Leftovers

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ Happy They Live day to all who celebrate

  35 years ago today, They Live debuted at #1 at the box office. In honor of my favorite documentary about the Reagan administration, here are some highlights from my OBEY tag: [...]

• Chris Coyier ☛ Thoughtful

  Here’s another compelling reason to blog.

• Education

  • Truthdig ☛ As Asylum Seekers Arrive, NYC’s Homeless Student Population Soars

    Roughly 1 in 9 students were living in shelters, “doubled up” with relatives or friends, or otherwise without permanent housing at some point in the school year, according to state data compiled by Advocates for Children, a group that supports the city’s most vulnerable students.

    The city’s population of homeless students was astronomical even before the recent influx, with the number of kids lacking permanent housing exceeding 100,000 for each of the past eight years – a stark indication of the city’s ongoing housing crisis.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Lessons In Printer Poop Recycling

    The fundamental problem with multi-color 3D printing using a single hotend is that they poop an awful lot. Every time they change filaments, they’ve got to purge the single nozzle, which results in a huge number of technicolor “purge poops” which on some machines are even ejected out a chute at the back of the printer. The jokes practically write themselves.

  • Hackaday ☛ Looking At How Pyramids Were Built Using Their Casing Stones

    As one of the most famous Ancient Egyptian pyramids, the Pyramid of Khafre on the plateau of Giza has been a true wonder of the Ancient World ever since its construction around 2570 BCE. Today, well over 4,500 years later, we are still as puzzled as our ancestors over the past hundreds of years how exactly this and other pyramids were constructed. Although many theories exist, including ramps that envelop the entire pyramid, to intricate construction methods from the inside out, the only evidence we have left are these pyramids themselves.

  • Hackaday ☛ Custom Aluminum Monitor Stand For The Home Office

    Monitor stands vary wildly in price, from a few cents for a pile of books from a thrift store to hundreds of dollars. One trendy style, as [Steven Bennett] puts it, is the “General Grievous,” with adjustable arms splayed around a central pole. While effective, it is not particularly aesthetically pleasing. [Steven] set out to make his monitor stand out of extruded aluminum.

  • Hackaday ☛ Saving Apollo By Decoding Core Rope

    One of our favorite retro hardware enthusiasts, [CuriousMarc], is back with the outstanding tale of preserving Apollo Program software, and building a core rope reader from scratch to do it. We’ve talked about [Marc]’s previous efforts to get real Apollo hardware working again, and one of the by-products of this effort was recovering the contents of the read-only core rope memory modules that were part of that hardware.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Vox ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Lahaina schools are open again. Parents worry they’re ridden with toxic waste.

  • The Conversation ☛ PFAS: how research is uncovering damaging effects of ‘forever chemicals’

    Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they’ve been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health.

    PFAS have, in fact, come under intense scrutiny due to new research showing their persistent nature in the environment and potential health impacts.

    So what are they and are they an issue in the UK and Ireland?

    Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals, numbering approximately 4,700 variants. What makes them different is their formidable carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds, renowned among scientists as the mightiest in chemistry.

  • NPR ☛ Indiana high court reprimands AG for remarks about 10-year-old rape victim's doctor

    The high court issued a public reprimand of Rokita on Thursday, saying his comments about Dr. Caitlin Bernard were highly likely to create improper influence and also "had no substantial purpose other than to embarrass or burden the physician."

    The court noted that in a sworn affidavit, Rokita, a Republican, "admits these two rule violations and acknowledges that he could not successfully defend himself on these two charges if this matter were tried."

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Say We Bred With an Extinct Human Species and It Left a Grim Change in Our Brains

    A new study, published in the journal PLoS Genetics, concludes that these genes are one of the most widespread traces of our ancient ties with the Denisovans, who are believed to have mated with modern humans leaving Africa around 60,000 years ago.

    As a result of that interbreeding, us homo sapiens appear to have inherited a genetic adaptation involved in zinc regulation that may have helped them weather the colder climates of the day — but at the same time may have been responsible for predisposing us to depression and all kinds of mental disorders.

  • Futurism ☛ Hearing Bad Grammar Causes Physical Distress, Scientists Find

    Scientists in the United Kingdom seem to have pinpointed a physiological response from hearing someone mangle the English grammar in a new study published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics.

    Researchers at the University of Birmingham took 41 English-speaking adults and subjected them to 40 samples of speech in English, half of which were riddled with grammatical errors. The participants were hooked up to a monitor that tracked their heart rate variability (HRV), which is the space between heartbeats.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Mobile phones might cause lower sperm count

    After analyzing the semen samples of more than 2,800 young men, Swiss researchers found an association between a higher frequency of self-reported mobile phone use and lower sperm concentration in a study published this week in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • 2023-11-01 [Older] Biden Administration Signs Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence [Ed: Buzzwords regime]

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Once again, "AI" is revealed to be an army of mechanical turks in a call center.

    Cruse "autonomous"vehicles require 1.5 drivers, and manual intervention every two and a half miles: [...]

  • New York Times ☛ G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.

    Two days later, Cruise went further and voluntarily suspended all of its driverless operations around the country, taking 400 or so driverless cars off the road. Since then, Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media.

    The board plans to evaluate the findings and any recommended changes. Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems, is conducting a separate review of the crash, said two people who attended a companywide meeting at Cruise on Monday.

  • Simon Willison ☛ Hacking Google Bard - From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration

    This kind of attack against LLM systems is inevitable any time you combine access to private data with exposure to untrusted inputs. In this case the attack vector is a Google Doc shared with the user, containing prompt injection instructions that instruct the model to encode previous data into an URL and exfiltrate it via a markdown image.

  • Gizmodo ☛ ‘I’d Have Told Them to F*ck Off’: Succession Star Brian Cox Says AI Is a Human Rights Issue

    Succession star Brian Cox has joined the parade of actors fighting against artificial intelligence, calling it a “human rights issue.” Cox, who’s known for playing Logan Roy in the series, equated using AI to replicate an actor’s likeness as “identity theft” in an interview with Sky News this week, adding that he worries about young actors who may be primary targets.

    “The younger actors are put in a situation where they’re told they have to do this and they don’t, but they don’t know that at the time, …” Cox told the outlet, referring to the increasingly common practice of studios pressuring actors to get body scans and sign away their rights.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Beatles get back together for one last song with the help of artificial intelligence

    The three remaining Beatles, including George Harrison doing the guitar track, tried to finish the song in the 1990s, but apparently, the quality wasn’t good enough, so they gave up. “In John’s demo tape, the piano was a little hard to hear,” McCartney explained. “And in those days, of course, we didn’t have the technology to do the separation.” He said the song “just kind of languished in a cupboard” after that. Harrison also died in 2001.

    It was in the 2020s, during the making of Peter Jackson’s documentary on the Beatles, “Get Back,” when the remaining terrific two discovered that with the use of machine learning technology, they could separate Lennon’s voice from the scratchy recording without losing much quality. “Now we could mix it and make a proper record of it,” McCartney said.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ The generative AI power law: How data diversity will influence adoption

    The transformative power of generative AI for industries is colossal, and we are convinced that AI will gravitate to where data lives. The power law of gen AI, developed by theCUBE Research team, describes the adoption patterns we see emerging in the cloud, on-premises and at the edge with a long tail of highly specific domain models across every industry.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ China's AI Analog Chip Claimed To Be 3000X Faster Than Nvidia's A100 GPU

    As published in Nature, ACCEL is quoted as hitting 4.6 trillion operations per second in vision tasks – hence the 3,0000x performance improvement against Nvidia’s A100 (Ampere) and its 0.312 quadrillion operations. According to the research paper, ACCEL can perform 74.8 quadrillion operations per second at 1 W of power (what the researchers call “systemic energy efficiency) and a computing speed of 4.6 peta-operations per second. Nvidia’s A100 has since been superseded by Hopper and its 80-billion transistors H100 super-chip, but even that looks unimpressive against these results.

  • India Times ☛ Google AdSense to move from pay-per-click to pay-per-impression model

    Previously, the Google AdSense network processed fees within a single transaction. The company is now splitting the AdSense revenue share into separate rates for the buy-side and sell-side.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ nuclear safety

    This method posed a substantial problem for nuclear deterrence, though. The process of installing the pits in the weapons was time consuming, required specially trained personnel, and wasn't particularly safe. Particularly after the dawn of ICBMs, a Soviet nuclear attack would require a rapid response, likely faster than weapons could be assembled. The problem was particularly evident when nuclear weapons were stockpiled at Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases for faster loading onto bombers. Each SAC base required a large stockpile area complete with hardened pit vaults and assembly buildings. Far more personnel had to be trained to complete the assembly process, and faster. Opportunities for mistakes that made weapons unusable, killed assembly staff, or contaminated the environment abounded.

  • LRT ☛ Decade until tipping point. Eventually, Lithuania will be divided into islands, become as cold as Lapland

    Using satellite data, scientists at the University of Leeds have estimated that around 28 trillion tonnes of Earth’s ice have already melted between 1994 and 2017. This is equivalent to a 100-metre-thick ice sheet covering the whole UK.

    The study has also found that the rate of ice loss has increased dramatically over the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tonnes per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tonnes per year in 2017, mainly due to the sharp increase in the loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Hundreds of migrants rescued off Spain's Canary Islands

    Authorities intercepted two boats carrying a total of 254 people on Friday evening.

    A third boat carrying 238 people was intercepted at dawn on Saturday and a fourth vessel carrying 247 people was intercepted on Saturday morning.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions leaves one dead, injures several others, including two children — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Zelensky says war not ‘at stalemate,’ contrasting recent statement by Ukraine’s commander-in-chief — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ NBC: U.S. and Europe start talking to Ukraine about possibility of peace negotiations with Russia — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian air defenses down missiles over city of Kerch in annexed Crimea, debris crashes into shipyard — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ U.K. Defense Ministry: Thousands of Russian troops likely killed during assault on Avdiivka since start of October — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Scheerpost ☛ Eulogy for My Father, Daniel Ellsberg

    He had often spoken of his identification with the mythical seer Cassandra: who received the gift of seeing the future, but also the curse that no one would believe her. For most of his life, he had struggled with this dubious gift and the driven sense that he must find some way to make people see and act appropriately. He believed that the danger facing humanity came not just from our technology and our policies but from the tragic defect that allowed so many humans not to identify with the sufferings and fate of others far away, not of their tribe.

  • [Old] Common Dreams ☛ Living on a Deadline in the Nuclear Age. Some Personal News

    So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon's nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of disastrous willful denial by many officials, corporations and other Americans, scientists have known for over three decades that the catastrophic climate change now underway--mainly but not only from burning fossil fuels--is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another existential risk.) I'm happy to know that millions of people--including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message!--have the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.

• Environment

  • New Yorker ☛ 2023-10-31 [Older] A Smoking Gun for Biden’s Big Climate Decision?

  • NL Times ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] About 100 Dutch climate activists arrested during street blockade in Berlin

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-10-31 [Older] US Climate Envoy Demands 'Public Responsibility' From Fossil Fuel Firms

  • HRW ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] COP28: Climate Action Requires Upholding Rights

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2023-11-04 [Older] COP28’s Effort in Tackling Climate Crisis in The Future, Will It Work?

  • NL Times ☛ 2023-10-29 [Older] Dutch companies less climate ambitious and innovative: study

  • CBC ☛ 2023-10-29 [Older] Some MPs are calling on Ottawa to take a bigger bite out of fossil fuel companies' profits

  • CBC ☛ 2023-10-28 [Older] What the guy who got into a shouting match with Danielle Smith at a climate conference thinks of the exchange

  • The Age AU ☛ 2023-10-28 [Older] After 18 months from hell, these farmers are doing everything they can to save their crops

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2023-10-29 [Older] Poor Sanitation Causes Disease and Death Globally. Climate Change Will Only Make It Worse.

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] Navajo Sheep Herding at Risk From Climate Change. Some Young People Push to Maintain the Tradition

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-10-29 [Older] Climate scientist and sustainable builder win top German environment prize

  • The Age AU ☛ 2023-11-04 [Older] Tony Abbott says ‘climate change cult’ will be discredited

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ 2023-11-03 [Older] Michigan House passes climate change reform, mandating clean energy by 2040

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2023-11-03 [Older] Fixing the Climate Crisis

  • Gizmodo ☛ 2023-11-02 [Older] Dust Doomed the Dinos, Scientists Say

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-02 [Older] Climate adaptation funds woefully inadequate, says UN

  • Green Party UK ☛ 2023-11-02 [Older] Green Party urges Rishi Sunak to focus on environment and climate in King's Speech

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Any Antidote to Climate Anxiety Involves Organizing

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-11-02 [Older] Nebraska Pipeline Opponent, Indonesian Environmentalist Receive Climate Breakthrough Awards

  • Gizmodo ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Will Your City Have Enough Water and Power in a Hotter Future?

  • NOAA ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Maritime commerce in a changing climate

  • Vox ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] It takes more than trees to build a livable city

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Nigeria, Ghana Ready for energy and infrastructure collaboration with Germany

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Opinion | Wind energy is generating new opportunities at Beal City Schools

    • CBC ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Vodka from CO2? Feasible. Energy storage? Fantasy. Danielle Smith's hot-and-cold views on technology

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Exclusive-EU, US, COP28 Hosts Rally Support for Global Deal to Triple Renewable Energy - Documents

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] Pension Investment in Renewables May Be Undermining a Just Transition

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] Germany seeks Nigeria energy and migration partnerships

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-10-29 [Older] G-7 Nations Back Strong Supply Chains for Energy and Food Despite Global Tensions

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-10-29 [Older] Colombia to Send Energy to Drought-Stricken Ecuador

    • Russell Graves ☛ Keropunk Part 5: Mantle Lanterns

      It’s been about a year since the rest of my KeroPunk series, and while that covered the common kerosene equipment you’re likely to find, there is one more “final evolution in kerosene” sort of lantern that I’d like to talk about: The mantle lanterns. If you’ve ever used an old Coleman propane lantern, you’re familiar with the concept - and also the loud hissing coming off such lanterns. With kerosene, the mantle lantern is utterly silent in operation, while throwing about a 40W (incandescent) bulb worth of light (if you have everything even and bright).

    • Vox ☛ Julia Child, the natural gas industry’s most famous influencer

      Child herself never endorsed products on her shows (regulations around public programming forbade it) and there’s no evidence to suggest that she was a willing shill of the AGA. But from the industry’s point of view, Child was potent product placement that could help establish the dominance of gas in the American home. “Millions of viewers week after week will be able to watch Julia Child as she stirs food simmering over a gas flame,” read an October 1978 article from the association’s monthly trade magazine.

      This was a continuation of a larger campaign called “Operation Attack.” Launched by the AGA in the late 1960s, it employed at the time some of the same experts and public relations firms as the tobacco industry to fend off growing threats to gas. The nation was becoming more environmentally conscious; the fossil-fuel industry feared heightened scrutiny from the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, and energy price shocks had begun to make alternative fuels more appealing. To make matters worse, new research raised questions about gas stove emissions and impacts on public health. Gas was losing ground to electric competition, but the industry had plans to fight back.

    • CS Monitor ☛ Green energy’s green light

      New polls show that more Americans may be willing to live near energy-producing infrastructure. One reason is that power producers are learning how to win over communities through patient engagement. Some critics of such projects “just don’t want it because they don’t want it,” Lisa Grow, CEO of Idaho Power, told the Los Angeles Times. So much of that resistance, she said, is based on misunderstanding. “But for people that have specific needs, I think it is worth the time to have a process where they can be invited in, and you can deal with some of those things upfront. If you wait until the end, you just have a fight.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-10-31 [Older] RECOMMENDED — From ice mummies to baby mammoths — some sensational archaeological finds are due to climate change, but others risk being lost forever.

• Finance

  • Gizmodo ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] As Banks Write Down X, Musk Offers Employee Stock Options [Ed:Ponzi scheme instead of salary]

  • Pro Publica ☛ LA Mayor Orders Residential Hotels to Be Used for Temporary Homeless Housing

    Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued an order Wednesday that allows the city to use residential hotel rooms — which by law are intended to be used as permanent housing for some of the city’s poorest residents — to temporarily shelter homeless people.

    The order goes against the goals of a 2008 city law, which sought to preserve nearly 19,000 mostly bare-bones residential hotel rooms as stable housing for low-income, disabled and elderly Angelenos, who were increasingly being displaced by the development of condos and tourist hotels. If residential hotel owners want to convert their buildings into other uses, they must either replace the housing units or pay an equivalent fee to the city.

  • The Age AU ☛ 2023-10-31 [Older] Retirees flock to government’s reverse mortgage scheme to boost income [Ed: What incredible spin; losing one's own "to boost income"]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • uni Case Western Reserve ☛ Taylor Swift: A force to be reckoned with

    This past week, Taylor Swift became a billionaire, the first musician to do so from their songs and performances alone. Only three other musicians have achieved this status—Jay-Z, Rihanna and Jimmy Buffett—and all relied on their side companies, brands and investments to reach it. The size of Swift’s success is staggering: She has more number-one albums than any woman in history, was the first artist to claim the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 and shows no signs of slowing down. At just 33, Swift has accomplished extraordinary feats that other artists can only imagine in their wildest dreams. She is a force to be reckoned with.

  • The Record ☛ EU urged to drop new law that could allow member states to intercept and decrypt global web traffic

    More than 300 of the world’s most respected cybersecurity experts have written to European Union lawmakers to warn that a proposed legal reform that may soon become law could fundamentally undermine security online.

    A similar joint letter has been sent by industry organizations — including the Linux Foundation, Cloudflare, and Mozilla — telling the EU lawmakers that the proposed regulations are a “dangerous intervention” that risk breaking the fragile system of trust that underpins the use of cryptographic certificates on the web.

    The letters were prompted by a proposed update to the bloc’s eIDAS (Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services) regulations which would give EU member states the ability to issue so-called Qualified Website Authentication Certificates (QWACs).

  • Internet Society ☛ Civil Society Experts Voice Concern as New EU Digital Identity Regulation Finalized

    In 2022, the Internet Society, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Epicenter.works participated in a workshop and panel discussion on Article 45 of the European Digital Identity Regulation. Attendees explored the technical aspects of the proposal and discussed its potential negative impacts on Internet security and trust (watch video highlights of that workshop). We have tracked the development of the file through the trilogue process and, with this intervention, are sharing a set of recommendations that we believe would remove ambiguity from the text and increase public trust.

    We are concerned that despite previous discussions at which the goals and concerns of relevant stakeholders, including the Commission, were debated, the text relating to Qualified Web Authentication Certificates (QWACs) in the eIDAS proposals remains ambiguous, and risks undermining trust in browsers as a globally deployed element of the Internet ecosystem.

  • [Repeat] OpenSSF (Linux Foundation) ☛ OpenSSF Co-Signs Industry Joint Statement on Article 45 in the EU’s eIDAS Regulation

    The organizations that build and secure the Internet are concerned about proposed EU regulations that aim to mandate that all Web browsers recognize a new form of certificate for the purposes of authenticating websites. To support Mozilla’s position on eIDAS regulation and the organization’s multi-year effort to avert a potential policy disaster for cryptography in Articles 45 and 45a of the proposed eIDAS provisions, OpenSSF has co-signed the Industry Joint Statement on Article 45 in the EU’s eIDAS Regulation Those provisions are likely to weaken the security of the Internet as a whole.

    In summary, the eIDAS proposal would potentially introduce root certificates that do not meet the established security standards and could lead to data compromise.

  • India Times ☛ Elon Musk teases AI chatbot 'Grok,' with real-time access to X

    Building an AI model at the same scale as those companies comes at an enormous expense in computing power, infrastructure and expertise.

  • Engadget ☛ Arm picks up a minority stake in Raspberry Pi

    It seems that Arm wants to gain more of a foothold in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. "With the rapid growth of edge and endpoint AI applications, platforms like those from Raspberry Pi, built on Arm, are critical to driving the adoption of high-performance IoT devices globally by enabling developers to innovate faster and more easily," Paul Williamson, senior vice-president and general manager of Arm's IoT division, said in a statement.

  • The Register UK ☛ Arm grabs a minority slice of Raspberry Pi • The Register

    Since 2012, the maker of the currently best-selling British computer has released a number of Raspberry Pi models in different form factors. Last month, it launched the Raspberry Pi 5, which brought several notable improvements – including a much faster quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz, better graphics and more robust I/O.

    Over the past few years these devices have also become popular for use in industrial applications at the edge. As of 2020, more than half of all Raspberry Pi units were being deployed in industrial and commercial settings. This no doubt factored into Arm's decision to invest.

  • Futurism ☛ Obama Has Secretly Been Working on AI for Biden

    Per NBC, aides for both Biden and Obama say that AI keeps both the current and former president "up at night," and by Biden's reported request, the current president's one-time boss is said to have spent the last five months "quietly" meeting with White House officials, convening Zoom conferences with various top aides and speaking with leaders in the tech world.

    Obama "helped really set the frame of mind that companies can innovate while also being responsible," White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told NBC, "and that companies need to be accountable."

  • NBC ☛ Biden quietly tapped Obama to help shape his AI strategy

    The joint effort culminated Monday when Biden signed an executive order establishing some government oversight of AI development. It’s the first time Biden has tapped his former boss to help shape a key policy initiative, aides said, and he did it because Obama shares his views on the issue and brings a certain heft that could help move the process along quickly.

    “You have to move fast here, not at normal government pace or normal private-sector pace, because the technology is moving so fast,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients recalled Biden saying. “We have to move as fast, or ideally faster. And we need to pull every lever we can.”

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel CEO Admits to and Details The Company's Three Biggest Mistakes

    Gelsinger is still focused heavily on the foundry operations; it is now opening up its fabs to companies that want to create high-performance chips on Intel's cutting-edge process technologies. That's essentially the business model of TSMC and Samsung, the world's other two cutting-edge foundries. Intel had previously kept its cutting-edge nodes to use for its own processors, but Gelsinger has argued in the past that was a mistake.

  • [Old] Digit.in ☛ Pat Gelsinger interview: Intel’s visionary CEO on future of chipmaking

    “Obviously, we missed the mobile wave. We had like five different AI acquisitions, and when I was pushed out of the company we killed the one that would have made all the difference in the world. Those are the two monster trends that Intel missed, and we were fundamentally biased to building a great foundry. Those to me are the three massive opportunities that Intel was uniquely positioned to benefit from, and we’ll do our best to bring us back into position on those fronts,” Gelsinger mentioned, when I asked him about Intel’s past mistakes.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ White House 2024: AI threatens to 'supercharge' disinformation

      AI programs can clone in an instant a political figure's voice and create videos and text so seemingly real that voters could struggle to decipher truth from fiction, undermining trust in the electoral process.

    • [Old] The University of Helsinki ☛ Weaponized News : Russian Television, Strategic Narratives and Conflict Reporting [PDF]

      Russia has been involved in two major geopolitical conflicts in recent years: the Ukraine crisis and the civil war in Syria. Since Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine crisis in 2013-2014, many commentators have pointed to the effectiveness of the Russian strategic narratives to explain the support the Kremlin enjoys at home and abroad. Although Russia's use of information as a weapon is not new, in the light of the limited transparency of Russian strategic thinking, studying Russia’s discursive environment and, in particular, strategic narratives becomes critical. Therefore, the concept of strategic narrative plays a central role in assembling the main argument for this doctoral thesis. The concept provides a foundation for the analytical framework to explore a set of media frames purposefully embedded into television news to reinforce, subvert, undermine, overwhelm or replace a pre-existing discourse on a subject significant to both the audience and the ‘speaker’ that is often a political elite. The main focus of the dissertation is on the visuals employed in the Russian television news, which have received surprisingly little scholarly attention to date. A starting point is the desire to obtain a deeper understanding of how the Russian government’s complex and controversial political decisions are legitimized on television, and also, and most importantly, to determine what role images play in advancing the strategic narratives that justify violence, human costs and engagement in military conflicts. For that, I adopt three distinct perspectives. First is a comparative perspective, which contrasts the narratives produced for two different audiences — domestic and foreign. It also compares the strategic narratives constructed around two different conflicts — the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the civil war in Syria. Second is a retrospective perspective, which explores the narratives not only in terms of their current application but also as a process that has been evolving over a two-year period of time. Third, the dissertation employs a hybrid media perspective to explore the interactions between mainstream media and social media. These three perspectives, in combination, encompass a comprehensive and longitudinal investigation of Russian strategic narratives as a representation of the weaponized information. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods adds ‘depth’ and ‘breadth’ dimensions to the dissertation’s analytical spectrum. The thesis represents a compilation of four articles. Each article illuminates one of three perspectives adopted in the dissertation. The articles highlight the results which demonstrate that the approach adopted in this dissertation is important for several reasons. First, while much of the media and international relations literature focuses on projection or reception of strategic narratives, there is almost no research which offers deep insights into strategic narrative as a process that can develop or be modified over the course of time to account for changes in political goals or target audiences. What happens to a dominant, established strategic narrative when the context changes? This dissertation aims to fill this gap by studying Russia’s dominant strategic narratives in television news from comparative, retrospective and hybrid media perspectives. Second, this dissertation argues that strategic narratives gain their power through images that invoke collective emotions and ideas, like sympathy or aversion while reinforcing existing political myths, cultural stereotypes and historical memory. Thus, the thesis conceptualises visual images as affective anchors that can be used to reactivate collective memory and dominant discourses and construct emotional relationships between the audiences and mediated events. Finally, wartime images studies anticipate, but rarely empirically examine the television images that are employed to mediate the contemporary conflicts. This dissertation extends the understanding of how the Russian television visually mediates the conflicts to advance the state’s interpretation of the events and justify the country’s involvement in the international conflicts to domestic and global audiences.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Orban government attempts to ban under-18s from World Press Photo Exhibition over 'LGBTQ images'

    The Hungarian government has issued a ban on individuals below the age of 18 from attending the World Press Photo exhibition in Budapest. This decision is based on the presence of LGBTQ content on display. Dóra Dúró, deputy president of the far-right Our Homeland party, had previously urged the government to investigate whether the exhibition violated Hungary's controversial child protection law. 

    The law prohibits the "representation and promotion of homosexuality" in materials such as books and films for individuals under the age of 18. This legislation is commonly referred to as the anti-LGBT law, and the European Union has initiated legal proceedings against it. Dúró raised concerns about photographs depicting an LGBTQ nursing home. The National Museum has included a notice on its website stating that the exhibition is not accessible to those under 18. The Museum, however, does not enforce the ban -- the cultural institution does not ask for IDs when entering the exhibition.

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-11-03 [Older] Appeals Courts Temporarily Lifts Trump's Gag Order as He Fights the Restrictions on His Speech

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-11-03 [Older] US Supreme Court to Hear NRA Free Speech Case Against New York Official

  • Vox ☛ 2023-10-31 [Older] The Supreme Court seems stumped by two cases about free speech online

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-02 [Older] Israel, Hamas and freedom of speech in German football

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2023-10-31 [Older] Rashid Khalidi: “We Are Seeing a Horrifying Attempt to Shut Down Speech Around Palestine”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Belarusian journalist Alyaksandr Mantsevich sentenced to 4 years in prison

    A court in the northwestern city of Maladzyechna convicted Mantsevich, the founder and editor-in-chief of regional independent newspaper Regyonalnaya Gazeta, on charges of discrediting Belarus and sentenced him to four years in jail and a fine of 14,800 Belarusian rubles (US$4,496), according to the banned human rights group Viasna and a Facebook post by his daughter Nasta Mantsevich. Alyaksandr Mantsevich denied the charges in court, Viasna reported.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • New York Times ☛ ‘Just Like Medicine’: A New Push for Divorce in a Nation Where It’s Illegal

    The approach is a departure from the previous strategy of sharing personal stories in the hope of winning lawmakers’ sympathy. Now, activists are using science and statistics to present the long-term effects that keeping divorce illegal has on millions of abused women.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Gig Work Wages In U.S. Are So Bad They're a Human Rights Issue, U.N. Poverty Expert Says

    A United Nations poverty and human rights expert has sent letters to Amazon, DoorDash, and Walmart, demanding they address allegations that their wages are so low that they trap workers in poverty. Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, also sent a letter to the U.S. government, requesting a response to allegations that the U.S. minimum wage and earnings for workers in the gig economy are so bad that they’re forced to rely on government assistance.

  • The Scotsman ☛ How to fight back against unfair airlines - Martyn James

    As part of the campaign, a white paper commissioned by online travel agent On the Beach launched this week, calling on the Government and regulators to step in and stop airlines from treating their customers unfairly.

    Here’s what our campaign found – and what needs to change.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • [Repeat] Ubuntu ☛ Intel® TDX 1.0 technology preview available on Ubuntu 23.10 [Ed: Digital Restrictions (DRM) garbage boosted by Canonical]

    Intel® TDX introduces new architectural elements to create secure, isolated virtual machines known as trust domains (TDs). The primary goal of Intel® TDX is to safeguard TDs from various potential software threats, including the virtual-machine manager and other non-TD software on the platform. Intel® TDX also enhances TD defence against specific physical access attacks on platform memory, including offline dynamic random access memory (DRAM) analysis such as cold-boot attacks and active attacks on DRAM interfaces.

• Monopolies

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] Google CEO Lashes Out at Microsoft in Defense of Search Practices at US Trial

  • Engadget ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] Microsoft bans 'unauthorized' third-party Xbox controllers and accessories

  • Gizmodo ☛ 2023-10-30 [Older] Microsoft May Drop Support for 'Unauthorized' Xbox Controllers, Accessories

  • Gizmodo ☛ 2023-11-01 [Older] Most Accessibility Accessories Should Still Work on Xbox After Ban, Microsoft Claims

  • Silicon Angle ☛ UK antitrust regulator ends e-commerce probes into Amazon and Meta

    Because Amazon runs the underlying e-commerce infrastructure, it has access to data about third-party merchants’ sales. At the same time, the retail giant competes with many of those businesses by offering rival products. The CMA was concerned that Amazon could use the data it collects about third-party merchants’ sales to give its rival products an unfair edge.

  • The Register UK ☛ Brits make Amazon, Meta stop using third-party data to undercut rivals

    The monopoly watchdog launched separate investigations into both internet giants' business practices, and accused the Big Tech duo of not only gathering up information about sellers using their respective online souks, they also - surprise, surprise - exploited that info to get a commercial advantage.

  • [Old] New Republic ☛ How Amazon Keeps Workers’ Pay Low

    Writing last week about the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, I observed that Bezos was playing Monopsony against Amazon’s sellers and against Amazon’s mostly nonunion warehouse employees. But I qualified that by saying workers’ beef with Bezos was typically not about wages but working conditions. Now a fascinating new report from the National Employment Law Project, or NELP, argues that Amazon’s warehouse wages aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. An Amazon warehouse’s presence in a given county, NELP says, drives wages down, just like monopsony theory says it should.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Film Censors Given Powers to Remove Pirated Movies From YouTube, Telegram

      India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting announced on Friday that the country's film censorship board has been given powers to remove pirated films from platforms like YouTube. Copyright holders, their agents, "and/or any other person" may file a complaint by filling in what appears to be a paper form. The Ministry adds that if the complainant isn't a copyright holder or hasn't been authorized by one, individual hearings may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Death and sound

    Today I accidentally visited an art installation on death and grief. When I realized what I had walked into, I felt a strong resistance to going on. But there was soft, sweet droning music playing, and the lighting was dark and violet.

    My soul woke up. It wanted to be closer to death; not because I desire it, but because this form of death was friendly enough to feel familiar.

  • 5 🔤SpellBinding: BETLMNF Wordo: IMMIX

• Science

  • A Call to Get Rid of DST... and Time Zones

    It's that time of year in the US again, where we set our clocks back an hour. Sure does suck having to find all of the wall clocks and alarm clocks twice a year. CGP Grey made a very popular video that makes the rounds during these times of the year which is linked below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4 "Daylight Saving Time Explained" Youtube video by CGP Grey While we're at it, time zones in the modern day suck too... we should get rid of those.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Embrace copy+paste-driven development

    This week, I inherited a half-finished proof-of-concept codebase that sort-of implements a teleconferencing service. The fellow I'm inheriting from is wonderful to work with; an old, grizzled sort of guy.

    He walked me through the backend. It has two event buses, an enormously complex JS framework that does all sorts of automatic dependency injection, implements socket.io for you, etc.

    At the same time, the team he works with (that I am now managing) consists of people who are either early in their career, or resistant to learning.

  • This week (and the previous weeks) — The Halloween Edition #1

    After two months of work and stress, I return to report about my growing virtual pet obsession and my foray into more PC games. I'm taking some sort of hiatus from GBF, I think? Also, I can do pixel art now!

    Hey, it's been a while! A long, long while... and yes, despite the title, I'm posting this several days after Halloween. Anyway, erm, belated happy Halloween!