Leftovers

• Nikita Prokopov ☛ In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox

  As you can see, even the checkmark wasn’t always there. But one thing remained constant: checkboxes were square.

  Why square? Because that’s how you can tell them from radio buttons: [...]

• James G ☛ The indie web

  Herein lies a question: How does one join the indie web? What about the IndieWeb? The answer to both is the same: start a personal website! The IndieWeb community is here to help, as is the broader indie web community that you can find across the web.

• Thorsten Ball ☛ 63 Unpopular Opinions

  What follows is a a dump of thoughts, of unpopular opinions, that only makes sense as a dump. (A fish stew.) Take the dump apart and it’s throwaway thoughts. Don’t take them too seriously. Except the ones I hid in there on purpose.

• Michal Zelazny ☛ Silence and space

  Some time ago in another blog posts I touched briefly my life philosophy. I mentioned “going lightly” in context of being always ready to go. But that’s not all at all. It’s something very important for me, very precious to my heart. It also has a wide meaning which can be sorted into three categories: people, things and experiences. It doesn’t mean I treat people equally to things, it just means that in all areas of my life, both mundane and ideological I use the same approach. I like to think it makes me internally consistent.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ Edits and Egos

  Almost everyone will find something to mention if you ask for a review. They don’t want to seem silly. You also have full license to ignore any suggestions you receive. Including those in this post.

• New York Times ☛ Why Millennials Are Declaring Themselves Obsolete

  The largest living generation in America peers into the abyss of middle age. Are we really worried, or is it just a shtick?

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ There's a Surprisingly Simple Reason Why Some Kids Learn to Talk Earlier

    It's not all genetic.

  • Science Alert ☛ World First Partial Heart Transplant Is Growing With a Baby

    "Expected to last a lifetime."

  • Science Alert ☛ One Protein Helps 75% of Cancers to Spread – And We May Have a Way to Stop It

    "We are very excited."

  • Science Alert ☛ 'Landmark Discovery': Hubble Detects Water Vapor in Smallest Exoplanet to Date

    97 light-years away.

  • Science Alert ☛ Dark-Age Skeletons Uncovered With Buckets on Their Feet And Rings Around Their Necks

    What were they trying to stop?

  • Science Alert ☛ Japan's Moon Lander Sends Home Bittersweet Image of Its Current View

    It looks lonely out there.

• Hardware

  • Dan Langille ☛ r730-03

    This is the Dell R730 host known as r730-03.

  • Hackaday ☛ No Dish? Try A Portable Weave Helix Antenna

    When you think of satellite communications, you probably think of a dish. But that’s not the only option — a new device from the American University of Beruit and Stanford created a portable antenna made of woven materials that packs easily, weighs little, and can reconfigure for ground-to-space or ground-to-ground communications. The antenna reminded us of a finger trap and you can see it for yourself in the video below.

  • Hackaday ☛ 3D Printed RC Kart Actually Made Entirely By Hand

    If we told you somebody built a 3D printed go-kart, you’d expect to see a certain sequence of events. A bit of work in CAD, a printer montage, then some assembly. That’s not the case here. [3D Sanago] is an artist that works with 3D printing pens, creating 3D objects entirely by hand. It’s an impressive skill, all the more so when it’s used to build something functional like this gorgeous little go-kart.

  • Hackaday ☛ Lorenz Attractor Analog Computer With Octave Simulation

    [Janis Alnis] wanted to build an analog computer circuit and bought some multiplier chips. The first attempt used apparently fake chips that were prone to overheating. He was able to get it to work and also walked through some Octave (a system similar to Matlab) simulations for the circuit. You can follow along in the video below.

  • Hackaday ☛ Getting Started With USB-C And Common Pitfalls With Charging And Data Transfer

    USB-C is one of those things that generally everyone seems to agree on that it is a ‘good thing’, but is it really? In this first part of a series on USB-C, [Andreas Spiess] takes us through the theory of USB-C and USB Power Delivery (PD), as well as data transfer with USB-C cables. Even ignoring the obvious conclusion that with USB-C USB should now actually be called the ‘Universal Parallel Bus’ on account of its two pairs of differential data lines, there’s quite a bit of theory and associated implementation details involved.

  • Hackaday ☛ Bringing An IBM Butterfly Laptop Back From The Dead

    Among all the laptops produced over the last few decades, there is one which rises above the rest and which has retained an appeal long after its meager computing resources became obsolete. It’s the IBM 701c, the famous “Butterfly” laptop, whose fold-out keyboard still gives it star  quality, and [John Graham-Cumming] has documented the restoration of one from the tattered remains of two scrap examples.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chip smuggling operation that sent 53,000 banned American chips to China gets busted — $12 million worth of chips funneled through South Korean company

    A smuggling operation carried out by the unnamed South Korean 'Company A' involved 53,000 chips worth nearly $12 million.

  • RFA ☛ Chinese Communist Party continues crackdown on LGBTQ+ people

    Beijing leads a nationwide clampdown on 'foreign ideologies,' amid growing abuse of queer and trans people.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong court orders embattled Chinese property giant Evergrande to liquidate

    By Holmes Chan and Xinqi Su A Hong Kong court on Monday issued the liquidation of battered Chinese property giant Evergrande after lawyers failed to convince a judge it had a working restructuring plan.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ France’s Tractor Protesters Have Reason to Be Angry

    Since last fall, farmers have rolled out their now-usual array of actions in small towns and villages around France: tractor processions, dumping manure in front of official buildings, “free shopping cart” actions, or throwing eggs at supermarkets accused of taking excessive profits. Yet national media gave these protests little coverage. While their interest was surely otherwise occupied, the fact that Paris was not affected by any demonstrations, coupled with a certain contempt for “yokels,” no doubt partly explains this lack of attention.

  • Futurism ☛ Stanley Admits Its TikTok-Famous Mugs Are Made With Lead After All

    In the post, a user known as "Lead Safe Mama" claimed that she detected lead when checking for the toxic metal on the bottom of a Stanley Quencher, using a reactive agent that changes color when coming into contact with the heavy metal.

  • JURIST ☛ France government abandons plan to reduce state subsidies on agricultural diesel

    The French government introduced a series of urgent measures on Friday that abandon its plan to reduce state subsidies on agricultural diesel.

  • Science Alert ☛ Do You Live in a 'Blue Zone'? Here's Why You Might Live Longer For It

    Longer and healthier lives.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Ian Betteridge ☛ The information grey goo

    I’m broadly positive about the future of LLMs and AI, but no one should pretend there will not be difficulties or that the transition to using machines isn’t going to pose plenty of challenges.

    Some scenarios, though, are profoundly dangerous, not just for the publishing and creative industries, but for society as a whole.

    When we discuss the threat of AI, many people imagine rampant machine intelligences with big guns hunting us all down in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (thank you, James Cameron). I doubt that’s likely. But one consequence which I can see use sleepwalking into is the informational equivalent of an apocalypse that dates back over thirty years: the “grey goo” scenario.

  • Kevin C Tofel ☛ Logging out of Chromebooks for a while

    Although it will cost me around $25 per month for hosting, I’ll leave the site up and running for a bit. There is still value there for those interested in Chromebooks and ChromeOS. However, I’ll likely shutter the comments. I don’t need reminding that the site couldn’t survive.

  • Gabriel Simmer ☛ Porting to Workers

    Choosing how to build this site on Workers was a bit tricky. My goal continues to be to overengineer what it ostensibly a static site for fun and negative profit. Thus, I completely ignored Cloudflare Pages. I wanted to keep a tiered caching strategy that I tried in the initial version of the Fly.io version, and it would be easier given I could leverage Cloudflare's caching systems. Ideally I want to regenerate pages from source when things change, but I also have to pay attention to how long it takes to execute a function when called. With Fly.io, I wanted fast page generation, but I didn't really care hold long it took since the CPU time wasn't limited in any way. Another limitation is that Workers don't really have a filesystem, so I'd have to leverage the various offerings available to store files. With Fly.io, I built the Docker image with the posts bundled in, which was great for speed but felt a little less than ideal since there was no clear separation between publishing a post and deploying changes to the backend.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Hill ☛ Ring no longer allowing police to request users’ doorbell video footage

      Law enforcement agencies will still be able to access videos with a search warrant while Ring has the right to share footage without users’ permission in limited circumstances, The Associated Press reported.

      Amazon has paid millions of dollars to settle over alleged privacy violations involving the Ring doorbell since buying the California-based Ring in 2018.

    • Associated Press ☛ Ring will no longer allow police to request doorbell camera footage from users

      The update is the latest restriction Ring has made to police activity on the Neighbors app following concerns raised by privacy watchdogs about the company’s relationship with police departments across the country.

      Critics have stressed the proliferation of these relationships – and users’ ability to report what they see as suspicious behavior - can change neighborhoods into a place of constant surveillance and lead to more instances of racial profiling.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Amazon Ring says US police will now need warrant to access user footage

      Amazon Ring will now require US law enforcement to obtain a warrant to access doorbell footage from individual users. The company announced in a blog post that it would no longer allow law enforcement to request doorbell footage directly from users in the company’s social networking app, Neighbors. The move is an about-face from Ring’s long-held and controversial policy that drew the ire of civil liberties and privacy advocates.

    • NYOB ☛ Data Protection Day: 74% of experts say DPAs would find ‘relevant violations’ at most companies - if they would investigate them

      When the GDPR came into force in 2018, the new and shiny data protection law was hailed as a shift towards stricter enforcement – ensuring that in the EU, the fundamental right to data protection does not only exist on paper. To mark this year’s Data Protection Day on 28 January, noyb conducted a survey among more than 1000 data protection professionals working in European companies. This provided a unique view from the inside: 70% of respondents believe that authorities need to issue clear decisions and enforce the GDPR to ensure compliance, while 74% say that authorities would find ‘relevant violations’ if they would walk through the door of an average company. In an attempt to move towards “evidence-based enforcement”, this research also shows that authorities would need to fundamentally change their approach to enforcement to get businesses to comply.

    • NYOB ☛ GDPR: a Culture of Non-Compliance? Numbers of evidence-based enforcement efforts [PDF]

      74.4% assume relevant violations at an average company. More than 1,000 pri- vacy professionals, largely working as data protection officers (DPOs) or internal compliance departments of large companies, answered our questionnaire. While the survey shows that at least awareness of privacy issues grew during the last five years, most companies still don’t comply with the GDPR. 74.4% of the respondents agree with the statement that “if a data protection authority (DPA) would walk through the door of an average company tomorrow, it would surely find relevant GDPR violations”. This is an extremely high percentage and indicates that privacy professionals still largely operate in a culture of non-compliance or merely partial compliance. These objective numbers match the experience of noyb and continuous anecdotal indications.

  • Confidentiality

    • Jan Schaumann ☛ Post-Quantum Cryptography in January 2024

      Government and industry consensus appears to be largely that "Q-Day" is still several years out, primarily because of the difficulty of creating quantum computers with stable qubits, although it seems rather difficult to get reasonable estimates on that. All estimates, however, appear to be dramatically falling, while practical capabilities are increasing.

• Defence/Aggression

  • El País ☛ Inside the Facebook profile of a migrant smuggler

    Three members of the Northeast Cartel have pled guilty to human trafficking on the border between Mexico and the United States. The case has shone a light on how criminals recruit clients and victims via social media

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump’s Hometown Shock Troops Are Raring For a Fight

    Wax’s speech made one thing clear: If there are still any pundits or patsies holding out hope for a return to the mythical era of cordial conservatism that ruled Republican politics the last time the NYYRC had any sort of juice, they can give up now. The current incarnation of the club is all-out MAGA-minded, and the leadership is determined to make their group a talent incubator for prospective staffers of future far-right politicians long after Trump’s sun has finally set. They’re hardly kingmakers at the moment — the biggest political job one of the club’s top dogs has held is a nebulous gig for George Santos, the instantly-disgraced ex-congressman. But they are beginning to boast connections to dozens of boldface names in the MAGA movement, from controversial congressmen like Gaetz to shadowy advisers like Bannon, who have both spoken at past NYYRC events — and now, they’ve finally had a visit from the emperor himself. They’ve gotten here by running the Trump playbook: start fights, grab headlines, and make a whole lot of noise. But the brand of politics they’re espousing is dark, even by Trumpist standards. Tilt your head one way, and guys like Wax are just tiny, squeaky wheels in a vast political machine. Tilt it the other, and they could very well be the GOP’s amped-up, authoritarian-friendly future.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Israel-Hamas war: Germany joins states pausing UNRWA funding

    The UN said it is investigating allegations from Israel that around a dozen UNRWA staff members were involved in the terror attack staged by the Hamas militant group that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,100 people and the kidnapping of 240 more. UNRWA employs around 13,000 people in Gaza.

    Guterres confirmed that of the 12 employees cited in the allegations, nine had been fired, one was dead, and the identity of the two others was being clarified.

    He vowed that "any UN employee involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution."

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea tests submarine-launched cruise missile, KCNA says

    Leader Kim Jong Un called the test a success.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Australia's resources minister seeks investment from S.Korea, Japan

    Australia's resources minister has begun a week long trip to South Korea and Japan to discuss gas exports and critical minerals opportunities, as its government on Monday released a "prospectus" of 52 investment ready critical minerals projects.

  • teleSUR ☛ North Korea Launches Cruise Missiles From its East Coast

    North Korea's government has ramped up weapons tests in recent weeks, including the launches of a purported “underwater nuclear weapon system”.

  • RFA ☛ Kim Jong Un’s sister ‘not to be underestimated,’ author says

    The world will soon be seeing a lot more of Kim Yo Jong, according to a new book about her.

  • RFA ☛ Kim Jong Un boosts underwater nuclear threat, urges fast submarine build

    Current and future threats spur need for N Korea to defend maritime sovereignty, says leader Kim.

  • JURIST ☛ Denmark report reveals ‘systematic illegal behavior’ in past adoptions of South Korean children

    Denmark’s Ministry of Social of Social affairs has released a report revealing that adoptions of South Korean children were subject to “systemic illegal behavior” on the part of South Korea. The report focused on the period between January 1, 1970 and December 31, 1989 and was released on Thursday.

  • France24 ☛ North Korea fires cruise missiles into Sea of Japan

    North Korea fired several cruise missiles on Sunday, Seoul's military said, the latest in a series of tension-raising moves by the nuclear-armed state.

  • France24 ☛ North Korea says leader Kim oversaw test of submarine-launched cruise missiles

    North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw the test launch of a new strategic cruise missile from a submarine, state media said Monday, the latest tension-raising move by the nuclear-armed state.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Sarawak premier urges opposition to stop undercutting Malaysian PM Anwar

    Tan Sri Abang Johari Openg said the country needs political stability to focus on pressing economic challenges.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia’s ex-finance minister charged with failure to declare assets

    The 85-year-old, who served as finance minister twice between 1984 and 2001, pleaded not guilty.

  • The Straits Times ☛ ST Picks: Fine wine, Made in China

  • New York Times ☛ Two Masked Attackers Kill 1 in Shooting at Istanbul Church

    The Islamic State has taken responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE intelligence group.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Apartment building in Russia’s Rostov-on-Don, declared hazardous in 2020, partially collapses — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Fire breaks out at Moscow Satire Theater — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘A very kind boy’: Two Russian convicts and likely ex-Wagner fighters sought in connection with rape and robbery — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian authorities’ harsh reaction to ‘almost naked’ party reportedly sparked by filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov’s comments to Putin about event — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Scotsman ☛ Humza Yousaf urged to order ministerial code probe into himself over Whatsapp scandal

    Appearing at the Inquiry, Mr Yousaf was shown a table provided by the Scottish Government, which said he “deleted all messages after a month for cybersecurity purposes as per their understanding of the Scottish Government mobile messaging apps usage and policy”.

• Environment

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ How viable is Arctic shipping?

    The volume of trade passing through the Panama Canal, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, has declined by 30% since November, after severe drought hit its reservoirs, lowering the water level. The spot rate for sending a 40-foot container from China to northern Europe has risen by 283% since early-December, according to figures from Freightos, an online freight marketplace.

  • France24 ☛ Climate activists hurl soup at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris

    Two protesters from a climate and agricultural NGO hurled soup onto the bulletproof glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" painting in Paris, demanding the right to "healthy and sustainable food".

  • Energy/Transportation

    • YLE ☛ Glitch in Finnish-Estonian electrical cable "probably not caused by external factor"

      Fingrid detected a malfunction in the underwater cable early Friday, following damage to a similar cable last October.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

      Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ "Driverless" cars always have a driver

      Tonight I was chatting with an old acquaintance who now works for one of these murderbot companies (the conversation was... fraught) and they told me that it was commonly known amongst their staff that SFPD is well aware that every vehicle has a responsible party, but they pretend not to know, because it sounds complicated and annoying to deal with.

• Finance

  • New York Times ☛ Real Estate Giant China Evergrande Will Be Liquidated

    After multiple delays and even a few faint glimmers of hope, a Hong Kong court has sounded the death knell for what was once China’s biggest real estate firm.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Dan Q ☛ Automattic Shakeup

    My employer Automattic‘s having a bit of a reorganisation. For unrelated reasons, this coincides with my superteam having a bit of a reorganisation, too, and I’m going to be on a different team next week than I’ve been on for most of the 4+ years I’ve been there. Together, these factors mean that I have even less idea than usual what I do for a living, right now.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Biden Administration to implement new AI regulations on tech companies

    The new requirement would give the government access to sensitive programs at companies such as OpenAI, Google LLC, Amazon Web Services Inc. and other companies with artificial intelligence programs. As part of the requirement, companies must also undertake safety testing on any new AI creations.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI and Other Tech Giants Will Have to Warn the US Government When They Start New AI Projects

    "We're using the Defense Production Act, which is authority that we have because of the president, to do a survey requiring companies to share with us every time they train a new large language model, and share with us the results—the safety data—so we can review it,” Gina Raimondo, US secretary of commerce, said Friday at an event held at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She did not say when the requirement will take effect or what action the government might take on the information it received about AI projects. More details are expected to be announced next week.

  • NPR ☛ Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?

    Last year was, by all accounts, a bloodbath for the tech industry, with more than 260,000 jobs vanishing — the worst 12 months for Silicon Valley since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Intel’s nightmare quarter

    The chip maker was set to lose about US$25-billion in market value, if premarket losses hold, based on its share price of $43.65. Its stock had soared 90% in 2023.

  • Futurism ☛ As AI Destroys Search Results, Google Fires Workers in Charge of Improving It

    As Vice reports, news of the company ending its contract with Appen — a data training firm that employs thousands of poorly paid gig workers in developing countries to maintain, among other things, Google's search algorithm — coincidentally comes a week after a new study found that the quality of its search engine's results has indeed gotten much worse in recent years.

    Back in late 2022, journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to refer to the demonstrable worsening of all manner of online tools, which he said was by design as tech giants seek to extract more and more money out of their user bases. Google Search was chief among the writer's examples of the enshittification effect in a Wired article published last January, and as the new study out of Germany found, that effect can be measured.

    With CEOs' short-sighted AI gold rush claiming ever more jobs, the termination of the Appen contract is particularly harsh not only because of how crappy Google Search has gotten, but also because of how crappy things were and are for people who work for the Australia-based AI training firm.

  • New York Times ☛ On Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll and the Limits of Libel Law

    Incentives to serve up lies for politics or profit are so strong that libel damage awards and settlements may not meaningfully change behaviors.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Taiwan Offers Lessons in How to Defeat Disinformation

      Worries that China would use disinformation to undermine the integrity of Taiwan's vote dogged the recent election.

      In repelling disinformation, Chinese and domestic, Taiwan offers an example to other democracies holding elections this year.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Censorship, AI, disinformation, and repression undermine Asian elections in 2024

    Internet restrictions, AI-driven disinformation, and mass arrests have intensified ahead of major elections across Asia. These attacks undermine freedom of expression at a time when elections are supposed to restore or strengthen democratic rule and counter authoritarianism in the region.

    In 2023, several laws and regulations were updated in the region and eventually used as tools of censorship during election periods.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Tom MacWright ☛ Work hard and take everything really seriously

    In the short form, it’s hard to take a stance and not get grouped into either extreme. It’s also hard not to feel baited by someone who’s engagement-farming their social media presence by using time-tested bait questions.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • ICANN ☛ Proposed Top-Level Domain String for Private Use

    ICANN org will consider all comments submitted during this Public Comment proceeding. Based on the comments, it may update its evaluation on the identified candidate string. The outcome of the Public Comment proceeding will be provided to the ICANN Board for consideration to reserve the string or take alternate action.

  • APNIC ☛ A hop away from everywhere — long-haul links in today’s Internet

    Intercontinental Internet communications lie on top of a complex network of submarine cables forming its global communication backbone. As part of ongoing work focused on the criticality of the submarine cable network, fellow researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I mapped traceroute measurements to submarine cables as a first step towards understanding its potential vulnerabilities.

  • [Old] ACM ☛ Untangling the world-wide mesh of undersea cables

    The growth of global Internet traffic has driven an exponential expansion of the submarine cable network, both in terms of the sheer number of links and its total capacity. Today, a complex mesh of hundreds of cables, stretching over 1 million kilometers, connects nearly every corner of the earth and is instrumental in closing the remaining connectivity gaps. Despite the scale and critical role of the submarine network for both business and society at large, our community has mostly ignored it, treating it as a black box in most Internet studies, from connectivity to inter-domain traffic and reliability. We make the case for a new research agenda focused on characterizing the global submarine network and the critical role it plays as a basic component of any inter-continental end-to-end connection.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Netflix is different now — and there’s no going back

    Netflix has only continued to push the envelope with another price hike last fall (its third in three years). It also stopped letting subscribers sign up for its cheapest, $11.99 per month ad-free plan. It’s now moving to get rid of the plan completely for those who already signed up as part of its attempt to push users toward its $6.99 per month ad-supported plan or its $15.49 per month standard tier.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• R J Faas ☛ Apple’s DMA response exposes some hidden costs and upsets folks because they didn’t get what they expected

  A lot of ink has already been spilled over Apple’s announcement of how it intends to respond to Europe’s Digital Markets Act. I don’t want to reiterate many of the points others have made but I do have a few thoughts. d

• Patents

  • YLE ☛ Patent applications hit 10-year high in Finland

    The sector accounting for the biggest volume of applications was electrical engineering. Within this category, there were 281 applications for digital communication inventions, followed by 106 for computer technology and 92 labelled as telecommunications.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • The Age AU ☛ X enforces Taylor Swift search ban after deepfake pornography floods social media

      When searching for the singer’s name on the site, an error message reads: “Something went wrong. Try reloading”. However, it only applies when searching for the singer’s first and last name consecutively.

      The decision to block such content is a temporary action, said X’s head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, and is being handled with “an abundance of caution” to prioritise safety.

    • India Times ☛ Taylor Swift searches blocked on X after fake explicit images spread

      The social media platform X has blocked users from searching for Taylor Swift after fake sexually explicit images of the pop singer proliferated on social media. Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, stated that this is a temporary action taken to prioritize safety. Swift was named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" in 2023.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ X/Twitter Temporarily Suspends ‘Taylor Swift’ Searches After AI Image Uproar

      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the images “alarming” at a press conference Friday, and asked social media companies to more strongly enforce content moderation policies and further said Congress should take action to pass protective legislation. b

    • Axios ☛ X blocks searches for Taylor Swift

      The big picture: It was not immediately known whether X has taken such blocking action before, but the platform formerly known as Twitter has been critcized for its content moderation policies since the 2022 Elon Musk-led takeover.

      • X CEO Linda Yaccarino has said X embraces an approach called "freedom of speech, not reach" — meaning it has zero tolerance for illegal content, but won't ban posts that are "lawful, but awful."

    • uni Cornell ☛ Right of Publicity: an overview

      The right of publicity prevents the unauthorized commercial use of an individual's name, likeness, or other recognizable aspects of one's persona. It gives an individual the exclusive right to license the use of their identity for commercial promotion.

    • CBC ☛ Explicit fake images of Taylor Swift prove laws haven't kept pace with tech, experts say

      One photo, shared by a single user, was seen more than 45 million times before the account was suspended. But by then, the widely-shared photo had been immortalized elsewhere on the internet.

    • Variety ☛ X/Twitter Blocks Searches for ‘Taylor Swift’ as a ‘Temporary Action to Prioritize Safety’ After Deluge of Explicit AI Fakes

      On Friday, SAG-AFTRA issued a statement condemning the Swift fake images as “upsetting, harmful and deeply concerning” and said “the development and dissemination of fake images — especially those of a lewd nature — without someone’s consent must be made illegal.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in an interview with NBC News, called the fake Swift porn images “alarming and terrible” and said that “we have to act” and that “irrespective of what your standing on any particular issue is I think we all benefit when the online world is a safe world.”

• Copyrights

  • Greg Morris ☛ Turning Words Into Your Own

    Which leads me to wonder where the point is that the copied words become your own? Is changing the phrasing slightly enough?

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Disney 'Cracks Down' on Mickey Mouse 'Steamboat Silly' Pirates

    Mickey Mouse's first cartoon appearance entered the public domain this month. This means that the famous "Steamboat Willie" cartoon is now free to copy, remix and monetize. More recent Mickey appearances remain protected, including the "Steamboat Silly" short which, confusingly, uses Steamboat Willie footage.