Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ A Tiny Tuner For The Low Power Ham

  Something that all radio amateurs encounter sooner or later is the subject of impedance matching. If you’d like to make sure all that power is transferred from your transmitter into the antenna and not reflected back into your power amplifier, there’s a need for the impedance of the one to match that of the other. Most antennas aren’t quite the desired 50 ohms impedance, so part of the standard equipment becomes an antenna tuner — an impedance matching network. For high-power hams these are big boxes full of chunky variable capacitors and big air cored inductors, but that doesn’t exclude the low-power ham from the impedance matching party. [Barbaros Aşuroğlu WB2CBA] has designed the perfect device for them: the credit card ATU.

• Hackaday ☛ Möbius String Robot Goes Round And Round

  While it doesn’t look like a traditional robot, the hydrogel robot from [Zi Liang Wu] forms a möbius strip and can be activated by light. They also experimented with shaping the hydrogels as a Seifert ribbon.

• El País ☛ 'ABBA: Against the Odds': When ABBA was declared ‘the enemy’ in Sweden

  Surprised by their success, ABBA was also bewildered by the furious reaction it triggered in Sweden, culminating in a huge demonstration on the streets of Stockholm against the country hosting the following year’s contest: it is said that 200,000 people took to the streets, some armed with violins and flutes. The 1975 event did finally take place in the Swedish capital, but an alternative festival of folk, rock, jazz was staged alongside it in a bid to combat the commercialization of music. Faced with this backlash, Sweden neither participated in nor broadcast the Eurovision in 1976.

• Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ My Blogging Workflow

  Mine is made with Jekyll and hosted on Fastmail — yes, on Fastmail’s virtual drive; more on that in a second. I mix medium-length articles with images, quotes, and short notes/asides (which we used to know as “tweets”), which makes my blog, in fact, a tumblelog.

• Barry Hess ☛ All Blogs Are Welcome

  I follow bloggers who blog with all of the various softwares, like Pika. Yes, even WordPress! I follow a lot of the bloggers that use open-source static site generators or content management systems to build their blogs. Yesterday I poked fun at that workflow, but in truth I have nothing but respect for these bloggers. In fact they are in large part the inspiration for Pika!

• Lykolux ☛ URLs for blog posts

  Well whatever you find attractive. I don’t know how this is relevant for SEO. I simply want myself to avoid URL clashes: having two blog posts with the same URL is wrong.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0050 Granularity of IDs

  One of the items she added was a doctor’s referral letter. My natural instinct would have been to create a very granular ID, something like: [...]

• Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ Responsible IT - Part 1

  Lately, I attended an IT decision maker conference. A few hundred CIOs and other IT decision makers under a single roof. When looking at the conference schedule, you found the usual suspects: [...]

• Yury Molodtsov ☛ Why Execution Eats Ideas For Lunch

  Because it’s the execution that truly matters. If you or I got teleported to 2004 with an idea for Facebook, I doubt we’d be able to create it.

• Science

  • France24 ☛ ‘Danger behind the beauty’ of auroras as more solar storms may affect Earth

    "We need to understand that behind this beauty, there is danger," Quentin Verspieren, the European Space Agency's space safety programme coordinator, told AFP.

    Mike Bettwy of the US Space Weather Prediction Center said that "we're focused on the more sinister potential impacts" of solar storms, such as taking out power grids and satellites, or exposing astronauts to dangerous levels of radiation.

  • Rlang ☛ A simple probabilistic algorithm for estimating the number of distinct elements in a data stream

    I just came across a really interesting and simple algorithm for estimating the number of distinct elements in a stream of data. The paper (Chakraborty et al. 2023) is available on arXiv; see this Quanta article (Reference 2) for a layman’s explanation.

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count

    The CVM algorithm, named for its creators — Sourav Chakraborty of the Indian Statistical Institute, Vinodchandran Variyam of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and Kuldeep Meel of the University of Toronto — is a significant step toward solving what’s called the distinct elements problem, which computer scientists have grappled with for more than 40 years. It asks for a way to efficiently monitor a stream of elements — the total number of which may exceed available memory — and then estimate the number of unique elements.

  • [Old] arXiv ☛ [2301.10191] Distinct Elements in Streams: An Algorithm for the (Text) Book

    Given a data stream $\mathcal{A} = \langle a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_m \rangle$ of $m$ elements where each $a_i \in [n]$, the Distinct Elements problem is to estimate the number of distinct elements in $\mathcal{A}$.Distinct Elements has been a subject of theoretical and empirical investigations over the past four decades resulting in space optimal algorithms for it.All the current state-of-the-art algorithms are, however, beyond the reach of an undergraduate textbook owing to their reliance on the usage of notions such as pairwise independence and universal hash functions. We present a simple, intuitive, sampling-based space-efficient algorithm whose description and the proof are accessible to undergraduates with the knowledge of basic probability theory.

• Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ 70 Years After Brown v. Board, Segregation Academies Persist in Deep South

    A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

    Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

• Hardware

  • [Repeat] Vice Media Group ☛ Early Color Photography, and the Man Who Revives It

    He’s not adding color to black and white photos, as people often assume, but rather enhancing the scans of faded early color photographs known as “autochromes,” which date back to the early 20th century and needed about 30 times the exposure time compared with black and white photos of the era. “A lot of people have black and white photographs from the 1970s,” Humphryes says. “They don't realize that people have been taking color photos since 1861.”

  • Hackaday ☛ M1 Development Board From Scraps

    Apple is fairly notorious for building devices that are difficult to repair, but with the right tools it’s often not completely impossible to circumvent some of their barriers. As they say, every lock has a key. [dosdude1] has wanted a specific M1 development board for a while now and has been slowly piecing together everything he needs to cobble one together, and finally got this unit running despite many roadblocks put in his way by Apple.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ After Accident With First Patient, Neuralink Seeks Volunteer for Second Implant

    This wasn't entirely unforeseen. Doctors had previously warned about danger to Neuralink's test patients due to the company's lack of transparency, and it even turned out that Neuralink and federal regulators were aware of the specific risk of the threads pulling out before going ahead with the surgery.

    But, of course, the company proceeded anyway — even telling its first patient, a paralyzed man named Noland Arbaugh, not to worry about the gruesome fates of certain Neuralink test monkeys.

  • Derek Kędziora ☛ The will to live

    People simply giving up on life is a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with a society. And thus, Dutch woman, 29, granted euthanasia approval on grounds of mental suffering. Previously, I wrote about people choosing euthanasia due to poverty in Canada.

  • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ #DeleteFacebook

    I finally managed to delete my Facebook account. This was a long time coming. Being disconnected feels good, it feels liberating.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Futurism ☛ ISIS Affiliates Using AI to Generate Propaganda Promoting Terrorism

    But the news anchor is AI-generated, the Washington Post reports, showing terrorist supporters are technology savvy and harnessing new AI tools to spread hateful messaging, citing a new study from the SITE Intelligence Group, a terrorist monitoring consultancy.

    Since the March 23rd video, ISIS affiliates have released five more videos courting viral success and circulating among its supporters across the world to recruit new members, according to the study.

  • Anne Sturdivant ☛ A Community of Concerns

    Speaking of timelines, that is one of the "tricks" I have found on Mastodon. One of the problems of Late Stage Twitter is that it was one giant behemoth beholden to an algorithm. Many little people drowned out by many large people. Maybe that was just fine for you but I tired easily of the large accounts. I tire of them on Mastodon too. What I have found worked for me on Mastodon was to find the Local timelines that I liked best, usually on smaller/niche instances, and then I joined them.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ I’ve been baited into writing about touch screen Macs once more

    Today Ben Lovejoy posted Touchscreen Macs: The idea that will not die on 9to5Mac and as someone who has weighed in here more than a few times, I figured I’ll do it one more time and then let this topic rest for a while.

  • CS Monitor ☛ AI could transform internet search. Google’s AI Overview shows how.

    Alphabet’s immediate challenge is legal. The Justice Department, which finished closing arguments this month in its first case against the company, has charged Alphabet with illegally paying companies to ensure its Google search engine is the default on smartphones and web browsers. A second antitrust trial about Alphabet’s ad practices looms this fall.

    The longer-term threat is technological. Some analysts suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) will erode Google’s dominance in search. That’s not a foregone conclusion for the $2.2 trillion company. But the twin threats put Alphabet in an awkward position.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Post Office Horizon affair is exposing a wider 'debt' collection scandal – Brian Wilson

    While Horizon is unique in scale as a miscarriage of justice, I hope the inquiry also leads to wider consideration of how the law on debt recovery operates. The pursuit of postmasters was based on threats and fear – pay up or we’ll send you to jail. Faced with that lonely choice, many succumbed regardless of guilt and paid prices up to, and including, death.

    My guess is there are many mini-Horizons under the surface where people, isolated and without recourse to legal advice, face an overbearing system that puts power in the hands of public and private agencies to enforce collection of disputed debts. These legal processes and criminal protection rackets are based on the same principle – pay up or we will do you damage.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI’s Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded

    The dissolution of OpenAI’s superalignment team adds to recent evidence of a shakeout inside the company in the wake of last November’s governance crisis. Two researchers on the team, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov, were dismissed for leaking company secrets, The Information reported last month. Another member of the team, William Saunders, left OpenAI in February, according to an internet forum post in his name.

  • [Old] AdExchanger ☛ Let's Give Walled Gardens The Name They Deserve: Roach Motels

    When consumer data goes into a walled garden, it never comes out. Ad dollars go in, but the true measurement of the results never come out. These are not walled gardens. A better metaphor for this closed ecosystem is a roach motel.

  • Licensing / Legal

    • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Ellison: we will exploit open source

      The Financial Times yesterday ran an interview with Oracle boss Larry Ellison [full transcript here]. One of the big talking points is Ellison's approach to open source, and whether or not it poses a threat to a firm like his.

    • [Old] InfoWorld ☛ In Oracle's fight with open source, the good guys won -- this time

      Ellison's treatment of open source since the Sun acquisition has been nothing short of reprehensible, and it made me really mad. The man who promised to be a good steward to Sun's treasure trove of technology tried to pull a fast one by taking OpenOffice, a very viable and free alternative to Microsoft's bloated, way-too-expensive Microsoft Office, and turning it just another commercial product.

• Security

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Wired ☛ US Official Warns a Cell Network Flaw Is Being Exploited for Spying

      The system known as SS7—which connects cellular networks run by different providers—and its more recent upgrade called Diameter have long been considered a serious security and privacy problem. Researchers have warned that hackers who can gain access to a mobile provider's system or even create their own have the ability to reroute cellular data, allowing them to track individuals or eavesdrop on their communications. Now one US official is raising the alarm that this technique has been used numerous times against real victims in the US.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Record ☛ Grindr's chief privacy officer on the dating app's data controversies

      Hundreds of Grindr users filed suit against the LGBTQ+ dating app late last month for allegedly sharing their HIV status with third parties without consent. The accusations are the latest in a string of privacy-related scandals for the company, including a 2022 incident in which the site’s data sharing practices reportedly led to the outing of a senior Catholic church official as a Grindr user.

    • The Register UK ☛ The mystery of the targeted ad and the library patron

      In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library.

      Her audiobook consumption, she explained, had been highly focused the previous month, focused on a specific subgenre that she doesn't believe would come up by chance.

    • Derek Kędziora ☛ Customers and users in 2024

      By 2024, it’s become less clear that you can ever be a paying customer with any reasonable expectation of privacy. The latest example is Slack training AI models on chats from paying customers. The temptation for companies to do this is simply going to be too strong for most to resist.

    • EPIC ☛ CFPB Fair Credit Reporting Act Rulemaking – EPIC – Electronic Privacy Information Center

      The FCRA establishes firm limits on the purposes for which a CRA can collect, sell, or disclose certain personal data, and it requires each CRA to maintain the accuracy of the personal data it holds and to comply with a consumer’s request to access or correct their own information. But in the half century since the FCRA was enacted, the business of collecting and selling personal information has radically changed in scale, complexity, and the threats it poses to privacy.

      In response to these changes, the CFPB is poised to update and upgrade existing consumer reporting regulations through its FCRA rulemaking authority. The CFPB released an outline of proposals and alternatives under consideration in September 2023, and the Bureau is expected to soon release a notice of proposed rulemaking.

    • [Repeat] Security Week ☛ User Outcry as Slack Scrapes Customer Data for AI Model Training

      By default, and without requiring users to opt-in, Slack said its systems have been analyzing customer data and usage information (including messages, content and files) to build AI/ML models to improve the software.

      The company insists it has technical controls in place to block Slack from accessing the underlying content and promises that data will not lead across workplaces but, despite these assurances, corporate Slack admins are scrambling to opt-out of the data scraping.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Reason ☛ U.S. TikTok Ban Is Disguising Real Privacy Concerns

    Writing in The Free Press, Rep. Michael Gallagher (R–Wisc.)—co-sponsor of the TikTok bill—claims that because the Chinese Communist Party allegedly "uses TikTok to push its propaganda and censor views," the United States must move to block. This endorsement of the Chinese "governing system" evinces no awareness of the beauty of our own. We can combat propaganda with our free press (including The Free Press). Of greatest help is that the congressman singles out the odious views that the Chinese potentates push: on Tiananmen, Muslims, LGBTQ issues, Tibet, and elsewise.

  • El País ☛ SpaceX satellites threaten to hide asteroids that pose danger to humanity

    The International Astronomical Union demands that urgent action be taken against the uncontrolled proliferation of these devices. Starlink satellites make it difficult to search for objects at risk of impacting the Earth

  • Reuters ☛ US, TikTok seek fast-track schedule, ruling by Dec. 6 on potential ban

    The law, signed by President Joe Biden on April 24, gives ByteDance until Jan. 19 to sell TikTok or face a ban. The White House says it wants to see Chinese-based ownership ended on national security grounds, but not a ban on TikTok.

  • The Register UK ☛ Three arrested for 'helping N Koreans' get remote US IT jobs

    Vong's alleged role in the conspiracy, at least according to the Feds, was to secure positions at companies and then outsource that work to North Koreans who could actually do the technical work, all while keeping a percentage of the salary for his trouble and funneling the rest back to Pyongyang. A Vietnam native, Vong was a naturalized US citizen who actually worked in a nail salon.

  • Wired ☛ The Race to Buy TikTok Is On—but There Might Not Be a Winner

    What exactly McCourt would do with TikTok remains unclear, but in an interview with Time Magazine, he said that “the user experience wouldn’t change much.” He was not deterred by the prospect of the Chinese government preventing him from buying TikTok’s core algorithm, which is responsible for determining what content users see on the app.

  • The Verge ☛ Head of Canada’s intelligence agency says Chinese government can access TikTok user data

    TikTok has previously claimed that staffers in China are unable to access US and European users’ data. The company has undertaken two massive corporate restructuring efforts — Project Texas and Project Clover, referring to the US and European endeavors, respectively — to silo off user data from China. US user data is hosted in Oracle’s cloud infrastructure and isn’t supposed to be accessible by anyone outside the US, though a recent report by Fortune suggests efforts to secure US user data have been “largely cosmetic.”

  • CBC ☛ Intelligence chief warns Canadians that China can use TikTok to spy on them

    "Most people can say, 'Why is it a big deal for a teenager now to have their data [on TikTok]?' Well in five years, in 10 years, that teenager will be a young adult, will be engaged in different activities around the world," he told host Catherine Cullen.

    "If you are, for whatever reason, getting in the crosshairs of the [People's Republic of China], they will have a lot of information about you."

  • Canada ☛ CSIS Public Report 2023 [PDF]

    As Canada’s security intelligence service, CSIS is committed to protecting Canada’s national security, interests, economic prosperity, and people from threats both foreign and domestic. As CSIS enters its 40th year of protecting Canadians in 2024, CSIS will continue to grow, learn, and adapt to ensure it remains one step ahead of Canada’s adversaries and threat actors who seek to undermine the security of our nation. In pursuit of this mission, CSIS will continue to engage with a broad range of national security partners to foster informed dialogue on national security matters, and increase collective resilience against threats to ensure the continued safety, security, and prosperity of Canada and all Canadians.

  • Craig Murray ☛ The Drive for War

    The collective shrug with which the Western media and political class noted the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has been telling.

• Environment

  • New Statesman ☛ Does bad press matter to water companies?

    Watson said that when his organisation surveyed the Thames prior to the Oxford and Cambridge boat race in March and found dangerously high levels of E Coli bacteria, the Environment Agency was “not remotely interested”, and neither the water companies nor the regulator are prepared to issue any advice on whether it is safe to swim outside of the tiny number of spots that are designated for bathing. There is, he said, “no safety net to protect the public from what is going into our rivers”.

  • CBC ☛ Plastic pollution is the new front in the culture war

    Tochor was speaking about Bill C-380, his own initiative to reverse the Liberal government's move to list manufactured plastic items as a toxic substance under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

  • Futurism ☛ Microsoft's Emissions and Water Use Shoot Up as It Goes All in on AI Datacenters

    As Microsoft ramps up efforts to conquer the artificial intelligence industry, its latest sustainability report shows that its water use and carbon emissions have shot up dramatically.

    The software giant increased its water use from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 million cubic meters in 2023. And its emissions jumped from around 12 million metric tons of carbon in 2020 to about 15 metric tons last year, mostly stemming "from the construction of more datacenters" and indirect carbon footprint from "building materials, as well as hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks."

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Doug Jones ☛ Europe Train Adventure

      I’ll be traveling from London to Rome via train!

      The trip is structured so I’ll have 2 nights in each city along the way, which I hope will give me a chance to have a break and do some sightseeing in-between travel days (plus a buffer if there should be an issue with one of the trains).

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Scotsman ☛ Swedish heiress and Scottish estate landowner drives mass nature restoration in Highlands

      Since 2015, the estate has worked to reduce deer numbers, plant native woodland, restore peat bogs and reintroduce red squirrels on land that was historically used for field sports.

      Over the next 50 years, the Loch Abar Mòr partnership seeks to create a rich mosaic of habitats “alive with nature” that cross traditional land boundaries.

  • Overpopulation

    • New York Times ☛ Mexico City Has Long Thirsted for Water. The Crisis Is Worsening.

      The groundwater is quickly vanishing. A key reservoir got so low that it is no longer used to supply water. Last year was Mexico’s hottest and driest in at least 70 years. And one of the city’s main water systems faces a potential “Day Zero” this summer when levels dip so much that it, too, will no longer provide water.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Greece ☛ ‘Likes’ do not translate into votes

    So what happens when it is time for the polls and then the elections? Are social media users excluded from the sample? Obviously not. The question is rhetorical but helps us to make the next guess: The inactivity of passive scrolling and the online spectacle is different from the political stakes of an electoral contest.

    In short, “likes” do not translate into votes. Politics are also partly about an image, but not only that. A smart, cute or entertaining post does not translate into political dominance. “Governability” options obey different indicators.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ We Can’t Have a Fair Society Under Capitalism

    Random chance governs far more of our lives than most of us are comfortable admitting. Fully appreciating the influence of luck on life chances should lead us to rethink our economic and political institutions from the bottom up.

  • InfoSecurity Magazine ☛ Decoding US Government Plans to Shift the Software Security Burden

    However, the US government’s National Cybersecurity Strategy, published in 2023, seeks to redress this balance by shifting more security responsibility on the software manufacturers.

    US government officials and cybersecurity experts discussed two key ways they are looking to achieve this shift during the conference.

  • The Register UK ☛ Graph database shows Biden outspends Trump on social media

    The research group, which employed Neo4j's graph database for the first time this year, found direct spending by Biden was greater than Trump's spending by about 7-to-1 on Facebook and Instagram ads. However, in attack ads from groups associated with either candidate, more mention Biden (47 percent) than Trump (37 percent).

    The IDJC found $15.3 million spent by 1,802 groups that invested 24,000 ad buys for Trump or Biden. There were 5,545 unique ads between the beginning of September last year and February 29, 2024. These ads generated about 869 million impressions. In addition, Biden and Trump's campaigns spent another estimated $10 million, earning 303 million impressions.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Departing top CISA official reflects on nearly four years in the cyber hot seat

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has made important progress on understanding cyber risks, collaborating with industry and encouraging tech companies to make their products more secure, according to a departing top official at the agency, Eric Goldstein, who also believes the agency has more work to do on things like implementing a rule for gathering cyber incident data.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Wired ☛ How Big Dairy Took Over Your TikTok Feed—With Help from Uncle Sam

      Dairy Management, whose funding largely consists of legally mandated fees collected from farmers, is one of a constellation of government-supported dairy marketing groups that also includes the Fluid Milk Board, a beverage-focused entity whose promotion arm has paid Emily Ratajkowski, Kelly Ripa, Amanda Gorman, and more than 200 others to promote milk on social media. (The milk board also recently sponsored a section in New York Magazine’s The Cut, focused on women in sports.) In recent years, Dairy Management has partnered with mega-influencer MrBeast at least twice, filming him as he toured a dairy farm and paying him to promote a dairy-focused competition in the video game Minecraft.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • VOA News ☛ Film director Rasoulof fled Iran on foot, newspaper says

    Rasoulof said Monday he had fled Iran after a court sentenced him to eight years in jail, of which five were due to be served, over his new film "The Seed of the Sacred Fig."

    The leading Iranian filmmaker, often a target of the country's authorities, told The Guardian in an interview published Friday that he had found shelter in Germany and was hopeful he could attend the film's Cannes premiere next week.

    The film tells the story of a judge's struggles amid political unrest in Tehran.

  • VOA News ☛ Iranian Nobel laureate faces new trial, Mohammadi family says

    Jailed Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi faces a new trial over accusations she made against security forces of sexually assaulting female prisoners, her family said Saturday.

    The trial, due to begin Sunday, relates to an audio message she shared from prison in April with supporters in which she decried a "full-scale war against women" in the Islamic Republic.

  • VOA News ☛ Iran hangs 2 women as surge in executions intensifies, group says

    Iran last year carried out more hangings than in any year since 2015, according to nongovernmental organizations, which accuse the Islamic Republic of using capital punishment to instill fear in the wake of protests that erupted in autumn 2022.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Glory to Hong Kong: An Illegal protest song & the Streisand Effect

    What has made the song even more famous is the government’s efforts to expunge it from the [Internet]. Alas, the horse has now bolted. It is not just out of the stable but over the horizon.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ What To Know About Assange's Next Hearing On May 20

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian in Georgia protests: I feel it’s my duty to be here

    Even after the Georgian parliament passed the controversial “foreign influence” law, thousands of people continue to protest the bill. Maja, a Lithuanian who has called the Caucasus country home for almost a decade, was among them.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Georgia's president vetoes foreign agent law

    President of the European Council Charles Michel wrote on X that Zourabichvili's veto "offers a moment for further reflection," while adding that the bill in its current form "is not in line with EU values and path."

    The veto can be overriden by another vote in Parliament. The bill is backed by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze and his Georgian Dream party, which have majority control in the Parliament.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Georgia president vetoes controversial 'foreign influence' law

    Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili on Saturday put a mostly symbolic veto on the "foreign influence" law which has sparked unprecedented protests and warnings from Brussels that the measure would undermine Tbilisi's EU aspirations.

  • Futurism ☛ USA Today Using AI to Generate Parts of Articles, Leaked Memo Shows

    The Gannett memo states that the AI tool was trained by Gannett during a nine-month period, according to the Verge's reporting. The automated roundup tool "aims to enhance the reporting process and elevate the audience experience," according to the memo. How such a tool would do much of either, though — unless elevating the "audience experience" simply means keeping readers from having to read an article in full — is unclear.

  • CPJ ☛ Syrian journalist Mahmoud Ibrahim arrested after post on anti-Assad protests

    “CPJ is appalled that Syrian authorities have arrested yet another journalist for commenting on news events in their own country. Mahmoud Ibrahim should not be criminalized simply for expressing his opinion,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “Syrian authorities must inform Ibrahim’s family of his whereabouts, grant him access to medical care, and release him and all other journalists unfairly jailed for commenting on the government of President Bashar al-Assad.”

  • [Repeat] Press Gazette ☛ Christiane Amanpour versus Deborah Turness on news impartiality

    But Amanpour explained: “What if World War Two was about to explode – would we say we’re impartial to the Nazis’ desire to overrun the world?

    “No, we are not impartial, and we should not be, we should be objective and truthful.”

    Amanpour said earlier: “I’ve never subscribed to this idea that truth is subjective, because it’s empirical, evidentiary, and factual.”

  • VOA News ☛ Journalists covering opposition to Georgian law receive threats

    Last week, hundreds of critics of the law — including around 30 journalists who covered the protests — received threatening phone calls, according to media reports and watchdogs. Numerous offices faced similar vandalism to the Media Development Foundation, and at least six opposition politicians and activists were beaten.

    Kintsurashvili worries the harassment will become more common in Georgia now that the law’s enactment appears imminent.

    “The purpose of this legislation is not transparency,” she said. “They want to silence unwanted voices, critical voices,” she continued, referring to the government.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFA ☛ China’s ‘virtual invasion’ of India and the cultural genocide of Tibet

    Powered by this claim, one of the weapons of the PRC’s foreign offensive are geographical maps where boundary disputes are used as tools for sinicization of Tibet. In this pursuit, the CCP is indefatigable.

    On March 30, the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the PRC committed its latest misappropriation of Indian toponyms, changing 30 placenames in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Disneyland Resort costumed character employees vote to unionize

    The results of the vote, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, come after a three-day election period in which employees, known as “cast members” in Disney parlance, placed their votes at three polling sites in Disneyland. The employees announced their intent to unionize in February.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ The IndieWeb’s next stage?

    Over its first decade-plus, the IndieWeb community has done a great job developing protocols and experimenting with a wide range of tools to accomplish many online activities. The wiki is a rich resource for DIYers, and the availability of the chat for people to ask technical questions is fantastic. Regular Homebrew Website Club events offer a way to connect directly with other website owners. The W3C has adopted the Webmention protocol. In this sense, the IndieWeb is already a smashing success.

    I also think we could be more, if we wanted.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Australian Music Library Startup Melodie Raises $660K Financing

    Investors are paying attention as Melodie just announced a convertible note bridging round ahead of a larger strategic equity raise planned for 2025. With $1 million already committed, there is strong investor confidence in the company’s continued growth.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ An Australian telco’s streaming service will...

    Say you’re a customer of a shiny new streaming service that offers you a catalogue of music, movies, or television programming for a flat monthly fee. Say they also offer certain media you can pay for, which adds it to your personal catalogue you can listen to or watch whenever you want. To distinguish them from your streaming material, they may use terms like “buy” to refer to the transaction.

    Do you own any of what you buy here?

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CBC ☛ Canadian Taylor Swift fans are flying to Europe for cheaper concert tickets

  Bryan Kingston couldn't believe it when he snagged floor seats to an upcoming show in London, U.K., for $500 each on a resale website, when he had paid twice as much in Detroit last year.

• The Register UK ☛ Microsoft and Mistral deal not a merger, says UK regulator

  At the time and to assist with its assessment, the CMA invited "comment from interested parties." Also under the spotlight was Microsoft's decision to hire Inflection AI CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who is now heading up Microsoft's AI division and took many of his employees with him.

  In return, Microsoft is believed to have paid Inflection AI some $650 million. The CMA did not comment on this situation today, however, the European Commission said in mid-April it had determined the maneuvering did not technically add up to a merger.

• [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ EU asks Microsoft to provide information about Bing’s generative AI features

  The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, announced the move today. Microsoft has until May 27 to provide the requested information. Failing to do so could lead to potentially significant fines.

  The request is part of the European Commission’s efforts to ensure tech giants comply with the bloc’s Digital Services Act, or DSA. The legislation requires large online platform operators such as Microsoft to monitor for several types of risks in their services and mitigate them. That includes risks associated with generative AI features.

• Copyrights

  • [Old] Digital Music News ☛ Too Lost x Tipalti Gets Artists Paid Across the Globe

    Too Lost has quickly become one of the fastest-growing music distributors thanks to its unwavering commitment to innovation and artist empowerment. By offering forward-thinking features and a cutting-edge technology platform, Too Lost ensures that artists have the tools and support they need to thrive in today’s music landscape.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Paywalls on stuff I pay for

    Paywalls are… tolerable on the desktop. I configure Firefox with plugins to periodically purge cookies for privacy reasons, but I use the Manage Exceptions section to include URLs for newspapers. It was becoming tedious logging into each one, every single time I wanted to read an article.

  • New York Times ☛ Inside OpenAI’s Library

    Built at Mr. Altman’s request and stocked with titles suggested by his staff, the OpenAI library is an apt metaphor for the world’s hottest tech company, whose success was fueled by language — lots and lots of language. OpenAI’s chatbot was not built like the average internet app. ChatGPT learned its skills by analyzing huge amounts of text that was written, edited and curated by humans, including encyclopedia articles, news stories, poetry and, yes, books.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Time for a Refresh

    The CC team has been evaluating our progress toward our 2021-2025 strategy. Through that process, we have noticed the ways we have been organically adjusting to the social and technical shifts around us, as well as the ebbs and flows of funding availability. It would be an understatement to say that much has changed since we developed the strategy in 2020 and launched it in 2021. Turns out that our predictions and plans set forth in 2020 are not as helpful in the reality of 2024 and likely even less so for 2025 and beyond.

    Rather than continuing to progress through the existing strategy, we have determined that the stronger, and dare we say more strategic, approach is to conduct a strategy refresh.

  • The Register UK ☛ Reddit adds OpenAI to its stable of AI training partners

    Like the OpenAI deal, Reddit's Google AI training partnership gave the Chocolate Factory access to Reddit's aforementioned Data API. "This partnership is consistent with other content arrangements," Google said in its statement about the OpenAI deal.

    For those that may not recall, Reddit decided last year to start charging for access to its Data API due to concerns that AI models would start ingesting all its user-supplied content without Reddit getting a cut.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ YouTube Ripper Seeks IP-Addresses of 'Threatening' & 'DMCA-Abusing' Competitors

    YTMP3.nu, one of the largest YouTube ripping sites on the web, is trying to pinpoint competitors who allegedly sent abusive takedown notices to Google in an SEO battle. The company behind the site filed a lawsuit and previously obtained email addresses of the defendants. In addition, they now want Google, Cloudflare and Namecheap to share more information, including IP-addresses.