Links 28/06/2024: More Attacks on the Press, More Censorship in Russia
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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International Business Times ☛ How To Become A Virtual Assistant With No Experience In 6 Steps And Earn Up To $10K Monthly
In her new role, Lauriel enjoys the flexibility to work from home or while travelling, the freedom to choose her clients, and a consistent monthly income of around $10,000. Lauriel is part of a growing number of burnt-out workers who have left the traditional 9-5 grind for the world of virtual assistance.
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Robert Birming ☛ Go your own way | Robert Birming
So true. We will never be able to please everyone. And if we try, we'll end up living an unfulfilled and unhappy life. Living a lie.
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Lou Plummer ☛ Me and the Box | Living Out Loud
My first memory of television is from July of 1969 - Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 and the moon landing. I remember the adults in the house being awed and excited but not much more beyond that. Most of my early TV memories are of stuff the grownups watched, not kid shows. Walter Cronkite used to give the Vietnam box score at the end of every evening's broadcast, listing how many Americans were killed, captured and wounded each day. We didn't watch the news at home but at my grandparent's house it was always on.
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Andy Bell ☛ The time for designers to learn to code is now
Following that, I got the CSS bug and over a decade or so, very much focused my attention on what the language could achieve in a design lens. Of course I picked up other stuff — y’know, WordPress, React, yada yada — but truly understanding how HTML and CSS worked unlocked my ability to create actually user-friendly interfaces.
That’s our job as designers. It’s not to pontificate over design tools and their ever expanding features; it’s to design things for people.
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Gabriel ☛ Gabz/mL · Why I Blog.
Fast-forward to 2024
I think to this day some of the reasons I blog, are still somewhat the same. It has definitely evolved with time, I think, or the reason is more clear now than it was back then.
Why do I Blog?
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RIPE ☛ A Click Away - Improving Navigation on ripe.net
For the past year, we’ve focused on improving the user experience of www.ripe.net. Our initial efforts were centred around the website redesign and technical developments, such as improving the effectiveness of our search functionality, as outlined in previous RIPE Labs articles. Along with these efforts, we also plan to rearrange the navigation menus to make content easier to find.
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Matt Webb ☛ Karma as ancient progress studies (Interconnected)
It’s interesting to look at karma with this lens: an explanatory framework for progress.
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Science
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Wired ☛ NASA Desperately Needs New Spacesuits. Private Firms Are Struggling to Make Them
The two winning teams were led by Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space, respectively. They were eligible for task orders worth up to $3.5 billion—in essence NASA would rent the use of these suits for a couple of decades. Since then, NASA has designated Axiom to work primarily on a suit for the Moon and the Artemis Program, and Collins with developing a suit for operations in-orbit, such as space station servicing.
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Science Alert ☛ Never-Before-Seen Trilobite Anatomy Preserved by Pompeii-Like Ash in Morocco
An explosive volcanic eruption that took place in prehistory is one of them. As the ash from a pyroclastic flow during the Cambrian age was dumped on a shallow marine environment, its population of ancient arthropods called trilobites were preserved almost instantly – including any soft tissues that are normally degraded or destroyed during other fossilization processes.
Now, hundreds of millions of years later, those unfortunate animals have given us an unprecedented record of their three-dimensional anatomy, along with any smaller creatures that happened to be clinging to their bodies at the time.
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The Register UK ☛ Elon Musk to destroy the ISS, with NASA's approval
After SpaceX builds the "deorbit vehicle," NASA will take ownership of it and operate it.
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The Conversation ☛ US military project aims to prevent hackers targeting satellites and recognises rising threat of cyberattacks in space
As space becomes more important to the world’s critical infrastructure, the risk increases that hostile nation states will deploy cyber attacks on important satellites and other space infrastructure. Targets would include spy satellites or military communications satellites, but commercial spacecraft too.
The US Department of Defense believes its new partnership, called Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR), would enhance US national security and the country’s competitive advantage in space. It would go some way beyond the relationship between government and private contractor that already exists.
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Education
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Arduino ☛ Why is STEAM education important for kids? 6 activity tips
School’s out for summer – at least for most of us. While the majority of children (and teachers!) will probably be breathing a huge sigh of relief, parents face a new challenge: how to keep kids engaged during the long break. Of course, downtime is important, but there are also loads of fun ways to keep those brains fired up and prevent the summer slide.
As we explain in this article, incorporating STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) into your child’s summer routine is a great place to start. Read on for our top tips for success, along with some interesting summer STEAM activities to try at home.
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University of Michigan ☛ U-M researchers suggest end-of-alphabet last names receive lower grades
“In our paper, we argued that the potential bias we observed is caused by a mechanism called fatigue,” Wang said. “When graders have too much of a workload and too many students, they develop this fatigue, they get distracted and they will perform worse and worse with more and more. Given this mechanism, it would be great if we can reasonably control the workload of each grader and give them behavioral nudges to take rests, maybe every five minutes when they work more than 40 to 45 minutes or so.”
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Dan Slimmon ☛ Leading incidents when you’re junior
If you’re a junior engineer at a software company, you might be required to be on call for the systems your team owns. Which means you’ll eventually be called upon to lead an incident response. And since incidents don’t care what your org chart looks like, fate may place you in charge of your seniors; even your boss!
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Haskell For All ☛ Haskell for all: My spiciest take on tech hiring
My spiciest take on tech hiring
… is that you only need to administer one technical interview and one non-technical interview (each no more than an hour long).
In my opinion, any interview process longer than that is not only unnecessary but counterproductive.
Obviously, this streamlined interview process is easier and less time-consuming to administer, but there are other benefits that might not be obvious.
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Hardware
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AnandTech ☛ NVIDIA's AD102 GPU Pops Up in MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Cards
Meanwhile, MSI is apparently not the only video card manufacturer using salvaged AD102 chips for GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, either. @wxnod has also posted a screenshot obtained on an Inno3D GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super based on an AD102 GPU.
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El País ☛ Is the mobile phone starting to die?
There is also a fact: fewer phones are being sold. “People are still buying smartphones, I’m not saying that suddenly no one uses mobile phones, but the numbers are going down,” stresses Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute, an advisory firm that helps companies detect technological trends. This consultancy decreed in 2017 that the beginning of the end of the smartphone had begun, as sales had stagnated (we all already have a mobile phone, this market is not going to grow anymore). Although the figures have never returned to the previous days of bonanza, “if we think about the next decade, instead of using just a phone there will be many different devices. And these devices will replace the smartphone. This has already started to happen.” The era of the human who is permanently crouched over a rectangle, the days of faces illuminated by the blue light of a screen, the times of two thumbs moving at the speed of light on a protective plastic are on their way out.
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Michigan News ☛ Thief steals copper coils from roller rink, killing A/C during heat wave
Rollerworld owners discovered the air conditioning wasn’t working on the morning of Friday, June 21, when they realized they could not control the temperature at the rink on their phone app, owner Amy Wright said.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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US News And World Report ☛ Magic Mushroom's Psilocybin Is America's Most Popular Hallucinogen
But attention to public policy changes hasn't kept pace, the report added. It said the choice facing federal regulators is whether or not psychedelics should follow cannabis' for-profit path.
"The current situation with psychedelics reminds me of where we were with cannabis policy 12 years ago," Kilmer said. "Now is the time for federal policymakers to decide if they want to shape these policy changes or stay on the sidelines."
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teleSUR ☛ Namibia: New Desalination Plant to Be Constructed, Rising Water Demand
Currently, the region relies on groundwater aquifers from the Omaruru Delta and Kuiseb Delta, alongside desalinated water from the Orano desalination plant, interconnected by a network of pump stations, pipelines, and reservoirs.
Namibia approves 20 million cubic metres desalination plant at Henties Bay
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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The Register UK ☛ Anthropic unleashes Claude models for US government
And of course even with lofty motives, Anthropic is not fundamentally different from Google and OpenAI partner Microsoft – each keen to sell Secure AI in Google Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service in Azure Government respectively – not to mention AWS now with added Claude. For all players, the point is billable AI first, responsible machine learning a little lower down the list.
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Scoop News Group ☛ How the CIA is using generative AI — now and into the future
The CIA has been using AI for things like content triage and “things in the human language technology space — translation, transcription — all the types of processing that need to happen in order to help our analysts go through that data very quickly” as far back as 2012, when the agency hired its first data scientists, Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s director of AI, said during an on-stage keynote interview at the Amazon Web Services Summit on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
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Cyble Inc ☛ OpenAI Delays Voice Mode Rollout To July Over Safety Issues
Experts are raising eyebrows after OpenAI announced a one-month delay in the rollout of its highly anticipated “Voice Mode” feature for ChatGPT, citing safety concerns. The company said it needs more time to ensure the model can “detect and refuse certain content.”
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Wired ☛ Deepfakes Are Evolving. This Company Wants to Catch Them All
Impersonating a real person on a live video feed is just one example of the kind of reality-melting trickery now possible thanks to AI. Large language models can convincingly mimic a real person in online chat, while short videos can be generated by tools like OpenAI’s Sora. Impressive AI advances in recent years have made deepfakery more convincing and more accessible. Free software makes it easy to hone deepfakery skills, and easily accessible AI tools can turn text prompts into realistic-looking photographs and videos.
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Cyble Inc ☛ Apple AirPods Firmware Update Fixes Bluetooth Security Flaw
Apple has taken steps to enhance the security of its popular AirPods lineup by addressing a critical Bluetooth vulnerability through a new firmware update. This AirPods firmware update, identified as Firmware 6A326 and 6F8, is aimed at several models including AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Fit Pro.
The AirPods vulnerability tracked as CVE-2024-27867 and discovered by Jonas Dreßler, posed a potential risk where attackers within Bluetooth range could spoof a user’s device and gain unauthorized access to their AirPods. This issue highlights the importance of timely updates to protect Apple devices from cyberattacks.
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Cyble Inc ☛ Polyfill Supply Chain Attack Potentially Affected 'Tens Of Millions' Of Websites
Claims, counterclaims, website shutdowns, redirections and DDoS attacks were among the highlights (or lowlights) as news of the Polyfill supply chain attack entered its second day.
After Polyfill(.)io was shut down by registrar Namecheap, the allegedly compromised JavaScript CDN service relaunched at Polyfill(.)com, and claimed it had been “maliciously defamed.”
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Press Gazette ☛ What happened when British GQ stopped trying to 'feed the algorithm'
British GQ has slowed things down and stopped trying to “feed the algorithm”.
GQ‘s European director of audience development, analytics and social, Neha-Tamara Patel, joined in July 2022 and told Press Gazette about a strategy shift that has seen the legacy men’s lifestyle brand move away from quick wins towards more considered content with the aim of a more engaged core audience.
She said: “It was apparent to me that we were doing a lot of what I call ‘feeding the algorithm content’: lots of short-form news, a lot of quick fashion news, all of which was still within GQ’s world but from an audience perspective wasn’t really serving us long term.
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404 Media ☛ Researchers Prove Rabbit AI Breach By Sending Email to Us as Admin
Members of a community focused on jailbreaking and reverse engineering the Rabbit R1 AI assistant device say that Rabbit left critical API keys hardcoded and exposed in its code, which would have allowed them to see and download “all r1 responses ever given.” The API access would have allowed a hacker to use various services, including text-to-speech services and email sending services, as if they were the company. To verify their access, the researchers sent 404 Media emails from internal admin email addresses used by the Rabbit device and the Rabbit team.
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Six Colors ☛ Preparing for the era of orchestrated apps
Over the next few years you’re going to be hearing a lot more about a concept that Apple started to discuss at WWDC this year: orchestration. Broadly, the idea is that the machine-learning models on your Apple devices are going to be able to understand what you want to do, based on your commands and current context, and make it happen by using the combined resources of your device’s system software and third-party apps.
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NYPost ☛ AI-generated video of Justin Timberlake drinking beer shocks fans
An eerie AI-generated video of Justin Timberlake chugging a beer in his now infamous mugshot is making the rounds on social media — leaving many fans shocked over how “convincing” is it.
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El País ☛ How Google will change with AI, according to SEO experts
The change has not reached Spain or Europe, and there is no timeline for when AI Overviews will be available. But there is a group of Spaniards who are waiting anxiously to see how the changes will work: SEO experts, the workers who try to improve their clients’ page ranking. How will they do their job if Google no longer offers links and directly gives answers? Will their job disappear?
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Record ☛ Law enforcement searches of Clearview AI facial recognition doubled in past year
The number of facial recognition searches law enforcement conducted via controversial Clearview AI technology doubled to 2 million over the past year, the company said Thursday.
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[Old] The Washington Post ☛ Police in Austin, San Francisco skirt facial recognition ban
A spokeswoman for the Austin Police Department said these uses of facial recognition were never authorized by department or city officials. She said the department would review the cases for potential violations of city rules.
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[Old] Time ☛ Ukraine's 'Secret Weapon' Against Russia Is Clearview AI
In the ongoing war against Russia, Clearview has become the Ukrainian government’s “secret weapon,” Tymchenko says. More than 1,500 officials across 18 Ukrainian government agencies are using the facial-recognition tool, which has helped them identify more than 230,000 Russian soldiers and officials who have participated in the military invasion. Ukraine's use of Clearview has rapidly expanded beyond identifying Russian troops on their soil. The nation has come to rely on the private U.S. tech company, which has just 35 employees, to assist with a vast range of wartime tasks, many of which have not been previously reported, according to interviews with officials from half a dozen government agencies, law-enforcement officers, Ukrainian analysts, and Clearview executives.
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Ben Frain ☛ Seriously, use icon fonts
With an icon font the designers and the developers have the same flexible asset. Pick the font, paste in the relevant glyph and the size you set the asset in the graphics editor is the size it will end up in the code. Let me re-iterate that point as it’s an amazing benefit of using an icon font. Icomoon has a beautiful feature and I’ll provide a direct quote here from their docs that explains this:
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The Kent Stater ☛ Flash Bistro upgrades with Amazon Just Walk Out technology
But it is possible. Flash Bistro in the Student Center recently underwent a renovation, outfitting the store with Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology.
Now, customers only need an Amazon One palm print, tap of a credit card or a Flashcard to make purchases. As they walk through the store, they grab items they want and leave. There are no cashiers or self-checkouts.
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404 Media ☛ ID Verification Service for TikTok, Uber, X Exposed Driver Licenses
The Israel-based company, called AU10TIX, offers what it describes on its website as “full-service identity verification solutions.” This includes verifying peoples’ identity documents, conducting “liveness detection” in a real-time video stream with the user, and performing age verification, where a service will predict how old someone is based on their uploaded photo. AU10TIX also includes the logos of other companies on its site, such as Fiverr, PayPal, Coinbase, LinkedIn, and Upwork, some of which confirmed to 404 Media they are active or former AU10TIX clients.
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Unmitigated Risk ☛ Balancing Innovation and Privacy: The Risk of Government Surveillance in the Age of AI
Imagine a world where every conversation, every movement, and every interaction is tracked in real-time by unseen eyes. This isn’t the plot of a dystopian novel—it’s a very real possibility enabled by today’s rapid technological advancements. As we develop and deploy powerful new tools, and maintain the ones that we built the internet on, the line between technology that makes our lives easier and invasive surveillance becomes increasingly blurred.
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[Old] CNN ☛ Microsoft defends its right to read your email
Although the move could be perceived as a breach of trust, Microsoft says it's allowed to make such unilateral decisions. It pointed to its terms of service: When you use Microsoft communication products -- Outlook, Hotmail, Windows Live -- you agree to "this type of review ... in the most exceptional circumstances," Frank wrote.
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[Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Microsoft tightens privacy policy after admitting to reading journalist's emails
The new rules prevent the company from snooping on customers’ communications without first convincing two legal teams, independent of the internal investigation, that they have evidence sufficient to obtain a court order were one applicable.
The company did not apologise for the search.
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Confidentiality
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Unmitigated Risk ☛ Why We Trust WebPKI Root Certificate Authorities
In contrast, “standards” in WebPKI encompass community norms, best practices, and recommendations specific to each root program. These standards are adaptable, evolving with technological advancements, security threats, and collective learning among CAs. They provide a framework that upholds the integrity of the Internet, ensuring that CAs remain transparent and live up to their promises while adhering to ecosystem norms, requirements, and best practices.
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Filippo Valsorda ☛ XAES-256-GCM
About a year ago I wrote that “I want to use XAES-256-GCM/11, which has a number of nice properties and only the annoying defect of not existing.” Well, there is now an XAES-256-GCM specification. (Had to give up on the /11 part, but that was just a performance optimization.)
XAES-256-GCM is an authenticated encryption with additional data (AEAD) algorithm with 256-bit keys and 192-bit nonces. It was designed with the following goals: [...]
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Defence/Aggression
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Truthdig ☛ A Militarized AI Hell on Earth
Venture capital and military startup firms in Silicon Valley have begun aggressively selling a version of automated warfare that will deeply incorporate artificial intelligence (AI). Those companies and their CEOs are now pressing full speed ahead with that emerging technology, largely dismissing the risk of malfunctions that could lead to the slaughter of civilians, not to speak of the possibility of dangerous scenarios of escalation between major military powers. The reasons for this headlong rush include a misplaced faith in “miracle weapons,” but above all else, this surge of support for emerging military technologies is driven by the ultimate rationale of the military-industrial complex: the potential to make vast sums of money.
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New York Times ☛ Campaign Tied to China Are Harassing a Dissident’s Teenage Daughter
A covert propaganda network linked to the country’s security services has barraged not just Mr. Deng but also his teenage daughter with sexually suggestive and threatening posts on popular social media platforms, according to researchers at both Clemson University and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
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NL Times ☛ Wilders tests new coalition's "religious criticism" boundary, calling Islam "disgusting"
A few days before a Cabinet containing ministers from the far-right PVV is installed for the first time, party leader Geert Wilders lashed out fiercely against Islam in a post on social media. Wilders said the religion "is a disgusting, reprehensible, violent and hateful religion" on Wednesday.
He invoked the coalition agreement's caveat that "criticism of religion" is allowable, and the four parties in the coalition agreed to uphold the basic rule of law. Wilders made his statement in the context that he has endured "20 years of protection, safe houses, 5 fatwas, thousands of death threats and visits to many Islamic countries."
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ ‘The state encourages it’: Amid the full-scale war in Ukraine, thousands of Russians have reported their fellow citizens for dissent. Who are they? — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ From Babi Yar to Bucha Jonathan Littell on ‘An Inconvenient Place,’ his new book reckoning with Nazi and Russian atrocities in Ukraine — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Press Gazette ☛ Ex-editor Geordie Greig blames Daily Mail for Tory woes
He added: “There is a long tradition in British newspapers of taking a political stance, supporting one party or another. This is perfectly reasonable. But it is never reasonable to bury sleaze and incompetence.”
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Environment
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Presidential election seen as climate turning point as CO2 hits record
Recent data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been at record high levels the past two years. The jump from 2022 to 2024 is the largest two-year increase NOAA has recorded in the 50 years the agency has collected data.
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Energy/Transportation
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CS Monitor ☛ Chinese EVs could circumvent American tariffs through Mexico
“Time and again, we have seen the Chinese government dump highly subsidized goods into markets for the purpose of undermining domestic manufacturing,’’ Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, wrote in an April letter to President Joe Biden that called for an outright ban on Chinese electric vehicles in the U.S. “We cannot let the same occur when it comes to EVs.’’
Low-priced Chinese EVs pose a potentially “extinction-level event’’ for America’s auto industry, the Alliance for American Manufacturing has warned.
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THT ☛ Surviving on 100kb/s
So, a couple of weeks ago, a power surge killed my desktop pc, my thinkpad and networking equipment, and I haven’t had the time to repair/buy it. Instead, I just adapted to the 100kb/s cellular life.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Cleantech has an enshittification problem
EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit – lots of it.
But no matter how much public transit we install, there's always going to be some personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters. Between deliveries, accessibility, and stubbornly low-density regions, there's going to be a lot of cars, vans and trucks on the road for the foreseeable future, and these should be electric.
Beyond that irreducible minimum of personal vehicles, there's the fact that individuals can't install their own public transit system; in places that lack the political will or means to create working transit, EVs are a way for people to significantly reduce their personal emissions.
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Finance
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Security Analysis of the EU’s Digital Wallet
A group of cryptographers have analyzed the eiDAS 2.0 regulation (electronic identification and trust services) that defines the new EU Digital Identity Wallet.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Cyble Inc ☛ Philippines Data Security Officer Hacked 93 Different Sites
A data security officer from the Manila Bulletin has admitted to hacking 93 websites, including government and private company sites, as well as servers abroad. The hacker, known by the alias “Kangkong,” was arrested along with two others by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Cybercrime Division on June 19 following reports of multiple unauthorized access attempts and breaches.
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Federal News Network ☛ DCSA has a new roadmap for delayed background investigation IT system
In congressional testimony Wednesday, DCSA Director David Cattler said the Defense Department this spring initiated a 90-day recovery plan for the NBIS program, which is charged with delivering new IT capabilities to support the background investigation mission. Cattler took over as director of DCSA in March. He has said addressing NBIS delays is one of his top priorities.
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European Commission ☛ Feedback Open: Cybersecurity risk management & reporting obligations for digital infrastructure, providers and ICT service managers
The NIS2 Directive strengthens cybersecurity risk-management measures and streamlines incident-reporting obligations for a large number of operators across the EU.
Given the cross-border nature of some operators from the digital sectors, NIS2 requires the Commission to align the rules at EU level.
This act will facilitate that, as well as specifying the cases when an incident must be considered significant.
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European Commission ☛ Draft implementing regulation - Ares(2024)4640447 [PDF]
[...] laying down rules for the application of Directive (EU) 2022/2555 as regards technical and methodological requirements of cybersecurity risk-management measures and further specification of the cases in which an incident is considered to be significant with regard to DNS service providers, TLD name registries, cloud computing service providers, data centre service providers, content delivery network providers, managed service providers, managed security service providers, providers of online market places, of online search engines and of social network [...]
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Insight Hungary ☛ 444 banned in Russia
444. hu is the only Hungarian news site on the Russian Foreign Ministry's ban list. As of 25 June, Russia has restricted access to 81 European news services listed by country on the ministry's website. Some outlets have been listed as pan-European media.
Their statement says that this is in response to a decision taken by the Council of the European Union on 17 May banning "all broadcasting activities" of three Russian media outlets, RIA Novosti, Izvestia Media Information Centre, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which also came into force on the 25th of June.
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EFF ☛ The Global Suppression of Online LGBTQ+ Speech Continues
EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world, and that includes LGBTQ+ communities, which all too often face threats, censorship, and other risks when they go online. This Pride month—and the rest of the year—we’re highlighting some of those risks, and what we’re doing to help change online spaces for the better.
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RFA ☛ China restricts religious debate event for Tibetan monks
Authorities shortened the two-week event, which enjoys popularity across Tibetan-populated regions, to one week and cut the number of monastic attendees to 3,200 from about 7,000, said one Tibetan source, who like others in the report declined to be named.
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Techdirt ☛ Paramount Kills ‘MTV News’ Archives, Because Who Cares About History?
Paramount (CBS) Corporation this week simply erased decades of music journalism in the blink of an eye. Last year the company shut down MTV News and fired all its staff as part of a “strategic realignment.” This week, without warning, the company deleted the entirety of the MTV News archives, erasing decades of music journalism without much in the way of any warning.
In a scene that’s been repeated constantly in the last decade, journalists watched helplessly as stuff they’d spent years of their life working on simply disappeared: [...]
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Reason ☛ Review: 'The Trust Fall' Documents Julian Assange's Legal Battles
Even if Assange is never forced into an American court, that won't reverse the damage to his health caused by his long entrapment in the Ecuadorian embassy and the British Belmarsh prison, or the chilling effect on others who might dream of following in his footsteps.
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New York Times ☛ Thursday Briefing: Evan Gershkovich’s Trial
The Russian authorities haven’t revealed any evidence to support their charges. Observers have been barred from attending the trial, which began in the industrial city of Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains. His lawyers have been prohibited from publicly revealing anything they learn.
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Truthdig ☛ Until Julian Assange Is Pardoned, Press Freedom Remains at Risk - Truthdig
Assange did not plead guilty to some heinous crime, but to “activities that journalists engage in every day, and that we absolutely need them to engage in,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “In this respect the case establishes a terrible precedent, even if it’s not one the courts have fully endorsed.”
“Press freedom and human rights groups — including the Knight Institute,” Jaffer continued, “repeatedly criticized the administration for pursuing the case, arguing that the prosecution of Assange for publishing government secrets was impossible to reconcile with the administration’s stated commitment to press freedom.”
“The case is a disgrace,” James C. Goodale, the former vice chairman and general counsel of The New York Times, who led a team of lawyers representing the Timesin the historic Pentagon Papers case, told Truthdig. “The plea deal with Assange asks him to concede he was a part of a conspiracy to obtain national security information. The Justice Department has long sought to criminalize the newsgathering abilities of the press and to use this case as a precedent to criminalize the basic functions of the press, which in part includes publishing classified information. The fact that Assange had to agree to settle this case and agree with government claims is disappointing but he can hardly be blamed for anything after all he has been through.”
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Reason ☛ Julian Assange's Freedom Came at a Steep Price
"Really anybody who is concerned about press freedom should be deeply concerned about the prosecution of Julian Assange," says Trevor Timm, co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. "Maybe [some] journalists don't like Julian Assange, or they have criticized one or many of his actions over the years. That's all well and good, but what really matters are the acts the Justice Department is trying to criminalize here."
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The Dissenter ☛ Inside The Assange Plea Deal: Why The US Ended the Case
The U.S. government deployed their hubristic argument about Assange and the First Amendment as part of their defense of the extradition request—and it backfired.
Marjorie Cohn, the dean of the People’s Academy of International law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, asserted, "It is no coincidence that the plea came a little more than a month after the High Court of England and Wales ruled that Assange could appeal the extradition order against him. The Justice Department apparently feared it would lose the appeal."
Stella Assange said that she believed the negotiations "revealed how uncomfortable the United States government is, in fact, [with] having these arguments aired."
"The fact that this case is an attack on journalism, it’s an attack on the public’s right to know, and it should never have been brought,” she concluded. “Julian should never have spent a single day in prison. But today we celebrate because today Julian is free."
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[Old] Press Gazette ☛ Trust in news up slightly in UK but remains lower than global average
However the UK’s trust level is down long-term, from 51% in 2015, with a low point of 28% in 2020.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Julian Assange Is Free, but Justice Has Not Been Served
There is zero question that Assange going free is cause for celebration. Assange is a journalist who exposed US war crimes. As a result of this work, he has suffered vicious and relentless persecution at the hands of the US government. Yet Assange’s freedom was attained in a bittersweet victory. Until the very end, the US government refused to drop its claim that basic journalism can constitute a violation of the Espionage Act. A plea deal does not set a legal precedent, but the steep price extracted from Assange will undeniably have a chilling effect on journalism.
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AntiWar ☛ Julian Assange Is Free! - Antiwar.com
Trump, who had been harshly critical of both Manning and Assange, ratcheted up his attacks on Assange and Obama after Manning’s prison release. His anger was interpreted by his Department of Justice as his wish for an indictment of Assange, which the DoJ obtained in 18 counts including espionage. The DoJ then sought Assange’s extradition from London, whereupon he fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy there, where he resided in the basement for seven years until he was forcibly extracted by British police.
The case against Assange is a sham and is motivated by the U.S. intelligence community and its colleagues in the DoJ. It is a sham because the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech of all persons, not just Americans. Even though the materials Assange and WikiLeaks received had been stolen by Manning, because they were and are of profound interest to the public – American drones targeting civilians, secret U.S. military actions in countries with which the U.S. was not at war, and government lying to the public on a grand scale – the media is free to reveal them.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Democracy Now ☛ Kenya Protests: Police Abduct Activists as Pres. Ruto Rejects Tax Bill Linked to Foreign Debt Crisis
Anti-government protests in Kenya are continuing after President William Ruto made a dramatic reversal Wednesday, announcing he would not sign the finance bill that sparked a nationwide uprising, and would instead send the bill back to Parliament. At least 23 people were killed and dozens more injured when police fired live rounds, rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters who stormed Kenya’s Parliament building. We speak to a writer and activist based in Nairobi who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for her safety. She says many in the youth-led movement have been “abducted” during the police crackdown on demonstrations, which are now calling for Parliament to be dissolved and new elections to be held. We also hear from Mamka Anyona, a Kenyan international finance and development expert, who breaks down the financial crisis that led to the mass unrest. The contested finance bill deploys a tax hike in an attempt to repay $80 billion in foreign loans, largely from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But critics say mismanagement and corruption have led to high inflation and unemployment, and characterize both the bill and the loans themselves as undemocratic decisions reached without constituent approval. ”It has all ended up creating this tinderbox,” Anyona says.
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Pro Publica ☛ How NYPD Commissioner Caban Buries Officers’ Disciplinary Cases
Brianna Villafane was in Lower Manhattan protesting police violence in the summer of 2020, when officers charged into the crowd. One of them gripped her hair and yanked her to the ground.
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International Business Times ☛ Foxconn Excludes Married Women from Jobs at Apple iPhone Plant In India, Raising Ethical Concerns
In March 2023, sisters Parvathi and Janaki, both in their 20s, visited a Foxconn-run plant in southern India after reading job postings on WhatsApp. Upon arrival, a security guard at the main gate turned them away after asking, "Are you married?" During an interview in her local shanty town, Parvathi explained, "We didn't get the jobs because we are both married." She added, "Even the auto-rickshaw driver who took us from the bus stand to the Foxconn facility told us they wouldn't take married women, but we thought we would still give it a shot."
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ We Have a Distribution Problem
The systematic effort to stomp out organized labor power in America since the end of WW2 has been very successful. We’ve gone from a high of one in three workers being union members in the 1950s, to a paltry one in ten today. This decline has been engineered by business interests, mostly using money and political power. Part of the battle is waged on an intellectual battlefield as well: The effort to spread the idea that the free market produces prosperity, that unions break that free market and thereby make everyone poorer, and that working people will achieve their own prosperity more effectively by riding the rising tide of booming business than they will by organizing into unions.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The Register UK ☛ Nokia to sell submarine network business to France for $375M
That Nokia, a Finnish company, owns a submarine cable firm based in France is a consequence of the fate of former telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent. The company was a merger of French telecom firm Alcatel and Lucent Technologies, which was formerly AT&T's supplier Western Electric and the home of Bell Labs, the birthplace of the transistor. The two paired up in 2006 in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble bursting.
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[Repeat] APNIC ☛ Navigating Starlink's FCC paper trail
Anyone watching the satellite Internet scene in the last few years could not have missed Starlink, the new Low Earth Orbit (LEO) kid on the block. From a researcher’s perspective, SpaceX — Starlink’s operators — are quite opaque, however. There is little engagement with the research community, and official pronouncements often lack detail — they’re clearly not the kind of company that takes people on factory tours to proudly show off how they make and run things. Much of what is being bandied around publicly about Starlink comes from social media influencers whose technical qualifications, insights, background, and access to information are at times questionable, and whose information cannot be relied upon. Very little is peer-reviewed or quality-assured in other ways.
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[Old] PC Mag ☛ The Internet Is Not Forever: 38% of Web Pages From 2013 No Longer Exist
The Pew Research Center finds that 38% of the pages extant in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023 and that a quarter of the pages that were online at some point over that period have now vanished.
Pew’s study, based on a sample of almost a million pages recorded by the nonprofit archive Common Crawl, also documents how this “digital decay” has eroded the utility of news and government sites as well as Wikipedia, with links at those places increasingly serving up only 404 error messages.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ $8.1m Damages Agreed By YouTuber & Bungie For 96 Bogus DMCA Notices
A gamer who impersonated an anti-piracy partner working for Bungie as part of a bogus DMCA takedown notice campaign on YouTube, agreed to a $8.1m copyright infringement judgment. Nicholas Minor, aka Lord Nazo, sent 96 fraudulent takedown notices against creators in the Destiny 2 community early 2022. An injunction targeting the defendant aims to ensure there's no repeat of any similar behavior, anywhere in the world, ever again.
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Torrent Freak ☛ LaLiga and UAE Launch 'Anti-Piracy Laboratory' to Block Pirate Sites
Spanish football league LaLiga and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are teaming up to tackle online piracy. This week, they launched a dedicated 'anti-piracy laboratory' that aims to block pirate sites and services, while also exploring new technological enforcement tools. LaLiga's President, who was present at the signing, describes the agreement as "historic and unique".
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Digital Music News ☛ Created By Humans Raises $5M—Licensing Works to AI Models
The startup has raised $5 million in funding, with plans to expand beyond books to become a platform “where creators of videos, images, music, and even medical data can sell licensing rights for AI training.”
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Scoop News Group ☛ U.S. Copyright Office looks to overhaul its enterprise copyright system
Appearing before the House Administration Committee, Shira Perlmutter, the register of Copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office, said the agency is modernizing its approach to workflow and services, with a particular focus now on mapping out next steps and timing on registration for its new Enterprise Copyright System.
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Wired ☛ Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse
Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned.
An AWS spokesperson, who talked to WIRED on the condition that they not be named, confirmed the company’s investigation of Perplexity. WIRED had previously found that the startup—which has backing from the Jeff Bezos family fund and Nvidia, and was recently valued at $3 billion—appears to rely on content from scraped websites that had forbidden access through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a common web standard. While the Robots Exclusion Protocol is not legally binding, terms of service generally are.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding
We're living through one of those moments when millions of people become suddenly and overwhelmingly interested in fair use, one of the subtlest and worst-understood aspects of copyright law. It's not a subject you can master by skimming a Wikipedia article!
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The Atlantic ☛ Generative AI Can’t Cite Its Sources
Curious about how these media deals might work in practice, I tried a range of searches in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Although Perplexity generally included links and citations, ChatGPT—which is not a tailored, Google-like search tool—typically did not unless explicitly asked to. Within those citations, both Perplexity and ChatGPT at times failed to deliver a functioning link to the source that had originated whatever information was most relevant or that I was looking for. The most advanced version of ChatGPT made various errors and missteps when I asked about features and original reporting from publications that have partnered with OpenAI. Sometimes links were missing, or went to the wrong page on the right site, or just didn’t take me anywhere at all. Frequently, the citations were to news aggregators or publications that had summarized journalism published originally by OpenAI partners such as The Atlantic and New York.
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[Repeat] Creative Commons ☛ Moving Institutions Toward Open—Building on 6 Years of the Open GLAM Survey
How common is it for cultural organisations to permit the free reuse of their digitised public domain collections? Where are these materials published online, and under what conditions?
Since 2018, Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace’s Open GLAM Survey has been answering these questions and more, providing valuable insights into open access activity within the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector. The Survey offers a comprehensive overview of the landscape of open access policy and practice among cultural institutions and organisations, serving as a crucial guide for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of copyright and heritage.
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The Register UK ☛ Reddit to use robots.txt to scare off AI data scrapers
It should be noted that robots.txt can't force scrapers to do anything; the file's contents are more like guidelines or firm requests. Web crawlers can be made to ignore them, so Reddit says it will continue to rate limit and/or block rogue bots – presumably that includes bad ones that ignore robots.txt – from accessing the site.
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The Verge ☛ YouTube is trying to make AI music deals with major record labels
After debuting a generative AI feature last year that produces music in the style of famous artists like Charli XCX, John Legend, and T-Pain, YouTube is now asking major record labels to allow it to clone more musicians. According to the Financial Times, the Google-owned video platform is offering to pay Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records “lump sums of cash” in exchange for licensing their songs to legally train its AI music tools.
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Matt Birchler ☛ The public web and consent
The big sticking point here is consent. I don’t think it’s moral for a company to go “we’ve trained on your data already, but if you don’t want us to do that again, you can put a rule in your robots.txt file.” That sucks, and anyone at the companies building these LLMs who say this is fine know that they’re lying to justify their bad behavior.
But let’s say you are a good server admin who doesn't want to participate in LLM training and you update your robots.txt file to block every LLM bot you know of. As we said above, you can’t block new bots since they don’t announce themselves until after they’ve done all their initial training, and also that file isn’t law, it’s just a suggestion. As we’ve seen in recent days, Perplexity doesn’t give a shit about that file and will plow right through any guardrails you’ve tried to set up.
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Thomas Rigby ☛ Rage against the machine
Reading Jeremy Keith's call to arms, "The machine stops", I started to think about ways to not just prevent AI crawlers but to actively sabotage them. Idle Luddite thoughts of an evening.
There are those who say we shouldn't; that the "public" web is fair game. After all, it's freely available to anyone to access. But that's it; to access. As Louie says in Training AI,
"The “public” in “public web” means free to access; it does not mean it's free to use."
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Daniel Pocock ☛ European Commission fooled by IBM Red Hat merger risk to source code
It is now one year since IBM Red Hat announced restrictions on the availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code.
At the time, various people wrote to me commenting that I had been right in my concerns about the direction of open source software and the increasingly fake communities like the FSFE misfits who pretend to be FSF.
The IBM Red Hat merger required regulatory approval from the European Commission. An enormous report was produced about the risks of the merger and the source code question was in there. It was foreseen and the European Commission did nothing to mitigate the risk or place conditions on the merger to protect all the other companies who contributed to that source code.
Let's go through it step-by-step: [...]
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[Old] Manton Reece ☛ Where Apple went wrong with free apps
Today, we know that Apple has never planned well for free apps. You don’t need to look much further than their reversal of allowing in-app purchase in free apps to see that they are making this stuff up as they go along.
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Manton Reece ☛ More DMA, more rejections, more exhaustion
Maybe nothing I’ve written in 20 years of blogging has proven more true than that statement. Enough already! Just let us build apps that customers want and distribute them outside the store without gimmicks. That’s what the DMA is about and Apple knows it.
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The Register UK ☛ Apple degraded Watch to cut competition, say heart doctors
The physicians argue in their amicus brief [PDF] filed this week with the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that when Apple's watchOS 5 replaced its Heart Rate Path Optimizer (HRPO) algorithm with a Heart Rate Neural Network (HRNN) and Irregular Rhythm Notifications (IRN), it made the wearables worse for monitoring heart health.
To catch you up with this twisty-turning saga: AliveCor, which makes electrocardiography (ECG) hardware and software, tried to sue Apple in 2021 on antitrust grounds, accusing the iGiant of unfairly trying to monopolize the personal heart-rate monitoring market.
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The Register UK ☛ Google tells court Epic Games' injunction demands too costly
It's been six months since a California jury decided that Google Play was an illegal monopoly, but that verdict hasn't settled matters.
Epic and Google have been in and out of court in the months following the verdict to hammer out terms of agreement on the injunction Epic proposed in April, and the court's decision [PDF] to have Google file the aforementioned briefing followed a discussion between "economic experts" in May, during which Judge James Donato reportedly expressed skepticism of Google's Play Store apocalypse claims.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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