Leftovers

• The Conversation ☛ Using AI to monitor the [Internet] for terror content is inescapable – but also fraught with pitfalls

  In broad terms, there are two types of tools used to root out terrorist content. The first looks at certain account and message behaviour. This includes how old the account is, the use of trending or unrelated hashtags and abnormal posting volume.

  In many ways, this is similar to spam detection, in that it does not pay attention to content, and is valuable for detecting the rapid dissemination of large volumes of content, which are often bot-driven.

  The second type of tool is content-based. It focuses on linguistic characteristics, word use, images and web addresses. Automated content-based tools take one of two approaches.

• NL Times ☛ Van Gogh painting stolen in 2020 was damaged during museum heist, restorers say

  Since the theft, the painting developed several deep scratches that broke through all layers of paint. One scratch cut all the way to the canvas. At other points, varnish was damaged. The experts who studied the painting said they believe all of the damage can be repaired.

• The Atlantic ☛ Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction

  Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution. A core element of one of his early novels, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a magical book that acts as a personal tutor and mentor for a young girl, adapting to her learning style—in essence, it is a personalized and ultra-advanced chatbot. The titular Primer speaks aloud in the voice of a live actor, known as a “ractor”—evoking how today’s generative AI, like many digital technologies, is highly dependent on humans’ creative labor.

• Standards/Consortia

  • [Repeat] Tedium ☛ Does RSS Need A Creator-Economy Rethink?

    RSS is widespread and a lot of platforms use it. (Tedium has an RSS feed.) But when it comes down to the mainstream medium a lot of people expected it to become, it’s only really had its moment in the sun in the form of podcasts. As Anil Dash noted this week, there’s something truly radical about podcasts—a format that can make a lot of money for its creators, can be spread broadly, and appears to be difficult to bury inside a walled garden. Spotify tried to close off the podcast ecosystem, and largely failed. It’s a radical media format.

    Meanwhile, newsletters have essentially turned into the tool that RSS was supposed to be for content—a distribution format controlled by the creator. It’s not a perfect one—it’s built around decades-old technology, and it breaks frequently. Email is designed to flood you with information, no matter the source, and newsletters have to compete with every piece of junk mail you get—which mean it looks like junk mail, too. But as a direct distribution mechanism, it works pretty well.

  • Wired ☛ WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps

    For about the past two years, WhatsApp has been building a way for other messaging apps to plug themselves into its service and let people chat across apps—all without breaking the end-to-end encryption it uses to protect the privacy and security of people’s messages. The move is the first time the chat app has opened itself up this way, and it potentially offers greater competition.

    It isn’t a shift entirely of WhatsApp’s own making. In September, European, lawmakers designated WhatsApp parent Meta as one of six influential “gatekeeer” companies under its sweeping Digital Markets Act, giving it six months to open its walled garden to others. With just a few weeks to go before that time is up, WhatsApp is detailing how its interoperability with other apps may work.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ WhatsApp could soon interoperate with other messaging apps

    Initially, interoperability will focus on text messaging and media sharing between two people, with group chats and calls planned for later, according to the Wired report.

    Users must opt in to receive messages from other apps to ensure better privacy and security. Interoperability aims to eliminate the need for users to know which app their contacts are using, allowing easy communication across platforms.

• Science

  • The Kent Stater ☛ A total solar eclipse guide: What to know in advance

    Complete darkness will fill the sky for a few minutes on April 8, when the city of Kent experiences a total solar eclipse for the first time in 200 years.

    Kent will see the moon cross in front of the sun for approximately four minutes, beginning at 3:13 p.m. according to NASA, so let’s brush up on the science behind the eclipse.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Pterosaur Ceoptera evansae: New species found in Scotland

    Sometimes new discoveries take a long, long time to surface. Paleontologists first saw the bones of the new pterosaur Ceoptera evansae in 2006, during a field trip to the southwest coast of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

  • Science Alert ☛ Rare 3D Fossil of Trees Older Than Dinosaurs Reveals Bizarre Alien-Like Ancient Forests : ScienceAlert

    A 2.3 meter (7.5 foot) long by roughly 2 meter wide block of stone stored at Canada's New Brunswick Museum contains some remarkable exceptions, giving researchers a three-dimensional view of an ancient species that sprouted roughly just 15 million years after the first tree-like flora appeared.

• Education

  • The Register UK ☛ Infosec pros sound off on usefulness of higher education • The Register

• Hardware

  • [Old] QRP HomeBuilder ☛ QRP HomeBuilder - QRPHB -: Another Look at the LM386

    Others online have provided detailed analysis about each stage of the LM386, so I won’t bother. However, I will comment about why it might be noisy. Normally, in modern AF power amps. the differential input pair emitters get 50 - 100 ohms of degeneration to boost linearity at the expense of noise. Other than that, in the IC only current sources connect to the emitters (and usually active loads to the collectors -- i.e. no resistors), However, the LM386 input pair get multiple large value resistors connected to their emitters. This translates into lots of Johnson noise from thermal agitation within conductors, plus related high-level input current noise that all gets amplified by the NPN voltage amp and delivered to the output stage.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan opioid cash sparks feeding frenzy of vendors, seeking cut of $1.5B

    Advocates say the best way to save lives is to expand local services and fill gaps in treatment and recovery. But to do that, local officials more accustomed to road repairs and zoning approvals must navigate through a feeding frenzy of vendors hawking merchandise marketed to capture settlement dollars, said Jonathan Stoltman, director of the Opioid Policy Institute in West Michigan.

    “There are so many sharks in the water now because there’s so much money,” Stoltman said.

  • International Business Times ☛ Airports In Spain Make Massive Security Rule Change For Travellers, Will Begin from Later This Year

    As of now, three busy airports in Spain are going to install a new technology that will make the process speedier and smoother for travellers. Passengers will no longer be required to remove their liquids and electronics from their hand baggage for scanning, which would mark the country's step in upgrading security checks and reducing queue times.

    The new equipment will have the latest scanning technology and will be able to generate 3D images and it will soon be fitted at Spain's three major holiday hotspots in Madrid, Barcelona and Palma.

  • The Olive Press ☛ Spain to relax airport security rules: New high-tech scanners will make life a lot easier for travellers in these 3 airports

    The X-ray technology known as EDSCB(Explosive Detection System for Cabin Baggage) will generate a 3D image, similar to those used in hospitals for CT scans.

    Airport operator Aena will launch the equipment at the country’s busiest airports in 2024, namely Madrid, Barcelona, and Palma.

  • Express ☛ Spanish airports abandon annoying airport rules as tourists hail game changing move | World | News

    xsMadrid, Palma, and Barcelona, operated by Aena, will introduce new X-ray technology known as Explosive Detection System for Cabin Baggage (EDSCB).

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Opioid settlement funds shouldn’t bolster Kansas law enforcement budgets

    It’s unfortunate that law enforcement programs receive money over chronically underfunded community-based organizations doing boots-on-the-ground prevention and harm reduction. This disbursement also goes against the recommendations of leading public health researchers, scientists, and clinicians, including those who wrote a Call to Action on Opioid Settlement Funds.

    In Kansas, synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, were responsible for 56% of the state’s 738 drug overdose deaths in 2022, a significant increase from fewer than 10% of the 326 overdose deaths in 2017. Safe Streets Wichita has been integral in increasing the community’s access to free harm reduction kits that include naloxone and fentanyl test strips to combat the opioid epidemic.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Futurism ☛ Man Uses AI to Talk to 5,000 Women on Tinder, Finds Wife

    Instead of going through the tedious process of actually interacting with women, Moscow resident Aleksandr Zhadan programmed OpenAI's GPT large language models to talk to well over 5,000 women on his behalf.

    Zhadan went as far as to have it schedule IRL dates with matches and filter out profiles that showed women posing with alcohol, as Gizmodo reports.

    Lo and behold, his efforts appear to have paid off: Zhadan found his wife, Karina Vyalshakaeva, in apparent proof that his bizarre and extremely 2024 method of finding love in the age of AI can actually work — if the happy couple isn't making the whole thing up for clout, that is.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Sticking to YouTube subscriptions, the only way I have control

    Well, I’m stopping. In this social media age of no nuisances, it has to be good or bad or pit tribes against each other, YouTube follows the same path. I do a search to learn about say a VPN or what Apple Vision Pro is like and I get a lot of recommendations that lean negative “this sucks” with a horrified face or see recommended videos that are irrelevant. Personally I find YouTube less and less useful for good information these days and influencers are easily influenced so I try to pay them no mind.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AI hallucinations: The 3% problem no one can fix slows the AI juggernaut

    “LLMs are notoriously unreliable, and they will occasionally fail even if you use them entirely the right way,” said Kjell Carlsson, head of AI strategy at Domino Data Lab Inc., which makes a data science platform.

  • Xe's Blog ☛ Surreality

    Searching for information used to be so easy. Now there's so much uninformation that we can't find anything. Then we take all of this trivia and celebrity bullshit and put it into unthinking automatons designed to make us click on ads. What could go wrong?

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Teaching LLMs to Be Deceptive

    Interesting research: “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training“: [...]

  • Nicolas Magand ☛ What bothers me about ChatGPT and A.I.

    I took way too much time to write this post, as I had a lot of difficulties expressing my thoughts, and the more I worked on what I was really wanting to say, the more I had to say. The first result was all over the place, so I started from scratch again, and this new result feels “summarised,” but I’m not sure if it’s clearer than the original or if it feels “complete” in my mind.

    I decided to jump in and never mind if some parts are confusing for you, dear readers: I had a very intense month of January at work, and my brain feels like it already needs a big vacation. If you’re wondering about some of my points, please use the “reply to this post” link at the end of the post, and I’ll do my best explaining them to you if needed, if it can be explained.

    Here we go.

  • Thousands of Raterlabs employees laid off one year after earning union-fought pay raise

    Thousands of employees working for a Kirkland-based technology company are being laid off.

    According to postings from the Washington State Department of Employment Security, RaterLabs, Inc. is permanently furloughing more than 3,600 workers. The notice was received on Tuesday.

  • Business Standard ☛ Tesla asks managers which jobs are critical, stoking layoff fears: Report

    Tesla managers have been asked whether each of their employees' positions were critical, stoking layoff fears in the company, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

    Tesla sent out a single-line query for each job after canceling some employees' biannual performance reviews, some of the people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

  • New York Times ☛ Snap Shares Plummet After First-Quarter Guidance Disappoints

    The Snapchat parent company’s revenue for the fourth quarter was up from a year earlier, but it missed Wall Street’s expectations on spending.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Verge ☛ Google’s use of student data could effectively ban Chromebooks from Denmark schools

      Municipalities will need to explain by March 1st how they plan to comply with the order to stop transferring data to Google, and won’t be able to do so at all starting August 1st, which could mean phasing out Chromebooks entirely.

      The regulator ruled that municipalities aren’t allowed to send Google data unless the laws change or Google provides a way to filter students’ information out. Google using it for purposes like performance analytics or feature development is a problem under their interpretations, even if it doesn’t include targeted advertising. For instance, it’s easy to see how regulators might take issue with student data being used to develop and improve AI features, which are increasingly part of Google Workspace and Chromebooks.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Pirates vote against #ChatControl 1.0 extension – Patrick Breyer

      Today, the European Parliament supported a one-year extension of the temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive, also known as Chat Control 1.0. The regulation allows for untargeted, general and indiscriminate searches of private messages by US big tech companies, aiming to detect suspicious content. Pirate Party Members of the European Parliament have long advocated and campaigned against this error-prone and arbitrary technology, which represents the end of the privacy of digital correspondence and fails to provide effective solutions against grooming.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Coal production up 12 pc in FY24

    In FY23, coal production had increased by 14.77 per cent from 778.21 million tonnes in FY22 to 893 million tonnes in FY23. In FY21 the country had produced 716 million tonnes.

  • The Nation ☛ It’s the 2024 Election Season. Where’s the Climate Story?

    Fact one: More voters face national elections in 2024 than ever before—about 4 billion people, nearly half the human population.

    Fact two: Last year was the hottest in recorded history—and scientists warn that oil, gas, and coal burning must be rapidly phased out if we are to preserve a livable planet.

    Fact three: Journalists too often don’t connect one fact with the other.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Tucker Carlson: Why is he getting the royal treatment in Moscow?

    The controversial former Fox News personality, who has been in the city over the past week to conduct an interview with President Vladimir Putin, is almost as well known in Moscow as many Russian TV personalities are. Clips from his former and current programs are frequently played on Russian TV, showing him angrily dissenting from official U.S. foreign policies, particularly regarding Russia and the war in Ukraine.

  • India Times ☛ chinese hacking us infrastructure: Chinese hacking campaign aiming critical infrastructure goes back five years: US - The Economic Times

    The US National Security Agency, US cyber watchdog CISA, the FBI, and the Transportation Security Administration said that the group known as "Volt Typhoon" had quietly burrowed into the networks of aviation, rail, mass transit, highway, maritime, pipeline, water and sewage organisations.

  • The Atlantic ☛ An Airtight Ruling Against Trump

    These words echoed through my mind today, nearly 50 years later, as I read the historic opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in United States v. Trump, holding that former President Donald Trump does not enjoy immunity from prosecution for any crimes he committed in attempting to end constitutional democracy in the United States.

    The result was no surprise. As I said last month, no one who attended the oral argument could have believed Trump had any chance of prevailing. The question was timing: How long would an appeal delay Trump’s trial, originally scheduled for March 4? Many of us thought that the decision might come sooner, perhaps within days of the argument, given how quickly the court had scheduled briefing and argument. And by the end of last week, some commentators had, by their own reckoning, reached the “freakout stage” as to why the decision was taking so long.

  • The Local SE ☛ Iranian intelligence suspected of plot to kill Swedish Jews

    According to an investigative report by Swedish Radio (SR), the couple, Mahdi Ramezani and Fereshteh Sanaeifarid, had applied for and been granted asylum in Sweden by posing as Afghans.

    The couple were arrested in April 2021 on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a terrorist crime involving the murder of Jewish figures in Sweden, SR reported.

  • JURIST ☛ Sweden drops investigation into Nord Stream rupture due to lack of jurisdiction

    The prosecutors concluded that they did not have jurisdiction over the pipeline. According to the official decision, sabotage against the Nord Stream pipeline was not a crime “against the security of the kingdom.” The prosecutor’s office said they gave their findings to Germany, who is still conducting their own investigation.

  • RFERL ☛ Sweden Ends Investigation Into Nord Stream Blasts Due To Jurisdiction Issues

    Two more investigations, one by Denmark and another one by Germany, are still under way.

  • Meduza ☛ Sweden drops investigation into Nord Stream pipeline attack, passes evidence to Germany

    Sweden has dropped its investigation into the 2022 explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, saying the case falls outside the country’s jurisdiction. The Swedish Prosecutor’s Office said all evidence has been handed over to German law enforcement for use in its own investigation.

    Swedish prosecutors reached the decision after determining that there was no evidence of Sweden’s or Swedish citizens’ involvement.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Crumbley verdict: Jury says mom is responsible for son’s mass shooting

    A school shooter’s mother is headed to prison after a Michigan jury found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

    The verdict, the first of its kind in the United States, puts the onus of responsibility on parents in a way that has never before been seen in a mass shooting case. The question of whether parents should be held accountable for the murders committed by their boys has reverberations that date back to the Columbine shooting in 1999. Those 13 deaths in Littleton, Colorado, are widely seen as the opening of a dark era in which American schools and towns have become shorthand for the mass murder of children: Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Taliban and International Diplomacy

    At the same time, the significant criticism of the Taliban, which is contained in the US official document. It was said that “Two years after the Taliban takeover in August 2021, Afghanistan now suffers under an extreme form of religious authoritarianism that uses military force and its secret police as governance instruments of choice. Its people are starving. Many Afghans are ripe for radicalization and face horrific choices: sell their children or their organs to feed their families. Joining ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) is a third horrific option; ISIS-K threatens Taliban credibility, Afghanistan’s security, and, if unchecked, the wider region.” The main goal of the United States is: “U.S. engagement prevents the territory of Afghanistan from being used to conduct terrorist attacks on the United States or any other country.”

  • RFERL ☛ Why China Is Closely Watching The Pakistani Elections

    With Pakistan becoming increasingly unstable, Beijing -- who has become one of Islamabad’s most important allies -- is worried about the future of its investments in the country of some 231 million people and ensuring the safety of Chinese workers who have increasingly come under deadly attacks.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Scheerpost ☛ Source Who Revealed How Taxes Steal for the Rich Rewarded With Five Years in Prison

    For leaking this sensitive information, Littlejohn has been sentenced to five years in federal prison, the maximum jail term (CNN, 1/29/24). Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a statement (1/29/24): [...]

  • India Times ☛ Taylor Swift's Battle with a College Student Tracking Her Jet | World News - Times of India

    At one point Sweeney had more than 30 flight tracking accounts on X, including that of owner Elon Musk. Musk had his own dustup with Sweeney, tweeting at one point that his commitment to free speech required him not to ban Sweeney's @elonjet account. But it wasn't long before Musk abruptly about-faced and banned the student from X, accusing Sweeney of endangering his personal safety.

  • The Dissenter ☛ What They Were Hiding: Increased Solitary Confinement In Immigrant Detention Facilities

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • TechXplore ☛ EVs that go 1,000 kilometers on a single charge: New gel may make it possible

      Futuristic advancements in AI and health care stole the limelight at the tech extravaganza Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024. However, battery technology is the game-changer at the heart of these innovations, enabling greater power efficiency. Importantly, electric vehicles are where this technology is being applied most intensely.

      Today's EVs can travel around 700km on a single charge, while researchers are aiming for a 1,000km battery range. Researchers are exploring the use of silicon, known for its high storage capacity, as the anode material in lithium-ion batteries for EVs. However, despite its potential, bringing silicon into practical use remains a puzzle that researchers are still working hard to piece together.

      Enter Professor Soojin Park, Ph.D. candidate Minjun Je, and Dr. Hye Bin Son from the Department of Chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). They have cracked the code, developing a pocket-friendly and rock-solid next-generation high-energy-density Li-ion battery system using micro silicon particles and gel polymer electrolytes. This work is published in the journal Advanced Science.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Energy security is global security - Atlantic Council

      In nine years as a US ambassador in Europe, I witnessed time and again Vladimir Putin’s use of energy as a tool of coercion. I saw it as ambassador to Greece when Russia cut off gas supplies to neighboring Bulgaria, and as ambassador to Ukraine when Russia tried to pressure Ukraine and the EU by altering gas transit, upending the reliable flow of energy.

    • International Business Times ☛ Lufthansa Warns 90% Flights Set To Be Cancelled, Affecting More Than 100,000 Passenger

      Lufthansa has sent out a massive warning to its customers stating that 90% of its flights are set to be cancelled this week.

      The flag carrier of Germany has announced it is going to face "extensive" problems with flights with nearly 25,000 ground staff set to walk out of airports on strike. Lufthansa's ground staff are represented by the Vereinigte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft (Ver.di), the second-largest trade union in Germany. The union has announced that the strike will begin at 4 AM on Wednesday and will go on till 7: 10 AM on Thursday, lasting 27 hours.

      Germany, Europe's largest economy, has faced a series of nationwide strikes impacting rail, air and public transportation over the years. The latest industrial action will affect flights to and from several airports in the country, including Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, and Dusseldorf, with more than 100,000 people expected to be affected overall.

      The German carrier took to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday to inform its customers that only 10-20 per cent of flights will be able to take off on Wednesday.

    • AAAS ☛ An electrifying new ironmaking method could slash carbon emissions

      To tweak the setup to purify iron, Kempler’s team added iron oxide particles to its cathode. Now, the electrons sent to it would also release the oxygen atoms from iron oxide and again form sodium hydroxide—as well as leave behind solid metallic iron. The process is highly efficient, the researchers claim. In fact, they estimate that selling the chlorine and some of the sodium hydroxide at current market prices should enable the overall process to produce iron at roughly the same price as making it in blast furnaces. And because sodium hydroxide can bind CO2 and convert it into carbon-based minerals, the process could be used to help capture CO2, making it carbon negative.

• Finance

  • A Whole Lotta Nothing ☛ Today’s YouTubers are repeating the mistakes of yesterday’s bloggers – A Whole Lotta Nothing

    It reminds me a lot of how blogging changed around 2005-2009, when ad money came pouring in, and while it was great for bloggers that previously were just publishing for the heck of it (myself included), eventually the money tainted the process as many people rushed to improve their bottom line, often at the expense of whole reason they created their sites.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ A Golden Era of Blogging

    Platforms are like Rumpelstiltskin: they promise to spin you some gold, but in the end demand your first-born child.

  • Yahoo News ☛ Pfizer's Problems Go Far Beyond Just Declining COVID Revenue

    A lot can change on the stock market in just a few years, and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) is a great example. At the end of 2021, its shares were trading at around $60, and things were looking great for the COVID-19 vaccine maker. It would go on to hit a record of more than $100 billion in annual revenue in 2022.

    Today, however, the stock is below $30 per share. What was once hype and excitement surrounding the stock has now been replaced with fear and concern as investors worry about what the future holds for the business.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Scoop News Group ☛ DHS seeks 50 artificial intelligence experts for new AI Corps

    The announcement comes as federal agencies across the government have been working to implement the budding technology and develop their own guardrails for things like generative AI. President Joe Biden’s AI executive order also put an emphasis on the technology, including efforts to hire AI talent in the federal government.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Arm's stock gains more than 25% on strong earnings beat and bullish guidance

    Arm is a chip design company that primarily makes money through royalties. Its customers pay those fees to access its designs, which enable them to build Arm-compatible chips. The royalties are usually just a small fraction of the overall chip price.

    In a letter to shareholders, Arm said its customers shipped more than 7.7 billion Arm chips in the September quarter, which is the most recent period for which numbers are available.

  • International Business Times ☛ New AI Regulation White Paper Talks of Preparing the UK Economy for Future AI Risks | IBTimes UK

    The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology announced on February 6 a new AI regulation white paper which would help UK regulators with over £100 million in funding to advance research and innovation in the AI field, especially in the healthcare and drug discovery sector. As part of the plan, the Sunak government has asked UK regulators to publish a plan of action to tackle AI risks and opportunities by April end.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Echoes of the Past and Their Impact on Security Today

    When I was a boy, my parents often made me read books they thought were important. One of these was “The Republic” by Plato, written around 380 BC. After reading each book, they’d ask me to talk about what I learned. Reading this one, I realized that politics haven’t changed much over time and that people always seem to believe their group should be the ones making the big decisions. This was the first time I truly understood the saying “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” As someone who works in security, I think it’s important we all remember this. For example, these days, there’s a huge focus on Supply Chain Security in software, almost like it’s a brand-new idea. But if we look back to 1984, Ken Thompson talked about this very concept in his Turing Award lecture where he said, “No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.”

  • [Old] uni California ☛ Risk Management is Where the Money is

    Security technology has heretofore been about moving trust around as if risk is definitionally undesirable and reliable trust management simply obviates the issue of risk. It does not come close. In two years time the "trust-hauling" market will be somewhere on the down-slope between legacy and dead. Risk management is going to take over as the dominant paradigm because risk management can subsume trust, but trust management cannot subsume risk. The Internet has made this so.

    The Internet is irresistible because it lowers barriers to entry on a global basis -- global in both space and time. Ever more important parts of the world's economy exist only in cyberspace, and lead times have entirely collapsed. Every professional fortune teller is bidding geometric increases n the dollar volume of electronic commercial activity. But when there is enough booty available, even absurdly difficult attacks become plausible. This is the world we are in. It will never be possible to really do the job of trust management any more than it is possible to really win an arms race or really preclude your car from being stolen. But risk management -- that is doable and it is doable at a profit. The proof is all around us.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes

    These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ New EU plans against child abuse inadequate – Patrick Breyer

    “The proposals fall far short of truly protecting children better. Apart from sensible proposals, the Commission is riding on a wave of criminalisation and tougher penalties, without any proof of effectiveness. Following controversial German legislation, encrypted messenger services, anonymous forums or encrypted file hosting services are being exposed to the risk of criminalisation and closure for ‘facilitating or promoting criminal offences’ (Article 8).

    A dangerous gap in the proposal is the often amateurish and under-equipped prosecution of child sexual abuse. We need EU-wide standards and guidelines for criminal investigations into child abuse offences, including the identification of victims and the necessary technical means. We need to collect statistics on how long investigations take and how successful they are in order to improve. Law enforcement should be obliged to report criminal material for removal instead of – as in the Boystown case – simply watching it spread.

  • Quartz ☛ Elon Musk net worth plummets as Tesla stock, market cap fall

    The Bloomberg Billionaires Index suggests that Musk has lost more than $24 billion this year. Even after a judge said the company paid him too much, Tesla stock is the biggest source of his wealth. It’s down nearly 28% for the year already, beset by a variety of woes, including lots of recalls and stiffer competition in the electric vehicle market.

  • Quartz ☛ Snapchat is laying off 10% of its global workforce

    In the same filing, Snap said it expects to incur charges of $55 million to $75 million as a result of the layoffs. Most of those charges, which mainly consist of severance packages, are expected in the first quarter of 2024. Nearly 540 of the company’s reported 5,400 employees will be impacted.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Citizen Lab ☛ PAPERWALL: Chinese Websites Posing as Local News Outlets Target Global Audiences with Pro-Beijing Content

      A network of at least 123 websites operated from within the People’s Republic of China while posing as local news outlets in 30 countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, disseminates pro-Beijing disinformation and ad hominem attacks within much larger volumes of commercial press releases. We name this campaign PAPERWALL.

      PAPERWALL has similarities with HaiEnergy, an influence operation first reported on in 2022 by the cybersecurity company Mandiant. However, we assess PAPERWALL to be a distinct campaign with different operators and unique techniques, tactics and procedures.

    • Futurism ☛ Former Google News Director Admits Big Tech Is Killing Journalism

      Between many massive rounds of industry layoffs, a changing technological landscape, and increasingly eroding public trust in the news, the future of journalism is muddier than ever. And according to one former Big Tech executive? Big Tech's current project, generative AI, might put a nail in the media's coffin — or at the very least, fundamentally change what journalism is and how it's consumed [sic].

    • The Washington Post ☛ Opinion | Ex-Google director: The real wolf menacing the news business is AI

      In any event, regulators pursued the illegitimate complaint: the idea that platforms should pay publishers every time they display a headline/blurb or sometimes even for the act of linking itself. As these regulations or threats of regulation spread around the world — Europe, Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Canada — I spent more and more time preparing to disable news products, or disabling search, or building accounting systems to count “snippets” and calculate payments. That meant I spent less time giving journalists research and transcription tools, or building mechanisms to help retain subscribers.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • 404 Media ☛ Stripe Cuts Off Platform Used by Dominatrixes

    A recent addition to online payment processor Stripe’s already strict rules has kicked a platform used by online dominatrixes off its services.

    Wishtender, a platform that allows people to make wishlists and send gifts anonymously—and is used by many findommes and other online sex workers—announced that it was scrambling to adjust to Stripe cutting it off.

  • RFA ☛ Burned Bibles and broken homes

    The incident was the latest in a string of similar assaults and legal moves against Christians in the one-party communist state with a mostly Buddhist population despite a national law protecting the free exercise of their faith.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Mobile Internet Suspended in Poonch-Rajouri; Omar Abdullah Barred from Visiting Region

    A day after the Lok Sabha passed the Constitution Jammu and Kashmir Scheduled Tribes Order (Amendment) Bill, 2024 to provide Scheduled Tribe (ST) status to Pahari and three other communities in the Union Territory, the authorities suspended mobile [Internet] services and banned mass gatherings in the twin districts of Rajouri and Poonch “as a precautionary measure.”

  • JURIST ☛ Moscow court orders arrest of exiled novelist Boris Akunin over Ukraine support

    The Basmanny District Court in Moscow ruled for Akunin’s arrest, stipulating a two-month detention period should he be extradited to Russia. If convicted, Akunin, 67, could face up to seven years in prison for terrorism-related charges and up to 10 years for disseminating “fake news” during wartime. In December, Russia’s Ministry of Justice opened a criminal case against Akunin, and on January 12, it recognized him as a foreign agent.

  • JURIST ☛ Australian journalist receives death sentence from Beijing court

    Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Dr. Yang Hengjun, an Australian writer, to a suspended death sentence on Monday. The sentence can be reduced to a life sentence after two years of good behaviour.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ How Scottish Beacon aims to promote local independent journalism

    Launched in August last year by a team at Greater Govanhill, a Glasgow-based not-for-profit magazine, The Scottish Beacon is a website that showcases work from 22 independent local and hyperlocal newsrooms across Scotland.

  • JURIST ☛ UN rights expert urges UK government to halt extradition of Julian Assange

    UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, urged the UK government Tuesday to stop the impending extradition of Julian Assange to the US. She urged the government to carefully consider Assange’s appeal and cited significant concerns that his extradition could put him at risk of treatment amounting to torture.

  • Center for International Media Assistance ☛ Are Donors Taking the Journalism Crisis Seriously? An Analysis of Official Aid to Media 2010–2019

    The future of independent journalism is in crisis. Escalating threats are driving a record number of journalists into exile and authoritarians are finding new ways to silence journalism, control the information space, and stifle public debate and dissent. Traditional business models for the media are no longer viable in the wake of digital transformations. To secure the future of independent journalism, international aid is critical. And yet, the international assistance community is not meeting the needs of a sector in danger of extinction. Support for media has languished at 0.3 percent of total official development assistance. Out of the more than $200 billion of development aid spent each year, just $317 million on average is committed to support media freedom, pluralism, and independence. While the world’s major democracies have reaffirmed their commitment to saving independent media in recent years, this has yet to translate into a meaningful increase in foreign assistance to the sector.

  • RFERL ☛ Incarceration Of 11 Kyrgyz Journalists Condemned By CPJ Media Watchdog

    Last month, eight international human rights groups -- Civil Rights Defenders, Human Rights Watch, International Partnership for Human Rights, Norwegian Helsinki Committee, People In Need, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, International Federation for Human Rights, and the World Organization Against Torture -- called on the Kyrgyz government to stop its crackdown on independent media, calling the reporters' arrests "intimidation and harassment" of journalists to keep them from carrying out their work.

  • RFERL ☛ Independent Kloop Website Blocked In Kyrgyzstan Amid Government Pressure

    Kloop said at the time it was officially informed of the lawsuit against it that the move was taken after an audit by the State Committee for National Security (UKMK) determined its "published materials are aimed at sharply criticizing the policies of the current government" and that "most of the publications are purely negative, aimed at discrediting representatives of state and municipal bodies."

    Established in June 2007, Kloop is a Kyrgyz news website most of whose contributors are students and graduates of the Kloop Media Public Foundation School of Journalism. As an independent media entity, it is known for publishing reports on corruption within various governmental bodies and providing training to Central Asian journalists in fact-checking and investigative techniques.

  • CPJ ☛ Moscow police detain around 20 journalists during protest by soldiers’ wives

    Around 20 journalists were arrested and briefly detained in the Russian capital of Moscow on February 3 while covering a protest led by a movement of Russian women demanding the return from Ukraine of their men, who were mobilized following a September 2022 decree by President Vladimir Putin, according to multiple media reports and human-rights news website OVD-Info.

  • CPJ ☛ Ghanaian journalist Mohammed Aminu Alabira says NPP parliamentarian, party supporters punched and kicked him

    Alabira, a correspondent for privately owned broadcaster Citi FM, told CPJ he was covering the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) parliamentary primaries on January 27 in the northern town of Yendi when an unidentified man approached the counting area and accused an electoral official of destroying ballot papers. The man’s allegation resulted in an uproar among NPP party supporters, who began destroying ballot papers and electoral equipment, according to Alabira and a colleague, who witnessed the incident and spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFA ☛ Tibetan monk who criticized China’s policies released from prison

    Tsultrim was a monk at the Nangzhig Monastery in Sichuan’s Ngaba county when he was taken into custody in 2019. He was secretly detained for more than a year and sentenced in a closed trial in 2021.

    Before his arrest, he had written favorably on the language rights of Tibetans and had praised the previous incarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s second-most important spiritual leader behind the Dalai Lama.

    He posted the writings on his website and had received at least three warnings from Chinese authorities before he was detained.

  • JURIST ☛ Zimbabwe government agrees to abolish death penalty 19 years after last execution

    The Zimbabwean cabinet passed a private member’s bill which was introduced at the end of last year to officially abolish the death penalty. The decision has also been welcomed by the United Nations entity in Zimbabwe who stated that the abolishment is “an important step towards enhancing human rights and aligning with global progress” in other countries which have outlawed the punishment.

  • Meduza ☛ Woman who was forcibly returned to Chechnya after fleeing her family feared victim of ‘honor killing’

    A 26-year-old woman from Chechnya, Seda Suleymanova, who was forcibly returned to the republic after escaping from her home there, may have been killed by relatives in an “honor killing,” two separate sources told human rights group SK SOS.

  • Scheerpost ☛ John Kiriakou: Dying by Callous Disregard – ScheerPost

    I was lucky. But what would have happened to somebody in a similar circumstance in prison, where nobody cares if you live or die and where medical care varies from substandard to nonexistent?

    I think the answer is an easy one.

    Look at the case of Lucas Bellamy.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Disney Plus will start its password-sharing crackdown this summer

    This comes as Disney Plus plans to launch a one-app experience with Hulu in March after releasing it in beta last year. The company’s earnings report also revealed that Disney Plus lost 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada following last year’s price hikes, while Hulu added 1.2 million members.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

  In both cases, an apologist for corruption masquerades as a pragmatist who understands the ways of the world, unlike you, a pathetic dreamer who foolishly hopes for a better world. In both cases, the apologist provides cover for corruption, painting it as an inevitability, not a choice. "Don't hate the player. Hate the game."

• Patents

  • India Times ☛ intel r2 semiconductor patent row: German court rules against Intel in patent row over chips

    A court in Germany has issued an injunction against the sale of some of Intel's chips, in a patent dispute between the tech giant and another US company that filed the complaint.

    The regional court in Dusseldorf ruled in favour of California-based R2 Semiconductor in a case involving voltage regulators, a court spokesperson said, confirming an earlier report in the Financial Times.

• Copyrights

  • Walled Culture ☛ Important court ruling on copyright ought to lead to a blossoming of UK open culture – but will it?

    This touches on a topic that Walled Culture has written about many times: the fact that many museums and art galleries around the world try to claim copyright on faithful reproductions of artistic creations in their collections that are unequivocally in the public domain. Their argument, such as it is, seems to be that taking a digital photo or making a 3D copy requires such an immense intellectual effort that a new monopoly should be granted on it. It’s really about money, of course.

  • The Verge ☛ How to keep your art out of AI generators - The Verge

    The pervasive nature of it seems especially egregious to creators who are fighting to stop their works from being used, without consent or compensation, to improve the very thing that threatens to disrupt their careers and livelihoods. The data pools that go into training generative AI models often contain images that are indiscriminately scraped from the [Internet], and some AI image generator tools allow users to upload reference images they want to imitate. Many creative professionals need to advertise their work via social media and online portfolios, so simply taking everything offline isn’t a viable solution. And a lack of legal clarity around AI technology has created something of a Wild-West environment that’s difficult to resist. Difficult, but not impossible.

    While the tools are often complicated and time consuming, several AI companies provide creators with ways to opt their work out of training. And for visual artists who want broader protections there are tools like Glaze and Kin.Art, which make the works useless for training. Here’s how to navigate the best solutions we’ve found so far.