Links 06/06/2024: "You Should Write More" and Why "Consistent Blogging is Hard"
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
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-29 [Older] Who was Franz Kafka and why is he more popular than ever?
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Happy Birthday to me... Meh.
I recently turned 40 yrs old. To me it was just another day, nothing special. It was great to no have any well wishes, or fanfare. No acknowledgement of the day, save one email that I really didn't want a birthday greeting from. I'm hopeful that life truely does start at 40 because I'm not where I want or expected to be in life on a personal and professional level.
I recently spent some time this past month researching Mastodon, I was trying to determine if it was something of use to me and if it was better than twitter (which I deleted long ago). After much thought and contemplation I arrived at the answer that like all social media, it is not for me. While it would be great to blast out a notifiaiton when I update my capsule or gopher hole to garner a larger audience I think a atom xml feed is really all I need. There is also the restrictions on what is and isn't allow in terms of speech on the many instances which I don't much like but I also don't want to deal with the headaches for running my own instance. The gemini capsule and gopher server I have are enough for me. The allure was there but critical thinking won, for which I'm glad. Unlike twitter though, I don't have to have an account to browse so I'll likely be digging to see what I can find sometimes but you'll never see an account for me and if you do it's most likely not even me in real life.
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Lcamtuf ☛ You should write more
You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert to write about a particular topic. Experts are often busy and struggle to explain concepts in an accessible way. You should be honest with yourself and with your readers about what you know and don’t know — but otherwise, it’s OK to write about what excites you, and to do it as you learn.
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Robert Birming ☛ Make yourself a good day | Robert Birming
This whole page could be filled with quotes about it, which we have all seen and heard thousands of times. But it doesn't matter if we tattoo it on our forehead - we have to embrace it too.
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Anne Sturdivant ☛ WeblogPoMo 2024 Retrospective: Communities of Content
I wrapped up my WeblogPoMo on Friday, May 31, 2024, with a post about my personal experience and a list of the posts I published during the challenge. It was an acceptable way to end the spree but after reading about and witnessing some other participator's heartfelt wishes and thanks for organizing the event, I thought I needed to say more.
Every time I participate in or see others participate in a writing challenge I can't help but get caught up in the magic of it all. This February I watched some of the members of Wiggle Work who I follow on Mastodon share their daily posts. I yearned for last November when I tried my hand at NaBloPoMo for the first time.
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Lev Lazinskiy ☛ Consistent Blogging is Hard
This was such a cool experiment. I love that he was able to get so many people to participate. There were a bunch of new blogs created because of this, and a lot of them are still online today.
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Lou Plummer ☛ Looking At Pictures
I wonder how much people look at their photos these days. I know that taking pictures is insanely popular. Instagram, Facebook and other social media sites prove that, but I have to wonder what people do with their photos after they have milked them for Internet points? Personally, I love when any app I use has an "on this day" function that allows me to look back through the years. Instead of a static wallpaper on my phone, I use a folder full of my favorite images so that I constantly get surprised. I keep my photo collection pretty organized. I make use of the facial recognition features and I make albums for special occasions. I routinely go through and delete snaps of the various computers, printers and switches I take at work. I even have a couple of projects, like the 100 Strangers whose street portraits I took, that I've looked at many, many times over the years and which I am happily sharing again since I started blogging.
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New Yorker ☛ What Doge Taught Me About the Internet
In the early twenty-tens, one cottage industry in digital journalism was the unmasking of Internet memes: a journalist would identify the source of a popular image or joke just as one might dig up the etymology of a word. I was chasing that trope as a freelance writer, in December, 2013, when I found myself curious about the origins of a meme known as Doge. It was a photograph of a Shiba Inu dog lying on a couch with its paws crossed, giving a baleful side-eye; social-media denizens covered the image with multicolored text phrases like “so amaze” and “much wow” in Comic Sans. My investigation was not, I admit, a Watergate-level affair: I did a reverse Google Image search for the photo template; found the popular pet blog of a Japanese woman named Atsuko Sato, who shared photos of her cats and her fluffy yellow dog; and contacted her via the site. Sato and I eventually discussed the dog’s surprise Internet fame through a translator. A subsequent article that I wrote for the Verge came out on New Year’s Eve, after a lightning-speed edit. Unsurprisingly, the piece proved to be a big hit on Twitter, which was in its heyday. Sato told me that the dog, who’d been rescued from a puppy mill, was named Kabosu, after the Japanese citrus that the pooch’s round face resembled.
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Science
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Hackaday ☛ Fourier, The Animated Series
We’ve seen many graphical and animated explainers for the Fourier series. We suppose it is because it is so much fun to create the little moving pictures, and, as a bonus, it really helps explain this important concept. Even if you already understand it, there’s something beautiful and elegant about watching a mathematical formula tracing out waveforms.
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Marcel Kolaja ☛ Not Just Scale
Scale, and scalability, is only a small part of the overall reason distributed systems are interesting. Other practical reasons include: [...]
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Andrei Ciobanu ☛ From the Circle to Epicycles (Part 1) - An animated introduction to Fourier Series | andreinc
This article will be part of a more extended series in which I plan to explore various aspects of Fourier Mathematics. I will take notes, create some visuals (a good pretext to learn more about graphics), and hope that it will be useful to someone other than me.
The article has yet to be thoroughly reviewed by anyone other than me, so I put it online, hoping to get some feedback before bringing it to a final state.
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Science Alert ☛ A Single Mutation Gave These Fish a Sense of Curiosity And Opened Up Their World
Exploratory behavior is a key personality trait for animals of all kinds, from mammals to spiders, exposing individuals and populations to novel dangers as well as previously unknown opportunities.
It also seems likely to play a role in speciation, say the international team of researchers, but the genetic details behind any such adaptive behavioral variations are not well-understood.
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Education
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Pro Publica ☛ Illinois’ Hands-Off Approach to Homeschooling Leaves Kids at Risk
It was on L.J.’s 11th birthday, in December 2022, that child welfare workers finally took him away. They arrived at his central Illinois home to investigate an abuse allegation and decided on the spot to remove the boy along with his baby brother and sister — the “Irish twins,” as their parents called them.
His mother begged to keep the children while her boyfriend told child welfare workers and the police called to the scene that they could take L.J.: “You wanna take someone? Take that little motherfucker down there or wherever the fuck he is at. I’ve been trying to get him out of here for a long time.”
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Chuck Carroll ☛ Allowing Yourself To Be Bored
Boredom has allowed me to discover hobbies and interests outside of digital entertainment. Boredom is what pushes me to read, to write, to meditate (where I come face to face with boredom, my distracted mind, and the void). It's when I feel bored that I decide to pick up a new hobby or skill or improve upon and existing one. I start tinkering with things and learning. I start to plan.
If I spent most or all of my free time scrolling social media, playing video games, binge-watching Netflix or some idiot on YouTube, this website certainly wouldn't exist. I would have not found the courage to step on the mats and train jiu-jitsu. Nor would I have decided to go back to school in my thirties to try something new. Boredom is essential to growth.
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Lucas da Silva ☛ Peter Han's "Dynamic Sketching" class
The classes are intense. While the schedule says each class is 3 hours long, we would usually stay in class for 5 hours, with Peter talking and explaining everything, without even stop to drink water. I don't know how he can do that, but you can definitely see how he is passionate about drawing. I'm not complaining about the extra 2 hours though, it was actually super inspiring, and in fact, I'm thinking about applying to his class again, whenever a new one opens.
So, how is the course anyways?
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Johan Halse ☛ Parenting
Once you find yourself in the position of being someone’s father you’ll quickly realize that you’re not actually raising anyone here, you just happen to be the veteran in the trenches alongside them, showing them the ropes and hoping they’ll survive and turn out okay. Ultimately they have their own mountain to climb in life and you’ll be standing at the foot of it, watching them from below with a panicked expression on your face. They’ll succeed and they’ll fail, but there’s both solace and frustration to be found in the fact that they did that by themselves and the most you can take credit for is being around and liking them and occasionally telling them what you think about stuff. The rest is up to them. Terrifying and liberating at the same time. I sincerely believe that as a parent, you really can’t mold or shape anyone: you can absolutely screw them up, but you do that with heinous shit like beating them or being an alcoholic or having big acrimonious shouting matches with your partner in front of them. Contrary to what the Internet thinks, the way you saw me handling tantrum #36 of the week at the supermarket with a resigned sigh rather than a stern admonition doesn’t figure into the equation, like, at all. The “parenting style” that can be perceived from the outside is barely scratching the surface of a complex dynamic that has been evolving for years.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Make ripples through time and space by writing
Whatever your motivation for writing might be, writing and publishing can lead to both expected and unexpected positives. Four years ago, I wrote a blog post about how to use BeautifulSoup loosely based on a PyCon Finland talk I did in 2016. Most recently last week, I read it through because I wanted to remember how to do something.
Those ripples I sent out in 2016 and again in 2020, reached myself far into the future and helped have a positive impact. I could have gone to read the documentation of BeautifulSoup but a semi-tutorial written by me, for me? That’s as targeted as one can get.
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Can Parents in Academia “Have it All”?
For researchers, the pressure to maintain a rigorous publication record while also being present for their children can lead to feelings of inadequacy and burnout. Peer reviewers and journal editors may find themselves grappling with time constraints and competing demands, struggling to balance their editorial duties with family obligations. Faculty members, tasked with mentoring students and advancing their own research agendas face similar challenges coping with the demands of parenthood.
To truly support parenting scholars, systemic changes must extend to support all these different stakeholders. This necessitates a 360-degree approach that addresses the diverse needs and challenges faced by each role. Provisions like parental leaves or breastfeeding accommodations are no longer enough.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ How QWERTY keyboards show the English dominance of tech
Have you ever thought about the miraculous fact that despite the myriad differences between languages, virtually everyone uses the same QWERTY keyboards? Many languages have more or fewer than 26 letters in their alphabet—or no “alphabet” at all, like Chinese, which has tens of thousands of characters. Yet somehow everyone uses the same keyboard to communicate.
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Hardware
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Hackaday ☛ Old Knobs With A Cast Of Thousands
You have an old radio — in the case of [The Radio Mechanic], a Stromberg Carlson — and it needs new knobs. What do you do? You can’t very well pop down to the local store and find any knobs anymore. Even if you are lucky enough to be around an electronics store, they aren’t going to have knobs to do justice to an antique radio. You could 3D print them, of course, but there are a number of issues with transferring the old knob to a CAD file for printing. So [The Radio Mechanic] decided to cast them instead.
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Hackaday ☛ Gamma Ray Spectroscopy The Pomelo Way
Depending on the circumstances you find yourself in, a Geiger counter can be a tremendously useful tool. With just a click or a chirp, it can tell you if any invisible threats lurk. But a Geiger counter is a “yes or no” instrument; it can only tell you if an ionizing event occurred, revealing nothing about the energy of the radiation. For that, you need something like this gamma-ray spectroscope.
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Hackaday ☛ Displays We Like Hacking: HDMI
I don’t like HDMI. Despite it being a pretty popular interface, I find crucial parts of it to be alien to what hackers stand for. The way I see it, it manages to be proprietary while bringing a lot of the old cruft in. It doesn’t have a native alternative like DisplayPort, so portable implementations tend to suffer power-wise; the connector situation is interesting, and the HDMI Foundation has been doing some weird stuff; in particular, they are pretty hostile to open-source technology.
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Clayton Errington ☛ Obsolete Hardware
So what was the solution? This laptop belonged to a family member and was just wanting their laptop to function so they could watch some shows. I was able to successfully run a Linux operating system in a live boot to test and make sure all the boxes were checked they needed.
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Chris Aldrich ☛ Acquisition: 1953 Smith-Corona Silent Typewriter | Chris Aldrich
I’ve been wanting either a 1950s Series 5 Smith-Corona Silent or Silent-Super for a while now to better support some of the regular use of index cards in my daily work. Both models came with standard three roller paper bails as well as two adjustable paper fingers on top of Smith-Corona’s traditional two metal paper card fingers found next to the ribbon vibrator assembly. This means that I can type not only more easily on index cards, but the process is far quieter and also allows me to use more of the card’s surface area without as much work.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Is Nvidia becoming the de facto AI mainframe?
Forgetting the fact that it took 30 years for Nvidia Corp. to become an overnight success, its incredible rise over the recent past looks like it has the makings of a bubble.
About 15 years ago, the company made a riverboat gamble to pivot from gaming toward high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, and the numbers have been getting crazier. Revenue has more than doubled year-on-year for the last three straight quarters. Having pushed longtime leader Intel Corp. back to the rearview mirror, Nvidia recently declared a 10-for-1 stock split just to keep share prices affordable.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-29 [Older] WHO vaping report: Tobacco companies target kids
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The Verge ☛ Humane warns AI Pin owners to ‘immediately’ stop using its charging case
Humane is telling AI Pin owners today that they should “immediately” stop using the charging case that came with its AI gadget. There are issues with a third-party battery cell that “may pose a fire safety risk,” the company wrote in an email to customers (including The Verge’s David Pierce, who reviewed it when it came out).
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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RTL ☛ Apple faces pressure to deliver on AI at developer conference
AI and perhaps even a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI will likely be a driving theme at the Monday kickoff of Apple's annual WWDC developers' conference in Silicon Valley, according to analysts.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple cosies up to OpenAI ahead of developer event
The WWDC keynote address, delivered by CEO Tim Cook on 10 June, is seen as Apple’s biggest sales pitch in years. The company has to convince consumers, developers and investors that it can thrive in the AI era. And there’s added pressure because Apple’s existing business is stagnant, with revenue declining in five of the past six quarters.
The two companies haven’t disclosed the deal publicly yet, and terms of the arrangement aren’t clear. Apple and OpenAI declined to comment.
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[Repeat] Atlantic Council ☛ Ukrainian lawmakers are debating banning Telegram. Here’s what to know.
In late April, Ihor Solovey, director of Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, explained in an interview why he believes that using Telegram is risky due to its lack of transparency and potential control by Russia. Using the message app of it for sending personal data and for official purposes, especially in the public sector and military zones, is not recommended, he said. Anonymity on the platform is often used to spread false information, he added, including by Russian special services, which negatively affects public order and security in Ukraine.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Edward Snowden warns of AI 'werewolves'
Snowden raised concerns about the growing control major tech platform owners such as Google have over AI content. The risk is that people try to “inject their politics into powerful models and impose them”, he said.
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI Insider Estimates 70 Percent Chance That AI Will Destroy or Catastrophically Harm Humanity
Kokotajlo's spiciest claim to the newspaper, though, was that the chance AI will wreck humanity is around 70 percent — odds you wouldn't accept for any major life event, but that OpenAI and its ilk are barreling ahead with anyway.
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Towards Conversational Discovery: New Discovery Applications for Scholarly Information in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence
Here, we explore generative AI (GenAI). These systems can produce original and realistic outputs based on the patterns and data they have been trained on. We’ll discuss how GenAI is moving us towards conversational discovery and what this might mean for publishing, as well as potential future trends in information discovery.
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[Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ In public letter, former OpenAI researchers urge increased transparency on AI risks
The letter, titled “A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence,” has 13 signatories. The group includes current and former researchers from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind research group and Anthropic PBC. The letter has been endorsed by Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Stuart Russell, three prominent computer scientists known for their foundational contributions to machine learning.
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Michael Burkhardt ☛ I’m Not Anti-AI
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not new concepts. Many of the foundational mathematical and statistical principles (e.g. the method of Least Squares) that underlie today’s machine learning algorithms date back centuries. Thinking machines have been contemplated, celebrated, and vilified for nearly as long.
What is relatively new is the availability of high-speed, low-cost compute resources that make the application of sophisticated algorithms practical to use. Until the early 21st century, even basic ML techniques like linear regression were difficult to use at scale because only mathematicians and scientists at universities and big corporations had access to the compute resources needed to run them. Today, most of us have more computing horsepower in our pockets than those researchers had just decades ago. Even if someone could have developed sophisticated AI-based products back then, who could have used them? Widespread use of interconnected computers date back only to the late 1990s.
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The Atlantic ☛ India Just Endured the World’s First AI Election
The main purpose of AI in Indian politics has not been to create deepfakes as they have conventionally been understood: an AI spoof of a candidate saying or doing something damaging, with ambiguity around whether it’s real or fake. Days before Slovakia’s election last fall, for example, a fake clip emerged of a major candidate talking about rigging the vote. Instead, in India, politicians and campaigns have co-opted AI to get out their messages. Consider maybe the weirdest use of AI during the election: The team of one candidate on the ballot for the Congress Party, India’s national opposition, used AI to resurrect his deceased politician father in a campaign video. In the clip, H Vasanthakumar, a member of Parliament until he passed away in 2020, endorses his son as his “rightful heir.” The hyper-real video, in which the late Vasanthakumar is dressed in a white shirt and a tricolored scarf, garnered more than 300,000 views on Instagram, and more on WhatsApp.
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Antipope ☛ Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
CoPilot+ is Microsoft's LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000's Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF ... THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on "help the users get stuff done". Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they're asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it's a truthful answer or not.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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India Times ☛ Gaza scam: Money you paid for Gaza may be heading to Ghaziabad instead
The most common scams related to Gaza that people are falling prey to include fake websites, fake cryptocurrency links, phishing emails, fake video links, and social media scams. Scammers set up fraudulent websites that mimic legitimate aid organisations, use phishing emails that appear to be from reputable charities to steal personal information, and circulate fake video links that lead to malicious sites.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Security Week ☛ Hypr Raises $30 Million for Passwordless Authentication
The company’s passwordless authentication solution supports secure logins on both mobile and web applications, enabling businesses to easily secure their users’ accounts with multi-factor authentication (MFA).
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Cyble Inc ☛ 'TotalRecall' Tool Is Able To Extract Data Stored By Windows Recall
While Microsoft’s forthcoming Recall feature has already sparked security and privacy concerns, the tech giant attempted to downplay those reactions by stating that collected data would remain on the user’s device.
Despite this reassurance, concerns remain, as researchers – including the developer of a new tool dubbed “TotalRecall” – have observed various inherent vulnerabilities in the local database maintained by Recall, lending credibility to critics of Microsoft’s implementation of the AI tool.
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Simon Willison ☛ My Twitter thread figuring out the AI features in Microsoft's Recall
A Microsoft engineer confirmed on Hacker News that Recall uses on-disk vector databases to provide local semantic search for both text and images, and that they aren't using Microsoft's Phi-3 or Phi-3 Vision models. As far as I can tell there's no LLM used by the Recall system at all at the moment, just embeddings.
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India Times ☛ Microsoft: Microsoft hit with Austrian privacy complaints over its education programme
NOYB's (None of your business) gripes centre on Microsoft's 365 Education suite of software programmes for students that include Word, Excel, Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint and Outlook.
In its first complaint, the advocacy group alleged Microsoft shifts its responsibility as a data controller required to process users' personal data under EU privacy rules known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to schools, which do not hold the necessary data.
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EDRI ☛ European Data Protection Summit - Bridging individual rights and collective values in the EU and beyond
By shifting the focus to encompass both individual (not necessarily consumer-centred) rights and collective values, we can better address the multifaceted nature and significance of privacy and data protection. Recognising the significance of collective values such as societal trust, democratic participation, and social cohesion, hand in hand with equality and equity, allows us to mitigate potential negative consequences overlooked in discussions and legal frameworks focused solely on individual rights.
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404 Media ☛ A Suspected Human Smuggler Used AirTags to Track and Control The Woman He Brought Into the U.S.
AirTags have been a tool for stalkers and domestic abusers since Apple launched them in 2021. Police records show that this is a problem, and the legal system has failed women who were targeted by stalkers using AirTags. There have been several instances where AirTag stalking has turned violent, and in at least two cases, resulted in the tracker murdering their target.
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Online Privacy and Overfishing
Internet surveillance, and the resultant loss of privacy, is following the same trajectory. Just as certain fish populations in the world’s oceans have fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent (ad infinitum), our expectations of privacy have similarly fallen precipitously. The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth. What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.
Historically, people controlled their computers, and software was standalone. The always-connected cloud-deployment model of software and services flipped the script. Most apps and services are designed to be always-online, feeding usage information back to the company. A consequence of this modern deployment model is that everyone—cynical tech folks and even ordinary users—expects that what you do with modern tech isn’t private. But that’s because the baseline has shifted.
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Confidentiality
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US Navy Times ☛ Command senior chief convicted for unauthorized Wi-Fi on her ship
The former command senior chief of the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew pleaded guilty at a court-martial in March to charges that she installed an unauthorized Wi-Fi system aboard the ship and then lied about it to superiors, according to records obtained by Navy Times.
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The Register UK ☛ US Navy senior chief demoted for secretly installing Wi-Fi
The installation escaped scrutiny until about June, when a crew member tried to pass info about the illicit network to the ship's commanding officer. However, that tip was intercepted by Marrero, who didn't tell the commanding officer anything about the Wi-Fi deployment, presumably because she didn't want to get herself in trouble.
The scheme unraveled in August after a Manchester crew member was set to be disciplined. In order to "influence or impede" the crew member's punishment, Marrero edited an image of the ship's Starlink data usage to show less data being transferred via the satellite link, presumably to hide the Wi-Fi network and the backhaul connectivity it was using.
It is unstated in the report whether the crew member was being disciplined in relation to the Wi-Fi network, hence why Starlink data usage came up at all, but either way the senior chief lied to her superiors.
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Defence/Aggression
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Democracy Now ☛ Biden Limits Asylum & Shuts Down Border for Migrants Ahead of Debate with Trump
President Biden has issued one of the most restrictive immigration policies ever declared under a recent Democratic administration. It will temporarily shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, deny asylum to most migrants who do not cross into the U.S. via ports of entry, and limit total asylum requests at the southern border to no more than 2,500 per day. The ACLU has threatened to sue the Biden administration over what reporter John Washington, who covers immigration in Arizona, calls an “excruciating and likely deadly” decision. “An illegal asylum seeker is a contradiction in terms,” Washington continues. “People have the right, according to U.S. law, to ask for asylum irrespective of how they crossed the border or where they are or what their status is. And this rule really flies in the face of that.”
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EFF ☛ Win for Free Speech! Australia Drops Global Takedown Order Case
In April, the Commissioner ordered X to take down a post with a video of a stabbing in a church. X complied by geo-blocking the post in Australia, but it declined to block it elsewhere. The Commissioner then asked an Australian court to order a global takedown — securing a temporary order that was not extended. EFF moved to intervene on behalf of X, and legal action was ongoing until this week, when the Commissioner announced she would discontinue Federal Court proceedings.
We are pleased that the Commissioner saw the error in her efforts and dropped the action. Global takedown orders threaten freedom of expression around the world, create conflicting legal obligations, and lead to the lowest common denominator of internet content being available around the world, allowing the least tolerant legal system to determine what we all are able to read and distribute online.
As part of our continued fight against global censorship, EFF opposes efforts by individual countries to write the rules for free speech for the entire world. Unfortunately, all too many governments, even democracies, continue to lose sight of how global takedown orders threaten free expression for us all.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-26 [Older] Germany: Racist chants reported in Erlangen after Sylt video
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Site36 ☛ UNHCR calls for rescuing the victims of the externalisation of EU borders in the Sahara
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The Scotsman ☛ Why D-Day still has a sobering relevance for us all today
In the United States, they call them “The Greatest Generation”: those souls born in the early 20th century, who lived through the Great Depression and fought in the Second World War, and to whom we owe so much.
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The Hill ☛ 5 things to know about D-Day’s 80th anniversary
Veterans and world leaders are gathered in Normandy, France, for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, marking the invasion that helped turn the tide of World War II.
President Biden is among the leaders who will commemorate the landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on June 6, 1944, the largest amphibious invasion in history. They will honor the thousands who died during the assault, alongside the surviving veterans — many of them now more than 100 years old.
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Federal News Network ☛ Army develops its approach to electronic warfare
The Army has been reexamining its approach to electronic warfare as recent studies and exercises have shown that the service needs a layered approach to EW and that the electromagnetic spectrum should be treated with the same strategic importance as physical terrain in military operations.
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ANF News ☛ A Yazidi woman and two children in Hol Camp rescued
Internal Security Forces stated that 10-year-old Xunav Nayêf, who was rescued along with the woman, had been kidnapped and separated from her mother during the genocidal attacks of ISIS on Shengal (Sinjar) in 2014 when she was only a few months old.
The rescued woman and children will be handed over to the Yazidi House through the Liaison and Coordination Office in order to reunite them with their families.
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Scoop News Group ☛ House Republicans propose eliminating funding for election security
A key House panel has zeroed out funding for federal grants that would send tens of millions of dollars to state and local governments to improve the security of their election infrastructure, while slashing funds for the federal agency charged with disbursing them.
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Cyble Inc ☛ U.S. Navy Dismisses Senior Leader For Wi-fi Network On Ship
The U.S. Navy took action against a senior enlisted leader who installed an unauthorized Wi-Fi system aboard a combat ship. According to documents obtained by the Navy Times, Grisel Marrero, the former command senior chief of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester’s gold crew, pleaded guilty in March to charges related to the operation of the illicit network and a subsequent cover-up.
The network appears to have been set up through the use of a Starlink satellite connected to the ship.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Global warming accelerating at 'unprecedented' pace - study
Global warming has accelerated at an “unprecedented” pace as the window to limit rising temperatures within internationally-set targets closes, over 50 leading scientists warned in a study published on Wednesday.
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Omicron Limited ☛ UN chief urges fossil fuel ad ban as heat records pile up
Dramatic climate shifts have already begun taking a heavy toll worldwide, fueling extreme weather events, flooding and drought, while glaciers are melting away and sea levels are rising.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a ban on advertising oil, gas and coal—the main drivers of global warming—as global climate monitors delivered a swathe of new findings signaling that the planet is in trouble.
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Federal News Network ☛ It is ‘too early’ for an Army drone branch, Rainey says
“I think unmanned aerial systems are going to come to bear at echelon. I think individual soldiers [need to be able] to employ them just like they employ their weapon. So 11 Bravos, I think, the tanks should be able to have a robot sitting next to him that can launch UAS. I think every maneuver person is going to need them. They have huge sustainment implications,” Rainey said during the Center for Strategic and International Studies event on Monday.
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Vox ☛ TikTok politics, Gen Z, and a grand national experiment
What I do remember was one video that dared me to examine my digital diet. “Check your TikTok screen time,” user @katherout challenged me. “Then check how many hours last week you actually hung out with your friends. It should not be similar ... It’s very possible that you spend more time with people you don’t know on TikTok and YouTube, than people you do know in real life.”
And so I checked. At my peak, I was using TikTok — a social media platform famous for user-uploaded short-form videos — for a little over 10 hours a week. In the same week, I’d spent around 11 hours hanging out with friends.
My experience is not unusual. For many Americans, Tiktok has become one of the great time sucks of the era, a perpetual engagement machine with an algorithm that knows how to keep you glued.
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The Conversation ☛ D-day’s secret weapon: how wetland science stopped the Normandy landings from getting bogged down
On New Year’s Eve 1943, Scott-Bowden and Ogden-Smith swam ashore under the cover of darkness, having been dropped off by a small boat 300 meters from the French coast. Alongside their swimming suits, rather like modern-day dry-suits, they were equipped with a torch, compass, watch, a fighting knife and a .45 Colt revolver. They also took a soil corer, or auger, for taking soil samples and ten tubes for storing the samples.
When they eventually reached the predetermined point on Gold Beach, they crawled in a W pattern, collecting samples. They recorded their positions on waterproof writing tablets strapped to their wrists. When they had finished sampling the area, they waded into the surf and swam back out to sea. Reaching what they hoped was their rendezvous point, they signalled with their torches fitted with a directional cone and waterproofed with a condom until they were picked up by the rest of the COPP team.
Upon their return to England, the samples were analysed by soil and wetland scientists to determine the peat and clay content. It was crucial for assessing the suitability of the beaches as landing sites.
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RFERL ☛ Tajikistan Set To Outlaw Islamic Hijab After Years Of Unofficial Ban
Despite the effective ban on the hijab in public institutions, there is no legislation in Tajikistan that outlaws Islamic attire. But that is about to change.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-28 [Older] Germany records highest number of naturalizations since 2000
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-28 [Older] Netherlands: Former spy chief to lead right-wing coalition
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-27 [Older] Armenia detains hundreds of anti-government protesters
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-28 [Older] Georgia parliament pushes through 'foreign agents' law
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Atlantic Council ☛ Vladimir Putin just tacitly admitted Crimea is not really part of Russia
The Battle of Kherson provides a particularly vivid demonstration of the credibility gap between Russian rhetoric and Russian reality. The only regional capital captured during the entire Russian invasion, Kherson was liberated in November 2022, less than two months after Putin had declared it to be “Russian forever.” Rather reach for his nuclear button, Putin responded to this embarrassing setback by ordering his defeated troops to quietly withdraw across the Dnipro River.
The evolving Battle of Crimea is perhaps even more revealing. For over ten years, Putin has insisted the occupied Ukrainian peninsula is now part of Russia, and has rejected all attempts to discuss its status. During this period, the seizure of Crimea has emerged as arguably the most important single element in modern Russia’s national narrative; it has come to be seen as the greatest achievement of Putin’s entire reign, and is widely regarded as a symbol of the country’s return to the top table of international affairs. This official Russian reverence for Crimea initially persuaded many in the West to view the peninsula as off-limits, but failed to deter Ukraine.
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Meduza ☛ ‘We thought we’d return the favor’: Leaked documents reveal that Kremlin propagandists are trying to tap into a new audience — Meduza’s — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Vox ☛ OpenAI insiders have signed an open letter demanding a "right to warn" the public about AI risks
Employees from some of the world’s leading AI companies published an unusual proposal on Tuesday, demanding that the companies grant them “a right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence.”
Whom do they want to warn? You. The public. Anyone who will listen.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-26 [Older] Several injured by turbulence on Qatar Airways flight
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-27 [Older] EU-China EV tariffs: German carmakers fear backlash
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DeSmog ☛ UN Chief Calls For Ban on Fossil Fuel Advertising
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DeSmog ☛ Vermont Passed a Bill Making Big Oil Pay. Now Comes the Hard Part.
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VOA News ☛ Zimbabwean authorities urge citizens to cycle to work
Jacob Mafume, the mayor of Harare, said if Zimbabweans in greater numbers chose to cycle to work, there would be less congestion and fewer road accidents, among other benefits.
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Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan House OKs new penalties for drivers who hit bicyclists, runners
The effort was inspired in part by a June 2016 crash in Kalamazoo County that killed five bicyclists, injured four more and already prompted a 2018 law that requires drivers to keep a 3-foot distance from cyclists.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Hindu ☛ Odisha’s elephant population grows by 122 over seven years
The All-Odisha Elephant Census-2024 which was released on June 5, says a total of 2,098 elephants were found in 38 forest divisions. These elephants include 313 adult tuskers, 13 adult makhnas, 748 adult females, 148 sub-adult males, 282 sub-adult females, 209 juveniles, and 385 calves. It says there were no elephants in 13 divisions.
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Overpopulation
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ Housing Is The Economy
There are lots of economic issues but housing costs are the biggest one for most people. The only real way to improve this is to build a whole lot of new housing. Understand that this is a necessary part of being a progressive. Every day more people are born and they will all need places to live and if we ignore the need to continually build all of those places then everything gets fucked up, as it is now.
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Finance
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-29 [Older] German inflation and wages both rise
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CNBC ☛ EBay to drop American Express over fees
It's a notable blow to American Express, whose customers are often the most attractive among merchants and spend the most money per month on their cards. But it's not the first time merchants have voiced opposition to AmEx's business practices by walking away, most notably the warehouse chain Costco nearly a decade ago.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Pro Publica ☛ What Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial Indicates About a Second Trump Term
There’s a tape that both the defense and the prosecution played in summations in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial. In it, you can hear the chaos of Trump’s office at Trump Tower in September of 2016: Trump seems to be having multiple conversations almost simultaneously. He talks to an unidentified person on the phone. He discusses polls with Michael Cohen, his executive vice-president at the time. Trump and Cohen talk about a diversity initiative and stopping the media from unsealing the records of Trump’s first divorce. His executive assistant pops in with word of a call from a developer. Trump calls for a Coke.
And then, very clearly, you can hear Cohen saying, “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away. I’ve actually come up and I’ve spoken … I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg” — then the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer — “about how to set the whole thing up.”
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The Hill ☛ It’s time for cybersecurity alternatives
Next week, Microsoft President Brad Smith will testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security on his company’s “cascade of failures” after Chinese state-affiliated hackers compromised over 500 federal cloud accounts last May. During the hearing, legislators will hear updates on new cybersecurity practices from Microsoft leadership and examine what else can be done to strengthen the company against attacks. What likely won’t be discussed: Alternatives to the United States’ cloud storage oligopoly if its adversaries continue to access critical government data in the future.
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI Negotiating to Buy "Vast Quantities" of Fusion Power, Which Doesn't Exist Yet
And as it turns out, the company didn't just sign a massive partnership with OpenAI partner Microsoft last year, but it's even in talks for a deal with OpenAI itself to "buy vast quantities of electricity to provide power for data centers," according to the WSJ.
But there's one big problem: the tech has yet to materialize, making any promises of "vast" amounts of power nothing but an empty-handed commitment in the distant future. Try as they might, researchers have yet to figure out how to make it a viable way to generate energy, rendering it nothing more than a moonshot.
At the same time, the revelation throws Altman's already dubious personal dealings into an even murkier light.
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Wired ☛ Marc Andreessen Once Called Online Safety Teams an Enemy. He Still Wants Walled Gardens for Kids
On Wednesday, Andreessen offered some clarification: When it comes to his 9-year-old son’s online life, he’s in favor of guardrails. “I want him to be able to sign up for internet services, and I want him to have like a Disneyland experience,” the investor said in an onstage conversation at a conference for Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI research institute. “I love the internet free-for-all. Someday, he's also going to love the internet free-for-all, but I want him to have walled gardens.”
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Futurism ☛ Leaked Emails Show Elon Musk Diverting AI Resources Away From Tesla as Automaker Flails
The latest report is a striking development considering Musk has long threatened to divert his AI ambitions away from Tesla, going as far as to "blackmail" investors earlier this year. In January, he tweeted that he's "uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI and robotics without having [about] 25 percent voting control," infuriating shareholders.
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CNBC ☛ Elon Musk told Nvidia to ship AI chips reserved for Tesla to X, xAI
But emails written by Nvidia senior staff and widely shared inside the company suggest that Musk presented an exaggerated picture of Tesla's procurement to shareholders. Correspondence from Nvidia staffers also indicates that Musk diverted a sizable shipment of AI processors that had been reserved for Tesla to his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter.
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Futurism ☛ The AI Industry Is Swarming DC With Lobbyists
As the AI industry continues to balloon, so does its army of lackeys ready to buttonhole lawmakers for favorable regulation. According to a new report by the consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, thousands of AI lobbyists have descended upon the Capitol, in a dramatic surge of influence that's already coincided with major policy decisions.
Between 2019 and 2022, the number of lobbyists sent by corporations and other groups on AI-related issues stayed relatively equal year-to-year, hovering around 1,500. Then in 2023, things went off the charts, with over 3,400 lobbyists flooding Washington DC — an increase of more than 120 percent.
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Silicon Angle ☛ LLM developer Cohere reportedly raises $450M at $5B valuation
The AI large language model developer’s latest raise reportedly also drew contributions from several new backers. The group is said to include Cisco Systems Inc. and PSP Investments, a Canadian pension fund.
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Reuters ☛ Nvidia and Salesforce double down on AI startup Cohere in $450 million round, source says
The generative AI company, which makes money by selling its models and applications to enterprises with a emphasis on data privacy, generated $35 million in annualized revenue by the end of March, up from $13 million last year, the source added.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Reason ☛ Journal of Free Speech Law: "Defamatory in Whose Eyes?," by Prof. Kenneth W. Simons
Defamation is a moral and legal wrong that is distinct from the wrongs of insulting or offending a person, lying to a person, or unjustifiably causing emotional distress. Defamation essentially involves harm or injury to a person's reputation. And reputation is a social concept: It refers to a person's standing in some relevant audience, i.e., the group or community beyond the speaker and the person.
But from whose perspective must a statement be defamatory? This question has multiple dimensions. Is our only interest whether the person's standing is lowered in the eyes of the community? Or should we also consider the perspective of the person who claims to have been defamed? Must that person subjectively view the statement as injuring his or her own reputation? Are we also interested in the perspective of the speaker?
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VOA News ☛ European Union braces for foreign disinformation as voters head to polls
Some 360 million people in 27 nations — from Portugal to Finland, Ireland to Cyprus — will choose 720 European Parliament lawmakers in an election that runs Thursday to Sunday. In the months leading up to the vote, experts have observed a surge in the quantity and quality of fake news and anti-EU disinformation being peddled in member countries.
A big fear is that deceiving voters will be easier than ever, enabled by new AI tools that make it easy to create misleading or false content. Some of the malicious activity is domestic, some international. Russia is most widely blamed, and sometimes China, even though hard evidence directly attributing such attacks is difficult to pin down.
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404 Media ☛ 'Team Fortress 2' Botters Use AI Voice to Defame Critic
“Someone decided to train an AI on my YouTube videos, allowing them to make any audio they recorded of themselves sound like I had said it,” Megascatterbomb, the YouTuber who’s been trying to bring attention to the botting problem, said in a video shared on YouTube in an effort to highlight the retaliation he’s faced. “If you recall me saying some of the most vile and hateful things imaginable over the mic; that was a bot, not me.”
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The Hill ☛ Donald Trump falsely claims he beat Nikki Haley in every GOP primary
Former President Trump falsely asserted Tuesday that he beat former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley in every GOP presidential primary this cycle, despite Haley beating him in two races earlier this year.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-05-29 [Older] Thailand's ex-PM Thaksin to be indicted over royal insult
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Blogger Detained After Posting Only A Period In Response To Ayatollah's Picture
The case highlights ongoing tensions in Iran regarding freedom of expression, particularly on social media, and adds to the growing concern over the treatment of intellectuals and activists in the country.
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VOA News ☛ Pakistan’s top court issues notices to 34 channels for airing controversial pressers
In mid-May, news channels aired press conferences by Faisal Vawda and Mustafa Kamal in which they criticized the judicial system and senior judges. Taking notice of the speeches, the top court demanded the two politicians explain their remarks.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Tiananmen crackdown vigils: Snuffed out in HK, cities around world mark date
Thirty five years have passed since the Tiananmen crackdown occurred in 1989. Hong Kong, which for 30 years was one of the only places on Chinese soil to host large-scale commemorations that marked the incident, has seen its candlelight vigils snuffed out following Covid curbs and the enactment of a Beijing-imposed security law.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK police make 4 arrests on Tiananmen crackdown anniversary
Hong Kong police arrested four people on the 35th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Among them, an elderly woman was apprehended on suspicion of acting with seditious intention under the city’s new, homegrown security law.
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI Insiders Say They're Being Silenced About Danger
The group is seeking robust whistleblower protections, safe anonymous reporting pathways, and the abolition of the restrictive non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements that quiet current and former AI staffers. The AI workers are also asking that AI companies work to "support a culture of open criticism," as they write in an open letter, so long as trade secrets are protected.
According to the letter and a press release, the Right to Warn demands have been cosigned by AI "godfathers" Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, as well as fellow renowned AI scientist Stuart Russell.
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VOA News ☛ Arrests, detentions in Hong Kong on 35th anniversary of 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown
Police late Tuesday said they made four arrests, including a 68-year-old woman who was chanting slogans, and suspected to have committed offenses "in connection with seditious intention," which carries a sentence of up to seven years in jail under a new domestic security law - known locally as Article 23. Videos from local media showed a woman shouting "The people will not forget."
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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[Repeat] Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Jimmy Lai trial adjourned after media tycoon appears to be unwell
“As a prominent and outspoken journalist and publisher, Jimmy Lai has been targeted in a clear attempt to stop the peaceful exercise of his rights to freedom of expression and association,” British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said in a statement issued on December 18, 2023. “I call on the Hong Kong authorities to end their prosecution and release Jimmy Lai. ”
In January, four UN experts called for all charges against the pro-democracy tycoon to be dropped, as they pressed for his immediate release.
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VOA News ☛ Trial of Apple Daily’s Jimmy Lai adjourned over health concerns
Lai founded the now-defunct, pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, which the government forced to shutter in 2021. If convicted under the national security law, the British national faces life in prison.
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VOA News ☛ Georgia’s parliament speaker signs controversial ‘foreign agents’ bill
Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili signed on Monday a contentious law that critics say curbs media freedom and will threaten Georgia’s chances of joining the European Union.
Papuashvili signed the bill into law after the Georgian Dream party-controlled legislature overrode President Salome Zourabichvili’s veto of the bill.
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BIA Net ☛ Perpetrator of armed attack on journalist released after just 4 months
Adem T., who carried out an armed attack and wounded Azim Deniz, the owner of Deniz Postası newspaper and Anadolu TV in Kayseri, was released in four months.
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Press Gazette ☛ Facebook deleting local news posts and labelling them as spam
Small independent publishers in the UK are frustrated and confused about why some of their Facebook posts are being flagged as spam and removed.
Many small local news titles are heavily reliant on Facebook for content distribution and traffic.
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New York Times ☛ Arrest Threatens Nepal’s Standing as Bastion of Free Speech
The executive, Kailash Sirohiya, was detained nearly two weeks ago in a thinly veiled act of retaliation by Nepal’s powerful home minister, Rabi Lamichhane. The minister had been the subject of intensely negative coverage by the Kantipur Media Group, owned by Mr. Sirohiya.
The company’s news articles had disclosed that Mr. Lamichhane, a popular television host before he turned to politics, had broken the law by serving in Parliament while maintaining citizenship in a second country, the United States.
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YLE ☛ Panu Pokkinen to take over as Yle Uutiset Editor-in-Chief
Panu Pokkinen has been named as the new editor-in-chief of Yle's News and Current Affairs division.
He moves from his role as responsible editor and director of the company's Sports and Events unit and has previously headed up the sports department and worked as editor-in-chief of news at Iltalehti and as a duty editor at Ilta-Sanomat.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Papers Please ☛ Texas requires ID to visit some websites
The U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to review a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a Texas law that requires all visitors to some websites to provide the site operator with evidence of their identity and age.
The Texas law applies to all visitors to any website “more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors.” It doesn’t matter if you are an adult, none of the material on the site is obscene or illegal (“harmful to minors” doesn’t mean obscene or illegal for adults) , or you want to access portions of the site — perhaps the majority — that aren’t considered harmful to minors. You still have to identify yourself to the site operator by “digital identification,” “government-issued identification,” or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data.”
The issue raised in the petition for certiorari (request for review by the Supreme Court) is the “standard of review” applicable to this law. That may seem like a technical issue, but it is likely to determine the outcome of this and many other cases.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Top IT industry managers are divided on the need for face-to-face communication in the workplace
Many managers are currently seeking a balance between digital and face-to-face communication. A recent study from the University of Eastern Finland published in Information Technology & People shows that top IT industry managers have different views on when and for what purposes face-to-face communication in the workplace is needed.
"Some top managers felt that all work tasks can be performed remotely with the help of digital communication. According to them, face-to-face communication is only necessary for maintaining interpersonal relationships and a sense of community," says Doctoral Researcher Lotta Salin of the University of Eastern Finland.
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RFERL ☛ Taliban Publicly Flogs Dozens Of People In Northern Afghanistan
The court said those flogged were accused of theft and so-called moral crimes, including adultery, homosexuality, and eloping.
Public punishments are on the rise in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, ordered the return of Islamic sentences in November 2022.
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Wired ☛ Inside the Biggest FBI Sting Operation in History
A couple of weeks later, a coalition of European police authorities held a press conference and took responsibility for the hack: The French Gendarmerie had hacked into EncroChat’s infrastructure, pushed malware to the phones themselves, harvested about 100 million EncroChat messages, and then shared them with police in the Netherlands, the UK, Norway, and Sweden. Attempted murder for hire, international drug trafficking, extortion, narcotics laboratories—the small group of officials said they had eyes into all of it. “International drug and money laundering corridors have become crystal clear,” Dutch authorities said in their press release.
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Deccan Chronicle ☛ World's richest have never been so wealthy: Study
The number of "high net worth individuals" (HNWI) -- defined as people with liquid assets of at least $1 million -- rose by 5.1 percent last year to 22.8 million, according to consulting firm Capgemini.
Their total wealth reached $86.8 trillion in 2023, a 4.7 percent increase from the previous year, according to the annual World Wealth Report.
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404 Media ☛ Amazon’s AI Warehouses Isolate Workers and Hinder Union Organizing, New Report Finds
Amazon’s use of AI and robotics in its warehouses isolates workers and negatively impacts union organizing drives, a new report finds.
The report, conducted by Oxford University research team Fairwork and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, aimed to explain how AI impacts warehouse workers by interviewing employees at robotic Amazon warehouses in the U.K.
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Fair Work ☛ Fairwork Amazon Report: Transformation of the Warehouse Sector through AI
The report by Fairwork and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) offers insight into how AI and robotics deployment and integration in Amazon warehouses across the UK are changing the experiences and conditions of workers. Although the stated objectives of these technologies are to improve operational efficiency and create better work environments, this research shows that these technologies can put workers at mental and physical risk.
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Gannett ☛ 4 years, 220 deaths. Ohioans are dying in jail before going to court
When a guard brought her breakfast May 11, 2022, six days after she’d arrived at the Richland County Jail, Copeland had no pulse. She died of dehydration.
“All they had to do,” said her father, Jon Copeland, “was give her a drink of water.”
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Gannett ☛ Families gather at Ohio jail to remember those who died in custody
Isaiah Trammell, a 19-year-old with autism spectrum disorder, died following 10 hours in custody of the Montgomery County Jail. Officers taunted and threatened Trammell, placed him in a concrete cell by himself and strapped him into a restraint chair two separate times while he begged for his medications and to call his family.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The Strategist ☛ The Achilles’ heel of a digital nation: Australia’s dependence on subsea cables
Australia’s digital sovereignty is at risk of disaster, held hostage by a network of vulnerable subsea cables. Our complacent reliance on these underwater lifelines is a reckless gamble with our economic, social and national security. While the government and telecommunications industry tout ongoing efforts to enhance cable security, their measures are mere stopgaps, inadequate to address the magnitude of the looming crisis.
We need more resilient cable designs, more distributed landing points, alternative communication paths and the best possible cybersecurity measures.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google won't answer questions on new Umoja cable system
The US internet giant announced last month that the new cable – the first to connect Africa and Australia – would also have a terrestrial component running from Kenya, through Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Zimbabwe to South Africa, before crossing the Indian Ocean to Australia.
“Establishing a new route distinct from existing connectivity routes is critical to maintaining a resilient network for a region that has historically experienced high-impact outages,” Google said at the time.
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NDTV ☛ Starlink Brings Internet To Remote Tribe. They Get Hooked To Porn
"Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white [sic] people." And added, "But please don't take our internet away."
The tribe now faces a fundamental dilemma - The uses of the internet and its impact on their culture.
The youth are now hooked to their phones - They are chatting with friends, glued to screens, and accessing pornography and misinformation.
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TMZ ☛ Elon Musk's Starlink Hookup Leaves A Remote Tribe Addicted To Porn
It's not just porn causing worry -- other issues range from kids playing violent shooter games to chatting with strangers online and getting addicted to their phones for hours.
According to another tribesman, Tsainama Marubo, they're also becoming lazy and adopting what he calls "the ways of the white [sic] people."
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International Business Times ☛ Elders Of Amazon Tribe Slam Elon Musk's Starlink For Exposing Young Members To Porn, Social Media
Elon Musk's efforts to bring [Internet] access to a secluded Amazonian tribe have backfired, according to tribal elders who blame social media and pornography for tearing the community apart.
Nine months ago, the arrival of Starlink, Musk's [Internet] service, brought the web to the remote Marubo tribe along the Ituí River for the first time. This has caused a bitter rift within the 2,000-member community - between those who wish to keep the community free from the clasps of technology, and those who are ready to embrace it.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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International Business Times ☛ Man Frustrated With New Tesla Too Big For Parking Space: Can't Return It, Can't Resell It For A Year
Just a few weeks after receiving the truck, Raddon expressed his desire to return the truck on X. Much to his chagrin, Tesla won't buy it back from him or let him resell it. "Tesla has refused my request to sell my recently purchased Cybertruck," he wrote in an X post. "They do not want to buy, and have told me I can't sell. It does not fit into the complex I live."
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Digital Music News ☛ Surprise: Spotify's Price Hike Is Unpopular With Consumers
With the new price increases, some of Spotify’s subscription offerings are no longer as lucrative as they once were for consumers. The Spotify Duo subscription has increased 30% since last year’s price hike. Meanwhile the Spotify Family plan has increased by 25% in price. Spotify Premium for individuals saw a 20% increase.
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Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Music-Only Tier Quietly Launches Amid Bundling Dispute
Following price increases in the U.S. and the U.K. – and against the backdrop of a stateside battle over bundling – Spotify is quietly rolling out a music-only tier.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Surveillance pricing
What's more, once an industry contracts corporate gigantism, it will become too big to jail, able to outspend and overpower the regulators charged with reining in its cheating. Anyone who believes Smith's self-evident maxim had to accept its conclusion: that companies had to be kept smaller than the state that regulated them. This wasn't about "punishing bigness" – it was the necessary precondition for a functioning market economy.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Fight Against Ticketmaster
The DOJ says that, together, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have forced fans into paying way too much to see their favorite bands. Ticketmaster’s huge market power led Pearl Jam to testify against the ticketing giant before Congress in 1994, and more recently megastars like Taylor Swift have spoken out against the company and its perceived monopoly.
For the Lever Time podcast, Arjun Singh sat down with veteran indie musician Greg Saunier, drummer and founding member of Deerhoof, and antitrust expert Morgan Harper from the American Economic Liberties Project to discuss the ways Ticketmaster has hurt artists, fans, and small venue owners, and to unpack the lawsuit and ask whether it will bring meaningful improvements to an increasingly predatory music industry. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
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Trademarks
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CBC ☛ He wants to trademark his geography game Worldle. The N.Y. Times has a problem with that
Kory McDonald says nobody would confuse his geography-themed game Worldle for the hit New York Times-owned word game Wordle — even if there is only one letter of difference.
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Right of Publicity
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VOA News ☛ Australia criminalizes distribution and creation of deepfake pornographic material
A deepfake is an image or video in which a person's face or body has been altered to make it appear they are doing or saying something that never happened.
Deepfake pornography overwhelmingly affects women and girls. Increasingly, it is being generated by artificial intelligence.
The Australian government said it will not tolerate such “insidious criminal behavior.”
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Copyrights
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Walled Culture ☛ We are losing vast swathes of our digital past, and copyright stops us saving it
It is hard to imagine the world without the Web. Collectively, we routinely access billions of Web pages without thinking about it. But we often take it for granted that the material we want to access will be there, both now and in the future. We all hit the dreaded “404 not found” error from time to time, but merely pass on to other pages. What we tend to ignore is how these online error messages are a flashing warning signal that something bad is happening to the World Wide Web. Just how bad is revealed in a new report from the Pew Research Center, based on an examination of half a million Web pages, which found:
"A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website."
"For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023."
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Wired ☛ Google’s AI Overview Search Results Copied My Original Work
In email exchanges and a phone call, a Google spokesperson acknowledged that the AI-generated summaries may use portions of writing directly from web pages, but they defended AI Overviews as conspicuously referencing back to the original sources. Well, in my case, the first paragraph of the answer is not directly attributed to me. Instead, my original article was one of six footnotes hyperlinked near the bottom of the result. With source links located so far down, it’s hard to imagine any publisher receiving significant traffic in this situation.
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Axios ☛ Downshiftology's Lisa Bryan and Raptive's Michael Sanchez on AI and the creator economy
AI is threatening creators from all sides: using creators' work for training data, replacing them — and now making it harder for audiences to find their work.
Why it matters: Problematic and sometimes inaccurate AI search summaries could steal creator's livelihoods, weaken their brands and accelerate the decline of the open web.
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Torrent Freak ☛ 'Adam Ruins Everything' Star Suggests BitTorrent as an Option to Watch the Series
Online piracy is a major problem for the entertainment industries. In some instances, the problem is kept intact due to limited availability of content from legal sources. This week, 'Adam Ruins Everything' star Adam Conover mentioned BitTorrent as a viewing option for fans who no longer have access to the series after HBO removed it a few months ago.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Bungie's Vow to Relentlessly Pursue 'Anonymous' Cheaters Was No Bluff
In August 2023, video game giant Bungie filed yet another copyright infringement-based lawsuit targeting up to 50 individuals involved in developing and selling cheat tools for Destiny 2. What set this apart from similar lawsuits was a two-line warning in the complaint's introduction. Elsewhere, the statement could've been dismissed as typical anti-piracy posturing, but here, Bungie's relentless deanonymization of targets sends a powerful, credible message.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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