Random News not worthy of own thread

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by felter » Sat, 24. Jul 21, 03:43

WOW (pun intended) I'm surprised that no one (mind you not many left here) has mentioned what's currently happening with the Activision|Blizzard saga. As it turns out that Activision|Blizzard is not exactly the nicest place to work especially if you are a women as Californian powers that be are suing them for some pretty attrocious and nasty working conditions towards women. Activision|Blizzard and especially J. Allen Brack are trying to sweep it under the carpet, denying that any of the allegations are true, while a massive amount of current and ex employeees are confirming the allegations. There has been mass demonstrations inside WOW itself and a lot more cancelled subscriptions, with a growing voice that J. Allen Brack should resign over the issue, especially since he made a statement on the subject which many are calling an empty pathetic and false statement. Pesonally I haven't had anything to do with Activision|Blizzard since that Honk Kong Blitzchung fiasco and I can't see that changing anyting soon.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by BaronVerde » Thu, 29. Jul 21, 10:57

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by Vertigo 7 » Mon, 2. Aug 21, 18:17

felter wrote:
Sat, 24. Jul 21, 03:43
WOW (pun intended) I'm surprised that no one (mind you not many left here) has mentioned what's currently happening with the Activision|Blizzard saga. As it turns out that Activision|Blizzard is not exactly the nicest place to work especially if you are a women as Californian powers that be are suing them for some pretty attrocious and nasty working conditions towards women. Activision|Blizzard and especially J. Allen Brack are trying to sweep it under the carpet, denying that any of the allegations are true, while a massive amount of current and ex employeees are confirming the allegations. There has been mass demonstrations inside WOW itself and a lot more cancelled subscriptions, with a growing voice that J. Allen Brack should resign over the issue, especially since he made a statement on the subject which many are calling an empty pathetic and false statement. Pesonally I haven't had anything to do with Activision|Blizzard since that Honk Kong Blitzchung fiasco and I can't see that changing anyting soon.
I've been loosely following this and I can't say I'm surprised to see these things come to light. I've known a couple of Blizz employees over the years and I never really got the impression from them they loved working there because of the people they worked with. Neither of them stayed with Blizz for very long and took other tech jobs. I never got any specifics as to what their conflicts were with their coworkers but this situation would certainly fit.

Whatever the outcome, I hope to see some resolution for the victims, especially for the family of the woman that killed herself. And further I hope that this spurs change within the industry as a whole as this is not just a problem at Blizzard/Activision.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by mr.WHO » Mon, 2. Aug 21, 20:02

At first I thought it was just another overblew twitter drama by oversensitive snoflakes, but there are more and more disgusting rumors coming out of Blizzard.

I don't have high hopes for justice for victims - I recall similar situation was in Ubisoft and it was shrug under the carpet (albeit the Blizzard rumors makes Ubisoft seems like nice place).


One "funny" thing I realized.
Today at my company there was annual sensivity training and I was always laughing off this as "who even need this? or Who do the situation like these".
I wasn't laughing anymore when I realized, that it makes waaaaaaaay too much sence, when you think about Blizzard-like environment.

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by felter » Tue, 3. Aug 21, 00:11

I don't think they are the same. As far as I know, Ubisoft are not facing any legal prosecutions over what was going on there, it was supposedly being taken care of all in house which has turned out to be a joke and a quick sweep under the carpet job. While Activision|Blizzard are being actively sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing and will have to some day answer for their actions in a court of law.

The other thing is shareholders, while both companies are publicly traded the Majority of Ubisofts shares are held by the Guillemot family and all major position are all but held by family members, so they do not fear the shareholders, for there to be any kind of action against the Guillemot family from the shareholders, their own family would have to vote against them and that is not going to happen any time soon.

While Activision|Blizzard, there is no single major shareholder and currently right now Bobby Kotick is not liked by a minority of those shareholders, and it wouldn't take much to turn that minority into a majority. Also, things are not currently going to good for Blizzard, WOW their golden egg was seeing a mass exodus of it's paying customers before this all started, due to the likes of Asmongold and others quitting wow and moving over to FF14. And last week, another big name WOW streamer, Preach, packed it in and is no longer playing or streaming the game. So I reckon Activision|Blizzard are going to be going through a pretty rough time, which will also piss off the shareholders.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by felter » Wed, 4. Aug 21, 01:52

Things are happening at Blizzard as it has been announced that J. Allen Brack is stepping down as President of Blizzard and is being replaced by Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra. So the first head has rolled off the block, I hope this is just the start and that there are more to come. Not just that, there is also a new class action lawsuit being filled on behalf of the shareholders that accuses Activison|Blizzard of intentionally failing to disclose its ongoing problems with sexual harassment and discrimination. As I said in the previous post, there are a few shareholders that don't like Bobby Kottick, they had stuck the knife in with challenging his bonus, now they are giving that knife a little bit of a twist.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by pjknibbs » Wed, 4. Aug 21, 06:23

Normally I'd say "Big deal, one rich person leaves and another takes their place", but the fact one of the replacements here is a woman may actually indicate they're taking this seriously. Remains to be seen how deep the rot goes, of course.

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by felter » Wed, 4. Aug 21, 17:59

I'm actually beginning t think we are starting to see the end of Activision|Blizzard that Bobby Kottick is slowly removing Blizzard from Activision that soon the company will Just be Activision under his total control. Think on it, a few years back there was a Blizzard CEO, then there was a Blizzard President, and now you just have joint leaders running the company. Also have you noticed that the people who actually run Activision|Blizzard, none of them have any computer experience, programming experience or even game playing experience and a lot of them are ex politicians quite a few from Trumps camp. There are some nasty people in amongst them, Fran Townsend actively supports torture as a mean of extracting information, and she is just a teddy bear compared to some of them.

It also turns out that the law firm that has been brought in to investigate the issues and take care of them, is actually an anti-staff law firm, they do not believe that staff should have any rights and will use any means to silence staff members that try to fight for the rights of staff, and they have been brought in to look at staff complaints, not a good thing. There are a lot of people that need to be removed from Activision|Blizzard before that company can itself improve, heal and get back to making games again.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by felter » Thu, 5. Aug 21, 01:24

A follow-up to the new lawsuit against Activision|Blizzard. When I posted about yesterday it was still pretty much a breaking story hence no link to it, but Kotaku have done a short piece on it which gives a short explanation on what it is about. I have to say I love how this one mentions three of the executives CEO Bobby Kotick, CFO Dennis Durkin, and former CFO Spencer Neumann, it's good to see Kotticks name finally being mentioned in all of this mess. They also have a pretty good case against them.

On a side note, that Fran Townsend had been blocking staff from Activision|Blizzard on her Twitter account as she didn't like what they had to say to her, it must have got pretty bad as she has now shut down and deleted her Twitter account. One final piece, it looks like they are starting to lose sponsors now, as T-Mobile has pulled their sponsorship from the Overwatch and call of duty leagues.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by Vertigo 7 » Thu, 5. Aug 21, 09:58

Aren't they still getting a ton of money from China? If that's still flowing in, it's not likely the loss of any sponsors are going to hurt them much.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by mr.WHO » Thu, 5. Aug 21, 10:37

China is recently more and more unstable market - see Disney problems with movies blocked, or last week when Tencent shares dropped by 60 bilion $, because China goverment want to crack on gaming addicts by making monitoring systems that cut of the game if you play too long.

It's business 101 that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket and China is one a hell basket for waaaaaaay too many companies.

Edit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ttzQfjpe44

While China idea is creepy, the basic idea isn't so bad:
- age restriction to gaming
- time restriction to gaming
- spending limit to game microtransaction

Basically doing parent job, but by state level (not that this ever went into very bad direction).

A choice between free corporations running glorified online gambling and treating you as a whale vs China acting like a creepy heavyhanded bad parent.

Hmmmmm.

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by felter » Fri, 6. Aug 21, 05:08

Vertigo 7 wrote:
Thu, 5. Aug 21, 09:58
Aren't they still getting a ton of money from China? If that's still flowing in, it's not likely the loss of any sponsors are going to hurt them much.
Yeah if that was the only thing that was happening to them, but it's not it's only a small part of the bigger picture. WOW subscriptions are falling, teams are leaving their game leagues, shareholders are not happy, while their staff and customers are up in arms, their share price has falling to a 5 year low, and then you have their sponsors leaving. That big picture is not a pretty one.

Onto something totally different. Apple is going to be actively searching for child pornography on Iphone and Ipads, they have software they have designed to look at any picture that is stored on the iCloud, comparing their hash to a register of known child pornography images. Am I the only one who has an issue with this, fair play that they want to stop child pornography I'm all for that, but they are actively going to search for child pornography, when they think they have found some they are going to view the potential child pornography before reporting it to the police. They are a private company, they are not employed by either the police or any government agency to search out child pornography, but they are going to actively search for these pictures, so they can look at them before deciding if a crime has been committed. It's only going to be done in the US, probably the reason for this is a lot of places have laws against searching and looking at child pornography. Some people are getting up against the privacy issue but to me if they are looking for child pornography without the authorization of some kind of law enforcement agency, then they are not any better than the ones who they are reporting, they will just be paedophiles with a conscience at the end of the day.

BBC article.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by red assassin » Fri, 6. Aug 21, 09:08

felter wrote:
Fri, 6. Aug 21, 05:08
Onto something totally different. Apple is going to be actively searching for child pornography on Iphone and Ipads, they have software they have designed to look at any picture that is stored on the iCloud, comparing their hash to a register of known child pornography images. Am I the only one who has an issue with this, fair play that they want to stop child pornography I'm all for that, but they are actively going to search for child pornography, when they think they have found some they are going to view the potential child pornography before reporting it to the police. They are a private company, they are not employed by either the police or any government agency to search out child pornography, but they are going to actively search for these pictures, so they can look at them before deciding if a crime has been committed. It's only going to be done in the US, probably the reason for this is a lot of places have laws against searching and looking at child pornography. Some people are getting up against the privacy issue but to me if they are looking for child pornography without the authorization of some kind of law enforcement agency, then they are not any better than the ones who they are reporting, they will just be paedophiles with a conscience at the end of the day.
You are missing the point here. Tech companies scan for child abuse material because of government pressure to do so. Tech companies won't lift a finger to do anything that costs them money out of the goodness of their hearts. Most tech companies already check any files they hold on their servers against lists of hashes, e.g. https://www.iwf.org.uk/our-services/hash-list. This is because people sharing child abuse imagery over messaging apps, social media networks, and the like is a huge problem - one of the worst consequences of the internet is how easy it's made access to this sort of material - and tech companies scanning for hash lists is a compromise where the alternative is governments making laws demanding direct access to check.

This story is in the news because Apple is moving the scanning process from iCloud's servers to iPhones themselves, likely as a precursor to providing end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups (after which they will no longer be able to scan server-side, obviously). I assume most privacy concerns are because of a perceived difference in invasiveness of the scanning happening server-side vs device side. There's also a vague slippery slope argument being made that "if they can check for this what will they be asked to check for next", but I'm not sure the people making that argument understand the extent to which scanning for child abuse material already happens. Doing these sorts of scans device side is likely the only way to prevent end to end encrypted chat apps like most modern messenger apps just becoming a way of sharing child abuse material in bulk undetectably, so I imagine we'll start seeing it more.

edit to add: It's also well known that the moderators of big social networks etc get exposed to an enormous amount of this sort of material in the course of their work (and will regardless of whether any hash-bashed checking is happening of course), so "employees of tech firms having to check child abuse imagery at work" is not a new issue either. Facebook in particular is notorious for underpaying and overworking these people and not providing them adequate mental health support.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by mr.WHO » Fri, 6. Aug 21, 10:23

felter wrote:
Fri, 6. Aug 21, 05:08
Am I the only one who has an issue with this
You shouldn't have any issue with it, no matter what they are doing.
This is main argument of people who don't like clouds - you don't own your data once you put into cloud and you don't own the cloud either.

You really shouldn't put your private data onto cloud in the first place, but if you put criminal data then this is double down on stupidity.
Oh well, since there are people who put their picture of breaking the law on Facebook this was bound to happen sooner or later.


What concers me more is if Apple will not turn into some kind of digital Epstein - it's not hard to imagine some day, some bad actors would use this data to blackmail.

Not to mention you don't have full control over your cloud, how can you prove that data you have on it wasn't planted by Apple employee?
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by BaronVerde » Fri, 6. Aug 21, 10:47

Look at this, squirrels on the jump:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08 ... edal-moves

What do you say now, Scrat ? :-)
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by Vertigo 7 » Fri, 6. Aug 21, 15:12

@felter, to play devil's advocate, it is illegal, at least in the US, to store or transmit child porn. It's likely in their own interests to do their due diligence to avoid liability if their services are being used for it. And besides, a hash is just a hash. It's not the actual data itself so if they hashed everything you store, it won't amount to jack squat unless they have a known hash that matches against something you have stored there.
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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by mr.WHO » Fri, 6. Aug 21, 19:03

It makes me wonder - if they want to make working solution that will be able to search it effectively there must be some kind of database for reference - whoever is responsible for maintenance of such database and search model must have a real f*** up job, by being exposed to worst the humanity. I bet whoever is working on that, when is walking down the street is looking at people all around completely different.

Second thought - if it will be something like automatic bot of YT then it will be really crazy.
I recall Facebook has such bot and it still crappy at it's job - like ignoring obvious cases while flaging something completely unrelated.


Anyway here is a YT video how machine learning algorithm work and explain why bots do these kind of mistakes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo


BTW Theoretically, with good enough algorithm and big data you would be able to do the crime prediction, like in "Minority Report" or "Psyho-Pass".

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by burger1 » Tue, 10. Aug 21, 10:19

Some Gigabyte power supplies faulty. Gigabyte's GP-P750GM & GP-P850GM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aACtT_rzToI

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by jlehtone » Tue, 10. Aug 21, 12:09

Unrelated, Gigabyte suffered a cyberattack too. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/s ... ansomware/

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Re: Random News not worthy of own thread

Post by felter » Tue, 10. Aug 21, 16:33

Vertigo 7 wrote:
Fri, 6. Aug 21, 15:12
@felter, to play devil's advocate, it is illegal, at least in the US, to store or transmit child porn. It's likely in their own interests to do their due diligence to avoid liability if their services are being used for it. And besides, a hash is just a hash. It's not the actual data itself so if they hashed everything you store, it won't amount to jack squat unless they have a known hash that matches against something you have stored there.
I will quote what apple has said:
Apple says that it will manually review each report to confirm there is a match. It can then take steps to disable a user's account and report to law enforcement.
I have underlined the important part. What they are saying is if their system detects a possible picture containing child pornography, they will download and visually inspect that picture before deciding whether to send a complaint to the police. So they are going to have at least one person who they have decided is allowed to view child pornography. Considering everything that has been going on with Activision|Blizzard right now, do you think that an American companies executives should be making these kinds of decision. What are they going to do if they discover this person or people are taking their work home with them, do you think they are going to report themselves to the police and face the consequences, let alone how are they even going to decide who looks at those pictures. Here in the UK if they were to do this they would be prosecuted, it doesn't matter what the reason they would still be viewing child pornography and that is illegal here.

I do suspect that they would not just send an unreviewed picture to the police claiming it as porn, as if it wasn't, they would be making a pretty big allegation against someone and once an allegation like that is made, whether it is deemed true or not that person would always be on a police record as a suspect in child pornography, and it would affect the rest of their lives. Just imagine if it happened to someone and later on in life they try to adopt a child, on a background check they would come back as unsuitable due to an allegation of child pornography. So Apple are not going to blindly send pictures to the police claiming it as possible child pornography without actually knowing what that picture is, as that could open up a legal nightmare that they most certainly don't want to get into. So they will decide on someone who can look at those pictures and make a decision on what it actually is, to cover their own ass, but who gets to look and who decides who that person is. That is what I'm getting at, American Corporate Executives should not be making these kinds of decisions, and it saddens me that people actually think it is okay.
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