Yes. Everyone and their grandma wants to build the ultimate panacea of AI so of course you’ll see a myriad of AI-powered products and services on a daily basis until the tech industry as a whole is done with the topic.
They’ll close a report as “no action” if the issue isn’t related to Microsoft products. That said, in my experience they’ve been a reasonable intermediary for a few incidents I’ve reported involving government websites, especially where Microsoft software was part of the stack in some way.
For example, I’ve reported issues in multiple countries where national ID numbers are sequential. Private companies like insurers, pension funds, and banks use those IDs to look up records, but some of them didn’t verify that the JSON Web Token (JWT) used for the session actually belonged to the person whose national ID was being queried. In practice, that meant an attacker could enumerate IDs and access other citizens’ financial and personal data.
Reporting something like that directly to a government agency can be intimidating, so I reported it to Microsoft instead, since these organizations often use Azure AD B2C for customer authentication. The vulnerability itself wasn’t in Microsoft’s products, but MSRC’s reactive engineers still took ownership of triage and helped route it to the right contacts in those agencies through their existing partnerships.
Why is Google indexing these harmful images in the first place?
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and other large tech companies have had image recognition models capable of detecting this kind of content at scale for years, long before large language models became popular. There’s really no excuse for hosting or indexing these images as publicly accessible assets when they clearly have the technical ability to identify and exclude explicit content automatically.
Instead of putting the burden on victims to report these images one by one, companies should be proactively preventing this material from appearing in search results at all. If the technology exists, and it clearly does, then the default approach should be prevention, not reactive cleanup.
I think that “one by one” part allows different interpretations of what guessmyname possibly meant.
But I fail to make sense of it either way. Either the nuance of lack of consent is missing, or Google is blamed for not doing what they just did from the very first version.
From what I can tell, your program treats files as duplicates if they share the same normalized filename and the exact same size; it doesn’t compare contents or hashes.
Mine samples bytes at specific positions, hashes those samples, and compares the hashes to produce a similarity score rather than a strict match. This works great for photos, two shots taken in the same second can differ slightly in pixels but still depict the same scene, so they’re considered duplicates. It also normalizes image orientation by rotating based on the brightest corner, so photos in different orientations are compared
using the same features.
Yeah I will for sure implement hashing down the line, the current file name/size comparison was good enough for what I need at the minute and an initial release.
Given the time it'd be cool to try single threaded vs parallelism (rayon) on larger datasets and compare the performance.
Nice work on your tool, sounds like you've put a lot of consideration into it.
What’s the title for? Is it about “reading” or is it about “books” ?
A lot of people who say they “read books” really mean they bought one or checked it out from the library, then only dipped into it here and there, maybe a few paragraphs at a time.
I haven’t read a proper book cover to cover in years, probably not since high school. But I do read a lot every single day, either for my job or because I genuinely want to grow professionally. I’ll also read a few chapters from books friends or coworkers recommend, especially the parts that seem most relevant. I just don’t really see why I need to finish the whole thing if I’m already getting what I came for.
My parents, meanwhile, will read the same books over and over again, cover to cover, every year.
Replace "books" with "sustained reading for entertainment" and it's more clear what's meant. Reading a summary or occasional chapter isn't the same thing, nor is reading technical literature.
Note that this isn't an oblique way to frame your preferences as bad. They're simply a different kind of activity, like how writing commit messages is a different activity than writing a novel. There are different activities even within this definition of "reading". I primarily consume new books. My spouse usually re-reads old ones. One of us is better equipped for literary analysis while the other is better equipped for relatable conversations with normal people, but neither is a more "correct" way to read.
I've bookshelves full of obscure nonfiction but only dip into specific chapters when curiosity demands, which is most days. But every day it's a different book. I can't remember when I last read an entire book, it just seems inefficient. Get the info, appreciate the learning, move on.
"Sustained reading for entertainment" sounds like an ordeal rather than delight.
Well yeah, you're using them as reference books. You wouldn't necessarily approach a textbook the same way, since the point there is to guide you through a series of lessons that gradually build on each other. Similarly for narrative works. Jumping into the middle of a nonlinear narrative entirely misses the intentional choices behind the structure, for example.
You can read how you want, of course. The consequence is sometimes simply that you close yourself off from other aspects of the medium. There aren't many aspects bigger than narrative structure, but that's your choice to make.
I’d hope anyone using this tool understands that names aren’t unique. So if your mother’s or father’s name shows up in that API, it only means someone else out there has the same name. People who are into conspiracy theories tend to love software like this because it helps them force a preexisting narrative to fit their conclusions.
edit: I removed the author’s name from this post, because the search results don’t really prove anything. Their first name is extremely common in the United States and returns 166 matches on its own, and their last name returns around 1,000. That’s exactly the point here: this API is doing basic name lookups, not confirming identities. Without additional identifiers (like location, email, phone number, or some kind of unique ID), these hits are essentially just name collisions and shouldn’t be treated as meaningful evidence.
Most of us did stuff like this when we were younger.
For starters, we were broke. I mean, we didn’t have enough extra cash to pay for something we knew we could probably get for free. Back then, having a credit card in college was basically a “rich kid” thing. The money we had was whatever was in our pockets, maybe stashed under a pillow, or saved in a piggy bank. These days, kids are more “modern,” so the idea of not having a card paid for by mom or dad, or at least some extra cash, sounds ridiculous. But that’s how it was for a lot of us.
So I’d constantly look for ways around paying, because I genuinely couldn’t afford it. Think learning C just to write a keygen.exe and bypass license checks, doing in-memory hex edits to tweak games and give myself more virtual coins, or forking Tor to get single-hop proxy connections.
I remember when I was younger and didn't have a single cent to spend, at all. Any payment requirement would completely lock me out, because I had no payment method.
The question is, how do you live now? I remember being on University email lists that I had no business being on, just to get find out when they had free food that I could eat. I grew up ridiculously cheap and broke college student syndrome only exacerbated things. I've gone too far in the other direction, which is equally as unhealthy, but I can't be the only one.
I've went from being broke most of my young life, to homeless a short period, to being employed as a programmer to eventually being financially independent, I'm not sure there is much difference ultimately, besides being able to afford more expensive things. I used to buy stuff I enjoyed, if I could afford it, I still buy stuff I enjoy, but never buy things to just buy it, mostly happy with the stuff I have, except for some computers stuff that I don't neeeeeeed. But it's really nice to have 96GB of VRAM available for example.
Don't overthink either directions, be happy with what you have and focus on what you want to do, rather than "what you should have" or similar. Not sure anyone can really give you good non-generic tips here, without knowing more about your specific situation.
Certain reimbursements/allowances for volunteering are treated favorably for tax purposes if conditions are met, e.g. ehrenamtspauschale (volunteer allowance).
Also, as Gemeinnützig, for tax and for issuing donation receipts.
It could also function as community service hours ordered by a court (sozialstunden).
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