Privacy, Your Age, and AI all rolled into one

Tech News from the week of Apr 29th - Part 2

Author

Walter Wimberly
May 06, 2024

Welcome back my Tech Curious friends. Below you can find information about the most recent tech news. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

Apple Cost Google How Much?

Apple sitting on a pile of cash

Ever notice how Apple doesn’t have their own search engine? Ever wonder why they use Google by default on Apple products?

Turns out Google pays 36% of the ad revenue they get from Apple users back to Apple. That’s worth $20 Billion ($20,000,000,000) dollars to Apple. So it might not pay for them to create their own search engine.

And if you think that’s a lot… Microsoft has reportedly tried to lure Apple from Google by offering them 90% of the revenue from Bing searches, but Apple has said no.

I wonder if Google returning poor results on person will change their mind?

Facial Recognition at Airports

whose face is that

Facial recognition is an interesting topic, as it has lots of uses especially in security minded applications. However, it also provides a lot of challenges for privacy.

So what’s more important: safety, or privacy? Well, US Senators are asking the TSA to restrict its use of facial recognition.

AI Personal Device is Underdone

The Rabbit, a Personal AI device was supposed to act like a personal assistant. While this could make your life a lot easier, however other people we concerned about privacy, as it potentially tracked everything it saw.

Luckily, we won’t have to worry about it, as the reviews come in and call it underwhelming, underdone, and a poor experience.

» read more and here and there’s more too if you search for them.

wordpress

WordPress is the most popular CMS hands down. And not just because it’s free. It’s fairly easy to use, however, if you want to test things out, it can be a challenge.

To make it easier, Automatic, the people behind WordPress have released a new tool to make it easier to test your site. It looks highly flexible, with the possibility of pushing to a live site. It is currently only available for Mac, although you can request Windows early access from their site.

Of course, this isn’t the only app built to do this. Check out the article below for more info, including links to other options.

Computer Science to Graduate? Maybe…

high school graduation

Louisiana is looking to make Computer Science a requirement to graduate high school. It’s already an option to replace a math or science credit, or in stead of a foreign language.

This passed the education sub-committee without objection, which is good news for us tech loving folks. however, what is computer science to politicians and high school educators? Programming? Programming theory? Web Design? Using MS Office?

Who knows? We’ll have to wait to find out, but as a CS professor, I’m all for it.

More Age Verifications

how old are you?

Last week we talked about age verification. And we’re back at it… but this time with Tennessee. However, instead of adult entertainment, we’re talking social media.

Gov. Lee signed the bill this week that prohibit minors from signing up for a social media account unless they have the “express written permission” of the minor’s parent.

As someone who’s read the literature on kids having social media accounts too early, I understand the risks. However, this law could be very difficult to regulate. Nor does it tell them how they have to do it. So expect lawsuits to be forthcoming.

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