Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

watchOS 26.2.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, no developer): Today’s update enables Precision Finding for the new AirTag 2 on the Apple Watch Series 9 and later and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. Prior to now, Precision Finding for the AirTag has been limited to the iPhone. It is not yet clear if […]

Swift Pitch: Borrowing Sequence

Ben Cohen: A sequence provides access to its elements through an Iterator, and an iterator’s next() operation returns an Element?. For a sequence of noncopyable elements, this operation could only be implemented by consuming the elements of the iterated sequence, with the for loop taking ownership of the elements individually. While consuming iteration is sometimes […]

curl Removes Bug Bounties

Jan Tångring (Hacker News): “AI slop and bad reports in general have been increasing even more lately, so we have to try to brake the flood in order not to drown”, says cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg to Swedish electronics industry news site etn.se. Therefore, cURL is terminating the bounty payouts as of the end of […]

★ The Names They Call Themselves

*Fascist* and *Nazi* weren’t slurs that were applied to the Italians and Germans by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves. The job won’t be done, this era of madness will not end, until we make *the names Trump’s regime calls themselves* universally acknowledged slurs.

What It’s Like to Get Undressed by Grok

Ella Chakarian, writing for Rolling Stone (News+):

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kendall Mayes was mindlessly scrolling on X when she noticed an unsettling trend surface on her feed. Users were prompting Grok, the platform’s built-in AI feature, to “nudify” women’s images. Mayes, a 25-year-old media professional from Texas who uses X to post photos with her friends and keep up with news, didn’t think it would happen to her — until it did.

“Put her in a tight clear transparent bikini,” an X user ordered the bot under a photo that Mayes posted from when she was 20. Grok complied, replacing her white shirt with a clear bikini top. The waistband of her jeans and black belt dissolved into thin, translucent strings. The see-through top made the upper half of her body look realistically naked.

Hiding behind an anonymous profile, the user’s page was filled with similar images of women, digitally and nonconsensually altered and sexualized. Mayes wanted to cuss the faceless user out, but decided to simply block the account. She hoped that would be the end of it. Soon, however, her comments became littered with more images of herself in clear bikinis and skin-tight latex bodysuits. Mayes says that all of the requests came from anonymous profiles that also targeted other women. Though some users have had their accounts suspended, as of publication, some of the images of Mayes are still up on X.

And:

Emma, a content creator, was at the grocery store when she saw the notifications of people asking Grok to undress her images. [...] Numbness washed over Emma when the images finally loaded on her timeline. A selfie of her holding a cat had been transformed into a nude. The cat was removed from the photo, Emma says, and her upper body was made naked.

Emma immediately made her account private and reported the images. In an email response reviewed by Rolling Stone, X User Support asked her to upload an image of her government-issued ID so they could look into the report, but Emma responded that she didn’t feel comfortable doing so. [...] In our call, she checked to see if some of the image edits she was aware of were still up on X. They were. “Oh, my God,” she says, letting out a defeated sigh. “It has 15,000 views. Oh, that’s so sad.”

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