Leftovers

• The Evolution of the Kubernetes Gateway API

  The Kubernetes API plays a key role in the Kubernetes ecosystem, driving development, teamwork and creativity.

• Frank Meeuwsen ☛ I am already in love with Kagi Smallweb!

  Here’s the first Kagi follow-up: Oh my, will you just LOOK at Kagi Small Web! A collection of handpicked personal homepages you can browse through, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of appreciated pages and you can even see the list of 12.361blogs. Yes I checked and I’m in it. More on this on their own blog. This is just wonderful. To quote the blogpost:

• Frank Meeuwsen ☛ Kagi update #2: Well thát escalated …

  Kagi update #2: Well thát escalated quickly… After the glowing reviews, I also found concerns about the ethical choices of the company. It all comes down to the discussion in this forum thread. I have to be honest, it’s a messy situation. I wasn’t even aware of the issues with the Brave browser, which is my default browser for over a year now. I don’t know for a 100% how to deal with this. I still want to read some of the more thoughtful and balanced responses in the thread. I have experience working at a startup and currently work at a creative agency. I recognize some of the discussions and arguments that are given from both sides. I don’t claim to have the answers for them. I don’t even know for sure how I feel about it myself.

• 404 Media ☛ Friendship Ended With GOOGLE Now KAGI Is My Best Friend

  Kagi is a search engine that I have been spending $10 per month to use. Its main selling point, and the reason it costs money, is that it does not have ads. Zero ads, anywhere. “Ads based search engines make almost $300 a year off their users,” Kagi’s site says. “Choosing to subscribe to Kagi means that while you are now paying for your search you are getting a fair value for your money, you are getting more relevant results, are able to personalize your experience and take advantage of all the tools and features we built, all while protecting your and your family's privacy and data.”

• Eric Walker ☛ Still Sticking with the USB sticks I see...

  I am baffled by what has been happening as I posted in December last year when I purchsed some picturs and was handed a USB stick. I am not quite sure what is happening that some companies resorting to sending (or giving) people pictures on USB sticks! Isn’t this the age of highspeed [Internet], almost unlimited data, and cheap online storage? I thought this was long dead but to the point, I now have in my position two USB sticks from the same orginization that we purchased pictures from from our daughters dance competiation almost a month back. The first one that we recieved 2 weeks ago was corrupt so they had to mail us another one 🙄.

• Roy Tang ☛ 2024 Site Update

  I've had "Site redesign" on my to do list since at least January 2023 so today I am finally deploying something. Seemed to be an appropriate thing to do right after Easter?

  It took me a while because honestly I kept changing my mind on what exactly I wanted (typical user!), so the fact that I am willing to commit to something and deploy it is... a thing I guess?

• Idiomdrottning ☛ Throwing robots at it

  “Just throw another machine at it” becomes the mantra because, thanks to the weird memory-leaky processes of economic transactions and labor, and how bad market capitalism is at valuating the true costs of things, it’s “cheaper” to run something on 40 servers that with optimization work could be run off of one Raspberry Pi.

• The Register UK ☛ Sleuths who cracked Zodiac Killer's cipher thank the crowd

  Eight days later, it was solved by Donald and Bettye Harden – a couple living in Salinas, California, with an interest in ciphers. The code was, according to Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke, a homophonic substitution cipher, alternately described as a monoalphabetic substitution cipher with variants. This means the characters in the original message could be replaced with several possible cipher characters, in order to resist analysis based on the statistical frequency of characters in English words.

• Science

  • Vox ☛ How solar eclipse tourism became big business

    Instead, it could well be the upcoming solar eclipse on April 8, which could see as many as 4 million people in the US journeying to view it. This year’s total solar eclipse is particularly special for the US: Although the phenomenon happens globally every 18 months, this one will be visible across a huge swath of the country, making witnessing it more accessible. Plus, the eclipse is expected to last longer than the prior one did in 2017, adding to its allure.

• Education

  • [Old] uni Oxford ☛ Digital News Report 2023

    This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 93,000 online news consumers in 46 markets covering half of the world's population.

    The report documents how video-based content, distributed via networks such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are becoming more important for news, especially in parts of the Global South, while legacy platforms such as Facebook are losing influence.

  • Press Gazette ☛ How under-35s’ interest in news has collapsed and what we can do about it

    Ever since I started working in the media industry two decades ago – initially as a research expert – the question of how to engage young audiences with news has been one of the most frequently deliberated issues within news organisations and at news conferences. We all agree that the news industry must do better. But I did not appreciate just how poorly the industry had done in the last decade until I researched this article: since 2013, millennials’ and Gen Z’s engagement with news has simply collapsed.

    In the UK, interest in news among all adults has declined by a quarter since 2013, while it has halved for under-35s, with data indicating that the younger the news consumer, the less interested they are in the current news offer.

• Hardware

  • New York Times ☛ Switching From iPhone to Android Is Easy. It’s the Aftermath That Stings.

    Even if you manage to ditch your iPhone, Apple’s hooks are still there.

  • Barry Hess ☛ Safer Table Saws Are Coming

    It appears in the U.S. it is likely that there will be a new table saw regulation that requires all new table saws to include flesh sensing technology. This is the technology that has mostly been seen in SawStop saws over the past twenty years. I personally think this is good, and SawStop is surprisingly waiving their remaining patents to allow it to progress.

  • New York Times ☛ How a Violin Maker’s Dreams Came True in Cremona, Italy

    As a teenager, she decided she would become a violin maker. Eventually, a journey with twists and turns took her to Cremona in northern Italy — a famed hub for violin makers, including masters like Antonio Stradivari, since the 16th century. There, An, a rising star in the violin-making world with international awards under her belt, runs her own workshop.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Charges 8 in Beer Heists That Targeted Trains and Warehouses

    The men stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of beer, mostly Modelo and Corona, by robbing rail yards and warehouses across the Northeast, federal prosecutors said.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Federal News Network ☛ President Biden’s AI-facing executive order should be applauded

    Companies are being reckless with AI, putting the potential benefits of the technology ahead of data privacy. This is not a new condition. Historically, companies rush to adopt disruptive technology without fully considering potential ramifications. ChatGPT and Microsoft already have had AI-related breaches that grabbed headlines this year, and there will certainly be more as the popularity of the technology grows. Without the proper guardrails, these types of headline-grabbing incidents will further compromise consumer privacy.

  • Eclectic Light Company ☛ Happy birthday APFS, 7 years old today

    Seven years ago, on 27 March 2017, Apple introduced one of the most fundamental changes in its operating systems since Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was released 16 years earlier. On that day, those who updated iOS to version 10.3 had their iPhone’s storage silently converted to the first release of Apple File System, APFS. Six months later, with the release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra on 25 September, Mac users followed suit.

  • Karina Nguyen ☛ The cost of AI reasoning over time. - by Karina Nguyen

    Over the years language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks, as measured by the commonly used Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Simultaneously, the cost of running these models has significantly decreased due to innovations such as Mixture of Experts (MoE), compute and parameter-efficient training and inference techniques, hardware/chip advancements, etc. These developments have enabled LLMs to achieve impressive performance while reducing computational requirements and operational costs.

    An interesting question to ask is what’s the trend of AI reasoning costs over time. So, I made a plot, showcasing the performance of language models on the MMLU benchmark against their cost, spanning from 2022 to the present day. The resulting visualization has a clear trend: as time progresses, language models are achieving higher MMLU accuracy scores while their associated costs continue to drastically decrease.

  • 404 Media ☛ Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage

    Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history.

    I was able to find the AI-generated books with the same method we’ve previously used to find AI-generated Amazon product reviews, papers published in academic journals, and online articles. Searching Google Books for the term “As of my last knowledge update,” which is associated with ChatGPT-generated answers, returns dozens of books that include that phrase. Some of the books are about ChatGPT, machine learning, AI, and other related subjects and include the phrase because they are discussing ChatGPT and its outputs. These books appear to be written by humans. However, most of the books in the first eight pages of results turned up by the search appear to be AI-generated and are not about AI.

  • 404 Media ☛ A ‘Law Firm’ of AI Generated Lawyers Is Sending Fake Threats as an SEO Scam

    "All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model,” Ali Shahriyari, cofounder and CTO of the AI detection startup Reality Defender told 404 Media.

    Commonwealth Legal’s listed address is the fourth floor of a one-story building that looks nothing like the image on its website, and both of its phone numbers are disconnected. No one responded to the contact form that I filled out.

  • Techdirt ☛ AT&T Stops Pretending It Had Nothing To Do With A Massive Data Breach Impacting 73 Million Customers. Sort Of.

    As the story grew, AT&T apparently realized that this shrug emoji in word form probably wasn’t going to work on the press or regulators. So last weekend the company issued a more detailed update on its website that at least acknowledges the data was legitimate, originating from “2019 or earlier,” impacting 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and approximately 65.4 million former customers.

    Though AT&T still claims it’s unsure where the data originated or what systems were compromised (itself not a great sign given they’ve had half a decade to investigate):[...]

  • Quartz ☛ Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp down in big outage

    Image and media uploads appear to be struggling the most on the platforms, according to [Internet] monitoring service Netblocks, which also notes there are no indications of “country-level [Internet] disruptions or filtering.”

    Meta’s status and outage update page indicates “major disruptions” for Instagram’s Messenger API, the Messenger Platform, WhatsApp Business API, and the Ads Transparency tool. The Ads Manager currently has “some disruptions.”

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Simon Willison ☛ Kobold letters

      Gmail strips style blocks before forwarding—which it turns out isn’t protection against this, because you can put a style block in the original email to hide the attack text which will then be stripped for you when the email is forwarded.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Reason ☛ The 3 Body Problem's Chilling Social Media Parallel

      From struggle sessions to cancel culture, the story depicts the terrors of surveillance authoritarianism.

    • [Repeat] Bruce Schneier ☛ Surveillance by the New Microsoft Outlook App

      The ProtonMail people are accusing Microsoft’s new Outlook for Windows app of conducting extensive surveillance on its users. It shares data with advertisers, a lot of data: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ IDF Says UN Observers in Lebanon Were Wounded by Hezbollah Explosive

    A spokesman for the Israeli military said the blast was caused “by an explosive previously installed there by Hezbollah,” a Lebanese militia and political movement.

  • New Yorker ☛ Donald Trump’s Amnesia Advantage

    The incumbency bind is a real problem for Biden in 2024. So, too, is the political amnesia powering the increasingly absurd arguments from Trump and his enablers about how he’d better handle everything from Israel and Ukraine to the border. Forgetting—Trump’s own memory lapses, and those of the broader electorate—is one of the former President’s political superpowers.

  • Parallel Mirror ☛ Cool Gray City of Tech Authoritarians: Balaji's dark vision for San Francisco

    So what would it mean for San Francisco to be taken over by tech zillionaires who belong to the Network State cult? Well, B.S. is the kind of guy who likes to run his mouth on four-hour-long podcasts hosted by sycophantic fanboys. And he has a LOT to say about what the Network State will mean for S.F.

    Buckle up!

    Below are some annotated highlights of his four hour and twenty-seven minute long interview on the Turpentine podcast.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ IDF denies it uses AI software to target individuals in Gaza bombing campaigns

    In what is a frankly dystopian-sounding investigative report, Israel’s +972 magazine, which said it had spoken to six Israeli intelligence officers on the condition of anonymity, claimed attacks on targets in Gaza had at times been led by an AI system called “Lavender.”

  • Gizmodo ☛ Israeli Military Using AI to Select Targets in Gaza With 'Rubber Stamp' From Human Operator: Report

    Israel has been using an artificial intelligence system called Lavender to create a “kill list” of at least 37,000 people in Gaza, according to a new report from Israel’s +972 magazine, confirmed by the Guardian. Lavender is the second AI system revealed after the existence of Israel’s The Gospel was first reported on last year, but while The Gospel targets buildings, Lavender targets people.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Spends Millions on Ad Blitz as Congress Considers Banning the App

    That seems to be the idea driving TikTok’s multimillion-dollar marketing blitz on TV and rival social platforms nationwide — tagged #KeepTikTok — as the Senate considers a bill that would force the company’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or have it face a national ban. Many lawmakers from both parties have said the app could endanger American users’ private data or be used as a Chinese propaganda tool.

  • The Hill ☛ Is Saudi Arabia trying to sabotage Biden?

    For the Russians, high oil prices are a matter of survival. For the Saudis, skyrocketing oil costs are essential to fulfilling the grandiose economic vision of MBS. They are also key to exacting revenge against Biden, who early on went out of his way to insult the young heir apparent. The White House indicated it intended to “recalibrate” its relationship with the Saudis, and especially with MBS, who had worked successfully with the Trump White House.

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Returns as Official Entertainment Partner of Eurovision

    That’s the lofty version put forth by TikTok, though this year’s sponsorship comes loaded with practical concerns — particularly as it relates to a pesky pullout by Universal Music Group.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Campus reacts to potential Tiktok ban

    “As screen time increases, so do inherent risks, and with the proliferation and popularity of new social media platforms, so does the potential reach of dangerous, provocative and often harmful content,” Dingell said. “I think of many ways these myriad of issues highlight the need for comprehensive data privacy legislation that would ensure the safety and integrity of every American’s data on every social media platform and mitigate potential harms.”

    The legislation adds that ByteDance, and other businesses controlled by a foreign adversary, must divest from U.S. assets or sell the app within six months to a U.S.-approved buyer, ensuring that the company relinquishes all control over the app and its algorithms. Failure to sell would make it illegal for app stores and web hosts to distribute or update TikTok in the U.S., with potential penalties for noncompliance. Finding a suitable buyer may be difficult, however, given the antitrust scrutiny on potential purchasers like Microsoft, Google and Meta and the possibility of China blocking the sale.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ Beethoven’s Secret Code

    Kitchen would eventually identify 23 degrees of dynamics (and counting), from fff—thunderous—to ppp—a whisper. He found four kinds of staccato, two kinds of dynamic swells, marks to indicate different ways of grouping notes together, marks to reinforce crescendos and diminuendos. Taken together, Kitchen argued, these marks amount to “living instructions from one virtuoso performer to another,” an elaborate hidden language conveying new levels of expression—and thus emotion—in Beethoven’s music that had been lost for centuries.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Man Cuffed but Not Charged After Chiefs Super Bowl Rally Shooting Sues 3 More Lawmakers Over Posts

    A man who was briefly handcuffed but not charged in the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally is suing three more lawmakers over social media posts falsely accusing him of being among the shooters and an immigrant in the country illegally.

    Denton Loudermill Jr. of Olathe, Kansas, filed the nearly identical federal lawsuits Tuesday against three Republican Missouri state senators: Rick Brattin of Harrisonville, Denny Hoskins of Warrensburg and Nick Schroer of St. Charles County.

• Environment

  • Gizmodo ☛ Amazon Is Ditching Plastic Packaging Abroad—but Using Even More in the U.S.

    In response to growing pressure to address the plastic pollution crisis, Amazon has been cutting down on plastic packaging. Last July, the company said it used 11.6 percent less plastic for all of its shipments globally in 2022, compared to 2021. Much of Amazon’s reductions took place in countries that have enacted — or threatened to enact — restrictions on certain types of plastic packaging. But the company’s progress may not extend to the U.S., which has not regulated plastic production on a federal level.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ How to volunteer with native plants in L.A., Santa Barbara, OC

    One of the easiest ways to learn about California native plants is volunteering to get your hands dirty.

    There are numerous nonprofit organizations devoted to protecting and/or restoring habitat in Southern California’s fire- or invasive-weed-ravaged hills, and they rely on volunteers to help them with a variety of chores, from seeding and potting to planting native seedlings in the field.

  • The Hill ☛ EV adoption has brought modest, but measurable, declines in Bay Area emissions: Study

    Using an air quality monitoring network set up in the area more than a decade ago, scientists documented a 2.6 percent annual decline in vehicle emissions rates over a five-year period. They published their results Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ They planted a DIY native garden with love, trial and error

    Water-hungry lawns are symbols of Los Angeles’ past. In this series, we spotlight yards with alternative, low-water landscaping built for the future.

  • Quartz ☛ Chinook salmon dumped in wrong Oregon river in tanker crash

    After colliding with the side of the road, the tanker split open, leaking its contents onto a riverbank next to the road. This spilled an estimated 77,000 salmon smolts, the technical term for a fish that’s around two-years-old, into the Lookingglass Creek, which runs alongside the road.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How brown rats crawled off ships and conquered North American cities

    After first appearing on the continent before 1740, brown rats took over the East Coast from black rats "in only a matter of decades," said Michael Buckley, one of the authors of a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

    Brown rats are larger and more aggressive than black rats—and they want to be close to human populations, said Matthew Frye, a researcher and community educator with the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Could microbes be the answer to detoxifying Scottish water sources?

    Scottish researchers are discovering new ways of combating environmental damage caused by acid mine drainage in Scotland by studying bacteria that can degrade dangerous waste products.

  • New York Times ☛ The Taiwan Earthquake’s Aftermath in Photos

    See scenes from around the island.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • France24 ☛ Senegal's newly elected president announces audit of oil, gas and mining sectors

      Senegal will conduct an audit of the oil, gas and mining sectors, newly elected President Bassirou Diomaye Faye told the nation in a televised speech on Wednesday, while also reassuring investors they were welcome in the country.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Some Andreesen-Horowitz Crypto-Bro bloviates on a vision of Fascist San Francisco

      I hesitate to even give oxygen to a story like this, but it's just so fucking whack-a-doodle. It sounds a parody, or an April Fools joke, or a stand-up comic doing a tour with "triggered" in its name, but apparently people like Balaji Srinivasan and Garry Tan are saying shit like this out loud and not getting laughed out of the room.

• Finance

  • Intel Layoffs: Staff in sales and marketing division affected

    Intel has reportedly reduced the size of its “Sales and Marketing Group.”

    “With the objective of continuing to deliver on company strategy and drive outcomes for its customers, Intel’s [Sales and Marketing Group] announced changes to its organizational structure,” a spokesperson for the tech giant said in a statement to CRN.

    “We are confident in Intel’s future and are committed to supporting all employees through this process, including treating impacted employees with dignity and respect.”

    The company didn’t disclose how many sales and marketing positions have been axed.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AWS reportedly lets go hundreds of workers across multiple teams

    Amazon Web Services Inc. is letting go hundreds of employees across its sales, training and retail technology groups, GeekWire reported today. The cloud giant confirmed the layoffs in a statement without commenting on the number of affected staffers. The job cuts follow two larger workforce reductions that proprietary trap AWS parent Amazon.com Inc. carried out last year.

  • Goldman, Morgan Stanley must face investors' lawsuit over Archegos collapse

    A New York state appeals court said former ViacomCBS investors may sue Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other banks that underwrote two stock offerings for the media company, upholding a ruling that banks fear could upend capital markets.

  • Why are Indian Banks Resilient in the Face of Global Crises?

    Last year, we saw the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, which threw the whole US banking system into jeopardy. A few months later, Switzerland’s Credit Suisse declared bankruptcy, which was later acquired by its rival UBS. This incident questioned the reputation Switzerland held as a global finance stronghold. The resulting reverberation of these banks resulted in depositors losing trust, resulting in panic withdrawing their money, thrusting the banks into a liquidity crisis, and leaving them in a financial mess.

  • Bankrate LLC ☛ List of failed banks: 2009-2024

    The last Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) bank to fail was Citizens Bank of Sac City, Iowa. That was the fifth FDIC bank failure of 2023, a year with some of the largest bank failures in U.S. history.

    Earlier last year Silicon Valley Bank failed March 10, 2023, and then Signature Bank failed two days later, ending the unusual streak of more than 800 days without a bank failure.

    Before Citizens Bank failed in November 2023, Heartland Tri-State Bank failed July 28, 2023 and First Republic Bank failed May 1, 2023.

  • Business Insider ☛ Apple Cuts 600 California Jobs After Electric Vehicle, Screen Retreats

    Tech giant Apple downsizes workforce tied to two major projects.

  • TechCrunch ☛ OpenAI-backed Ghost Autonomy shuts down | TechCrunch

    The startup, which had raised nearly $220 million, posted a note on its website that it ended worldwide operations and wound down the company as of Wednesday.

  • CoRover.ai Is Shutting Down Its US, UK Companies To Focus On India Market

    CoRover, the maker of BharatGPT offering global providing conversational AI platform announces plans to shut down their US and UK offices to prioritise India market

  • The Business Journals ☛ New round of layoffs reported at New Relic

  • Rental Platform Rezi Runs Out of Money, Shuts Down

    Rezi, a platform that leased vacant apartments to list on its own platform, has shut down, adding to the list of proptech casualties.

  • Osso VR to lay off 67 people at corporate HQ | MedTech Dive

  • Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly

  • Value of WeWork Capital, Rhone Group’s SF Building Falls 47%

    New appraisal pegs value of 600 California Street at $183M, less than the debt on the office property.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New Yorker ☛ How Should Reporters Cover Donald Trump?

    As Trump faces his first criminal trial in New York, reporters continue to encounter challenges in covering the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee and his supporters.

  • Techdirt ☛ Elon Lost The Spam Wars To ‘Pussy In Bio’ Spam

    Forget Mars colonies and self-driving cars. Elon Musk’s greatest challenge yet? Defeating Twitter’s relentless ‘pussy in bio’ spam army. And let’s just say, it’s not going well.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Federal cybersecurity blanket stretches to cover Internet of Things (IoT) devices

    Organizations — both public and private — have been scattering billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices all over the world. These devices are typically low-power and have low computing capacity. Yet they are still potential entry points for cybersecurity attacks. Now the FCC has established a voluntary cybersecurity labeling program for IoT devices, as well as some proposed rules. For details, the Federal Drive Host Tom Temin talked with Katy Milner, a partner at Hogan Lovells.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Intelligence community gets a chief AI officer

    John Beieler, who serves as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ top science and technology advisor, has been named chief artificial intelligence officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Beieler confirmed his additional role during a speech today at an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance in Arlington, Va.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AWS reportedly lets go hundreds of workers across multiple teams

    The restructuring effort detailed today will reportedly see the Amazon unit axe “hundreds” of positions at its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization. Some of the affected employees support AWS’ sales operations. Others focus on providing training and certifications to customers.

  • [Repeat] GeekWire ☛ AWS cuts hundreds of jobs in sales group and stores tech team

    Amazon Web Services will cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, and a few hundred jobs on its Physical Stores Technology team, executives in the tech giant’s cloud computing division informed employees Wednesday morning in internal emails.

    In the Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, most of the cuts are in training and certification, and sales operations. The company said it’s shifting its focus to self-serve digital training and training programs run by external partners.

    AWS also cited overlap in some program management and sales operations roles.

  • The Hill ☛ Billionaire says Trump Media a ‘scam,’ calls investors ‘dopes’

    Truth Social parent company Trump Media is a “scam,” billionaire investor Barry Diller told CNBC in an interview Thursday.

    “It’s a scam, just like everything he’s ever been involved in is some sort of con,” Diller said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” referring to former President Donald Trump and Trump Media & Technology Group.

  • CNBC ☛ Trump Media stock is 'a scam' Barry Diller says

    Trump Media is "a scam," and people buying its high-flying stock are "dopes," IAC

    and Expedia Chairman Barry Diller said Thursday in a scathing takedown of the social media company whose majority shareholder is former President Donald Trump.

    "I mean, it's ridiculous," Diller said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" when asked about Trump Media. "The company has no revenue."

  • Quartz ☛ Google hires former OpenAI executive to boost AI Studios, Gemini

    At OpenAI, Kilpatrick helped AI developers bring their products to life. His move from the Microsoft-backed AI startup to Google, which was first reported by Business Insider and Gizmochina, is another example of Big Tech’s poaching of talent from companies that make generative artificial intelligence technologies. Microsoft in March hired most of Inflection AI’s staff. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a public pitch to OpenAI’s researchers to join the cloud software company last fall. AI talent poaching isn’t limited to Big Tech. Wall Street banks such as Morgan Stanley and Citigroup have lured talent from rival Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America also lost AI-focused staffers to its competitors.

  • Quartz ☛ Amazon layoffs hit hundreds of AWS employees

    The layoffs are impacting employees on AWS’s sales, marketing, and global services (SMGS) team, and those on its physical stores technology team. Most of the cuts on its SMGS team are due to “business changes” with training and certification and sales operations, the company said. Cuts for its physical stores technology employees are due to “a broader strategic shift in the use of some applications in Amazon’s owned as well as in third-party stores,” according to AWS.

  • The Kent Stater ☛ Two investors in Trump Media insider trading case plead guilty

    Each of the brothers pleaded guilty in New York to one count of securities fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.

    The two brothers were arrested in June and charged with illegally trading on nonpublic knowledge of a shell company’s secret plan to buy Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of struggling social network Truth Social.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Western media amplify Russian propaganda targeting US troops in Niger

      Russia has also been using its oversized propaganda machine to spread anti-American sentiment and influence policy making and public opinion in Niger, including by targeting the continued U.S. military presence in the country.

      On March 28, Russia’s state-owned Sputnik Africa news agency quoted Niger's Interior Ministry as saying the United States had promised the previous day “to submit a plan for the ‘disengagement’ of troops from the West African country after Niamey ended its military pact with Washington.”

    • uni Oxford ☛ Overview and key findings of the 2023 Digital News Report

      Perhaps the most striking findings in this year’s report relate to the changing nature of social media, partly characterised by declining engagement with traditional networks such as Facebook and the rise of TikTok and a range of other video-led networks. Yet despite this growing fragmentation of channels, and despite evidence that public disquiet about misinformation and algorithms is at near record highs, our dependence on these intermediaries continues to grow. Our data show, more clearly than ever, how this shift is strongly influenced by habits of the youngest generations, who have grown up with social media and nowadays often pay more attention to influencers or celebrities than they do to journalists, even when it comes to news.

      In our extra analysis chapters this year, we’ve identified the most popular news podcasts in around a dozen countries – along with the platforms that are most used to access this content. We also explore increasing levels of criticism of the news media, often driven by politicians and facilitated by social media. We also devote a section to the particular case of public service media that have been at the forefront of this criticism and face particular challenges in delivering their universal mission in a fractious and fragmented media environment.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Reason ☛ Journal of Free Speech Law: "Weaponized from the Beginning," by Prof. John Fabian Witt

    The eleventh of twelve articles from the Knight Institute’s Lies, Free Speech, and the Law symposium.

  • Techdirt ☛ Techdirt Podcast Episode 385: How Important Will The Murthy Case Be?

    We’ve written a lot about the Murthy case at the Supreme Court, and especially how poor of a job the states did in making their argument. Now, as we await the ruling, there are a lot of questions about what it will look like and how consequential it will be. This week, we’re joined by law professor Kate Klonick to discuss what happened, what’s likely to come next, and what kind of impact it will have.

  • Reason ☛ Journal of Free Speech Law: My "When Are Lies Constitutionally Protected?"

    The tenth of twelve articles from the Knight Institute’s Lies, Free Speech, and the Law symposium.

  • Reason ☛ Brickbat: Don't Forget Your Lines

    Training materials for Scottish police say that actors performing a play could run afoul of the nation's new hate speech law, which bans communication that could stir up hatred of protected groups. Supporters of the law had claimed it would only apply to producers, directors, and others involved behind the scenes with a play, not…

  • Reason ☛ Defending Pornography in the Age of Safe Spaces: A Q&A With Nadine Strossen

    The civil liberties lawyer talks to Reason about the misguided impulse to attack free speech in the name of protecting women.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Lack of liberal studies has ‘no impact’ on global recognition of Hong Kong university entry exam, authorities say

    Hong Kong’s university entrance exam remained internationally recognised despite the fact that liberal studies had been replaced with citizenship as a core subject, authorities have said. The Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE), the city’s university entry exam, is set to begin next week.

  • RFA ☛ ‘Know-it-all’ TikToker fined for saying Ho Chi Minh City is full of criminals

    Nguyen Nhat Hai is known for his pro-government musings and anti-celebrity rants.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Facebook has blocked Kansas Reflector. Here's what we're doing, and how you can help.

    UPDATE: Facebook appears to have restored Kansas Reflector’s ability to share links to our website and our past posts, approximately seven hours after the problem was first reported. We have not received an explanation about why our stories were blocked.

    Meta spokesman Andy Stone offered the following response on Twitter: “This was an error that had nothing to do with the Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta. It has since been reversed and we apologize to the Reflector and its readers for the mistake.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Atlantic ☛ A great day for The Atlantic

    For the third consecutive year, the American Society of Magazine Editors has bestowed upon The Atlantic its top prize.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Journalist Gregory Gondwe is on the run from Malawi’s army

    In recent months, several African journalists have been harassed for investigating military corruption.

    For instance, in January, Malawian journalist Gregory Gondwe was forced into hiding after publishing an exposé on dodgy army contracts there. And in February, journalists with the Zimbabwean site The NewsHawks were forced to drop an investigation about army corruption after the reporters were “put under surveillance” by the government, according to the publication.

  • The NewsHawks ☛ GAGGED - NewsHawks

    The NewsHawks, which delayed publication this week due to circumstances beyond its control, will not publish follow-up stories on the issue of three senior Zimbabwean army generals forced out due to corruption after subtle threats and brazen direct pressure from state security agents, particularly military intelligence operatives.

    The NewsHawks journalists have now been put under surveillance, especially editor Dumisani Muleya and news editor Gagare, in a move which has a chilling effect on media freedom and journalism practice.

  • CS Monitor ☛ University of Iowa bought two local newspapers in resistance to news desert

    As news deserts grow across the U.S., college newspapers could offer a solution. The Daily Iowan, a student paper for the University of Iowa, bought two struggling local papers which student journalists will help run, in a first-of-its-kind deal.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Harvard University ☛ How dating sites automate sexual racism

    Apryl Williams opened a Tinder account in 2013 and began wondering about the algorithms used by dating apps, how they selected potential matches, and what role race may play in the system.

    Now, after nearly 10 years of research, the Black sociologist who studies race, gender, and popular culture has written a book about her findings, “Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating,” a blend of technical analysis, user interviews, and a historical look at racism and romance in America.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Once again, AI is revealed to be three Mechanical Turks in a trenchcoat.

    Update: It's easy to point and laugh at this as "LOL, AI doesn't work", and that's appropriate, because it's funny, and it doesn't, but also consider whether the goals of this project were not what you were told that they were. The "Just Walk Out" project allowed Amazon to replace a bunch of cashiers making the California minimum wage of $16 / hour with a bunch of call center gig workers in India making (I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess) a lot less than that. So if they are shutting this program down, it's probably because the savings they saw from outsourcing retail clerks to a third world call center were somehow not high enough.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Deputies shoot armed 17-year-old in midst of mental health crisis

    San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies on Tuesday shot and killed a 17-year-old boy authorities say was experiencing a mental health crisis — the second teen killed by the law enforcement agency in less than a month.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Wall Street’s War on Workers Can Be Stopped

    Leopold cofounded the Labor Institute for popular worker education and authored the Runaway Inequality guide used by unions to train workers on combating wealth inequality. Leopold’s latest book carries on the same tradition of taking on big-picture issues of political economy in a straightforward way that most working people can understand.

    The book traces the root cause of mass layoffs to a pervasive corporate culture that prioritizes stock buybacks and enriching shareholders. He clearly demonstrates that not only are mass layoffs devastating for working-class communities, but they are also destroying worker loyalty to the Democratic Party while opening up huge political opportunities for the far right.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Ex-deputy says he was fired after refusing to affiliate with alleged deputy gang

    A former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy says he was fired after refusing to take part in law enforcement gang activity, according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

    Federico Carlo, the ex-lawman behind the suit, alleges he was wrongly accused of giving a Nazi salute and sharing a sexually explicit photo, then “abruptly terminated” by a “tattooed Regulator deputy gang member” who is now the acting commander overseeing training and personnel.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust

    As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Event Wrap: ICANN 79

    Paul Wilson presented on RIR transfer policies and IPv6 at ICANN 79 in San Juan, Puerto Rico from 2 to 7 March 2024.

  • Public Knowledge ☛ FCC Set To Reinstate Title II Authority, Ensuring a Free and Open Internet

    The FCC announces plans to restore the nation's net neutrality rules for all.

  • Stanford University ☛ FCC Prepares To Restore Net Neutrality, But The New Rules Might Be Weaker Than The Ones Discarded By Trump

    As always, there’s a catch: Stanford Law Professor and net neutrality guru Barbara van Schewick notes the new rules are technically weaker than the ones stripped away by the Trump administration, with several loopholes apparently lobbied for by industry (her FCC filing has more detail). My email inbox is filled with consumer groups lauding the move, yet none of them apparently thought this was worth a mention.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

  Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results: [...]

• Digital Music News ☛ Over 40% of Apple Users Subscribe to Apple Music, Study Finds

  In brief, the 88-page suit accuses the Cupertino-based company of “delaying, degrading, or outright blocking technologies that would increase competition in the smartphone markets” – including by allegedly leveraging its App Store to the detriment of third-party developers.

• Copyrights

  • Public Domain Review ☛ Windows Onto History: The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)

    Throwing people out of windows (or _defenestrating_ them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy.

  • Public Domain Review ☛ [Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory

    By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, ​​Octavian Esanu asks, playfully and tenderly, if we can see pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art?

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Top musicians ask for protection against AI, calling it ‘an assault on human creativity’

    Some of the biggest names in the music business published a signed open letter today decrying the “predatory” use of artificial intelligence in music, which they say must be stopped before it gets out of hand.

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Access to data isn't a grant to exploit it

    As the AI hype cycle continues and continues to take on ever more characteristics of a bubble, we should be making an ever more concerted effort to block, confound and frustrate the crawlers they use to trawl the public internet for data. They've operated under the assumption that public access to data comes with the implied permission to exploit and train their models on said data.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI’s GPT Store Is Triggering Copyright Complaints

    For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI’s GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools. Cartoon generators spin up New Yorker–style illustrations and vivid anime stills. Programming and writing assistants offer shortcuts for crafting code and prose. There’s also a color analysis bot, a spider identifier, and a dating coach called RizzGPT. Yet Blichfeldt Andersen is hunting only for one very specific type of bot: Those built on his employer’s copyright-protected textbooks without permission.

  • Walled Culture ☛ How private equity has used copyright to cannibalise the past at the expense of the future

    Walled Culture has been warning about the financialisation and securitisation of music for two years now. Those obscure but important developments mean that the owners of copyrights are increasingly detached from the creative production process. They regard music as just another asset, like gold, petroleum or property, to be exploited to the maximum. A Guest Essay in the New York Times points out one of the many bad consequences of this trend:

    "Does that song on your phone or on the radio or in the movie theater sound familiar? Private equity — the industry responsible for bankrupting companies, slashing jobs and raising the mortality rates at the nursing homes it acquires — is making money by gobbling up the rights to old hits and pumping them back into our present. The result is a markedly blander music scene, as financiers cannibalize the past at the expense of the future and make it even harder for us to build those new artists whose contributions will enrich our entire culture."

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | When Private Equity Came for the Music Industry

    Buying up rights to a proven hit, dusting it off and dressing it up as a movie may impress at a shareholder conference, but it does little to add to a sustainable and vibrant music ecosystem. Like farmers struggling to make it through the winter — to think of another industry upended by private equity — we are eating our artistic seed corn.

    Private equity firms have poured billions of dollars into music, believing it to be a source of growing and reliable income. Investors spent $12 billion on music rights in just 2021 — more than in the entire decade before the pandemic. Though it is like pocket change for an industry with $2.59 trillion in uninvested assets, the investments were welcomed by music veterans as a sign of confidence for an industry still in a streaming-led rebound from a bleak decade and a half. The frothy mood, combined with a Covid-related loss of touring revenue and concerns about tax increases, made it attractive for many artists, including Stevie Nicks and Shakira, to sell their catalogs, some for hundreds of millions of dollars.

    How widespread is Wall Street’s takeover? The next time you listen to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” on Spotify or Apple Music, you are lining the pockets of the private investment firms Carlyle, Blackstone and Eldridge. A piece of the royalties from Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” goes to Apollo. As for Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” — hey, whoever turns you on, but it’s money in the till for HPS Investment Partners.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • Less

      Last week* I stumbled across a youtube recording of an invigorating talk by 100 Rabbits' Devine Lu Linvega from last September's Strange Loop conference. Some of the themes Devine touched on resonated so strongly with me that I felt compelled to write something - anything - here in response. Many of the themes relate somehow to computation and programming, topics which are near and dear to my heart, but I think they can be applied more broadly.

      I'm not a good enough writer to properly put everything into words without a huge amount of effort, so I'm going to limit myself to the following few bullet points. There's a lot more to the actual talk, by the way, so I'd encourage you to take the time to listen to that in full if you have the chance. These are just a handful of thoughts which came to me while watching, and more-than-likely completely misrepresent Devine's intent. These are just some of the patterns his words left in my brain.

    • peak performance

      for all intents and purposes i am not what most people think of as an ideal trans woman. (sadly, this also includes a lot other trans women.) my body is not small, but rather rugged and sturdy. i have a belly and tiny tits and a decent ass that gets increasingly peach-like over time. when i look at myself, though, i see myself as a beautiful creature. i think this started to happen alongside a significant decrease in dysphoria once i accepted that i might be a butch — the rara avis of gender presentation and identity. the butch i am is the person i longed to be, and i love this version of myself more and more.

  • Science

    • Mathematically Transforming a Biased 6-Sided Dice Into an Unbiased 20-Sided Dice

      Back in 2017, I learned how to convert coin flips from a biased coin into fair coin flips using a process created by John Von Neumann to debias random binary data. For about 7 years, I tried to figure out if there was a way to expand that to biased dice of sizes larger than 2. I didn't end up figuring out a direct method, but while trying to figure out how to program a shuffler for a deck of cards on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 6502 Assembly, I learned how to convert random bits to random numbers within arbitrary ranges. This allowed me to find a solution to convert rolls of a biased dice of one base to an unbiased dice of another base. This probably isn't the optimal solution, but it is one that is simple enough for me to calculate with pencil and paper or even often times in my head.

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Programming

      • Shellshock

        Shellshock or "bashdoor" is about ten years old now (September, 2014), and folks on a mailing list were confusing it with heartbleed (of similar vintage and severity but for OpenSSL), so now might be a good time for a trip down the old memory lane… rowhammer time! Can't touch this. bash had for a long while a feature that allowed passing code to child processes via environment variables. Now features are known to some as bloat and to others as "attack surface". Bloat is a matter of opinion, but attack surface can be quite tangible (for an abstraction) especially when a high severity bug exists in bash but not in other shells that also have a lot of features and lines of code, ZSH for example. There was a parade of users coming into the #zsh IRC channel claiming that zsh was also vulnerable; they were executing bash from zsh, so (eventually—the routine got old, quick) I advised them to uninstall bash and try the exploit code, again.