a first-person view (FPV) remote controlled aircraft with goggles is an immersive experience that makes you feel as if you’re really sitting in the cockpit of the plane or quadcopter. Unfortunately, while your wearing the goggles, you’re also completely blind to the world around you. That’s why you’re supposed to have a spotter nearby to keep watch on the local meatspace while you’re looping through the air.
But what if you could have the best of both worlds? What if your goggles not only allowed you to see the video stream from your craft’s FPV camera, but you could also see the world around you. That’s precisely the idea behind mixed reality goggles such as Apple Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest, you just need to put all the pieces together. In a recent video [Hoarder Sam] shows you exactly how to pull it off, and we have to say, the results look quite compelling.
[Sam]’s approach relies on the fact that there’s already cheap analog FPV receivers out there that act as a standard USB video device, with the idea being that they let you use your laptop, smartphone, or tablet as a monitor. But as the Meta Quest 3 is running a fork of Android, these devices are conveniently supported out of the box. The only thing you need to do other than plug them into the headset is head over to the software repository for the goggles and download a video player app.
The FPV receiver can literally be taped to the Meta Quest
With the receiver plugged in and the application running, you’re presented with a virtual display of your FPV feed hovering in front of you that can be moved around and resized. The trick is to get the size and placement of this virtual display down to the point where it doesn’t take up your entire field of vision, allowing you to see the FPV view and the actual aircraft at the same time. Of course, you don’t want to make it too small, or else flying might become difficult.
[Sam] says he didn’t realize just how comfortable this setup would be until he started flying around with it. Obviously being able to see your immediate surroundings is helpful, as it makes it much easier to talk to others and make sure nobody wanders into the flight area. But he says it’s also really nice when bringing your bird in for a landing, as you’ve got multiple viewpoints to work with.
Perhaps the best part of this whole thing is that anyone with a Meta Quest can do this right now. Just buy the appropriate receiver, stick it to your goggles, and go flying. If any readers give this a shot, we’d love to hear how it goes for you in the comments.
A Volkswagen software subsidiary called Cariad experienced a massive data leak that left 800,000 EV owners exposed, according to reporting by the German publication Spiegel Netzwelt. The leak allowed personal information to be left online for months, including movement data and contact information.
This included precise location data for 460,000 vehicles made by VW, Seat and Audi. According to reports, the information was accessible via the Amazon cloud storage platform.
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VW said in a statement reviewed by the German press agency DPAthat the error has since been rectified, so that the information is no longer accessible. Additionally, the company noted that the leak only pertained to location and contact info, as passwords and payment data weren’t impacted. It added that only select vehicles registered for online services were initially at risk
This article then states that because it required technical expertise to access the locations, you shouldn’t be worried, which is quite frankly a retarded position to take: it is exactly those people with technical expertise that are the ones looking for these vulnerabilities and interested in exploiting them. Location data is extremely sensitive.
German electric air taxi company Volocopter has filed for bankruptcy protection, the latest in a string of similar startups to hit financial turbulence. The company plans to keep operating while it searches for new investors.
“We are ahead of our industry peers in our technological, flight test, and certification progress. That makes us an attractive company to invest in while we organize ourselves with internal restructuring,” CEO Dirk Hoke said in a statement.
Volocopter is one of the more well-funded electric air taxi startups, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars over nearly a decade with backing from major automakers like Germany’s Mercedes-Benz and China’s Geely.
Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads.
In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to “unintentional” Siri activations that occurred after the “Hey, Siri” feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, “Hey, Siri.”
Sometimes Siri would be inadvertently activated, a whistleblower told The Guardian, when an Apple Watch was raised and speech was detected. The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri’s alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters noted (claims which remain disputed).
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It’s currently unknown how many customers were affected, but if the settlement is approved, the tech giant has offered up to $20 per Siri-enabled device for any customers who made purchases between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024. That includes iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, HomePods, iPod touches, and Apple TVs, the settlement agreement noted. Each customer can submit claims for up to five devices.
A hearing when the settlement could be approved is currently scheduled for February 14. If the settlement is certified, Apple will send notices to all affected customers. Through the settlement, customers can not only get monetary relief but also ensure that their private phone calls are permanently deleted.
While the settlement appears to be a victory for Apple users after months of mediation, it potentially lets Apple off the hook pretty cheaply. If the court had certified the class action and Apple users had won, Apple could’ve been fined more than $1.5 billion under the Wiretap Act alone, court filings showed.
But lawyers representing Apple users decided to settle, partly because data privacy law is still a “developing area of law imposing inherent risks that a new decision could shift the legal landscape as to the certifiability of a class, liability, and damages,” the motion to approve the settlement agreement said. It was also possible that the class size could be significantly narrowed through ongoing litigation, if the court determined that Apple users had to prove their calls had been recorded through an incidental Siri activation—potentially reducing recoverable damages for everyone.
“The percentage of those who experienced an unintended Siri activation is not known,” the motion said. “Although it is difficult to estimate what a jury would award, and what claims or class(es) would proceed to trial, the Settlement reflects approximately 10–15 percent of Plaintiffs expected recoverable damages.”
Siri’s unintentional recordings were initially exposed by The Guardian in 2019, plaintiffs’ complaint said. That’s when a whistleblower alleged that “there have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.”
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Meanwhile, Google faces a similar lawsuit in the same district from plaintiffs represented by the same firms over its voice assistant, Reuters noted. A win in that suit could affect anyone who purchased “Google’s own smart home speakers, Google Home, Home Mini, and Home Max; smart displays, Google Nest Hub, and Nest Hub Max; and its Pixel smartphones” from approximately May 18, 2016 to today, a December court filing noted. That litigation likely won’t be settled until this fall.
Historically, manufacturers have let buyers unlock that access and customize what software their phones run. Notable exceptions in the US have, for the most part, only included carrier-specific phone variants.
Unlocking a Pixel smartphone, for example, requires adjusting a couple of settings and installing a couple of well-known tools. Then you’re ready to purge locked software or install a new launcher. Roughly a year ago, Xiaomi introduced a policy limiting users to three unlocked devices per account, providing only a limited time window for unlocking, and demanding waiting periods before doing so. It’s now gone even further, limiting users to unlocking the bootloader of just a single device throughout the year.
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Custom ROMs usually (but not always) derive from pre-existing OSs like Android or Xiaomi’s HyperOS. To write operating software that works on a certain device, you need to develop it on that specific device. Consequently, individuals and teams throughout the enthusiast phone sphere constantly add to their collections of bootloader-unlocked phones. The new unlocking restrictions could place undue hardship on resource-limited development teams, reducing the number of custom ROMs produced moving forward.
Custom ROMs are not only important so you can do what you want on your hardware, but very important is that they allow you to keep updating a device long beyond manufacturer support (eg Cyanogen mod), keeping “outdated” devices running and useful.
