Leftovers

• The Nation ☛ That Time Bernie Sanders Told America: “I Am Proud to Say That Henry Kissinger Is Not My Friend”

  In one of the most remarkable exchanges in the modern history of presidential politics, Sanders asked, toward the close of the foreign policy section of the debate, if he might add a brief final word. “Where the secretary and I have a very profound difference, in the last debate and I believe in her book…she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it rather amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country,” said the senator, to loud applause.

  “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” continued Sanders.

• Democracy Now ☛ Historian Greg Grandin: Glowing Obituaries for Henry Kissinger Reveal “Moral Bankruptcy” of U.S. Elites

  Henry Kissinger is dead at the age of 100. The former U.S. statesman served as national security adviser and secretary of state at the height of the Cold War and wielded influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward. His actions led to massacres, coups and and even genocide, leaving a bloody legacy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and beyond. Once out of office, Kissinger continued until his death to advise U.S. presidents and other top officials who celebrate him as a visionary diplomat. Yale historian Greg Grandin says those glowing obituaries only reveal “the moral bankruptcy of the political establishment” that ignores how Kissinger’s actions may have led to the deaths of at least 3 million people across the globe. Grandin is author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.

• The Atlantic ☛ Henry Kissinger’s Real Legacy

  The following is a guide to our writing about Kissinger, from 1969, when he first joined the Nixon administration, to the present day, including two pieces by Kissinger himself on the rise of artificial intelligence.

• Bikobatanari ☛ Browsing the Eastern Side of the Personal Web

  One major thing that I realized while browsing these places is that the Personal Web, while it was something that got swept under the rug in the West, is something that's still alive in the East. Many of the sites indexed by these search engines have been around for years—years longer than even Neocities' existence. Many sites from the mid-2000s are still being updated to this day, or at the very least have been updated in the past 3–4 years, which is significant considering that they've been up for more than a decade or two by that point.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Scott Hanselman and I got tired

  Fear of a schedule is one of the top reasons smart people I know say they “can’t write”. But you own your space. You can post whatever, whenever. You don’t owe anyone an explanation, unless you want to provide one.

• Vice Media Group ☛ Wikipedia Editor Who First Noted Henry Kissinger's Death Has Become an 'Instant Legend'

  Henry Kissinger’s death was already a meme long before it actually happened. The former presidential advisor and U.S. Secretary of State is widely known as a war criminal for the bombing of Cambodia and shaping decades of foreign policy linked to the deaths of millions, most prominently while expanding the Vietnam War under Richard Nixon. Over the years, left-leaning social media users have shared countless memes remarking on Kissinger’s uncanny longevity, perhaps most famously a comic depicting a frustrated grim reaper trying to find Kissinger inside a claw machine game.

• Kev Quirk ☛ Building a PenPal System

  Since deciding to start the whole PenPal thing, I wanted a way of managing those posts from within my CMS. This is how I did it...

• Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ After 50 years, US to return to moon on January 25

    With its Artemis program, NASA wants to establish a base on the surface of the moon.

  • Chris ☛ Binary Finger Counting

    Life pro tip: count on your fingers in binarys. Assuming you have ten fingers, you can count to 1023 on your hands. If you have one hand occupied, you can still count to 31 on the free hand.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ China's Loongson debuts processor that 'matches Intel silicon circa 2020'

    Loongson's effort is the 3A6000 processor, which uses its own LoongArch CPU instruction set that has characteristics of both the MIPS and RISC-V architectures. The chip has four physical cores and can run eight hardware threads, includes a pair of DDR4 controllers, and runs at between 2.0GHz and 2.5GHz, consuming 38 watts when running at the latter speed.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple to become first customer for Amkor's $2 billion Arizona chip packaging facility

    The upcoming advanced packaging facility near Peoria, Arizona, will feature a massive 55-acre state-of-the-art manufacturing campus with over 500,000 square feet (46,451 square meters) of cleanroom space when fully built and equipped. To put the number into context, the cleanroom space of the Peoria plant will be over two times larger than the cleanroom space of Amkor's advanced chip packaging facility in Vietnam. The initial phase of the Peoria factory, which will use Amkor's leading-edge technologies for advanced packaging and testing of chips for computing, automotive, and communications applications is expected to be operational within two to three years, so in 2025 or 2026.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • New Statesman ☛ The Research Brief: Why harmful social media content needs stronger regulation

    What’s the backstory? Molly Russell, a young woman from Harrow, London, died aged 14 following an act of self-harm in 2017. She had suffered from depression, and consumed a host of “graphic” content that featured self-harm and suicide on social media. In 2022, an inquest into her death ruled that the negative social media content that Russell consumed had contributed “more than minimally” to her death. The Molly Rose Foundation was set up in Russell’s memory to raise suicide prevention awareness and help young people with support.

    Social media algorithms deliver tailored content to users and can provide seemingly endless opportunities for procrastination and scrolling. But they can also be much, much worse, feeding vulnerable people a myriad of harmful content featuring depression, self-harm and suicide ideation.

  • International Business Times ☛ Air Pollution From Fossil Fuels Kills 5 Million People Every Year: Study

    A new study published in the journal BMJ has claimed that air pollution caused by fossil fuels is killing 5 million people every year across the world.

    The study has attributed 61% of the total 8.3 million deaths to ambient air pollution in 2019. More than half of these deaths were associated with conditions such as ischemic heart disease (30%), stroke (16%), chronic obstructive lung disease (16%), and diabetes (6%).

  • Futurism ☛ Something Fascinating Happens When You Take Smartphones Away From Narcissists

    The answer, according to researchers in Romania who published a recent study about that exact question in the Journal of Psychology, is fascinating. They found that individuals who exhibit signs of narcissism, which is defined by a sense of both self-aggrandizing and insecurity, are much more stressed out than their less-narcissistic peers when they don't have their phones.

  • [Old] NIH ☛ NOMOPHOBIA: NO MObile PHone PhoBIA

    The term NOMOPHOBIA or NO MObile PHone PhoBIA is used to describe a psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity. The term NOMOPHOBIA is constructed on definitions described in the DSM-IV, it has been labelled as a “phobia for a particular/specific things”. Various psychological factors are involved when a person overuses the mobile phone, e.g., low self-esteem, extrovert personality. The burden of this problem is now increasing globally. Other mental disorders like, social phobia or social anxiety, and panic disorder may also precipitate NOMOPHOBIC symptoms. It is very difficult to differentiate whether the patient become NOMOPHOBIC due to mobile phone addiction or existing anxiety disorders manifest as NOMOPHOBIC symptoms. The signs and symptoms are observed in NOMOPHOBIA cases include- anxiety, respiratory alterations, trembling, perspiration, agitation, disorientation and tachycardia. NOMOPHOBIA may also act as a proxy to other disorders. So, we have to be very judicious regarding its diagnosis. Some mental disorders can precipitate NOMOPHOBIA also and vice versa. The complexity of this condition is very challenging to the patients’ family members as well as for the physicians as NOMOPHOBIA shares common clinical symptoms with other disorders. That's why NOMOPHOBIA should be diagnosed by exclusion. We have to stay in the real world more than virtual world. We have to re-establish the human-human interactions, face to face connections. So, we need to limit our use of mobile phones rather than banning it because we cannot escape the force of technological advancement.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Gizmodo ☛ If You Used Gmail Today, Your Emails May Be Delayed

    Significant delays affected certain Gmail users on Thursday, and Google says you may need to send that email again. According to Google’s Workspace status page, emails from Gmail users sent between 11:30 AM EST and 2:00 PM EST on Thursday may not have gone through or were significantly delayed.

  • Futurism ☛ Former Google CEO Warns AI Could Endanger Humanity Within Five Years

    Speaking to a summit hosted by Axios this week, Schmidt, who is now the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, likened AI to the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945.

    "After Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it took 18 years to get to a treaty over test bans and things like that," he told Axios cofounder Mike Allen during the exchange at the website's A+ Summit in DC. "We don't have that kind of time today."

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ The Intelligence Committees’ Proposals for a 702 Reauthorization Bill are Beyond Bad

      The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in the U.S. House of Representatives released a Nov. 16 report calling for reauthorization, which includes an outline of the legislation to do so. According to the report, the bill would renew the mass surveillance authority Section 702 and, in the process, invokes a litany of old boogeymen to justify why the program should continue to collect U.S. persons’ communications when they talk with people abroad.

      As a reminder, the program was intended to collect communications of people outside of the United States, but because we live in an increasingly globalized world, the government intercepts and retains a massive trove of communications between Americans and people overseas. Increasingly, it’s this U.S. side of digital conversations that domestic law enforcement agencies trawl through—all without a warrant.

      Private communications are the cornerstone of a free society.

    • Vice Media Group ☛ The LAPD Is Using Controversial Mass Surveillance Tracking Software

      The LAPD's contract with Cobwebs Technology was revealed in a report from Knock LA, which obtained documents via freedom of information requests. According to the outlet, the LAPD contracted with the Israeli firm in October 2022 and plans to use its technology for a full year before auditing its use and compiling a report.

      Cobwebs’ system has two main platforms. The first is Tangles, which the company previously described in a now-deleted press release as a web intelligence platform that allows users to search the open web, social media, dark web, and deep web. Tangles can be AI-enabled with “image recognition, face recognition, OCR [optical character recognition] capabilities, NLP [natural language processing] and more,” the press release stated.

    • Futurism ☛ Users Horrified as Streaming Service Tells Friends and Family What They're Watching

      Why? On top of adding an unsolicited social media aspect to a service that a ton of its users want to use solely as a way to stream their collection of pirated movies and ripped Blu-rays — something the company tries to downplay, of course — Plex's new feature is a privacy nightmare waiting to happen.

    • 404 Media ☛ Plex Users Fear New Feature Will Leak Porn Habits to Their Friends and Family

      Plex is a hybrid streaming service/self-hosted media server. In addition to offering content that Plex itself has licensed, the service allows users to essentially roll their own streaming service by making locally downloaded files available to stream over the internet to devices the server admin owns. You can also “friend” people on Plex and give them access to your own server.

      A new feature, called “Discover Together,” expands social aspects of Plex and introduces an “Activity” tab: “See what your friends have watched, rated, added to their Watchlist, or shared with you,” Plex notes. It also shares this activity in a “week in review” email that it sent to Plex users and people who have access to their servers.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Meta Sues FTC, Says it Has No Constitutional Right to Stop Facebook From Profiting Off of Kids' Data

      The complaint, filed late Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, calls out FTC chairperson Lina Khan and other commissioners for exceeding the inherent powers of their agency. Meta has simmered for more than six months over the FTC’s claims the company violated that original privacy agreement.

    • The Register UK ☛ Meta goes to war with FTC over right to profit from kids' personal data

      Zuck & Co's complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in Washington, DC, on Wednesday claims the regulator's structure and operation violates the US Constitution.

      In 2011, Meta, in its Facebook incarnation, settled with the FTC over allegations the Silicon Valley titan ran roughshod over people's privacy, and vowed to respect netizens' wishes to keep their info private.

    • Papers Please ☛ Senate bill introduced to ban TSA use of facial recognition in airports

      Six US Senators led by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) have introduced a bill to prohibit the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from using automated facial recognition at airports.

      S.3361 the “Traveler Privacy Protection Act of 2023”, was introduced on November 29, 2023 by Sens. Merkley, Kennedy,  Edward Markey (D-MA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

      Introduction of this bill comes more than five years after these and other Senators started to raise questions about whether airline passengers can be, should be, or are already being required to submit to automated facial recognition at airports, despite questionable claims by the TSA that passengers can “opt out” of facial recognition.

    • EFF ☛ The Government Shouldn’t Prosecute People With Unreliable “Black Box” Technology

      At issue is the iPhone’s “frequent location history” (FLH), a location estimate generated by Apple’s proprietary algorithm that has never been used in Massachusetts courts before. Generally, for information generated by a new technology to be used as evidence in a case, there must be a finding that the technology is sufficiently reliable.  

      In this case, the government presented a witness who had only looked at 23 mobile devices, and there was no indication that any of them involved FLH. The witness also stated he had no idea how the FLH algorithm worked, and he had no access to Apple’s proprietary technology. The lower court correctly found that this witness was not qualified to testify on the reliability of FLH, and that the government had failed to demonstrate FLH had met the standard to be used as evidence against the defendant. 

      The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court should affirm this ruling. Courts serve a “gatekeeper” function by determining the type of evidence that can appear before a jury at trial. Only evidence that is sufficiently reliable to be relevant should be admissible. If the government wants to present information that is derived from new technology, they need to prove that it’s reliable. When they can’t, courts shouldn’t let them use the output of black box tech to prosecute you. 

  • Confidentiality

    • Cryptography Engineering ☛ To Schnorr and beyond (part 2)

      The problem here is that we already know of algorithms that can solve these discrete logarithms in (expected) polynomial time: most notably Shor’s algorithm and its variants. The reason we aren’t deploying these attacks today is that we simply don’t have the hardware to run them yet — because they require an extremely sophisticated quantum computer. Appropriate machines don’t currently exist, but they may someday. This raises an important question: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • JURIST ☛ EU court rules public administrations may ban headscarves for employees

    The case came to the CJEU to decide whether a “strict neutrality” religious symbol policy in workplaces amounted to discrimination contrary to EU law, specifically Council Directive 2000/78/EC on equal treatment in employment and occupation. Article 2 of the directive enshrines the principle of equal treatment, prohibiting both direct and indirect discrimination in the workplace, with an example being on the grounds of religion.

  • The Nation ☛ “No One Wins on a Dead Planet”: A Former UN Climate Chief Loses Faith in Fossil Fuel Companies

    Speaking to a small group of reporters on Monday, Figueres highlighted the plummeting cost of renewable energy and the growth of electric cars as two areas where positive changes are happening faster and faster.

    But we are getting “horribly close” to tipping points, even if they have not become our destiny, she added.

  • Vox ☛ There are now more land mines in Ukraine than almost anywhere else on the planet

    About 174,000 square kilometers of Ukraine is suspected to be contaminated with mines and unexploded ordnance, called UXOs. It is an area about the size of Florida, about 30 percent of Ukraine’s territory. This estimate accounts for land occupied by Russia since its full-scale invasion, along with recaptured areas, everywhere from the Kharkiv region in the east to areas around Kyiv, like Bucha. According to Human Rights Watch, mines have been documented in 11 of Ukraine’s 27 regions.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The People Who Didn’t Matter to Henry Kissinger

    Yet for all the praise of Kissinger’s insights into global affairs and his role in establishing relations with Communist China, his policies are noteworthy for his callousness toward the most helpless people in the world. How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere?

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Now that is how you write a headline

    Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies. The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him: [...]

  • India Times ☛ US judge blocks Montana from banning TikTok use in state

    A US judge late on Thursday blocked Montana's first-of-its kind state ban on the use of short-video sharing app TikTok from taking effect on Jan. 1, saying it violated the free speech rights of users [sic].

  • New York Times ☛ Judge Halts TikTok Ban in Montana

    TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been locked in a legal battle with Montana since the state passed the ban in April.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Naval Intelligence adopting cloud services to sort signal from noise

    One such tool is called SeaVision, a web-based application hosted by the Transportation Department. It’s a maritime situational awareness tool that allows the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center and the Office of Naval Intelligence to gather information on what Boone called “vessels of interest.” Python algorithms help human analysts sort through the data, and interactive visualization tools help create a fuller picture of the environment.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ Viral Images of Dead Infants in Israel-Gaza War Are AI Fakes, Experts Say

    A striking number of viral photos on both sides of the Isreal-Hamas conflict have been revealed to be AI fakes — and according to experts, the problem is only going to get worse.

    In interviews with the Associated Press, researchers from multiple firms and organizations tasked with verifying the truthfulness of online claims said that there has been a grim influx of faked AI images featuring butchered children that are used to cast blame on each side of the bloody conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.

  • Associated Press ☛ Fake babies, real horror: Deepfakes from the Gaza war increase fears about AI’s power to mislead

    Viewed millions of times online since the war began, these images are deepfakes created using artificial intelligence. If you look closely you can see clues: fingers that curl oddly, or eyes that shimmer with an unnatural light — all telltale signs of digital deception.

    The outrage the images were created to provoke, however, is all too real.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ FOI request reveals Bellingcat collusion with Western intelligence

• Environment

  • David Rosenthal ☛ There Is No Planet B: Part 1

    Below the fold in part 1 of this two-part post, I apply some arithmetic just to the logistics of Musk's plans for Mars. Part 2 isn't specific to Musk's plans; I discuss two attempts to list the set of "knowns" about Mars exploration, for which the science is fairly clear but the engineering and the economics don't exist, and the much larger set of "known unknowns", critical aspects requiring robust solutions for which the science, let alone the engineering, doesn't exist: [...]

    "Musk has predicted that a Starship orbital launch will eventually cost $1 million" but a more realistic estimate is about $1.5M, or $10/Kg. Each launch requires a lot of fuel. "Roughly four hundred truck deliveries are needed for one launch"

  • Energy/Transportation

    • BBC ☛ Every Bitcoin payment 'uses a swimming pool of water'

      Every Bitcoin transaction uses, on average, enough water to fill "a back yard swimming pool", a new study suggests.

      That's around six million times more than is used in a typical credit card swipe, Alex de Vries of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, calculates.

      The figure is due to the water used to power and cool the millions of computers worldwide Bitcoin relies on.

      It comes as many regions struggle with fresh water shortages.

    • The University of Cambridge ☛ Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

      First, we consider Bitcoin’s share of the world’s total yearly electricity production and consumption. A reference to global energy production has been added as well to account for the wide array of industries that primarily rely on sources other than electricity (e.g. diesel fuel). In a similar fashion, some Bitcoin mining facilities are known to directly tap into energy assets at the production point rather than procuring electricity via the regular grid.

    • The Register UK ☛ Bitcoin's thirst for water is just as troubling as its energy appetite

      According to Digiconomist founder and Vrije University data science PhD candidate Alex de Vries, the Bitcoin network may be using as much as 2,237 gigaliters of water in 2023, which equates to around 590 billion US gallons, or 492 billion imperial gallons, De Vries concluded in a paper published yesterday.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Gizmodo ☛ Bottlenose Dolphins Somehow Even Cooler Than We Knew, Can Sense Electricity

      It looks like bottlenose dolphins may have more tricks up their fins than we knew. New research involving trained zoo dolphins seems to confirm that these mammals can sense electricity, much like other aquatic life. The talent may allow them to better hone in on hidden fish prey and navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field, the authors say.

• Finance

  • What’s Behind Bay Area Tech Layoffs, What’s Next

    Oakland resident Jessie Norden was relieved when she got the email from her employer, Palo Alto’s VMWare, even though it said she was being laid off from her role as a senior product manager.

    “At least I know I have a job until Jan. 31,” she said. “And I was quite pleased with the amount of severance they were giving, 6.25 months.”

    She knew the writing was on the wall because San Jose’s Broadcom was acquiring VMWare, a cloud computing company, for $69 billion, in one of the biggest tech deals ever. Now, hundreds of VMWare’s 38,000 employees are getting pink slips.

  • Daily Dot ☛ ‘Listen to me, the person who is hiring people’: Tech CEO urges workers to stop quitting their jobs. Here’s why

    While 2022 may’ve been the year of the Great Resignation, it’s looking like there’s more and more evidence popping up that proves 2023 is the year of the Great Regret. A reported 80% of people who decided to leave their gigs in search of greener employment pastures have ultimately found themselves either hating their new employer, being laid off, or scrambling to secure a different position.

    Tech CEO and TikToker Theresa Sue (@resasue) just posted an earnest video in which she begs individuals who are thinking of jumping ship at their current roles to pump the breaks.

  • Mondaq ☛ Layoffs: The Challenges Of The PERM Notify And Consider Requirement

    While there is no specified notification method in the regulations or guidance, an employer should select an option that she believes adheres to the good faith expectation and that will reach the laid-off worker in sufficient time to apply. Examples would include e-mail or sending a notice by certified mail to the worker's last known address. The notification must provide a full description of the job opportunity, invite the worker to apply for the opportunity, and have clear application instructions. The employers should obtain the latest contact information for laid-off U.S. workers and inform them of their responsibility to update contact information should it change.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ The future of digital currencies depends on interoperability. How can it be achieved?

    Over the past few years, the number of central bank digital currencies and other digital assets has grown exponentially. This growth speaks to the confidence that many people have in the interplay of technology finance and money that can offer cutting-edge transparency, speed and efficiency. But it has also resulted in new concerns, including how standards can be developed to create an even playing field for new entrants into the financial system, maintain privacy and security, and ensure that new systems are compatible with existing ones. This problem of “interoperability” needs to be solved, or else what may emerge is a world of digital asset “silos.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michael Geist ☛ Skillful Negotiation or Legislative Fail? Taking Stock of the Bill C-18 Deal With Google

    Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge’s deal with Google on Bill C-18 for an annual $100 million contribution has sparked some unsurprising crowing from partisans who insist the fears that the government had mishandled the Online News Act failed to recognize a well-executed negotiation strategy. Yet the response from industry supporters of the bill has been noticeably muted: News Media Canada did not issue a press release with CEO Paul Deegan noting that the impact would depend on the forthcoming regulations, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters said it was relieved there was a deal and that links would not be blocked, Quebec broadcasters are already calling for more support, and Friends of Canadian Broadcasting said the deal did not deliver the support it originally hoped for. These comments come closer to reflecting the reality of the deal, namely that the government misread the market, passed deeply flawed legislation, and was ultimately forced to row back core elements of the law and accept payments consistent with what was on the table over a year ago.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Should Netflix, Hulu pay local governments to stream? Michigan House says no

    As more Michigan residents switch from cable to streaming services like Hulu and Netflix, lawmakers are exploring whether those providers should have to pay the fees cable companies currently pay to local governments.

    A bill pending in the Michigan Legislature would let them off the hook, but some fear the proposed changes could ultimately drain city budgets and put a key funding source for public access channels that stream government meetings at risk.

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft joins OpenAI’s board with Sam Altman officially back as CEO

    Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it’s done. Microsoft is getting a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI as well, the company announced on Wednesday.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Sam Altman’s New Order Doesn’t Include OpenAI’s Chief Scientist

    Ilya Sutskever was a leading member of the board that ousted Sam Altman, along with Tasha Mccauley and Helen Toner, and we still don’t know why Altman was fired in the first place. The new board will only have one returning member, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who is joined by former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Sutskever lost his board seat for sure, but he’s also the one founder who didn’t return to his old position in this press release. Altman’s comments on his cofounder feel both warm and cold at the same time.

  • India Times ☛ After chaos, Microsoft wins observer seat at OpenAI

    Instead, the board that dismissed Altman was overhauled, now including the addition of Microsoft as a non-voting measure.

    Microsoft will join former US Treasury Secretary and political power broker Larry Summers, who was added last week, as well as Silicon Valley veteran Bret Taylor.

  • India Times ☛ Sam Altman officially returns to OpenAI. Here’s what he said

    Greg Brockman, who had resigned soon after Altman’s removal, also returned as president. According to the company’s blog, Mira Murati is back as the chief technology officer, while the new board will initially comprise former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor (Chair), former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Quora founder Adam D’Angelo.

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI makes it official: Sam Altman is back as CEO

    Both deliver news that the OpenAI board will henceforth include a non-voting observer [sic] from Microsoft.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Microsoft to take non-voting position on OpenAI board

    The observer position means Microsoft’s representative can attend OpenAI’s board meetings and access confidential information, but it does not have voting rights on matters including electing or choosing directors.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who had recruited Altman to Microsoft after his ouster from OpenAI, had said earlier that governance at the ChatGPT maker needed to change.

  • El País ☛ Microsoft gets OpenAI board seat as a non-voting observer

    Altman’s message hinted at a significant change in OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, and praised CEO Satya Nadella and his team for their support: “[They] have been incredible partners throughout this, with exactly the right priorities all the way through. They’ve had our backs and were ready to welcome all of us if we couldn’t achieve our primary goal. We clearly made the right choice to partner with Microsoft and I’m excited that our new board will include them as a non-voting observer.”b

  • Axios ☛ Meta says it disrupted China-based influence operations to divide Americans

    The big picture: With several high-profile elections around the world coming next year, including the presidential race in the U.S., Meta said it expects new campaigns will attempt to hijack authentic partisan debate to inflame tensions in target countries.

  • El País ☛ Thousands of fake Facebook accounts shut down by Meta were primed to polarize voters ahead of 2024

    Instead of spreading fake content as other networks have done, the accounts were used to reshare posts from X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that were created by politicians, news outlets and others. The interconnected accounts pulled content from both liberal and conservative sources, an indication that its goal was not to support one side or the other but to exaggerate partisan divisions and further inflame polarization.

  • France24 ☛ Facebook shuts thousands of fake Chinese accounts masquerading as Americans

    “These networks still struggle to build audiences, but they're a warning," said Ben Nimmo, who leads investigations into inauthentic behavior on Meta's platforms. "Foreign threat actors are attempting to reach people across the internet ahead of next year's elections, and we need to remain alert."

  • Security Week ☛ Meta Takes Action Against Multiple Foreign Influence Campaigns

    Social media giant Meta removed three foreign influence operations from the Facebook platform during Q3, 2023. It designates such operations as coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB). Two were Chinese in origin, and one was Russian, the company says.

  • The Nation ☛ Signs

  • The Nation ☛ The Architect of the Adult Survivors Act Talks About Bringing Justice and What’s Next

    Before Donald Trump faced 91 felony charges and the likely loss of his New York state business licenses in a massive civil fraud case, his first real taste of justice came when a jury found him liable for sexually abusing, and then defaming, the writer E. Jean Carroll last May, and awarded her $5 million. The law that let Carroll sue Trump for an assault she said happened in the mid-1990s was the Adult Survivors Act, which opened a one-year window for people who suffered sexual abuse to bring civil suits against their abusers. That window closed last week.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • NPR ☛ Meta warns that China is stepping up its online social media influence operations

      The targets of the Chinese operations that Meta has disrupted include people in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Europe and the United States. The campaigns vary widely in how they work, but the focus tends to be on promoting Chinese interests, from defending Beijing's human rights record to attacking government critics, Nimmo said.

      "There's a very kind of global mandate there. And they are using many different tactics. So we've seen small operations that try and build personas. We've seen larger operations using large, clunky, sort of spammy networks," he said. "The common denominator, other than origin in China, is really that they're all struggling to get any kind of authentic audience."

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • NPR ☛ Weather experts in Midwest say climate change reporting brings burnout and threats

    Before he left, he went on air and talked about the harassment he faced. In response, he received hundreds of messages from grateful viewers.

    "I would like to express how sorry I am for everything Chris Gloninger has gone through for just informing his viewing audience about climate change," wrote one viewer. "We were very lucky to have someone so knowledgeable about climate change in Des Moines."

    Gloninger's experience echoes the treatment of other public-facing officials in recent years, including election workers, educators, and public health officials.

  • PHR ☛ Turkish Court Strips Nation’s Top Doctors of their Positions

    A civil court in Ankara today arbitrarily dismissed eleven of the most eminent physicians in Türkiye from their elected positions on the Central Council of the Turkish Medical Association, the country’s largest professional medical group. Physicians for Human Rights, the World Medical Association, the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, and the Standing Committee of European Doctors call for the doctors’ immediate reinstatement.

    These baseless charges are the latest attempt by the Turkish government to impede the independence of medical professionals, which it sees as a threat because their medical obligations to patients must be exercised outside of government control.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New Statesman ☛ Can anyone save the BBC from itself?

    The latest announcements, with a range of further cuts being made across BBC News, may not seem to matter too much: they’re just the latest stage of an erosion caused by the sparse financial settlement imposed on the broadcaster by the government. A flat licence fee at a time when inflation was soaring was bound to lead to pain. But the BBC is an organisation with a total income of £5.7bn, of which £3.7bn comes from the UK licence fee, and therefore it is also a matter of choice – and public interest – where it decides to cut back. The question is simple: has it got its priorities right?

  • CPJ ☛ Iranian journalist Mohammad Mir-Ghasemzadeh arrested as authorities ramp up legal pressure on media

    As of Thursday, authorities had not disclosed the reason behind Mir-Ghasemzadeh’s detention or any potential charges. Mir-Ghasemzadeh was recently working on a series of reports exposing the alleged financial corruption of a parliament member from Gilan province, according to that source and tweets by the New York-based Independent Center on Human Rights in Iran.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Conversation ☛ How Saudi Arabia’s unchallenged 2034 World Cup bid could weaken Fifa’s human rights demands

    Upon learning that the bid process was non-competitive, the Sport & Rights Alliance – a coalition of human rights and anti-corruption organisations, trade unions, fan representatives, athlete survivors groups and players unions – expressed its concern.

    In a post on Twitter (now called X), the Alliance said: “Amid the triviality of extravagant sports events and gestures, activists highlight the stark reality of oppressive conditions in Saudi Arabia.”

    It is a country where homosexuality is currently illegal, and women’s rights are restricted by a model of male guardianship. Expressing criticism of the ruling regime can also result in immediate imprisonment or, in some cases, execution.

  • Scheerpost ☛ I Faced Death by Incarceration. The UN Heard My Plea to Abolish Life Sentences.

    Decades ago, most people had never even heard the term “death by incarceration,” the racially discriminatory and cruel practice commonly known as life imprisonment. Now in 2023, the United Nations has condemned it and called on the United States to abolish it.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Gizmodo ☛ Weird Al Uses His Spotify Wrapped Video to Dunk on Spotify

    Weird Al, known for his parodies like “White & Nerdy,” “Polka Face,” and “Eat It,” is calling out Spotify for its royalties payments to artists. Spotify pays its biggest artists $0.003 per stream, and yes, that is the correct number of zeros. Not 3 cents, a third of one penny per stream. By that metric, Weird Al would have earned a little more than $12, more like $350,000 but his point stands.

  • CBC ☛ Netflix balks at proposed levy on streaming services

    The legislation, formerly known as Bill C-11, is meant to update federal law to require digital platforms to contribute to and promote Canadian content. The watchdog is exploring whether to require streamers to make an initial contribution to help level the playing field for local companies, which are already required to support Canadian content.

• Monopolies

  • India Times ☛ Google pushes for antitrust action against Microsoft in UK cloud market

    Microsoft and Amazon have faced mounting scrutiny around the world over their dominance of the cloud computing industry, with regulators in Britain, the European Union, and the US probing their market power.

  • Essel Group ☛ Google presses for antitrust action against rival Microsoft: Reuters

    In a letter submitted to the CMA, Google said Microsoft’s licensing practices, unfairly discouraged customers from using competitor services, even as a secondary provider alongside Azure.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Malware Threats Can Be An Effective Anti-Piracy Strategy, Research Suggests

      Most people know that they shouldn't stream or download pirated content. However, legal and moral arguments are often insufficient to deter prospective pirates. In recent years anti-piracy campaigns have started to focus on malware and other security threats instead. New research suggests that that can be quite effective.