Links 23/01/2025: More Overt Constitutional Violations and "TikTok Executive Order" (White Flag to CCP)
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Career/Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Environment
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Rachel ☛ Feedback on lessons, leap seconds, and LLMs
So no, I don't use anything of the sort, and I tell people not to quote any of that crap at me, or to send me screenshots of it pretending to be an answer to something, and that they need to find actual sources for their data. This has not made me the most popular person.
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Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Year in Review 2024
My CDO let me down recently, as I discovered that I had given my annual reviews at least three different kinds of title, and as I had also chosen to not give them their own tag, distinct from Monthlies, it was a bit of a pain finding them. As it is, four I still have not found, but I have another whole year to do that. If, indeed, they exist. And as I seem to have a general outline format, I shall continue to use that.
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Greg Morris ☛ Making Micro Social
There’s a lot going on that I want to be away from at the minute. Couple this with my desire to push my skills forward and make something I’m working on a micro.blog app built in Swift, and its placeholder name is micro social.
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Buttondown LLC ☛ The Juggler's Curse
I know this because I can't do the outside five-ball cascade... yet. But it's something I can see myself eventually mastering, unlike the slightly more difficult trick of the five-ball mess, which is impossible for mere mortals like me.
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Brandon ☛ Re: Outgrowing your name (online)
Last month, my oldest friend asked for my email address because he wanted to send me something to look at it. I told him to just send it to MassReality. He responded with, "OMG you still have that name! That's so f'n cool!" I laughed and told him I had other emails, but they all go to the same place so he's welcomed to email me there, and for some reason it made him happy to know the same name we used to use on AOL Instant Messenger and the same name we sent emails back-and-forth regarding our movie script was still alive and kicking. In a small way, that made me happy too.
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Annie Mueller ☛ Anti-narrative - annie's blog
We mistake what is familiar for what is good because we like to feel safe.
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Sara Jakša ☛ Quiet art; the tapestry of writing (Co-written with James)
Next time you have an idea, take note of it. Let the note grow. Add context or observations or whatever is on your mind. Maybe in those words you will see something: a story, an essay, oratory, a poem or a stand up joke. Let it grow and let it be brought up to this world, whatever that means for you.
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Ted Unangst ☛ stories i refuse to believe
The internet is filled with stories that purport to teach us a valuable lesson or something about how the world works, and they’re really important because they really happened. NASA spent millions of dollars designing a space pen, which was really foolish when they could have just used a pencil like the Russians. I think not as many people believe that anymore, but it’s still floating around out there.
Here are three more stories which will never decompose, because it’s more fun to retell the tale than question why.
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Science
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Rlang ☛ How Are P-values Distributed Under The Null?
The (perhaps surprising) answer is that under any null hypothesis, the p-values are uniformly distributed: all p-values between 0 and 1 are equally likely.
Before we give a formal proof, here’s some intuition. For any significance level $\alpha$, how often will a statistical test under the null yield a significant result? Of course $\alpha$, by the definition of the significance level. But for a test to be significant at $\alpha$, it must be true that the p-value $p ^lt; \alpha$. So we’re saying that $p ^lt; \alpha$ with probability $\alpha$. Or $Pr(p ^lt; \alpha) = \alpha$, which is the definition of a uniform distribution.
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post: Reflections from The Munin Conference Part Two – Open Science
Today’s post is by Mark Huskisson. Mark is the Co-Chair of the Assembly of the Commons for the European Research Infrastructure, OPERAS, and strategic adviser to PKP | Public Knowledge Project. He is an independent consultant, speaker, and contractor at The Husk Agency.
This is the second article of three in a guest series reflecting on the main themes and ideas gathered and discussed at The Munin Conference at the end of 2024. An annual publishing conference located at the University of the Arctic which aims to gather thinking and thought from around the world of publishing for discussion and debate. The conference is named after Munin, one of Odin’s ravens, sent out each day to gather knowledge from around the world and the event lives up to the spirit of this idea with a vibrant knowledge-gathering program. Part One, looking at Bibliodiversity, is available here.
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Science Alert ☛ Hubble's 2.5-Billion-Pixel Mosaic Reveals Andromeda in Breathtaking Detail
The Hubble Space Telescope has created a massive 2.5-gigapixel panorama of Andromeda. It took 10 years and more than 1,000 orbits to capture all of the images.
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The Register UK ☛ NASA spacewalkers to swab the ISS for microbial life
The plan is for the spacewalkers to collect samples from sites near life support system vents on the exterior of the ISS. Scientists will be able to determine if the ISS releases microorganisms and assess whether any can survive in the harsh environment outside the outpost.
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Career/Education
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The Scotsman ☛ Overly lenient parents, bad diet and lack of life skills have left young generation ill-prepared for workplace
If they have not been taught to look after themselves at home, it can be a warning sign for how they will interact with colleagues and customers.
In addition, many young people, while being academically qualified, have low emotional intelligence – an inability to understand and manage their own emotions, or empathise with clients, which can lead to strained relationships and reduced customer satisfaction.
Many are also set in their thinking, lacking a flexible approach which makes it harder to respond to change, slowing down implementation of new processes, reducing competitiveness.
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Crooked Timber ☛ On Institutional Voice and witnessing Truth; On the Yale Report
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that we also expect from university leadership good judgment in the practice of showing leadership in learning and teaching (or experiments in living) with all the obligations and self-restraint and self-discipline those require (recall this post responding to an essay by Agnes Callard also rejecting institutional neutrality). If phronesis is relatively absent in the ranks of university leadership — and we may not all find ourselves in conditions as blessed as Yale’s — it is by no means obvious that the principles so beautifully articulated by “Della Rocca & Rodriquez” are (ought implies can) binding.
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YLE ☛ More people than ever visited Helsinki's libraries last year
They saw 9.2 million visitors last year, which was an all-time high since the city began keeping records, and 13 percent more than in 2023.
The last time there were nearly as many visits was when the flagship Helsinki Central Library Oodi had been open for a full year, in 2019, with nine million visitors.
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Citizen Lab ☛ Call for applications: Information Controls Fellowship Program 2025
The Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) fosters research, outputs, and creative collaboration on repressive Internet censorship and surveillance issues. The program supports researchers examining how governments in countries, regions, or areas of OTF’s core focus are restricting the free flow of information, cutting access to the open Internet, and implementing censorship mechanisms, threatening global citizens’ ability to exercise basic human rights and democracy; work focused on mitigating such threats is also encouraged. The application is available on the OTF website.
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Hardware
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The Strategist ☛ How drone racing promotes battlefield FPV capability
Military capability and military sport have been linked for millennia, with soldiers competing in events such as the Olympic Pentathlon and the Military World Games to develop their skills in peacetime. Today, militaries use sports to forge international relationships, a key application of soft power.
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Idiomdrottning ☛ Pagination
E-ink’s calming nature isn’t just the screen tech in light and space; it’s also the reduced motion in time. The microperforated RLCD that the DC-1 uses can handle animation better than e-ink can, but that doesn’t mean that it should animate everything. Using that 60hz power to reduce lag on text input would’ve been awesome (though early reviews say the lag on handwriting is inexplicably really bad…?) and there are other apps, like music making apps, where a fast display comes in handy.
As long as the UI itself is stable and knows how to chill the heck out for three seconds and isn’t hyper jittery.
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Louie Mantia ☛ Withered Technology
Instead of focusing on the newest, shiniest, and often most-expensive components, Nintendo focused on maximizing the potential of more mature and cheaper technology.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The Atlantic ☛ You're Being Alienated From Your Own Attention
After a lot of trial and error, I now view audience attention as something like the wind that powers a sailboat. It’s a real phenomenon, independent of the boat, and you can successfully sail only if you harness it. You don’t turn the boat into the wind, but you also don’t simply allow the wind to set your course. You figure out where you want to go (in the case of my show, what you think is important for people to know), you identify which way the wind is blowing, and then, using your skills and the tools of the boat, you tack back and forth to manage to arrive at your destination using that wind power.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Cancer Is Killing Our Firefighters
In 2023, the World Health Organization classified the act of firefighting as a Group 1 carcinogen, just like asbestos and tobacco. Both the fires themselves and the very gear firefighters wear on the job are making them sick.
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Lee Peterson ☛ Journaling for mental health
As I’ve mentioned before I’m in a period of my life that is very challenging, I’m dealing with a lot of changes and struggling to keep my head above water. Over the past six months or so I’ve really gotten into a physical journal process.
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The Independent UK ☛ Is your child spending too much time online? Here are the warning signs
This week, Baroness Beeban Kidron addressed the House of Lords, emphasising the unequal battle children face against the tech giants vying for their attention.
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New Yorker ☛ Is Social Media More Like Cigarettes or Junk Food?
In recent years, experts have been warning that social media harms children. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist who became a whistle-blower, told a Senate subcommittee that her ex-employer’s “profit optimizing machine is generating self-harm and self-hate—especially for vulnerable groups, like teenage girls.” A growing number of parents worry that their children are perpetually distracted and obsessed with their phones, and a mounting body of research supports these concerns. “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” Vivek Murthy, whose second term as the U.S. Surgeon General ended on Monday, wrote in an opinion piece last year.
History suggests that our collective approach to social media may be approaching a fork in the road. Haugen’s testimony helped inspire many new social-media laws. California passed the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which included provisions to limit data collection on children and reduce persuasive design features that might lead to overuse. Utah’s Social Media Regulation Act added a requirement that parents consent before children can set up an account. New York’s analogous legislation targeted algorithms that recommend content to kids, presumably to reduce the allure of these platforms. These laws are more like junk-food regulations than cigarette bans. They aim to make the product in question safer and give families more tools to manage their harms, but ultimately keep them available to all ages.
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[Repeat] University of Michigan ☛ High-speed internet linked to drop in COVID-19 death rates
The mortality rate from COVID-19 was about 50% lower in U.S. counties with higher internet access in the summer and early fall of 2020.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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The Register UK ☛ LinkedIn sued for allegedly training AI on private messages
A lawsuit [PDF], filed on behalf of Alessandro De La Torre in a California federal court, alleges InMail messages were fed to neural networks based on LinkedIn's disclosure last year. The Microsoft-owned goliath announced policy changes reflecting its use of member posts and personal data to train AI models and its provision of said data to third-parties for that purpose.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Google announces new educational features for Chromebooks and Workspace
Workspace for Education is a collection of tools for schools and universities to improve learning and collaboration. It includes cloud-based apps such as Gmail, Drive and Calendar, as well as tools for education that assist in classrooms and help students work together.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race
AI competition is not a zero-sum game. Instead, the world’s superpowers need to work together to make sure AI benefits humanity.
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International Business Times ☛ AI Startup Overruns Reddit With Spam: Is This The End Of Authentic Online Forums?
Thanks to companies like Astral and similar AI-driven platforms, Reddit could soon face an influx of automated marketing posts. This surge in AI-generated content is expected to persist beyond the initial wave, as these AI applications tend to be highly cost-effective, potentially making them a long-term tool for marketers.
'What is perhaps most disheartening is that the people creating tools like Astral genuinely seem to believe AI and humans are interchangeable, and that machine will be far better than human can ever be,' Gizmodo's business and technology reporter Thomas Maxwell noted.
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404 Media ☛ Viral 'Challah Horse' Image Zuckerberg Loved Was Originally Created as a Warning About Facebook's AI Slop
The viral AI-generated bread horse image that Mark Zuckerberg “loved” on Tuesday was originally created as a meme by a Polish news organization to warn about the dangers of AI-generated slop on social media. The image became a viral sensation on the Polish internet but broke containment and began going viral more widely; it was then stolen by a totally unrelated real AI spam farm where it has gone megaviral and was ‘loved’ by the Meta CEO.
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404 Media ☛ Zuckerberg 'Loves' AI Slop Image From Spam Account That Posts Amputated Children
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “loved” an AI-generated slop image of a horse made out of bread posted by a spam page on Facebook that also posts AI-generated images of children with amputations and regularly circumvents Facebook’s algorithm to link users offsite to ad-laden AI-generated content farms.
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Wired ☛ This New AI Search Engine Has a Gimmick: Humans Answering Questions
Reading about its gimmick, I didn’t really understand why it bothered with the AI answers at all. Why not just go straight to the human? I called its CEO, Andy Kurtzig, to find out.
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ "I prefer to meet people where they are" says reasonable-sounding white dude holding court at a table in the back of a Nazi Bar, redux.
"Oh no, but those poor Blue Sky users, when the service becomes even more terrible they might lose all their posts. We must save them from their own bad decisions!"
Oh dear. How sad. Nevermind.
It's Cory. This time the guy holding court is Cory.
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Pivot to AI ☛ The UK deploys Humphrey, your AI-powered consultation-ignoring bot
We already know — from tests done directly on responses to public consultations — that LLMs don’t summarize text, they only shorten it. They also frequently reverse meanings.
But the real use case for Humphrey is to pretend to take notice of a consultation and save money when the fix is in — such as the UK consultation on handing artistic works to AI companies, which is supposedly in progress until February, but which the government has already declared is now policy.
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[Old] Pivot to AI ☛ Don’t use AI to summarize documents — it’s worse than humans in every way
The reviewers agreed that AI summaries were likely to make more work for bureaucrats, not less.
What went wrong? LLMs don’t summarize text — they just shorten it. That’s a subtle difference, but it’s key.
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Benedict Evans ☛ Are better models better?
However, there is also a broad class of task that we would like to be able to automate, that’s boring and time consuming and can’t be done by traditional software, where the quality of the result is not a percentage, but a binary. For some tasks, the answer is not better or worse: it's right or not right.
If I need something that does have answers that can be definitely wrong in important ways, and where I’m not an expert in the subject, or don’t have all the underlying data memorised and would have to repeat all the work myself to check it, then today, I can’t use an LLM for that at all.
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EDRI ☛ Slovenia: a tool to identify AI
Danes je nov dan has launched Razkrinkaj.ai, an innovative tool designed to test users’ ability to identify AI-generated content while educating them about the risks associated with its misuse. Presented as an interactive quiz, the tool covers various areas such as recognising synthetic images, text, and videos.
As generative artificial intelligence evolves rapidly, distinguishing between reality and fiction is becoming increasingly challenging. Digital environments are now flooded with synthetic content that, at best, seeks to capture attention and, at worst, manipulates political beliefs or facilitates financial fraud. This makes media literacy and the ability to identify AI-generated content essential skills in the digital age.
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Renewable Energy World ☛ Charlotte software company attracts $1.2B to finance residential solar and storage
Palmetto’s proprietary technology platform leverages AI to provide homeowners with personalized energy recommendations and interactive tools to enable a better understanding of their energy usage and spending. Through Palmetto’s marketplace, customers can explore custom-tailored solutions like solar panels, battery systems, EV chargers, protection plans, and smart energy devices, while financing some of these products directly through Palmetto LightReach.
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Futurism ☛ Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders
But while the executive actions range in scope, legal experts have called attention to some curious common threads: bizarre typos, formatting errors and oddities, and stilted language — familiar artifacts that have led to speculation that those who penned them might have turned to AI for help.
"Lots of reporting suggested that, this time around, Trump and his lawyers would avoid the sloppy legal work that plagued his first administration so they'd fare better in the courts," Slate journalist and legal expert Mark Joseph Stern remarked last night in a Bluesky post. "I see no evidence of that in this round of executive orders."
"This is poor, slipshod work," he added, before alleging that the actions were "obviously assisted by AI."
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Apple Intelligence is anything but
Why toggle it off? Well, it's stated that it's in beta, but feels more like an altogether unnecessary alpha. Nothing it does is intelligent.
It mangles notification summaries.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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NYOB ☛ US Cloud soon illegal? Trump punches first hole in EU-US Data Deal.
Since the Snowden disclosures we know that the US engages in mass surveillance of EU users by scooping up personal data from US Big Tech. The "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" (PCLOB) is the key US oversight authority for these laws. The New York Times now reports, that Democratic Members of the (officially "independent") PCLOB, have received letters, demanding them to resign by Friday night. This would bring the number of appointed Members below the threshold to have PCLOB operate and question the independence of all other executive redress bodies in the US.
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Techdirt ☛ European Commission Fined For Violating Its Own Data Protection Rules; Also Found To Have Used Privacy-Violating Ads
Shortly after the GDPR came into force on 25 May 2018, somebody noticed that the European Parliament’s Web site was not compliant. A few days later, it was discovered that the European Commission breached its own rules — they went on to claim that the GDPR didn’t actually apply to them in the same way that it did for everyone else. The European Commission did eventually bring in an equivalent set of rules for EU institutions, but conveniently ones with lower fines.
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The Record ☛ Trump admin tells all Democrats on intelligence oversight board to resign | The Record from Recorded Future News
The oversight board is a little-known executive branch agency that is supposed to be run by a bipartisan group of five people, who are nominated by the president and confirmed to six-year terms by the Senate.
It was thrust into the spotlight in 2023 when it split along party lines over recommending that a controversial foreign spying law require court approval for searches of data belonging to U.S. persons swept up by the effort. The statute, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), was renewed without such a mandate. It is up for renewal again next year.
Right now PCLOB has four members, three of whom are Democrats.
[...]
By law, the board must have at least three members to hold a quorum. Without that number of panelists, PCLOB cannot open or close any existing projects, though its staff can continue to work on previously approved efforts, the source close to the agency said.
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Bitdefender ☛ Half a million hotel guests at risk after hackers accessed sensitive data
Troy Hunt's "Have I Been Pwned" service claims that over 430,000 unique email addresses have been exposed in the breach - including guests' names, physical addresses, phone numbers, purchase information, and partial credit card numbers.
Otelier, which was previous known as MyDigitalOffice, is used by hotels around the world to manage guest reservations, transactions, and invoicing.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Coming to an End
That arrangement finally appears to be crumbling. Last week, the Court heard oral arguments in a case concerning the legality of Texas’s age-verification law, one of many such laws passed since 2022. This time around, the justices seemed inclined to erase the distinction between accessing porn online and in person.“Explain to me why the barrier is different online than in a brick-and-mortar setting,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett requested of the lawyer representing the porn-industry plaintiffs. “Do you agree that, at least in theory, brick-and-mortar institutions shouldn’t be treated differently than online?” asked Justice Neil Gorsuch.
If the Court indeed allows Texas’s law to stand, it will mark a turning point in the trajectory of internet regulation. As more and more of our life has moved online, the two-track legal system has produced an untenable situation. And lawmakers are fed up with it. Roughly 130 million people today live in states that have a law like Texas’s, all enacted in the past three years.
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Defence/Aggression
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Lee Peterson ☛ Standing by your values
I don’t have time for the argument that they are doing it for their companies, they are selling their souls. A brave mood would be to stand up for what’s right and to these bullies.
I for one am standing by these values and supporting none of these people, this includes buying any of their products and also where I am moving any monthly income somewhere else.
No more giving money to Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.
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Nick Heer ☛ The TikTok Executive Order
For whatever reason, among the highest of priorities for this new administration is the status of TikTok. Specifically, delaying enforcement of last year’s law requiring U.S. businesses to not facilitate TikTok’s availability lest they be subject to massive penalties. But laws are only as real as those with power demand them to be and, in this case, one man believes he can override both its enforcement and its stated goals.
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Digital Music News ☛ Is TikTok Going Down In Flames? Forgive Me If I Struggle to Care
Perhaps you can guess the major label, based on a protracted licensing stand-off that left some lingering bad blood. But the anger is more palpable in the indie camp, thanks to some less-than-friendly moves by TikTok that effectively marginalized indie label collective bargaining power.
After neutering Merlin and forcing indie to sign their non-negotiable contracts (and like it), it’s not puzzling why indie labels aren’t rushing to the short-form video platform’s defense.
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VOA News ☛ TikTok's US reprieve comes as other countries limit social media use
The U.S. is not the only country looking to regulate social media and other platforms such as online gaming. While the reasons behind the restrictions vary, a growing number of countries already regulate technology or are proposing legislation to restrict its use.
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DeSmog ☛ U.S. Climate Denial Group Using Far-Right to Attack EU Green Policies
The Heartland Institute, which has for decades been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change, claims that it worked with politicians in Austria and Hungary in an attempt to stall the EU’s Nature Restoration Law last year.
In a post on its website published on 10 January, the Heartland Institute claimed that it helped to encourage Hungarian lawmakers to withdraw their support for the legislation in March. The Nature Restoration Law, which eventually passed in June, sets targets for restoring degraded ecosystems, habitats, and species across the EU.
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Cyble Inc ☛ EIAT Role In 2025 Australian Election
As Australia prepares for its 2025 federal election, concerns surrounding the integrity of the electoral process have become a focal point. The Electoral Integrity Assurance Taskforce (EIAT) has played a critical role in highlighting various risks to the country’s democratic systems, offering strategic guidance and support to the Australian Electoral Commissioner to ensure a secure and fair election.
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Techdirt ☛ Why Google And Apple (And Others) Have No Choice: They Can’t Restart TikTok, They Can Only Fight
Instead the Executive Order creates new problems. Because here is Trump trying to claim an unprecedented amount of raw power to decide whether or not to enforce the law. But that lawlessness he’s demonstrating can offer no protection from law. It can offer no protection from anything. And Google and Apple and any of the other providers TikTok needs would be fools to pretend otherwise.
Just run the math: Trump wants these companies to be in his debt. From at least some, like Google, he’s already extracted at least a million dollars in tithes “for his inauguration.” But there’s nothing to limit him from continuing to extract millions more. Meanwhile, if any of these companies serve TikTok they will be staring down a sanction of potentially more than 500 billion dollars (the penalty, especially for the app stores, is $5000 per TikTok user, and even for the other providers it’s still $500 per user). So if the way to avoid that penalty is to depend on Trump’s arbitrary benevolence, Trump could extract up to $499,999,999,999 from each of them, and that’s just to maybe avoid them getting in trouble for violating this law. Stay tuned for what other laws get put on the books next, especially now that the constitutional limits on them have been so relaxed.
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump Puts Drug Trafficker Who Allegedly Contracted Killings Back on the Street
On Day One, Donald Trump freed hundreds of people accused or convicted of assaulting cops, some even treated as terrorists at sentencing.
On Day Two, Donald Trump freed a global drug trafficker accused of arranging murder-for-hire.
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The Independent UK ☛ Michael Fanone tells Stewart Rhodes to 'go f*** himself' live on CNN
Michael Fanone, a former police officer injured in the January 6 US Capitol riot, told Stewart Rhodes to "go f*** himself" live on CNN after the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group said he had "no regrets" over the 2021 insurrection.
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India Times ☛ Capitol Hill Riot: 'Can't whitewash blood, feces, and terror': Judge on Trump's pardons for capitol [insurrectionists]
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly also criticised the pardons while dismissing charges. “What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions,” she said. “Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.”
The January 6 attack left more than 140 police officers injured as [insurrectionists], armed with flagpoles, bats, Tasers, and bear spray, stormed the Capitol. During his campaign, Trump had pledged to pardon those involved, describing them as “patriots” and “political prisoners.”
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NPR ☛ Trump gave pardons to hundreds of violent Jan. 6 [insurrectionists]. Here's what they did
Police officers who were injured by the [insurrectionists] on Jan. 6 condemned Trump's action as a "betrayal."
"It's a miserable miscarriage of justice," said former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who was repeatedly assaulted that day.
Gonell told NPR that he was set to appear in court for the sentencing of a man who attacked him with a PVC pipe. That sentencing is now canceled. And in the hours since Trump signed the pardon proclamation, Gonell said his phone had repeatedly buzzed as the Justice Department notified him that people who had physically attacked him were being released from prison.
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Michigan Advance ☛ U.S. Senate Republicans have little to say about Trump pardons of 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants
As of early January the government had charged just over 1,580 people for crimes related to the [insurrection], 608 of whom were charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement. Nearly a third of those charged with assaulting officers used a dangerous or deadly weapon, according to the Justice Department.
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France24 ☛ Musk's gesture "very much a fascist salute" driven by attention-grabbing, expert says - France 24
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Truthdig ☛ Elon Musk Scrambles UK Politics With Misinformed Tweets
Contrary to Musk’s claims, the U.K. media and government have not been ignoring the story or covering it up. A scandal in Rotherham was the first story to reach a national audience, broken by The Times of London in 2011, and was followed up by investigative reporting by the BBC that revealed child prostitution gangs operating in some 50 Pakistani communities across England and Wales. Beginning in 2013, the Conservative government and independent agencies launched inquiries and reports, including a large, well-funded public probe, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which ran for eight years and reported in 2022.
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Sightline Media Group ☛ Army lawyer sentenced for deleting files, lying about Russian contacts
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Kyle Ford ☛ Meet Vitamin (C)haos
Let’s be real. Things will be bleak for the next few years.
Tuning out entirely is a natural instinct, but unfortunately many people won’t have that luxury.
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Wired ☛ Elon Musk Plays DOGE Ball—and Hits America’s Geek Squad
One thing is clear—this ends United States Digital Service as it previously existed, and marks a new, and maybe perilous era for the USDS, which I have been enthusiastically covering since its inception. The 11-year-old agency sprang out of the high-tech rescue squad salvaging the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that almost tanked the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who used internet-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; the nimble “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government tech as nifty as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked out of the agency’s funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. The USDS typically took on projects that were mired in centi-million contracts and never completed—delivering superior results within weeks. It would embed its employees in agencies that requested help, being careful to work collaboratively with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the different systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom.
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404 Media ☛ Hundreds of Subreddits Are Considering Banning All Links to X
Hundreds of subreddits are considering banning all links to X.com in response to Elon Musk’s salute at a Donald Trump inauguration rally that was celebrated by Nazis as being a Nazi salute. The moderators of dozens of those subreddits have said that they have decided they will ban all links to X.
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The Register UK ☛ Trump ‘waved a white flag to Chinese hackers,’ senator says
US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said the Department of Homeland Security's directive to fire everyone on its advisory committees – including its cybersecurity panels and the Cyber Safety Review Board – sends a strong signal to China. That safety board in particular was investigating Beijing's Salt Typhoon intrusions into telecoms networks.
"Within his first two days in office, Donald Trump has already waved a white flag to Chinese [intruders]," he told The Register.
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TruthOut ☛ “Citizens United” Allowed 44% of Trump’s Election to Be Funded by 10 Megadonors
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House comes almost exactly 15 years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Citizens United ruling, which opened the floodgates for corporations and billionaires to pour unlimited money into elections. At Trump’s inauguration on Monday, the front row included several of the world’s richest and most powerful men, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Their collective net worth is over $1 trillion. For more on money in politics and the legacy of Citizens United, we speak with Brendan Fischer, the deputy executive director at Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. “Democrats and Republicans have both embraced super PACs and embraced the megadonors that fund them, but Trump is taking this to another level,” says Fischer, who notes that about 44% of Trump’s election was funded by just 10 megadonors.
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Digital Music News ☛ Instagram Reportedly Poaching Top Fentanylware (TikTok) Stars & Producers
Instagram is reportedly taking advantage of TikTok’s absence from app stores by offering creators large bonuses for posting exclusively to Reels. With TikTok’s continued absence from both Fashion Company Apple and Google’s app stores, Instagram is using the opportunity to secure exclusivity deals with some of the platform’s biggest creators.
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New York Times ☛ CapCut, a Video-Editing App From ByteDance, Returns for U.S. Users
Other apps from the company behind TikTok, including CapCut and Lemon8, went dark this weekend before flickering back. The federal law banning Fentanylware (TikTok) also applies to them.
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The Straits Times ☛ Under Convicted Felon, could Fentanylware (TikTok) become China’s bargaining chip?
Refusing to sell Fentanylware (TikTok) to the Americans could help Beijing assert its stance in what it sees as US bullying.
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LRT ☛ Lithuanian defence minister criticises Social Democrats for using TikTok
With some countries restricting Fentanylware (TikTok) use for government officials and the United States set to ban it, Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė has criticised her Social Democratic Party (LSDP) for using the social control media platform.
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Digital Music News ☛ The Fentanylware (TikTok) Rollercoaster Went Into Overdrive This Weekend — Here’s the Whirlwind Summary
What happened to Fentanylware (TikTok) over the weekend? It’s complicated. Just hours before the Fentanylware (TikTok) ban deadline (January 19th at 12 am EST) the service shut down in the United States, triggering mass-panic among Fentanylware (TikTok) addicts nationwide.
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Availability Update: Access Still Blocked on Fashion Company Apple App Store, Surveillance Giant Google Play Store; App Restored for Existing Users — Plus Convicted Felon Signs Executive Order Delaying Ban
Where is Fentanylware (TikTok) down in the US?
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Digital Music News ☛ Dictator Officially Grants Fentanylware (TikTok) a 75-Day Stay on Ban—Apple, Surveillance Giant Google Still Blocking New Installs
President Convicted Felon has signed an executive order that gives Fentanylware (TikTok) a 75-Day stay on the ban signed into law by President Biden. Fashion Company Apple and Surveillance Giant Google are still blocking the app from their respective app stores, preventing new installs.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Dictator suspends Fentanylware (TikTok) ban, signs tech-focused executive orders
President The Insurrectionist has issued an executive order that suspends the U.S. government’s ban of Fentanylware (TikTok) for 75 days. The directive was included in a batch of technology-focused executive orders that Convicted Felon signed late Monday. Another renamed the United States Digital Service, a government office that helps maintain federal websites, and granted it new responsibilities.
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Environment
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Omicron Limited ☛ NZ's climate policies are no longer enough to keep warming at 1.5°C—here's what needs to happen
New Zealand is no exception. Current climate policies are no longer a sufficient contribution to the global effort to keep warming at 1.5°C, according to the Climate Change Commission's first review of the country's 2050 climate target.
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Pro Publica ☛ David Fotouhi, Trump’s EPA No. 2, Represented Companies Accused of Pollution
David Fotouhi, a lawyer who recently challenged a ban on asbestos, worked to roll back climate regulations and water protections while serving in the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first administration.
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Doc Searls ☛ And Now the #HughesFire
Note that the Palisades and Eaton Fires are still not fully contained, though we haven’t been worried about them in a while. The same will happen with the Hughes Fire. While it is currently 0% contained, that does not mean it hasn’t been slowed or halted along stretches of its perimeter. Full containment means firefighters are sure the fire will not spread beyond control lines. And they are very cautious about the numbers they share. The winds later tonight and tomorrow are still a concern, and thousands of people remain evacuated.
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The Nation ☛ In Our New Climate Reality, There Is No Getting Back to Normal
You might think the harrowing scenes of Los Angeles burning would elicit a similar reckoning in our national conversation, but almost nothing resembling those stark, factual, and, yes, alarming sentences will be found in the pages of our august organs of elite opinion. Rather than such clear language about our global emergency—the all-important context in which LA’s situation must be understood—the mainstream response has largely sought to contain the wildfire narrative within an Overton window of acceptable, i.e., unalarming, discourse. Much of the media is treating LA’s tragedy as extraordinary, yes, and somehow related to climate change, but ultimately manageable and preventable—if only smarter state and local policies and protocols are implemented.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ After the fires, one topic is taboo: What should be built differently?
More bluntly, Mark Ryavec, a former L.A. City Council legislative analyst and now acerbic critic of City Hall, is calling for a dead stop on rebuilding in Palisades “without first examining what happened there and applying lessons that may be learned to reform building codes and significantly increase the capacity of the local firefighting water system.”
The orders “will allow property owners to more quickly start rebuilding — with the same building materials and fire safety requirements that failed to protect over 10,000 homes,” he said in an opinion piece.
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Omicron Limited ☛ The ash left behind by the Los Angeles wildfires might be toxic, experts warn
Experts warn that the blazes unleashed complex chemical reactions on paint, furniture, building materials, cars, electronics and other belongings, turning ordinary objects into potentially toxic ash that requires protective gear to handle safely. The ash could include harmful lead, asbestos or arsenic, as well as newer synthetic materials.
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Energy/Transportation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Solar power surpasses coal as EU energy source
Solar energy has become the EU’s fastest-growing power source, contributing 11% to its supply. Overall, strong growth in solar and wind have boosted the share of renewables to 47%, up from 34% in 2019.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Lesetja Kganyago scoffs at bitcoin as strategic reserve
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday, Kganyago warned that governments should be careful to avoid the influence of “lobbyists” who have “a particular interest in a particular product” wanting to impose it on societies.
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YLE ☛ People who bike or walk to work call in sick less, THL study finds
The most physically active commuters had an average of 4.5 fewer annual sick leave days than their less active counterparts, according to the health agency.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Deseret Media ☛ Elephants can't pursue their release from a Colorado zoo because they're not human, court says
The ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court follows a similar court defeat in New York in 2022 for an elephant named Happy at the Bronx Zoo in a case brought by an animal rights group. Rulings in favor of the animals would have allowed lawyers for both Happy and the elephants at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs — Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo — to pursue a long-held legal process for prisoners to challenge their detention and possibly be sent to live in an elephant sanctuary instead.
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Overpopulation
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Overpopulation ☛ “America Needs More People”
That’s according to the editorial board of the New York Times, arguing for expanding immigration into the United States. Based on comments, most of their subscribers disagree.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Ravi Dwivedi: The Arduous Luxembourg Visa Process
In 2024, I was sponsored by The Document Foundation (TDF) to attend the LibreOffice annual conference in Luxembourg from the 10th to the 12th of October. Being an Indian passport holder, I needed a visa to visit Luxembourg. However, due to my Kenya trip coming up in September, I ran into a dilemma: whether to apply before or after the Kenya trip.
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Site36 ☛ German Supreme Court sends six antifascists to pre-trial detention, solidarity actions in several cities
Seven people wanted for attacks on right-wing extremists turned themselves in on Monday. Arrest warrants have been issued for them from Germany and Hungary. All of them face trial in Budapest with very high penalties. Seven Antifa activists turned themselves in to the authorities on Monday.
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FAIR ☛ As Trump II Begins, Bezos Swaps Scrutiny for ‘Storytelling’
As the Washington Post faces a staff rebellion and plummeting subscription rates, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has introduced a new mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Prince Harry settles suit with Murdoch media after apology
The Duke of Sussex would have faced a high legal bill even if he had won the case. Harry had accused Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers of unlawfully spying on him.
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The Register UK ☛ Meta and X sign up to EC code of conduct on hate speech
Under Digital Services Act, monitors will be allowed to report abusive language and platforms should respond in 1 day
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The Register UK ☛ Microsoft to join CISPE following legal spat over licensing
Microsoft is to become the latest member of CISPE months after negotiating a settlement with the trade association of European cloud providers over alleged anti-competitive software practices. However, not all in the group are happy with the enrollment.
A senior spokesperson for the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers of Europe confirmed that its 39th associate will be the Redmond-based cloud and software titan, telling us the group is "representative" of the region's industry "and that includes hyperscalers."
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Silicon Angle ☛ Google reportedly invests $1B+ in OpenAI rival Anthropic
The cash infusion comes on top of the $2 billion that Google has already provided to the artificial intelligence developer. Separately, Anthropic is said to be raising $2 billion from a group of institutional investors led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The latter deal is expected to value the company at $60 billion.
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[Repeat] APNIC ☛ Concluding the ICP-2 principles consultation
The feedback period for the proposed ICP-2 principles has officially concluded. Close to 300 responses were received from the different Internet communities associated with each Regional Internet Registry (RIR). Table 1 shows the breakdown of responses by region.
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The Washington Post ☛ TikTok is back from a ban, but users feel burned and some are leaving
A number of users reported searches on anti-Trump hashtags and “fascism” were being hidden Monday and Tuesday. Some people are deleting the app over the shift.
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Jason Becker ☛ Compassion When I Cannot Offer Forgiveness
My ruminations were about both accountability and forgiveness. Despite that, I did not actually forgive Vincent. Shortly after I wrote that post, after continuing to read his blog for a bit to see where things went, I decided to cancel my Tinylytics subscription and unfollow his posts from the few places I paid attention.
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The Independent UK ☛ Meta denies claims it is pushing users to follow accounts linked to Trump team
Meta has denied claims from some users that it is pushing them to follow social media accounts linked to US president Donald Trump and his administration.
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Techdirt ☛ Paramount And CBS Willing To Kiss Trump’s Ass In Exchange For Merger Approvals
For years many press outlets (and contrarian engagement pundits like Matt Stoller) tried to argue that the Trump GOP was now “serious about antitrust reform,” “reining in corporate power,” or “holding Big Tech Accountable.” The argument was that because Trumpism claims to be “populist,” it could be convinced to implement serious anti-corporatist antitrust reform that would help the public.
Of course that’s a naïve, violent misread of how authoritarianism works; kleptocrats are only interested in leveraging government power against corporate power if it’s of specific benefit to them personally.
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Techdirt ☛ The Emptiness Of Zuck’s Promise To Move ‘Biased’ Trust & Safety From California To Texas
I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it’s not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I’m going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly appears to be just a flat out lie.
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VOA News ☛ Murdoch's UK tabloids apologize to Prince Harry, admit intruding on Diana
It was the first time News Group has acknowledged wrongdoing at The Sun, a paper that once sold millions of copies with its formula of sports, celebrities and sex — including topless women on Page 3.
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IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Patrik Hammarén appointed as President of Nokia Technologies and member of the Nokia Group Leadership Team
Hammarén joined Nokia in 2007 and has been acting President of Nokia Technologies since October 2024. Prior to this role, Patrik held several senior positions in Nokia Technologies’ patent licensing business including: Chief Licensing Officer Wireless Technologies; Vice President, Head of IoT Licensing Program; and Head of Patent Licensing Greater China. During this time, he was heavily involved in the renewal of Nokia’s major smartphone license agreements and the growth of Nokia’s IoT licensing program.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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uni Northwestern ☛ Deserted By Fact-Checking
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook is eliminating fact-checking may amount to a double whammy for people living in this country’s ever-expanding news deserts.
Having lost their primary local news sources, these communities often turn to social media and other alternatives to try to stay informed. Now one of those key sources is removing safeguards against the spread of misinformation.
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[Old] Africa Center for Strategic Studies ☛ Mapping a Surge of Disinformation in Africa – Africa Center
The proliferation of disinformation is a fundamental challenge to stable and prosperous African societies. The scope of these intentional efforts to distort the information environment for a political end is accelerating. The 189 documented disinformation campaigns in Africa are nearly quadruple the number reported in 2022. Given the opaque nature of disinformation, this figure is surely an undercount.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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NDTV ☛ Musk Calls To "Defund" Wikipedia After His Gesture Compared To Nazi Salute
During the Donald Trump inauguration, Elon Musk extended his right arm towards the crowd in an upward angle twice. It was compared to a Nazi salute.
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RTL ☛ Of perspectives and propaganda: Musk, Wikipedia founder in row over how to describe 'Nazi salute'
The gesture was controversial enough, but now come the sub-controversies: Elon Musk is trolling Wikipedia and encouraging its defunding after a description of his recent flourish, seen by some as a Hitler salute, appeared on the encyclopedic website.
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RFA ☛ Vietnam arrests Protestant pastor for ‘anti-state propaganda’ – Radio Free Asia
He became a pastor in 2011 and formerly served as administrator of Chuong Bo Protestant Church under the independent Mennonite Church. He is currently a member of the Interfaith Council of Vietnam, which advocates for religious freedom.
He has been repeatedly harassed by Vietnamese authorities, including in an incident in 2014 when police forcibly entered his home and beat him up.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK man charged under Article 23 security law over 'seditious' online posts
Li was accused of “publishing statements, photos, and/or pictures on Facebook with an intent to bring people into hatred, contempt or disaffection against” Hong Kong, and inciting violence or unlawful acts between March 29 last year and January 21.
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VOA News ☛ Navalny lawyers get jail time for doing their job
[...] VOA Russian spoke to legal experts who voice concern about the ability of Russian activists to get proper legal representation in the future after Navalny lawyers got up to 5½ years in prison for essentially doing their job, something that did not happen even in the Soviet times.
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Lou Plummer ☛ Let's Talk about Some Uncomfortable Topics, Shall We?
This is not the paragraph where I am going to wrap everything up into a neat package and hand it to you so that you know what to do. I wish I knew. I know that as angry as I am, I also have to practice empathy, understanding, and forgiveness, or I'll just be a shitty excuse for a person. I also have to resist the urge to just get along with people and take the easier and softer way of ignoring things that need to be dealt with. It's a balancing act and a hard one. Just do the best you can and act from a loving place as much as possible,
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EFF ☛ Protecting “Free Speech” Can’t Just Be About Targeting Political Opponents
But noticeably absent from the Executive Order is any commitment to government transparency. In the Santa Clara Principles, a guideline for online content moderation authored by EFF and other civil society groups, we state that “governments and other state actors should themselves report their involvement in content moderation decisions, including data on demands or requests for content to be actioned or an account suspended, broken down by the legal basis for the request." This Executive Order doesn’t come close to embracing such a principle.
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BIA Net ☛ Iranian rapper sentenced to death after deportation from Turkey
The 37-year-old artist, who lived in İstanbul from 2018 to 2023, was deported to Iran by Turkish authorities in December, despite his pending asylum application.
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CBC ☛ Meta accused of pro-Trump bias after #Democrat hashtag blocked on Instagram
Social media users noticed searches for #Democrat, #DNC and other related terms like #TheLeft were not returning any results for at least several hours, while searches for terms like #Republican, #RNC and #TheRight yielded millions of posts.
People posted screenshots to other social media platforms showing messages that read, "We've hidden these results," after searching Democratic hashtags on Instagram.
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India Times ☛ Journalist among 2 held for 'offensive' comments on Maha Kumbh, Hindu deities in UP
Kamran Alvi was arrested after he posted a video related to the Maha Kumbh. It offended some people. The higher authorities took note of the video. Alvi, a journalist with over 9,000 followers on Facebook, operates a news portal. Police have said that they are investigating others connected to the circulation of the video.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Georgia: Journalists and dissent under targeted attack
"Today, it is me. Tomorrow, it could be anyone who dares to dream of just, democratic, European Georgia — untouched by Russian influence, unshackled by oppression. Fight while there is still time," the imprisoned journalist warned from behind bars.
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VOA News ☛ Reporter's Notebook: Navigating journalism in the 'new' Syria
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BIA Net ☛ Journalists face prison over coverage of Kurdish reporters killed in northern Syria
The İstanbul prosecutor's indictment claims Daştan and Bilgin were “terrorist organization members” who were "neutralized" in counterterrorism operations. Reporting their deaths as killings by security forces constitutes a criminal act, according to the charges.
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ANF News ☛ 7 journalists arrested for protesting murder of colleagues remain in prison
The lawyers said that no action had been taken in the file for a month and that their clients were still in prison despite this. They added that their freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the rights to assembly and marches had been violated.
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Press Gazette ☛ Laura Wilshaw named next ITV News editor
Wilshaw is joining from ITN stablemate Channel 4 News where she has been deputy editor since August 2022.
Her appointment is a return to ITV News, having previously been senior programme editor for News at Ten during the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and formerly head of home news.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFA ☛ Inside the secret, dangerous journey to flee Tibet
For decades, tens of thousands of Tibetans — primarily children — have left their homelands never to return again.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Would Schedule F scrap due process rights for federal workers? OMB nominee won’t say
Calling the shift to Schedule F a move that appears to open the door to “political cronyism,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., asked OMB nominee Russell Vought during his Senate Budget Committee confirmation hearing Wednesday whether workers fired under the classification would be afforded “the due process rights that merit-based civil servants have.”
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The Independent UK ☛ Bishop Budde’s ‘woke’ sermon wasn’t an ambush – it was a reminder of basic Christian values
I appreciate that Christianity has been overwhelmed by people loudly proclaiming they know best – often in extremely wealthy megachurches or hastily assumed baptisms in an apparent attempt to fend off sexual assault investigations – but when it comes down to it, basic Christian values are laid out in the New Testament. Love thy neighbour. Cast not the first stone. A saviour is born in the humblest of dwellings.
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Spiegel ☛ Finland Confronts Its WWII History: "If You Only Knew How Many Jews I Have Shot"
But some elements of Finnish society want to hear nothing about it and see the volunteers as Finnish patriots - particularly supporters of the right-wing populist party Perussuomalaiset (formerly known as the True Finns but now called the Finns Party), but also the military and others on the right of the political spectrum. According to the commonly accepted narrative, the Finnish SS members had nothing to do with war crimes and the Holocaust – or, if they did, they were forced to participate against their will.
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New York Times ☛ Single Parents Should Get as Much Paid Leave as Couples, Spanish Court Rules
The decision, by a court in the southeastern region of Murcia this month, is the first to stem from a November ruling by Spain’s constitutional court that barred discrimination against children born into single-parent families.
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Press Gazette ☛ LGBTQ+ journalists ‘disappointed’ and ‘frustrated' by Meta hate speech changes
On 7 January chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp. He said the company would cease moderating topics that are “subject of frequent political discourse and debate”, like immigration and gender identity, as well as ditch its third-party fact checking service in favour of a community notes system which is seen on Elon Musk’s platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
On the same day Meta also made updates to its Hateful Conduct policy, stating users are able to describe LGBTQ+ people as “mentally ill” and “abnormal” simply because they are LGBTQ+.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Krebs On Security ☛ MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years
The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas broadband developers complain to Senate about allocation of state, federal grants
The Department of Commerce has held a prominent role in selecting recipients of grants to address gaps where lack of private investment left merchants and residents with slow or nonexistent service. Upgrades to high-speed broadband have been touted as a key to education, economic growth, pubic safety and quality of life in urban and rural areas.
So far, the Department of Commerce said about $660 million has been earmarked for high-speed internet enhancements statewide.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Why Netflix is going big on live sports with the NFL and WWE
Alongside a landmark partnership with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and winning the broadcast rights in the United States for the 2027 and 2031 Women's World Cups, the streaming giant has demonstrated its ambition to become the dominant online platform for live sports.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Netflix is 'running away with the streaming market'
The year 2024 was pivotal for Netflix as it ventured into live sports. It partnered with World Wrestling Entertainment, broadcast two US National Football League games on Christmas Day and secured US broadcast rights for the 2027 and 2031 Fifa Women’s World Cups.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his “first buddy”
This is – incredibly – even worse than it sounds. Marcus Bokkerink, the outgoing head of the CMA, was amazing, and he had charge over the CMA's Digital Markets Unit, the largest, best-staffed technical body of any competition regulator, anywhere in the world. The DMU uses its investigatory powers to dig deep into complex monopolistic businesses like Amazon, and just last year, the DMU was given new enforcement powers that would let it custom-craft regulations to address tech monopolization (again, like Amazon's).
But it's even worse. The CMA and DMU are the headwaters of a global system of super-effective Big Tech regulation. The CMA's deeply investigated reports on tech monopolists are used as the basis for EU regulations and enforcement actions, and these actions are then re-run by other world governments, like South Korea and Japan: [...]
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Trademarks
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TTAB Blog ☛ Opposer Proves Prior Use of Common Law REVOLUTION JEWELRY WORKS Marks, Wins Opposition Battle
Opposer Revolution Jewelry Works survived some harsh Board sanctions for its attorneys' violation of the Standard Protective Order [TTABlogged here] and emerged victorious in this consolidated opposition to registration of the marks REVOLUTION JEWELRY in standard character form, and REVOLUTION JEWELRY DESIGNS in the design form shown first below [JEWELRY and JEWELRY DESIGNS disclaimed]. The Board found those two marks likely to cause confusion with opposer's common law marks REVOLUTION JEWELRY WORKS and the two marks shown second below, all for jewelry. The Board declared, "[t]he crux of the parties’ dispute in this case rests on priority." Revolution Jewelry Works, Inc. v. Stonebrook Jewelry, LLC DBA Revolution Jewelry, Oppositions Nos. 91248007 and 91248009 (January 15, 2025) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Cynthia C. Lynch).
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TTAB Blog ☛ Precedential No. 2: TTAB Sustains Section 14(3) Opposition to LA MONTSERRATINA for Meat Products Based on Reputation in USA Without Use
Ruling that the potential harm to Opposer Plumrose Holdings' reputation in the United States gave it "standing" despite lack of use of its marks in this country, the Board sustained an opposition to registration of the mark LA MONTSERRATINA in the form shown immediately below, for ham, sausage, and other meat products, on the ground of misrepresentation of source under Section 14(3) of the Lanham Act. Opposer's Venezuelan company has sold meat products in Venezuela since 1949 under the LA MONTSERRATINA mark, and since 2011 under the mark shown second below. Plumrose Holding Ltd. v. USA Ham LLC, Opposition No. 91272970 (January 7, 2025) [precedential] (Opinion by Judge Thomas L. Casagrande).
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Tech Industry Urges EU to Halt Italy's Overreaching Anti-Piracy Measures
The CCIA, which represents global tech firms including Amazon, Cloudflare and Google, is sounding the alarm over Italy's "Piracy Shield" blocking scheme. The group's European branch urges the EU Commission to step in to prevent overblocking and to promote transparency. Additional measures requiring Internet services to actively report illegal activity on their networks are seen as problematic too.
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[Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ GEMA Files Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Suno
“Generative AI tools such as the music tool from Suno Inc. make uninhibited use of compositions and texts that do not belong to them,” added GEMA supervisory board chairman Ralf Weigand. “If we don’t want to do without man-made music in the future, we urgently need a legal framework that guarantees authors an appropriate share of the value created by AI providers.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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