Firefox collects data, AI is a disaster, France bans TikTok (sort of): Linux & Open Source News

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Timecodes:
0:00 Intro
0:35 Sponsor: Squarespace
01:36 Firefox adds data collection
03:30 Debian maintainer restricts KeePass XC features
05:53 AI is still a disaster
11:16 Linux kernel 6.9 is out
12:42 France bans TikTok to quell protests
14:18 Gaming: NTSYNC driver, Wine 9.9
16:15 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
17:29 Support the channel

Firefox adds data collection

See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy

Debian maintainer restricts KeePass XC features

https://linuxiac.com/debian-keepassxc-sparked-debate/

AI is a complete disaster

https://www.engadget.com/google-search-will-now-show-ai-generated-answers-to-millions-by-default-174512845.html

https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/google-io-showcases-new-ask-photos-tool-powered-by-ai-but-it-honestly-scares-me-a-little

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/gmails-ai-powered-email-summaries-can-dig-through-your-inbox-for-you/

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

https://www.securityweek.com/user-outcry-as-slack-scrapes-customer-data-for-ai-model-training/

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-dissolves-team-focused-long-term-ai-risks-less-one-year-announc-rcna152824

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/24158529/reddit-openai-chatgpt-api-access-advertising

Linux kernel 6.9 is out

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.9-Released
https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-69-features

France bans TikTok to quell protests

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/french-tiktok-ban-makes-vpn-usage-soar-in-new-caledonia

Gaming: NTSYNC driver, Wine 9.9

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-NTSYNC-Broken

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases/wine-9.9

hey everyone and welcome to this new episode of the Linux and open source news this week we have Firefox implementing more data collection but don’t be afraid it looks kind of fine and you can disable it we also have more stuff happening around AI which proves that it is an absolute disaster right now we also have the release of the Linux kernel 6.9 and France starting to ban Tik Tok in certain territories to quell some protest which is not great we also have this excellent Segway to our excellent sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and chances are you all know what Squarespace is but if you don’t just know that they’re your all-in-one solution to create and run your own website Squarespace has all the tools you need to start your website improve it even without knowing anything about code they have pre-made layouts that you can customize heavily in terms of the colors of block placement just by drag and drop it’s really easy to use you can create all your pages but you also have plenty of modules like anything you need to run a store complete with online payment you have a members only area you have a logo creator you can even buy your own domain name that you will need to have a serious website straight from Squarespace so there are your all-in-one platform to let you create and run that website so to get started with Squarespace just click the link in the description or head over to squarespace.com slthe Linux experiment and you’ll get 10% off your first website okay so Modzilla announced that Firefox needs more user data to power certain browser features in Firefox 126 which is the current version of the browser it will now collect some data on what you have searched for this data is just broken down into broad categories like Health travel animals hobbies and the like meaning that they will have a better idea of your interest without knowing the exact specifics they seem to be using this to power things like Firefox suggest which are those little suggestions that you can see in the popup that appears when you start typing in the address bar they’re saying that the data is anonymized with oblivious HTTP that’s a tool that reroutes all the data so they cannot know your own IP address they cannot link it to your search dat data and they’re also not linking this data to your Firefox account if you use one they say they don’t collect the specific Search terms that you’re typing or the websites that you visit just the broad categories you’ve searched for and if you disable usage data in firefox’s settings you will also disable this data collection and honestly this looks sort of okay I am never a big fan of a tool I’m using implementing more data collection especially to power a feature that I’m sure no one really uses like Firefox suggest if it is to prepare for more features I would have preferred them to announce these features at the same time as the data collection but here it is completely Anonymous it is not linked to any personal data and you can turn it off and it is already turned off if you already disabled Telemetry in Firefox so I think it’s okay and there’s not much to worry about I would prefer if it wasn’t there but it’s not a big deal that it is keypass XC users that use Debian testing are in for a rough ride because the maintainer for this package arbitrarily decided to cut some features from the application in the default package most notably browser integration which lets you use the passwords you saved in your password manager inside of your web browser which is you know one of the biggest use cases for a password manager the developer also published a pretty infuriating and patronizing message when asked why this happened basically saying that a password manager should not interface with anything and that these developments are I quote misguided and that users could always install the I quote crappy version manually and that is a very entitled response a maintainer job is to distribute software not to decide how the software works if the default version of the app comes with these plugins enabled and and most users want them it’s not up to the maintainer to decide if it’s misguided or crap it’s their job to give users what they need if they don’t like the app or the direction it takes they can always resign from their position especially here when we’re talking about using your passwords in a web browser with an extension instead of having to open your password manager unlock it find the password for the website you’re visiting copying and pasting it like a caveman the rational behind this is that it’s not secure to have these Integrations enabled and also that it increases the attack surface but you know what also increases the attack surface of your system using X11 where any app can be a key logger and you can’t do anything about it or having the network enabled or having a service that lets apps communicate with each other like copy pasting which you need if you’re disabled browser integration do you want to remove these score features of a system just like uh using browser integration for a password manager is a core feature of a password manager it’s not up to the maintainer to decide if these core features should exist if you don’t like that keypass XC has these plugins you should probably just stop maintaining keypass XC for Debian now fortunately you can still install the keypass XC Das full package to get the normal fully functional version and not use the crappy limited version the maintainer wants you to use now we have had a lot of stuff happening around AI this week and it just paints a pretty Bleak picture first Google had its annual developer conference Google IO which was mostly focused on AI and in terms of features it looks useful stuff like asking Google to show you how your kid swimming has progressed that will generate a slideshow of all the pictures of your kid swimming or asking what is your license plate number Google will now pull all the photos of your own car with the plate clearly visible in Gmail Google can sift through your emails and generate summaries for you and Google search will also start showing summaries on certain topics instead of the links first all AI generated of course but when you think about it Google’s AI is now able to deduce personal information instead of collecting it when you type it or when you search for things or when you voluntarily contribute it so they can use your photos documents emails and more and just deduce everything they need to know to Target you with ads without you even contributing any of this data willingly and with AI answers now reaching Google Search right before you even see any links it’s no longer Bing does that but it has like 2% market share so no one gives a crap it’s now billions of people will see the one world view that Google has trained its AI to regurgitate and I’m not sure that’s something that will benefit society as a whole now stay on AI netbsd has decided to ban contributions that are using AI generated code they updated their commit guide especially the second paragraph titled do not commit tainted code to the repo which now includes a ban on code generated by large language models or similar technology and they actually name names like GitHub and Microsoft’s co-pilot open ai’s chat GPT or meta and Facebook’s llama they say they will presume any AI gener ated code is Tainted and must not be committed without approval which is normal as any ruling in any country could force a specific license on this AI generated code and could force projects to revisit a lot of older comets and remove or rewrite some code other projects did that previously like Gen 2 for example and I would be surprised if more open- Source projects didn’t adopt a similar stance on AI and just started Banning AI code alog together now if you needed even more proof that AI is still a show we also have slack now scraping consumer data to develop new AI models this is done by default and it doesn’t require any opin and all message contents and files typed in or uploaded to slack can now be used to train their AI model they say data will not leak between workplaces but when you look at how easy it is to make things like chat GPT spit out a Verbatim copy of online articles it probably won’t be too hard to force slack AI to also spit out exact copies of messages sent by another company to opt out you actually have to contact the slack customer experience team via email you cannot even do it with a simple toggle in the settings and we also have open AI team focused on preventing the long risks of AI that has disbanded just one year after it was formed team members stated that they disagreed with Open ai’s Leadership on the core priorities they also said that the company should be more focused on security monitoring safety and societal impact and that these concerns are not only not being addressed but that their team didn’t even get access to the Computing resources they needed to conduct research on those topics and finally if you use Reddit well your posts are now used to train open AI as well as Reddit struck a deal with open AI to let them use their realtime API the CEO of open AI is actually a Reddit shareholder as well which probably helped smooth over the deal and it is no surprise open AI would want access to this data in a legal way because Reddit is basically now better than Google at giving you relevant results for a lot of Searchers and it also sort of proves that open AI is perfectly aware that they need to pay to actually use content that is publicly available online to train their AI model so that’s probably not going to help them for their current ongoing cases against major Publishers who are requiring the exact same thing but also these Technologies are insanely useful they will definitely transform and improve the lives of many many people but they do need some safeguards and barriers and some oversight letting company decide how the world will work or how Society functions or the core tools that everyone uses has never worked in any period of time for anyone we need to make sure those things don’t go too fast too far because if they do we’re all kind of screwed now this week we also saw the release of the Linux kernel 6.9 headline features include better performance for Intel Core Ultra CPUs some AMD CPU performance improvements and also the implementation of AMD pstate preferred core meaning that on your specific AMD CPU the fastest core that you have will be identified and will be prioritized for heavy workloads to increase performance Intel CPUs with a hybrid design so with efficiency and performance scores should also see better support and performance the terminal or TT wise should look better when running them on a high resolution display thanks to higher quality fonts Intel fast boot wasn’t enabled on all platforms and the new experimental Intel XE driver for modern Intel gpus has seen some improvements although it is still not the default for now and you can add to that the usual improvements to the performance of various file systems plus more Hardware support as always so it is a pretty solid version that should bring performance improvements for virtually everyone provided the dis R you use gives you an update to 6.9 and since it’s not an LTS colel chances are if you’re not using a rolling release drro you might not get access to it it will also only be supported for a few months uh so you probably will get those benefits with a later version of the colonel instead now in a pretty totalitarian move France decided to ban Tik Tock in new calonia a territory in the Pacific that is still part of France for now there are some violent clashes and protests going over there notably because France is planning a constitutional reform for the territory to let more people who aren’t native to the territory vote in decisions regarding new calonia itself including a potential referendum to become an independent state so as protests organize it looks like Tik Tok was one of the main tools being used and so France decided to ban it in a move reminiscent of basically every totalitarian regime of course it serves no real purpose because most people they just turned to VPS tends to still use the application with certain Services reporting a 150% increase in the number of VPN users there and in case you were wondering this is what infringing on Free Speech looks like it’s not a company deciding to ban you from its own private platform for saying something they don’t like it’s not a Discord server run by three people telling you you don’t have the right to say something this is a government telling you that you cannot use this specific application because they don’t like what you’re saying on it that’s the problem that’s infringing on free speech and seeing France do that when other countries that have done that in the past don’t really have the best track record in terms of Human Rights or even just democracy in general that’s extremely worrying and let’s finish this with the gaming news first we have some news about the new anti sync driver for wine and proton which promises to bring a lot of performance Improvement ments when gaming on Linux this driver should be included in the kernel 6.10 but unfortunately it’s been marked as broken as the driver is not complete enough not all the patchers required have been merged and it is now too late to include them in 6.10 meaning the driver will not be compiled by default in 6.10 and we will have to wait for the next release to see how much it helps our gaming experience the developer for the driver someone working for code Weaver first the company that contributes most of Wine’s code said that they’re sorry for taking too long to get these patches into an acceptable State and seriously you don’t have to apologize you’re doing awesome work the fact that it took a little bit longer than you initially thought is really not a problem we’ll wait for 6.11 to get access to this and it looks like it’s going to be a major performance improvement over using regular wine we will have to compare how it does if you compare it with fsync or esync when using proton but there should be performance improvements there too and wine 9.9 was also released this week improving support for running 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit systems and making arm support smoother and more efficient by better detecting the CPU model some obsolete features in wi’s direct X implementation were also removed and there are also 38 bug fixes in that release notably for crisis 2 for Siberia Assassin’s Creed Syndicate unity and odyssey or Fallout 3 and as always these improvements will at some point make their way into proton as well so you will get those benefits when Val decides to rebase proton on the latest version of Y and how about you decide to rebase your computer experience thanks to our 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