Links 24/05/2024: Layoffs at LinkedIn and Election Interference Via Social Control Media
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Wired ☛ He Trained Cops to Fight Crypto Crime—and Allegedly Ran a $100M Dark-Web Drug Market
Over his years working as a cryptocurrency-focused intern at Cathay Financial Holdings in Taipei and then as a young IT staffer at St. Lucia's Taiwanese embassy, Lin allegedly lived a double life as a dark-web figure who called himself “Pharoah" or “faro”—a persona whose track record qualifies as remarkably strange and contradictory even for the dark web, where secret lives are standard issue. In his short career, Pharoah launched Incognito, built it into a popular crypto black market with some of the dark web's better safety and security features, then abruptly stole the funds of the market's customers and drug dealers in a so-called “exit scam” and, in a particularly malicious new twist, extorted those users with threats of releasing their transaction details.
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James G ☛ Brainstorming how to elevate older blog posts on my site
One thing I have been thinking about is re-posting older pieces of my writing in my feed and on my home page. There would be a visual indicator to show that the post on my home page is a repost, with a link to guidance on what that means. The feed versions, too, would show an indicator that the post is a few months old. I would re-post things manually: if I haven't been writing for a while, I may repost a blog post of which I am particularly proud, or that covers a topic I have not written about in a while.
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Brandon ☛ Streamlining My Blogs
I felt like I was spread too thin, and the older blogs were no longer bringing me joy. In fact, almost all of the content that was being published on them had been pre-written over a year ago. I was just coasting on my drafts. But the more I thought about it, I realized it was time to make some changes.
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Lewis Dale ☛ Adding some slashpages
I used to have a /now page, but I never maintained it so I’ve removed it[1]. I already have /blogroll, which I’d populated a while ago. One of the few pages on that list that I think are relevant to me is probably the /uses page. I could have sworn I had one once, but that might have been on another iteration of this site.
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Lou Plummer ☛ My Rules for Me
I wrote these commandments, if you will, a few years ago to serve as a constant reminder of the way I want to live my life. Every morning for a solid year I hand wrote these in a journal every morning while I was having my first cup of coffee. Of course I don't do these perfectly, but no matter what, these are my values. I'm not wishy washy. I've shared them with enough people close to me to get called out of I stray too far. I would not have it any other way.
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Science
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James G ☛ Hugging Face Papers RSS Feed
I enjoy making RSS feeds for sites whose content I would like to follow. I have made an RSS feed for Hugging Face Daily Papers, a curated list of research papers in machine learning. This feed is available at: [...]
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Education
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Barry Sampson ☛ Never Work With People
I guess it’s no surprise that I still remember this first incident.
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Sightline Media Group ☛ Bill would allow retroactive Purple Heart vets to transfer GI benefits
The legislation, titled the Purple Heart Veterans Education Act, would permit retroactive award recipients who served on or after Sept. 11, 2001, to transfer their education benefits to one or more dependents. It was unveiled just ahead of Memorial Day, when the nation honors its deceased service members.
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Hardware
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Hackaday ☛ Using A Spring As A Capacitive Touch Button
When [Daniel Eichhorn] designed the Pendrive S3 project, he wanted to use an off-the-shelf USB enclosure but also add a button for the user to start certain actions. Drilling a hole into the enclosure would be an option, but decided a touch sensor on the top of the enclosure would be much more elegant — not to mention better at keeping dirt and moisture out. To bridge the 6.3 mm spacing between the PCB and the top of the enclosure [Daniel] used a small, 7 mm PCB-mounted spring.
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Hackaday ☛ Is This The World’s Smallest Multichannel Voltmeter?
The instrument which probably the greatest number of Hackaday readers own is likely to be the humble digital multimeter. They’re cheap and useful, but they’re single-channel, and difficult to incorporate into a breadboard project. If you’ve ever been vexed by these limitations then [Alun Morris] has just the project for you, in the world’s smallest auto-ranging multichannel voltmeter. It’s a meter on a tiny PCB with a little OLED display, and as its name suggests, it can keep an eye on several voltages for you.
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Hackaday ☛ Passive Diplexer Makes One Antenna Act Like Two
Stay in the amateur radio hobby long enough and you might end up with quite a collection of antennas. With privileges that almost extend from DC to daylight, one antenna will rarely do everything, and pretty soon your roof starts to get hard to see through the forest of antennas. It may be hell on curb appeal, but what’s a ham to do?
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New York Times ☛ C. Gordon Bell, Creator of a Personal Computer Prototype, Dies at 89
Called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, Mr. Bell was the master architect in the effort to create smaller, affordable, interactive computers that could be clustered into a network. A virtuoso at computer architecture, he built the first time-sharing computer and championed efforts to build the Ethernet. He was among a handful of influential engineers whose designs formed the vital bridge between the room-size models of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer.
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Lykolux ☛ Repair at the sewing shop
I’ve never paid much attention to my clothes. As long as I’m something other than a billboard, it’s okay. It’s more an object of daily use than an object of beauty or social status. So I’ve never been to a stewing store!
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Security Week ☛ US Intelligence Agencies’ Embrace of Generative AI Is at Once Wary and Urgent
The operation’s results far exceeded human-only analysis, finding twice as many companies and 400% more people engaged in illegal or suspicious commerce in the deadly opioid.
Excited U.S. intelligence officials touted the results publicly — the AI made connections based mostly on internet and dark-web data — and shared them with Beijing authorities, urging a crackdown.
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ Studies find that trigger warnings do nothing
Happy ending: upon reading this study, members of the Mastodon HOA stopped asking Matt Blaze to put content warnings on black and white architectural photos "because they are depressing".
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[Old] Association for Psychological Science ☛ Caution: Content Warnings Do Not Reduce Distress, Study Shows
Advocates for the use of trigger warnings suggest that they can help people avoid or emotionally prepare for encountering content related to a past trauma. But trigger warnings may not fulfill either of these functions, according to an analysis published in Clinical Psychological Science.
Instead, warnings appear to heighten the anticipatory anxiety a person may feel prior to viewing sensitive material while making them no less likely to consume that content, wrote Victoria M. E. Bridgland (Flinders University), Payton J. Jones, and Benjamin W. Bellet (Harvard University). Additionally, participants’ distress levels after viewing potentially triggering material were the same regardless of whether or not they received a warning.
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Brandon ☛ When We're Gone: On Death & Blogging
I sometimes think about what will happen if I pass away suddenly. The blog and Mastodon posts stop, and the emails go unanswered. My wife doesn't have much interest in these things, so I don't think she could navigate to update my blog nor my Mastodon, although she might respond to some emails. Suddenly, all the work and words written no longer matter. They are just wasting away on the web, waiting for the domain or hosting to expire, whatever comes first. Folks unsubscribe from the RSS because what is the point, no new content is coming. And just like that, it's all over.
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NPR ☛ Your earbuds and you: What all that listening is doing to us
According to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion young adults, ages 12 to 35, are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss due to "unsafe listening practices." By 2050, the WHO predicts that 1 in 10 of us will experience "disabling hearing loss."
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Air Force Times ☛ Veteran suicide prevention algorithm favors men, investigation finds
An artificial intelligence program designed to prevent suicide among U.S. military veterans prioritizes white men and ignores survivors of sexual violence, which affects a far greater percentage of women, an investigation by The Fuller Project has found.
The algorithm, which the Department of Veterans Affairs uses to target assistance to patients “with the highest statistical risk for suicide,” considers 61 variables, documents show, and gives preference to veterans who are “divorced and male” and “widowed and male,” but not to any group of female veterans.
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US News And World Report ☛ TikTok: Ground Zero for Vaping Sales to Kids
Vendors often evade restrictions on sales and advertising of vaping products to minors by creating what TikTok users tag as #puffbundles or #vapebundles, researchers found. These bundles include other products like candy, fake eyelashes and lip gloss, so the packages don’t appear to contain vaping products at all
Nearly 29% of the products were described as “bundled,” about 9% indicated the products were “hidden,” and 6% touted international shipping as an option.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Anton Zhiyanov ☛ LLMs are insecure
LLMs are insecure by design.
There is an AI security company called Lakera, which has developed Gandalf — a security challenge where your goal is to convince an LLM to give away a secret password.
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Vox ☛ Google AI Overview: Do AI-written answers make the search engine a publisher?
But rather than try to get a handle on how reliable these results are overall, there’s another question to ask here: If Google’s AI Overview gets something wrong, who is responsible if that answer ends up hurting someone?
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Rach Smith ☛ Generative AI is for the idea guys
Generative AI is like the ultimate idea guy’s idea! Imagine… if all they needed to create a business, software or art was their great idea, and a computer. No need to engage (or pay) any of those annoying makers who keep talking about limitations, scope, standards, artistic integrity etc. etc.
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Tracy Durnell ☛ Mega tech companies are cheaters
If you found out the winner of the Boston Marathon had cheated, would you say, well that’s fine because surely next time they’ll find a way to win without cheating? Or if not next time, someday.
No, that person who took the subway was DQ’d.
But in effect that’s what tech companies are asking us to do for their fatally flawed products, hoping they’ll dig so deep into the market so they’ll become too “important” to get shut down. The answer to valid criticism is always that they’ll fix that later — just ignore the man behind the curtain and focus on the potential of this technology.
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The Verge ☛ Steve Kramer, the political consultant behind Biden deepfake robocalls, faces $6 million fine
The Federal Communications Commission has proposed imposing multimillion-dollar fines on the political consultant responsible for the robocall campaign that used an AI-generated deepfake of President Joe Biden’s voice — and on the telecom company that facilitated the calls.
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Security Week ☛ VMware Abused in Recent MITRE Hack for Persistence, Evasion
The threat actor deployed a VMware vCenter backdoor named BrickStorm and a web shell named BeeFlush. It also deployed a web shell named WireFire and exfiltrated data using a different web shell, named BushWalk.
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The Atlantic ☛ The OpenAI dustup signals a bigger problem
As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote yesterday in The Atlantic, “The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.” I spoke with Charlie this morning about the hubris of OpenAI’s leadership, the uncanny use of human-sounding AI, and to what extent OpenAI has adopted a “move fast and break things” mentality.
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New Statesman ☛ Deepfake technology endangers us all
It’s easy to vilify influencers for being shallow and attention-seeking, promoting over-consumption, and narrow beauty standards. But this trend shows us the danger deepfakes (and other forms of technology that could be used misogynistically) present for all of us – especially women. Anyone who has shared any image of themselves online is now at risk of having a deepfake made of them by anyone with malicious intent and [Internet] access. If there is any digital representation of you online – an image, something as common as a Facebook profile picture, or even a professional headshot for LinkedIn, or a video; even your voice or your written work – then you are susceptible. This reality should help us to see why deepfake technology needs immediate legislation – holistic, wide-reaching laws that address the risks deepfakes pose to all of us.
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Futurism ☛ Google Is Already Jamming Advertisements Into Its Crappy AI
On Tuesday, Google announced that those AI Overviews — already the subject of ridicule for mishaps like recommending people change their car's blinker fluid — will start including shopping ads, in one of the company's first attempts to monetize its AI offerings while trying to protect its biggest cash cow, search ad revenue, against the rising tide of chatbots.
The scale of the rollout is unclear, but here's what you can expect to see, per a Google blog post. When you ask a question like "how do I get wrinkles out of clothes," the search engine will generate an AI Overview that is shown above all the conventional search results. This section contains a heavily summarized paragraph addressing your query — and beneath it, a lineup of all the wonderful sponsored products to suit your needs.
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The Register UK ☛ I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite and no one wants to fix it
It would appear that the biggest technological innovation since the introduction of the world wide web a generation ago has been productized by a collection of fundamentally unserious people and organizations who appear to have no grasp of what it means to run a software business, nor any desire to implement any of the systems or processes needed to affect that seriousness.
If that sounds like an extraordinary claim, bear with me. I have an extraordinary story to share.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Amid growing deepfake fears, FCC chair wants more transparency around AI-generated political ads
Rosenworcel is concerned about how AI-generated ads can mislead the public. If adopted, her proposal would not ban such ads but ensure that advertisers are transparent about them if they appear on TV or radio. Her proposal does not include political ads on streaming platforms.
Unsurprisingly, since the technology around generative AI has vastly improved, there have been concerns over deepfake content hoodwinking the public. In February this year, following deepfake Joe Biden robocalls in New Hampshire that told Democrats in the state not to vote in the primary election, there were plenty of discussions on the regulation of artificial intelligence. The FCC subsequently imposed a ban on AI-generated robocalls.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Wired ☛ A Leak of Biometric Police Data Is a Sign of Things to Come
Fowler, who shared his findings exclusively with WIRED, says within the heaps of information, the most concerning were those that appeared to be verification documents linked to Indian law enforcement or military personnel. While the misconfigured server has now been closed off, the incident highlights the risks of companies collecting and storing biometric data, such as fingerprints and facial images, and how they could be misused if the data is accidentally leaked.
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Threat Source ☛ Apple and Google are taking steps to curb the abuse of location-tracking devices — but what about others?
Certainly, products like the AirTag and Samsung trackers that these companies have direct control over will now be more secure, and hopefully less ripe for abuse by a bad actor, but it’s far from a total solution to the problem that these types of products pose.
As I’ve pointed out in the past with security cameras and any other range of [Internet]-connected devices, online stores are filled with these types of products, promising to track users’ personal items with an app so they don’t lose common household items like their phones, wallets and keys.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Some Microsoft services, DuckDuckGo hit by global outage
Users turned to social media on Thursday to complain about the outage, which is also impacting third parties, including the search engine DuckDuckGo, which relies on Microsoft’s infrastructure.
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EDRI ☛ It's time for a heart-to-heart about the EU's surveillance agenda
But here’s the kicker: while we’re still reeling from security fiascoes like this one or the recent Pegasus spyware scandal, police chiefs in the European Union are pushing a policing agenda that puts us all in the cross-hairs.
Privacy is safety. As we approach the European elections in June, it’s time to discuss the EU’s role in shaping how technologies are developed and used.
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Privacy International ☛ Sports and Surveillance | Privacy International
Increasingly we have seen surveillance, and especially mass surveillance measures, being introduced at sports events impeding the enjoyment particularly of the right to privacy and right to participate in sporting life.
When we saw that the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights recently made a call for submissions on the right to participate in sports, and we knew we had to share our findings on the use of surveillance on this right.
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Comparitech Ltd ☛ The world's most surveilled football stadiums
Here at Comparitech, our team researched the top 100 stadiums in world football (or, soccer for our US readers) to find out which football fans are the most watched. Using a range of data resources and reports, including news articles and stadium statistics, we have collated the number of cameras found in each stadium. We focused on the number of cameras recording the public in and around the grounds and not those that record and stream matches on television.
We were able to find camera figures for 49 out of 100 stadiums.
Here are our key findings: [...]
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The Register UK ☛ Apple Wi-Fi Positioning System open to global tracking abuse
In a paper titled, "Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems," Erik Rye, a PhD student at the University of Maryland (UMD) in the US, and Dave Levin, associate professor at UMD, describe how the design of Apple's WPS facilitates mass surveillance, even of those not using Apple devices.
"This work identifies the potential for harm to befall owners of Wi-Fi APs (access points), particularly those among vulnerable and sensitive populations, that can be tracked using WPSes," the authors explain in their paper [PDF]. "The threat applies even to users that do not own devices for which the WPSes are designed – individuals who own no Apple products, for instance, can have their AP in Apple’s WPS merely by having Apple devices come within Wi-Fi transmission range."
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Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Too much personal information online
Why do we do it? I think because it’s fun and we have an urge to socialize through tools we have. I don’t use social networks and I feel I satisfy my need of socialization with posting such personal data in hope of forming connection to other people. I don’t know how correct that is.
Anyway, that feels unhealthy. As one who cares about privacy, I find it very upsetting that we voluntarily share such information. However, this is a personal blog, the blogs I read are also mostly personal. Everything we do and everything we say is personal so isn’t every post somehow sharing personal information?
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Defence/Aggression
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The Straits Times ☛ China starts ‘punishment’ drills around Taiwan days after new president takes office
Mr Lai Ching-te called on Beijing to cease its threats.
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RFA ☛ Hong Kong trade offices 'keep an eye' on 'anti-China' activities
A top adviser in the Hong Kong cabinet appears to confirm that the offices are engaged in political espionage.
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RFA ☛ Former British Marine accused in Hong Kong spy case found dead
Matthew Trickett’s death sparks calls for a review of the status of the city’s London trade office.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong gov’t declines to comment on death of British man Matthew Trickett accused of spying for city
The Hong Kong government will not comment on the death of a British man accused of spying for the city, finance chief Paul Chan has said, hours after the Briton was confirmed dead in the UK.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Matthew Trickett: UK man charged with spying for Hong Kong found dead in a park
Matthew Trickett, one of three men involved in a high-profile UK national security case, has been found dead in a park in the UK.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Chinese-linked hacking units increasingly use ‘ORBs’ to obfuscate espionage, researchers say
Scores of purchased or compromised devices used in “operational relay box networks” make detection and defense harder.
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Reason ☛ Free Speech Unmuted: Free Speech, Fentanylware (TikTok) (and Bills of Attainder!), with Prof. Alan Rozenshtein (Minnesota Law) [Ed: Fentanylware (TikTok) is clearly an attack on free speech, so blocking it is not]
https://youtu.be/tKWqi-ghGuI Can Congress require China-based ByteDance to divest itself of Fentanylware (TikTok) as a condition for Fentanylware (TikTok) continuing to be easily accessible in the US? Prof. Alan Rozenshtein (Minnesota) joins Jane Bambauer and me to discuss this.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Mattis: Don’t create separate military cyber service
The United States should not create a separate military cyber service, former Defense Secretary James Mattis said Wednesday, but rather should establish a way for the Pentagon to operate inside the country in the event of a serious cybersecurity incident.
The remarks from Mattis came on the same day that the House Armed Services Committee adopted into the annual defense policy bill an amendment ordering a study on the possibility of a U.S. Cyber Force, with its author citing limitations in Cyber Command’s role. A similar provision was excluded from a final deal on last year’s defense authorization law.
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New York Times ☛ TikTok Moves to Limit Russian and Chinese Media’s Reach in Big Election Year
TikTok said on Thursday that it was introducing new measures to limit the spread of videos from state-affiliated media accounts, including Russian and Chinese outlets, as the company deflects criticism that it could be used as a propaganda tool in a major election year.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump and GOP echo Nazi, far-right ideology ahead of election
He’s dined with a white supremacist. He’s invoked theories espoused by Nazis in their quest for racial purity.
His response to white supremacists marching in Charlottesville? There were “very fine people on both sides. “
So this week, when a video on former President Trump’s Truth Social account made reference to a “unified Reich,” his opponents were primed to pounce.
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The Hill ☛ The Chinese Communist Party wants to decide our elections for us. We can’t allow it.
Fake CCP-affiliated accounts are cropping up, spreading disinformation and societal discord and undermining the very foundation of our democracies: trust in our elections.
Russia and Iran have written the authoritarian playbook to influence democratic elections, but Beijing is an avid reader. Learning from their campaigns to influence U.S. domestic politics, the CCP is intent on undermining U.S. trust in the democratic process, souring our image on the world stage, and swaying the results in its favor. We cannot let this happen, for the sake of our and other democracies’ hard-won right to vote.
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TechTea ☛ Well... I Tried Booktok... by Tale Foundry
TikTok is the exact opposite of the kind of platform for creating discussion about books. Social media in general is less about discussion and more about short hot takes, TickTok and other short form platforms are even worse. They encourage endless scrolling, short hot takes, and an algorithmically generated monoculture.
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[Repeat] Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine's Western allies should fear Russian victory not Russian defeat
Rather than scaring themselves into self-deterrence with nightmare scenarios of future Russian collapse, Western leaders should be laser-focused on the far more immediate dangers posed by Russian victory. After a series of initial setbacks, the Russian army has now regained the initiative in Ukraine and is advancing. Putin is more confident than ever and is clearly preparing his entire country to wage a long war of attrition. Unless the West dramatically increases its military support for Ukraine, there is very chance that he will succeed.
If Putin achieves victory in Ukraine, he will almost certainly go further. The Kremlin dictator is already boasting of his Ukrainian “conquests” and comparing himself to all-conquering eighteenth century Russian Czar Peter the Great. At the beginning the war, Putin had sought to frame the invasion as a defensive measure by blaming it on NATO expansion and imaginary “Ukrainian Nazis.” As his battlefield fortunes have improved, he has begun to talk openly of reclaiming “historically Russian lands.”
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[Repeat] ADF ☛ U.N.: Surge in Sahel Drug Trafficking Threatens Security
A new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) shows that drug trafficking in these areas — once considered transit hubs as the drugs flowed from South America to Europe — is increasing due to local and international demand. The illicit trade exacerbates myriad security challenges, hinders economic development, and threatens public health.
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[Repeat] ADF ☛ Joint Forces Pursue IS-Mozambique Southward
“Insurgents crossed the Lurio river by boat into Nampula and attacked the villages of Nasua and Manica in Erati district on April 25,” the conflict observation website Cabo Ligado reported. “IS claimed to have burned homes, churches and schools and to have killed one civilian in Nasua.
“The next day, insurgents clashed with security forces around the village of Mithoca, according to IS. Police in Nampula confirmed that insurgents had attacked Erati district and that schools and homes had suffered extensive damage.”
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The Business Standard ☛ Ships rerouted by Red Sea crisis face overwhelmed African ports | The Business Standard
Rough weather with high seas, common at the 'Cape of Storms' as well as the cyclone-prone Mozambique Channel, mean ships could burn through their fuel quicker, making refuelling services crucial, shippers said.
"In Singapore, we're delivering larger bunker volumes to vessels that will now be sailing longer voyages," a spokesperson for TFG Marine, a unit of energy trader Trafigura, said.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Krebs On Security ☛ Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud
Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Pride of Ukraine: Oleksandr Usyk’s historic victory boosts wartime morale
Ukrainian boxer Oleksandr Usyk's remarkable achievement in unifying the heavyweight division for the first time this century has provided war-torn Ukraine with a welcome morale boost, writes Joshua Stein.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine faces long-term mental health challenges among veteran community
Far away from the front lines of the country’s ongoing war with Russia, growing numbers of Ukrainian veterans are facing up to the psychological aftermath of their military service, writes Claire Szewczyk.
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Atlantic Council ☛ General CQ Brown, Jr., on the US role in Gaza, Ukraine, and other crises around the world
It’s time to plan for the long term in the Middle East, the general said at an Atlantic Council event.
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Atlantic Council ☛ President Zelenskyy’s term is over but he’s still a legitimate wartime leader
Kremlin attempts to question the legitimacy of Ukraine's President Zelenskyy due to the end of his official term in office ignore the obvious impossibility of holding elections amid Europe's biggest invasion since World War II, writes Elena Davlikanova.
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LRT ☛ Who is behind ‘sabotages and diversions’ in Lithuania and Poland?
Little is known publicly about the series of mysterious attacks on Lithuanian and Polish facilities, and Lithuanian law enforcement is reluctant to disclose further details. Former officials interviewed by LRT.lt say that the number of such cases could increase and that this is part of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
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University of Michigan ☛ Liberty and justice for all, including Gaza
On Wednesday, April 24, President Biden signed a foreign aid package into law. The package is worth $95 billion in total and will give aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific.
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RFERL ☛ British Police Charge Man With National Security Offenses Linked To Russia
British police have charged a 64-year-old man with suspected offenses under the National Security Act (NSA) following a counterterrorism investigation.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Says Main Power Line To Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Plant Goes Down
Russia said on May 23 that the main power line supplying the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine had gone down, but that there was no threat to safety and the plant was being supplied by a backup line.
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Pushes Back On British Claim That China Sending Lethal Aid To Russia
In a split with Britain, U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said he had not seen evidence that China was directly sending lethal military assistance to Russia for its war against Ukraine.
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RFERL ☛ Investigative Group Confirms Russian Missile Carrier Ship Sank In Crimea
The investigative group Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) confirmed on May 23 that a Ukrainian missile attack four days earlier on the port of Sevastopol hit a Cyclone missile carrier ship belonging to Russia's Black Sea Fleet.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Teen Gets 13 Years In Prison For Distributing Leaflets
A court in Siberia on May 23 sentenced a teenager to 13 years in prison for distributing leaflets containing the symbol for the Free Russia Legion, which is fighting alongside Ukrainian armed forces against Russian troops.
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RFERL ☛ At Least 8 Killed In 'Extremely Brutal' Russian Strikes On Kharkiv, Donetsk
At least seven people were killed on May 23 in Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv in a wave of Russian strikes that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called "extremely brutal" as he again appealed to allies for more air-defense systems for his embattled country.
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RFERL ☛ Norway Slaps Further Restrictions On Russian Visitors
Norway has announced further restrictions for the entry of Russian citizens in the Nordic country in reaction to Moscow's ongoing war in Ukraine.
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The Straits Times ☛ China urges UK to stop making ‘groundless accusations’, says Chinese embassy in UK
The spokesperson also called on London to stop adding fuel to the fire on the Ukraine issue.
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CS Monitor ☛ On Ukraine’s battlefields, this group respects fallen soldiers – no matter which side
When soldiers are lost on the battlefield in Ukraine, it leaves unanswered questions back home. Some go to great lengths to answer those questions.
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New York Times ☛ Advancing Russian Troops Threaten to Reverse Some of Ukraine’s Hard-Won Gains
Such losses could hurt Ukrainian morale as Russia makes advances all along the front line.
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Latvia ☛ Latvian Security Service pushes for prosecution of suspected Russian spy
The State Security Service (VDD) confirmed May 23 it has asked for a suspected Russian spy to be prosecuted, not only for espionage but also for possessing illegal weaponry.
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France24 ☛ US imposes visa restrictions and will review cooperation with Georgia
The United States was imposing new visa restrictions and reviewing relations with Georgia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday, after it pushed forward a Russian-style 'foreign influence' law that triggered mass protests.
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France24 ☛ Russia moves to extend its maritime borders, angering Baltic Sea nations
Russia unveiled a bill on Tuesday that would redefine its maritime borders in the Baltic Sea, causing an outcry among Baltic and other northern European countries and fueling geopolitical tensions.
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LRT ☛ Lithuania seeks joint EU, NATO response to Russian plans to change sea borders – PM
Vilnius is seeking a unified response from the European Union and NATO to recent reports that Russia plans to revise its maritime borders with Lithuania and Finland, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said on Thursday.
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RFERL ☛ Airports, Industrial Facilities Closed In Tatarstan Over Drone Attack
Authorities in Russia's Republic of Tatarstan on May 23 suspended operations at several industrial facilities and airports in Kazan, the capital, and Nizhnekamsk "for security reasons" over "possible drone attacks."
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RFERL ☛ Senior Russian Military Official Held As Kremlin Continues Corruption Sweep
A military court in Moscow has sent to pretrial detention Lieutenant General Vadim Shamarin, a senior military official, the latest arrest of a top military official in what the Kremlin called its ongoing fight against corruption.
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teleSUR ☛ Russia to Retaliate if UK-Made Weapons Attack Its Territory
Diplomat Zakkarova also called the European Union's decision to use Russian assets as an "attempt to legitimize theft."
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teleSUR ☛ Russian Military Downs Air Targets Over Belgorod
Direct hits from projectiles have caused damage to two children's camps in the Russian city.
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The Straits Times ☛ South Korea imposes sanctions on North Koreans, two Russian vessels
SEOUL - South Korea on Friday imposed sanctions on seven North Korean individuals and two Russian vessels over weapons trade and other activities between Pyongyang and Moscow deemed in breach of U.N. Security Council resolutions, Seoul's foreign ministry said.
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The Straits Times ☛ South Korea, Japan unveil sanctions over alleged Russia-North Korea arms trade
SEOUL/TOKYO - South Korea and Japan announced on Friday a series of sanctions applied to individuals, organisations and ships related to Russia's alleged procurement of weapons from North Korea in breach of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
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Meduza ☛ Culling the command: Russia has arrested four generals in the past month. Here’s what we know about the Defense Ministry ‘purge.’ — Meduza
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LRT ☛ Lithuanian woman to stand trial in Belarus for espionage
Elena Ramanauskienė, a Lithuanian citizen, will be tried in Belarus for espionage, the country’s media reports.
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RFERL ☛ Belarusian Police Search Home Of Parents Of Athlete Who Defected To Poland
Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, who defected to Poland after coaches attempted to force her to return home during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, said on May 23 that police in Belarus searched her parents' home.
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RFERL ☛ Lukashenka Appoints New Chief Of Armed Forces' General Staff
Belarus's authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka on May 23 appointed Major General Paval Muraveyka to the post of the chief of the Belarusian armed forces' General Staff.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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[Old] Ann Arbor District Library ☛ AADL Talks To: Ken Burns, Documentary Filmmaker
In this episode, AADL Talks To Ken Burns. Ken is a documentary filmmaker known for his critically acclaimed films exploring all facets of American culture. Ken reflects on growing up and coming of age in Ann Arbor during the 1960s, and how this period of intense political and cultural activity mixed with family tragedy charted his journey. He takes us down the streets we remember -- past restaurants and theaters that have come and gone -- and through a back alleyway during the 1969 South University Street Riot. Along the way, he highlights the people, places, and vibrant musical and cinema culture that left its mark on his work.
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Environment
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NPR ☛ Mangroves protect communities from storms. Half are at risk of collapse, report finds
Half of the world's mangrove ecosystems, with trees whose roots stretch down into brackish water, are at risk of collapse. That's according to the first assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading scientific authority on the status of species and ecosystems. The new report finds that sea level rise fueled by climate change is the biggest risk.
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Energy/Transportation
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The Future of Electric Vehicles: Trends and Innovations
Current Trends in Electric Vehicles The electric vehicle (EV) industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, driven primarily by increasing environmental concerns and stringent government regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Globally, EV adoption is on the rise, with markets in Europe, China, and North America leading the charge.
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Defence Web ☛ Thank Eskom private intel project for decrease in power blackouts says George Fivaz
This time last year then Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter and former South African Police chief General George Fivaz were embroiled in a hostile exposé of the business-funded private intelligence operation at the buckling State Owned Enterprise (SOE).
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Hackaday ☛ Nuclear Fusion R&D In 2024: Getting Down To The Gritty Details
To those who have kept tabs on nuclear fusion research the past decades beyond the articles and soundbites in news outlets, it’s probably clear just how much progress has been made, and how many challenges still remain. Yet since not that many people are into plasma physics, every measure of progress, such as most recently by the South Korean KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research) tokamak, is met generally by dismissive statements about nuclear fusion always being a certain number of decades away. Looking beyond this in coverage such as the article by Science Alert about this achievement by KSTAR we can however see quite a few of these remaining challenges being touched upon.
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David Rosenthal ☛ "Sufficiently Decentralized"
Below the fold, thanks to a tip from Molly White, I look at recent research suggesting that there is in fact a "central third party" coordinating the enterprise of Bitcoin mining.
I have been pointing out that the crypto-bros claims of decentralization are false for more than a decade, most recently in Decentralized Systems Aren't. In that talk I quoted Vitalik Buterin from 2017 in The Meaning of Decentralization: [...]
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MIT Technology Review ☛ AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.
As AI has become more integrated into our world, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the technology’s rising electricity demand. You may have seen the headlines proclaiming that AI uses as much electricity as small countries, that it’ll usher in a fossil-fuel resurgence, and that it’s already challenging the grid.
So how worried should we be about AI’s electricity demands? Well, it’s complicated.
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Molly White ☛ Privacy, human rights, and Tornado Cash
I use the phrase “money laundering” here simply to refer to the act of “washing” assets so as to obscure their origins, and not necessarily in the criminal sense of the phrase. In [cryptocurrency], even people performing perfectly legal transactions might find themselves wanting to, in essence, launder their own money in order to clutch back some degree of privacy that otherwise just is not supported on a ledger that publicly records every action you take. However, these services are also widely — some will say primarilyb — used for the type of illegal activity generally associated with money laundering: that is, concealing the proceeds of a crime. Many of the cryptocurrency heists and scams that I track at Web3 is Going Just Great end with the trail running cold as assets are laundered through Tornado Cash or similar mixing services.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Science Alert ☛ Crows Can Actually Count Out Loud, Amazing New Study Shows
A team of scientists has shown that crows can 'count' out loud – producing a specific and deliberate number of caws in response to visual and auditory cues. While other animals such as honeybees have shown an ability to understand numbers, this specific manifestation of numeric literacy has not yet been observed in any other non-human species.
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Daniel Pocock ☛ Kilmore East bushfire, Wandong & Black Saturday response compared to defective blocks in Ireland
There were two periods in my childhood when we lived in the village of Wandong, population 1500. It may have been smaller back in the 1980s.
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Overpopulation
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ Iran: Running Out of Time to Avoid Running Out of Water?
Water scarcity, exacerbated by climate change, is posing a serious threat to global “hotspots” with Iran among the most vulnerable. Iran is swiftly approaching a state of “water bankruptcy,” marked by a perilous imbalance where water demand surpasses the available natural supply.
The relentless depletion of non-renewable water resources has triggered a cascade of environmental and socio-economic challenges nationwide. This deepening crisis is poised to disrupt livelihoods, worsen food insecurity, negatively impact water-dependent industries and services, drive migration decisions, and intensify social tensions.
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Associated Press ☛ California's water tunnel to cost $20 billion. State officials say the benefits are worth it
“This new analysis acknowledges what we’ve known all along: the Delta Tunnel is meant to benefit Beverly Hills and leave Delta communities out to dry,” said U.S. Rep. Josh Harder, a Democrat whose district includes the Central Valley communities like Stockton, Lodi and Galt. “I’m sick and tired of politicians in Sacramento ignoring our Valley voices and I will do everything in my power to stop them from stealing our water.”
The tunnel would be part of the State Water Project — a complex system of reservoirs, dams and canals that provides water to 27 million people while irrigating 750,000 acres (303,515 hectares) of farmland.
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San Fancisco ☛ California’s largest water project in decades would cost $20 billion
“If they complete this (tunnel) and take the water, which they will, it will make the salmon extinct,” said Dan Whaley, a resident of the Sutter Island area of the delta and chairman of Delta Legacy Communities Inc., a nonprofit working to protect local communities. “The water in the delta will be cut in half. We will no longer have navigable waterways.”
Many see the tunnel as a water grab from a sparsely populated, vulnerable region.
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Finance
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp
But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.
They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out
Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.
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Bains among the layoffs at LinkedIn
LinkedIn news editor Jessy Bains was among the layoffs this week.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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RFA ☛ Indonesia courts US tech titans as it pursues digital transformation
Billionaire Elon Musk and other high-profile CEOs have visited since late April and met with the president.
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JURIST ☛ Australia and Solomon Islands discuss new partnership amid security review
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles explained in an interview on Tuesday that the extent of Australia’s security partnership with the Solomon Islands is unknown due to the islands’ government undertaking a security review. The Australian defence minister confirmed both governments want to continue their security partnership.
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New York Times ☛ Vietnam Names Security Chief Lam as President
But it remains unclear whether Gen. To Lam, the new president, can rise to the post of the top leader, the chief of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
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JURIST ☛ Moldova and EU sign historic security and defense partnership
The Republic of Moldova and the European Union signed a security and defense partnership on Tuesday, making Moldova the first non-member country to enter into such an agreement with the EU.
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Oskar van Rijswijk ☛ Celebrating democracy
Today is a celebration in Germany, a celebration of democracy. In the capital, Berlin, of course, but also in many states and municipalities, the 75th anniversary of the German Constitution is being celebrated today.
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The Record ☛ Cyber Force provision gets House committee’s approval
The House Armed Services Committee unanimously adopted an amendment calling for the assessment minutes before the panel approved the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, 57-1.
The legislation now goes to the full House, which is expected to consider the $895 billion measure next month.
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Terence Eden ☛ Gell-Mann Amnesia and Purdah
This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously, but published long after the events. At the time, I was a Civil Servant in Cabinet Office. Now I am not. But as we're heading for another General Election, I thought I'd share this post.
It's the evening of the 2019 General Election. I am plagued by two thoughts.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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MIT Technology Review ☛ That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday.
First posted on Tuesday, the video has millions of views, more than 24,000 comments on Facebook, and a content warning on TikTok for its grisly depictions of severed heads. A slick BrainBridge website has several job postings, including one for a “neuroscience team leader” and another for a “government relations adviser.” It is all convincing enough for the New York Post to announce that BrainBridge is “a biomedical engineering startup” and that “the company” plans a surgery within eight years.
We can report that BrainBridge is not a real company—it’s not incorporated anywhere. The video was made by Hashem Al-Ghaili, a Yemeni science communicator and film director who in 2022 made a viral video called “EctoLife,” about artificial wombs, that also left journalists scrambling to determine if it was real or not.
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International Business Times ☛ Michael Schumacher 'First Interview' Made By AI, Magazine Who Printed It Asked To Pay €200,000
The magazine falsely claimed the interview to be Schumacher's first after his skiing accident
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Hill ☛ The internet’s death warrant: Congress looks to sunset Section 230
Section 230 is a favorite punching bag for many politicians. It has been irresponsibly mischaracterized and has become wildly misunderstood. Republicans often blame Section 230 for the censorship of conservative viewpoints, while Democrats say it allows platforms to inadequately restrict user discussions. Neither is in fact true.
Section 230 simply protects platforms and users from being sued for speech that is not their own. It is not Section 230 that gives companies the right to moderate and associate with certain types of speech — the First Amendment does that. It does not protect companies from illegal activity, either. Explicit carve outs mean that any time a platform violates federal law, it can be prosecuted and punished.
When politicians demonize Section 230, what they are really doing is masking their anger and resentment of free speech online. That should frighten all of us.
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Reuters ☛ Contested Slovakia TV overhaul passes first vote as Fico recovers from shooting
Under the legislation, RTVS's director will be replaced years before his term expires, and a nine-member council - appointed by the government and parliament - will be responsible for filling the position. Opposition parties have raised concerns the law would stifle criticism of the government, curtail freedom of speech and undermine media independence.
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[Old] Michigan News ☛ Censorship and forgotten stories: Book chronicles film history in Ann Arbor
“Ann Arbor used to have a really thriving alternative cinema scene,” Uhle said. “Before you could see a movie on even a VHS tape or a DVD, you had to go see a movie on a screen projected somewhere. And in a lot of colleges, there were sort of film societies that were started to show movies for students. A lot of them would be sort of a mix of commercial hits and a few classics.”
Possibly the first of these film societies in the country, Uhle said, began at the University of Michigan in 1932 before the groups became more widespread by the 1960s.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Press Gazette ☛ GB News begins ‘formal legal process’ to challenge Ofcom rulings
It comes days after Ofcom said it was considering issuing GB News with a statutory sanction.
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Press Gazette ☛ Culture Secretary backs Ofcom for ‘doing its job’ scrutinising GB News
Lucy Frazer was also accused by MPs of failing to express a view on Israel's treatment of journalists.
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Reason ☛ The U.K. Will Let Assange Appeal Extradition, as Pressure Mounts on Biden To Drop Charges
American national security bureaucrats and prominent political figures have never forgiven Assange and WikiLeaks for exposing clear-cut war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq during the George W. Bush administration. The U.S. government used its own document classification system and policy to conceal those war crimes, which included the murder of journalists and Iraqi civilians caught on video from a U.S. Army helicopter.
Yet the coverage of the High Court's most recent decision in Assange's favor by outlets such as the BBC, the Associated Press, ABC, and The New York Times includes no reference to that fact. There's no mention of how the "leader of the free world" used patently undemocratic methods not only to hide criminal conduct by its military but also to politically and legally destroy Assange and Chelsea Manning—the whistleblower who leaked the helicopter murder video to WikiLeaks.
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Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan town adjusts to life with ‘ghost newsroom,’ as local papers wither
The local newspaper still exists online and residents can grab a thin printed copy at Family Fare Supermarket, but the stories within it often aren’t focused on Cheboygan.
The Daily Tribune employs one sports reporter, but no local news reporters to report on happenings in this Lake Huron community, 15 miles southeast of Mackinaw City, leaving residents to scour Facebook and a weekly shopper publication for information on elections and tax increases.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Black Enterprise ☛ Pregnant Women Left Jobless Due To Layoffs At Tech Companies
No specific legal protection supports pregnant or postpartum workers from mass layoffs driven by business necessities.
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International Business Times ☛ Is Driving Uber, Lyft and DoorDash Worth It: Many Earn Lower Than Minimum In 5 Major US Metros
However, it's a harsh reality that drivers are not being compensated adequately for their services. They are grappling to meet the local minimum wage figures in some areas, which makes it increasingly difficult for gig driving to be a viable option for Americans trying to make ends meet amidst rising living costs.
Research was carried out by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the Center for Wage and Employment Dynamics to analyse the earnings of passenger and delivery drivers for six companies in January 2022. This included Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, Uber Eats, Instacart and Grubhub.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ A renter turned a woman's L.A. home into illegal Airbnb, suit says
In March, as part of the eviction lawsuit, Sriram subpoenaed Airbnb for information on Jarzabek and found out that although he communicated with Sriram using a phone number with a New York area code, the number registered for Jacobs with Airbnb had a +44 code, the country code for the United Kingdom.
The subpoena also shed light on the profits: for 16 months between 2022 and 2023, the Airbnb listing generated $215,954 in payouts — an average of roughly $13,500 per month — all from a property that the host didn’t own, wasn’t authorized to sublet and allegedly wasn’t in the country to operate. It’s not clear if he had other similar listings.
“If the city can’t figure out how to crack down on Airbnb, it should err on the side of caution and ban the platform until it can build a task force to manage it,” Sriram said. “The current solution is to let havoc ensue and see what happens.”
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US News And World Report ☛ Native American Tribes Give Unanimous Approval to Proposal Securing Colorado River Water
The Navajo Nation Council has signed off on a proposed settlement that would ensure water rights for its tribe and two others in the drought-stricken Southwest -- a deal that could become the most expensive enacted by Congress.
The Navajo Nation has one of the largest single outstanding claims in the Colorado River basin. Delegates acknowledged the gravity of their vote Thursday and stood to applause after casting a unanimous vote. Many noted that the effort to secure water deliveries for tribal communities has spanned generations.
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France24 ☛ FRANCE 24 news coverage disrupted as staff strike against public media merger
Staff at France Médias Monde, France Télévisions and Radio France are striking Thursday against a proposed merger of France’s public broadcasting sector championed by Culture Minister Rachida Dati.
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Wired ☛ Drivers Are Rising Up Against Uber’s ‘Opaque’ Pay System
For years, Uber has taken a commission of 25 percent from London-based drivers. But the company told drivers in January 2023 the app was updating its pricing model, a change it said was necessary to make fares appeal to drivers and offer the lowest pick up time for passengers. Yet the people behind the wheel say those changes have lowered their wages and made how they’re calculated impossible to understand—sparking fears that dynamic pricing is offering drivers across Europe and the US personalized wages, a charge that Uber denies.
“A few years back, the fare was transparent, you used to see how much the passenger was charged,” says Farah Musa, an Uber driver since 2015, who is taking part in the protest and 24-hour strike. Now that information is hidden, and he doesn’t understand how the fare is calculated. “Dynamic pricing is not good for drivers. We are being cheated.”
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Why Nigeria's 'baby factories' continue to thrive
"This issue of baby factories is a gross violation of the rights of the victims, especially these young ladies who are often taken to these facilities without theor consent," she said.
"The Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act prohibits all forms of violence against person, particularly women and girls. The law provides maximum protection and effective remedies for the victims and also punishment for the offenders."
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JURIST ☛ Netherlands announces ban on adoption from foreign countries
The motion was passed for diverse reasons. The Dutch House of Representatives seriously doubted if it would be possible to design a realistic public law system in which abuses of the system could no longer occur. Several malpractices came to light in a 2021 report from the Joustra Committee, with the report concluding that the government had failed to combat adoption abuse. Furthermore international adoption is not a sustainable solution anymore to protect the interests of children, according to the government. The government states that the interests of children are best served when they can be safely cared for in their country of origin.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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IT Wire ☛ ACMA takes Optus to court over 2022 breach
Then chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said: "We are devastated to discover that we have been subject to a cyber attack that has resulted in the disclosure of our customers’ personal information to someone who shouldn’t see it.
"As soon as we knew, we took action to block the attack and began an immediate investigation.
"While not everyone may be affected and our investigation is not yet complete, we want all of our customers to be aware of what has happened as soon as possible so that they can increase their vigilance.
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APNIC ☛ A transport protocol’s view of Starlink
This extended latency means that the endpoints need to use large buffers to hold a copy of all the unacknowledged data, as is required by the TCP protocol. TCP is a feedback-governed protocol, using ACK pacing. The longer the round trip time the greater the lag in feedback, and the slower the response from endpoints to congestion or to available capacity. The congestion considerations lead to the common use of large buffers in the systems driving the satellite circuits, which can further exacerbate congestion-induced instability. In geosynchronous service contexts, individual TCP sessions are more prone to instability and experience longer recovery times following low events as compared to their terrestrial counterparts, when such counterparts exist.
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Wired ☛ US Sues to Break Up Ticketmaster and Live Nation, Alleging Monopoly Abuse
Filed on Thursday in the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit focuses on Ticketmaster’s long-term exclusivity contracts with many of the largest music venues, making it the predominant ticketing service available to concertgoers. The firm secures these deals in part by “threatening and retaliating against venues that work with rivals,” the DOJ alleges.
In the complaint, the DOJ accuses Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which acts as a promoter for hundreds of high-profile artists, of exploiting their relationship to establish a “self-reinforcing flywheel” that blocks competitors from gaining a foothold. Live Nation parlays its exclusive promotion deals into exclusive ticketing deals with venues, the DOJ claims, which are left with no practical choice but to go with Ticketmaster, for fear of losing access to sought-after acts represented by its parent company. The DOJ is seeking to break up the joint organization.
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New York Times ☛ U.S. Plans to Sue Ticketmaster Owner, Accusing It of Defending a Monopoly
The Justice Department and a group of states plan to sue Live Nation Entertainment, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, as soon as Thursday, accusing it of illegally maintaining a monopoly in the live entertainment industry, said three people familiar with the matter.
The government plans to argue in a lawsuit that Live Nation shored up its power through Ticketmaster’s exclusive ticketing contracts with concert venues, as well as the company’s dominance over concert tours and other businesses like venue management, said two of the people, who declined to be named because the lawsuit was still private. That helped the company maintain a monopoly, raising prices and fees for consumers, limiting innovation in the ticket industry and hurting competition, the people said.
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Vox ☛ Ticketmaster lawsuit: Will concert ticket prices drop?
When tickets first went on sale for her highly anticipated Eras Tour in November 2022, fans agonized over hours-long queues and frozen screens before Ticketmaster’s website ultimately crashed. Many failed to procure tickets, which were ultimately sold on the secondary market for as much as $11,000.
In the wake of that fiasco, the Department of Justice opened an investigation of Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. On Thursday, it filed a lawsuit seeking to break up Live Nation, accusing it of operating an illegal monopoly through anticompetitive behavior that has harmed everyone from consumers to venues to artists.
"It is time to break it up," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press conference Thursday.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Taylor Swift broke Ticketmaster? It's déjà vu all over again
That was the gist of headlines two years ago, when Swift’s Eras Tour resulted in a ticket-sales fiasco of epic proportions. Hordes of Swifties freaked out over a) their inability to score face-plus-fees entree to the Tour of the Century or b) their inability to even connect to the Ticketmaster website amid the crushing demand.
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Wired ☛ Judge Hints at Plans to Rein In Google’s Illegal Play Store Monopoly
A jury in December found that Google broke US antitrust laws through deals and billing rules that gave an unfair boost to its Google Play app store. On Thursday, a judge began laying out how Google could be forced to change its business as a penalty. The remedies under consideration could drive the most consequential shakeup ever to Google’s dominance over the Android universe.
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Trademarks
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Right of Publicity
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The Conversation ☛ Scarlett Johansson’s complaint to OpenAI is a new benchmark in the development of machine intelligence
Despite having previously declined OpenAI’s request to sample her voice, actress Scarlett Johansson said she was “shocked” and “angered” when she heard the new GTP-4o speak. One of the five voices used by GTP-4o, called Sky, sounded uncannily like the actress in her role as the AI Samantha in the 2013 film Her – about a man who falls in love with a virtual assistant. Adding to the discussion, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman appeared to play up the comparison between Sky and Samantha/Johansson, tweeting “her” on the launch day of GPT-4o.
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Copyrights
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The Verge ☛ OpenAI’s News Corp deal licenses content from WSJ, New York Post, and more
OpenAI has struck a deal with News Corp, the media company that owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Daily Telegraph, and others. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s deal with News Corp could be worth over $250 million in the next five years “in the form of cash and credits for use of OpenAI technology.”
The multi-year agreement gives OpenAI access to current and archived articles from News Corp publications for AI training and to answer user questions.
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Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI strikes deal with News Corp. to access Wall Street Journal content
The multiyear deal will give OpenAI unfettered access to current and archived articles from the Journal, plus other News Corp. publications such as The New York post, Barron’s, MarketWatch and more.
OpenAI said the licensing deal will enable it to display content from News Corp.’s media sites within ChatGPT’s responses when it’s prompted by user’s questions. The idea is to use the content to “enhance its products,” OpenAI said, which likely means it will use it to train future iterations of its LLMs.
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The Register UK ☛ OpenAI does a deal with News Corp for content
The tie-up means that "OpenAI has permission to display content from News Corp mastheads in response to user questions and to enhance its products." What that possibly means: The models can be trained on News Corp articles, answer queries using that info, and cite those sources.
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Press Gazette ☛ Big tech vs publishers: Don't kill content which powers open web
The open [Internet] thrives on content created by publishers. However, four tech giants – Alphabet/Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft/OpenAI – are posing a significant challenge to these content creators.
These companies are leveraging their platforms to capture the value generated by publishers’ content, undermining the open [Internet]’s diversity and sustainability via their self-serving generative AI and privacy agendas.
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post: The STM Integrity Hub - Connecting the Dots in a Dynamic Landscape
The pressure is definitely increasing. Last year saw a record number of retractions and publishers continue to receive submissions from papermills. Generative AI compounds those problems by making research misconduct easier through the fabrication of data, images and text. What is particularly concerning is that such fabricated data are largely undetectable with current tools, which are based on the detection of duplication and manipulation of existing content (think of plagiarism, or image manipulation or duplication). Another change that we see is that the general public has increasingly become aware of these challenges. Many outlets, including leading newspapers and magazines, have covered the problem of papermills and other forms of misconduct in the last two years.
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Digital Music News ☛ Weeks After Hugging It Out, Fentanylware (TikTok) Taps UMG Artist Billie Eilish to Debut Fan Spotlight Feature [Ed: Fentanylware (TikTok) is helped by British singer to tighten Beijing's grip on Western culture]
TikTok has announced a new feature called ‘Fan Spotlight,’ which allows artists to pin their favorite fan-created videos to their profile. The new feature is being showcased by UMG artist Billie Eilish as part of the media blitz for her new album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT.
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Digital Music News ☛ Sixteen Years Later, Indie Rock Band Pavement Has a Certified Gold Track After ‘Harness Your Hopes’ B-Side Blows Up on Spotify & TikTok
Sixteen years later, a track from indie rock group Pavement has been certified Gold by the RIAA after riding a wave of viral success on Spotify and TikTok.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Hollywood Takes Down Animeflix, Vegamovies and Others With Broad Anti-Piracy Order
Netflix, Disney, Universal, and several other major Hollywood studios, have obtained a broad anti-piracy order in India. The High Court of New Delhi issued a dynamic+ blocking order targeting several pirate sites, mostly streaming portals. The order also requires domain registrars to suspend the associated domains and Namecheap appears to have already taken swift action in response.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Anti-Piracy Chief: Google's Gambling Ad Liability Should Be Adopted For Piracy
A decision by Italy's Council of State, overruling the decision of a lower court that Google couldn't be held liable for displaying locally illegal advertising, is being welcomed by the head of telecoms regulator AGCOM. Massimiliano Capitanio notes that Google's defense failed the moment it became more than a passive host. "The same line should be adopted to eradicate piracy," Capitanio says.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Mostly a medical rant tbh
Last night I woke up and - everything was fine?
I didn't feel any pain. My feet were fine, my jaw was silent, there was no sound.
I think it used to be like that. I think it was always like that until two months ago.
The wisdom teeth BS should be the novelty here, not it's absence.
[...]
See, the problem with lying to a patient who's had the same infection for the last 10 months due to medical stupidness...
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Wheel of suffering
I feel like I'm aging faster lately. Like life's complications are weighing on me a little more.
Maybe there are actually more challenges lately or maybe I'm not taking good enough care of myself. Feels like there aren't enough hours in the day or the week to do all the recommended self care regimens and still make time for all the other stuff. Other stuff like kids and parents and friends and work and community.
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🔤SpellBinding: AEVMORK Wordo: BOOZY
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Technology and Free Software
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I, Hamurabi, suck at this game
Apparently you are supposed to grow the population (??) or at least hold it steady? But that costs bushels and land, which obviously one would want to minimize, while having a large rainy day fund to mostly feed the rats with. There are useful plagues that halve your population, so luck is probably a thing? Besides learning more about Economics (really not my thing, as you may have noticed) one solution would be to write a program that figures out how to best play the game, but then you'd be copying numbers from one computer program to another, just like that nice lady in Galaxy Quest did. Why then have a human in the loop? (Some might suspect that "hand crafted coding" is turning or has turned into "industrial line coding" is turning into "a few people monitor the machines that do everything", just as the means of production has done in various places.)
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.