Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Engaging more with the Fediverse and IndieWeb

  The site you’re reading today is “static”. I mean that more than just the CMS; there are no external mechanisms to electronically ping me whatsoever. The only hole I’ve punched in the firewall, so to speak, is an email address. That has turned out to be a tremendous bottleneck, but it still weirdly feels like one I can control and manage.

• Thorsten Ball ☛ Watching A Pathological System

  In my life as a software developer I’ve had quite a few chances to observe pathological systems. Most of them early on, when I worked on SaaS applications and the pet/cattle distinction wasn’t that common yet and your production system was a nice pet that you check in on every day, making sure it doesn’t get sick.

• New York Times ☛ Paju, South Korea’s City of Books

  With some 900 book-related businesses, Paju Book City, northwest of Seoul, is an intentional and euphoric celebration of books and the bookmaking process.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Nanoplastics Linked to Changes in Brain Proteins Associated With Parkinson's, Study Finds

    This isn't good.

  • Science Alert ☛ Archaeologists Discover Hidden Clues About Who Really Built Europe's Bronze Age Mega-Forts

    A lost civilization.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ A 555 Can Even Make Your Car Indicator More Visible

    Modern cars often come with white marker lights or daytime running lights that are on all the time, as a supplement to the primary headlights. The problem is that in some vehicle designs, these additional lights tend to make it harder to see the indicators when they’re on. [nibbler] had this very problem, and decided to solve it with a special interrupter circuit that cuts the daytime running light when the indicator is on. Even better, they used a 555 to do it!

  • Hackaday ☛ Fail Of The Week: This Flash Drive Will NOT Self-Destruct In Five Seconds

    How hard can it be to kill a flash drive? Judging by the look of defeat on [Walker]’s face in the video below, pretty darn hard.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • India Times ☛ At Meta, millions of underage users were an 'open secret,' show court filing

    The social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, including their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing

  • [Old] National Health Service UK ☛ Why we should sit less

    To reduce our risk of ill health from inactivity, we are advised to exercise regularly, at least 150 minutes a week, and reduce sitting time.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ What we know so far about surging respiratory illnesses in China

    Paris, France Cases of respiratory illnesses have been surging in northern China, particularly among children, sparking speculation online of a new pandemic threat four years after Covid-19 first emerged in the country.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China ministry seeks more fever clinics to combat respiratory illness surge

    The spike became a global issue last week when the World Health Organisation asked China for more information.

  • New York Times ☛ Unvaccinated and Vulnerable: Children Drive Surge in Deadly Outbreaks [Ed: After the mishandling of COVID-19 a lot fewer people trust government vaccine mandates, which include experiments]

    About 60 million “zero-dose children” have not received any vaccines and have aged out of routine immunization programs. Protecting them will require a costly vaccination blitz.

  • The Kent Stater ☛ The effects video games have on mental health

    Video games have been around now for more than 30 years. However, people are just now beginning to conduct research on the correlation between video games and mental health.  According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), [which promoted torture]

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Ruben Schade ☛ It does everything, if it does something

    Earlier this week I quoted Dan Olson chatting with Adam Conover about the open web. The whole interview is worth a listen.

    I was also intrigued to hear how the current hype surrounding Hey Hi (AI) compared to past bubbles like the metaverse and cryptocurrency:

    AI is tricker because it has emerged very slowly out of useful tools. It’s in this irrational hype bubble that better resembles the original dot com boom. We have a tool that does something, so you have a whole bunch of people rushing in to claim it does everything.

  • arXiv ☛ White-Box Transformers via Sparse Rate Reduction: Compression Is All There Is?

    [...] we contend that a natural objective of representation learning is to compress and transform the distribution of the data, say sets of tokens, towards a low-dimensional Gaussian mixture supported on incoherent subspaces. The goodness of such a representation can be evaluated by a principled measure, called sparse rate reduction, that simultaneously maximizes the intrinsic information gain and extrinsic sparsity of the learned representation. From this perspective, popular deep network architectures, including transformers, can be viewed as realizing iterative schemes to optimize this measure. Particularly, we derive a transformer block from alternating optimization on parts of this objective: the multi-head self-attention operator compresses the representation by implementing an approximate gradient descent step on the coding rate of the features, and the subsequent multi-layer perceptron sparsifies the features. This leads to a family of white-box transformer-like deep network architectures, named CRATE, which are mathematically fully interpretable. We show, by way of a novel connection between denoising and compression, that the inverse to the aforementioned compressive encoding can be realized by the same class of CRATE architectures. Thus, the so-derived white-box architectures are universal to both encoders and decoders. Experiments show that these networks, despite their simplicity, indeed learn to compress and sparsify representations of large-scale real-world image and text datasets, and achieve performance very close to highly engineered transformer-based models: ViT, MAE, DINO, BERT, and GPT2. We believe the proposed computational framework demonstrates great potential in bridging the gap between theory and practice of deep learning, from a unified perspective of data compression. [...]

  • India Times ☛ X may lose up to $75 million in revenue as more advertisers pull out

    Internal documents viewed by The New York Times this week show that the company is in a more difficult position than previously known and that concerns about Musk and the platform have spread far beyond companies including IBM, Apple and The Walt Disney Co., which paused their advertising campaigns on X last week. The documents list more than 200 ad units of companies from the likes of Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, many of which have halted or are considering pausing their ads on the social network.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Old] The Telegraph UK ☛ Government shared Covid monitoring of social media with US State Department

      The activities of the RRU and another controversial Government division, the Counter Disinformation Unit, were laid bare by Big Brother Watch earlier this year.

      Last night, its director, Silkie Carlo, said it was “chilling that so many journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens have been treated like the enemy within”.

    • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Major UK retailers urged to quit ‘authoritarian’ police facial recognition strategy

      A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers – also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark – saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will “amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system”.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ Sierra Leone Declares National Curfew Amid Security Concerns

    It was not yet clear who had tried to break into the military’s main armory and barracks in the capital, Freetown, or what happened after they failed.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ 'Get Out From Here': Dutch PM Probable Geert Wilders Tells Muslims In New Viral Video

    [...] The speech is said to be after his far-right party's surprise victory in Netherlands. But HT cannot independently verify the date and location of the video. [...]

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Propastop looks at Russia hybrid tactics on Finland's border

    Speaker of the Eduskunta/riksdagen, Finland's parliament, Jussi Halla-aho suspects has suggested that in among the numbers of asylum seekers could be included personnel from the notorious Wagner Group of mercenaries – though University of Tampere doctoral researcher Mikko Räkköläinen says that this would not fit Wagner's M.O. so far.

    In any event, Russia appears to be engaging in hybrid warfare tactics on Finland's border which are aimed at destabilizing NATO, diverting attention from the conflict in Ukraine, and shaping information narratives, Propastop reports, adding the full extent of Russia's involvement and its impact on regional stability may become clearer in due course.

  • France24 ☛ Influx of migrants from Russia to Finland: ‘This will put pressure on Europe’

    Finnish border guards agree. "Previously the Russians didn’t let people cross their border crossing point to Finland without required travel documents to Finland, but now they have.The phenomenon at the eastern border involves elements of organised illegal immigration facilitated by international crime including active marketing in social media," Commander Pentti Alapelto of the Finnish Border Guard told FRANCE 24.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Europe warned of potential new “major” migration crisis

    Another concern is the rise of Jihadist organisations who, he said, are already present and active in Sudan.

    The current unrest and tensions could, he went on to warn, create a new safe haven for these organisations which would pose major risks for the Sahel region.

    This matters for Europe, he said, because many radical organisations in the region have close links with those in Europe.

  • New York Times ☛ The Stabbing of Derek Chauvin: What We Know

    The attack in an Arizona prison was the latest violent episode involving a high-profile inmate at a federal correctional facility.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Taiwan’s Golden Horse awards sees return of Chinese stars

    Actress Hu Ling on Saturday became the first Chinese film star to walk the red carpet of Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards since 2019, when China boycotted the self-ruled island’s biggest awards show over political tensions.

  • YLE ☛ The EU could contribute €100,000 for every border crosser, the SDP suggests

    Around 55 border crossers had arrived at Raja-Jooseppi, the only Finnish checkpoint still open, by Saturday afternoon.

  • YLE ☛ Finnish company exporting crucial truck parts to Russia | News | Yle Uutiset [Ed: send taxpayers' money to finnish companies to export defence to another country, to defend itself from this; racket, if unintended too]

    The company claims Finnish Customs has permitted its exports to Russia.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Many Ukrainians see Putin’s invasion as a continuation of Stalin’s genocide

      Many Ukrainians see today's ongoing Russian invasion as a continuation of the Stalin regime's genocidal attempts to eradicate Ukrainian national identity and destroy the Ukrainian nation, writes Kristina Hook .

    • New York Times ☛ Battle for Influence Rages in Heart of Wagner’s Operations in Africa

      The death of the mercenary group’s leader has created a window of opportunity in the Central African Republic for Western powers to offer an alternative.

    • Latvia ☛ Rinkēvičs: EU must act as one on confiscation of Russian assets

      Latvian Radio's correspondent in Ukraine Indra Sprance invited Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs to a interview recorded in Kyiv just a few hours after the Russian drone attack on the Ukrainian capital on Saturday. The interview covers a a range of topics, including the crucial question of Ukraine's path towards eventual full membership of the European Union.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Expert panel: How will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine develop in 2024?

      How will Russia's invasion of Ukraine develop during 2024? The Atlantic Council hosted a panel of experts to explore the key issues that will likely shape Russia's war in Ukraine during the coming year.

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine sees largest Russian drone attack since invasion, says military

      Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 74 out of 75 Russian attack drones overnight, in what Kyiv said was the biggest drone attack since the start of the invasion.

    • JURIST ☛ Ukraine announces reforms to military mobilization efforts

      In a press conference on Friday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced coming reforms to its mobilization efforts. Ukraine’s military is in the midst of a recruiting crisis as the war against Russia rages on. Zelenskyy did not specify the structure of the reforms.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Says Ukraine Attacked Moscow, Other Cities With Fleet Of Drones; No Major Damage Reported

      Russian officials said Ukraine targeted Moscow and other Russian cities with a fleet of at least 20 drones, with most downed by anti-aircraft systems.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia 'Lost' 76 Planes To Sanctions Related To Ukraine Invasion, Minister Says

      Russia lost 76 passenger planes due to sanctions imposed after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev said on November 25, according to RBK.

    • RFERL ☛ EU Commission Pledges 50 Million Euros To Repair Ukrainian Port Facilities

      The European Commission on November 25 said it will provide 50 million euros ($54 million) to Kyiv to repair and upgrade infrastructure in Ukrainian ports in an attempt to increase food exports.

    • RFERL ☛ On Holodomor Remembrance Day, Russia Unleashes Largest Drone Attack On Ukraine

      Russia on November 25 unleashed the largest wave of drone attacks on Ukraine since the start of the war, wounding several people and causing damage, with Kyiv bearing the brunt of the attack, in what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called "an act of willful terror."

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Deliberate terror’ Russia launches what Kyiv authorities call ‘most massive’ drone attack since beginning of war on Ukraine — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian State Duma speaker says ‘traitors’ who left after Ukraine invasion not welcome in Russia — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Head of Ukrainian delegation at spring 2022 peace talks reports Russian delegation offered to end war if Ukraine abandoned NATO aspirations, says leaders had ’no trust’ Russia would follow through — Meduza

    • New York Times ☛ Russia Bombards Kyiv With ‘Record’ Drone Assault, Ukraine Says

      The aerial assault began early Saturday and continued past sunrise. Ukraine said its air defense teams had shot down nearly all of the explosive-laden attack drones.

    • RFERL ☛ Skopje Says Blinken To Attend OSCE Summit That May Include Lavrov

      U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to attend the OSCE ministerial summit in Skopje on November 30-December 1, North Macedonia’s foreign minister said, an event that could also include the presence of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

    • RFERL ☛ Hundreds Protest Plans For Waste-Recycling Plant In Russia's Altai Region

      About 1,000 residents of the village of Pavlovsk, in Russia's Altai region in southern Siberia, have staged an unsanctioned protest against the planned construction of a waste-recycling plant in their village.

• Environment

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Pollution from coal plants contributes to far more deaths than scientists realized, study shows

    In the study, published in the journal Science, colleagues and I mapped how U.S. coal power plant emissions traveled through the atmosphere, then linked each power plant’s emissions with death records of Americans over 65 years old on Medicare.

    Our results suggest that air pollutants released from coal power plants were associated with nearly half a million premature deaths of elderly Americans from 1999 to 2020.

  • New York Times ☛ Cockroaches and Mountains of Trash Plague Acapulco After Hurricane

    Residents complain of rashes and stomach ailments as 666,000 tons of garbage overwhelm the city. Uncollected waste after natural disasters can lead to illnesses, experts said.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Positech Games ☛ Tesla model Y performance after 1 year. My review

      Specs wise, I basically picked the ‘go ahead and take my money’ version, because I chose red, performance, and Full-Self Driving [sic]. FSD gets you nothing but traffic light recognition in the UK for now, but I expect to keep the car 5 years and wanted to lock in FSD for £10k as I expect it to offer more soon.

  • Overpopulation

    • NL Times ☛ Millions of households will pay at least 10% more for tap water in 2024

      The drinking water company says it will face major challenges in the coming years to supply sufficient and clean drinking water, such as climate change, economic growth, and housing construction, as a result of which demand continues to rise. Vitens expects to use 30 percent more drinking water by 2040, which is 100 billion liters more than now Vitens stated in a press release. That is why the drinking water company will invest significantly more in the coming years, including by deploying fewer but larger production locations. Investments will increase by 367 million euros over the next ten years to 650 million euros in 2033.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ How Microsoft goes around seeking unfettered ownership of artificial general intelligence

    Microsoft, which already has a considerable ownership stake in OpenAI owing to its billion-dollar investment in the company, now aims to take full control of the momentum around artificial general intelligence (AGI).

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI fiasco triggers serious calls for guardrails around AI industry

    The nail-biting drama around Sam Altman being sacked from OpenAI, joining Satya Nadella-run Microsoft and then returning to OpenAI -- all within a span of six days -- has alerted governments and regulators and the call to apply guardrails on AI industry is now more vocal than ever.

    Couple of days before his ouster, Altman had said at a tech event that big regulatory changes weren't needed for current AI models, but would be soon.

  • Michael Geist ☛ On Media Bailouts and Bias: Why Government Media Policy Is Undermining Public Trust

    Yesterday I was a guest on a Toronto-area radio station where I was asked to discuss the government’s plans to more than double the amount available per journalist as part of the labour journalism tax credit. After a discussion of the tax credit program and months of blocked news links on Facebook as a consequence of Bill C-18, the host shifted the discussion by suggesting that the media had largely become propaganda on behalf of the government, insisting that these measures were consistent with a strategy of either blocking or influencing news coverage. I paused for a moment and said I disagreed, noting that there was good journalism and bad journalism, and his take was bad journalism. The segment ended immediately after that.

  • India Times ☛ iPhone warning notifications to MPs: Apple team from US likely to meet CERT-In officials this month

    Apple's cyber security executives from the US are expected to meet officials of CERT-In this month regarding the show cause notice issued to the company in the wake of several opposition MPs receiving a warning notification on their iPhones. Last month, several opposition leaders claimed they have received an alert from Apple warning them of "state-sponsored attackers trying to remotely compromise" their iPhones and alleged hacking by the government.

    CERT-In, which comes under Meity, had issued a show cause notice to Apple in this regard.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China pledges deeper trade ties with Vietnam

    November 26, 2023 11:04 AM
    
    

    Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao met with Vietnamese PM Pham Minh Chinh on Nov 25.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Despite a history of shelling from China, many in Kinmen sweet on closer ties with the mainland

    The idea for closer ties was in the spotlight in September when Beijing unveiled a plan to transform Fujian.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China, US exchange accusations over US vessel in South China Sea

    China’s military said it had driven away a US warship that the US Navy said was on a routine freedom of navigation operation.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Top diplomats of China, Japan, South Korea seek to boost three-way ties

    This meeting among the foreign ministers is meant to pave the way for a summit of the three countries' presidents.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China warns South Korea not to politicise economic issues

    Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned his South Korean counterpart on Sunday not to politicise economic and tech issues as the two prepared to meet Japan's top diplomat on the sidelines of a trilateral meeting aimed at boosting cooperation.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Myanmar armed group seizes China-Myanmar border crossing

    Goods that pass through the crossing include appliances, agricultural tractors, consumer items.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ Misinformation super-spreaders on X sharing ads revenue: Report

      Some super-spreaders of misinformation on X, who are verified premium users with blue badges, are sharing Elon Musk's ads revenue even after making conspiratorial claims about the Israel-Hamas war, a new report has revealed.

      NewsGuard, a for-profit misinformation watchdog organisation, found that such posts with misinformation reached a collective 92 million views.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ BBC Persian: Iran secretly executes Milad Zohrevand for connection with 2022 protests

    Iranian authorities have cracked down on protests ever since they erupted following Amini’s death. In September, Iran opened fire on protesters in Zahedan on the one-year anniversary of a massacre known as “Bloody Friday.” On Bloody Friday, Iranian authorities opened fire on Masha Amini protestors and killed 100 individuals. Additionally, in October, the Tehran Court in Iran sentenced two female journalists who covered the Mahsa Amini protests to prison.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korean teen rapist’s lawyer asks for leniency because he is ‘polite’

    The lawyer said the teen was a polite and delicate student who shed tears even when scolded by a teacher.

• Monopolies

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ The moral injury of having your work enshittified

    The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate: [...]

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Are Things Getting Worse?

    Companies go through natural cycles where they create and capture value. When incentives are aligned, things work extremely well (Google Search quality/page load speed, or Amazon and low prices). But, profit-maximizing companies sometimes overreach and try to capture too much value. This creates opportunities for competitors (if anything, the cycles are becoming faster)

  • Copyrights

    • Hackaday ☛ Double-Dose Of AI Turns Daily Tasks Into Works Of Art [Ed: "Works Of Art" or just plain plagiarism?]

      Not so long ago, “Magic Mirror” builds were all the rage, and we have to admit getting out daily reminders and newsfeeds on an LCD display sitting behind a partially reflective mirror is not without its charms. But styles ebb and flow, so we don’t see too many of those builds anymore. This e-ink daily calendar reminder hearkens back to those Magic Mirrors, only with a double twist of AI.