Bishma

As an AWS focused solutions/systems architect, I've been feeling this for the last 10ish months too. I attended the first 9 re:Invent conferences (up until Covid upended things) but I was glad I didn't attend last year; and re:Inforce sounds like it was even worse.

These days, our biometric data is valuable to businesses for security purposes, to enhance customer experience or to improve their own efficiency.

Facial recognition technology [...] scans images or videos from devices including CCTV cameras and picks out faces.

From supermarkets to car parks and railway stations, CCTV cameras are everywhere, silently doing their job. But what exactly is their job now?

Businesses may justify collecting biometric data, but with power comes responsibility and the use of facial recognition raises significant transparency, ethical, and privacy concerns.

If your password gets stolen, you can change it. If your credit card is compromised, you can cancel it. But your face? That’s permanent. Biometric data is incredibly sensitive because it cannot be altered once it’s compromised. This makes it a high-stakes game when it comes to security.

... sentencing guidelines suggest a from eight to 14 months in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 7.

Back on June 25:

Former Bob’s Burgers voice actor Jay Johnston agreed today to plead guilty to federal charges stemming from his participation in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The 55-year-old actor [...] faces multiple charges including civil disorder and disorderly or disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds.

A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.

So Ticketmaster and AXS are suing to maintain their monopoly on scalping?

informed employees of the filing late Friday [...] that it had filed for a debtor-in-possession loan — a way for companies that are reorganizing after filing for bankruptcy to secure additional working capital to meet payroll. [...] employees have been waiting for paychecks since June 21st [...] it’s not certain that the company will be able to secure such a loan.

Chicken Soup took on $325 million in debt when it acquired Redbox in 2022 and has since been sued over a dozen times over unpaid bills.

Found via the author's Mastodon Post

Generally, the media has focused on the (mainly) men whose names and desires were taken from the company’s subscriber database and shared with the world. [...] Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.

In my headcanon Sisko walks out of corn field one day, a few years after the end of DS9, and gets promoted to admiral.

Inspired by ummthatguy's Dr. T'Ana as Dr Cox posts. This one specifically reminded me of this Elliot line exchange Dr Cox.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has acquired the popular movie theater chain Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the two companies announced on Wednesday.

Sony, which will oversee the theaters under a new Sony Pictures Experiences division, says it “will preserve Alamo Drafthouse’s distinctive movie-dining experience,”

Sony is acquiring Alamo Drafthouse from Altamont Capital Partners, Fortress Investment Group, and Alamo founder Tim League — a group that took ownership of Alamo after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2021.

I blatantly stole this from a bsky thread my friend reposted, though I'm sure its history is longer and full of more tales of honor than that.

A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.

The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.

ICQ will stop working on June 26. It's encouraging users to migrate to a messaging app from Russia-based VK, its parent company.

I stopped using ICQ in the very early 00s. I didn't know anything of it still remained.