Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Alexis Wright on imagining the future

  Alexis is a Waanyi writer, most famous for her books Plains of Promise (1997) and most recently Praiseworthy (2023) which is probably my next book to read.

  Via Wikiquote:

  We have to think big…‘We have to imagine big, and that’s part of the problem. We’re letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they’re very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly.

• Hardware

  • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Washing machine vs laundry room

    So, the natural next step for us was to work closely with them to figure out how we can migrate our EC2 workload to their Kubernetes cluster. As far as we knew, this would be a win-win situation: we would outsource the remaining infrastructure work to the central team which specialized in this, and it would free our hands to work more on our application platform.

    As we got closer to the finish line, the leadership became more against this move. At the time, I didn’t understand the “why?”. It looked like a political move to me, and to some extent it was but not in a malicious way.

    You see, by running on top of the central infrastructure, we would give away part of our freedom, flexibility, and autonomy: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • 9to5Mac ☛ App downloads by teenagers should be Apple’s responsibility, says Meta

    It’s no coincidence that Meta is putting forward this proposal shortly after losing a bid for the dismissal of hundreds of lawsuits from parents claiming social media companies deliberately seek to get teenagers addicted to their apps.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Insecticides Help Drive Down Men's Sperm Counts, New Review Suggests

    Several studies indicated that men’s average sperm count has steadily declined over the past half-century, particularly since the early 2000s. Scientists speculated on many possible reasons for this worldwide drop, such as increased rates of obesity or greater exposure to environmental toxins, insecticides included. Researchers at George Washington University, George Mason University, and Italy’s Ramazzini Institute wanted to get a better sense of the data linking insecticides to sperm quantity so they decided to perform a systematic review of relevant studies around the world.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ How AI can detect diabetes with a 10-second voice sample

    According to a study published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health medical journal, a short voice recording is all it takes to determine with surprising accuracy whether an individual has type 2 diabetes.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Italy set to be first-ever country to ban synthetic food

    Italy will ban synthetic foods, said Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida at an event organized by the European Conservatives and Reformists with the participation of EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski.

    A bill banning the production, import and sale of food produced in laboratories will be discussed in the lower house of parliament.

  • Science Alert ☛ Men's Drinking Habits Can Have a Shocking Effect on Their Unborn Child

    Research clearly shows that sperm carry a vast amount of epigenetic information – meaning heritable shifts in the way genes are expressed that don't result from changes in the DNA sequence – that strongly influences fetal development and child health.

  • Science Alert ☛ 50 Years of Data Links Insecticides to Global Decline of Human Sperm Counts

    Insecticide exposure has been linked to lower sperm concentration in adult men worldwide, according to a new review of 25 studies spanning almost 50 years. The research team from Italy and the US says it's the most thorough systematic review of the topic so far.

    These are strong findings as their method takes into account each study's limitations, so their published paper recommends reducing exposure to the two types of insecticides studied to preserve male fertility and increase the changes of parenthood.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ YouTube to require disclosures for realistic-looking computer-generated videos

    Google LLC will require users to disclose if videos they upload to YouTube contain realistic-looking content generated with artificial intelligence tools. YouTube product management executives Jennifer Flannery O’Connor and Emily Moxley detailed the new policy in a blog post published today.

  • The Strategist ☛ AI, arms control and the new cold war

    So far, the 2020s have been marked by tectonic shifts in both technology and international security. Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, which brought the post–Cold War era to a sudden and violent end, is an obvious inflection point. The recent escalation in the Middle East, which may yet lead to a regional war, is another. So too the Covid-19 pandemic, from which the United States and China emerged bruised, distrustful and nearer to conflict than ever before—not least over the vexing issue of Taiwan, a stronghold in the world of advanced technology.

  • Futurism ☛ Sam Altman Seems to Imply That OpenAI Is Building God

    In an interview with The Atlantic earlier this year, Altman painted a rosy and speculative vision an AGI-powered future, describing a utopian society in which "robots that use solar power for energy can go and mine and refine all of the minerals that they need," all without the requiring the input of "human labor."

    And Altman isn't the only one invoking the language of a God-like AI in the sky.

  • [Old] Vanity Fair ☛ Artificial Intelligence May Be Humanity’s Most Ingenious Invention—And Its Last?

    We invented wheels and compasses and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and the eames lounge chair and penicillin and e = mc2 and beer that comes in six-packs and guns and dildos and the Pet Rock and Doggles (eyewear for dogs) and square watermelons. “One small step for man.” We came up with the Lindy Hop and musical toothbrushes and mustard gas and glow-in-the-dark Band-Aids and paper and the microscope and bacon—fucking bacon!—and Christmas. “Ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-ko-ssa.” We went to the bottom of the ocean and into orbit. We sucked energy from the sun and fertilizer from the air. “Let there be light.” We created the most amazing pink flamingo lawn ornaments that come in packs of two and only cost $9.99!

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Federal News Network ☛ What does the Veterans Affairs Department do when disaster strikes one of its record-storage facilities?

      In July 1973, a fire damaged or destroyed up to 18 million Army and Air Force official military personnel files at the National Archives and Records Administration’s National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. These records are important for veterans who are looking to make claims with the Veterans Affairs Department. So how did the government do in helping those whose records were lost or damaged in the fire? The VA's Office of Inspector General looked to answer that question with a recent audit. To learn what it found, Federal Drive Executive Producer Eric White talked with Brent Arronte, Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Audits and Evaluations with the VA OIG.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ How .tk Became a TLD for Scammers

      Sad story of Tokelau, and how its top-level domain “became the unwitting host to the dark underworld by providing a never-ending supply of domain names that could be weaponized against internet users. Scammers began using .tk websites to do everything from harvesting passwords and payment information to displaying pop-up ads or delivering malware.”

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Record ☛ Court rules automakers can record and intercept owner text messages

      A Seattle-based appellate judge ruled that the practice does not meet the threshold for an illegal privacy violation under state law, handing a big win to automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors.

    • Video ☛ Judge rules it's legal for automakers to download & store your text messages under WA privacy law - Invidious

    • La Quadature Du Net ☛ French National Police Use of AI-Powered Video-Surveillance Subject to Criminal Law

      Investigative media Disclose has just revealed that for years, knowing that it was totally illegal, the French National Police force has been using the automated video-surveillance solutions from the Israeli company Briefcam.

    • Techdirt ☛ Turns Out Barbra Streisand Is Aware Of The Streisand Effect, But Seems Confused About It

      As some folks know, back in 2005, right here on Techdirt, I coined “The Streisand Effect,” as a throwaway line at the end of a post. It was in reference to a story from two years earlier regarding Streisand suing photographer Ken Adelman after he had started the California Coastal Records Project, in which he aimed to photograph the west coast of the United States from a helicopter every few years to document erosion. One of the many, many photos on the site included Streisand’s coastal mansion. Streisand claimed that this was an invasion of privacy and violated California’s anti-paparazzi law. Except that before she filed the lawsuit the photo had a grand total of six views, two of which were by Streisand’s lawyers. Immediately after the lawsuit was filed, nearly half a million people viewed the image.

    • Techdirt ☛ Unsealed FTC Complaint Shows Data Broker Kochava Hoovered Up Oceans Of Sensitive Data On Millions Of Americans

      There’s generally been two reasons the U.S. government hasn’t tried to regulate data brokers or pass even a baseline privacy law, and it’s not, contrary to conventional wisdom, because it’s too hard.

    • JURIST ☛ HRW: Uganda surveillance system threatens rights to privacy, expression and association

      Human Rights Watch (HRW) raised concerns on Tuesday about a new vehicle tracking system in Uganda.

    • Tutao GmbH ☛ Tuta Is An Independent Company And Not Linked To Five Eyes Secret Services

      This statement by Cameron Ortis is completely false.

      The Tutao GbmH is not owned by any secret service, nor is it a "storefront" as claimed by Cameron Ortis.

      These allegations against Tuta, (formerly Tutanota), are false. Tutanota has never and Tuta will never operate a “storefront” for any intelligence or law enforcement agency. This would completely contradict our mission as a privacy protection organization.

    • CBC ☛ Alleged RCMP leaker says he was tipped off that police targets had 'moles' in law enforcement

      Cameron Ortis, the former RCMP intelligence official on trial in Ottawa, says he was tipped off by a counterpart at a "foreign agency" that the people he's accused of leaking secrets to had "moles" inside Canadian police services.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Encrypted Email Service Tuta Denies It's a 'Honeypot' for Five Eyes Intelligence

      “So if targets begin to use that service, the agency that’s collecting that information would be able to feed it back, that information, into the Five Eyes system, and then back into the RCMP,” Ortis claimed, in reference to the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, of which Canada is a prominent member. Ortis has claimed that some unnamed Five Eyes foreign agent introduced him to the honeypot operation and that he didn’t notify his superiors at the RCMP about it. Follow-up questions about the whole thing have mostly led him to say things like “I don’t recall,” and “that’s something I can’t talk about.”

• Finance

  • Increased Layoffs During the Festive Season: Continued Workforce Reductions at Google, Amazon, and More

    Even though the end of 2023 is approaching, layoffs in the tech industry show no indications of abating. The year began with upheaval, as thousands of tech professionals were laid off. So far, in 2023, more than 244,342 IT workers have been laid off, a 50% increase from 2022. There have been significant layoffs at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, as well as at tiny financial firms and apps.

    While layoffs have decreased in recent months, the dread of job loss persists. The gloom of layoffs persists even over the holiday season, with significant businesses such as Google, Amazon, Snap, and others announcing new employment cuts. The most recent layoffs reportedly hit product management, customer services, and engineering staff, sending global shockwaves.

  • 505 Games parent Digital Bros lays off 30% of staff due to fears that players don't want new IP

    505 Games parent company Digital Bros have announced - you guessed it - a round of mass layoffs. Following in the wake of Microsoft, Epic, CD Projekt, Sony and, well, take your pick, the company aim to cut roughly 30% of their workforce to shore up profits. The specific reasoning here is that Digital Bros think that people aren't interested in playing original new games; they'd rather get to grips with fictions and franchises they know and love already. As such, the company plan to "limit" their big budget projects in future, though no specific cancellations have been announced.

  • Washington's Worsening Debt Problem

    Are you in debt? Seems like many are and, unfortunately, many in Washington are and it's getting worse.

    Consumer debt is over $17 trillion. That's not the national debt, that's just us random folks who might get a little spend-crazy with a credit card, those with student loans and those who needed financial support and are having trouble zeroing it out.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong journalist group expresses ‘deep regret’ over interview access at banking summit, urges improvements

    < The city’s largest journalist group has urged the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to improve media arrangements at its events, expressing “deep regret” that reporters were not allowed to interview attendees at an international finance summit organised by the authority.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Network of PR-led UK local news websites used to promote paid-for content

    Paid-for press releases ending up displayed as news on Surveillance Giant Google News and MSN.

  • Press Gazette ☛ BBC journalists vote to end months-long dispute over local cuts

    BBC local journalists have taken part in three days of strike action this year.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Appeals Court Sides With Author Sued Over ProPublica Article

    A New York state appeals court has handed freelance journalist William D. Cohan a legal victory, affirming the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the subject of an article published by ProPublica. Ruling with unusual dispatch — the court issued its opinion on Oct. 31, only three weeks after oral arguments — it declared that the article “flatly contradicts the existence of actual malice,” the standard of proof that a public figure must meet to win a libel suit. “The plaintiff failed to show,” the opinion stated, “that his claims had a substantial basis in law.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • BIA Net ☛ Dutch-Kurdish director Dosky: 'I was subjected to strip search in Turkey'

    Director Reber Dosky, who was detained in Mardin on November 8, and kept in Urfa Repatriation Center, drew attention to torture here stating that a Moroccan migrant was kept in the refrigerator overnight.

  • Pro Publica ☛ LA Residential Hotels Got Inside Safe Contracts Despite Housing Law Violations

    As part of Mayor Karen Bass’ signature homelessness initiative called Inside Safe, the city of Los Angeles awarded Las Palmas Hotel a contract potentially worth about $2 million to temporarily shelter people living on the streets.

    But the 62-unit hotel in Hollywood was already supposed to be providing housing for people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else under a 2008 city law meant to ease a “housing emergency” that has grown more severe in the past 15 years.

• Monopolies

  • New York Times ☛ How Microsoft’s Legal Legacy Shapes the Antitrust Case Against Google

    Lawyers for the Justice Department and Surveillance Giant Google as well as the judge in a monthslong trial have invoked the landmark case against Abusive Monopolist Microsoft from the 1990s.

  • Copyrights

    • Slamming Into Painted Boulders

      In the wake of the near-cancellation of yet another film, the creative community calls out Warner Bros. Discovery’s shameless greed.

      [...]

      Every time you do it, you’re betting it’s going to make its budget back and perhaps even become profitable.

      But choosing not to wager at all is no way to run a business, as anyone watching the recent debacle around Coyote vs. Acme can attest.

      The film, a feature-length take on the classic Road Runner cartoons that integrates live-action elements around the ingenious presence what Wile E. Coyote has finally decided to sue the Acme Corporation for repeatedly selling him defective goods, was unceremoniously dumped from release despite having direct connection to one of the most prominent players on the Warner Bros. Discovery payroll, superhero impresario James Gunn.