Links 30/11/2023: Belated End of Henry Kissinger and 'Popular Science' Shuts Online Magazine
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Digital Restrictions (DRM)
- Monopolies
- Gemini* and Gopher
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Leftovers
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Idiomdrottning ☛ Wiki on the wider web
Before wiki, most (not all, but most) people made web in one of two ways: bug-ridden GUI hells like Macromedia Dreamweaver, or hand-writing HTML the long way. M4 and other shortcuts weren’t something we, the slovenly post–Eternal-September arrivees, were familiar with. Wiki made “text-near, minimalist” markup mainstream.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Verdict on Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger is dead. The media mill is already churning out fiery denouncements and warm remembrances in equal measure. Perhaps no other figure in twentieth-century American history is so polarizing, as vehemently reviled by some as he is revered by others.
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Meduza ☛ ‘Controlling reality’: Sociologist Jennifer Earl on the many faces of repression — and what can be done to resist them — Meduza
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Science
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Omicron Limited ☛ Telescopes didn't always play nicely with each other. That's about to change
A team of researchers from the John Hopkins Institute addressed the main problem of assessing images from sky surveys taken over many years from different telescope in different locations under different conditions. The challenge has been to match observations of the same objects and when the surveys are in close proximity this can be more challenging. Existing tools have been available to crossmatch data from various catalogs such as TopCat, CDS Match and Aspects but to date, these are sow and have had higher than wished for failure rates.
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The Register UK ☛ That time a JPL engineer almost killed a Mars Rover before it left Earth
He was into his unofficial second shift, having already logged 12 hours that Wednesday, and was tasked with verifying the integrity of the motors in the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) attached to the end of Spirit's robotic arm.
[...]
"The monitoring multimeter I disconnected was actually completing the circuit that powered the spacecraft's ground test telemetry. I inadvertently disabled the connection the instant I removed the leads."
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Education
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New York Times ☛ Popular Science Shuts Online Magazine in Another Sign of Decline
“Like most media companies, Recurrent is adapting to the evolving landscape of its audience,” Cathy Hebert, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Whether it’s due to shifting patterns in social media, an increase in consumer demand for video or shifting advertising budgets — which have also increasingly moved toward video — it’s clear that change is a consistent theme.”
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Axios ☛ Layoffs hit Recurrent Ventures following CEO shakeup
Catch up quick: Recurrent has a portfolio of about 20 brands that include Popular Science, Domino, Bob Villa and others. Last year, it acquired Dwell and Business of Home. It sold its food website Saveur to the publication's longtime editor earlier this year.
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Hardware
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The Drone Girl ☛ The biggest drone service providers of 2023 for remote sensing
The commercial drone market encompasses a range of work, including building software and hardware. But one of the biggest money-makers in the drone industry is actually flying them. And a few drone companies stand out as especially heavy hitters for being the biggest drone service providers. Drones can provide all sorts of services. Drone delivery might come to mind first, while there are other unique use cases like serving as flying billboards or putting on drone light shows.
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Hackaday ☛ CT Scanner Reveals The Difference Between Real And Fake AirPods
These days, you have to be careful what you buy. Counterfeit hardware is everywhere, especially when you’re purchasing things sight unseen over the Internet. [Jon Bruner] recently set out to look at a bunch of fake AirPod clones, and found that the similarities between the imposters and the real thing are only skin deep. A CT scan reveals all.
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Hackaday ☛ Gesture-Controlled Robot Arm Is A Nifty Educational Build
Traditionally, robot arms have been controlled either by joysticks, buttons, or very carefully programmed routines. However, for [Narongporn Laosrisin’s] homebrew build, they decided to go with gesture control instead.
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Hackaday ☛ Chromium(III) Telluride As Ferromagnetic Material With Tunable Anomalous Hall Effect
Chromium(III) Telluride (Cr2Te3) is an interesting material for (ferro)magnetic applications, with Yao Wen and colleagues reporting in a 2020 Nano Letters paper that they confirmed it to show spontaneous magnetization at a thickness of less than fifty nanometers, at room temperature. Such a 2D ferromagnet could be very useful for spintronics and other applications. The confirmation of magnetization is performed using a variety of methods, including measuring the Hall Effect (HE) and the Anomalous Hall Effect (AHE), the latter of which is directly dependent on the magnetization of the material, rather than an externally applied field.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Fierce Pharma ☛ Pfizer's cost-savings mission continues with office shuffle, job cuts in Ireland
While "there will be redundancies" stemming from the move, the company will minimize job cuts by "utilizing open roles and moving talent to other opportunities," the spokesperson added.
The Citywest location currently employs 125 people, while the Ringsend workforce is comprised of 400 employees. Pfizer has five sites in Ireland with a total staff of about 5,000 people. As COVID sales crater, Pfizer takes $5.6B in inventory write-offs on Paxlovid, Comirnaty
Pfizer’s Newbridge job cuts earlier this month impacted staffers who helped produce the company’s COVID-19 antiviral Paxlovid. The scale-down came in response to “lower-than-expected utilization” for Pfizer’s COVID products, a spokesperson told Fierce Pharma at the time.
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The Conversation ☛ How to get someone out of a cult – and what happens afterwards
For some people, there is a gradual slipping away. The classic cult-like group encourages isolation from friends, family and even outside employment. But if someone does continue to engage with other activities and groups, these might reduce the appeal of an increasingly demanding group.
Some people experience a sudden change in thinking when the group crosses an ethical line or when the when the duplicity of a leader’s teaching and behaviour is realised. Sometimes a group of people leave together.
But, as the length and depth of involvement increases, leaving can become harder and harder. This is partially due to the “sunk costs” effect. If you spend your life savings on “training” and cut all your ties with your family, it becomes more difficult to start over.
Additionally, many people are both perpetrators and victims of the group’s harmful activities. Shame and social stigma does not make it any easier to leave.
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Homeopathic quackery vs…a fibroadenoma?
Regular readers know that my clinical specialty is breast cancer surgery, and that I am a breast cancer researcher as well. In the before time (i.e., before the COVID-19 pandemic) I used to write frequently about breast cancer and breast disease. In the nearly four years since the novel coronavirus first caused the epidemic in Wuhan China that ultimately spread to the rest of the world and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. So it was interest, amusement, and alarm that greeted my discovery of the Philadelphia Homeopathic Clinic and its page on the Homeopathic Treatment for Breast Fibroadenoma.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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CS Monitor ☛ Sports Illustrated is latest media to feel the pull and sting of AI
Computer-generated writers ... writing computer-generated stories?
Sports Illustrated is the latest media company to see its reputation damaged by being less than forthcoming – if not outright dishonest – about who or what is writing its stories at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age.
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New York Times ☛ Elon Musk Uses a Crude Insult to Slam Advertisers for Pulling Back From X.
About 200 big advertisers, including Disney, Apple and IBM, stopped spending on X after Mr. Musk agreed with a post that accused Jewish communities of pushing “hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” If the freeze continues, it could end up costing the company up to $75 million this quarter, according to internal documents seen by The New York Times.
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University of Michigan ☛ Automated shuttle planned for Detroit is testing at Mcity
The vehicle under test is identical to those destined for Detroit. The evaluation is taking place at Mcity — the world’s first purpose-built environment for testing connected and automated vehicles and technologies under controlled, realistic conditions.
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Six Colors ☛ A picture is worth a thousand permissions requests
And yet all of Apple’s security alerts got in the way again and spoiled the whole thing. Here’s a screenshot I took right after my new Mac booted for the first time after migration: [...]
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Simon Willison ☛ llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer
A llamafile is a single multi-GB file that contains both the model weights for an LLM and the code needed to run that model—in some cases a full local server with a web UI for interacting with it.
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Zimbabwe ☛ It’s now possible to obtain summaries of YouTube videos through Bard, and more useful stuff
As helpful as generative AI like ChatGPT and Bard are in the research process, they still make up stuff with such confidence you’ll believe it’s true. So, you are forced to check everything they tell you as ChatGPT recommends, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.”
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI Refuses to Comment on Secretive Q* AI
While a spokesperson refused to give a statement, insiders told the magazine that OpenAI is in fact working on Q* and has already used it to solve math problems. However, they argued that the existence of the project likely wasn't enough to trigger fears among OpenAI's board that could've led to Altman's dismissal.
At the end of the day, we simply have no idea if Q* will represent a breakthrough or not, let alone if it will ever be turned into a viable consumer-facing product.
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New York Times ☛ Amazon Introduces Q, an A.I. Chatbot for Companies
The chatbot, developed by Amazon’s cloud computing division, is focused on workplaces and not intended for consumers. Amazon Q aims to help employees with daily tasks, such as summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets and answering questions about company policy. It will compete with other corporate chatbots, including Copilot, Google’s Duet AI and ChatGPT Enterprise.
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New York Times ☛ G.M. to Cut Spending on Cruise Self-Driving Unit
General Motors is slowing the expansion of its Cruise automated driving division and significantly cutting spending at the unit after suspending operations in response to growing safety concerns about its driverless cars.
The company had been planning to roll out a ride service in San Francisco and three other cities and begin testing Cruise vehicles on the streets of several other markets. It now plans to focus on only one city as it works to improve the operation of its fleet of driverless vehicles it has been testing.
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Techdirt ☛ Sports Illustrated The Latest To Bare Its Entire Ass Thanks To Laziness, Greed, And Half-Cooked ‘AI’
The rushed integration of half-baked “AI” (aka not at all sentient language learning models) into journalism has been a gargantuan mess. Execs at companies like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) have made it very clear they see LLMs primarily as a way to attack labor and cut corners, resulting in soulless and low quality product, oodles of plagiarism, and no shortage of employee ill will.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Washington Post ☛ A toddler was taken in a carjacking. VW wanted $150 for GPS coordinates, lawsuit says.
In the lawsuit filed Monday, the family said that both Volkswagen and Car-Net’s service provider, Verizon, disrupted its chances of finding Isaiah by requesting payment instead of immediately assisting.
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Pete Warden ☛ Little Googles Everywhere
Imagine asking a box on a pillar at Home Depot “Where are the nails?” and getting directions, your fridge responding with helpful advice when you say “Why is the ice maker broken?”, or your car answering “How do I change the wiper speed?”. I think of these kinds of voice assistants for everyday objects as “Little Googles”, agents that are great at answering questions, but only in a very specific domain. I want them in my life, but they don’t yet exist. If they’re as useful as I think, why aren’t they already here, and why is now the right time for them to succeed?
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Gizmodo ☛ Be Careful What You Tell OpenAI’s GPTs
The vulnerability comes from something called prompt leaking, where users can trick a GPT into revealing how it was built through a series of strategic questions. Prompt leaking presents issues on multiple fronts according to Polyakov, who was one of the first to jailbreak ChatGPT.
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Techdirt ☛ Ron Wyden Wants To Know Why The DEA Still Has On-Demand Access To Trillions Of Phone Records
For decades, the government has used the Third Party Doctrine to obtain massive amounts of phone records without a warrant.
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Defence/Aggression
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Neritam ☛ Social media is ‘undermining our democracies’
In an interview with FRANCE 24 at the Paris Peace Forum, US billionaire Frank McCourt strongly criticised tech giants, saying social media is “undermining our democracies”. The owner of French football club Olympique de Marseille told us more about his Project Liberty plan. He has invested $100 million in the initiative, which he hopes will “transform the way the [Internet] works”.
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Green Party UK ☛ Keeping 1.5 alive, phasing out fossil fuels and tackling climate inequality must be priorities for COP28 climate talks
“Thirdly, these climate talks must recognise that it is a super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet. The UK government must be willing to challenge the grotesque inequality driving climate breakdown and reform our tax system to make the polluter pay. This means taxing the wealth of the super-rich and introducing a carbon tax on the most polluting corporations and individuals. Such taxes, introduced globally, could generate the funds needed for a generous new Loss and Damage Fund to finance climate action in the poorest countries – those suffering the most from the impacts of climate breakdown but contributing the least to the crisis.”
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Futurism ☛ Saudi Arabia Apparently Scheming to Get Poor Countries Addicted to Oil
Reporting from the nonprofit journalism organization Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and Channel 4 News found that Saudi Arabia calls the scheme an "oil sustainability program" on an English-language government website, with one of its stated goals as "increasing sustainability. But in the Arabic version, it's called an "oil demand sustainability programme" that's meant to "sustain and develop the demand for hydrocarbons as a competitive source of energy, by raising its economic and environmental efficiency."
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New York Times ☛ Donald Trump and the Jefferson Davis Problem
State courts in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere have so far declined to rule in favor of challenges asserting that Donald Trump should be disqualified from holding the presidency again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. (Cases in Michigan and Colorado have been appealed.)
Challengers assert that Mr. Trump is barred because, as stated in Section 3, he was an officer of the United States who, after taking an oath to support the Constitution, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the country or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Dual Threat of Donald Trump
Whether Trump could really see the inside of a cell is a matter of intense debate even among legal experts, but this much is clear: The federal charges he faces are grave; some of the cases against him, particularly those related to refusing to hand over classified records, seem strong; and convictions on these charges can bring prison time.
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The Atlantic ☛ Beware Populist Politicians Who Threaten to Kill
Duterte reburied Marcos, who had died in exile in Hawaii, as a hero at the national cemetery in Manila. Obliged by the Philippines’ constitution to step down after one term, he endorsed Marcos’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Jr., to be his successor. The country had come full circle. Evangelista’s book is an extraordinary testament to half a decade of state-sanctioned terror. It’s also a timely warning for the state of democracy in 2024. Eight years ago, most Filipinos shrugged off Duterte’s homicidal rhetoric as political buffoonery. The horrors that followed suggest that demagogues with a violent message might well be taken at their word.
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Vice Media Group ☛ There's a New QAnon [Blockade] in Canada. They Want to 'Pick Up' Homeless People.
The movement’s self-appointed spokesperson Gordon Berry advocated for arresting politicians and dismantling the government. Attendees of early meetings told Press Progress that the group had initially intended to send caravans to Toronto and Tofino, British Columbia in a plot to target politicians, police, and freemasons.
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New Statesman ☛ Lapland: a prisoner of geography
Threatened by Russia as well as climate change, Finland’s northernmost region has become a front line of western Europe’s existential crisis.
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Democracy Now ☛ Mass Killings in Darfur Revealed as Fighting Between Sudanese Military Factions Escalates
We get an update on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, where more than 12,000 people have been killed and over 6 million displaced since April, when the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group broke out into fighting. Earlier this month, human rights groups say members of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group carried out a massacre of around 1,300 Masalit people over three days in Sudan’s West Darfur region and have subjected them to unlawful detentions, sexual violence, ill-treatment and looting. “The overall picture that survivors drew to us is horrific,” says Human Rights Watch researcher Mohamed Osman, who details how the United Arab Emirates and Egypt are suspected of backing the fighting between the groups. “What we know is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the violations that people are facing day to day,” says Sudanese activist Marine Alneel, who lays out how today’s fighting continues the country’s history of power struggles.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ ‘We bought our lives’: Russian soldiers are reportedly bribing their superiors to avoid combat — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Former Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev reportedly reveals second family in new memoir — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian human rights groups ask Supreme Court to dismiss authorities’ request to ban non-existent ‘international LGBT movement’ — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Four police officers reportedly killed, 18 wounded in Ukrainian strike on building in Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Paul Whelan, U.S. citizen jailed in Russia, reportedly assaulted by fellow inmate — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian State Duma approves first reading of bill holding volunteer fighters criminally accountable for military offenses — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Authorities in Russia’s Primorsky region launch chatbot for reporting ‘extremist’ neighbors — Meduza
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Environment
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New York Times ☛ Vietnam Relied on Environmentalists to Secure Billions. Then It Jailed Them.
When Vietnam was awarded a multibillion-dollar deal by a group of nine wealthy nations last year to work on reducing its use of coal, it agreed to regularly consult with nongovernmental organizations.
Instead, the government has arrested several prominent environmentalists from those organizations who shaped policies that helped secure the funding, prompting concerns over sending money to countries that have violated human rights.
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Democracy Now ☛ UAE Oil CEO Sultan Al Jaber Uses His Role as U.N. Climate Summit President to Push Fossil Fuel Deals
As the largest-ever United Nations climate summit kicks off Thursday in Dubai, we look at how the COP28 president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also CEO of the United Arab Emirates state oil company, has used climate summit meetings to lobby countries for oil and gas deals. The Centre for Climate Reporting obtained documents from meeting briefings that include Abu Dhabi National Oil Company talking points. The Centre’s Ben Stockton lays out how the oil boss was put in charge of the climate summit, and how the UAE also hopes to use COP28 to deflect from “a record of human rights abuses.” The new revelations “call into question the integrity of COP28,” he says. Democracy Now! will broadcast from COP28 in Dubai next week.
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Bridge Michigan ☛ Feral goldfish are menacing Great Lakes: We’re going to need a bigger bowl
Feral goldfish have been invading much of North America, including the Great Lakes, for decades and recently their numbers seem to be rising rapidly. The reason for the uptick is not clear, but it could be because invasive carp are being better controlled, and the goldfish are taking their place. New designs for stormwater ponds, where people often dump unwanted fish, that allow the ponds to overflow into nearby waterways could also be boosting the numbers.
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CBC ☛ Canada's fossil fuel industry is banking on carbon capture to lower emissions. Is it a viable solution?
But is that realistic? And should the federal government be footing the bill, in the form a new multibillion-dollar tax credit and other incentives? The Alberta government also announced a new tax credit that could total as much as $5 billion in taxpayer money.
Here is a closer look at the technology, where it is being used in Canada, and how it could play into the pivotal climate talks that begin Thursday in Dubai.
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The Nation ☛ Protect the Planet
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Energy/Transportation
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France24 ☛ Paris metro prices will almost double during 2024 Olympic Games
The prices for metro tickets will almost double from July to September 2024 to help cover the cost of expanding the transport network for the Paris Olympic Games. Millions of visitors are expected in the capital, which will run from July 26 to August 11.
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Hackaday ☛ Monitoring Energy Use And Saving Money
On the surface, the electric grid might seem like a solved piece of infrastructure. But there’s actually been a large amount of computerized modernization going in the background for the past decade or so. At a large scale this means automatic control of the grid, but for some electric utility customers like [Alex] this means the rates for electricity can change every hour based on demand. By keeping an eye on the current rate, you can extract the most value from these utilities.
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DeSmog ☛ ‘We Need to Address the Issues of Burnout, Anxiety, and Sustaining the Movement’
Since starting a solitary strike against climate inaction in Kampala in January, 2019, aged 22, Uganda’s Vanessa Nakate has emerged as one of the world’s most celebrated youth climate justice activists. Now a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, she will be attending the COP28 U.N. climate talks, which open in the United Arab Emirates today, to demand world leaders act with the ambition the crisis demands.
In January 2020, a media company cropped Nakate out of a photo featuring her friend Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, and three other young white women climate advocates, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Nakate’s response that the news outlet “didn’t just erase a photo, you erased a continent” focused global attention on the obstacles preventing climate advocates from marginalised communities participating in international gatherings. Vanessa is the founder of Youth for Future Africa, the Rise Up Movement, and author of A Bigger Picture, a manifesto on inclusive climate action, and featured on the cover of TIME in 2021.
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DeSmog ☛ Fossil Fuel Friendly Daily Mail Firm Handed £500k Government Contract to Run UK COP28 Events
The UK’s events at this year’s COP28 summit will be hosted by a Daily Mail events firm that specialises in organising exhibitions for the oil and gas industry, DeSmog can reveal.
Government records show that dmg events, which is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), will be paid £545,000 for “commissioning and delivering pavilion and office space for the UK’s COP28 delegation taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE)”.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Science Alert ☛ 'Emotional' Elephants Smashed a Car to Protect One of Their Babies
A herd of elephants in Malaysia smashed up a car after it struck one of their babies on Sunday night.
That (frankly understandable) response shows how the highly emotional animals will do anything to protect their own, an elephant advocate said.
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CNN ☛ Elephant herd tramples car after baby struck along Malaysian highway
Authorities did not provide further updates about the condition of the elephant baby.
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Finance
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India Times ☛ Apple to end credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs: report
The tech giant recently sent a proposal to the Wall Street bank to exit the contract in the next 12 to 15 months, the report said, citing people briefed on the matter. Apple and Goldman started rolling out a virtual credit card in 2019.
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Vox Media ☛ Unity cuts 256 Wētā FX workers in third round of layoffs in 2023 - Polygon
Unity purchased Wētā Digital in 2021 in a $1.6 billion deal and brought over 275 employees. Now, the game engine maker is laying them all off.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Democracy Now ☛ Remembering Rosalynn Carter, Former First Lady & Pioneering Advocate for Mental Health Journalism
We look at former first lady Rosalynn Carter’s decadeslong advocacy for mental healthcare in the United States. She died November 19 at the age of 96. Carter campaigned for legislation forcing health insurance to cover mental healthcare and fought to remove stigma around the topic through a fellowship program for journalists. “There are hundreds of fellows that were inspired by Mrs. Carter, and that has led to a sea change,” says Aaron Glantz, award-winning journalist and former Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism. “There was no established beat for mental health in journalism, and she’s utterly changed that.
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The Register UK ☛ Meta: If you're in our house running AI-massaged political ads, you need to 'fess up
Meta will require advertisers to disclose whether their political ads on its platforms contain any AI-generated or digitally altered content.
The Facebook giant's President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg – yeah, the guy who was once UK Deputy Prime Minister – announced the requirements on Tuesday, and argued they’re an extension of Meta’s existing stance on software-aided adjustments to content. That stance being to tackle the rise of synthetic media.
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India Times ☛ Sam Altman back as OpenAI CEO; Microsoft to take non-voting, observer position on board
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who had recruited Altman to Microsoft after his ouster from OpenAI, had said earlier that governance at the ChatGPT maker needs to change.
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Bjoern Brembs ☛ German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?
In a world in which impact factors and other bibliometric measures still reign supreme, these are laudable policies that set the DFG apart from other institutions. In fact, these steps are part and parcel of an organization with a long tradition of leveraging its power for good scholarly practices. Even before DORA/CoARA the DFG has continually evolved their policies to minimize the effect of publication venue on the assessment of applicants.
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Michael Geist ☛ Salvaging Bill C-18: Government Upends Legislation To Bring Google Onside the Online News Act
The government has announced that it has reached agreement with Google on deal that will ensure that news links are not blocked on the search engine and that the company pays $100 million to support the news sector in Canada. To be clear, this is good news for all given that the alternative was bad for news outlets, the government, Canadians, and Google. Indeed, over the past few months in discussions with representatives of media outlets, the consistent refrain I heard was that there *had* to be a deal. The harm from Facebook and Instagram blocking news links was taking a significant toll with lost revenues, lost traffic, and lost deals, meaning that something had to be salvaged from Bill C-18.
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The Verge ☛ Interview: Sam Altman on being fired and rehired by OpenAI
During our interview, Altman repeatedly declined to answer the main question on everyones’ minds: exactly why he was fired to begin with. OpenAI’s new board, led by Bret Taylor, is going to conduct an independent investigation into what went down. “I very much welcome that,” Altman told me.
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The Verge ☛ The CEOs of Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, and Discord will testify before the US Senate on child safety
Some of the biggest names in tech will testify before the US Senate on January 31st, 2024 during a hearing about online child exploitation. In a Wednesday announcement, the Senate Judiciary Committee said it will hear from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, and Discord CEO Jason Citron.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Gizmodo ☛ Elon Musk Pivots From Jews to Pizzagate as Advertisers Flee
If Elon Musk is actively trying to drive advertisers away from his floundering social media site X, then he’s doing a really fantastic job of it. Fresh off spurring a maelstrom of criticism over a tweet that was broadly decried as antisemitic (and which led to an outflux of advertisers), Musk has now decided to dip his toe into the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which seems about right.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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EFF ☛ Speaking Freely: Ron Deibert [Ed: York does not understand free speech; she attacks it when it suits her agenda]
Ron Deibert is a Canadian professor of political science, a philosopher, an author, and the founder of the renowned Citizen Lab, situated in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He is perhaps best known to readers for his research on targeted surveillance, which won the Citizen Lab a 2015 EFF Award. I had the pleasure of working with Ron early on in my career on another project he co-founded, the OpenNet Initiative, a project that documented internet filtering (blocking) in more than 65 countries, and his mentorship and work has been incredibly influential for me. We sat down for an interview to discuss his views on free expression, its overlaps with privacy, and much more.
York: What does free expression mean to you?
The way that I think about it is from the perspective of my profession, which is as a professor. And at the core of being an academic is the right…the imperative, to speak freely. Free expression is a foundational element of what it is to be an academic, especially when you’re doing the kind of academic research that I do. So that’s the way I think about it. Even though I’ve done a lot of research on threats to free expression online and various sorts of chilling effects that I can talk about…for me personally, it really boils down to this. I recognize it’s a privileged position: I have tenure, I’m a full-time professor at an established university…so I feel that I have an obligation to speak freely. And I don’t take that for granted because there’s so many parts of the world where the type of work that we do, the things that we speak about, just wouldn’t be allowed.
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Techdirt ☛ Musk’s Faulty Vision Of ‘Free Speech’ Is Driving Speech Off ExTwitter
I mean, it’s not like we didn’t warn Elon Musk. Free speech is not about creating a single private space where everyone gets to speak, because that doesn’t support free speech. It enables the worst of society to browbeat, harass, and abuse anyone they dislike, creating a total garbage dump that drives people away and silences them.
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Project Censored ☛ A Note on Research and Evaluation of Censored News Stories
Candidate stories are initially identified by Project Censored professors and students, or are nominated by members of the general public who bring them to the Project’s attention. Together, faculty and students evaluate each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and inadequate corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story is deemed inappropriate and is excluded from further consideration.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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The Dissenter ☛ US Says If CIA-Backed Embassy Security Opened Phones Of Assange Visitors, It Was Constitutional
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Scheerpost ☛ John Kiriakou: Reflections on the Deep State’s Media Watchdog Tool
We do know, however, that the Pentagon last year gave NewsGuard $750,000 for access to its “Disinformation Fingerprints” project, which it described in the contract as “a catalog of known hoaxes, lies, and disinformation stories spreading online.”
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New York Times ☛ Jezebel to Be Resurrected by Paste Magazine
Paste Magazine, a music and culture outlet, acquired Jezebel on Tuesday and planned to start publishing on the site again as soon as Wednesday, said Josh Jackson, a co-founder and the editor in chief of Paste.
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Press Gazette ☛ Two-thirds of Telegraph subscribers ‘less likely’ to renew if UAE-linked bid goes ahead
The survey of 532 British adults whose main choice of daily newspaper was The Daily Telegraph, including 307 print or digital subscribers, was commissioned by Stack Data Strategy. Stack is a sister company of PR firm Hanbury Strategy, which is assisting Paul Marshall’s bid for the newspaper.
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Press Gazette ☛ Jeff Zucker on Telegraph deal: ‘This is me… not Abu Dhabi’
Zucker is chief executive of the investment group Redbird IMI, a joint venture between US investment firm Redbird Capital and International Media Investments which is led by UAE deputy prime minister and Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Techdirt ☛ Court To Officers: You Can’t Charge Someone With Resisting Arrest When You Broke The Law With A Warrantless Entry
There are few things I enjoy more than watching cocksure cops trip over their own hubris.
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Pro Publica ☛ Retired St. Louis Detective Says He’s Too Sick to Testify at Murder Trials
Prosecutors routinely find ways to get key detectives to testify in criminal trials, even when they are retired, sick or otherwise reluctant. Some fly retirees in from Florida or other retirement locales when necessary. Others have said they use subpoenas to force detectives to take the witness stand.
But prosecutors in the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office have been unable to get retired homicide detective Thomas W. Mayer Sr. into a courtroom, even though some of the cases Mayer investigated involved the murders of children — the sort of high-profile cases cops say they especially want to win.
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Reason ☛ A Los Angeles Jail Let a Woman Die of Withdrawal, Then a Coroner Allowed Her Body To Decompose
According to a lawsuit filed this month, that wasn't the only way jail employees mishandled Bews' case. Not only did jail employees fail to treat Bews, despite numerous medical records stating she would need withdrawal medications, but once she had died, the jail mishandled her remains, leading to major decomposition that Bews' mother said made her daughter look "mummified"
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RFERL ☛ Rights Group Says Iranian Political Prisoner Karimi Executed Along With Six Others
"The execution of Ayoub Karimi, based on coerced confessions and without a fair trial, like the execution of other political prisoners, is a crime," said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights.
"The authorities of the Islamic republic must be held accountable for this crime."
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Judge At Wushu Championships Takes Stand By Shunning Head Scarf
In an exclusive interview with RFE/RL's Radio Farda, Arghavan Jalali Farahani explained that her decision was "a gesture of solidarity with the ongoing struggles in Iran" and a tribute to Mahsa Amini and Armita Garavand, two Iranian women who died after a confrontation with morality police over the hijab and have become symbols of resistance against the mandatory Islamic dress code.
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ANF News ☛ The story of Rojîn, kidnapped by ISIS from Shengal nine years ago
Rojîn Hadid Talal is one of the thousands of people abducted during the Shengal genocide. Rojîn, who was a child when he was abducted, returned to the Yazidi House in the Cizire Region of North-East Syria at the age of 17. The Yazidi House helped Rojîn reach his relatives in Shengal.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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APNIC ☛ Why is IPv6 Router Advertisement default-enabled by some network vendors?
IPv6 Router Advertisement (RA) is a Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) ICMPv6 message that is used to communicate specific information (via flags) to IPv6 hosts (or a device that does both routing and ‘hosting’). RA messages are sent by routers periodically without solicitation and in response to Router Solicitation (RS) messages from the hosts, depending on your specific configuration and timers. IANA has an up-to-date list of all the flags that RA can be used for.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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India Times ☛ Instacart partners with Peacock to offer streaming content to US subscribers
Instacart said on Wednesday it had partnered with NBCUniversal's Peacock to provide the streaming service at no extra cost to all paying U.S. subscribers of the grocery delivery firm.
In return, Instacart will be featured in a custom ad spot, which will run across NBCU's linear TV, social media and streaming platforms, the company said.
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Monopolies
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Techdirt ☛ Let’s Not Flip Sides On IP Maximalism Because Of AI
Copyright policy is a sticky tricky thing, and there are battles that have been fought for decades among public and corporate interests. Typically, it’s the corporate interests that win — especially the content industry. We’ve seen power, and copyrights, collect among a small group of content companies because of this. But there is one significant win that the public interest has been able to defend all these years: Fair Use.
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Copyrights
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The Kent Stater ☛ Banksy mural worth over $1.2m lost as building demolished
The mural, which adorned the Castle Amusements building, depicted a worker chipping away at one of the 12 yellow stars on the blue EU flag.
Then, in 2019, the mural — which had become a tourist landmark in the town, a major gateway into the EU — disappeared overnight after being whitewashed.
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Torrent Freak ☛ ICANN Simplifies Requests For Hidden Domain Name Registration Data
ICANN has launched a new service which aims to simplify requests for domain name registration data currently unavailable to the public. The Registration Data Request Service (RDRS) aims to provide a "simple and standardized" process for interested parties, including IP professionals, to obtain data previously available via public WHOIS databases.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Site Blocking Fallout Keeps GitHub Unusable for Some Indians
Website blocking is used in dozens of countries to prevent the public from easily accessing pirate sites. This is also true in India, where many thousands of sites have been rendered inaccessible, including developer platform GitHub. While the underlying court order was reversed many months ago, some Indians continue to have trouble accessing parts of the website.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding: ADIMWSR Wordo: FLUFF
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the next non-sense
When turning into the alley i notice a car passing on the main street has snow on the roof. The cold is here. Snow is yet to come. I walk towards the pub, half way down the alley i stop.
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Technology and Free Software
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Against Pinocchio
A camera can do some of what a painter does, in some ways better. A pocket digital calculator can do some of what a matematician does, in some ways better. A ruler can show distances better than most people can guess them. A piece of string can keep things together better than most people can. Cameras and calculators and rules and strings are not people.
“AI” can refer to many things thanks to the tangles of semantics. From old school text indexing and Eliza-level parsing, to backtracking and logic engines, to amazing inscrutable engines like Watson and AlphaGo, to (in the future) p-zombie AI who claim they can think and feel, but, y’know, not really.
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Opening desktop links on Linux with different browsers and profiles
This is a quick note on the how I fixed something that has been bothering me for quite a long time but never took the time to fix. See, I use browser profiles to separate work and personal contexts (bookmarks, themes, etc). The issue is that only one of them is a default for clicking on links on any desktop application.
I have my work profile as the default because most of my browser external clicks were coming from Slack or the terminal so when a link was meant to be open in my personal profile I would copy the link and paste it directly in the address bar.
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30 November 2023
Its cold outside, really,really cold and very very snowy... perhaps this is going to be a "real" winter again after many eternal falls merging directly into spring skipping winter. I would hope so, it would be great for junior experiencing his first real winter.
I would have never thought that i could "lose" myself in the "digital world" in the way that i experienced since i dabbled seriously back into the whole C64 ecosystem. Its not a week since i started to play around with the BMC64 emulator and now i can say with certainty that i am back at the same proficiency level as of my 10 - 12 year self hacking on the commodore.
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[Old] ZFS commands
The commands on this page are my notes
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Internet/Gemini
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Some slight modifications to how gemini pages are built
Saw that a crawler had been looking at my gemini pages, because it was kind enough to include it's name in a request (it loaded a page like 'gemini://cybersavior.dev/robots.txt?gemini://their.gem/faq') Looking at it, it seems they scrape pages for hash tags in the content then add it to a searchable db freeshell.de[1] . Pretty cool stuff, but the way I use tags wouldn't get picked up. So, for the purposes of gemini, I didn't really have anything for them. But, I do have a taging system, and it was an easy enough task to change how I generated the pages to make my tags "hash tags", thank muffet[2] for making this a one line change.
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Debugging Urbit: A First Attempt
I own an Urbit planet, but I haven't used it to communicate with anyone in several months. The reson is simple: my ship has been unbale to receive messages from anyone since mid-July, and I have no idea why. I can `|hi` other ships and can access Landscape without issues, but when I open a group the Groups app, dojo prints a dump of nouns, with the core of the problem being a bad peek operation.
I've run into the same issue twice before, and in the other two instances I breached my ship and deleted my pier to try to fix the problem. These were two of no less than seven breaches I've performed to solve one problem or another. I'm getting tired of having to pay an Ethereum gas fee every time my ship starts throwing errors, so I've largely abandoned my planet over the last four monthss.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.