Links 26/01/2025: Chatbot Woes and UnitedHealth Data Breach (Windows TCO)
Contents
- Leftovers
- Standards/Consortia
- Science
- Career/Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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The Hindu ☛ Republic Day 2025 LIVE updates: President Droupadi Murmu unfurls the national flag at Delhi’s Kartavya Path
This January 26 carries extra significance as India’s Constitution, which came into effect on this historic day in 1950, completes 75 years.
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Jamie Lawrence ☛ I disagree
All of life, like ALL of it, requires us to either engage in some flexibility with the people we interact with or we need to choose some selective ignorance about them. Whether it’s local communities, society at large, sports clubs, schools, business, whatever: We all live in a shared world, with shared infrastructure, shared spaces, shared climate and, in order to live and enjoy some of the privileges of this wonderful life, we need to be able to share them with people we don’t fully agree with.
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Jamie Crisman ☛ Blogging and Gardening
Lots of discussions about social media going on lately. A failing of the tech industry that most people find it easiest to be on giant cruise ship. And then jump to another cruise ship once the buffet starts giving people food poisoning. Tech industry failed to make it easier for everyone to use sailboats. Ranting metaphor aside, I do think there’s a lot of value in owning your own space. At the very least own your own domain name and you can change boat from time to time. Some people do not know what to do with their own site even if they had one, so I want to talk about two “personal site” styles.
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Don Marti ☛ security headers for a static site
This site now has an OPML version (XML) of the blogroll. What can I do with it? It seems like the old "Share your OPML" site is no more. Any ideas?
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Manuel Moreale ☛ Tiny corners
The more I look around the web the more I’m convinced we should all treasure our own tiny corners of the web. My site is precious. Precious for me. It is mine to do what I want. I can build it, I can destroy it, I can shape it, I can let it rot. I can change it or let it stay still. I can make it super busy or let it go dormant. I can make it welcoming or hostile. I’m in charge of all those decisions and no one can come here and tell me what I should do with it. The only moderation rules are the ones dictated by my morals and I own the responsibility of my words. My name is on it, my face is on it. I write and say the things I want to write and say at this very specific moment in time, based on the person I am and the things I believe in, and no one can force me to do otherwise. There’s something incredibly liberating about all this.
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Baldur Bjarnason ☛ First outlines of a plan: thinking strategically about a modern tech and media business
When your work is caught in an unproductive rhythm and pace, that means you’re stuck in a rut. I kept writing, but without a plan or strategy for how it would help me work and this site is explicitly for work. Instead of helping my career, the newsletter, the essay writing, and the blog felt like an anchor I was dragging along behind me. Or, worse, a potential distraction.
The newsletter and the ongoing commentary on the tech industry’s self-destruction had become a chore – a gruelling obligation with no reward.
It was time to pause and rethink things.
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Austin Kleon ☛ The cease-and-desist of winter - Austin Kleon
“The old is dead, and I don’t know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there’s something that can come out of experimentation. It’s somewhat unsettling, but it’s a hopeful thing in a way. I’ve been here before, lots of times.” RIP filmmaker and artist David Lynch. [...]
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Amit Gawande ☛ Rotting Links on the Web
A while ago, I and a few others from the Micro.blog community did a weekly roundup of posts shared and discussed on the timeline. I was reminded of one such post from 6 years ago recently. What saddened me was that most links mentioned in that digest are unavailable today. The posts are either unreachable at the shared links or broken with missing content or images.
The link rot is painfully prevalent on the web today, as this statistic from early 2024 highlights.
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Adam Newbold ☛ Blog Question Challenge 2025
I started this particular blog a year ago because Robb kept reminding me that I needed to share my App Defaults. So, I guess the answer is “friendly peer pressure”. I’ve had other blogs before, each an artifact of an attempt to begin a regular public writing practice that never really took hold, and each lost to time like the grains of colored sand from a completed Tibetan Buddhist mandala, now flowing down a river, having once existed as something and now as something else, reflecting the impermanence and transformation of all things. But I suppose it’s also nice to just have a place to share your writing every now and then.
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Elliot C Smith ☛ Second Principles
Not many problems have a single, straightforward guide to best practice, so starting from 'whatever everyone else is doing' often still requires some experimentation. Looking across the spectrum of what people consider best can help filter out the common, critical components.
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Lee Peterson ☛ Intentionality: Only buying things when you absolutely have to and clearing out
I’ve been thinking a lot about reducing things, be it mental load or physical things like electronics or even furniture.
Some of this is an interest in being more intentional and my impact on the environment and my physical space. I look around and consoles aside I’m doing ok, I only buy what I need when I need it most of the time.
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Standards/Consortia
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Hackaday ☛ Soviet Wired Radio, How It Worked
At the height of the Cold War, those of us on the western side of the wall had plenty of choice over our radio listening, even if we stuck with our country’s monolithic broadcaster. On the other side in the Soviet Union, radio for many came without a choice of source, in the form of wired radio systems built into all apartments. [Railways | Retro Tech | DIY] grew up familiar with these wired radios, and treats us to a fascinating examination of their technology, programming, and ultimate decline.
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W Evan Sheehan ☛ On the Importance of Stable IDs
I’m a big booster of RSS, so having an RSS feed was MVP[1] for me when I was setting up my website. I copy-pasta’ed the example feed template from the Eleventy documentation into my project and moved on. I didn’t know much about the various feed formats, and I had very little interest in learning about them. See if you can spot the issue with the example template that bit me this weekend.
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[Old] Dan Cătălin Burzo ☛ So you want to add a web feed
You’ve decided you want a web feed for your website’s content.
Some popular CMSes have you covered with built-in feeds. For WordPress, an RSS feed is available by default at your-website.com/feed, so it’s just a matter of making the feed visible in your HTML templates and you’re good to go.
But if you have to implement one from scratch, this guide goes through the basics. To keep it short, it has opinions without much space offered to alternatives and nuance.
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Science
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Wired ☛ 5 Physics Equations Everyone Should Know
All the tech we rely on, from cars to smartphones, was engineered using physics. You don’t need to know the science to use these things. But a well-rounded human should understand at least some of the key concepts—along with some music, art, history, and economics. Robert Heinlein said it all in Time Enough for Love: [...]
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Career/Education
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Sean Goedecke ☛ Playing politics is how senior engineers protect their team
When I write about doing politically valuable work in big tech companies, I often get comments accusing me of trying to get ahead at the expense of my colleagues. In fact, the reverse is true. If you’re a senior engineer or above, it is your responsibility to effectively navigate tech company politics. You owe it to the more junior members of your team.
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LRT ☛ Librarians bring books to Lithuanian rural readers: let’s not leave people with only TVs
If it were not for benevolent librarians and volunteers, readers in Lithuania’s rural areas would have much less access to books.
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Hardware
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G8GKA ☛ Black ADF4351 Eval Boards
None of the differences described here are a major issue, if you are aware of them.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Futurism ☛ A Mother Says an AI Startup's Chatbot Drove Her Son to Suicide. Its Response: the First Amendment Protects "Speech Allegedly Resulting in Suicide"
Now, Character.AI — which received a $2.7 billion cash injection from tech giant Google last year — has responded to the suit, brought by the boy's mother, in a motion to dismiss. Its defense? Basically, that the First Amendment protects it against liability for "allegedly harmful speech, including speech allegedly resulting in suicide."
In TechCrunch's analysis, the motion to dismiss may not be successful, but it likely provides a glimpse of Character.AI's planned defense (it's now facing an additional suit, brought by more parents who say their children were harmed by interactions with the site's bots.)
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California State University Northridge ☛ Plant Yourself in Campus Life: Join the Community Garden
Among the many resources around campus that students use to escape from classes, there is one tucked away in the Sequoia Hall Courtyard that stands out. Populated with growing fruits and vegetables, along with lush greenery and contrasting flowers, is the Marilyn Magaram Center (MMC). The MMC Wellness Garden is a spot where visitors can immerse in nature and learn about gardening and nutrition through hands-on experiences.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ Subject: A lose-lose situation Preview: The US withdrawal from the WHO will hurt us all
It is true that the US is far and away the biggest financial supporter of the WHO. The US contributed $1.28 billion over the two-year period covering 2022 and 2023. By comparison, the second-largest donor, Germany, contributed $856 million in the same period. The US currently contributes 14.5% of the WHO’s total budget.
But it’s not as though the WHO sends a billion-dollar bill to the US. All member states are required to pay membership dues, which are calculated as a percentage of a country’s gross domestic product. For the US, this figure comes to $130 million. China pays $87.6 million. But the vast majority of the US’s contributions to the WHO are made on a voluntary basis—in recent years, the donations have been part of multibillion-dollar spending on global health by the US government. (Separately, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed $830 million over 2022 and 2023.)
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Ruben Schade ☛ When people judge you for wearing a mask
Anyway. Most people ignore me when I wear a mask, because they’re reasonable or don’t give a schmidt. This is a good thing. But occasionally you’ll get cooked individual who sees it as their mission to call you out. This is my primary strategy to deal with them: [...]
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Mark Hysted ☛ no longer listening to podcasts
I’d hope to bring some podcasts back into my day at some point, but I am currently enjoying the reduced input into my brain. My brain seems to appreciate it too.
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International Business Times ☛ Study Reveals Why Taxi and Ambulance Drivers Are Less Likely to Die from Alzheimer's
The man behind the project, Vishal Patel, wanted to test the theory that professions that require the ability to navigate your environment in real time, might reduce the risk of Alzheimer's.
Patel said, 'The same part of the brain that's involved in creating cognitive spatial maps - which we use to navigate the world around us - is also involved in the development of Alzheimer's disease.
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Lee Peterson ☛ Stepping away from social media and the news
With that in mind I’m taking a step back and have uninstalled all of my social media apps and logged out on my laptop. That means no Mastodon, Blue Sky or Glass. The only app I’m still using is Discord, which does give me a benefit and I appreciate being able to be part of a smaller community.
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Proprietary
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John Gruber ☛ Google Search, More Machine Now Than Man, Begins Requiring JavaScript
But the bottom line is that with this change, Google Search is more of an app than it is a website. A website is a server where you can make requests over the HTTP protocol and get results in HTML format. A server that communicates with clients via executable JavaScript is not a website. Whether it’s a justifiable decision or not, I don’t buy for a second that it’s a necessary decision on Google’s part. Thus I find this decision sad, but given the course Google has been on for the last 15 years or so, I’m also unsurprised. Old original Google was a company of and for the open web. Post 2010-or-so Google is a company that sees the web as a de facto proprietary platform that it owns and controls. Those who experience the web through Google Chrome and Google Search are on that proprietary not-closed-per-se-but-not-really-open web.
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TechCrunch ☛ Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.
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The Register UK ☛ Mysterious backdoor found on select Juniper routers
Once injected, the backdoor, dubbed J-magic by Black Lotus Labs this week, resides in memory only and passively waits for one of five possible network packets to arrive. When one of those magic packet sequences is received by the machine, a connection is established with the sender, and a followup challenge is initiated by the backdoor. If the sender passes the test, they get command-line access to the box to commandeer it.
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Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Group vandalizes Waymo robotaxi in Los Angeles' Beverly Grove neighborhood, police say
A crowd of people damaged a self-driving Waymo vehicle in Los Angeles’ Beverly Grove neighborhood early Saturday, police said.
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Wired ☛ How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI
DeepSeek’s success points to an unintended outcome of the tech cold war between the US and China. US export controls have severely curtailed the ability of Chinese tech firms to compete on AI in the Western way—that is, infinitely scaling up by buying more chips and training for a longer period of time. As a result, most Chinese companies have focused on downstream applications rather than building their own models. But with its latest release, DeepSeek proves that there’s another way to win: by revamping the foundational structure of AI models and using limited resources more efficiently.
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Pivot to AI ☛ AI doom cranks present new AI benchmark ‘Humanity’s Last Exam’ — be afraid!
The very first thing that will happen is LLMs being trained to this specific benchmark — as happens with every AI benchmark. Humanity’s Last Exam is the FrontierMath grift with a fresh, more dramatic coat of paint.
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Ben Congdon ☛ AI Slop, Suspicion, and Writing Back
The impetus for this post was my recent realization that I’ve developed an involuntary reflex for spotting AI-generated content. The tells are subtle now, but (sadly? tellingly?) this sort of content is seemingly everywhere now once you start looking.
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Deccan Chronicle ☛ Fact-Check: Images of Indira Gandhi in provocative attire are AI-Generated
Is the claim true?: No, the claim is false.
These images are generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
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VOA News ☛ Russian deepfake videos target Ukrainian refugees, including teen
Those statements are total fabrications. Only the first section — footage of the teenager — is real.
The offensive voiceover was likely created using artificial intelligence (AI) to realistically copy her voice, resulting in something known as a deepfake.
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Wired ☛ The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like It
Surprisingly, our new research, published in the Journal of Marketing, finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
This link shows up across different groups, settings, and even countries. For instance, our analysis of data from market research company Ipsos spanning 27 countries reveals that people in nations with lower average AI literacy are more receptive toward AI adoption than those in nations with higher literacy.
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ACM ☛ The Drunken Plagiarists - ACM Queue
Finally, my favorite feature of co-pilot programs is the abject plagiarism. We already know that the text and code being typed out by these things comes from scanning billions of lines of text and source code available in GitHub, but they can even be helpful in unintended ways. A colleague who was taking a night class in distributed systems showed me what happened when his professors (foolishly) suggested the students "use the new tools" in order to become more modern developers. As he accepted more and more of the co-pilot's suggestions, he noticed a pattern: It was as if someone was typing in another file from somewhere else. The coding style itself was one of the clues, but eventually the co-pilot gave itself away completely by saying, "You know there is a file just like this over in this other repo?" In a way, this makes sense. But as part of a homework exercise, it's just hilarious.
The more I've used these tools in my projects, the more I've realized that co-pilots are nothing more than drunken plagiarists, sitting behind you and your code with their hot, gin-soaked breath whispering semantic nothings in your ear. They are not a boon to your work, they are a rubber crutch?one that will cruelly let you down when you need it most. Now, we all just need to get real work done while we wait for this latest hype cycle to die a justified and fiery death.
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Social Control Media
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CBC ☛ TikTok, Meta 'chaos' reminds Canadian businesses of the value of diversification
"Relying on social control media outlets that are run by private billionaires can get a little dangerous," said Mair, co-founder of Mint Cleaning. The cleaning products company attributes 90 per cent of its sales to Instagram, but is also on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook.
"We're kind of at the mercy of them in a way because we do rely on [these platforms], and it's a hard battle for us."
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India Times ☛ Elon Musk: User growth is stagnant, we’re barely breaking even: Elon Musk tells X employees
Banks typically sell loans tied to acquisitions shortly after the deals are closed, but in this case, offloading X's debt has been difficult.
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Kyle Ford ☛ I (Still) Get Around – House of Kyle
Given…well, everything…here’s an updated state of the union. TL;DR? I’m trying to go decentralized as much as possible, and where I can’t, I’m at least trying to use the least worst centralized option. 🙃
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India Times ☛ Meta ads on Threads: Meta tests ads on Threads, its alternative to X
Launched in summer 2023, its debut came eight months after Musk's acquisition of Twitter -- now called X -- when changes like paid subscriptions and reduced content moderation were driving away users and advertisers.
The introduction of advertising on Threads was expected, given that Meta derives most of its revenue from ads across its free platforms.
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Axios ☛ Tinder taps TikTok influencers to share dating app experiences
Young people are finding dating apps more appealing after watching paid influencers on TikTok share their experiences, per Tinder's recent brand sentiment study shared exclusively with Axios.
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India Times ☛ People are hawking TikTok-loaded phones for thousands on eBay, Facebook
People are listing phones preloaded with TikTok for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, Facebook marketplace and other online storefronts - though it is not clear if there are many buyers at those prices.
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Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets
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The Record ☛ UnitedHealth updates number of data breach victims to 190 million
The company paid a $22 million ransom to the cybercrime gang behind the incident, but a dispute among them led to the data being posted on another group’s leak site. Since the attack occurred, Change Healthcare and UnitedHealth have spent months going through the stolen documents to see who needed to be notified.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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India Times ☛ Personal data breach notification, verifiable parental consent, dominate data rules consultation
IT companies or BPO companies are concerned that they may be in breach of the European Union’s General Data Protection Rules (GDPR) if they provide data of their foreign data principals for lawful purposes to the government of India under the DPDP.
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EFF ☛ EFF to Michigan Supreme Court: Cell Phone Search Warrants Must Strictly Follow The Fourth Amendment’s Particularity and Probable Cause Requirements
On appeal, the Court of Appeals made a number of rulings in favor of Mr. Carson, including that evidence from the phone should not have been admitted because the search warrant lacked particularity and was unconstitutional. The government's appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court was accepted and we filed an amicus brief.
In our brief, we argued that the warrant was constitutionally deficient and overbroad, because there was no probable cause for searching the cell phone and that the warrant was insufficiently particular because it failed to limit the search to within a time frame or certain categories of information.
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The Register UK ☛ FortiGate config leaks: Victims' email addresses published
A reminder for those who missed last week's leak: A new band of baddies going by the name of The Belsen Group leaked around 15,000 FortiGate config files online. These were stolen during the 2022 zero-day exploitation of CVE-2022-40684.
Beaumont warned at the time that passwords, some of which were stored in plain text, were - in a portion of cases - also included in the leak, and naturally he withheld these from the data published this week.
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New York Times ☛ The Surveillance Tools That Could Power Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
Apps and ankle monitors that track asylum seekers in real time wherever they go. Databases packed with personal information like fingerprints and faces. Investigative tools that can break into locked phones and search through gigabytes of emails, text messages and other files.
These are pieces of a technology arsenal available to President Trump as he aims to crack down on illegal immigration and carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. To do so, his administration can tap a stockpile of tools built up by Democrats and Republicans that is nearly unmatched in the Western world, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
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The Record ☛ Politicization of intel oversight board could threaten key US-EU data transfer agreement
The agreement, known as the Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework (TDPF), relies on the PCLOB as a “key oversight mechanism introduced by the U.S. to align its surveillance oversight and accountability standards with EU law,” according to Silvia Lorenzo Perez, the EU program director for security, surveillance and human rights at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The PCLOB’s role in ensuring limited bulk data collection by U.S. intelligence agencies is vital for Europe, Perez said.
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Gizmodo ☛ Court Says Feds Must Obtain Warrant to Search FISA Spy Databases
The decision, issued Tuesday night by the eastern district of New York Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall, comes in the case of Agron Hasbajrami, a U.S. resident who was arrested in 2011 and initially pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization. Hasbajrami appealed his case after learning that federal agents had acquired some of the evidence against him through a warrantless search of databases containing communications intercepted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
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Defence/Aggression
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CS Monitor ☛ Police say Jan. 6 pardons carry future risk for law enforcement
The National Association of Police Organizations and other police unions have now opposed the pardons, saying that violence against officers is an attack on America’s tradition of – and appreciation for – law and order.
In opposing the Jan. 6 punishments, Trump supporters charge that social justice [insurrectionists] on the left haven’t been similarly dealt with. But police arrested at least 11,000 people during the 2020 protests, according to a BuzzFeed tally.
“Police ... give meaning to the Constitution,’’ says Michael Scott, a former chief of police in Lauderhill, Florida, and now a criminologist at Arizona State University in Tempe who opposes the pardons. “That [meaning] is essentially being renegotiated. That’s profound stuff.”
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Tim Bray ☛ In The Minority
That’s us. I assume you’re among those horrified at the direction of politics and culture in recent years and especially recent weeks, in the world at large and especially in America. We are a minority. We shouldn’t try to deny it, we should be adults and figure out how to deal with it.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Police investigate Musk salute projected on Tesla factory
Now, German security services have launched an investigation into the suspected use of symbols of anti-constitutional organizations, including the depicted salute itself, the use or display of which is illegal in Germany.
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The Age AU ☛ Auschwitz liberation 80th anniversary: last of the survivors to speak as younger generations forget the Holocaust
Primo Levi wrote, just two years after his release from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945: “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man”.
The Jewish Italian writer struggled for the rest of his life with the vast existential questions raised by the moral void of the Holocaust. And as the world prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, the few remaining survivors of the concentration camps are approaching the end of their own lives as new wars make their warnings as relevant as ever.
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VOA News ☛ One of last Auschwitz survivors makes telling the stories his mission
Furst, now 92, is one of a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors able to share first-person accounts of the horrors they endured, as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' most notorious death camp. Furst is returning to Auschwitz for the annual occasion, his fourth trip to the camp.
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Alabama Reflector ☛ Social media experts are skeptical about the power of new state laws
More states are hoping to rein in the harm that social media can do to teens’ mental health and privacy by approving laws that require age verification or parental consent, prohibit “addictive feeds” or ban the apps for minors. They also are taking social media companies to court.
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The Scotsman ☛ Highly addictive TikTok is allowed in UK but banned in China
China’s ‘spinach’ version of TikTok is full of science experiments you can do at home and patriotic videos. The UK’s ‘opium’ version has drug gangs, misogynists and people pushing make-up for eight-year-olds
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[Repeat] New York Times ☛ TikTok Ban and Trump Executive Order Lead to Tech Company Dilemma
Just hours before the ban took effect, Amazon appeared to comply with the law, according to a New York Times review of the way TikTok’s web traffic is handled. Instead, Akamai Technologies, a Massachusetts-based company that was already helping to deliver TikTok videos to phones, took over more of the technical support.
The change, which was picked up by digital forensics conducted by The Times, was one of the small behind-the scenes-maneuvers that showed how tech companies have diverged in their approach to the TikTok ban.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Molly White ☛ Issue 75 – Absolutely preposterous
There are not very many people outside of the industry-funded, industry-silenced,a and therefore heavily pro-[cryptocurrency] [cryptocurrency] media world who follow [cryptocurrency] full-time. While there are journalists in traditional media who follow [cryptocurrency], they often split their time with broader finance, tech, or politics beats and struggle to dive deeply into the topic or even separate the reality from the marketing and political PR. They also often face editorial pressures to give “equal weight”, as though industry spin and reality are two equally valid perspectives. While I knew this was going to be particularly important work going forward into the new United States political administration, the events of the past week have highlighted that even more than I expected.
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Wired ☛ DOGE Will Allow Elon Musk to Surveil the US Government From the Inside
But under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, committees of the sort DOGE seemed to be shaping up to be have several legal requirements, including making all meetings publicly accessible and requiring a diversity of perspectives on the committee itself. By repurposing the USDS, which was already part of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump managed to skirt both the requirements of a formal advisory committee and the congressional oversight required when creating a new federal agency. In short, it meant DOGE would get more access to sensitive data than an advisory committee would likely have, while offering less transparency.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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India Times ☛ Big Tech wants to plug data centres right into power plants; Utilities say it's not fair
Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly, avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else.
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Interesting Engineering ☛ A new type of superconductivity welcomes magnetic fields
The researchers found that type III superconductors could be realized such that the vortices formed have no cores.
Similar to type II superconductors, these materials allow magnetic fields to penetrate in the form of vortices. However, a key difference is that the vortices lack cores in type III superconductors.
Additionally, type III superconductors are only characterized by one parameter, penetration depth (λ), which governs the behavior of the vortices by determining the depth up to which the magnetic field can penetrate the material.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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FAIR ☛ Media Hype Set Up Tren de Aragua to Serve as Trump’s New Bogeyman
A CNN headline (6/10/24) last June menacingly warned readers about the United States’s latest dial-a-bogeyman, guaranteed to further whip up anti-immigrant vitriol in the country and justify ever more punitive border fortification: “This Is the Dangerous Venezuelan Gang Infiltrating the US That You Probably Know Nothing About But Should.”
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YLE ☛ Finnish university launches security technology programme
Future professionals in security technology will be able to develop corporate security practices and influence societal decision making, according to the University of Jyväskylä, which said its new programme fulfills a critical need.
Its soon-to-be-launched security technology programme covers areas such as radiation, chemical, biological and cyber security. The university emphasised that these sectors are crucial as the world faces increasingly complex threats.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Scam Altman reportedly backs $1B round for AI healthcare startup Retro Biosciences
Retro launched in mid-2022 with the goal of extending the average human lifespan by 10 years. Using the $180 million in initial funding it received from Altman, the company filled a San Francisco warehouse with shipping containers repurposed into labs. It’s using those labs and a custom artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI to develop new medicines.
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The Register UK ☛ Meta to spend $60-65B in 2025 on AI infrastructure
Like its competitors, Meta has no problem burning cash to get ahead in this artificial intelligence race. According to Zuckerberg, the Social Network's $60-65 billion in CAPEX spending will support the deployment of roughly a gigawatt of new compute capacity with more than 1.3 million GPUs training and serving models by the end of the year.
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Tim Bradshaw ☛ A house of cards
Instead a large number of people seem to have somehow lost their minds and fallen victim to a morass of overlapping conspiracy theories. I suppose this has happened as a result of poor education combined with the deliberate weaponisation of political argument by social media companies. This isn’t helped by America’s long-standing infection by a cult which its adherents call ‘Christianity’. It’s not Christianity.
To make things worse, the reason median wealth is so low is that a huge proportion of the wealth of the country is in the hands of a minute number of plutocrats, many of them the owners of the social media companies. The plutocrats have all the money. The thing to understand about plutocrats is that all they care about is accruing more wealth and power: you don’t get to be a plutocrat unless you are a ruthless financial parasite. What sort of politics do you think these people like? The sort that gives them more money and power at any cost.
These plutocrats have inevitably fallen prey to rockstar syndrome. This is what happens to young men who bargain some small talent into great wealth, becoming socially isolated but for armies of unquestioning groupies and people whose jobs depend on telling them only what they want to hear and ensuring their every demand is met. It traditionally ends with expensive cars in swimming pools, followed by exclusive rehab clinics and death. Remove almost all the base talent and multiply the money by three orders of magnitude and you have a techbro plutocrat. Worse, the techbro plutocrats, despite believing themselves very gods, are not terribly smart, and have fallen prey to the lies and conspiracies spread by their own platforms.
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India Times ☛ What Mark Zuckerberg said about his $60-$65 billion AI investment to compete with OpenAI, Google
The move is part of the company’s strategy to strengthen its competitive edge against rivals OpenAI and Google in the race for AI dominance.
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The Atlantic ☛ Trump Bets It All on OpenAI
The Stargate Project is a resounding victory for a start-up that was struggling at the end of last year, as Karen Hao wrote for The Atlantic yesterday. OpenAI had lost some of its most talented staff; its relationship with its most important financial backer, Microsoft, was under stress; and it was weathering any number of other public controversies. This week’s announcement, meanwhile, “reduces OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, grants OpenAI (rather than its competitors) a mind-boggling sum of capital for computer chips—the hottest commodity in the AI race—and ties the company to Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda,” Hao wrote.
The announcement is the capstone to a steady maneuver by Altman to align himself with the incoming administration, another “masterful display of Altman’s power” to ingratiate himself with the powerful and raise huge amounts of capital, Hao noted. Altman, along with executives from Oracle and SoftBank, stood beside Trump in the White House as he made the announcement. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States,” Altman said.
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New York Times ☛ Meta to Increase Spending to $65 Billion This Year in A.I. Push
Much of the capital investment, a big jump from 2024, will fund expansion of Meta’s data centers, which provide the computing power needed by A.I. products and algorithms.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Omicron Limited ☛ Better digital literacy could help reduce climate and disaster conspiracy theories
These kinds of conspiracy theories are not only widespread but have also evolved into a mainstream form of climate change denialism. And they underscore an escalating challenge encountered by scholars and practitioners in climate change communication.
As researchers specializing in climate change communication and environmental sociology, we want to provide some analysis of climate change denialism driving climate conspiracy theories online, and propose potential ways to tackle misinformation.
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Daniel Miller ☛ We Should All Treasure Our Own Tiny Corners
One day, your neighbor is going to read and believe one thing on a platform controlled by an authoritarian power, another is going to believe a different thing, and the former will point to the latter when the authorities arrive, and you will be faced with an ethical decision. How well will you be prepared? Will you look into the eyes of all your neighbors and see humans? Or like that first neighbor, will you see an enemy, someone deserving of punishment? Or will you be somewhere in-between–a still, small voice inside will whisper, “Something’s wrong,” but it won’t get through all those loud voices emanating out of that small rectangle of glass in your hand, and you will remain still, wordless, passive…just like you’ve been trained to do.
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The Barents Observer ☛ 45 journalists have been prosecuted in Russia in 2024
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin signed a law introducing prison sentences of up to 15 years for 'fake news' about the Russian army. Under this law, any information that is not part of the official statements of the Russian Ministry of Defence could be labelled ‘fake'.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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RFERL ☛ 4 Sentenced To Death For 'Blasphemous' Posts In Pakistan
According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), "blasphemy accusations, whether true or false, often lead to lengthy prison sentences on death row and solitary confinement."
Critics say the laws are often abused to settle scores or used to target members of Pakistan's religious minorities.
Since 1987, more than 2,000 people have been accused of blasphemy laws. Nearly 100 people have been lynched to death while dozens remain on death row, according to USCIRF.
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New York Times ☛ Instagram and Facebook Blocked and Hid Abortion Pill Providers’ Posts
Some posts related to obtaining abortion pills were recently hidden on Instagram and Facebook and some accounts were suspended, before being later restored.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Nebraska Examiner ☛ 3 years of the Nebraska Examiner: Looking back for inspiration and ahead to growth, with your help
Three years ago today, our little online news experiment started because local reporting giants Paul Hammel and Cindy Gonzalez and retired editing great Cate Folsom got the itch to try something new.
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ANF News ☛ Imprisoned journalist Reyhan Hacıoğlu: The free press continues to resist under all circumstances
Reyhan Hacıoğlu, who was detained in a raid on her house in Van and imprisoned on January 21, sent a message through her lawyer.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFERL ☛ Afghans Laud ICC Arrest Warrants Over Taliban's Repression Of Women
Khan said based on evidence collected thus far in an investigation reopened in October 2022 there are reasonable grounds to believe Akhundzada and Haqqani "bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds."
He said his office had concluded that they are "criminally responsible for persecuting Afghan girls and women, as well as persons whom the Taliban perceived as not conforming with their ideological expectations of gender identity or expression, and persons whom the Taliban perceived as allies of girls and women."
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Air Force Times ☛ Air Force pulls class with Tuskegee Airmen video after DEI order
The unofficial Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco on Friday night posted an excerpt of an internal Air Force message, which said videos on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, had been removed from the service’s BMT course.
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Task And Purpose ☛ Air Force cuts Tuskegee Airmen, WASP history class at boot camp
A video on the famed unit, as well as one on World War II-era women pilots, was part of three courses removed from Air Force basic training curriculum.
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[Old] Southeast Ohio ☛ Afroman breaks it down
The trio of tracks — “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera” and “Lemon Pound Cake” — take a comedic spin on the Office deputies searching Foreman’s kitchen, closet, bedroom and garage on Aug. 21, 2022.
Office deputies knocked down his kitchen door and nearly took a slice of the cake while executing a search warrant on suspicion of kidnapping and drug trafficking, all of which was caught on a home surveillance system.
“People was tripping on how horrific and traumatizing it was (and) at the same time laughing,” Afroman says. “What I like about it is I inspire the human to hesitate and make the best out of a bad situation.”
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Vox ☛ Stargate will create jobs. But not for humans. | Vox
But even if you’re more excited about automation than I am, “we will replace all office work with AIs” — which is fairly widely understood to be OpenAI’s business model — is an absurd plan to spin as a jobs program. But then, a $500 billion investment to eliminate countless jobs probably wouldn’t get President Donald Trump’s imprimatur, as Stargate has.
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Jason Becker ☛ Twisting Religious Freedom into Religious Oppression
Exercising religious freedom should not mean freedom to eliminate secular life, freedom to act in place of our government, and freedom from taxes.
These things are especially terrifying given how easy it is to claim “religion” in the US.
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ On Having a Maximum Wealth
The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury. This is a theme found, to varying degrees, in society after society across the world: A lot of people with a low standard of living working in service of the goal of raising the standard of living for some sort of ruler or supreme leader and his family and allies. I understand that this is not some sort of revelation. “You’ve discovered class,” you are now saying in a mocking tone. Beyond the social and political and economic dynamics underlying this process, though—things that make up magisterial fields of inquiry—I think that every once in a while it is well worth taking a moment to gape at the basic ludicrousness of this fact. As societal goals go, an honest reading tells us that we are often not aiming for “better technology” or “philosophical progress.” No, the reality is that, thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is “allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.” Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: It’s not a crime if we do it with an app
Big Potato controls 97% of the frozen potato market, and any sector that large and concentrated is going to be pretty cozy. The execs at these companies all meet at industry associations, lobbying bodies, and as they job-hop between companies in the cartel. But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing."
This is just price-fixing, with an app. The fact that they don't sit around a table and openly discuss pricing doesn't keep this from being price-fixing. What's more, they admit it. A director at McCain said that "higher ups" forbade anyone in the company from competing on price. A Lamb Weston exec described the arrangement as everyone "behaving themselves," chortling that they'd "never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry." Lamb Weston's CEO attributed a 111% increase in net income to "pricing actions."
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Manga Publishers Maintain Pressure Despite Pirate Countermeasures
Japan's major manga publishers are facing perhaps the most complex set of piracy challenges ever seen online. With limited options to have a visible and sustainable impact short term, solid foundations below the surface seem destined to pay off in the future. Likewise, putting pirate sites under pressure, and maintaining it, regardless of countermeasures, is all in a day's work.
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Rolling Stone ☛ Paul McCartney Calls on U.K. Government to 'Protect' Artists From AI
“We’re the people, you’re the government. You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job,” McCartney said to lawmakers in the interview. “So if you’re putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not gonna have them. If there’s such a thing as a government, it’s their responsibility — I would think — to protect young people to try and enhance that whole thing so it works. So that these people have got job and can enhance the world with wonderful art.”
Tom Kiehl, chief executive of music industry body UK Music, told the BBC, “Government plans to change copyright law to make it easier for AI firms to use the music of artists, composers and music companies without their permission put the music industry at a huge risk.”
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BBC ☛ Sir Paul McCartney: Don't let AI rip off musicians
In a rare interview for Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Sir Paul said "when we were kids in Liverpool, we found a job that we loved, but it also paid the bills", warning the proposals could remove the incentive for writers and artists and result in a "loss of creativity".
The government said it aimed to deliver legal certainty through a copyright regime that provided creators with "real control" and transparency.
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India Times ☛ OpenAI faces new copyright case, from global publishers in India
The New Delhi-based Federation of Indian Publishers told Reuters it had filed a case at the Delhi High Court, which is already hearing a similar lawsuit against OpenAI. The case was filed on behalf of all the federation's members, who include publishers like Bloomsbury, Penguin Random House, Cambridge University Press and Pan Macmillan, as well as India's Rupa Publications and S.Chand and Co, it said.
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India Times ☛ Paul McCartney says he fears AI will rip off artists
The government is consulting on whether to let tech firms use copyrighted material to help train artificial intelligence models unless the creators explicitly opt out.
McCartney told the BBC that would make it harder for artists to retain control of their work and undermine Britain's creative industries.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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