Leftovers

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ Write for Yourself, Inspire Others

  People who blog sometimes share advice, myself included. Advice about life, careers, relationships… anything, really. If it’s something someone has lived through, chances are they’ve got insights to offer. Sure, some might call it unsolicited advice, but you’re free to read it or skip it, so it doesn’t matter much in the end.

  Here’s the secret: the advice bloggers give? It’s often as much for themselves as it is for you.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Westley Winks

  This is the 62nd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Westley Winks and his blog, wwinks.com

• James G ☛ Rich content presentation on personal search engines

  This is all to say: a lot of experimentation has been done in the realm of presenting answers to questions in a search engine.

  This all has me thinking: how does this apply to the concept of a personal website search engine?

• Science

  • Wired ☛ How Researchers Are Using Geospatial Technology to Uncover Mexico's Clandestine Graves

    "I never thought I would have to work on this, but if this knowledge is of any use, now is the time to show it," says José Luis Silván, a geographer at CentroGeo. Years ago, as part of his doctoral work, he specialized in measuring forest biomass and human populations through satellite information. At that time, he was far from imagining the scientific work he is doing today: investigating the potential of drones, hyperspectral images, and protocols to detect clandestine graves.

• Hardware

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming processor announced for November 7

    With a firm focus on gamers, AMD have revealed the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor will be coming on November 7th.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ M5Stack Introduces LLM Module for Offline AI Applications

    M5Stack has launched the M5Stack LLM Module, an advanced offline large language model inference module designed for terminal devices requiring efficient, cloud-independent AI processing. This product is described as targeting offline applications such as smart homes, voice assistants, and industrial control.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • VOA News ☛ Chinese online retailer Temu faces EU probe into rogue traders, illegal goods

    Regulators are also examining the risks from Temu's "addictive design," including "game-like" reward programs, and what the company is doing to mitigate those risks.

    Also under investigation is Temu's compliance with two other DSA requirements: giving researchers access to data and transparency on recommender systems. Companies must detail how they recommend content and products and give users at least one option to see recommendations that are not based on their personal profile and preferences.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Allen Pike ☛ Testing the Untestable - Allen Pike

    Let’s say you want to build an LLM-powered app. With a modern model and common-sense prompting, it’s easy to get a demo going with reasonable results.

  • Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Friendship circles

    I think the way Google+ worked was the nicest between social networks. Remember the circles? We would add every friend or person in a circle and we could choose what to share with each circle.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ Google Calendar on a Raspberry Pi

    The Raspberry Pi is an excellent device for displaying your Google Calendar as it’s relatively cheap to keep it running 24/7. Additionally, thanks to its HDMI and onboard connections, it can easily connect with most screens.

  • Jason Becker ☛ The paper cuts of corporate computing

    I actually end up Screen Sharing onto my Mac mini at various points in the day, but they’ve blocked the port that allows for high quality screen sharing somewhat recently. So while I used to get fast, retina or near retina level resolution, the experience now is… subpar.

    None of these things are the end of the world, but the paper cuts are real.

  • India Times ☛ ChatGPT now an AI web search engine, reigniting search war among Big Tech

    Search wars have intensified among the big tech once again, raising the $2 trillion question whether Google’s dominance in search can be disrupted. AI-powered internet search startup Perplexity AI has launched functionalities such as ‘internal knowledge search’ and ‘navigational query’. As per reports, it is close to raising a new funding round which could double the company’s valuation to $8 billion. Meta is reportedly building its own search feature in the Meta AI personal assistant. Meanwhile, Google, this week, expanded AI search overviews to 100 countries, reaching one billion users. Here’s an explainer on GenAI’s challenge to world’s largest tech monopoly: [...]

  • Wired ☛ Zero-Click Flaw Exposes Potentially Millions of Popular Storage Devices to Attack

    The vulnerability, which is called zero-click because it doesn’t require a user to click on anything to be infected, affects a photo application installed by default on popular network-attached storage (NAS) devices made by the Taiwanese firm Synology. The bug would allow attackers to gain access to the devices to steal personal and corporate files, plant a backdoor, or infect the systems with ransomware to prevent users from accessing their data.

  • PlayStation CEO on layoffs: 'We have to run a sustainable business'

    PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst discusses why Sony laid off hundreds of workers earlier this year, reiterating that it was a business decision.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Site36 ☛ Planned EU biometrics system turns into disaster: Delay of six months may lead to massive follow-up problems

      With the Entry/Exit System, the EU member states want to create a huge database with fingerprints and facial images. Nothing will come of this for the time being. A phased implementation is also not very realistic.

    • India Times ☛ Facebook India's advertisement unit sees FY24 profit grow 43% to Rs 505 crore

      Facebook India Online Services Private Limited is engaged in the business of selling advertising inventory to customers in India and providing IT-enabled support services and design support services to Meta Platforms Inc.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Trust fall: Trump’s win or loss will further damage our elections

    It happily noted, “Respondents had high confidence with the election results in Kansas. About sixty percent (60.5%) of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they were confident that the reported winners of the elections in Kansas are actually the candidates that most Kansas voted for.”

    Is 60.5% a number that should make us confident?

  • RFERL ☛ The Russian Tail: How Data Could Reveal Georgian Election Fraud

    Electoral experts and data analysts have noticed anomalies in the graphical distribution of votes across Georgia's regions and suspect this may be indirect evidence of election fraud, similar to what is said to have happened during Russia's 2020 constitutional referendum. They call this trend the "Russian Tail."

    Against the backdrop of hundreds of violations identified by election observers and questions about vote secrecy, the president and opposition parties do not recognize the election results. The Central Election Commission and the ruling Georgian Dream party deny any falsification.

    In this article, we examine what the recently circulated graphs show, what they're based on, and what they cannot show.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Case alleging Elon Musk’s voter giveaway is illegal moved to federal court

    The case now moves to federal court, where Krasner filed a motion Thursday afternoon pushing for the case to be returned to the district court. It was not immediately clear when the next hearing would be held.

    Krasner filed the lawsuit against Musk’s America PAC last week, alleging a $1 million daily giveaway to registered swing-state voters launched this month is “indisputably an unlawful lottery” under Pennsylvania consumer protection laws.

  • Wired ☛ The Untold Story of Trump's Failed Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela's President

    As bitter adversaries, the Trump administration and Maduro regime didn’t agree on, well, anything. Except for the fact that the US government wanted Maduro gone.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Inside Elon Musk’s vision to reduce the government if Trump wins

    The billionaire is enthusiastic about the potential to bring his slash-and-burn business philosophy, honed at Twitter and Tesla, to dramatically cut the federal government under Trump. Critics see potential conflicts of interest.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Problem Bezos Can’t See

    Ever since early 2016, Democrats in the general population have been complaining about the tilt of major media against Democrats and in favor of Trump and his cronies. Even before that, activists were pointing out that the Sunday shows feature Republicans, and rarely Democrats. It was a running joke that eiher John McCain or Lindsay Graham or both were on every Sunday. The complaints became angry as the media swarmed over the ridiculous Her Emails and Coney Says pieces, because most of us think that coverage made the difference in Hillary Clinton’s loss.

  • FAIR ☛ WaPo Says Not to Worry About Climate Disruption’s Disastrous Costs:

    The problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.

    What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Death toll from floods in Spain is now over 200

    The death toll in the eastern Spanish regions hit by heavy rains and flooding has risen to more than 200, authorities said on Friday.

    In Valencia, the region that bore the brunt of the devastation, at least 202 people have died, the regional government's emergency response agency reported.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Local DK ☛ Denmark charges Russian over bomb threat at Billund Airport

      A Russian man who has been held in pre-trial detention in Denmark for six months in connection with a threat against Billund Airport in April this year has been charged with possession of explosives and disrupting infrastructure, newswire Ritzau reports after court proceedings in Kolding on Thursday.

    • India Times ☛ Why a Memphis community is fighting Elon Musk's supercomputer

      The project, part of Musk's xAI artificial intelligence business, sits in an old manufacturing plant on more than 550 acres. Before beginning operations there in July, xAI rolled in flatbed trucks loaded with almost 20 mobile power plants, fueled by natural gas, to help meet its electricity demands.

      Residents of the heavily industrial community -- already home to an oil refinery, a steel mill and chemical plants -- see no upside. They contend that Musk's project has made pollution worse in an area already enveloped in smog.

    • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ Why a Memphis Community Is Fighting Elon Musk’s Supercomputer

      The project, part of Mr. Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence business, sits in an old manufacturing plant on more than 550 acres. Before beginning operations there in July, xAI rolled in flatbed trucks loaded with almost 20 mobile power plants, fueled by natural gas, to help meet its electricity demands.

      Residents of the heavily industrial community — already home to an oil refinery, a steel mill and chemical plants — see no upside. They contend that Mr. Musk’s project has made pollution worse in an area already enveloped in smog.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Bringing the Deep Sea to Seattle

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ In the opposite way

    And it’s for that I’m being involved, but in the opposite way: I’m doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to lend a helping hand to the present and the future of my community—more or less ample we mean. And I can’t stay still forever.

    It’s time for me to step it up.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Reddit's explosive user growth and AI tools help it soar to its first profit as a public company

    The social platform claimed a profit of $29.9 million, or 16 cents per share, for the period ending in September, and reported sales of $348.4 million, an amount surpassing the $312.8 million analysts had projected. Reddit also grew its number of daily users to 97.2 million, a 47% increase from the same time last year, according to a company statement.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Epstein makes shocking claim about Trump's White House team in 2017 recording

    Epstein told Wolff that Trump's staffers fought with “each other” while the former president “poisoned the well outside.” “He will tell ten people ‘Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kellyanne has a big mouth’—what do you think? Jamie Dimon [CEO of JPMorgan Chase] says that you’re a problem and I shouldn’t keep you. And I spoke to [financier] Carl Icahn. And Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson,” the financier went on.

  • NDTV ☛ Author Reveals Donald Trump And Epstein's Controversial Bet Involving Princess Diana

    In a podcast, controversial author and journalist Michael Wolff revealed that former US President Donald Trump and disgraced American financier Jeffrey Epstein allegedly bet on who would court Princess Diana first, according to Newsweek. Wolff, the veteran reporter best known recently for his trilogy of books on the Trump White House-Fire and Fury, Siege: Trump under Fire, and Landslide-said that he had a "secret source" when writing the first book, and it was "Trump's old friend Jeffrey Epstein."

  • India Times ☛ Indonesia bans sales of Google smartphones days after blocking Apple's iPhone 16

    Indonesia has banned the sale of Google smartphones due to non-compliance with local content requirements. The law mandates 40% local parts in phones sold within the country. The ban follows a similar restriction on Apple's iPhone 16. This move aims to ensure fairness for investors but raises concerns about negative impacts on investor confidence.

  • India Times ☛ Russia says massive fines against Google 'symbolic'

    The total sum of legal claims against Google in Russia has reached two undecillion rubles, according to the Russian news outlet RBK, a figure higher than all the money in the world combined. "I can't even pronounce this number, but it is more likely imbued with symbolism," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Russia fines Google $20 decillion (that’s 34 zeros) for YouTube bans

    The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

    The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Russia hits Google with astronomical fine over YouTube bans

    A Russian court today announced that Google LLC owes the Kremlin a staggering 2 trillion rubles for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube.

    Two undecillion rubles – a 2 followed by 36 zeroes – amount to $20 decillion, or around $20 billion trillion. Considering International Monetary Fund figures put the world’s gross domestic product at around $110 trillion and Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. has a market value of around $2 trillion, this is somewhat of an unrealistic fine.

  • FAIR ☛ Nicole Foy on Immigration and Labor

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Orban wishes best of luck to Trump ahead elections

    Former President Donald Trump spoke with Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Thursday, just days ahead of the U.S. presidential election, despite recent criticisms from senior Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have expressed concerns over the Hungarian leader’s authoritarian leanings.

    "Just got off the phone with President @realDonaldTrump. I wished him the best of luck for next Tuesday. Only five days to go. Fingers crossed," Orbán posted on X.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Elon Musk's Machine for Fascism: A One-Stop Shop for Disinformation and Violence

      They did replicate the effort. That same post described how, in 2020, Trump’s role in the bullshit disinformation was overt.

      Trump, his sons, and his top influencers were all among a list of the twenty most efficient disseminators of false claims about the election compiled by the Election Integrity Project after the fact.

    • Wired ☛ Profiteers Are Exploiting US Election Conspiracies and Hate to Make Millions

      United Patriot is one of four ecommerce companies identified by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) that have been advertising merchandise, often aimed at Trump supporters, using different levels of misinformation and hate speech.

      They have collectively paid to publish over 15,000 “political” ads that have racked up millions of impressions on Facebook. And though the operations present themselves as patriotic outlets selling US products, TBIJ has found evidence suggesting many are being at least partly run from overseas.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • VOA News ☛ Journalist shot dead in western Mexico

    Wracked by violence related to drug trafficking, Mexico is one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists, news advocacy groups say.

    Reporters Without Borders says more than 150 newspeople have been killed in Mexico since 1994.

  • VOA News ☛ RFE/RL journalist marks 5 months jailed in Azerbaijan

    An Azerbaijani journalist with VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on Wednesday marked five months since he was detained in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, on charges his employer rejects.

    Farid Mehralizada, an economist and journalist for RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service, Radio Azadliq, was abducted in Baku by unidentified men on May 30 and has been in pretrial detention since June 1.

  • VOA News ☛ Haiti, Israel ranked worst for securing justice in journalist killings

    The annual report from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, tracks impunity in journalist killings globally over the past decade. Nearly 80% of journalist killings around the world remain unsolved, the report said.

    “If journalist murders go unpunished, that creates an environment in which other journalists can be attacked,” the CPJ’s CEO, Jodie Ginsberg, told VOA. “It creates this environment where attacks on journalists feel like fair game.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • EFF ☛ The Human Toll of ALPR Errors

    Imagine driving to get your nails done with your family and all of a sudden, you are pulled over by police officers for allegedly driving a stolen car. You are dragged out of the car and detained at gun point. So are your daughter, sister, and nieces. The police handcuff your family, even the children, and force everyone to lie face-down on the pavement, before eventually realizing that they made a mistake. This happened to Brittney Gilliam and her family on a warm Sunday in Aurora, Colorado, in August 2020.

    And the error? The police officers who pulled them over were relying on information generated by automated license plate readers (ALPRs). These are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, upload them to a central server, and compare them to a “hot list” of vehicles sought by police. The ALPR system told the police that Gilliam’s car had the same license plate number as a stolen vehicle. But the stolen vehicle was a motorcycle with Montana plates, while Gilliam’s vehicle was an SUV with Colorado plates.

    Likewise, Denise Green had a frightening encounter with San Francisco police officers late one night in March of 2009. She had just dropped her sister off at a BART train station, when officers pulled her over because their ALPR indicated that she was driving a stolen vehicle. Multiple officers ordered her to exit her vehicle, at gun point, and kneel on the ground as she was handcuffed. It wasn’t until roughly 20 minutes later that the officers realized they had made an error and let her go.

  • Futurism ☛ A Staggering Number of Workers Have Reportedly Died While Building Saudi Arabia’s 100-Mile Skyscraper

    In the process of her reporting, the anonymous reporter discovers an extremely inconvenient truth: during the course of its multitrillion-dollar Vision 2030 project — which was launched in 2017 and includes its in-progress [right?] 100-mile skyscraper called "The Line" within its futuristic NEOM development — more than 21,000 foreign workers on it have died.

    The majority of the people who have died while working on Vision 2030 come from South Asian countries like Bangladesh, India, and Nepal — and those who are still alive told the anonymous undercover reporter in stark terms how horrendous their work conditions are.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Mass Deaths in Spain Aren’t Just a Natural Disaster

    In this respect, the Valencia floods offer a tragic example of what it means when unscrupulous bosses, vicious neoliberalism, and policies of far-right denialists intersect with a climate-related disaster. As journalist Daniel Bernabé notes, “Putting profit before life is not permissible, but it also explains the principles that govern our society.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever

  "Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.

  Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos – meaning Zuck can torment those users for profit and they'll still stick around so long as the abuse is less bad than the loss of all their cherished memories: [...]

• Techdirt ☛ Study: 76% Of U.S. Residents Want Government To Do Something About Soaring Broadband Prices

  A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey’s findings aren’t surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to pay some of the highest rates for access in the developed world.

  As usual the study doesn’t bother to actually explain why (lest industry get offended): regional monopolies, protected by regulatory capture and corruption, routinely carve out uncompetitive regional fiefdoms, from where they face little real pressure to compete on price, speeds, availability, or quality. This lack of competition also incentivizes bad behavior like privacy and net neutrality abuses.

• [Repeat] Tedium ☛ The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos & The Collateral Damage

  But consumers have blunt weapons for registering their displeasure. They can stop spending money on the product the person sells. And they can complain about it on the internet, or if they feel like going outside, with a protest. That’s it. But the problem is, when you’re dealing with someone with the financial heft of a Jeff Bezos, there is going to be collateral damage everywhere if you push back. Just as an example: If people stop shopping at Amazon, that hurts downstream creators and manufacturers who work independently, whose income might depend on either selling products on Amazon or on the affiliate revenue they get from promoting their products.

  That is the hard part of being upset at someone with a lot of power. The collateral damage is deep, and the relationships are complex. As public cloud providers go, Amazon Web Services has a market share of 50.1%, according to a recent analysis from HG Insights; that means that there are companies, large and small, that rely on Amazon at a deeper level than occasionally buying paperbacks. And, depending on your scale, switching to something else when you’ve committed to AWS is nontrivial.

• Trademarks

  • India Times ☛ YouTube: Google defeats UK trademark lawsuit over YouTube Shorts name

    Google on Thursday defeated a trademark lawsuit brought by a British short film company over YouTube's short video platform Shorts, with London's High Court ruling there was no risk of confusion for consumers.

    Shorts International, which runs a television channel devoted to short films, sued the tech giant last year, accusing Google of infringing its trademark over the word "shorts".

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ MPA Escalates Pirate Site Blocking in Philippines, Targeting Sflix and Myflixer

    The Motion Picture Association (MPA) continues to play a key role in expanding global site blocking efforts. After helping to establish a voluntary site blocking agreement in the Philippines, the MPA also filed the first complaints under the new rule. Torrent site YTS was the first target, followed by popular pirate streaming sites SFlix and MyFlixer this week.