Oh gods. I leave them everywhere ๐คท
I was going to say... I've had an elastic belt that basically disintegrated when I pulled it out of the closet after not having worn it in 15 years (wore it for 5 years before that).
"For life"? No. Pretty long time? Probably.
The study suggests authors are using AI as a writing aid, not to generate their papers. It's sort of interesting, in that it points out that "yeah, even scientists need grammar checking and help re-wording stuff sometimes." However, it's not the same thing as finding scientific papers with hallucinated data, charts, etc. That is a very real problem but it's a symptom of the larger issue of fraud in scientific papers. AI is orthogonal to that.
Apparently the labyrinth really was the easy part.
If it's part of a fingerprinting lib, then they just fucked it up. Because the fingerprinting can be done in one ~16ms window of time when the script runs and then you can break down the audio objects and pretend nothing happened.
Republicans lost their shit but not Donald Trump!
Because of the diaper.
Honestly, this doesn't sound like spyware. More like absurd optimization. Here's why: Audio devices often go to sleep (to save battery) and can take a second or two to wake up. That's enough time that the end user will miss the first second or two of audio.
By keeping the audio outputting something (even if it's just silence), they can guarantee that their little (often hilariously terrible) product videos will play the way they expect (which is loud and startling, of course!).
This is just one of those stupid tricks that's bad for energy use but good for ignorant users who might complain that the first second of every AliExpress video is silent ๐คท
The reason why I believe this to be the case is because there's really nothing unique or interesting to be learned from an audio output loop that's literally sending zeros through itself. If you wanted to use that to fingerprint a user, you wouldn't need to keep it active. You could pass a single zero (silence) through and be done.
Shit: Is this why people ask me random IT questions and suddenly vent about their lives in chat?
...and then they all died of dysentery because that uneducated, unnamed boy was never taught proper sanitation because he pooped in the woods nearby and didn't bury it, resulting in shigellosis being spread to the entire family by the flies that landed in the poop transferring the shigella dysenteriae bacteria on to the food the family was preparing for the poor, sweet boy who they worried would drive his pole into their daughters just as surely as he would a pole into the ground.
They have a bit of a case, but not really because "demon hunter" is a generic term that predates their band by hundreds of years (LOL).
How does that work, though? It must be weird banging your head into a Bible.
Just make a black friend and I'm sure they'd tell you all about it.
Actually, this amazing trick still works to this day!