Links 26/10/2024: "Open Source on Its Own is no Alternative to Big Tech" and Iran Death Toll
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Frank Meeuwsen ☛ Easy conversion from a 20+ year-old blog, starting soon (again)
This morning I was thinking again how I could convert my old blogposts from 2000 to 2005 to a more transferrable format. Like Markdown or Hugo. I once had them all converted to WordPress posts, but as it turns out, that’s not always the best way to go. Simple files makes it a lot easier. I still have an exact copy of the old blog punkey.com on my laptop, including all the individual posts in PHP. I wrote those in Pivot, a Dutch blogging CMS by the late great Bob den Otter. I figured it shouldn’t be that hard for Claude to help me out with some code to convert a few of these posts to Hugo-files I could use on this micro.blog. 4 Minutes later, I had 5 converted posts as a test on my laptop. Thanks to this simple Python script, made by Claude and it’s trainingsdata. This is so easy. The code may not be perfect, I will definitely run into errors and problems, but to have a pair-programmer like this by my side is what I always wanted.
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Bert Hubert ☛ Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
In Dutch we say you can’t compare apples and pears, but that’s not entirely true. Both are so-called handfruit, one a bit harder, the other a bit softer.
But comparing Open Source to big tech is like comparing an oven to a restaurant. Big tech provides well-supported services, and nowadays runs everything for you in their own data centers. Meanwhile, Open Source is a collection of free/libre software that someone still needs to work on to turn it into (for example) a “workplace as a service”.
As a comparison, your oven by itself is also not yet a restaurant.
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Science
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Bartosz Milewski ☛ Sheaves as Virtual Objects
Translating it back to the language of topology: There is a unique global function s defined over u whose restrictions are s_i‘s.
The advantage of this approach is that it’s easy to imagine the sheafification of an arbitrary presheaf by freely adding virtual arrows (the s‘s and their compositions with p_i‘s in the above diagram) to all intersection diagrams.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Two lost medieval Silk Road cities mapped in Central Asia
A new study published October 23 in the journal Nature has revealed that the two cities — Tugunbulak and Tashbulak — were major urban centers that lay on medieval Silk Road trading routes.
Drone-borne scanning equipment captured images of unexpectedly large settlements ringed with watchtowers, fortresses, plazas, and homes for tens of thousands of people.
The researchers suggest that cities located high up in the mountains may have been more important in the exchange of goods and knowledge along the medieval trade routes between East and West than previously thought.
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Futurism ☛ NASA Is Generating Far More Economic Growth Than Its Budget
According to its latest economic impact report, the cumulative effect of NASA efforts, ranging from lunar missions to technology development, generated over $75.6 billion in US economic output in 2023.
For reference, that's nearly three times NASA's allocated budget for that year, $26.4 billion — a convincing rebuff to critics who argue that the space agency receives too much public money in an era of private space companies.
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Education
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ARRL ☛ Handbook 101: A New Generation of Amateur Radio
The ARRL Handbook is your complete guide to wireless technology, experimentation, practice, and development – capturing the state of radio science and technology in one authoritative work for nearly 100 years. Use its more than 1,200 pages of amateur radio know-how to delve into radio electronics, circuit design, digital modulation techniques, and equipment construction.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Denny Henke
This is the 61st edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Denny Henke and his blog, beardystarstuff.net
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NPR ☛ These teachers often live in poverty. A pay raise could help — but there’s a cost
After adjusting for inflation, the average salary of a Head Start teacher increased less than 1% between 2010 and 2023, from $41,389 to $41,691, according to the Biden administration.
Compare that to the average salary of a preschool teacher in a public school classroom in 2022: $53,200.
This low pay has created a crisis of churn. The Biden administration reports that, nationally, nearly 1 in 5 Head Start teachers quit last year.
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Hardware
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Jeff Geerling ☛ JetKVM: tiny IP KVM that's not an Apple Watch
Now, every time I post a video about an IP KVM, someone asks me why they'd need one, instead of just using Remote Desktop Connection or VNC. Raspberry Pi even launched Pi Connect this year!
Well, this goes a level deeper. Instead of requiring software running on your computer, it's completely independent. That means it can work even when your computer's shut down or locked up. It can also send out magic 'Wake on LAN' packets to wake up other computers, even if your main computer's off.
And it can do things like mount virtual disk images and help you reinstall an OS on a computer that you can't get to easily.
Those features are usually built into enterprise servers, under the name IPMI, iDRAC, iLO, or the like.
But the JetKVM puts out of band management into the hands of homelabbers. All this is worthless, though, without fast, secure software.
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Fabian “ryg” Giesen ☛ Why those particular integer multiplies?
The x86 instruction set has a somewhat peculiar set of SIMD integer multiply operations, and Intel’s particular implementation of several of these operations in their headline core designs has certain idiosyncrasies that have been there for literally over 25 years at this point. I don’t actually have any inside information, but it’s fun to speculate, and it gives me an excuse to waffle about multiplier designs, so here we go!
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ARRL ☛ Dream Rig Contest Underway
The 5th annual Youth "Dream Rig" Essay Contest has begun to accept submissions.
The contest is sponsored by The Intrepid-DX Group, a U.S.-based 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization that promotes amateur radio activities around the world and recognizes the importance of including youth in the amateur radio hobby.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Futurism ☛ Space Tourist Alarmed When Vision Starts to Deteriorate
Some of what they're reporting sounds a little worrying. At the top of the list: inexplicably malfunctioning eyeballs.
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India Times ☛ My wrong posture was 'slowly killing' my brain: Millionaire Bryan Johnson shares his MRI findings
Millionaire Bryan Johnson, CEO of a brain activity monitoring company, shares how he corrected his posture to improve blood flow to his brain. An MRI revealed that his bad posture was blocking blood flow due to genetically narrow internal jugular veins. Johnson adopted five habits, including maintaining straight posture, moving every 30 minutes, and practicing specific exercises.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Nationalize Psychedelics
Psychedelic-assisted therapy is still awaiting official approval, but private firms are already using patents to corner the market. Government-funded research shouldn’t yield big profits for Big Pharma.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ How excessive phone-use is destroying relationships
“At home, we’d had months of me trying to get him to stop endlessly scrolling on his phone,” she says. “I’d hoped that going away, just the two of us, would get him to put it down for a while, at least. But it was clamped in his hand the entire time, while he effectively ignored me. I spent the weekend seething, and I knew our marriage was over.”
The couple, in their late forties, split up shortly afterwards. Ending a marriage over a mobile phone may sound melodramatic, but they’re not alone: “digital detachment”, described as constant phone use and a lack of meaningful, in-person communication, is an issue couples are increasingly citing during marital breakdowns, according to specialists Divorce-Online.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Rlang ☛ More neurons in the hidden layer than predictive features in neural nets
This week, we were talking about neural networks for the first time, and I was saying that, in many illustrations of neural networks, there was a layer with fewer neurons than predictive variables,
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Futurism ☛ Scammers Figure Out Trick to Steal Houses Using AI
Wherever you stand on AI, it's undeniable that the tech has supercharged fraudsters. Not many of these AI-enabled scams, though, can claim to be as audacious as trying to swindle entire houses from their owners.
Marty Kiar, a property appraiser in Broward County, Florida, says that scammers nearly pulled off such a scheme by trying to con a local title company, or a firm that helps ensure the legal transfer of property rights.
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NBCUniversal Media LLC ☛ Scammers now using deepfakes to commit title fraud – NBC 6 South Florida
A few days later, she got an unexpected email, saying the seller was ready for a video call. During the call, she said it quickly became apparent she was looking at a fake video, instead of an actual person. The video showed a woman, sitting in a room, looking straight at the camera. Albrecht could be heard asking the woman to raise her hand, but the woman did not react.
“After the second pause, I realized this is 100% a video playing on a loop,” she said. “It is not real.”
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India Times ☛ Alphabet's Waymo closes $5.6 billion funding to expand autonomous ride-hailing service
Alphabet's self-driving unit, Waymo, said on Friday it had closed a $5.6 billion funding round led by the Google parent, as it looks to expand its autonomous ride-hailing service.
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Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of Mac firmware
Firmware, software that’s intimately involved with hardware at a low level, has changed radically with each of the different processor architectures used in Macs.
Classic Macs based on Motorola 68K processors come with their own Macintosh ROM. That changed after the first PowerPC models of 1994, and the Power Macintosh 9500 from 1995 supports Apple’s version of Open Firmware. That had originated as OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems’ SPARC-based computers, and is based on the language Forth. Macs with Open Firmware can be booted into an interactive interface that makes it relatively straightforward to support and bring up new hardware. It’s also a security nightmare.
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India Times ☛ AI-generated child sexual abuse images are spreading, law enforcement is racing to stop them
Law enforcement agencies across the US are cracking down on a troubling spread of child sexual abuse imagery created through artificial intelligence technology - from manipulated photos of real children to graphic depictions of computer-generated kids. Justice Department officials say they're aggressively going after offenders who exploit AI tools, while states are racing to ensure people generating "deepfakes" and other harmful imagery of kids can be prosecuted under their laws.
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Futurism ☛ Tesla Has Secretly Been Testing Robotaxis
The cars still have a safety driver behind the wheel, however, demonstrating that Tesla still has a long road ahead of it in its attempt to catch up with the competition. Alphabet's Waymo has been operating driverless ridehailing services for years now.
The company also appears to be racing to meet Musk's characteristically overly ambitious timelines. Musk promised that Tesla would roll out a robotaxi service in California and Texas as soon as next year.
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Wired ☛ Apple’s Sales in China Are Stalling. What Will It Sacrifice to Turn Things Around? | WIRED
With iPhone sales down and Apple Intelligence banned, Apple looks ready to compromise.
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Firstpost ☛ Indonesia bans iPhone 16, declares its use 'illegal' over Apple's unfulfilled 'commitments' – Firstpost
Indonesia has banned selling of Apple’s latest iPhone 16 and all the devices in the lineup, declaring its use ‘illegal’. Here’s why it has done so
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Help Net Security ☛ SEC fines tech companies for misleading SolarWinds disclosures - Help Net Security
Unisys, Avaya, Check Point and Mimecast fined for misleading disclosures on the impact the SolarWinds’ Orion compromise had on them.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Omicron Limited ☛ Does tracking your employees actually make them more productive?
Regardless of whether efficiency tracking practices are right or wrong in a moral sense, a more fundamental question arises. Does increased surveillance and productivity measurement actually increase employee performance?
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The Register UK ☛ Worker surveillance must comply with credit reporting rules
The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday published guidance advising businesses that third-party reports about workers must comply with the consent and transparency requirements set forth in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) was enacted in 1970 to ensure the accuracy, fairness, and privacy of information in profiles maintained by credit reporting agencies. But it also includes provisions that apply when a consumer report is used to make employment decisions.
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Confidentiality
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[Old] SR2 Commmunications Limited ☛ Tor Relay Operator Community Health∗ Final Project Report [PDF]
This project aimed to identify the driving factors that motivate people to volunteer and stay committed to the project for long periods of time. Its primary goal was to conduct research that would assist the Tor Project in making informed decisions about its community of operators and understanding how best to support them. This was to be achieved in two ways: by creating operator personas, and by establishing an understanding of community health and identify areas for improvement, based on research data. Additionally, this analysis would be combined with relay data to identify metrics for monitoring the health of the relay operator community.
The project employed a blend of qualitative and quantitative approaches and was structured into four parts:
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Defence/Aggression
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] US charges second Indian over plot to kill Sikh separatist
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] Migrant boat sinks in English Channel, killing baby
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] Italy's Albania migrant plan hits legal stumbling block
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] India: Rape victims struggle to get justice
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-19 [Older] Mozambique: Opposition figures killed amid election protests
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-19 [Older] North Korea claims to have found crashed South Korean drone
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-19 [Older] Martin Sellner: Switzerland expels Austrian far-right figure
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-19 [Older] Mexico: Navy seizes drugs worth more than $100 million in record drug bust
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FAIR ☛ In Midst of Palestinian Genocide, Late Hamas Leader Scolded for ‘Eradicating’ Israel
The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.
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The Dissenter ☛ Palestinian-Owned Cafe Where I Spoke Was Attacked
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France24 ☛ Israeli strikes on Iran kill four soldiers
Israeli strikes on Iran on Saturday killed four soldiers in the Islamic Republic, according to local reports, FRANCE 24's Saeed Azimi said, adding the death toll was originally two.
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France24 ☛ Iranians and Israelis react to Tel Aviv's attack on Tehran
Iranians awake to the news of Israeli strikes on their country Saturday morning with some expressing fear of a widening conflict in the Middle East while others appear to be unfazed. Meanwhile in Israel, residents carry about their daily routine with some expressing their support for the retaliatory attack on Iran.
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France24 ☛ Israeli strikes on Iran: ‘Mixed reactions’ among Iranians
There were mixed reactions among Iranians following Israel's strikes on the Islamic Republic early Saturday with some carrying on with their daily routines and others panicking, FRANCE 24's Saeed Azimi said, reporting from Tehran. "All offices are open, schools are open, international flights will resume tonight from Tehran's international airport", Azimi added.
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France24 ☛ Israeli strikes on Iran: ‘Important junction’ in MidEast conflict
The US and Britain called for "de-escalation" after Israel on Saturday hit military targets across Iran in deadly retaliatory strikes as Muslim countries blamed Israel for exacerbating the conflict. "We are at an important junction in this war", MENA Programme at Chatham House associate fellow Yossi Mekelberg told FRANCE 24, adding that the conflict could either escalate or move from the "military sphere to diplomatic and political one".
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France24 ☛ Israel launches air strikes on Iran in retaliatory attack
Israel launched air strikes on Iran in a retaliatory attack Saturday that could push the Middle East closer to a regional war. Israeli planes hit military bases, missile sites, and other systems in several Iranian regions in retaliation for a missile barrage earlier this month. Iran said two soldiers died in the attacks.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Experts react: Israel has hit back at Iran with airstrikes. Is this the road to war or an off-ramp?
Our experts share their insights on what Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Iran could mean for the prospect of further Israeli-Iranian escalation.
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France24 ☛ Key points about Israel's deadly air strikes on Iran
Israel on Saturday launched a series of air strikes on what it described as "precise military targets" in Iran, with numerous explosions heard in the Iranian capital Tehran. The Iranian army said two soldiers were killed.
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France24 ☛ Israeli strikes kill and wound dozens in Khan Younis
The Israeli military conducted operations overnight into Friday in Khan Younis, killing 38 people and injuring more than a dozen others, health officials said. Palestinians who were killed or injured were taken to the European and Nasser Hospitals. Records from the European hospital obtained by the AP showed at least 15 members from al-Farra family were killed, including 13 children.
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France24 ☛ Israeli targeting of out-of-service nuclear site in Iran crosses 'red line'
Israel has crossed one of Iran's red lines that the Islamic Republic has warned about by attempting to target a "sensitive nuclear facility" in air strikes early Saturday, FRANCE 24’s Saeed Azimi said, reporting from Tehran. “Iranian air defence system in the city of Khondab which protects the heavy water reactor in Arak was activated and it was heavily engaged in fact,” Azimi said. Meanwhile the Iranian army said the strikes killed two soldiers, according to a statement carried by state television.
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France24 ☛ Tel Aviv launches retaliatory strikes on Tehran
Israel attacked Iran with a series of pre-dawn airstrikes Saturday in what it said was a response to the barrage of ballistic missiles the Islamic Republic fired upon Israel earlier in the month. Explosions could be heard in the Iranian capital, Tehran, though the Islamic Republic insisted they caused only “limited damage” and Iranian state-run media downplayed the attacks.
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France24 ☛ Iran says 'no limits' to determination to defend itself after Israeli strikes
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Saturday that Iran was determined to defend itself after Israeli warplanes struck military bases and missile sites in several Iranian provinces, killing four soldiers. This declaration came as the international community warned Israel and Iran against escalating the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
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SBS ☛ Muslim students and Swinburne University in prayer room row | SBS News
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NPR ☛ 2 years in, Trump surrogate Elon Musk has remade X as a conservative megaphone
For the owner of one of the internet’s most influential public squares to openly endorse one political party shocked many observers — especially since only six months earlier, as Musk agreed to buy the company, he declared that "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally."
Now, as both the 2024 election and the second anniversary of Musk's takeover of Twitter loom, the billionaire has completely evaporated any notion of political neutrality on the platform he's renamed X because his influence on it remains outsized.
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RFERL ☛ The Azadi Briefing: UN Complains Of Growing Taliban Interference In Aid Operations
A new UN report says the Taliban is increasingly interfering in international aid operations in Afghanistan.
On October 22, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said aid agencies recorded more than 170 incidents of interference in September, which led to the suspension of 83 humanitarian projects.
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[Repeat] Marcy Wheeler ☛ If Putin Is Running Musk, Trump Should Be Terrified
WSJ’s report that Elon Musk has had a number of communications with Vladimir Putin and other top Russians is unsurprising. Musk has obvious buttons to press (not just his narcissism, but also his insecurity about trans women arising from being dumped for Chelsea Manning and his daughter transitioning). And Musk has increasingly parroted obvious Russian propaganda of late.
I want to pull the passages of the story that describe the when, what, and who, because they’re important for understanding the import on the race.
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The Local SE ☛ How 'hybrid' Nordic biker gangs are starting to replace the Hells Angels
Danish journalist Carsten Norton, author of the book Bandekrigerne fra Værebro, or "The Gang Warriors from Værebro", pointed out the contradiction in a party which platforms itself as being both opposed to immigration and tough on crime as on having someone from Comanches at their wedding. The gang's raison d'être is to be open to all ethnicities, and it is arguably the most criminal biker gang in the Nordics.
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RTL ☛ World's richest man: Elon Musk all-in for Trump as Moscow denies secret Putin talks
While Musk's alleged conversations with Putin are drawing scrutiny, so are his daily $1 million giveaways to registered voters -- from the Justice Department and election watchdog groups.
Federal law prohibits paying people to register to vote and the department's public integrity unit reportedly warned Musk's America PAC in a letter this week that the sweepstakes may be illegal.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ What can stop the rise of populism in Germany and elsewhere?
Populism has many faces, but its pattern is always the same. Whether it's coming from Donald Trump in the US, Narendra Modi in India or from Björn Höcke and Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) it is always about supposed elites who have conspired against the people.
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Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Lawyers Are Ready to Subvert the Election, Without Going to Jail
They’re all ready for, as one Trump adviser puts it, “total warfare,” should the post-election period devolve into madness.
The MAGA side, however, has a unique concern gnawing at its pro-Trump lawyers, to the point that some of these attorneys have felt the need to issue new guidance to staff.
It all boils down to: How do we do this without maybe going to prison or being sued into oblivion?
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Vox ☛ Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump, explained | Vox
What does loyalty to Trump net him — or anyone else courting the former president’s favor — in the end?
I spoke with Vox senior reporter Whizy Kim, who has been reporting on Musk, his fans, lawsuits, and even his text messages since the months leading to his 2022 purchase of Twitter, to try to understand where Elon Musk the man, the media mogul, and the politically ambitious demagogue intersect. What does Musk really want? And if he gets it, what will it mean for the rest of us? (Our conversation has been condensed for length and lightly edited.)
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NPR ☛ How civil society groups are quietly working to prevent election-related violence
As Election Day nears, uncertainty remains high over almost every aspect of the presidential race. In swing states, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Harris continue to poll closely. There have been two attempted assassinations against Trump. But many researchers and conflict mitigation practitioners are concerned that the possibility of political violence in the coming weeks and months may be more certain than it has in any recent election.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Latvia ☛ Nordics and Baltics urge continued support for Ukraine at World Bank
On Friday, October 25, the Latvian Minister of Finance Arvils Ašeradens represented all the eight Nordic and Baltic countries for the first time at the World Bank Group (WBG) Development Committee meeting in Washington D.C.
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European Commission ☛ Commission welcomes the consensus reached by G7 partners to collectively provide €45 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine
European Commission Press release Washington, DC, 26 Oct 2024 The Commission welcomes the consensus reached by the EU and G7 partners to collectively provide loans for €45 billion to support Ukraine's urgent needs, facilitated by the EU's creation of the Ukraine Loan Cooperation Mechanism.
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France24 ☛ Zelensky calls for stop to North Korea’s troop deployments to Russia
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on world leaders to step up pressure on North Korea which is purportedly sending troops to Russia to fight in its war with Ukraine. Zelensky on Friday said Russia could send North Korean troops into battle as early as Sunday
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RFERL ☛ 5 People, Including Teenager, Killed In Russian Strikes On Ukraine
Three civilians were killed and seven wounded, including a child, in Russian shelling in Ukraine's southern Kherson region over the past 24 hours, a local official said.
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The Straits Times ☛ North Korea involvement in Ukraine raises regional security risks, say analysts
Move is unlikely to have a significant impact on the fighting on the ground but could affect security interests in Asia.
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New York Times ☛ Why Are North Korean Troops in Russia?
Over the last month, North Korea’s role aiding Russia in its war in Ukraine has significantly escalated. U.S. officials reported that North Korean soldiers are already operating in the Kursk region in western Russia, where Ukrainian forces are staging a counteroffensive. Michael Shear, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, explains what the deeping relationship between Russia and North Korea means for the war in Ukraine and the world.
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Latvia ☛ Lithuanian tourists provide a boost to south-eastern Latvia
Latvian, English and Russian are the most popular foreign languages used by tour guides and tour operators in Latvia on a daily basis, but with the growing interest of travelers from neighboring countries, the Lithuanian language is being used more and more often in Latgale region.
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France24 ☛ Georgia goes to polls: Choice between Russia and democratic EU
Georgians are making a choice between a return to “the Russian orbit” and a “democratic, European and free” future as they vote in the 2024 parliamentary elections, said Marika Mikiashvili, member of Coalition for Change from party Droa. "This is the last election where we can defeat them [the ruling Georgian Dream party] through elections," Mikiashvili added.
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France24 ☛ Georgians head to polls to vote in key parliamentary election
Georgians headed to the polls Saturday to vote in a parliamentary election many citizens see as a make-or-break vote on the opportunity to join the European Union. But Brussels put Georgia’s bid for entry to the EU on hold indefinitely after the ruling party passed a “Russian law” cracking down on freedom of speech in June. Many Georgians fear the party is dragging the country towards authoritarianism and killing off hopes it could join the EU.
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France24 ☛ Georgia votes in high-stakes election that could determine future in EU
Georgians voted on Saturday in elections that will determine the fledgling democracy's European aspirations, amid growing concerns over the ruling party's pro-Russian drift. The parliamentary election pits an unprecedented union of pro-Western opposition forces against the ruling Georgian Dream accused of stifling democracy and turning towards Russia. FRANCE 24's Régis Gente reports from Tbilisi.
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RFERL ☛ Georgian Dream Hails Victory, Opposition Decries 'Stolen Election'
The pro-Russian Georgian Dream party is on pace to extend its control of parliament, casting a dark cloud over the country's future membership in the European Union.
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The Straits Times ☛ Videos appear to show North Korean troops in Russia
The US said Pyongyang had moved at least 3,000 soldiers to training camps in the Russian Far East.
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The Straits Times ☛ Pyongyang erects blockades along inter-Korean railways
Seoul is keeping a close eye on North Korea-Russia military cooperation.
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New York Times ☛ Republic of Georgia’s Ruling Party Claims Election Victory
Voters cast ballots on Saturday in a parliamentary election that, preliminary results suggest, could derail the country’s pro-Western course.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The Washington Post ☛ Political groups pay influencers this election, without disclosures
Critics say the lack of transparency in the hottest new sector of political advertising could be abused by political groups to manipulate public opinion, and that federal election rules have failed to keep pace with the ways social media has transformed campaigning.
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ Your Opinions Can Be Bad But You Still Have to Tell the Truth
“These billionaire owners are craven bastards” is a problem, yes, but it is an omnipresent one. The acute and timely problem with these hasty non-endorsements is that the leaders of the publications lied about them. That is bad. It is one thing to have bad political opinions, as many editorial writers do; it is another thing for the head of a newspaper to lie about why they are doing what they do. There are many corny and overly self-serious tropes in journalism that are easy to make fun of, but one thing that is worth taking extremely seriously is the basic idea that journalism is about telling the truth. That commitment to telling the truth should be defended at all costs. It is why, even as we mock the WSJ’s stupid fascist editorials and the Washington Post op-ed page’s office-bound DC dreariness and the NYT’s roster of failing-upwards columnists-for-life, we still take the journalism in those papers as credible. Because the institutions themselves place a high value on credibility.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ Tens of thousands suffer in Saudi detention centres despite promise of reform
But a tranche of new footage smuggled out of the centres housing those awaiting deportation suggests nothing has changed.
The footage is part of a new documentary which will be broadcast on ITV on Sunday and reveals what life is really like inside the Kingdom under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
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Environment
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NL Times ☛ Light pollution awareness at annual "Night of the Night"
During the night from Saturday to Sunday, the Nature and Environment Federation will be drawing attention to light pollution and energy waste in the Netherlands for the twentieth time. During the Night of Nights, hundreds of companies and municipalities will switch off the lights of buildings and advertising lights. In addition, events are organized in the dark throughout the country. “Let the darkness be dark and discover how beautiful the night is,” is the call from the federation.
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CBC ☛ B.C. atmospheric river a successful first test of community-led rain management project
The St. George Rainway, which is still under construction, is a City of Vancouver project designed at the request of the community and with its input. It includes pebbles, soil and vegetation running along the east side of St. George Street as it slopes from East Broadway Avenue to East Fifth Avenue.
It follows the path of an ancient, buried creek and soaks up rainfall that would otherwise pool up and flow down the street. When torrential rains reached the Lower Mainland last weekend, causing damage and mudslides across Metro Vancouver, the unfinished rainway helped keep the street from flooding.
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Energy/Transportation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] Cuba hit by island-wide blackout after power plant failure
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Jason Becker ☛ Why We’ve Leased Cars for More than Ten Years
Over the next few years, we realized there are some nice things about leases, especially when you’re young and have good credit. The costs are consistent. There were no unexpected issues during an inspection or from a strange noise. Everything is in great shape, and within the first three years, virtually none of the regular wear and tear stuff happens. We know exactly how much we’re going to spend on a car.
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Positech Games ☛ Solar Farm data-collection begins!
There are THREE systems (oh yes) that are reporting the output data from the farm. We can call them the Solis, Orsis and Meter systems. Right now, I have data from two of them (although patchy) and the third one remains a mystery that I think I get access to through a third party, or maybe they just show up in the final invoices I get when I get the payment for the energy. Why are there three systems? surely its all one level right?
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Wildlife/Nature
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Deccan Chronicle ☛ Warning issued as elephants spotted in Parvathipuram Manyam
The tuskers are divided in two groups. One group, comprising of seven elephants, was spotted in Dibagudivalasa village. The other group, consisting of four elephants, was found near Jamiguda village in the Bhamini mandal.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] Decoding China: Beijing bracing for trade war on all fronts
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] Germany's Left Party taking a stand against far-right populists
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AlerNet ☛ Elon Musk — who rails against 'illegals in America' — revealed to be an illegal immigrant
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — the world's wealthiest man — has come out harshly against undocumented immigrants since becoming one of former President Donald Trump's biggest donors and campaign surrogates. But a new report reveals that he launched his career in the United States without legal status.
The Washington Post is now reporting that Musk was illegally staying in the U.S. on a student visa despite dropping out of school. While Musk, who is from South Africa, emigrated to attend Stanford University, he called his department chair shortly after the fall 1995 semester began to inform him that he wouldn't be attending classes.
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Pro Publica ☛ Small Midwestern Cities Could Be Key to 2024 Elections
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The Straits Times ☛ Uzbekistan set to elect parliament loyal to president
The election is certain to produce a legislature loyal to President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.
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[Repeat] New York Times ☛ The White House Bet Big on Intel. Will It Backfire?
The doubts expressed by top tech executives show how far Intel has fallen at a moment when Ms. Raimondo is trying to rebuild American chip manufacturing. Her unofficial role as a chip salesperson underscores how much is riding on the success of Intel, a 56-year-old firm that is at the center of President Biden’s efforts to rev up domestic semiconductor production.
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US News And World Report ☛ All Sides Claim Victory in Georgian Election
But exit polls by the pro-opposition Formula and Mtavari Arkhi channels showed major gains for pro-Western opposition parties, who they suggested would together be able to form a majority in the 150 seat parliament.
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Masayuki Hatta ☛ Thoughts on the New Digital Feudalism
But there’s an even more pressing concern: the unprecedented concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a few tech leaders. Take Elon Musk, for example. His control over Starlink satellites has influenced the course of the war in Ukraine, while his acquisition of Twitter (now X) has reshaped global public discourse, including the US presidential election. Similarly, apps like Tor make crucial decisions about privacy and security that affect billions of people.
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European Commission ☛ Public procurement directives – evaluation
Summary This initiative aims to evaluate the following directives:
• Directive 2014/23/EU on the award of concession contracts
• Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement [...] -
France24 ☛ Beyoncé endorses Harris, Rogan interviews Trump
Superstar Beyonce provided the latest shot of stardust to Kamala Harris's White House campaign on Friday, as the vice president and rival Donald Trump courted voters with just 11 days to go in a neck-and-neck election. Harris is focusing on promoting abortion rights as she turned her attention to battleground state of Texas where abortion has been banned. Meanwhile Trump sat down with world's top podcaster Joe Rogan for an interview on Friday. Rogan's podcast, which has millions of subscribers, is “widely listened by the same group of people Donald Trump wants to reach”, FRANCE 24's Fraser Jackson said.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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New Yorker ☛ The Lies Are Winning
“We’ve moved from a moment of alternative facts with Kellyanne Conway to now embracing the idea of lies,” Jane Mayer says.
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Officials Say Russia Behind Fake Video Of Pro-Trump Votes Being Destroyed
"The Intelligence Community (IC) assesses that Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania, judging from information available to the IC and prior activities of other Russian influence actors, including videos and other disinformation activities," the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in a joint statement issued on October 25.
The statement said that the video was debunked within three hours by local election officials and law enforcement officials after citizens reported it to authorities.
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NPR ☛ Russia is behind fake video of ballots being destroyed, U.S. officials say
The phony video was quickly debunked by local election officials and the district attorney’s office in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But it still circulated widely on social media, including Elon Musk's X, where it racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Nation ☛ Why We Need Prison Journalism More Than Ever
For a small group of incarcerated journalists around the country, the situation provided a clear mandate: Tell the story. Mostly confined to parking-lot-sized cells, they wrote about being denied masks, cleaning supplies, and showers; feeling trapped among guards who didn’t take the virus seriously; thrown in solitary confinement while sick instead of receiving medical care.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Adds Literary Critic, Activists To 'Foreign Agents' List
Medvedev, who advocates for the independence of the region of Udmurtia from Russia, has taken part in the events of the Forum of Free States of Post-Russia, which the Russian authorities have classified as an "undesirable organization," and was fined.
Khardin is a popular blogger, with over 127,000 subscribers to his Telegram channel. He opposes the war in Ukraine and has spoken out against political repression in Russia.
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FAIR ☛ CPB Funds Ideological Overseers at NPR in Response to Right-Wing Criticism
>After the public broadcaster came under right-wing scrutiny in the spring for supposed left-wing bias, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin (NPR.org, 5/15/24) announced the organization would be adding 11 new oversight positions, though she wouldn’t say who would be funding them. The hires include six editors for a new “Backstop” team that will give all content, including content from member stations, a “final review” before it can be aired.
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TruthOut ☛ Owner Jeff Bezos Reportedly Nixes Washington Post Endorsement of Harris
Lewis was previously the publisher at The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Lewis’ tenure at the Post, which began last year, has been plagued by controversy.
The reasons for Bezos’ reported intervention to stop a planned Harris endorsement are not clear, but he has told the paper’s leaders that he would like them to seek out more conservative readers and add more conservative opinion columnists, according to The New York Times.
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The Washington Post ☛ Will Georgia’s election be a win for Russia?
The so-called “foreign agent law” passed earlier this year requires nongovernmental groups and independent media outlets to register as “agents of foreign influence.” The bill, which sparked mass protests across Georgia, is in many ways a copy of a Russian law that has been used to crush political dissent. Advertisement
Russia has moved along a similar track in recent years, steadily dismantling civil society, with President Vladimir Putin making conservative values a cornerstone of his national idea and his struggle against Western influence.
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NDTV ☛ "Stop Donating To Wikipedia, Controlled By Far-Left Activists": Elon Musk
In the report, Pirate Wires said six weeks after October 7 (Hamas' terror attack on Israel), one of the Wikipedia editors successfully removed the mention of Hamas' 1988 charter, which called for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the entry on Hamas.
The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials, the US news website that reports at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture said.
In India too, Wikipedia has been accused of being misused by 'super editors' - longtime users who can lock topics on the website to prevent more edits - to run certain narratives.
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NPR ☛ Army releases report about Trump campaign incident at Arlington National Cemetery
The report, which is almost fully redacted, was made public Friday after a lawsuit filed by the government watchdog American Oversight.
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Techdirt ☛ Democracy Dies In Darkness… Helped Along By Billionaire Cowardice
Newspaper presidential endorsements may not actually matter that much, but billionaire media owners blocking editorial teams from publishing their endorsements out of concern over potential retaliation from a future Donald Trump presidency should matter a lot.
If people were legitimately worried about the “weaponization of government” and the idea that companies might silence speech over threats from the White House, what has happened over the past few days should raise alarm bells. But somehow I doubt we’ll be seeing the folks who were screaming bloody murder over the nothingburger that was the Murthy lawsuit saying a word of concern about billionaire media owners stifling the speech of their editorial boards to curry favor with Donald Trump.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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University of Michigan ☛ Wallace House hosts journalist roundtable on 2024 election
The panel’s speakers included Lydia Polgreen, New York Times opinion columnist, María Elena Salinas, ABC news contributor and broadcast journalist, opinion columnist Bret Stephens and Vincent Hutchings, Hanes Walton, Jr. collegiate professor of political science and Afroamerican and African studies. The speakers first considered questions from Henderson and later opened the floor to questions from the audience.
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Michał Sapka ☛ Bezos's fortune is too big to care about you
Tech billionaire is being evil again. This time Jeff Bezos kills Washington Post’s endorsement for one of the US presidential candidates. It doesn’t matter which one, but people are canceling their subscriptions. But, let’s face it. He is too rich to care.
Bezos bought Washington Post a decade ago for 250000000 USD (25 million). This seems a lot but almost the entire human race, but not for him.
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The Atlantic ☛ Cancel Amazon Prime, Not ‘The Washington Post’
Bezos, as it happens, has billions of dollars in contracts before the federal government. It did not take long for people to start suggesting that the decision not to endorse might have had little to do with journalistic principle and much to do with the relationship between Bezos and the famously vindictive person who, if elected president of the United States, could soon have major influence over his businesses. “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Martin Baron, a former Post executive editor, told NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” (Bezos has not commented on the endorsement decision. The Post’s communications chief told the paper’s reporters, “This was a Washington Post decision to not endorse.”)
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The Nation ☛ The Washington Post’s Craven Capitulation to the Billionaire Class
Here’s a new slogan that seems right for the sanctimonious-yet-venal brain trust at The Washington Post: Democracy dies in the darkness of Jeff Bezos’s wallet. The paper that’s long dined out on its reputation as a principled foe of a paranoid, authoritarian Republican regime announced on Friday that it wasn’t going to endorse a presidential candidate this time out (or indeed ever again), even though the twice-impeached, criminally convicted Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon look like a mere piker in the realm of unhinged abuses of maximum executive power.
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Axios ☛ WaPo, L.A. Times opt out of endorsements in 2024 election, sparking outrage
Why it matters: Their decisions, coming less than two weeks from Election Day, have been hit with backlash from journalists who argue billionaire owners of papers that would've endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris are pulling punches to play it safe.
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Molly White ☛ I am my own legal department: the promise and peril of “just go independent”
The day before the Washington Post news broke, bleary-eyed at 7am as I scanned through my email inbox before getting out of bed to make some coffee, a subject line caught my eye: “DMCA Takedown Notice”.
When I went to bed the night before, the plan for the next morning had been to fix a bug in my new presidential election spending tracker in Follow the Crypto, a page I urgently wanted to release as Election Day looms here in the United States. Now I knew those plans would have to wait until after I finished cosplaying as a lawyer, figuring out if and how to respond to some guy who’d — as far as I can tell — been hired by the alleged operator of a multi-million dollar cryptocurrency pyramid scheme to file a fraudulent copyright claim in an attempt to force me to take down a Web3 is Going Just Great post I’d already refused to delete.
A week prior, I’d received an email from an amateurish “reputation management company” offering me $200 each to delete the story and the associated tweet. I replied to inform them that, while I’m always happy to correct any errors, I do not remove posts simply because their subjects don’t like them. “I understand. You are right as such there are no errors,” they replied, then upped their bribe to $500. I stopped responding, and assumed that was that.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-10-19 [Older] With Gaza war next door, human rights in Egypt are ignored
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The Verge ☛ Lyft fined $2.1 million for misleading ads about how much drivers could make
Such moves “overinflated the actual earnings achieved by most drivers by as much as 30%,” writes the FTC, which says the company now must base potential pay claims on what drivers typically make, instead. And those amounts can no longer factor in tips as part of stated hourly pay.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Uber and Lyft Found a Loophole to Pay NYC Drivers Less
In New York City, some drivers in previous years made as little as $6 an hour, largely as a result of being unpaid for the vast amounts of time they spend waiting between rides. So in 2018, the city passed a law to change that, ensuring that New York’s roughly 84,000 rideshare drivers receive a predictable minimum wage like any other worker.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ No, Raising the Minimum Wage Does Not Hurt Fast-Food Workers
According to a working paper by Michael Reich and Denis Sosinskiy of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 led to an average pay increase of 18 percent per worker but did not reduce fast-food employment. Prices did go up, with some variation between chains and menu items, but the average increase of around 3.7 percent (“about 15 cents on a $4 hamburger,” as the Reich and Sosinskiy put it) was marginal. The researchers estimate consumers absorbed almost two-thirds of the increased costs.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Modern car trends we really, really hate
But not every technological gewgaw represents progress. Some are downright annoying, like that lane assist and preemptive braking so sensitive it makes the car feel like a carnival ride on the fritz. (Preemptive braking is a control function that applies the brakes when the car decides its current speed is unsafe.) Drive modes and shifters that involve screens and levers rather than a stick in the centre console can also feel like a step back.
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Trademarks
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IP Kat ☛ 2024-10-22 [Older] Combination of common architectural elements does not make orangery original
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Techdirt ☛ National Law Firm Learns That Competitors Buying Google Adwords Still Isn’t Trademark Infringement
Over a decade ago, we wrote about how the flurry of trademark lawsuits seen at that time over competitors buying up Google Adwords to get their company ads displayed when competitors are searched might finally be coming to an end. While these types of suits have certainly reduced in number based on anecdotal evidence, they have not disappeared entirely. And they make no more sense today than they did a decade ago.
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IP Kat ☛ 2024-10-21 [Older] EUIPO Grand Board finally confirms Nightwatch decision on EUTM conversions [Ed: EUIPO is pure corruption disguised as "justice"]
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Right of Publicity
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Hindustan Times ☛ AR Rahman calls AI 'evil', says its misuse in music can lead to people losing jobs: 'We need to bell this cat'
Interestingly, Rahman had used AI to recreate the voices of late singers Bamba Bakya and Shahul Hameed for the song Thimiri Yezhuda in Lal Salam. However, the composer clarified that he had sought permission from the singers' family members, and remuneration was sent for the same.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV's 'Breaking Bad' Headteacher Risked More Than Most, Paid the Price
Early this year, a court in the UK handed Paul Merrell a 12-month prison sentence for reselling pirate IPTV subscriptions. A respected headteacher and family man, with an otherwise clean record, the 42-year-old was hardly the stereotypical pirate often portrayed in the media. A document detailing Merrell's failed appeal recently came to light, shining new light on his unusual case.
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IP Kat ☛ 2024-10-23 [Older] Event reminder (1 week to go!) - IPKat webinar "Image rights in the age of AI: Less is more or more is better?" [Ed: AI or efficient plagiarism?]
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Don Marti ☛ personal AI in the rugpull economy
Big company decision-makers don’t want to let smaller companies have their own "agentic" tools, either. Getting a DMCA Exemption to let McDonald’s franchisees fix their ice cream machines was a big deal that required a lengthy process with the US Copyright Office. Many other small businesses are locked in to the manual, low-information side of a business relationship with a larger one. (Web advertising is another example. Google shoots at everyone’s feet, and agencies, smaller firms, and browser extension developers dance.)
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Nature ☛ Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs | Nature
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality synthetic text, often indistinguishable from human-written content, at a scale that can markedly affect the nature of the information ecosystem1,2,3. Watermarking can help identify synthetic text and limit accidental or deliberate misuse4, but has not been adopted in production systems owing to stringent quality, detectability and computational efficiency requirements. Here we describe SynthID-Text, a production-ready text watermarking scheme that preserves text quality and enables high detection accuracy, with minimal latency overhead. SynthID-Text does not affect LLM training and modifies only the sampling procedure; watermark detection is computationally efficient, without using the underlying LLM. To enable watermarking at scale, we develop an algorithm integrating watermarking with speculative sampling, an efficiency technique frequently used in production systems5. Evaluations across multiple LLMs empirically show that SynthID-Text provides improved detectability over comparable methods, and standard benchmarks and human side-by-side ratings indicate no change in LLM capabilities. To demonstrate the feasibility of watermarking in large-scale-production systems, we conducted a live experiment that assessed feedback from nearly 20 million Gemini6 responses, again confirming the preservation of text quality. We hope that the availability of SynthID-Text7 will facilitate further development of watermarking and responsible use of LLM systems.
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Digital Music News ☛ OpenAI Researcher Highlights How OpenAI Violated Copyright Law
OpenAI has been fraught with leadership changes as executives pour out of the company like water through a sieve. The latest departure is a former researcher who says the company broke copyright law and is destroying the internet. Here’s the latest.
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Digital Music News ☛ Lily Allen Says Foot Pics Make More Money Than Spotify Streams
To this, Allen replied, “Imagine being an artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify, but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Lily Allen’s OnlyFans account costs $10 per month, which comes out to a cool $10,000 monthly based on her subscriber count. Compare that with her 7.5 million monthly Spotify listeners, which earns her around $0.003 and $0.005 per stream.
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Techdirt ☛ German Court: LAION’s Generative AI Training Dataset Is Legal Thanks To EU Copyright Exceptions
The copyright world is currently trying to assert its control over the new world of generative AI through a number of lawsuits, several of which have been discussed previously on Walled Culture. We now have our first decision in this area, from the regional court in Hamburg. Andres Guadamuz has provided an excellent detailed analysis of a ruling that is important for the German judges’ discussion of how EU copyright law applies to various aspects of generative AI. The case concerns the freely-available dataset from LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network), a German non-profit. As the LAION FAQ says: “LAION datasets are simply indexes to the internet, i.e. lists of URLs to the original images together with the ALT texts found linked to those images.” Guadamuz explains: [...]
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Walled Culture ☛ The truth about copyright: even successful authors can’t live on the royalties publishers pay them
She says that she earns about $43,200 from such direct patronage – a decent sum, but one that requires a lot of work in terms of encouraging fans to contribute, an activity that takes away time from her creative writing. For what it’s worth, it precisely the model that I advocate in Walled Culture, and it’s interesting to see it working here. But the fact that a successful author like Byrne depends on patronage underlines the point that copyright simply does not do what most people think it does: provide a decent income for a good writer. Commenting on the reasons why today’s copyright model is not working for her or others, Byrne writes:
“But Publishing Is A Business, Monica.” I’ve heard this many times from many quarters. Yes! I agree! But it’s a business built on the unpaid and underpaid labor of the very workers who generate its product. Art is labor, no different from any other kind of labor; just as artists are human, no different from any other kind of human. To take it a step further, humans deserve the basic means of life independent of their ability or desire to perform labor, and that’s a whole other conversation; for now, while we advocate for Universal Basic Income, I welcome alternative compensation models for authors. And I appreciate whenever publishing professionals welcome them, too.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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