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[33]Close binspamdupenotthebestofftopicslownewsdaystalestupid freshfunnyinsightfulinterestingmaybe offtopicflamebaittrollredundantoverrated insightfulinterestinginformativefunnyunderrated descriptive typodupeerror [34]Sign up for the Slashdot newsletter! OR [35]check out the new Slashdot job board to browse remote jobs or jobs in your area Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically [36]sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with [37]this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge's nearly 30 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today! [38]× 173067038 story [39]Businesses [40]Nvidia Becomes Third Most Valuable US Company [41](cnbc.com) [42]15 Posted by [43]BeauHD on Thursday February 15, 2024 @05:00AM from the would-you-look-at-that dept. Nvidia is now the [44]third most valuable company in the U.S., surpassing Google parent Alphabet and Amazon. It's only behind Apple and Microsoft in terms of market cap. CNBC reports: Nvidia rose over 2% to close at $739.00 per share, giving it a market value of $1.83 trillion to Google's $1.82 trillion market cap. The move comes one day after Nvidia surpassed Amazon in terms of market value. The symbolic milestone is more confirmation that Nvidia has become a Wall Street darling on the back of elevated AI chip sales, valued even more highly than some of the large software companies and cloud providers that develop and integrate AI technology into their products. Nvidia shares are up over 221% over the past 12 months on robust demand for its AI server chips that can cost more than $20,000 each. Companies like Google and Amazon need thousands of them for their cloud services. Before the recent AI boom, Nvidia was best known for consumer graphics processors it sold to PC makers to build gaming computers, a less lucrative market. apply tags__________ 173067156 story [45]Portables (Apple) [46]Asahi Linux Project's OpenGL Support On Apple Silicon Officially Surpasses Apple's [47](arstechnica.com) [48]9 Posted by [49]BeauHD on Thursday February 15, 2024 @02:00AM from the new-and-improved dept. Andrew Cunningham reports via Ars Technica: For around three years now, the team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has worked to support Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, despite Apple's total lack of involvement. Over the years, the project has gone from a "highly unstable experiment" to a "surprisingly functional and usable desktop operating system." Even Linus Torvalds has used it to run Linux on Apple's hardware. The team has been steadily improving its open source, standards-conformant GPU driver for the M1 and M2 since releasing them [50]in December 2022, and today, the team crossed an important symbolic milestone: The Asahi driver's support for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics [51]have officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team's latest graphics driver fully conforms with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2, the most recent version of either API. Apple's support in macOS tops out at OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010. Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post that announced the new driver, which had to pass "over 100,000 tests" to be deemed officially conformant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple's GPUs don't support some features that would have made implementing these APIs more straightforward. "Regrettably, the M1 doesn't map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1," writes Rosenzweig. "While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set... Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on." Now that the Asahi GPU driver supports the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards -- released in 2017 and 2015, respectively -- the work turns to supporting the low-overhead Vulkan API on Apple's hardware. Vulkan support in macOS is limited to translation layers like MoltenVK, which translates Vulkan API calls to Metal ones that the hardware and OS can understand. [...] Rosenzweig's blog post didn't give any specific updates on Vulkan except to say that the team was "well on the road" to supporting it. In addition to supporting native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to take better advantage of software like Valve's Proton, which already has a few games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware. apply tags__________ 173066982 story [52]Privacy [53]Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show [54](gizmodo.com) [55]65 Posted by [56]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @10:30PM from the robot-love-comes-with-tradeoffs dept. "A lot of that AI chatbots that you spend days talking to push hard on getting more and more private information from you," writes longtime Slashdot reader [57]michelcultivo, sharing a report from Gizmodo. "To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends," says Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher from the company's *Privacy Not Included project. "Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, [58]all while prying as much data as possible from you." Gizmodo reports: Mozilla dug into [59]11 different AI romance chatbots, including popular apps such as Replika, Chai, Romantic AI, EVA AI Chat Bot & Soulmate, and CrushOn.AI. Every single one earned the Privacy Not Included label, putting these chatbots among the worst categories of products Mozilla has ever reviewed. You've heard stories about data problems before, but according to Mozilla, AI girlfriends violate your privacy in "disturbing new ways." For example, CrushOn.AI collects details including information about sexual health, use of medication, and gender-affirming care. 90% of the apps may sell or share user data for targeted ads and other purposes, and more than half won't let you delete the data they collect. Security was also a problem. Only one app, Genesia AI Friend & Partner, met Mozilla's minimum security standards. One of the more striking findings came when Mozilla counted the trackers in these apps, little bits of code that collect data and share them with other companies for advertising and other purposes. Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app. The privacy mess is even more troubling because the apps actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than the kind of thing you might enter into a typical app. EVA AI Chat Bot & Soulmate pushes users to "share all your secrets and desires," and specifically asks for photos and voice recordings. It's worth noting that EVA was the only chatbot that didn't get dinged for how it uses that data, though the app did have security issues. [...] apply tags__________ 173066906 story [60]AI [61]Largest Text-To-Speech AI Model Yet Shows 'Emergent Abilities' [62](techcrunch.com) [63]39 Posted by [64]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @09:02PM from the breakout-moment dept. Devin Coldeway reports via TechCrunch: Researchers at Amazon have [65]trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits "emergent" qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see the kind of leap in ability that we observed once language models got past a certain size. For reasons unknown to us, once LLMs grow past a certain point, they start being way more robust and versatile, able to perform tasks they weren't trained to. That is not to say they are gaining sentience or anything, just that past a certain point their performance on certain conversational AI tasks hockey sticks. The team at Amazon AGI -- no secret what they're aiming at -- thought the same might happen as text-to-speech models grew as well, and their research suggests this is in fact the case. The new model is called [66]Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities, which they have contorted into the abbreviation BASE TTS. The largest version of the model uses 100,000 hours of public domain speech, 90% of which is in English, the remainder in German, Dutch and Spanish. At 980 million parameters, BASE-large appears to be the biggest model in this category. They also trained 400M- and 150M-parameter models based on 10,000 and 1,000 hours of audio respectively, for comparison -- the idea being, if one of these models shows emergent behaviors but another doesn't, you have a range for where those behaviors begin to emerge. As it turns out, the medium-sized model showed the jump in capability the team was looking for, not necessarily in ordinary speech quality (it is reviewed better but only by a couple points) but in the set of emergent abilities they observed and measured. Here are examples of tricky text [67]mentioned in the paper: - Compound nouns: The Beckhams decided to rent a charming stone-built quaint countryside holiday cottage. - Emotions: "Oh my gosh! Are we really going to the Maldives? That's unbelievable!" Jennie squealed, bouncing on her toes with uncontained glee. - Foreign words: "Mr. Henry, renowned for his mise en place, orchestrated a seven-course meal, each dish a piece de resistance. - Paralinguistics (i.e. readable non-words): "Shh, Lucy, shhh, we mustn't wake your baby brother," Tom whispered, as they tiptoed past the nursery. - Punctuations: She received an odd text from her brother: 'Emergency @ home; call ASAP! Mom & Dad are worried... #familymatters.' - Questions: But the Brexit question remains: After all the trials and tribulations, will the ministers find the answers in time? -Syntactic complexities: The movie that De Moya who was recently awarded the lifetime achievement award starred in 2022 was a box-office hit, despite the mixed reviews. You can read more examples of these difficult texts being spoken naturally [68]here. apply tags__________ 173066104 story [69]The Courts [70]NYC Sues Social Media Companies Over Youth Mental Health Crisis [71](abc7ny.com) [72]22 Posted by [73]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @08:25PM from the damaging-influence dept. New York City Mayor Eric Adams [74]announced a lawsuit against four of the nation's largest social media companies, [75]accusing them of fueling a "national youth mental health crisis." From a report: The lawsuit was filed to hold TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube Accountable for their damaging influence on the mental health of children, Adams said. The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court, alleged the companies intentionally designed their platforms to purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications. The lawsuit pointed to the use of algorithms to generate feeds that keep users on the platforms longer and encourage compulsive use. "Over the past decade, we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the online world can be, exposing our children to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis," Adams said. "Our city is built on innovation and technology, but many social media platforms end up endangering our children's mental health, promoting addiction, and encouraging unsafe behavior." The lawsuit accused the social media companies of manipulating users by making them feel compelled to respond to one positive action with another positive action. "These platforms take advantage of reciprocity by, for example, automatically telling the sender when their message was seen or sending notifications when a message was delivered, encouraging teens to return to the platform again and again and perpetuating online engagement and immediate responses," the lawsuit said. The city is joining hundreds of school districts across the nation in filing litigation to force the tech companies to change their behavior and recover the costs of addressing the public health threat. apply tags__________ 173066066 story [76]PlayStation (Games) [77]Sony's PS5 Enters 'Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle' [78](theverge.com) [79]16 Posted by [80]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:45PM from the time-flies dept. After missing its sales target in the last quarter, Sony says it [81]plans to emphasize the PlayStation 5's profitability over unit sales as the console approaches its fourth birthday. "Looking ahead, PS5 will enter the latter stage of its life cycle," said Sony senior vice president Naomi Matsuoka. "As such, we will put more emphasis on the balance between profitability and sales. For this reason, we expect the annual sales pace of PS5 hardware will start falling from the next fiscal year." Sony also said it has no plans to release "any new major existing franchise titles" in its next fiscal year. The Verge reports: Sony now expects to sell 4 million fewer PS5 consoles in its 2023 fiscal year ending March 31st compared to previous projections, [82]Bloomberg reports. The revision came as part of today's [83]third-quarter earnings release which saw Sony lower the PS5 sales forecast from the 25 million consoles it expected to sell down to 21 million. While PS5 sales were up in Sony's third quarter, increasing to 8.2 million units from 6.3 million in the same quarter the previous year, Bloomberg notes that this was roughly a million units lower than it had previously projected. That's despite the release of the big first-party title Spider-Man 2, strong sales of third-party titles, and the launch of a new slimmer PS5 in November. In its third quarter, Sony's gaming revenue was up 16 percent versus the same period the previous year, sitting at 1.4 trillion yen (around $9.3 billion), but operating income was down 26 percent to 86.1 billion yen (around $572 million) due to promotions in the third quarter ending on December 31st. apply tags__________ 173066030 story [84]Privacy [85]US Military Notifies 20,000 of Data Breach After Cloud Email Leak [86](techcrunch.com) [87]11 Posted by [88]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:02PM from the PSA dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Department of Defense is [89]notifying tens of thousands of individuals that their personal information was exposed in an email data spill last year. According to the breach notification letter sent out to affected individuals on February 1, the Defense Intelligence Agency -- the DOD's military intelligence agency -- said, "numerous email messages were inadvertently exposed to the Internet by a service provider," between February 3 and February 20, 2023. TechCrunch has learned that the breach disclosure letters relate to an unsecured U.S. government cloud email server that was spilling sensitive emails to the open internet. The cloud email server, hosted on Microsoft's cloud for government customers, was accessible from the internet without a password, likely due to a misconfiguration. The DOD is sending breach notification letters to around 20,600 individuals whose information was affected. "As a matter of practice and operations security, we do not comment on the status of our networks and systems. The affected server was identified and removed from public access on February 20, 2023, and the vendor has resolved the issues that resulted in the exposure. DOD continues to engage with the service provider on improving cyber event prevention and detection. Notification to affected individuals is ongoing," said DOD spokesperson Cdr. Tim Gorman in an email to TechCrunch. apply tags__________ 173065756 story [90]The Courts [91]Amazon Sued Over Prime Video Ads [92](variety.com) [93]44 Posted by [94]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @06:20PM from the see-you-in-court dept. Amazon faces a class-action lawsuit [95]accusing the company of false advertising and deceptive practices because Prime Video now serves commercials by default. Variety reports: "For years, people purchased and renewed their Amazon Prime subscriptions believing that they would include ad-free streaming," the lawsuit says. "But last month, Amazon changed the deal. To stream movies and TV shows without ads, Amazon customers must now pay an additional $2.99 per month ... This is not fair, because these subscribers already paid for the ad-free version; these subscribers should not have to pay an additional $2.99/month for something that they already paid for." The case was filed on behalf of Wilbert Napoleon, a resident of Eastvale, Calif., who says he's a Prime member. "Plaintiff brings this case for himself and for other Amazon Prime customers," the suit said. The complain alleged that Amazon violates Washington State and California state consumer protection laws that prohibit unfair competition and deceptive business acts and practices. Amazon's conduct, as alleged, "was immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous and substantially injurious to consumers,â according to the lawsuit. The suit seeks unspecific monetary damages, including punitive damages, as well as an injunction to block Amazon's alleged deceptive conduct. The suit was filed Feb. 9, after Amazon starting [96]on Jan. 29 began running ads in Prime Video content in major markets including the United States unless users opt to pay extra ($2.99/month in the U.S.) to have an ad-free experience. Some analysts have forecast Prime Video ads generating more than $3 billion in revenue in 2024. apply tags__________ 173065702 story [97]Patents [98]US Patent Office Confirms AI Can't Hold Patents [99]25 Posted by [100]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @05:40PM from the natural-humans-only dept. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) asserts that [101]only humans can be recognized as inventors on patent applications, not artificial intelligence systems, although the use of AI in the invention process is permitted and must be disclosed. The Verge reports: The agency [102]published (PDF) its latest guidance following a series of "listening" tours to gather public feedback. It states that while AI systems and other "non-natural persons" can't be listed as inventors in patent applications, "the use of an AI system by a natural person does not preclude a natural person from qualifying as an inventor." People seeking patents must disclose if they used AI in the invention process, just as the USPTO asks all applicants to list all material information necessary to make a decision. However, to be able to register a patent, the person using the AI must've contributed significantly to the invention's conception. A person simply asking an AI system to create something and overseeing it, the report says, does not make them an inventor. The office says that a person who simply presents the problem to an AI system or "recognizes and appreciates" its output as a good invention can't claim credit for that patent. "However, a significant contribution could be shown by the way the person constructs the prompt in view of a specific problem to elicit a particular solution from the AI system," the USPTO says. The office also says that "maintaining 'intellectual domination' over an AI system does not, on its own, make a person an inventor" -- so simply overseeing or owning an AI that creates things doesn't mean you can file a patent for them. apply tags__________ 173065634 story [103]Encryption [104]Backdoors That Let Cops Decrypt Messages Violate Human Rights, EU Court Says [105](arstechnica.com) [106]23 Posted by [107]BeauHD on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @05:00PM from the jeopardizing-security-for-all dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has [108]ruled that [109]weakening end-to-end encryption disproportionately risks undermining human rights. The international court's decision could potentially disrupt the European Commission's proposed plans to require email and messaging service providers to create backdoors that would allow law enforcement to easily decrypt users' messages. This ruling came after Russia's intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSS), began requiring Telegram to share users' encrypted messages to deter "terrorism-related activities" in 2017, ECHR's ruling said. [...] In the end, the ECHR concluded that the Telegram user's rights had been violated, partly due to privacy advocates and international reports that corroborated Telegram's position that complying with the FSB's disclosure order would force changes impacting all its users. The "confidentiality of communications is an essential element of the right to respect for private life and correspondence," the ECHR's ruling said. Thus, requiring messages to be decrypted by law enforcement "cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society." [...] "Weakening encryption by creating backdoors would apparently make it technically possible to perform routine, general, and indiscriminate surveillance of personal electronic communications," the ECHR's ruling said. "Backdoors may also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously compromise the security of all users' electronic communications. The Court takes note of the dangers of restricting encryption described by many experts in the field." Martin Husovec, a law professor who helped to draft EISI's testimony, told Ars that EISI is "obviously pleased that the Court has recognized the value of encryption and agreed with us that state-imposed weakening of encryption is a form of indiscriminate surveillance because it affects everyone's privacy." [...] EISI's Husovec told Ars that ECHR's ruling is "indeed very important," because "it clearly signals to the EU legislature that weakening encryption is a huge problem and that the states must explore alternatives." If the Court of Justice of the European Union endorses this ruling, which Husovec said is likely, the consequences for the EU's legislation proposing scanning messages to stop illegal content like CSAM from spreading "could be significant," Husovec told Ars. During negotiations this spring, lawmakers may have to make "major concessions" to ensure the proposed rule isn't invalidated in light of the ECHR ruling, Husovec told Ars. Europol and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) said in a statement: "Solutions that intentionally weaken technical protection mechanisms to support law enforcement will intrinsically weaken the protection against criminals as well, which makes an easy solution impossible." apply tags__________ 173064548 story [110]Businesses [111]Lyft's CEO Says 'My Bad' on Margin Error, 'It Was One Zero' [112](yahoo.com) [113]18 Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @04:20PM from the tough-luck dept. Lyft Chief Executive Officer David Risher's response to a clerical error that unintentionally inflated the company's earnings outlook on Tuesday and sent shares soaring: "My bad." From a report: "First of all, it's on me," Risher said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday, [114]taking the blame for a typo in a company press release Tuesday that erroneously projected a particular measure of earnings margin to expand by an eye-watering 500 basis points. (In reality, Lyft expects margins to grow by 50 basis points.) "This was a bad error," he said, "but it was one zero in a press release." The typo, which actually appeared in multiple company documents on Tuesday, helped drive a 67% surge in Lyft's shares in after-hours trading. The mistake was a serious one, Risher said. But it shouldn't take away from Lyft's "butt-kicking" financial performance, he said. Risher said his team at Lyft was taking the error very seriously and noted it was corrected "within seconds of finding it." But in fact, on a call with analysts to discuss the quarterly results, Lyft executives didn't immediately note the error in their opening remarks. Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer just began referring to the company's outlook for a 50-basis-point expansion. It wasn't until later in the call, when an analyst pointed out the discrepancy, that Brewer acknowledged her outlook was "actually a correction from the press release." apply tags__________ 173064462 story [115]United States [116]California Banned Single-Use Plastic Bags. Now It's Tossing More Plastic. [117](latimes.com) [118]139 Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @03:42PM from the policy-backfire dept. An anonymous reader shares a report: When California state legislators passed a 2014 law banning single-use plastic bags, the hope was that it would notably reduce the amount of discarded plastic. But fast-forward nearly a decade: Californians are [119]tossing more pounds of plastic bags than before the legislation was passed. That's according to a recent report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, which took population changes into account and found the tonnage of discarded bags rose from 4.08 per 1,000 people in 2014 to 5.89 per 1,000 people in 2022. How could this happen? As Susanne Rust reported this week, plastic bag manufacturers replaced one kind of plastic bag for another. You've probably noticed them at grocery stores or had them loaded into your car during a drive-up order. These newer bags are thicker and meet technical specifications to be called "reusable." As Jenn Engstrom, CALPIRG'S state director, explained to Susanne, the switch created a loophole because the newer bags -- which typically cost 10 cents -- "are clearly not being reused and don't look like reusable bags and ... just circumvent the law's intent." The pandemic was also a contributing factor. COVID restrictions led many to get groceries, restaurant dishes and other products delivered to our doors, often in thick plastic bags. There's an effort to close the loophole, though. New legislation is being proposed that would also ban the thicker plastic bags from grocery and large retail stores. Clearly, not enough consumers have changed their plastic bag habits at the checkout stand. But the onus isn't on individuals. Plastic manufacturers create these products. Businesses buy the bags so customers have somewhere to put the goods they buy from businesses. [...] Under the new law, at least 30% of plastic items sold, distributed or imported into California must be recyclable by Jan. 1, 2028. It also stipulates that single-use plastic waste be reduced 25% by 2032. But as Susanne pointed out, plastics companies will have notable oversight and authority over the program "via a Producer Responsibility Organization, which will be made up of industry representatives." apply tags__________ 173064408 story [120]Businesses [121]India Stumped on How To Cut Google and Walmart-backed PhonePe Dominance in Payments [122](techcrunch.com) [123]16 Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @03:01PM from the how-about-that dept. An anonymous reader shares a report: India is facing a quandary in enforcing long-delayed rules to [124]curb the dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay in the country's ubiquitous UPI payments network, which processes over 10 billion transactions monthly. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a special unit of the Indian central bank, wants to limit the market share of individual companies in the popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system to 30%, a long-delayed effort to curb the dominance of Walmart-backed PhonePe and Alphabet's Google Pay, which together control over 83% of the growing payments market. However, with rival Paytm now struggling after strict regulatory action, the NPCI faces an acute challenge in bringing down the commanding share of the leading duopoly: It doesn't know how to. The NPCI officials believe there is a technical barrier to achieving the goal and have sought industry players in recent quarters for ideas, two sources familiar with the situation said. The NPCI, which delayed enforcing the rules to 2024, declined to comment Tuesday. apply tags__________ 173064330 story [125]United States [126]The US Military is Embedded in the Gaming World. Its Target: Teen Recruits [127](theguardian.com) [128]101 Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @02:20PM from the closer-look dept. The U.S. Navy has ramped up efforts to recruit young gamers and esports fans to meet recruitment goals, [129]allocating up to $4.3 million this year for esports marketing. This includes hosting video game tournaments and having sailors compete as the esports team "Goats & Glory." Critics argue targeting minors for military marketing normalizes war and raises ethical concerns, The Guardian reports. While the military cannot formally recruit those under 17, advertising and direct interaction with minors for recruitment purposes is permitted. Veterans groups oppose this, noting the military relies on gaming's appeal to young teens, whose brains are still developing, to influence future decisions about military service, the report adds. apply tags__________ 173064156 story [130]The Internet [131]DuckDuckGo's Browser Adds Encrypted, Privacy-Minded Syncing and Backup [132](arstechnica.com) [133]12 Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @01:40PM from the privacy-twist dept. DuckDuckGo keeps adding new features to its browser; and while these features are common in other browsers, DuckDuckGo is giving them a privacy-minded twist. The latest is a private, end-to-end encrypted syncing service. There's no account needed, [134]no sign-in, and the company says it never sees what you're syncing. From a report: Using QR codes and shortcodes, and a lengthy backup code you store somewhere safe, DuckDuckGo's browser can keep your bookmarks, passwords, "favorites" (i.e., new tab page shortcuts), and settings for its email protection service synced between devices and browsers. DuckDuckGo points to Google's privacy policy for using its signed-in sync service on Chrome, which uses "aggregated and anonymized synchronized browsing data to improve other Google products and services." DuckDuckGo states that the encryption key for browser sync is stored only locally on your devices and that it lacks any access to your passwords or other data. apply tags__________ [135]« Newer [136]Older » Slashdot Top Deals Slashdot Top Deals [137]Slashdot Deals Slashdot Poll Do you have a poll idea? (*) Yes, I will post in the comments ( ) No ( ) Cowboy Neal probably does (BUTTON) vote now [138]Read the 81 comments | 8685 votes Looks like someone has already voted from this IP. 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