Links 24/03/2024: Another Royal Cancer Case and Antarctica at Risk
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
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Ruben Schade ☛ Some things you might not know about me
My first paid job was voice acting. My sister and I auditioned for the Discovery Kids programme on the Discovery Channel, and both got the gig. We did promos and those “coming up next” bumpers.
I’ve been to Auckland, Colombo, Dallas, Darwin, and Dubai, but never left the airport. All of them were scheduled, save for Sri Lanka. Our Emirates flight to Frankfurt landed there out of the blue, and sat on the tarmac for more than an hour. We were never told why.
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Tedium ☛ Songs About Superman
Why was alternative rock inundated with hit songs about Superman throughout the 1990s and early 2000s? Consider the monoculture.
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Off Guardian ☛ Oppositional Defiance
Remember the bad kids in high school? The ones who didn’t make it onto the honour roll or the dean’s list? In my day they were the long-haired kids (the boys) who wore James Dean-style denim jackets and smoked in the bathrooms.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ Growth is a mind cancer
But it's our fault. Our as a society. We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don't celebrate when someone says "You know what? I think I have enough".
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Pete Brown ☛ More choices v. better things
What I sometimes find myself thinking, though, is that we tend to get stuck on the “more choices” part and lose sight of the “better things” outcome, which is what I think we are all actually looking for.
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Robin Rendle ☛ Robin Rendle — Is there a sane way to use the internet?
Then Ezra hit me with this line:
"What mediums do you want to be more like?"
It’s blogging and novels, for me. I want all the romance and poetry of a novel combined with all the excitement and messiness of a blog. That seems like a nice balance.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ I completed #100DaysToOffload
Between March 1st 2023’s Potluck: The Deck and February 21st 2024’s Talk ideas for new and experienced speakers, I published 100 blog posts so I called it a win and submitted a pull request to add myself to the Hall of Fame.
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Ben Tsai ☛ Blogging Retrospection
As part of consolidating my posts to Pika, I’ve been manually pasting old posts from other platforms here. And in through that process, I’ve basically reread everything I’ve written. That brought me a mix of emotions.
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Tim Bornholdt ☛ High quality album artwork
But that's not the only thing that's fun in the world. And I might have done a bit better at relegating those pursuits to my professional life, and then figured out a way to pursue other joyful things outside of that.
It's weird coming back to my media library after essentially neglecting it for most of my adult life. It feels like opening a time capsule, but then jumping down into it and living amongst the decade old cruft.
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Hackaday ☛ Building A Tribute Version Of Mattel’s VertiBird Toy
Mattel had a ton of hit toys in the 20th century. In the early 1970s, the VertiBird was one of them, letting kids pretend to fly a helicopter in circles on their loungeroom floor. An original VertiBird can be hard to come by these days, but what if you could make your own? Well, [Gord Payne] did just that!
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Hackaday ☛ It’s About Time
I’m pretty good with time zones. After all, I live in Germany, Hackaday’s server is in Los Angeles, and our writers are scattered all over the globe. I’m always translating one time into another, and practice makes (nearly) perfect. But still, it got me.
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Standards/Consortia
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[Old] MJ Fransen ☛ Advantages of FODT format in LibreOffice
Open document format
It is very important to use open formats for files and documents. Closed source vendors, like Microsoft, use their file formats as a weapon to force users into buying new versions. LibreOffice, like most open source applications. use open formats to encourage collaboration with other applications. Because their open format and the absence of the commercial need to force users into new versions, open format can be used for many years and will still be readable in future decades.
FODT format
A special variant of the odt format is the fodt format.
The fodt format is a single XML document, also known as Flat XML or Uncompressed XML Files. The normally used odt file is a collection of several sub-documents that are zipped together. The resulting file, the odt, of a LibreOffice text document will be smaller then the fodt-version of the same document. However, the fodt has some advantages.
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Science
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El País ☛ The magnetic shield that protects Earth and makes life possible
Spoiler alert: every second, Earth’s magnetic field deflects about 1.5 million tons of material ejected from the Sun at high speed. If it were not there, the atmosphere would suffer direct and continuous erosion. It would not be able to avoid the direct impact of those solar particles, which would sweep everything that protects us away with them. Therefore, without Earth’s magnetic field, life as we know it would not exist on the surface of our planet. Of course, our technological societies would not be possible either, since the magnetic field also protects our electronic equipment, not just our DNA, from this same bombardment.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ The huge, resource rich territory China will snatch while the West dithers: Antarctica
So the Antarctic Treaty has endured and expanded, due partly to its wisdom and partly because defying it, in practical terms, is hard to do. However, when working down there, one always had the sense that as soon as Antarctica’s vast resources become economically worth the risk of exploiting, this would change. We may be seeing the start of this now.
There are no prizes for guessing who is leading the charge. China only recently built its fifth base in Antarctica ‘for scientific purposes’ without submitting the environmental evaluations required by the treaty. The base was built in three months. The US still has the largest footprint on the continent, but the Chinese one is growing the fastest. American, UK or South Korean bases are not used for military purposes, spying or listening. I know this because I’ve been in them.
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Education
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Sara Jakša ☛ The Inner and Outer Layer of Participating
The other person told me, that for their junior collages, he recommends my speeches as example of how one does not need to be perfect to participate or contribute, I don't remember which word exactly, but somewhere in that area.
That actually gave me a pause. Because it the way it is true. One does not have to be perfect to contribute.
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Robin Rendle ☛ Robin Rendle — One endless meeting
We made a list on my team at Retool the other day of all the things we’ve done, everything we’ve shipped since the team started back in November. And it’s a lot! Plus, I realized that we’d shipped more in the last four months than I had in the prior three years. So what gives?
Was it the folks I was working with? Was it 10× engineers? Am I a 10× designer? (Lol no.) Or perhaps it was the environment? The snacks at the office? The app that we’re building? Were we all just running as fast as humanly possible and shipping a bunch of garbage? (Well, no. I think we’re all proud of what we’ve built so far, so that can’t be it.)
I think there’s a few reasons why we’ve been productive: [...]
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The Atlantic ☛ The wrong way to study AI in college
This talk of subordination naturally turned my mind toward AI, a technology that some believe threatens to upend the world as we know it. If students pursue majors in AI within the isolated confines of a college of computing—without the grounding of a broader arts-and-science education—how can we expect them to make wise decisions about how that technology is applied? I asked Ian for his thoughts.
“We generally don’t use computers just for computing—the computing does something,” he told me. “AI is a term without real meaning; in some ways, it’s just a nickname for a certain intensification of automation that’s been ongoing for years. But one of the promises, or threats, of AI is that it can apply computing problem-solving to many more domains, and very effectively. So if computer people do, in fact, know less about everything in the world beyond computing while simultaneously building or applying AI to many more problem spaces, and faster, too, then that seems like it could be quite concerning indeed.”
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Hardware
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J Pieper ☛ External daisy chain boards and new PH3 cable lengths
First are two tiny boards to make daisy chaining power and CAN-FD connections easier for boards that don’t have built-in daisy chain connectors like the moteus-n1. First is a junction board for PH3 cables:
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Bunnie Huang ☛ Sidebar on Meta-Knowledge
IRIS (Infra-Red, in-situ) is a multidisciplinary project I’m developing to give people a tangible reason to trust their hardware.
When I set out to research this technique, there were many unknowns, and many skills I lacked to complete the project. This means I made many mistakes along the way, and had to iterate several times to reach the current solution.
Instead of presenting just the final solution, I thought it might be interesting to share some of the failures and missteps I made along the way. The propensity to show only final results can make technology feel less inclusive: if you aren’t already in the know, it’s easy to feel like everything is magic. Nothing can be farther from the truth
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CNX Software ☛ Renesas RA2A2 Arm Cortex-M23 microcontroller offers high-resolution 24-bit ADC, up to 512KB dual-bank flash
Renesas Electronics RA2A2 Arm Cortex-M23 microcontroller (MCU) group offers a 7-channel high-resolution 24-bit Sigma-Delta ADC, as well as dual-bank flash and bank swap function for an easier implementation of firmware over-the-air (FOTA) updates. The 48MHz MCU also comes with 48KB SRAM, up to 512KB code flash, various interfaces, and safety and security features that make it suitable for smart energy management, building automation, medical devices, consumer electronics, and other IoT applications that can benefit from high-resolution analog inputs and firmware updates.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Cannabis: German growers celebrate as hemp is legalized
That was the day the German parliament passed the government's draft law "on the controlled distribution of cannabis to adults for consumption purposes." It stipulates that all adults will be allowed to grow three cannabis plants at home and keep up to 50 grams (1.75 ounces) of cannabis there, and may also carry up to 25 grams on their person.
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Futurism ☛ Loneliness Worse for Health Than Smoking, Obesity, Alcoholism
Published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, this groundbreaking look at what researchers are calling a "biophysical stressor" may help doctors better address this overlooked lifestyle factor that seems to greatly reduce quality of life for seniors.
The results were alarming: that nearly 53 percent of seniors identified in a database study experienced loneliness, and among those who experienced it, mental and physical health outcomes were much poorer across demographics and health conditions.
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Regenstrief Institute ☛ Primary care clinicians can offer solutions for loneliness
Loneliness is a significant biopsychosocial stressor with a mortality risk comparable to smoking more than 15 cigarettes a day and more harmful than alcoholism, obesity and lack of physical activity.
Despite its harmful effects, interventions to address the discrepancy between desired and actual social interaction are few and limited.
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Axios ☛ Air pollution in U.S.: Columbus, Minneapolis among worst air quality
The big picture: It's not coincidental that the cities with the worst air quality last year were in the Upper Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, as those regions were smothered in smoke from Canada's unprecedented wildfire season.
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IQAir ☛ 2023 World Air Quality Report | IQAir
Exposure to PM2.5 air pollution leads to and exacerbates numerous health conditions, including but not limited to asthma, cancer, stroke, and lung disease.2 Additionally, exposure to elevated levels of fine particles can impair cognitive development in children, lead to mental health issues, and complicate existing illnesses including diabetes.
The data utilized to create this report was aggregated from the global distribution of more than 30,000 regulatory air quality monitoring stations and low-cost air quality sensors operated by research institutions, governmental bodies, universities and educational facilities, non-profit non-governmental organizations, private companies, and citizen scientists.
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Kate Middleton announced that she is being treated for cancer. Guess what happened next? (Hint: Antivaxxers)
I must admit that I’ve never really been much into following the antics of Britain’s royal family. Like many Americans, I tend to look at the British royal family with bemusement at the realization that such an advanced nation still maintains such an outdated and unnecessary (not to mention expensive) appendage to the government as a royal family mixed with fascination at the antics of the modern royal family. While it is true that my wife and I did tour Buckingham Palace during a trip to London in 2015, a tour I highly recommend if you ever get the chance, that doesn’t mean I’ve ever been into the royals much beyond occasionally writing about Prince Charles (now King Charles) and his love of The One Quackery To Rule Them All, homeopathy, something that Edzard Ernst writes about a lot—understandably so given how badly he was treated by Charles. Even so, I must admit to some curiosity about what is really going on when I learned that Kate Middleton, now the Princess of Wales, announced that she is being treated for cancer: [...]
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YLE ☛ Some ADHD drugs in short supply, no immediate relief in sight
Finland, like some other European countries, has been hit by shortages of the medications. The situation could persist until late May.
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Science Alert ☛ Brain Waves Move in Opposite Directions For Memorizing And Recalling
Dynamic dances.
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Science Alert ☛ Landmark Study Confirms Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Is 'Unambiguously Biological'
The results are finally out.
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NYPost ☛ Deadly flesh-eating infection spreading at record levels in Japan, puzzling health officials
The bacteria is highly contagious and can lead to serious illness and death in adults over the age of 30, with older people at greater risk, according to NIID.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Wired ☛ Apple Chip Flaw Leaks Secret Encryption Keys
The flaw, which is present in Apple’s M1, M2, and M3 chips, is essentially unpatchable because it is present in the silicon itself. There are mitigation techniques that cryptographic developers can create to reduce the efficacy of the exploit, but as Kim Zetter at Zero Day writes, “the bottom line for users is that there is nothing you can do to address this.”
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Futurism ☛ Redditors Vent and Complain When People Mock Their "AI Art"
The fierce debate over generative AI art recently flared up in a Facebook group, when a user shared several AI art images depicting a character from the video game Baldur’s Gate 3 — and then got banned from the group after they ran afoul of anti-AI art moderators and other users.
The user then retreated to a subreddit called Defending AI Art to elicit sympathy from fellow AI art enthusiasts and lick their metaphorical wounds.
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The Verge ☛ AI-generated blues misses a human touch — and a metronome
As a musician, performing for a live audience was necessary for making money and becoming a known quantity. But we also needed to be good. Doing it well means reacting during a show, lingering on part of a song when the crowd loves it, or switching the setlist up on the fly. When we were at our best, we formed something like a symbiosis with our audience for a few fleeting moments or sometimes for a whole set. The best performers can make that happen almost at will. (I was not one of those performers.)
It’s hard to imagine Suno or anything like it ever being able to pull that off. So I don’t expect it to be a straight-up replacement for live music, which is one of the most important parts of the medium, anytime soon. But that’s only one part of the package, right? Before we get to a robotic band drawing people to a dance floor or making folks cry in an auditorium, AI needs to transcend the parlor trick of imitation and start demonstrating an understanding of what moves people.
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Benedict Evans ☛ The problem of AI ethics, and laws about AI — Benedict Evans
Meanwhile, Fujitsu and the Post Office knew that the system was full of bugs that could cause false shortfalls to appear, but Fujitsu and Post Office staff went to court and testified that the system was working correctly and that theft was the only explanation. This has now, understandably, become a huge scandal.
I think about this case every time I hear about AI Ethics and every time people talk about regulating AI. Fujitsu was not building machine learning or LLMs - this was 1970s technology. But we don’t look at this scandal and say that we need Database Ethics, or that the solution is a SQL Regulator. This was an institutional failure inside Fujitsu and inside the Post Office, and in a court system failing to test the evidence properly. And, to be clear, the failure was not that there were bugs, but in refusing to acknowledge the bugs. But either way, to take the language that people now use to worry about AI: a computer, running indeterminate software that was hard to diagnose or understand, made ‘decisions’ that ruined people’s lives - it ‘decided’ that money was missing. The staff at the Post Office just went along with those decisions.
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Jason Becker ☛ I think Apple loves you’re using an older Mac
I actually think Apple loves that you can use a Mac and iPhone this long and still be happy. It’s probably about the edge, because in today’s world security patching alone puts a huge burden at some point. But I think Apple wants its products to last and loves having users talk about their 8 year old Mac.
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Futurism ☛ Acclaimed Movie Secretly Contained AI Generated Imagery
Critics and audiences alike have raved about the movie since it premiered at the SXSW film festival — but that goodwill proved to be short-lived. In a scathing and now viral review shared on Letterboxd, a user called out the movie for having AI "all over" certain sequences, garnering thousands of likes and inciting tons of fiery discourse on other social media platforms.
"Don't let this be the start of accepting this shit in your entertainment," the user wrote.
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The Register UK ☛ Hardware-level vulnerability found in Apple Silicon CPUs
Dubbed GoFetch by the team that discovered it, the issue stems from how processors equipped with data memory-dependent prefetchers (DMPs) - eg, Arm-compatible Apple Silicon chips, and 13th generation and newer Intel architectures - can end up revealing sensitive information to malware running on a device.
For decades a lot of processors have typically used some kind of prefetching to boost their performance: These usually work by predicting what data the currently running program will need next from, say, system memory and automatically bringing that information into a cache within the processor from DRAM so it's ready for near-immediate use. The location of the data to prefetch could be predicted by noticing that a CPU core is accessing information in a certain pattern and then following that pattern ahead of execution.
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Hidde de Vries ☛ Clippy returned (as an unnecessary “AI”)
And yet, I'm not convinced these features are helpful. They interrupt a flow, the actual content production. And they're actively pushed onto users, from in-software notifications to promotional webinars. If that push is successful, everyone in the world will have to put up with the fruits of these features. It's to be seen what those fruits are: content that is better, content that is more superfluous or a bit of both?
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Netzpolitik ☛ Taurus leak: When it comes to privacy, it’s all or nothing
This incident underscores something important: private communications only work if everyone participates. If one person or endpoint is compromised, the whole network goes with it. Which means that digital privacy and security must be embedded at the core of our digital infrastructure. As we saw with the German military, relegating privacy to the status of optional „add ons“ or institutional infrastructure for a privileged few means that they will, at some point, fail. And when they do, they will fail everyone.
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The Register UK ☛ US to conduct 'industry-wide' privacy review of airlines
It won't have escaped anyone's notice, though, that airlines flying to and from the United States already are obliged to share airline passenger name records (PNR) with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – including names, telephone and credit card numbers, and more, soon after they've booked a flight. The hope would be that the government's system security is beyond reproach.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ Apple researchers explore dropping “Siri” phrase & listening with AI instead
Currently, Siri functions by holding small amounts of audio and does not begin recording or preparing to answer user prompts until it hears the trigger phrase. Eliminating that “Hey Siri” prompt could increase concerns about our devices “always listening”, said Jen King, a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
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arXiv ☛ [2403.14438] A Multimodal Approach to Device-Directed Speech Detection with Large Language Models
Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a predefined trigger phrase followed by the user command. To make interactions with the assistant more intuitive, we explore whether it is feasible to drop the requirement that users must begin each command with a trigger phrase. We explore this task in three ways: First, we train classifiers using only acoustic information obtained from the audio waveform. Second, we take the decoder outputs of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, such as 1-best hypotheses, as input features to a large language model (LLM). Finally, we explore a multimodal system that combines acoustic and lexical features, as well as ASR decoder signals in an LLM. Using multimodal information yields relative equal-error-rate improvements over text-only and audio-only models of up to 39% and 61%. Increasing the size of the LLM and training with low-rank adaption leads to further relative EER reductions of up to 18% on our dataset.
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The Register UK ☛ Chinese-market iPhones could feature AI powered by Baidu
Future iPhones in China could include AI features powered by Baidu's ERNIE chat bot.
Apple is apparently in talks with the Chinese web giant to integrate its machine-learning technology into iPhones sold in the Middle Kingdom, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Friday citing people familiar with the matter.
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India Times ☛ Apple: Apple held talks with China's Baidu over AI for its devices: report
Apple has held preliminary talks with Baidu about using the Chinese company's generative artificial-intelligence technology in its devices in China, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
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Deccan Chronicle ☛ Phone Tapping Case: Two Additional DSPs Arrested
Police alleged that the officers were without authorisation tapping the mobile phones of major leaders of political parties including the BRS as well as those of their family members.
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New York Times ☛ For Catherine, Living a Public Life in a Public Body, Privacy is Illusory
She asked for space after her cancer diagnosis, but cancer is a series of intrusions for any patient. And when Catherine agreed to marry a future king, her body ceased to be her own.
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New York Times ☛ Princess Kate’s Cancer Disclosure Shows Her Lessons From Previous Media Ordeals
“They know they can’t control the online world,” one expert on the royal family said about the recent spate of revelations about the health of Catherine and King Charles III.
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Defence/Aggression
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The Gray Zone ☛ Kosovo War at 25: Blair’s secret invasion plot to ‘topple Milosevic’ revealed
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The Hill ☛ US TikTok ban is good for the West, but what about Meta and X?
TikTok is already being used by the Chinese government to extend its foreign influence in the West. It’s high time the U.S. did something about it, after mostly avoiding the problem for years. What it did, of course, was pass a bill last week in the House of Representatives to ban TikTok, unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd, divests its American business interests.
On balance, this bill — if passed by the Senate — has potential to be a “win-win-win,” as NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway put it. If TikTok is sold off to American owners, the app won’t be banned in the U.S., the value of the company might actually rise and the West will have thwarted a propaganda security threat ahead of the next U.S. presidential elections.
The only problem is the cybersecurity threat that provoked this landslide vote in the House isn’t all that unique to TikTok. So, at only 12 pages, this legislation, which is hyper-focused on TikTok and only TikTok, has received some backlash. A more nuanced bill could have addressed the broader data security concerns that present on every social media platform and threaten Western national security.
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Social Economics Lab ☛ Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides - Social Economics Lab
We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms — i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Opinion: Trump shows what democracy can learn from ancient Greece
Yet the Athenian instruction more explicitly references “caring” in the sense of being a caretaker or guardian. This suggests that the officials’ duty is not simply to ensure the laws are executed, but also to safeguard their spirit. To execute without caring, indifferent to the fate of the overall democratic system, is to fail to execute properly at all.
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Deccan Chronicle ☛ India brings 35 Somali pirates to Mumbai
Indian Navy warship INS Kolkata on Saturday reached Mumbai with 35 apprehended Somali pirates and handed them to local police for further legal action in accordance with Indian laws, specifically the Maritime Anti Piracy Act 2022.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Somali pirates to face trial after India navy capture
Thirty-five suspected Somali pirates arrived in Mumbai aboard the Indian Navy destroyer INS Kolkata on Saturday.
They were apprehended in a daring high-seas Indian naval operation last week that recaptured a hijacked ship and freed its hostages.
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New York Times ☛ Abbott’s Army on the Border: Is it Working?
The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has spent $10 billion building his own border security network. In Eagle Pass, where it has been concentrated, far fewer migrants have been crossing this year.
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New York Times ☛ China’s Dispute With Taiwan Is Playing Out Near This Tiny Island
A fatal incident off Kinmen, a Taiwanese-controlled island, has become the latest occasion for Beijing to warn and test Taiwan’s president-elect.
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New York Times ☛ China’s Plan to Spur Growth: A New Slogan With Familiar Ideas
As China’s leaders promote their strategy, other countries worry the country is increasing factory overcapacity and plans more exports.
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RFA ☛ Manila blasts China’s ‘unprovoked aggression’ in latest South China Sea incident
A Chinese coast guard ship fired a water cannon that allegedly heavily damaged a Philippine supply boat near the Second Thomas Shoal.
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The Straits Times ☛ China vows to safeguard its territorial integrity after South China Sea incident
The remarks come a day after an incident in disputed waters in the South China Sea.
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The Straits Times ☛ India, China need to find ways to return stability to disputed border: Foreign minister Jaishankar
With China and India emerging as rising powers, challenge is to find the sustainable equilibrium.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Meduza geolocates arrest video of Moscow terrorism suspect to town 85 miles from Ukrainian border — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses nation after Moscow terrorist attack — Meduza
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CS Monitor ☛ Islamic State group claims credit for Moscow concert hall attack
Much remains unknown about the Friday night attack, including whether it related to a security alert the U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued two weeks earlier and whether it signals a resurgence of the group in the West.
Russia continues to investigate after detaining 11 suspects but it wasn’t possible to confirm the authenticity of statements issued by Russian investigators.
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Meduza ☛ Russian FSB claims Moscow terrorist attack suspects planned to flee to Ukraine, had ‘relevant contacts’ there — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Car linked to Moscow concert hall terrorist attack reportedly apprehended, two suspects arrested, four possibly at large — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ FSB director tells Putin all suspects in Moscow concert hall terrorist attack arrested — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russia confirms 133 killed in terrorist attack at concert hall outside Moscow, number expected to grow — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry reports that all terrorist suspects are foreign nationals — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ The aftermath The first photos from inside the Moscow concert venue attacked by terrorists — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Kremlin tells pro-government media to emphasize possible ‘traces’ of ‘Ukrainian involvement’ in reporting on Moscow terrorist attack — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Video circulates showing Russian security agent cutting off the ear of an apprehended terrorist suspect and forcing him to eat it — Meduza
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-03-21 [Older] EU, US Discussed How to Address China's Role as Conduit for Goods to Russia
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-21 [Older] Nalvany's death leaves Canadian imprisoned in Russia concerned for prospect of freedom
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CPJ ☛ 2024-03-21 [Older] Spanish journalist Xavier Colás denied visa renewal, expelled from Russia
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The Age AU ☛ 2024-03-22 [Older] Houthis tell China, Russia their ships won’t be targeted in Red Sea
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2024-03-21 [Older] China calls on parties concerned with the Ukraine crisis to start peace talks with Russia
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-21 [Older] Russian grain aid: Feeding Africa or fueling influence?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-21 [Older] Ukraine in search of looted art following Russian invasion
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-21 [Older] Ukraine updates: Russia captures eastern Ukrainian village
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] PACE: ‘Russian and Belarusian athletes should not compete in the Paris Olympic Games’
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TruthOut ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] Criminal Charges Filed Against Russian Gay Club for “LGBT Extremism”
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] EU aims to boost Ukraine aid with seized Russian asset plan
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] In Kupiansk, Ukrainians fear the return of Russian troops
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] IOC blocks Russian athletes from Olympic opening ceremony
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] Ukraine: Kupiansk residents fear the return of Russian troops
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] EU Leaders to Discuss Using Profits From Russian Assets to Arm Ukraine
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] EU to Give Ukraine 3 Billion Euros of Profits Per Year From Russia Assets
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] Kremlin Says Russian Election Clean Amid Rigging Allegations
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-03-20 [Older] Russia Says EU Frozen Assets Plan Is Theft, Will Lead to Decades of Lawsuits
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Environment
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Greece ☛ Southern Europe most vulnerable to climate change impacts, expert study warns
“Southern Europe, low-lying coastal regions and the EU’s outermost regions are hotspot regions for climate risks,” the report warns. “Southern Europe is particularly affected by heat and prolonged drought. Three out of the eight risks in the highest urgency category are evaluated with this high-urgency score because of their high severity in Southern European climate risk assessment,” it adds.
Bringing together findings from all the recent scientific research and publications, the report identifies five areas where climate change will have the biggest impact and puts forward specific proposals for those cases where significant action is needed now. These are the following: [...]
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Futurism ☛ Trees "Coughing" as They Fail to Capture Excess CO2
It's a dire warning sign that subverts the commonly-held belief that plants and trees can help humanity reduce its carbon footprint. According to the US Department of Energy, plants absorb around 25 percent of the CO2 emitted as a result of human activity — but scientists are now expecting that number to go down significantly as global warming increases.
"We found that trees in warmer, drier climates are essentially coughing instead of breathing," said Lloyd, lead author of a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a statement. "They are sending CO2 right back into the atmosphere far more than trees in cooler, wetter conditions."
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Project Censored ☛ TikTok Influencers Promote Overconsumption of Fast Fashion
Trend cycles have shortened by half, and TikTok is constantly running through microtrends, described as single items of clothing or beauty products that peak quickly. Shortened trend cycles have distorted consumer mindsets into accepting impulse buying and overconsumption over individual style. In turn, fast fashion giants have boosted production even as they shorten timelines and slash costs.
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Project Censored ☛ Saltwater Intrusion Threatens Drinking Water along US Coasts
The “salt line” in coastal rivers is the zone where freshwater from upstream meets salt water from the ocean. This line typically moves back and forth naturally, but when areas experience prolonged drought, the salt water inexorably pushes farther inland, occupying freshwater channels.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Schwarzenegger, Fonda, Newsom fight for California oil drilling limits
There are more than 100,000 unplugged oil and gas wells across California, which are known to release cancer-causing chemicals and planet-warming methane.
Around 30,000 of these wells are within 3,200 feet of sensitive sites, according to the California Department of Conservation, the state agency that supervises drilling. That includes the homes of about 2.7 million Californians.
“Oil companies call the frontline communities ‘sacrifice zones,’ ” said Fonda, who has launched her own political action committee to oust fossil fuel supporters from public office. “We have to prove to them that we will not tolerate so many Californians to be considered sacrificeable.”
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Energy/Transportation
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RFERL ☛ 'Crypto King' Freed From Montenegro Prison To Shelter Facility Amid Extradition Battle
Reputed "cryptocurrency king" South Korean Do Kwon has been released from a Montenegrin prison after completing a four-month sentence for forgery and transferred to a center for foreigners outside the capital to await the outcome of an extradition battle.
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The Record ☛ UN probing 58 alleged [cryptocurrency] heists by North Korea worth $3 billion
“The country’s attack methodologies continue to include spearphishing, vulnerability exploits, social engineering and watering holes,” the experts said.
The panel is currently investigating 17 cryptocurrency hacks from 2023 alone, with the value of the stolen funds equivalent to about $750 million.
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NL Times ☛ Western countries become independent of Russian uranium thanks to Dutch Urenco factory
The Russian state-owned company Rosatom controlled around half of the world market for enriched uranium until 2022. Many Western countries wanted to get rid of Russian uranium since the war in Ukraine. US President Joe Biden is even considering banning imports soon. However, the European Union does not yet dare to impose sanctions because it is 35 percent dependent on Russian uranium.
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Gizmodo ☛ Laser Strikes Against Planes Hit Record High
The FAA received 1,297 reports of laser strikes in the U.S. in February alone, an average of 44.7 per day. That’s significantly higher than January, which saw an average of 36.4 per day. Pilots in 2023 were hit with 13,304 laser strikes in the U.S., the worst year ever recorded.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ China could use its electric cars to attack the West
If this story were a spy novel, the device would have been planted by a daring mole within the government system.
But this is the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), and yet another proof of what can be done simply by saturating your target country with products that contain a digital Trojan horse.
This is now the signature weapon of the Chinese party state – industrial-scale cyber espionage capabilities weaponised through normal export trade.
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New York Times ☛ It’s a Golden Age for Shipwreck Discoveries. Why?
More lost shipwrecks are being found because of new technology, climate change and more vessels scanning the ocean floor for science or commerce.
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Overpopulation
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Greece ☛ Water shortages a looming threat for Greek isles
Year after year, the pressure increases. On the one hand, there is the explosive growth of tourism, followed by an increase in consumption; on the other, there is drought. The small Aegean islands are preparing for the start of the tourist season with their reservoirs empty, their boreholes pumping brackish water, and an increasing dependence on desalination. The first victim of this difficult situation is what agricultural production is left on the islands, according to the doctrine of “water for the people first and then everything else.”
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VOA News ☛ Iran Among Countries Facing High Water Scarcity
The most water-stressed regions are the Middle East and North Africa, where 83% of the population is exposed to extremely high water stress, along with South Asia, where 74% is exposed, according to the report.
It said that the 25 countries — which house one-quarter of the global population — use over 80% of their renewable water supply for irrigation, livestock, industry and domestic needs, and that even a short-term drought puts these places in danger of running out of water.
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Finance
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Matt Birchler ☛ Digital wallets and the “only Apple Pay does this” mythology
A final thing to note about DPANs is that they are much better for you as a customer in the event of a data breach. No merchant should be handling your credit card number directly in 2024, but let’s say the payment gateway gets hacked and leaks the DPAN and expiration date for a transaction you ran at a shop. In that case, the attacker wouldn’t be able to do anything with your DPAN they acquired because DPANs only work when submitted as a part of an encrypted bundle that’s unique to each transaction. There is a way to run recurring transactions on a card collected via Apple Pay, but that should not be possible for a hacker and now we’re a bit in the weeds, so let’s just say that your FPAN being in a data breach is way worse than your DPAN which is collected by all digital wallets.
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YLE ☛ SAK chief to government: Drop labour reforms that won't boost employment
The labour federation boss responded to the prime minister's comments as a fresh Yle poll shows diminishing support for the ongoing political strikes.
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The Straits Times ☛ South Korean police praise landfill worker for returning $29,000 to owner
Mr Park found two plastic bags filled with bundles of 50,000 won notes in a landfill.
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Latvia ☛ Nordic Investment Bank posted EUR 250m profit last year
On March 22, the Board of Governors of the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) held its annual meeting in Tallinn, Estonia.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Silicon Angle ☛ Report: GPU cloud operator CoreWeave seeking new funding at $16B valuation
Roseland, New Jersey-based CoreWeave launched in 2017 as a cryptocurrency mine operator. It used Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units to mint Ethereum. A few years later, it shifted to renting those GPUs to developers building artificial intelligence models.
The company operates a cloud platform optimized specifically for AI workloads. According to the company, customers can choose from about a dozen different Nvidia chips. The most powerful instance configuration on offer combines eight high-end H100 graphics cards, which reportedly cost up to $40,000 apiece, with a pair of Intel Corp. central processing units and 2 terabytes of RAM.
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New York Times ☛ The Government’s Struggles With Outsourcing Software Development
Even after an extensive investigation, Karen Hogan, the auditor general, said she could not determine exactly what it had cost to create ArriveCAN, which was rushed out in 2020 to collect contact and health information from international travelers during the Covid-19 pandemic and to coordinate quarantine measures. Ms. Hogan’s best guess is about 60 million dollars for an app that was widely derided as difficult to use. Its original budget was 2.3 million dollars.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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VOA News ☛ X Influencer Faked Taliban Statement Announcing Military Invasion of Pakistan
On X, influencer Baba Banaras — self-described as “defence enthusiastic” and living in Pakistan — used the “breaking” key word to post a fake Taliban announcement of a military invasion of Pakistan.
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The Nation ☛ An Anti-Biden Conspirator Now Acknowledges That Ron Johnson Was “Doing the Bidding” of Russia
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Censorship/Free Speech
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GO Media ☛ 30 Movies That Could Never Be Made Today
This isn’t a screed, or an argument that movies used to be better. When we look back, we only think of the best and most memorable movies, which skews our perspective. Lots of crappy stuff got made in every era of filmmaking—there are great movies being made today that would never have had a chance 30 years ago, and vice versa.
Some of the sorts of movies we don’t see anymore feel like losses, others we’re better off without. Some of this is cyclical: A few years ago, I’d have said we’d never again see a big-budget, all-star whodunit of the kind that used to be popular—but that was before the Knives Out movies. Oppenheimer and Barbie brought a glimmer of hope that grown-up movies can come back, but Hollywood has a habit of taking the wrong lessons from its successes—there are apparently 14 Mattel-based movies in the works...which is certainly not what we meant when we said we wanted more films like Barbie. All that aside, and for a variety of reasons, the following 30 movies could certainly never be made today.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Poet Gets 7 Years In Prison For Anti-War Verses
[...] The charges stem from poems Byvshev wrote that contain verses condemning Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. [...]
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The Telegraph UK ☛ BBC 'capitulating to cult ideology' in its transgender reporting guidelines, activists say
The new briefing note for the corporation’s journalists, unveiled in December, said individuals often have a “big personal stake” in reporting on trans issues, making it a “challenging area”.
Journalists were told that describing someone as “either a women’s rights activist or an anti-trans activist is an editorial choice”.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Angst Behind China’s ‘Lying Flat’ Youth
On Halloween in 2022, outside a party the police had just disbanded in Beijing’s warehouse district, I saw a 20-something woman in a sparkly spandex suit and bunny ears run into the road. “Freedom, not testing!” she shouted. “Reform, not revolution! Votes, not dictators! Citizens, not slaves!”
Those were familiar words at Tsinghua University, where I was studying for a master’s degree. From a bridge near campus, someone had hung a banner emblazoned with the slogans. The banner’s maker, who became known as “Bridgeman,” had disappeared a few days before Halloween. Now the girl in the spandex suit struggled with her boyfriend in the street as he tried to cover her mouth. The other young people streamed out of the warehouse party in silence. But, moments later, muted voices rose from the crowd: “I agree,” “I support you,” and even, “Xi Jinping has a small penis!”
Then a police officer took out his phone to start filming. Everyone dispersed.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Timeline: Hong Kong’s new security law – from public consultation to passage in 48 days, after ’27 years’ in the making
Officials in Hong Kong and China this week hailed the passage of a new security law for the city, even as Western governments expressed “alarm” at what the US described as its “vaguely defined provisions.”
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The Atlantic ☛ Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing
But Trump’s quixotic legal crusades are not as irrational as they appear. Suing the press serves as a branding exercise and a fundraising tool. The lawsuits show his supporters that Trump is taking the fight to those lying journalists—so won’t you contribute a few dollars to the cause? They thus have become an end unto themselves, part of an infinite loop: sue, publicize the suit, solicit and collect donations, sue again. The cases may be weak on the legal merits, but they “further his narrative of being persecuted by the radical left media,” Brett Kappel, a campaign-finance lawyer who has researched Trump’s legal actions against the press, told me.
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Common Dreams ☛ Despite WSJ Reporting, Julian Assange Lawyer Says 'No Indication' of Plea Deal
The 52-year-old Australian has been imprisoned at London's Belmarsh Prison since British authorities dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2019, after the South American nation's president terminated the diplomatic asylum granted to him in 2012. In the United States, he faces Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges for publishing material that includes the "Collateral Murder" video, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs.
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Salon ☛ Our government's quiet war on press freedom
Over the past 14 years, a war on the free press has been quietly escalating in the U.S. This brewing conflict is fueled by increased and unchecked government surveillance, a post-truth intolerance of any criticism of media coverage, and prosecutions of media sources, journalists and publishers which have been endorsed by politicians on both sides of the political spectrum. Beginning a decade ago with the prosecution of whistleblowers, the U.S. campaign to tamp down leaks has spread to the criminalization of standard investigative journalism. While the U.S. still presents itself as the global standard-bearer for free speech and freedom of the press, recent fissures expose a looming calamity.
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Crickey ☛ US keen to extradite Assange despite plea deal report: lawyer
The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported the US Justice Department is “considering whether to allow Julian Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information”. Under such a deal, Assange potentially “could enter that plea remotely, without setting foot in the US”.
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La Política Online S A ☛ "Julian Assange is being persecuted for telling a shameful and dangerous truth"
In an exclusive conversation with LPO, during the protest held in Manhattan, Sarandon mentions that she is not a good speaker, but feels a duty to defend Assange for herself and her children.
Why do you consider it so important to defend Julian Assange from prison in the United States?
Julian Assange is being persecuted for telling the truth, a shameful truth, a dangerous truth that defies the narrative in many situations. It is dangerous to see how there is no freedom of the press, especially when you see how journalists are silent now. They had no problem publishing many of these revelations, and now they are silent. Julian is not even a citizen of the United States. Where is Australia in all this? People are so afraid to challenge the status quo that they do nothing. And we see it when we realize the price that both Assange and his family are paying. We need to keep people informed of what's going on and we need to free Julian.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Register UK ☛ SpaceX employee severance agreements challenged by NLRB
The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has challenged SpaceX's severance agreements, alleging the paperwork unlawfully limits what staff can say and do once they leave the rocket maker.
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[Old] Gray Media Group ☛ Why has this Georgia man been behind bars for 10 years awaiting trial?
Police arrested Maurice Jimmerson and four others in 2013 for murder. A jury acquitted two of them, but for 10 years, Jimmerson has spent the majority of that time in a county jail, legally innocent.
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NPR ☛ The Gambia is debating whether to repeal its ban on female genital mutilation
As more and more countries outlaw the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), The Gambia could become the first country in the world to overturn such a ban.
The country's National Assembly advanced a bill on March 18 that would repeal the 2015 law criminalizing all acts of FGM. That prospect has alarmed health and human rights activists in The Gambia and worldwide.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Erich Schubert: Do not get Amazon Kids+ or a Fire HD Kids
The Amazon Kids “parental controls” are extremely insufficient, and I strongly advise against getting any of the Amazon Kids series.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Denuvo DRM maker cracks down on game leakers with new tech — TraceMark for Gaming puts a watermark on games to unmask the source
Irdeto, makers of Denuvo, continue to draw ire as they announce TraceMark for Gaming to eliminate modern game leaks as we know them.
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International Business Times ☛ Amazon Is Panicking After Losing 2M Customers To Chinese Rivals Temu And Shein Since January
This marginal decline comes as its Chinese-based competitors, Temu and Shein, have gathered a stronger hold internationally since expanding. The two online retailers ship out products directly from China and have already developed a strong presence in the British and American online retail market.
Both of the Chinese companies are known for selling more affordable and cheaper items than Amazon. The two represent the biggest challenge to Amazon right now in the online shopping market, with Walmart and Target previously being of concern to the American e-commerce company.
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India Times ☛ european regulators big tech crackdown: European regulators crack down on Big Tech
Apple, Meta Platforms and Google are set to be investigated for potential violations of the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) that could lead to fines of up to 10% of their global annual turnover, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
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India Times ☛ apple lawsuit iphone consumer friendly: US lawsuit against Apple could make iPhone experience more consumer-friendly
In Europe, consumers have already benefited after a slew of rules and regulations compelled Apple to make a number of user-friendly changes to its popular smartphone, suggesting similar changes could occur in the U.S. if the Justice Department lawsuit is successful.
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Quartz ☛ Apple antitrust lawsuit targets Android green iMessage bubbles
“Many non-iPhone users… experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame” when messaging people with iPhones, the Department of Justice stated in its landmark antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday. However, the problems go way beyond simply the color of a text message. In the complaint, the DOJ highlighted the friction and frustration associated with “breaking” chats, which refers to the poor group texting experience between iPhone and Android users in individual or group chats.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Someday, we’ll all take comfort in the internet’s “dark corners” (23 Mar 2024)
Now, consider the converse proposition: for younger users, platforms deliver less value. Younger users have less complex social lives on average relative to their parents and grandparents, which means that platforms have fewer ways to sink their hooks into those young users. Further: young users tend to want things that the platforms don't want them to have, right from the first day they sign up. In particular, young users often want to conduct their socializing out of eyesight and earshot of adults, especially parents, teachers, and other authority figures. This means that a typical younger user has both more reasons to leave a platform as well as fewer reasons to stay there.
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Chris Hannah ☛ Apple vs the World
I’m no longer a die-hard Apple fan, so I’m not going to get overly caught up on any of the arguments for or against them. But there’s a reason people talk about Apple’s “walled garden”. And rightly or wrongly, it seems that more and more people are starting to want to tear down the wall.
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Lee Peterson ☛ I feel the Apple lock in
So, back to the title of this post. What stops me moving to Android is iMessage, photos and iCloud. I’m locked into the Apple ecosystem. I can stop buying a new iPhone every few years but I’m still on iPhone.
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Patents
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Vintage Everyday ☛ The Story Behind Michael Jackson’s Anti-Gravity Lean
On October 26, 1993, Michael Jackson filed United States Patent #5,255,452: Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion. The patent is for the shoes used to perform Jackson’s iconic anti-gravity illusion seen on the music video “Smooth Criminal.” Jackson wanted to solidify his “patented” move. The patent above includes the abstract, drawings, summary, and description of the shoes. The patent allows the “wearer to learn forwardly beyond his center of gravity.”
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Copyrights
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Techdirt ☛ Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Solar Storm 1928
We’re past the halfway mark in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, and Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, and today we’re taking a look at the winner of Best Deep Cut: Solar Storm 1928 by David Harris.
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Boiling Steam ☛ Yuzu Shuts Down Following Nintendo's Threat. What's Next?
Despite the claims that Tropic Haze is going to pay 2.4 Million dollars to Nintendo in damages, the actual settlement out of court is usually confidential and nobody really knows what the conditions really are (and how much money is actually involved). In other words, don’t believe the press releases litterally. Press releases are for narrative control - the truth is often something else.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Premier League IPTV Piracy Clickbait Reaches New Low, But Will Go Lower
As elements of the UK media continue to stomp on reality in exchange for piracy-related clicks, a new story doing the rounds has managed to reach a new low. Accompanied by the usual dire warnings, the stories claim that a new overseas anti-piracy system has Brits "braced for a crackdown" because it could "stop Brits watching illegal streams for good." Perhaps the Premier League should buy this system right now? Yeah, about that.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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