Links 24/06/2024: New Research, New Attacks on Justices Sceptical of Patent Maximalists, European Commission for Copyright Maximalists
Contents
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Leftovers
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New York Times ☛ Royal Ascot Was Awash in Extravagant Hats
Fascinators are banned at a storied British horse racing event that has a strict dress code codifying what it means to be a hat.
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Lou Plummer ☛ Remember When They Called It Netiquette?
There is one area though where I am a wee bit prickly and it has to do with people's laziness. When someone barges into a forum or subreddit having made no effort to do any research or reading and demands help by asking the exact same question that approximately 1 miliion other people have asked, I get get a little vexed.
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Scott Willsey ☛ Redo, Redoes, Redid
You may have noticed that today marks a redesign that I hope brings a cleaner, sleeker, easier to read format to the site. I’m kind of excited about it – I hope it’s at least tolerable for you, the reader! Even better, I hope you actually like it.
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Robert Birming ☛ No blog yet? You might need 3.
It wasn't until I actually started blogging that I began to figure out what I wanted to write about and which tools to use. If I hadn't decided to start, I'd still be stuck, just thinking and not writing a single word.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Verge ☛ Inside Netflix’s bet on advanced video encoding
And while the roll-out of AV1 continues, work is already underway on its successor. It might take a few more years before devices actually support that next-gen codec, but early results suggest that it will make a difference. “At this point, we see close to 30 percent bit rate reduction with the same quality compared to AV1,” Aaron explained. “I think that’s very, very promising.”
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Science
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Science Alert ☛ Florida Man's Bowel Eviscerated After Freak Sneezing Accident
Sneezing can be incredibly dangerous.
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Science Alert ☛ Out-of-Body Experiences Have a Surprising Effect on Some People
And we might finally know why.
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Science Alert ☛ Deep Remnants of Earth's Primordial Crust Discovered in Australia
A new way to peer into the past.
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Science Alert ☛ Can Black Holes Be Created From Pure Light? New Paper Challenges Theory.
Here's why it might be impossible.
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Science Alert ☛ NASA Sued After Space Junk Projectile Crashes Into Florida Home
This one didn't go according to plan.
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The Straits Times ☛ Want more innovation? China should open up more, says Harvard scholar
China’s task of nurturing home-grown talent in fields including Hey Hi (AI) and space has become more urgent.
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Education
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Andreas ☛ I was fired
Two weeks ago without any prior warning the company I work for told me that they would part ways with me and that they would terminate my employment contract. Then they asked me to leave my phone and laptop with them and walked me to the exit. Here’s how it came to this, and what I’m taking away from it.
This is of course a very personal story, and I pondered for quite a while if I should even publish it here, but in the end this is a personal blog and I feel like telling this story, so why not.
Now the headline is actually a little exaggerated because I wasn’t “fired” in the true sense of the word; I live in Germany where we have very strong laws for worker protection, so truly firing someone, meaning immediately terminating an employment contract, is pretty much only possible if the employee has done something that violates their contract or the law and which makes further employment of that person impossible. I have done no such thing, and at least on paper I’m still employed for a few more months, but what happened certainly felt like being fired to me, which is why I think putting it like this is appropriate.
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Hardware
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Hackaday ☛ TSMC’s Long Path From Round To Square Silicon Wafers
Most of us will probably have seen semiconductor wafers as they trundle their way through a chip factory, and some of us may have wondered about why they are round. This roundness is an obvious problem when one considers that the chip dies themselves are rectangular, meaning that a significant amount of the dies etched into the wafers end up being incomplete and thus as waste, especially with (expensive) large dies. This is not a notion which has escaped the attention of chip manufacturers like TSMC, with this particular manufacturer apparently currently studying a way to make square substrates a reality.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Latvia ☛ Latvian Midsummer beliefs: How to be beautiful
Midsummer is the time of practicing ancient beliefs for various purposes: to be lucky or rich, to fall in love, to predict the future based on the weather, or even to be outright nasty to someone.
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Science Alert ☛ Parkinson's Discovery Suggests We May Already Have an FDA-Approved Treatment
Exciting news!
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Science Alert ☛ This Rare Gene Variant Seems to Protect You From Alzheimer's Disease
It's more common than we thought.
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New York Times ☛ How Pet Care Became a Big Business
People have grown more attached to their pets — and more willing to spend money on them — turning animal medicine into a high-tech industry worth billions.
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The Straits Times ☛ Denmark’s Buldak ramyeon recall sparks Surveillance Giant Google search spike
Despite the increased worldwide attention, the Korean food manufacturer remains cautious.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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The Atlantic ☛ Google Is Turning Into a Libel Machine
Except, Niemann admitted no such thing. Quite the opposite: He has vigorously defended himself against the allegations, going so far as to file a $100 million defamation lawsuit against Carlsen and several others who had accused him of cheating or punished him for the unproven allegation—Chess.com, for example, had banned Niemann from its website and tournaments. Although a judge dismissed the suit on procedural grounds, Niemann has been cleared of wrongdoing, and Carlsen has agreed to play him again. But the prodigy is still seething: Niemann recently spoke of an “undying and unwavering resolve” to silence his haters, saying, “I’m going to be their biggest nightmare for the rest of their lives.” Could he insist that Google and its AI, too, are on the hook for harming his reputation?
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Futurism ☛ Wendy’s Says Its AI Only Screws Up 14 Percent of Drive-Through Orders
Take this tidbit buried in the same NYT story: Wendy's AI drive-through system requires human intervention in the double digits — 14 percent, in fact, which is a pretty striking proportion.
White Castle has its own AI drive-through ordering system, and it also requires human intervention at a rate of 10 percent, a company spokesperson told the NYT.
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Engadget ☛ How small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline
Over the course of eight months and an estimated $700 (mostly in travel expenses), he was able to claw back what all other methods had failed to render: his personal Facebook account.
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Nicolas Magand ☛ Should I remove this blog from Google Search?
TL;DR: Recently, in the light of all the A.I. crap, I have been contemplating whether I should delist my website from all search engines, including Google.
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Thomas Rigby ☛ Artificial intelligence and the language of conscious intent
Incapable of hallucinating and lying, we're left with "wrong". Some of the output is just wrong; sometimes dangerously so.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Doc Searls ☛ Does personal AI require Big Compute?
Right now your new TV is reporting what you watch back to parties unknown. Your new car is doing the same. Hell, so is your phone. What if you had all that data? Won’t you be able to do more with it than the spies and their corporate customers can?
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New York Times ☛ What the Arrival of A.I. Phones and Computers Means for Our Data
In this new paradigm, your Windows computer will take a screenshot of everything you do every few seconds. An iPhone will stitch together information across many apps you use. And an Android phone can listen to a call in real time to alert you to a scam.
Is this information you are willing to share?
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HTTP Toolkit ☛ Public CDNs Are Useless and Dangerous
Public CDNs also create privacy risks. While online privacy was a niche topic when public CDNs first became popular, it's now become a major issue for the public at large, and a serious legal concern.
This can be problematic for public CDN usage because loading resources from a 3rd party leaks information: that the user is loading that 3rd party resource whilst on your site. Specifically, your site's domain (and historically full URL, though generally not nowadays) is sent in the Referer header with all subresource requests, like so: [...]
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Defence/Aggression
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New York Times ☛ After Escaping China by Sea, Dissident Kwon Pyong Faces His Next Act
Kwon Pyong recounted for the first time the series of gambles that got him out of China by jet ski, and almost a year later, out of South Korea.
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New York Times ☛ A Times Reporter on His Father’s Years in Mao’s Army in China
For nearly a decade, I worked in China as a Times correspondent and bureau chief. But it wasn’t until researching for a book that I uncovered the full story of my father’s role in Communist rule.
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JURIST ☛ China sanctions US arms company over arms trade with Taiwan
China announced sanctions against US arms company Lockheed Martin in response to the US sale of arms to Taiwan on Friday. The spokesperson of the Chinese foreign ministry Lin Jian contended that the arms deal violates the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués, especially the August 17 Communiqué of 1982.
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The Hindu ☛ Computer science student arrested for alleged terror links in West Bengal
According to the police, the accused has links to a new terror module named ‘Shahadat’, which is also operating in Bangladesh. “This terror module is found to be linked with activists of Ansar Al Islam, which is a banned terror organisation in Bangladesh and is affiliated to Al Qaida, which is a global terrorist organisation,” the STF said.
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[Old] The Asahi Shimbun Company ☛ In twilight years, former Unit 731 member set on spreading truth
Shimizu found himself explaining to his wife more details about the building than what the museum offered.
The building was the headquarters in China of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731. And Shimizu finally told his wife that he had been a member of the infamous biological warfare unit that used prisoners as guinea pigs in its experiments.
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Dawn Media ☛ Drivers of extremism
Much ink has been spilled trying to understand religious extremism and its outcomes, both in Pakistan and abroad. Existing research points out two sets of factors here — the societal organisation and drivers of extremism; and the role of the state.
On societal organisation, it is well documented that such indoctrination is carried out by clerics, not just through in-person contact in sermons and in madressahs, but also through highly localised WhatsApp and Facebook groups, as well as content on TikTok. They do it because they believe in it and because it sustains their social status within communities. People pay them respect, provide them with gifts, turn to them for advice and for dispute resolution.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Gunmen in Russia’s Dagestan attack religious sites and police post, killing at least ten — Meduza
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TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ More than 15 policemen, several civilians killed by gunmen in Russia’s southern Dagestan region
Armed militants attacked two Orthodox churches, a synagogue and a traffic police post in Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan, killing a priest and six police officers, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti said Sunday.
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The Straits Times ☛ Russia offers to help Vietnam develop nuclear energy, RIA reports
The offer was made to Vietnam Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh last week.
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The Straits Times ☛ Russia’s defence deal with North Korea could create friction with China: US general
Analysts say the pact could undercut Beijing’s leverage over its two neighbours.
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New York Times ☛ Gunmen Attack Synagogues and Churches in Russian Republic
Multiple law-enforcement officers and a priest in the region of Dagestan were killed in what appeared to be coordinated attacks, local officials said.
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New York Times ☛ Monday Briefing: Among Some Israelis, Muted Sympathy for Gaza
Also, shootings in Dagestan, a Russian republic.
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TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Gunmen kill 15 police officers and several civilians in Russia’s southern Dagestan region
Armed militants attacked two Orthodox churches, a synagogue and a traffic police post in Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan, killing a priest and six police officers, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti said Sunday.
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RFERL ☛ Anniversary Of Prigozhin Mutiny Marked By Detention Of Media Ally
On the anniversary of the mutiny carried out in Russia by the late mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Federal Security Service (FSB) has detained a top manager of his purported “troll factory.”
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RFERL ☛ Unknown Gunmen Kill 6 Police Officers, Priest In Separate Attacks In Daghestan
At least six police officers were killed on June 23 when gunmen opened fire at a synagogue, an Orthodox church, and a police station in separate attacks in the cities of Derbent and Makhachkala in Russia's North Caucasus region of Daghestan, Russian officials and news reports said.
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France24 ☛ Gunmen in Russia’s Dagestan attack churches, synagogue and police post
Gunmen on Sunday attacked synagogues and churches in Russia's North Caucasus region of Dagestan, killing a priest, six police officers, and a member of the national guard, security officials said.
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New York Times ☛ Ukraine Urges West to Allow Use of Weapons to Hit Russian Air Bases
After bombs again rained on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city, President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Western partners to permit the use of their weapons against air bases inside Russia.
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The Straits Times ☛ North Korean official criticises US for expanding support for Ukraine: KCNA
He said Pyongyang's stance was that Russia had a 'right to opt for any kind of retaliatory strike'.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Targets Kyiv Region As Moscow Says 4 Killed In Attacks On Sevastopol, Belgorod
Russia launched three missiles targeting Kyiv region in an early morning strike on June 23 after at least two civilians were killed when a residential building was struck by a Russian bomb in the northeastern city of Kharkiv a day earlier.
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RFERL ☛ Metropolitan Ionafan, Imprisoned By Ukraine For Supporting Russia, Being Sent To Moscow
Metropolitan Ionafan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), who was sentenced to five years in prison in August for his support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has reportedly been released and will be sent to Moscow following the intervention of Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill.
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RFA ☛ Is Cambodia ditching Ukraine?
Phnom Penh support for Ukraine, rare in Southeast Asia, helped end Cambodia's isolation from the West.
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France24 ☛ Russia accuses Ukraine of deadly drone attacks in Crimea's Sevastopol
Russian authorities said four people died and over 100 were wounded in Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on Sunday, while the second day of Russia's aerial bombing of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine killed at least one person.
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Off Guardian ☛ MSM Signaling a change in the Russia-Ukraine Narrative?
Two major incidents in the last week suggest we might be about to see a change in the narrative surrounding the Russian war in Ukraine. First we saw Piers Morgan interviewing economist and former US diplomat Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is noted for his eloquent and historically literate takes on the history of NATO and …
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Environment
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Wired ☛ Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change
Look at what else is happening in those very regions when it comes to home insurance: Providers are either retreating from or dramatically heightening their prices in states like California, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey, thanks to their unique susceptibility to climate change. These states have seen supercharged extreme weather events like floods, rain bombs, heat waves, and droughts. National lawmakers fear that the insurance crises there may ultimately wreak havoc on the broader real estate sector—but that’s not the only worst-case scenario they have to worry about.
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The Atlantic ☛ India Is Building a Mega-river
India is about to launch a massive engineering project—more than 100 years in the making—that will connect several of the subcontinent’s rivers, transforming the disparate flows of neighboring watersheds into a mega–water grid spanning from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Will climate change make insurance too expensive?
"Basically, if there is more damage, someone has to pay for it," said Ernst Rauch, a climate expert with Munich Re, a major reinsurance company. Either insurance companies, the state, or the person who suffered the damage must foot the bill.
The logic behind insurance is that many people sign up, but only a few suffer losses and receive compensation. If a growing number of people are hit by losses, however, insurance companies will pass on the risk and increase premiums for insurance holders.
As some previous extreme events have proven too costly to cover, insurance companies have in turn passed on some of their risk to what are known as reinsurers. Munich Re is one of these companies. It has been studying the effects of climate change for around 50 years with regard to their consequences for their own business.
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Dawn Media ☛ From fields to tables: How rising temperatures are altering the food we eat
“These events have a huge impact on crop production, from where the food chain begins.”
Hotter days, massive floods and prolonged droughts can minimise yields in some places, block the transportation of food, and drive down the nutritional value of staple grains. Unexpected rains, on the other hand, make it difficult for farmers to earn a living.
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The Straits Times ☛ Severe drought forces corn farmers in China’s east to delay planting
The seven drought-hit provinces account for roughly 35 per cent of China’s corn production.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ In central China, farmers face ‘total crop failure’ amid punishing drought
By Peter Catterall Farmer Bao Mingchen gestured to a dry pipe where water typically irrigates a patch of crops, the soil now cracked under a drought hitting China’s vast agricultural hinterland.
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Energy/Transportation
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ EU and China trade chiefs hold ‘candid and constructive’ talks over electric car tariffs
EU and China trade chiefs held “candid and constructive” talks on Saturday over plans from Brussels to ramp up tariffs on Chinese electric cars, and the two sides will hold further consultations, the EU said.
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Overpopulation
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Omicron Limited ☛ Tourists banned from Italy's Capri over water shortage
The company charged with supplying the island with water said there had been a technical problem on the mainland on Thursday, and while that had since been fixed problems with the supply to Capri remained.
Falco warned of "a real emergency" and said that while there was still water on most of the island on Friday, local tanks were "running out".
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Los Angeles Times ☛ California legislators reject proposal to limit water well-drilling
Over the past several years, California’s water managers have seen a pattern emerge in farming areas of the Central Valley: Even as declining groundwater levels have left thousands of residents with dry wells and caused the ground to sink, counties have continued granting permits for agricultural landowners to drill new wells and pump even more water.
A bill that was sponsored by the California Department of Water Resources sought to address these problems by prohibiting new high-capacity wells within a quarter-mile of a drinking water well or in areas where the land has been sinking because of overpumping.
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Finance
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JURIST ☛ Ireland criminal barristers to strike in July over pay dispute
The Irish Bar Council on Saturday announced a strike on three dates next month due to a lack of progress on pay restoration.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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JURIST ☛ Reform UK leader Nigel Farage claims Surveillance Giant Google blocked party advertisements
UK political party Reform UK leader Nigel Farage claimed Saturday that Surveillance Giant Google blocked the party’s Ad Accounts. Farage called this “election interference.” The account has since been reinstated. One advertisement was removed for a “policy violation.”
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Silicon Angle ☛ Rivals Apple and Meta Platforms reportedly discussing generative AI partnership
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the talks today, said the integration of Llama 3 would likely be similar to a deal Apple made with OpenAI, whose ChatGPT is currently the only third-party AI model in Apple Intelligence. Although Apple has developed some of its one, smaller LLMs in-house, it has said it will rely on third parties to perform more complex tasks.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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[Old] Africa Check ☛ Video shows police rescuing pregnant girls and babies from Nigerian ‘baby farm’ in 2013, not 2024 as social media posts suggest
In short: A video circulating online shows Nigerian police raiding a “baby factory” in the country’s Imo state, but it’s over a decade old.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFA ☛ Thousands welcome Dalai Lama’s arrival in US for knee surgery
The visit comes after the recent passage of a bill in the U.S. Congress that urges the Chinese government to engage in dialogue with the Dalai Lama or his representatives, or democratically elected Tibetan leaders, to resolve the China-Tibet dispute.
The Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act, also known as the Resolve Tibet Act, calls on China to cease its propagation of disinformation about the history of Tibet, the Tibetan people and the Dalai Lama.
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France24 ☛ French women’s rights supporters march against far right ahead of snap polls
Protesters wearing shades of pink and violet marched from the Place de la République square in central Paris to Place de la Nation in the east, bearing signs with messages such as "Push back the far right, not our rights".
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VOA News ☛ Thousands of women march in France against far right
About 200 women's rights groups and unions organized the marches in dozens of cities, including Paris, saying women's rights come under attack when countries are governed by far-right parties. In Paris, more than 10,000 women demonstrated peacefully, organizers said.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Robin Berjon ☛ The Public Interest Internet
Allow me to open with a wildly speculative question: What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean "internet" the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by "public interest" I don't mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good.1
Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues or pieces of internet infrastructure (much of which I rely upon here), including a great blog series from Danny O'Brien and friends, I have yet to read to an answer to this question: What global digital architecture should we assemble if we take seriously the idea that the internet should be public interest technology?
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Vincent Bernat ☛ Why content providers need IPv6
IPv4 is an expensive resource. However, many content providers are still IPv4-only. The most common reason is that IPv4 is here to stay and IPv6 is an additional complexity.
This mindset may seem selfish, but there are compelling reasons for a content provider to enable IPv6, even when they have enough IPv4 addresses available for their needs.
Disclaimer
It’s been a while since this article has been in my drafts. I started it when I was working at Shadow, a content provider, while I now work for Free, an internet service provider.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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New York Times ☛ The Future of Netflix, Amazon and Other Streaming Services
The three men meet occasionally to discuss the state of the industry, and lively disagreements have a been a staple of their discussions. But by the time they met on the yacht, they had all agreed that the money-losing status quo in the streaming business was unsustainable. The old cable model was a melting ice cube.
But what will take its place?
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Patents
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Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Does Justice Thomas Hate Invention or Just the Hubris of Inventors?
In Moore, the majority held that the MRT, which attributes the realized and undistributed income of an American-controlled foreign corporation to the entity’s American shareholders and then taxes those shareholders, “falls squarely within Congress’s constitutional authority to tax.” The Court reached this holding by relying on its “longstanding precedents” that allow Congress to attribute the undistributed income of an entity to the entity’s shareholders or partners for tax purposes.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ EU Invites Feedback from 'Pirate Sites' for Upcoming Watchlist
The European Commission has launched a new consultation, asking copyright holders to identify problematic sites and services for an update of the Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. To add some balance, the EU also welcomes feedback from sites and services that were branded piracy havens in the previous edition of the report.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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