Leftovers

• Lee Peterson ☛ A major benefit of having your own blog

  I feel no pressure to cover certain subjects and can just write.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Robert Kingett

  This is the 52nd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Robert Kingett and his blog, robertkingett.com

• Greg Morris ☛ For What End

  The real metric is indeed people liking my photos, but not on Instagram with a double-tap. It’s about buying prints and putting them on their walls, selling them through online services, or being commissioned to take specific shots. They say that you only need 1,000 true fans to ‘make it,’ but that doesn’t mean followers on social media. That means true fans — people who engage with and support your work. It doesn’t mean watching your TikToks.

• James G ☛ Clustering blog post titles with unigrams

  I was having a conversation yesterday with a reader about clustering news headlines according to similarity. This had me reflecting on some of my past experiments with clustering and sorting, where I have used word embeddings to find similar documents. Word embeddings encode semantic similarity between documents, which allow for more nuanced calculations and clustering.

• Antipope ☛ They don't make readers like they used to

  Anyway, all of that is just scene-setting for my real concern: the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward.

  Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we're now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we're seeing the consequences.

• Science

  • Stephen Wolfram ☛ What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models—Stephen Wolfram Writings

    It’s surprising how little is known about the foundations of machine learning. Yes, from an engineering point of view, an immense amount has been figured out about how to build neural nets that do all kinds of impressive and sometimes almost magical things. But at a fundamental level we still don’t really know why neural nets “work”—and we don’t have any kind of “scientific big picture” of what’s going on inside them.

    The basic structure of neural networks can be pretty simple. But by the time they’re trained up with all their weights, etc. it’s been hard to tell what’s going on—or even to get any good visualization of it. And indeed it’s far from clear even what aspects of the whole setup are actually essential, and what are just “details” that have perhaps been “grandfathered” all the way from when computational neural nets were first invented in the 1940s.

    Well, what I’m going to try to do here is to get “underneath” this—and to “strip things down” as much as possible. I’m going to explore some very minimal models—that, among other things, are more directly amenable to visualization. At the outset, I wasn’t at all sure that these minimal models would be able to reproduce any of the kinds of things we see in machine learning. But, rather surprisingly, it seems they can.

• Education

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Understanding Resilience in Scholarly Publishing - The Scholarly Kitchen

    Speaking of other shocks, scholarly publishing entities may face natural disasters, such as floods, storms, heatwaves, and wildfires, based on their geographical locations. Economic meltdown, wars, civil wars, and political turmoil are examples of man-made shocks — so are mergers and acquisitions and sudden significant changes in funders’ and governments’ policies on scholarly communication. On the other hand, examples of stress include mass-scale unethical practices by predatory publishers and paper mills, as well as widespread misuse of generative AI. Academia having an out-dated philosophy like ‘publish or perish’, which continues pushing young researchers to the edge, is also a stress and so are high subscription fees and article processing charges (APCs) unaffordable for researchers from less developed countries. The relentless aggression from certain sections of our society against scientific evidence will also fall under this category.

    In simplest terms, resilience is about bouncing back after facing a shock or a stress. But in reality, it is more than that. Being resilient means an entity is capable of maintaining its functions and identity despite disturbances. It also means that it is capable of adapting to the changed situation by making small adjustments. And, it is able to transform itself to the core to face future disturbances. The scholarly publishing industry, therefore, can show resilience against the above-mentioned shocks and stresses by building its capacities in three major ways.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CBC ☛ 2024-08-18 [Older] Boil-water advisory lifted in eastern Montreal after water main break

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Can Poland save the Oder River from toxic algae blooms?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Healthy eating: Why teens gorge and older people peck

  • YLE ☛ Finland cancels planned changes to speed limits

    The changes would have affected about 1,800 kilometres of roadway around the country, but the proposal was widely criticised by key stakeholders in the transport and logistics sectors during a consultation round.

    In a statement, the agency said it took note of the feedback received from the stakeholders, especially a consistent message that traffic safety objectives must be achieved by other means than lowering speed limits.

  • Disconnect.blog ☛ Sam Altman doesn’t care about you

    The OpenAI CEO wants to extend his life by 10 years, but doesn’t care the poor die 15 years earlier than the rich

  • Matt Stein ☛ Catching Up

    I was on an internet roll blogging, chattering on Mastodon and some private Discord groups, and then I dropped off for a few months.

    There was a melange of reasons for this, and while it wasn’t burnout or anything dire it was an abrupt shift in attention. I removed Discord, Ivory, and Slack from my phone and my world immediately got quieter.

    I liked it.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The stubborn problem of cars killing people

    But that progress has mostly plateaued over the past decade. The Department of Transportation, led by Secretary Pete Buttigieg, is again trying to eke more safety out of road systems by pushing for better-designed roads and vehicles and for ways to nudge people to drive sober, put their kids in car seats, obey the speed limit, stay off their phone. And certainly the roads and what Billings called the “human factor” of driving could be improved. Still, to reach the goal Buttigieg has laid out—“to reduce traffic deaths to the only acceptable number: zero”—will almost certainly require the country to consider more radical ideas. Perhaps more advanced driver-assistance technology could fully correct drivers’ bad judgment; perhaps some places could be redesigned to make cars one of many convenient ways to get around, instead of the only one.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Techdirt ☛ FCC Fines Lingo Telecom $1 Million Over Sloppy Biden AI Deepfake That Targeted New Hampshire Voters

    The deepfake quickly resulted in an uncharacteristically efficient joint investigation by the FCC and state AGs leading to multiple culprits, including Life Corp., a Texas telecom marketing company, a political consultant by the name Steve Kramer (who claimed he was, like Paul Revere, just helping Americans) and a magician named Paul Carpenter, who apparently “holds a world record in straitjacket escapes.”

    This week, the FCC announced that it had also fined another Texas-based telecom company, Lingo Telecom, $1 million for participating in the scam. Lingo, according to the FCC, helped transmit the bogus calls to voters using spoofed phone numbers. In addition to the fine, Lingo has agreed to a “robust compliance plan” to ensure it remains on its best behavior moving forward.

  • Creative Boom Ltd ☛ Is it time for creatives to leave X for good?

    This is just the latest chapter in Musk's apparent campaign to upset as many people as possible. His ardent support for free speech has upset those who feel that speech needs to be moderated. Yet free speech supporters are upset too because Musk's actions have stood in stark contrast to his words; arbitrarily suspending journalists and others whose speech he doesn't like.

    So, it's not surprising that people are wondering whether this is the time to leave the platform in protest. And it's not like this is a new or unprecedented idea.

  • The Verge ☛ No one’s ready for this

    No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Chris Coyier ☛ There are two kinds of advertising

      A billboard is contextual advertising. You’re driving on the highway and are told there is a McDonalds in 7 miles. The human condition + geography are the context.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Defence Web ☛ 2024-08-21 [Older] PLAN task force ships in Egypt

  • Defence Web ☛ 2024-08-21 [Older] SADC holds summit on regional peacekeeping missions

  • Defence Web ☛ 2024-08-20 [Older] CAR arms embargo lifted

  • Defence Web ☛ 2024-08-19 [Older] Can Senegal get the Casamance peace process over the finish line?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-18 [Older] Germany gets tough on knife crime with stricter laws

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ TikTok gets a safety advisory council for sub-Saharan Africa

    “The newly launched sub-Saharan Africa safety advisory council will further this effort by bringing together local experts who will collaborate with TikTok to develop forward-looking policies and address regional safety concerns,” it said. TikTok is owned by ByteDance.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Someone cut a key communications cable to Norwegian Air Force base

    The cable is considered part of the airbase’s critical infrastructure. It has been deliberately cut straight across. The damage was inflicted outside the territory of the base, Fremover writes.

  • The Strategist ☛ Ten years after Islamic State, Yazidis await justice

    In August 2014, Islamic State adherents in Syria and Iraq began committing mass murder, forced religious conversion, enslavement and the most egregious sexual violence against Yazidis, a distinct ethno-religious minority. Tens of thousands of people from 89 countries were involved in these crimes, but only two have been prosecuted.

    During the weeks of commemorative events held by Yazidi communities in northern Iraq this month, hundreds of families have been chased from refugee camps with hate speech from their Muslim neighbours. Many have described the experience as similar to what happened a decade ago when Islamic State was in charge.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Russia says prison hostage situation in Volgograd resolved

    The knife-wielding inmates identified themselves as members of the so-called "Islamic State" group, on a video purportedly filmed by the attackers which has been circulating.

  • RFERL ☛ Hostage-Taking Crisis In Russian Prison Ends With Eight Dead

    Telegram channels close to the penitentiary service issued a video showing four inmates who called themselves "Islamic State fighters" wielding knives and standing next to three bodies in FSIN uniforms and another uniformed person who was injured.

  • India Times ☛ [Cryptocurrency] lobbyist charged with breaking campaign finance rules

    A former cryptocurrency industry lobbyist was charged with campaign finance fraud Thursday, the latest criminal prosecution to stem from the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange.

    Federal prosecutors in New York accused former lobbyist Michelle Bond, 45, of violating campaign finance laws in 2022, when she made an unsuccessful bid for Congress as a Republican on Long Island. In an indictment filed in the Southern District of New York, prosecutors said Bond received a "sham $400,000 payment" from FTX that was orchestrated by Ryan Salame, an executive at the exchange and Bond's boyfriend.

  • VOA News ☛ FBI raids home of Russian state TV commentator in election-meddling probe 

    In a July assessment, the office said it “continues to observe a range of foreign actors conducting or planning influence operations targeting U.S elections this November.”

    Citing Russia, Iran and China as threats, the office said it anticipated that there would be efforts “to promote influence narratives seeking to undermine democratic institutions, foment discord, and/or change public opinion.”

  • VOA News ☛ US sanctions over 400 firms accused of aiding Russian war effort

    Announced the day before Ukraine’s Independence Day holiday, the sanctions focus on firms in Russia, Europe, Asia and the Middle East accused of helping Russia avoid U.S. sanctions and enabling its war in Ukraine, according to a Treasury Department press release.

    The Biden administration also added 123 firms to the U.S. export control list, which requires suppliers to obtain licenses prior to shipping items to the companies listed. Those added Friday included 42 Chinese firms and 63 Russian firms, according to a notice published in the Federal Register.

  • International Business Times ☛ Who Is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal: What To Know About The Billionaire Who Helped Elon Musk Buy X

    The Saudi Arabian businessman is the founder and majority shareholder of Kingdom Holding Company, a global conglomerate that invests in hotels, real estate, and publicly traded companies. In 2023, Bloomberg estimated his net worth at $14.6 billion.

    Bin Talal established Kingdom Holding Company in 1980. As a dedicated value investor, he uses the company as a platform to invest in a globally diversified range of businesses across sectors such as banking, real estate, and healthcare.

  • New York Times ☛ Nepal Lifts Ban on TikTok, in a Likely Overture to China

    The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-19 [Older] Lithuania begins construction of Germany's military base

    • Meduza ☛ Four prison guards dead after Russian inmates claiming ISIS affiliation take staff hostage — Meduza

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Russian 'spy bank' pushes for sanctions to be lifted

      The Russia-led International Investment Bank (IIB) is lobbying to have sanctions lifted, claiming this would help it meet its commitments to investors and creditors, Balkan Insight reports based on BIRN's investigation. The bank was hit with US sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, prompting IIB to announce in April 2023 that it would move its headquarters to Moscow, where it is now based. In the same month, Hungary became the last EU member to withdraw from the bank, which has faced accusations of operating as a Russian “spy bank”, a "trojan horse for Putin".

      The Orbán administration had previously offered full diplomatic immunity to its Russian staff and invested heavily in the institution—Hungary’s €60 million contribution was larger than those of Bulgaria, Czechia, Romania, and Slovakia combined. However, none of the invested funds, including bonds issued, have been recovered. MBH Bank, partly owned by a close associate of Hungary's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has frozen €19 million of IIB’s assets.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Fact Checkers Try to Shield Trump From Project 2025’s Abortion Madness

    The former president has actively attempted to run away from Project 2025, because the policy goals laid out in the 887-page blueprint are deeply unpopular. Trump has claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025, [and] I have no idea who is behind it.” On Thursday, he again claimed to “HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH” it.

    It’s an absurd claim: The policy manual was written in large part by former top Trump administration officials — and when he spoke at a 2022 event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, Trump said: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

  • Nick Heer ☛ Our Changing Assumptions About Photography

    I really thought my expectations would be proven correct — that I would find this image was created in software. All the indicators were there. But I was wrong. I do not find it an especially interesting photo. But I appreciate the user who made it found a way to capture it for real, probably by jamming a grocery store rose into some pavement. Maybe we will collectively experience a similar feeling when we know an improbable image was not generated by A.I. tools, but was actually made for real.

• Environment

  • The Barents Observer ☛ A new underwater device has been tested to count king crab in the Barents Sea | The Independent Barents Observer

    The king crab is originally from the Pacific Ocean and was once introduced into the Barents waters of the Soviet Union in Arctic Russia. Since then the invasive species has spread to Norway’s Barents Sea and a multi-million dollar industry has sprung up around it.

  • DeSmog ☛ eSportswashing: How the Youth Gaming Market Is Being Targeted by Major Climate Polluters 

    New research from the Badvertising campaign highlights the alarming trend of esportswashing. Taking a cue from the old tobacco industry playbook, major polluters are trying to co-opt a new generation and normalise climate polluting products and lifestyles. Since just 2017, at least 33 polluting sponsorship deals have been struck between the global esports industry and high-carbon polluters. Of these, 27 have been deals with car manufacturers, five with major fossil fuel companies, and two with the armed forces of the United States — the planet’s thirstiest consumer of oil.

    Petrostates too, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have sensed the opportunity and spent hugely into the esports sector, sponsoring teams of young gamers and even hosting tournaments in energy-hungry, air-conditioned arenas. In fact, the inaugural Esports World Cup is culminating in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where over 1,500 professional gamers have competed across 21 games, with over a million fans following online.

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-08-17 [Older] Nearly 68 Million Suffering From Drought in Southern Africa, Says Regional Bloc

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ 2024-08-18 [Older] How Canada reached the brink of an unprecedented railway stoppage

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-08-17 [Older] Possible Work Stoppage at Canada's Two Largest Railroads Could Disrupt US Supply Chain Next Week

    • DeSmog ☛ Imperial Oil Tailings Spill Fine a ‘Toothless Slap on the Wrist,’ Environmentalists Say

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Botswana unearths world's second-largest diamond

    • Futurism ☛ When These Journalists Tried to Review the Cybertruck, It Bricked

      The editor added that because the car "did not finish," borrowing the Formula 1 racing term for vehicles that don't make it to the finish line, the car gets a "mission-fulfillment score of zero."

    • International Business Times ☛ From CEO To Inmate: How A $47M [Cryptocurrency] Scam Brought Down A Kansas Bank And Its Leader

      Hanes, 53, massively embezzled in a series of wire transfers over just eight weeks last year, leading to the collapse and FDIC takeover of Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart, one of only five U.S. banks that failed in 2023.

    • The Record ☛ Suspect in $14 billion cryptocurrency pyramid scheme extradited to China

      As part of the pyramid scheme, participants were required to pay fees ranging from 700 yuan ($98) to 245,000 yuan ($34,300) to obtain platform membership, authorities said. In exchange, they were issued a virtual digital currency.

      The scheme attracted participants by offering high returns on their investments. The rebate system was based on two factors: the number of new members each participant could recruit and the amount of money invested by these new recruits.

    • Wired ☛ [Cryptocurrency]’s Shiny New Political Machine

      Despite its comparatively small size and the continued absence of any obvious mainstream utility, the [cryptocurrency] industry is hurling more money than any other at the US general election.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2024-08-18 [Older] 1 year after the Bush Creek wildfire, a B.C. community embraces its resilience

    • El País ☛ Dolphins are no longer helping out fishers

      This story of collaboration and mutual benefit is told by Flinders University professor Danielle Clode in her book Killers In Eden. And it is not the only example of humans and animals working together. While the vast majority of interactions between humans and animals have traditionally been conflictual — if not exploitative, with the former terminating the latter — there are a few cases of mutualism. Dolphins helping fishers in Brazil, birds guiding people to a beehive full of honey in Tanzania or crows locating beetle larvae highly sought after by the Kanaks of New Caledonia.

  • Overpopulation

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Ensuring the UAE’s food security in an unstable region

      However, the UAE’s reliance on food imports remains a significant challenge. In 2022, the country imported approximately 16.9 million tons of food, with cereals forming a significant portion. Wheat, a crucial staple, saw imports of around 1.9 million tons in 2022, primarily sourced from Russia (31 percent), Canada (28 percent), and Australia (12 percent) and recently India (41 percent). Rice imports, totaling about 1.2 million tons, came mainly from India (53 percent), Pakistan (31 percent), and Thailand (8 percent).

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Conflicts over water are on the rise around the world

      The newly updated data compiled by researchers at the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank, show that water-related disputes — ranging from quarrels over water sources to protests over lack of clean water — have erupted into violence with alarming frequency, and that water systems have increasingly been targeted in conflicts.

• Finance

  • NL Times ☛ 2024-08-18 [Older] Corendon ends cooperation with financially troubled Canada Jetlines

  • CBC ☛ 2024-08-19 [Older] Quebec to announce freeze of new temporary foreign workers for low-wage jobs in Montreal

  • CBC ☛ 2024-08-19 [Older] Businesses brace for possible CN/CPKC shutdown amid lockout and strike threats

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-19 [Older] Master forger of fake Euros busted in Naples, says Europol

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-19 [Older] German industrial orders fall amid sluggish foreign trade

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2024-08-17 [Older] Economic Bridges: The Gulf States’ Strategic Expansion Across Africa’s Key Sectors

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ Steve Macek on Dark Money

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Indonesia: Protests put halt to electoral law changes

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Jammu and Kashmir: What to expect as elections return?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany taps Iranian exile Mohammad Rasoulof for Oscars

    "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" was inspired by the mass protests in Iran in 2022 that were sparked by the killing of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, by the so-called morality police. Rasoulof heard the demonstrations from his prison cell when he got the idea for a thriller exploring state violence, paranoia and censorship.

    After shooting the feature in secret — the Iranian regime had banned the director from filmmaking in 2017 — Rasoulof had to leave the production and flee the country by foot across the border. He had just been sentenced to eight years in prison and a whipping for criticizing the regime, including their aggressive response to the pro-democracy protests.

  • CPJ ☛ New law grants Taliban morality police fresh powers to censor Afghan media

    “The Law for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice grants the Taliban’s notorious morality police extensive powers to further restrict Afghanistan’s already decimated media community,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “This law marks yet another appalling blow to press freedom in Afghanistan, where the morality police has worsened a crackdown on journalists and fundamental human rights for the past three years.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • VOA News ☛ Survey: Hong Kong laws contribute to decline in media freedom

    The law has “more severe restrictions on media” than previously existed, Selina Cheng, chair of the HKJA, told VOA. It includes substantially tougher penalties for sedition, which Cheng described as “the main legislation that's been used against speech and media work” since the implementation of a new National Security Law in 2020.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Chicago Police Arrest Several Journalists While Cracking Down on DNC Protest

    “[Police] didn’t have big enough bags for all of my gear, and they kept trying to shove it into these whatever medium-size bags, and it ripped to the bottom and both of my cameras crashed to the ground lens first,” Pacheco added.

    Tom Ahern, the Chicago police’s deputy director for news affairs and communication, according to Jane, ripped off Pacheco’s New York press credentials. Police did not return the credentials when Pacheco was released.

    When the credentials were ripped off, Pacheco claimed that they were taken so hard that it pulled on their hair. “You’re being arrested. You don’t get to keep your credentials,” the police official declared.

  • VOA News ☛ 3 journalists arrested covering DNC protests, prompting press freedom concerns

    "It's really important that law enforcement distinguishes between journalists and protesters and does not charge journalists for engaging in newsgathering activities," Katherine Jacobsen, the U.S. and Canada program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, told VOA. Jacobsen added that she hopes police drop the charges against the three journalists.

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned the incident.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFA ☛ Dalai Lama tells New York crowd he expects to live to more than 100

    The Dalai Lama also spoke about the need for religious harmony and emphasized the principles of secular ethics — an ethics system that appeals to religious and nonreligious alike and is based on the cultivation of genuine compassion.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Judge Clears Cops Who Falsified Breonna Taylor Warrant of Some Charges

    The ruling was handed down earlier this week in the civil rights violation case against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany. The two were not present at the March 2020 raid when Taylor was killed. Instead, in 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the pair (along with another detective, Kelly Goodlett) of submitting a false affidavit to search Taylor’s home before the raid and then conspiring to create a “false cover story… to escape responsibility” for preparing the phony warrant.

  • Scott O'Hara ☛ Spoiler Alert: it needs to be accessible

    The topic of how to make an accessible spoiler component, or ‘should there be a spoiler element?’ has recently (re)-caught my attention. (I wrote most of this back in February and then forgot about it… as I seem to do these days. But then people necro’d a GitHub issue on the topic, so here we go again)

    Now, I could do what I usually do and write some long winded junk about what a spoiler is, how it’s essentially a glorified disclosure widget… maybe mention something about the details and summary elements and how they likely wouldn’t be sufficient for all use cases. Blah blah blah. Boring.

    Instead, I’m just going to tell you what I’d expect from a spoiler component if someone were to build one, or if one were to ever be standardized. I’ll try to keep it as short as I possibly can (which I’m bad at).

  • El País ☛ Taliban enacts law banning women’s voices in public spaces in Afghanistan

    One of the most severe measures is to prevent women from speaking in public, including activities such as singing, reciting, or speaking into a microphone. The new law even prohibits women from looking at men who they are not related to. “The implementation of Sharia [Islamic law] and the hijab is our red line. We cannot negotiate with anyone on these issues,” said the Minister of Virtue and Vice, Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, according to the Afghan channel Tolo News.

  • The Hill ☛ Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan: A crisis unfolds

    On Aug. 14, the Taliban marked the third anniversary of their return to power in Afghanistan with a public holiday and a televised military parade at the former U.S.-run Bagram airbase. Dubbed “victory day,” the celebrations occurred against the backdrop of global condemnation of the Taliban regime for creating what many call “the world’s most serious women’s rights crisis” and for making Afghanistan the only country where girls are banned from education beyond sixth grade.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-08-21 [Older] South Africa's Telco Industry Calls for Tech Firms to Help Fund Infrastructure

  • India Times ☛ Google agreed to pay millions for California news. Journalists call it a bad deal

    Google will provide millions to fund California journalism jobs in a landmark deal while also supporting an AI research program. This comes after lawmakers dropped a bill requiring tech firms to pay publishers for linking to their content. Critics argued the deal largely benefits Google and offers less funding than anticipated.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Google Agreed to Pay Millions for California News. Journalists Call It a Bad Deal

    The agreement, which was hashed out behind closed doors and announced this week, will direct tens of millions of public and private dollars to keep local news organizations afloat. Critics say it's a textbook political maneuver by tech giants to avoid a fee under what could have been groundbreaking legislation. California lawmakers agreed to kill a bill requiring tech to support news outlets they profit from in exchange for Google's financial commitment.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ U.S. Accuses RealPage of Enabling Collusion on Rents in Antitrust Suit

  The suit, joined by North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington, accuses RealPage of facilitating a price-fixing conspiracy that boosted rents beyond market forces for millions of people. It’s the first major civil antitrust lawsuit where the role of an algorithm in pricing manipulation is central to the case, Justice Department officials said.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Justice Department sues property management software provider RealPage

  The company’s software suite is underpinned by a price recommendation algorithm. Landlords share property data such as rental rates, discounts and amenities with RealPage. The algorithm uses this information to generate rental price recommendations that are updated on a daily basis.

  The Justice Department charges that RealPage’s price suggestions reduce competition among landlords and thereby harm renters. “RealPage’s pricing algorithm enables landlords to share confidential, competitively sensitive information and align their rents,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Using software as the sharing mechanism does not immunize this scheme from Sherman Act liability.”

• The Register UK ☛ Feds and eight US states sue RealPage for rent price fixing

  "Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law," said US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a statement. "We allege that RealPage's pricing algorithm enables landlords to share confidential, competitively sensitive information and align their rents."

• USDOJ ☛ Case No. 1:24-cv-00710

  3. RealPage replaces competition with coordination. It substitutes unity for rivalry. It subverts competition and the competitive process. It does so openly and directly—and American renters are left paying the price.

• Wired ☛ The Apartment Rental Market Is Rigged by Algorithms, a DOJ Lawsuit Alleges

  If you’ve rented an apartment in the US in the past several years, you may have had the sense that the game was rigged: Prices creep up not only at your building but at others throughout the city, seemingly in lockstep. A new civil lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice today alleges that in many cases it’s not just in your head—and that a single company’s algorithm is to blame.

• Nick Heer ☛ The Upcoming iOS Changes for E.U. Users Are Making Me Jealous

  If someone were designing visual interfaces for clarity, they would end up with the European version of these screens. Which makes me half-wonder — and half-assume — the motives for designing them the other way.

• The Register UK ☛ Amazon antitrust case in Washington DC is resurrected

  Now the DC appeals court has determined that the District of Columbia met its legal burden by making allegations plausible enough to allow the case to continue.

  "Viewed as a whole, the District’s allegations about Amazon’s market share and maintenance of its market power through the challenged agreements plausibly suggest that Amazon either already possesses monopoly power over online marketplaces or is close to a 'dangerous probability of achieving monopoly power," the ruling says.

  The District of Columbia's current Attorney General, Brian Schwalb, welcomed the decision.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Raid: 150+ Encoders, STBs, and Servers Seized, Operators Arrested

    Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) has carried out a successful raid against a pirate IPTV provider that had been capturing broadcasters' content for at least two years. Authorities say the operation was hidden in a house with an outward appearance of being abandoned years ago. Among 279 items seized were 72 set-top boxes, 72 video encoders, servers, networking hardware, bank books, and mobile phones. Two suspects were arrested.