Links 27/12/2023: Apparent Suicide of Lee Sun-kyun, New Story About Long COVID
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/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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El País ☛ Stairway to Hell: 50 years of ‘The Exorcist’
Back in 1973, The Exorcist was released in only 24 theaters in the U.S., as the cast seemed lackluster and Warner studios had little faith in it. Ellen Burstyn and Max von Sydow were not considered famous enough to pull an audience in. Linda Blair was an unknown and Jason Miller, who played father Karras, was a playwright without much experience as an actor. But then there was the audience’s reaction to the film: vomiting and fainting spells, prompting some theaters to set up a permanent help desk. The critics were divided, and so was the Church. The image of a girl masturbating with a crucifix was not, so to speak, very Catholic. Meanwhile, the audience grew.
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France24 ☛ 'Parasite' actor Lee Sun-kyun dead at 48
South Korean actor Lee Sun-kyun, best known for his role in the Oscar-winning film "Parasite", was found dead Wednesday in an apparent suicide, Yonhap news agency reported.
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‘Parasite’ star Lee Sun-Kyun found dead in apparent suicide amid drug investigation: report
Before his death, the South Korean actor had been questioned three times by police regarding suspected illegal drug use.
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Tedium ☛ The Great YouTube Epic
To kick off this year’s year-end Tedium awards, we honor a video that may have done more good for creator culture than anything created before or since.
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Science
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Gizmodo ☛ Physicists Designed an Experiment to Turn Light Into Matter
Plasma could be wrangled to collide photons and yield matter, according to physicists who ran simulations to explore the practical applications of a world-famous equation.
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Education
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Zach Flower ☛ Adopt-a-Nerd
For the last 3 years or so, I've been volunteering to support the Computer Science curriculum at my neighborhood high school.
Generally, this has meant anything from guest lecturing in the classroom, mentoring in CS-based after-school programs, advising Senior students on their capstone projects, and sitting on the Capstone presentation panel.
I have loved every second of this work, because it's an opportunity to give back in a way that leverages my skills and interests, but a few interesting things have stood out to me over the course of this journey.
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Idiomdrottning ☛ Knowledge sharing
I said “If we both spend three hours reading a book each and then a few minutes asking each other questions on the other’s book, we’ve saved time compared to if we both had spent six hours each reading both books”. Knowledge sharing FTW and learning through groups can be awesome!
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Jon Udell ☛ Critical mass in the Goldilocks zone
Social sites typically push toward supercriticality with no such understanding. If Goodreads enshittifies at 125 million users, why would another service expect a different outcome at similar scale?
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El País ☛ We are entering the era of the robot scientist
Deciding whether something is respectable science is an even more complex process: a dialogue between scientists, society, politics and history decides whether something deserves to be recognized as science or not. Science is conservative, and proposing new ideas that go outside the narrow framework of what is accepted is normally a very tough battle: the scientific journal Nature recently published a study that confirms that, today, it is harder than ever to be a disruptive scientist. If you want to do well as a scientist, you need to be a man, middle class, and, above all, follow what most scientists in your field are doing.
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Hardware
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The Register UK ☛ War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape
It's this: Computers today are better than they have ever been before. Not just that they have thousands of times more storage and more speed, but that everything, the whole stack – hardware, operating systems, networking, programming languages and libraries and apps – are better than ever.
The myth is that early computers were simple, and they were replaced by better ones that could do more. Gradually, they evolved, getting more sophisticated and more capable, until now, we have multi-processor multi-gigabyte supercomputers in our pockets.
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Hackaday ☛ Building A Better Keyboard And Mouse Switch
Switching inputs between desktops seems like something that should be simple but can prove to be a pain in reality. [Hrvoje Cavrak] decided to take matters into his own hands and build a better keyboard and mouse switch.
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Hackaday ☛ The Strange World Of Japan’s PC-98 Computer Ecosystem
Despite the popularity of the IBM PC in the West during the 1980s, it had shortcomings that prevented it from flourishing in the Japanese market, most of all support for the Japanese language. This led to a sort of parallel universe in which NEC’s PC-9800 series (‘PC-98’) was the dominant personal computer, including its NEC µPD7220 display controller with its 4096-color palette. These computer systems led to a graphics style that persists to today, along with a whole ecosystem of games and applications that never left the PC-98. In an article by [Biz Davis] this software ecosystem, its art style and their lasting impact is explored.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Jon Udell ☛ Watch your hands
So once again I get to rewire my hand posture. Which, again, is a minor hardship, not remotely comparable to the guy I mentioned last time who had to switch sides and learn to fret with his right hand. As I also mentioned there, he found an upside. Now he’s a switch-hitter who can use both halves of his brain directly. In my case, I’m trying to embrace the rewiring as a way to break a habit and form new neural pathways. It’d be nice, though, if that weren’t always a response to self-inflicted injury!
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When RFK Jr. lies that he’s “not antivaccine”
One of the oldest antivax deflections in response to accusations of being antivaccine is a rejoinder of the form “I’m not antivaccine; I’m pro-safe vaccine” or “I’m not antivax; I’m a vaccine safety advocate.” Whatever the exact variation of this particular trope employed by any given antivaxxer when asked if they’re “antivaccine,” the idea is clearly to recast all the negative things that the antivaxxer had been saying about vaccines as not being evidence of a general opposition to vaccines but rather as evidence that they are “vaccine safety” advocates who are just pointing out ways in which vaccines are supposedly insufficiently “safe.” Of course, the antivax definition of “vaccine safety” implied by their attacks on vaccines always involves exaggeration, misrepresenting scientific data, pseudoscience, attributing adverse events to vaccines that they do not actually cause, and the Nirvana fallacy; i.e., a standard for safety that is unreasonable and impossible to achieve in the real world. I’ve written about this particular tactic more times than I can remember going back nearly two decades, but it appears that I need to address it again in the context of an interview conducted earlier this month CNN by Kasie Hunt with antivax activist turned independent Presidential candidate RFK Jr. (a.k.a. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.).
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Science Alert ☛ Every COVID Infection Increases Your Risk of Long COVID, Study Warns
It's still here.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Quartz ☛ In a bid to break free from OpenAI, companies are building their own custom AI chatbots
With OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Meta focused on building larger and larger AI models, there’s still a good argument for companies to wait and see what kind of capabilities arise from them. But there very well could be an ocean of smaller AI models designed for specific tasks, which means people might interact with different AI bots for various activities throughout their day. Ultimately, companies might find they can adopt AI in a less costly way by focusing on specific applications, said Yoon Kim, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research focuses on making generative AI models more efficient.
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Federal News Network ☛ NGA leans in on AI, machine learning to improve data analysis
“AI, in general, is very data hungry for data management systems and processes are really important. There’s also kind of interesting developments and I would even say paradigm shifts happening with these foundation models. These are large pre-trained models that are the starting points for natural language processing (NPL), and you basically fine tune it on a specific use case. . .the vantage point of taking in a large already pre-trained model and then fine tuning it on a smaller dataset,” Krell said. “Bias can come in a lot of places, whether it’s from the data sets, the models, and then the algorithms themselves. So, it’s definitely something to be aware of and something that we have to balance at the end of the day.”
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India Times ☛ 'Comply with existing IT rules': Centre's advisory amid growing concerns over deepfakes
“The content not permitted under the IT Rules, in particular those listed under Rule 3(1)(b) must be clearly communicated to the users in clear and precise language including through its terms of service and user agreements and the same must be expressly informed to the user at the time of first-registration and also as regular reminders, in particular, at every instance of login and while uploading/sharing information onto the platform,” the advisory stated.
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India Times ☛ AI pioneer says public discourse on intelligent machines must give 'proper respect to human agency'
The book, "The World I See," also portrays her formative years that abruptly shifted from China to New Jersey and follows her through academia, Silicon Valley and the halls of Congress as growing commercialization of AI technology brought public attention and a backlash. She spoke with The Associated Press about the book and the current AI moment. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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El País ☛ Gemma Galdón, algorithm auditor: ‘Artificial intelligence is of very poor quality’
Artificial intelligence is not just for engineers. You can lean more towards soft than hard science and still become a point of reference in the global debate about the social and ethical repercussions of what these systems do. Gemma Galdón, a 47-year-old AI expert from Mataró, in Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia, graduated in contemporary history and earned a PhD in technology-related public policies. She is the founder and top executive of Eticas Consulting, a company that examines algorithms to ensure their responsible use. “Being aware of how society has solved old problems gives me a useful perspective to work with new problems,” she says, sitting inside a coffee shop in Madrid. “Twelve years ago, when I got my PhD, there were very few people in the social sciences who worked with technology.” Her company currently advises European and American organizations. Galdón’s suitcase is packed: she is about to return to New York, where she lives and where she recently received a Hispanic Star Award, an accolade given to agents of change in the Spanish-speaking community at an event at the United Nations. She had to move to America, she says, because in the U.S. “the market is more receptive to responsible AI.”
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Reason ☛ The Best of Reason: How Florida Fixed Its Vote-Counting Problem After the 2000 Election
Ballots should be counted quickly and accurately.
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Windows TCO
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[Repeat] Cyble Inc ☛ Abdali Hospital Cyberattack: [Crackers] Demand 10 BTC Ransom After Breach
Details regarding the nature of the compromised data, the extent of the breach, and the motive behind the attack remain undisclosed by the [attackers].
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[Old] Gannett ☛ Increasingly common, health care cyberattacks now even target patients with ransom
The outage, an employee and a patient told the Free Press, affected at least the organization's billing systems and electronic medical records, and meant that workers at times had to use personal cellphones to communicate. McLaren, however, would not confirm specifically what systems were affected, whether patients' protected health information was compromised or even when the security threat was first identified.
Headquartered in Grand Blanc, McLaren is just the latest Michigan health system to face a growing threat caused by cyberattacks.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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EFF ☛ Surveillance Self-Defense: 2023 Year in Review
Fighting for digital security and privacy rights is important, but sometimes we all just need to know what steps we can take to minimize spying, and when steps aren't possible, explaining how things work to help keep you safe. To do this, we break SSD into five sections:
But not everything makes sense in SSD, so sometimes we also tackle security education issues with blogs, which tend to focus more on news events or new technology that may not have rolled out widely yet. Each has its place, and each saw a variety of new guidance this year.
Surveillance Self-Defense has provided expert guidance for security and privacy for 14 years. And in those years it has seen a number of revisions, expansions, and changes. We try to consistently audit and update SSD so it contains up to date information. Each guide has a "last reviewed" date so you can quickly see at the start when it last got an expert review.
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Defence/Aggression
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Greece ☛ Suspected migrant smuggler arrested on Kos
When a coast guard patrol boat pursued the vessel after spotting it off the northeast of the island, the skipper refused to stop the speedboat and attempted to ram the patrol boat.
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New York Times ☛ Chaos, Fury, Mistakes: 600 Days Inside New York’s Migrant Crisis
As the city raced to improvise a system that has processed more than 150,000 people since last year, it stumbled in myriad ways, many never reported before.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Nigeria: Attacks by armed gangs leave more than 100 dead
Groups of armed bandits [sic] launched a series of attacks over the weekend in Nigeria, with at least 113 people losing their lives and over 300 people reported injured, local government officials said Monday.
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teleSUR ☛ Morocco and Sahel to Boost Cooperation
The Sahel region is a semiarid region of western and north-central Africa, encompassing countries such as Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Authoritarianism
The corruption of American Christianity is nothing new: Modern-day pharisees from Jerry Falwell Sr. to Paula White have spent 50 years weaponizing the gospel to win elections and dominate the country, exploiting the cultural insecurities of their unwitting brethren for political, professional, and financial gain, all while reducing the gospel of Jesus Christ to a caricature in the eyes of unbelievers. The resulting collapse of the Church’s reputation in this country—with Sunday attendance, positive perceptions of organized religion, and the number of self-identified Christians all at historic lows—leaves evangelicals estranged from their secular neighbors like never before. Unbelievers might well prefer it this way. They might be tempted to shrug and move along, assuming that the crack-up of evangelicalism isn’t their problem. They are mistaken.
The crisis at hand is not simply that Christ’s message has been corroded, but that his Church has been radicalized. The state-ordered closings of sanctuaries during COVID-19, the conspiracy-fueled objections to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, the misinformation around vaccines and educational curricula—these and other culture-war flash points have accelerated notions of imminent Armageddon inside American Christendom. A community that has always felt misunderstood now feels marginalized, ostracized, even persecuted. This feeling is not relegated to the fringes of evangelicalism. In fact, this fear—that Christianity is in the crosshairs of the government, that an evil plot to topple America’s Judeo-Christian heritage hinges on silencing believers and subjugating the Church—now animates the religious right in ways that threaten the very foundations of our democracy.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Ukraine strikes Russian landing ship in missile attack on annexed Crimea port — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Ukraine says its troops have withdrawn from Marinka, one day after Russia says it seized destroyed town — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ No shoes, no shirt, no service: Russian celebrities face event cancelations and legal action after attending ‘almost naked’ party — Meduza
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Environment
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NL Times ☛ Second warmest Christmas period in the Netherlands since recordkeeping began
The weather peaked at 12.5 degrees on Christmas Day, making the two-day average high temperature 11.9 degrees. That was well short of the record set in 2015, when the average reached 14.2 degrees, according to weather website Weeronline.
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DeSmog ☛ 2023 Has Been A Big Year for Climate Accountability in the Courts
Climate litigation had a momentous year in 2023. Courts worldwide heard evidence and arguments at pivotal trials and hearings. Landmark rulings marked progress in holding governments to account for climate inaction or denial, and new climate cases continued to be filed.
With climate lawsuits now totaling nearly 2,500 worldwide, it is clear that courts have become a critical venue for seeking climate justice and accountability.
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Energy/Transportation
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Pro Publica ☛ DTE Energy Facing Oversight of Debt Collection Practices
DTE Energy, Michigan’s largest utility, will be required to publicly disclose information about how often it sells struggling customers’ old debt to third-party collectors following revelations that it does so far more often than other utilities in the region.
The Michigan Public Service Commission this month ordered DTE to start reporting information about debt sales every year. The utility, however, fended off an effort to end the practice altogether, according to commission documents.
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Hackaday ☛ China’s Nuclear-Powered Containership: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping?
Since China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) unveiled its KUN-24AP containership at the Marintec China Expo in Shanghai in early December of 2023, the internet has been abuzz about it. Not just because it’s the world’s largest container ship at a massive 24,000 TEU, but primarily because of the power source that will power this behemoth: a molten salt reactor of Chinese design that is said to use a thorium fuel cycle. Not only would this provide the immense amount of electrical power needed to propel the ship, it would eliminate harmful emissions and allow the ship to travel much faster than other containerships.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Hill ☛ Imagining the next 50 years of the Endangered Species Act
When President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) 50 years ago this week, it was with a virtual consensus of Congress: only four representatives voted against it. In the half-century since, the ESA has saved about 200 species from extinction, including the bald eagle, the white-tailed deer, and the American alligator. It protects over 1,600 other species and their ecosystems, providing countless economic and other benefits to communities across the country. These successes make the ESA, and biodiversity conservation, highly popular with Americans.
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Overpopulation
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David Rosenthal ☛ There Is No Planet B: Part 2
Source In Part 1 I applied basic arithmetic to the logistics of Elon Musk's claimed plans for colonizing Mars in 2050 to show they were implausible. Below the fold I continue, first by discussing Maciej Cegłowski's equally basic dissection of NASA's economically implausible plans for Mars in Why Not Mars?. Second, by reviewing the host of non-logistical and non-economic problems facing humans attempting to survive on Mars based on:
Kelley and Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars.
Towards Sustainable Horizons: A Comprehensive Blueprint for Mars Colonization by Florian Neukart.
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Finance
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NDTV ☛ Amid Layoffs, Paytm CEO Shares 2024 To-Do List Featuring Big AI Upgrades [Ed: Just spew out some buzzwords, hope for the best]
Fintech giant Paytm's parent company, One97 Communication, has laid off 100s of employees across verticals due to the firm's implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring automation in its process and ensure cost-cutting. Amid the layoffs, Paytm's Founder and CEO, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, shared his to-do list for 2024 and what he would like to change in the firm.
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Media and Tech Industries Hit by Record Layoffs in 2023
In a year marked by economic turbulence and ever-evolving digital landscapes, the media industry suffered an unprecedented wave of layoffs in 2023. A staggering 20,000 jobs were axed in the sector, the highest tally since the COVID-19 pandemic-triggered job losses of 2020. This sixfold surge in layoffs from 2022 is attributed to a myriad of factors, including economic headwinds, inflation, dwindling advertising revenues, fierce competition, changing consumer behavior, less robust subscriber counts, corporate strategy shifts, post-COVID adjustments, technological advancements, and Wall Street appeasement efforts.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ Meet the economist who wants the field to account for nature
Gretchen Daily, cofounder and faculty director of the Stanford Natural Capital Project, has dedicated her career to answering such complex questions. Using emerging scientific data and the project’s innovative open-source software, Daily and her team help governments, international banks, and NGOs to not only quantify the value of nature, but also determine the benefits of conservation and ecosystem restoration.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Silicon Angle ☛ Generative AI startup Anthropic reportedly on track to deliver $850M in annual revenue
Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC, is one of a number of high-profile AI startups attempting to take on OpenAI in the generative AI industry. The best known generative AI model is ChatGPT, which is renowned for its ability to create humanlike responses to text and audio prompts.
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India Times ☛ Anthropic forecasts more than $850 million in annualised revenue rate by 2024-end: report
Three months ago, the company told some investors it was generating revenue at a $100 million annualised rate and expected that figure would reach $500 million by the end of 2024, according to the report.
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The Register UK ☛ Infosys loses ten-year, $1.5 billion contract announced just three months ago
That announcement included the caveat that Infosys and the unnamed company would have to conclude a Master Agreement to seal the deal.
A December 23rd filing revealed that didn’t happen.
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Federal News Network ☛ A new national cyber strategy, and ever-evolving threats, headline another busy year in cyber
The most popular answer far and away was the Biden administration’s release of a new national cyber strategy. But regulatory activities, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and some game-changing cyber attacks were also among the most significant developments of the past year.
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Techdirt ☛ The Republican Push To Ban TikTok Has Very Little (And Dwindling) Real World Support
We’ve noted repeatedly how the Republican obsession with TikTok is a hollow performance. This is a party that refuses to pass a useful privacy law (or to regulate data brokers). This is a party that generally couldn’t care less about widespread corruption, or its impact on national security.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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El País ☛ The dangerous impact of ‘fake news’ on the lives of Spanish speakers in the United States
Lies usually have greater reach than truths. They spread much faster, a phenomenon that has been exacerbated by globalization. Misinformation spreads more and more quickly across countries and continents through social media and other channels of information. Hoaxes tend to create a lot of media confusion around current events, such as the war on Gaza and the geopolitical tensions between Israel and other countries, the recent elections in Argentina, or the announcement of new immigration laws in the United States. Events that currently have the world in suspense can be twisted by fake news.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Meduza ☛ Russia arrests writer Masha Gessen in absentia for spreading ‘disinformation’ about war
According to court documents, Gessen was put on Russia’s federal wanted list on December 8 and added to the international wanted list on December 12.
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Meduza ☛ Alexey Navalny shares first message from new Arctic prison after feared disappearance
In a dispatch shared to social media, Navalny said he was transferred to the remote village of Kharp from his previous prison in Vladimir via a roundabout route that took him through Moscow, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Kirov, and Vorkuta.
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The Age AU ☛ Putin critic Navalny, missing for weeks, turns up in Arctic Gulag prison
His spokeswoman said on Monday that Navalny, 47, had been tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony north of the Arctic Circle located in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region about 1900 kilometres north-east of Moscow.
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Techdirt ☛ Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign
Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety issues on their new Substack Notes microblogging service. As I noted at the time, Best seemed somewhat confused about how all this worked, and by refusing to be explicit in their policies he was implicitly saying that Substack welcomed Nazis. As we noted, this was the classic “Nazi bar” scenario: if you’re not kicking out Nazis, you get the reputation as “the Nazi bar” even if you, yourself, don’t like Nazis.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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BIA Net ☛ European Federation of Journalists' reaction to Erdoğan on Cyprus
EFJ Vice President Mustafa Kuleli stated, "The Erdogan government is trying to export its oppressive policies towards journalists in Turkey to Cyprus," regarding journalist Ali Kişmir, who is facing up to 10 years in prison for criticizing Turkey's intervention in the Northern Cyprus elections.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Papers Please ☛ Congress watches the “watchlists” — but will Congress act?
Earlier this month CBS News broadcast an in-depth report confirming that more than two million names (up from 1.75 million names in 2019) are now on U.S. government blacklists (euphemistically described as “watchlists”) restricting travel and other rights.
CBS also interviewed some of the U.S. citizens who, without ever being accused of any crime or having their day in court, and for no reason they know or that the government will tell them, have been stopped at gunpoint, delayed, or prevented from flying.
Less than a week later, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC) released a detailed staff report on the same issue, “Mislabeled as a threat: How the terrorist watchlist & government screening practices impact Americans“.
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India Times ☛ X, formerly Twitter, violated contract by not paying millions in bonuses: US judge
Schobinger's suit alleged that before and after billionaire Musk bought Twitter last year, it promised employees 50% of their 2022 target bonuses but never made those payments.
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Pro Publica ☛ Remains of Thousands of Native Americans Were Returned in 2023
American museums and universities repatriated more ancestral remains and sacred objects to tribal nations this year than at any point in the past three decades, transferring ownership of an estimated 18,800 Native American ancestors, institutions reported.
And more repatriations are forthcoming. Museums, universities and government agencies have filed 380 repatriation notices this year — more than the previous two years combined — under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, declaring that they plan to make human remains and burial items available to tribes.
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Techdirt ☛ Fifth Circuit Tells Wrongly Convicted Woman She Can’t Sue Over Obvious Judicial Fuckery
When we’re young, impressionable, and financially incapable of donating significant amounts of money to super PACs, we’re taught that the American government is a system of checks and balances. Civics classes explain there are three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial — all of which are supposed to be independent and equally powerful.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Techdirt ☛ Aylo’s Deferred Prosecution Agreement Will Make Pornhub A Much Safer Platform. Here’s Why.
Aylo Holdings, the parent company of Pornhub and some of the largest free and premium porn sites in the world, agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) to help resolve a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into the platform’s conduct related to a sex trafficking scheme.
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APNIC ☛ Three of the best: Measurement
Measurement is always a popular topic on the APNIC Blog. This year, authors and guest authors measured everything from qmin adoption to Apple’s new Relay network. Here are three of the best: [...]
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Michael Geist ☛ The Year in Review: Top Ten Posts
Last week’s Law Bytes podcast features a look at the year in review along with some guesses at what lies ahead. Before wrapping up for the year, the next three posts will highlight the most popular posts, podcast episodes, and Substacks of the past year. Today’s post starts with the top posts, which starts with a recent look at Bill S-210 and potential age verification and site blocking on the Internet. With the exception of an examination of Bill C-27’s Hey Hi (AI) regulations, the remaining posts all involve online news and Bill C-18.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Gizmodo ☛ Amazon Will Inject Ads Into Prime Video Starting Jan. 29th
The last major ad-free streaming service is going away. Starting Jan. 29th, Amazon users will start seeing advertisements appear on movies and TV shows for Prime Video, according to an email sent to subscribers on Tuesday. To keep Prime Video ad-free, you’ll need to pay an additional $3 a month, on top of the $139 a year members already pay for Amazon Prime.
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Patents
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Software Patents
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Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Emergency Appeal of the Fashion Company Apple Watch Ban
December 25th, marked the deadline for President Biden to reject the U.S. International Trade Commission’s (USITC) ruling banning imports of certain Fashion Company Apple Watch models. With no action from the White House, Fashion Company Apple now faces a federal government order to halt imports and sales of Fashion Company Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 devices because it incorporates light-based pulse oximetry technology covered by the claims of Masimo’s U.S. Patent Nos. 10,945,648 (claims 24 and 30) and 10,912,502 (claim 22).
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The Verge ☛ Apple appeals US ban on Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Series 9
The models, which Apple says are their most popular, were banned after the ITC found that Apple infringed on blood oxygen saturation technology patented by health tech firm Masimo.
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Reuters ☛ Apple files appeal after Biden administration allows US ban on watch imports
Masimo has accused Apple of hiring away its employees, stealing its pulse oximetry technology and incorporating it into the popular Apple Watch.
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The Verge ☛ Apple is now banned from selling its latest Apple Watches in the US
Apple can no longer sell the Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 in the US after President Joe Biden’s administration declined to veto the ban today.
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CNBC ☛ Apple files appeal after Biden administration allows U.S. ban on watch imports
"There's nothing legally extraordinary about the ITC issuing an exclusion order," Matich said. "What's extraordinary here is that the product at issue is high profile and that Apple has chosen to live with the ITC order rather than settle."
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India Times ☛ Apple files appeal after Biden administration allows US ban on watch imports
The US International Trade Commission's (ITC) order bars imports and sales of Apple Watches that use technology for reading blood-oxygen levels. Apple has included the pulse oximeter feature in its smart watches starting with its Series 6 model in 2020.
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India Times ☛ Apple Watch import ban goes into effect in US patent clash
In September, Apple released its Apple Watch Series 9, touting increased performance along with features such as the ability to access and log health data.
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El País ☛ Apple seeks a path to getting two of its best watches back on shelves during a bitter patent dispute
On Oct. 26, the ITC determined that Apple infringed on two patents owned by Masimo Corp. and Cercacor Laboratories, both U.S. companies. After a 60-day review, the ITC’s decision became final Tuesday, but the company had already pulled the watches from store shelves and removed them from its online sales lineup.
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El País ☛ Apple to halt sales of its newest watches in US over patent dispute
The disruption will likely cost Apple about $300-400 million in holiday-season sales, estimated Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. That’s a relative drop in the bucket for Apple, given analysts are expecting Apple to generate nearly $120 billion in sales during the October-December period that includes the holiday shopping season.
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Quartz ☛ Biden says it's fine to ban the fancy Apple Watches in America
The disagreement at the center of the ban stems from the technology Apple Watches use for their blood oxygen monitor features. A medical device company called Masimo said Apple’s version of the light-based pulse oximeter violated a patent for a similar piece of Masimo hardware, so it took Apple to court. That suit ended in a mistrial, but Masimo also sought intervention from the ITC, which gave it some relief.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Reckless DMCA Deindexing Pushes NASA’s Artemis Towards Black Hole
Behind the scenes, however, the ability to find relevant content is under attack. Blundering DMCA takedown notices sent by a company calling itself DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. claim to protect the rights of an OnlyFans/Instagram model working under the name ‘Artemis’.
Instead, keyword-based systems that fail to discriminate between copyright-infringing content and that referencing the word Artemis in any other context, are flooding towards Google. They contain demands to completely deindex non-infringing, unrelated content, produced by innocent third parties all over the world.
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Techdirt ☛ How Copyright Hinders The Preservation Of Modern, Digital Culture
In practice, that means that as platforms become obsolete and are phased out, they can take with them the digital artefacts that depend on those platforms to be accessed. Technical solutions exist that can help deal with these issues. For example, code stored on old physical formats can be transferred to new ones, and software emulators can help keep digital artefacts alive that might otherwise be impossible to access. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there’s a big problem in the form of copyright law. Generally speaking, technical solutions can only be applied with the permission of the copyright holders. If the latter can’t be found – hard enough with physical books, often impossible for complex pieces of outdated software – these characteristic digital creations may be doomed to disappear. The severity of punishments for copyright infringement are so disproportionate, that researchers and curators are understandably unwilling to risk being taken to court for their preservation work – good intentions are no defense. Moreover, it’s a threat that continues to hang over cultural institutions for decades as a result of copyright’s absurdly long term.
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The Guardian UK ☛ Digital curator Giulia Carla Rossi: ‘There is a misconception that if something is on the internet it will last for ever’
It’s perhaps a testament to the originality of the project that there’s no single, casual term for the works that you’re collecting. What sorts of things is Emerging Formats interested in? We use “emerging formats” to refer to what we call complex born-digital publications. They’re publications created first and foremost to be published, distributed and read in a digital environment. But they are also structurally and technically more complex than digital publications that we currently collect at scale, such as PDFs, standard ebooks or e-journals. There are more challenges for us because of their complexity, but for the same reason, they’re also more fragile. They rely on the original software and hardware they were designed for, which increases the risk of disappearance if you don’t collect them in a timely manner.
We’ve mostly focused on web-based interactive narratives (digital choose-your-own-adventure stories, stories that use live data, stories that are written collaboratively, or stories that respond to a specific location). But we’ve also looked at apps, both Android and iOS.
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Techdirt ☛ Brian May With An Awesome Response To Reports Of Queen Videos Getting Copyright Strikes
Copyright strikes on hosted video content happens all the time. There are tons of strikes issued in error, plenty that are purely fraud and abuse, and a bunch that may have been done in good faith but completely fail to recognize if and when specific content would be protected by fair use. What doesn’t happen nearly often enough when these strikes occur is to have the content producer, on who’s behalf the strike was issued, get directly involved in the defense of those receiving the strike.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Everything
This line caused some difficulty for Lojban; the problem stems from the notion of "having lost everything" but still having a sharp stick and the means to stick it to the bad guy. The set of everything presumably includes pointy sticks: it's not much of an everything otherwise. And if one has a sharp stick, then a Sith lord (or whomever) could lop off limbs, which points to the fact that there was not nothing left to lose.
[...]
Natural languages are messy, which leads to statements that are false such as "everyone owns a smartphone". One need only find one person who lacks a smartphone to send this argument down in flames.
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hi midnight pub
in a life before COVID, i bartended an entire career.
i worked at corporate chain restaurants, fancy steak houses, shady bars in the under commons.
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Contents of a drawer
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Electric cars: reprise
No cars is better than any cars of any kind -- that is true; public transit, density and sensible city planning are much better.
In the meantime, electric cars do offer a reasonable-seeming solution for short suburban commutes with lots of time to recharge, in places where infrastructure is available.
But I still think we are fooling ourselves about pollution (unless we are in Norway or some place that does not use coal). Batteries should not be equated to fuel - they hold fuel. Think of batteries as $20,000 fuel tanks - fuel tanks with holes, losing 15% to 40% of their content with every charge (battery efficiency is far from 100%). The fuel itself comes substantially from the coal-burning plant you can't see, where poor people live.
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Mickey not the Apple of mine eye
I couldn't grasp what I might have called "Disney people" back when I grew up feasting on cartoons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To me the animation seemed second rate compared to other offerings, and the stories/humor too tame (the 1970s term was "lame"..). Disney offerings seemed about half a step up from "Speedy Racer", if ya know what I mean.... ;-)
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Mickey not the Apple of mine eye
I've purchased exactly one Apple product, and while that Macbook Pro seemed "slick" for a season, it's the only computer I've ever owned that went utterly "brick up" on me - and *far* sooner than its price suggested it should.
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RE: The artist's position in society
When someone says something like "I live in Chicago" you don't assume that this person thinks everyone lives there or should move there. A typical reply might be "Well, I live in Utrecht," or whatever your location happens to be, and that reply might be taken as a mild retort to an unspoken assumption that only Chicago matters. This example of course is contrived to the point of parody, but you might hear similar dialogues playing out around consumer choices or various matters of lifestyle. — I bought this red jumper, says one girl. — I bought a new skirt, replies the other girl. They are both just talking about themselves, though it might seem as if they made normative statements. And maybe they are, even if not expressly.
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Technology and Free Software
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Testing bcachefs
It has been added to linux 6.7 and to test bcachefs I compiled linux 6.7 rc6+ (latest on master 231223) and created 40GB partition.
It feels faster than ZFS, the algorithms in bcachefs are very efficient. Send and receive are missing, it would allow us to copy snapshots to other machines and an efficient backup system (the all meta data would be sent to the receiving machine and bcachefs stores the checksums on disk, the receiving machine only compares the checksums from the sending machine whereas rsync computes the checksums in both sending and receiving machine for each run).
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Compiling linux (6.7)
Over time, there are more and more dependencies to install to be able to compile linux.
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Writing For Others
There was a time in my youth when I first connected to the internet in the early to mid-1990s. I was a teenager then and exploring what it means to be connected to people outside of your own hometown community. At that time there weren't these large social networks that we have today, and the best you could do was either IRC, ICQ, or AIM for instant messaging, but even then you had to be online and most - if not all - of your contacts were just your friends and acquaintances from school.
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Internet/Gemini
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Internet History and IP/OSI Protocol Wars
I recently read up on parts of Internet history, about IP versus OSI etc. and the pros and cons of each approach.
It started with the ARPA group of people around Vint Cerf, Jon Postel in the Internetworking Group (INWG) working with informal memos and loosely traded RFCs, patchwork solutions, working code, starting with a local solution and growing it etc. instead of starting with an architecture, thinking it through, putting it all into standards, documenting it well, add testing procedures, how can products get certified etc.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.