Leftovers

• James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Clarity

  Good technical writing is clear. I could make that statement and say "that's all you need to know!" But that wouldn't be clear! Herein lies a question: what does it mean to communicate technical concepts with clarity? Let's talk through a few tips that will help make your writing more comprehensible and intuitive to your audience.

• [Repeat] Kev Quirk ☛ PenPals

  I read this post and thought it was chock full of lovely stories from Brandons past (and present) with his PenPals.

• Brandon ☛ Pen Pals ✍️

  Over the past couple of months, I've seen pen pals pop up on several of the blogs I follow, and I love it. A one-on-one connection with someone else done in private is sort of the opposite of what we've been doing all these years with social media. It's something that takes more time than a "like" or a one liner, it's a real commitment to building something. In my opinion, that is what the internet should be all about.

  I thought it might be fun to look back on my pen pals from over the years, since I hold these relationships just as a close as any IRL relationship that I have. Heck, in some cases, even closer.

• Science

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ vhf omnidirectional range

    The term "VHF omnidirectional range" can at first be confusing, because it includes "range"---a measurement that the technology does not provide. The answer to this conundrum is, as is so often the case, history. The "range" refers not to the radio equipment but to the space around it, the area in which the signal can be received. VOR is an inherently spatial technology; the signal is useless except as it relates to the physical world around it.

• Education

  • New York Times ☛ Math Scores Dropped Globally, but the U.S. Still Trails Other Countries

    The results are the latest indicator of an American education system that struggles to prepare all students from an early age, with proficiency in math dropping the longer students remain in the system. National test results last year also reported greater declines in math compared with reading, a subject that can be more influenced by what happens at home and was less affected by school closures.

  • Hillel Wayne ☛ Notes on Every Strangeloop 2023 Talk I Attended

    This is my writeup of all the talks I saw at Strangeloop, written on the train ride back, while the talks were still fresh in my mind. Now that all the talks are online I can share it. This should have gone up like a month ago but I was busy and then sick. Enjoy!

  • The Conversation ☛ Rural communities are being left behind because of poor digital infrastructure, research shows

    In an era where businesses and households depend on the [Internet] for everything from marketing to banking and shopping, the lack of adequate digital access can be a significant hurdle. And our recent research shows that many homes and businesses in the UK are being left stranded in the digital age.

    Our two studies focused on a rural county in Wales, Ceredigion, where the lack of reliable digital infrastructure worsened the impacts of the pandemic on families and businesses. Poor digital accessibility and connectivity exacerbated the stress levels of families who were already having to juggle home schooling and working from home.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan spread word on free college. But are residents listening?

    Michigan is making a big push to increase the number of college graduates in the state, investing $70 million this year to expand the Michigan Reconnect program that pays for community college, lowering the minimum age from 25 to 21 years old.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong students’ performance drops in global study amid general decline over Covid-19 pandemic

    Hong Kong secondary school students’ performance in maths and reading has fallen in a global assessment amid a general decline internationally over the Covid-19 pandemic. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global study that evaluates the maths, science, and the mother-tongue reading literacy of 15-year-old students [...]

• Hardware

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Pete's Headphones Featured on IEEE

    This project gives musicians a way to block out unwanted sound while still being able to hear what they're playing. Complete with some really great graphics and a full project writeup from Pete, this is an article you won't want to miss!

  • IEEE ☛ Build Your Own Hi-fi Ear Defenders: An inexpensive solution to hearing well in loud environments

    The microphone’s breakout board applies a gain of 64x, using two stages. My first thought was to reduce this gain. Maybe the clipping was happening at only the first gain stage. Unfortunately, even with this gain eliminated, the clipping remained. I then tested the raw MEMS microphone output by feeding it into some “pro grade” mic preamps. With this setup, I was able to see that the problem wasn’t the amplification stages but that the mics themselves were producing the clipping. Through this test, I learned a valuable lesson: A mic’s listed AOP is the point at which the microphone will produce a 10 percent total harmonic distortion, and so noticeable clipping can actually start to happen well below this level.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Conversation ☛ Technology is stealing your time in ways you may not realise – here’s what you can do about it

    On the face of it some of these tasks may seem like examples of tech saving us time. In theory, online banking should mean I have more time because I no longer need to go to the bank in my lunch break. However, our research suggests that this is not the case. Technology is contributing to a denser form of life.

  • University of Arizona ☛ New wearable communication system offers potential to reduce digital health divide

    A group of University of Arizona researchers has set out to change that with a wearable monitoring device system that can send health data up to 15 miles – much farther than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth systems can – without any significant infrastructure. Their device, they hope, will help make digital health access more equitable.

  • teleSUR ☛ Flu and COVID-19 Infections Tick Up in the United States

    New COVID-9 strains have caused 15,000 hospitalizations and around 1,000 deaths every week.

  • Latvia ☛ 23 Covid deaths in Latvia last week

    The incidence of Covid-19 continued to rise in Latvia last week. The number of both inpatient and deceased patients increased, according to monitoring data from the Disease Prevention and Control Center (SPKC) published December 6.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • The Verge ☛ Ex-Twitter security head claims the company fired him to flout regulations

    The lawsuit alleged that Musk hired Steve Davis as an adviser and gave him broad authority, with which he immediately “began cutting Twitter’s products and services that supported and complied with the Twitter FTC Consent Decree.” Twitter had settled with the FTC over its inappropriate use of users’ personal information only a few months before, prompting the decree. Rosa’s suit complains that Davis and Musk were both “dismissive” of the decree.

    In November, around the time Davis was hired, a lawyer for Twitter posted a message to Slack saying that anyone feeling uncomfortable about things Twitter was asking them to do should seek whistleblower protection.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ GAO preparing report on agency artificial intelligence use case inventories

    Federal agencies’ annual AI use case inventories, which were initially required under a Trump-era executive order, have so far lacked consistency and received criticism from academics and advocates as a result. A major 2022 report by several Stanford researchers analyzed progress on the existing AI requirements under statute and existing executive orders, detailing compliance issues with the inventories in the first year they were required. FedScoop has continued to report on issues with those public postings in recent months.

  • Futurism ☛ Former Tesla Employee Offers Grim Warning About Vehicles' Safety

    A former Tesla employee and whistleblower has come forward, telling the BBC in a damning interview that the car company's controversial Autopilot system is not safe for use on public roads, arguing that other drivers, passengers, and pedestrians could be put at risk.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Gmail sucks, water is wet

    One for the annals of Apple / Google interoperability.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Oops! 23andMe Admits Hackers Stole 7 Million Customers' Genetic Data

      But the problem goes beyond this relatively small number of people. Because the website allows users to share DNA information with other users in order to find relatives, the true number impacted is orders of magnitude larger — with about 6.9 million customers having their personal information compromised, according to TechCrunch. Big yikes on that figure, because it affects something like half of the 14 million users at 23andMe.

      Personal information included users' names, birthdays, location, relationships, ancestry background, and shared DNA percentages with relatives, according to the news outlet.

    • CPJ ☛ CPJ to EU: The time to act on spyware is now

      Negotiations on the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), a draft EU law seeking to strengthen media freedom and pluralism in EU member states, are likely to conclude during a meeting scheduled for December 15.

      CPJ is concerned that Article 4 of the EMFA on the protection of journalists and their sources could be problematic, despite its well-intended purpose, because EU member states have requested that a “national security” exemption be included to justify spyware against journalists.

    • [Old] CPJ ☛ Special report: When spyware turns phones into weapons

      There’s nothing new about governments or criminal gangs spying on journalists or activists they fear might expose or discredit them. But the development of high-tech “zero-click” spyware – the kind that takes over a phone without a user’s knowledge or interaction – poses an existential crisis for journalism and the future of press freedom around the world.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ US senator claims governments spying on Apple, Android users

      Wyden’s letter cited a “tip” as the source of the information about the surveillance. His staff did not elaborate on the tip, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed that both foreign and US government agencies have been asking Apple and Google for metadata related to push notifications to, for example, help tie anonymous users of messaging apps to specific Apple or Google accounts.

    • Vice Media Group ☛ Apple Just Confirmed Governments Are Spying on People’s Phones With Push Notifications

      Wyden wrote that the federal government had restricted Apple and other companies’ ability to share information about this process. The Senator’s office “received a tip” last year that “government agencies in foreign countries were demanding smartphone ‘push’ notification records from Google and Apple,” Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, wrote in the letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. “My staff have been investigating this tip for the past year, which included contacting Apple and Google. In response to that query, the companies told my staff that information about this practice is restricted from public release by the government.”

    • Federal News Network ☛ Congress should reauthorize Section 702

      Letitia A. Long is chairwoman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

    • ABC ☛ FBI chief makes fresh pitch for spy program renewal and says it'd be 'devastating' if it lapsed

      The thorny path to reauthorization was laid bare during Tuesday's hearing, when lawmakers from both parties questioned Wray, at times aggressively, over periodic misuse of the program by FBI employees seeking out information about Americans. Though the program enables surveillance only of foreigners located outside the U.S, it also can capture the communications of American citizens and others in the U.S. when those people are in contact with those targeted foreigners.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Privacy first

      The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems.

      But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First": [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Futurism ☛ Head of Climate Conference Who Happens to Be an Oil Exec Says Actually Fossil Fuels Are Fine

    The conflict of interest is palpable. Al Jaber is CEO of Adnoc, the largest drilling company in the Middle East that's gearing up to expand its drilling ventures considerably.

    According to the Global Oil and Gas Exit List, a public database that keeps track of the activities of oil and gas ventures, the Al Jaber-led state oil company has far and away the biggest plans to expand oil and gas production in the world.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Human-induced climate change

    The COP28 summit reminds me that some people need a primer: [...]

  • Democracy Now ☛ COP28: Amy Goodman Attempts to Question UAE Oil CEO Serving as President of U.N. Climate Talks in Dubai

    As Democracy Now! broadcasts from the U.N. climate summit, Amy Goodman attempts to question the oil CEO presiding over the talks. COP28 president and United Arab Emirates oil CEO Sultan Al Jaber is facing criticism over the record number of fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance at the summit, and recently claimed there is “no science” to back up calls to phase out fossil fuels in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Big Oil’s Takeover of U.N. Climate Summit Decried by Activists Fighting for Fossil Fuel Phaseout

    Climate activist Harjeet Singh joins us for an update on the U.N. climate summit in Dubai, where fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber many countries’ delegations. “It is deeply, deeply problematic to see how fossil fuel lobbyists are taking over these climate talks,” he says, noting that climate activists’ fears of an industry takeover of the world’s foremost gathering for climate governance appear to have come true. “We can’t just allow fossil fuel industry to define what is going to happen here,” Singh warns, as financial interests continue to divert political energy away from decarbonization. Singh is the head of global political strategy with Climate Action Network and works on the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a global initiative to phase out fossil fuels and support a just transition.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Carbon Colonialism: Oil-Rich UAE Buys Up Large Swaths of Africa for Carbon Credits to Keep Polluting

    As Democracy Now! broadcasts from COP28 in Dubai, we look at how the United Arab Emirates is using its vast oil money to buy up the rights to land in many African countries in order to sell carbon credits to major polluters, a plan that critics characterize as a new form of colonialism. “After failing to mitigate at the source,” wealthy polluters now “want to, basically, buy, on the cheap, African land,” says Power Shift Africa’s Mohamed Adow about wealthy nations’ failure to deliver on climate finance and turn to a “land grab” on the African continent. “What they’re doing is actually commodifying nature,” says Adow, who describes carbon credits as an “imaginary concept” amounting to “permits to pollute.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ Why Are Russia & U.S. Promoting Nuclear Power at U.N. Climate Talks? Russian Environmentalist Speaks Out

    As Vladimir Putin arrives in Abu Dhabi but does not plan to attend the COP28 summit in Dubai, we speak with Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair for the leading Russian environmental organization Ecodefense, about the climate impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the renewed push at the summit to expand nuclear power. “When you promote nuclear power, you have to understand it’s diverting resources from renewable energy, and renewable energy is the real, most efficient answer to climate change,” says Slivyak. He also discusses how the collapse of civil society in Russia has pushed him and other social activists to leave the country.

  • Truthdig ☛ Reuters Tops List of Fossil Fuel Industry Media Enablers

  • Axios ☛ GOP's "dictator" test

    Why it matters: This isn't 2016. Trump is well aware that the softball question lobbed last night by Fox News' Sean Hannity — "Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if re-elected president, to abuse power?" — is rife with alarming context.

  • The Nation ☛ A Trump Dictatorship Is Not “Inevitable”—as Long as We Step Up Now

    But that’s if Trump wins. I don’t expect him to win 11 months from now. And I’m starting to worry that some of the alarm might be counterproductive.

    You don’t need investigative reporters or well-placed sources to know that Trump plans to end democracy. He’s told us, repeatedly, and as Maya Angelou famously warned, we ought to believe him. In his first campaign speech of the 2024 election, in Waco, Tex., he promised his followers, [...]

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump Says He’ll Be a Dictator on ‘Day One’

    It’s not unusual for political candidates to accuse their opponents of being would-be fascists or authoritarians. Rivals of Franklin Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama, among many others, warned about these men’s supposed dictatorial ambitions. (Of course, none of those presidents mounted a months-long effort to steal an election, capped by inciting a violent assault on the Capitol.)

    What is unusual, and in fact crazy, is for the rival to respond: Yeah, you bet I will.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Donald Trump vs. American History

    A central part of Trump’s project is to depict the presentation of empirical evidence as an attempt at ideological indoctrination. The claim that this country has prevented millions from achieving upward mobility should not be a controversial one; it reflects actual policies such as convict leasing, school segregation, and housing covenants. To Trump and his allies, however, anyone making such a claim has fallen prey to a “radical movement” that sees America as an inherently and irredeemably evil country. A professor stating that the Confederacy seceded from the Union because of slavery and racism is a member of the “woke mob,” never mind the fact that the seceding states said this directly in their declarations of secession. (Mississippi in 1861: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.”) An elementary-school teacher highlighting the importance of LGBTQ figures in the history of American activism is reprimanded for being part of an effort to force sexuality onto students, never mind the fact that Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, and Marsha P. Johnson played an indisputable role in shaping political life.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • El País ☛ ‘A colossal jerk has died’: when celebrity obituaries are not kind

    In his poem Obituary with cheers, the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti invited “the innocent” and “the victims” to celebrate the death of a “piece of shit” with “a black soul.” It was widely circulated on social media in 2004 when former US President Ronald Reagan died and it was misinterpreted that the author had just composed the verses for the occasion. It would happen again two years later with the death of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, but, in fact, it had been published in 1963 (although, in an interview in El Clarín in 2007, Benedetti gave his approval for the Chileans to appropriate it to use against Pinochet). The poem does not state who the deceased in question is; moreover, it specifically recreates the need to enjoy the departure for good of someone who was presumably horrible and whose death has made the world a better place: “it’s time to celebrate / not to tone it down / remember, not just anyone has died [...] don’t forget this dead man / was a real S.O.B.”

  • [Old] Rolling Stone ☛ Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

    Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

    Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed.

    McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.

• Environment

  • [Old] National World Publishing Ltd ☛ Edinburgh Tyre Extinguishers hit ‘posh’ New Town area and boast about deflating tyres of 32 SUVs

    Climate activist group Tyre Extinguishers claim to have deflated the tyres of another 32 SUVs in Edinburgh.

  • [Old] Auto Evolution ☛ Apparently, the Annoying "Tire Extinguishers" Were Right About SUVs

    A new report confirms that the activists are right about at least one thing – polluting the world. The Global Fuel Economy Initiative says that heavier and bigger vehicles considerably slowed down automakers' efforts to bring more fuel-efficient and cleaner vehicles to market.

  • [Old] National World Publishing Ltd ☛ Edinburgh Tyre Extinguishers ‘on a roll’ as they hit New Town area again and deflate tyres of another 15 SUVs

    Since 2022, hundreds of SUVs have been deflated in the Leith, Portobello, Hillside, Marchmont, Bruntsfield and New Town areas by the group.

    A global organisation, Tyre Extinguishers want to make it “impossible” to own an SUV. It describes them as “a climate disaster”, “dangerous” and “unnecessary”.

  • [Old] The Herald ☛ Tyre Extinguishers Edinburgh: Group targets New Town SUVs

    It is part of a protest against the pollution produced by these vehicles and the impact on climate change and clean air in cities.

  • [Old] Reach PLC ☛ Edinburgh climate protest group deflate tyres of 32 SUV's in city centre

    "Why do you own a tank in the middle of the city?!"

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ You'll Be Astonished How Much Power It Takes to Generate a Single AI Image

      As first spotted by The Register, a team of researchers from AI developer Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University recently shared a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper on how much power AI tools need to perform a variety of tasks.

      Their results are — and highlight the very real carbon footprint of turning to AI instead of a human artist for imagery needs.

    • Positech Games ☛ Solar farm 4th site visit: Substations!

      Its been a long time since my last visit to the site, and work stalled for ages due to arguments and analysis regarding earthing. Finally at LONG LAST, that was agreed upon, and we could recommence work. I went up there with a friend yesterday in pretty bad wet weather to see what progress there had been. Hopefully this is the start of the final leg of getting the farm finished and connected. When I was last there, most (85%?) of the panels and frames were installed, and most of the inverters, but that was it. This time there was some more stuff done.

    • New York Times ☛ Renewable Energy Could Be a Casualty in the War on Inflation. Here’s Why.

      High interest rates make green start-up costs soar. Officials at the U.N. climate summit fear the world could miss an opportunity to avert future greenhouse gas emissions.

    • The Verge ☛ Climate groups say Biden AI order doesn’t address AI’s climate impact

      The groups sent a letter to the White House urging the Biden administration, including national climate advisor Ali Zaidi, to add more climate-centered policies in its AI executive order released earlier in October. Seventeen groups signed the letter, including Accountable Tech, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, Climate Action Against Disinformation, Greenpeace USA, and the Tech Oversight Project.

      The letter accuses the administration of neglecting AI’s impact on spreading disinformation on climate and the huge energy cost of training large language models.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ The case against bitcoin

      The bull case preached by the laser-eyed and luna-tattooed crowd is, as before, driven by sentiment and speculation rather than utility. Bitcoin may be a glorified pet rock in terms of money-ness, but people like to hoard it and trade it as a risky hybrid of gold and Nasdaq start-up in the hope of outsized gains. The optimistic view is that any news will be good news as bad actors like Sam Bankman-Fried or Changpeng Zhao get flushed out, mass-market spot ETFs get closer, and potential interest-rate cuts lift risk appetite. With a rising price providing a positive feedback loop, who wouldn’t want to take a punt?

    • APNIC ☛ A carbon-aware Internet with the Green Web Foundation

      At the Green Web Foundation, we seek to increase the Internet’s energy efficiency and speed the Internet’s transition away from fossil fuels by 2030. As part of this vision, we conducted the project ‘A Carbon-Aware Internet’ with support from the RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund in 2022.

      Using real-time data about electricity around the world, we annotated network connections with carbon intensity. With this information, any digital infrastructure provider can move their compute workloads to greener regions.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol

    I like that this paper has been accepted at a cybersecurity conference.

    And, for the record, I have written about the positive aspects of security theater.

  • [Old] HP ☛ Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol

    Abstract: This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader election protocols in computer science. For example it gives some opportunities to minorities while ensuring that more popular candidates are more likely to win, and offers some resistance to corruption of voters. The most obvious feature of this protocol is that it is complicated and would have taken a long time to carry out. We will advance a hypothesis as to why it is so complicated, and describe a simplified protocol with very similar features. Publication Info: IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, Venice, Italy, July 6-8, 2007

  • Scoop News Group ☛ DHS seeks information for CISA analytics and machine learning project

    The Department of Homeland Security is seeking cloud-related information to support an analytics and machine learning research and development project that’s in the works for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

    The Advanced Analytics Platform for Machine Learning (CAP-M) project, which is being developed by DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate for CISA, is “envisioned to be a multicloud, multi-tenant environment for testing new software and tools, and developing complex machine learning capabilities,” per DHS’s request for information, posted Tuesday.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft announces major security leadership reshuffle, appoints new CISO

    Igor Tsyganskiy, who joined Microsoft four months ago in the role of chief strategy officer, has been appointed the new CISO, replacing Bret Arsenault, who had held the role for 14 years.

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Hires New CISO in Major Security Shakeup

    Microsoft security boss Charlie Bell has quietly executed a major shakeup of the software giant’s security hierarchy, removing the CISO and Deputy CISO and handing the reins to Igor Tsyganskiy, a recent hire who previously served as CTO and President at asset management giant Bridgewater Associates. d

  • Michael Geist ☛ My CRTC Appearance on Bill C-11: Why Isn’t the Commission Concerned with Competition, Consumer Choice, and Affordability?

    The CRTC’s Bill C-11 hearings are in their third and final week as a steady stream of broadcasters and producers make their way to Gatineau to urge the Commission to force Internet streamers to hand over cash in a giant cross-industry subsidy scheme designed to support everyone from small producers to Bell’s news division. As the witnesses take turns seeking the mantle that they are facing the biggest crisis (even as there is record film and television production in Canada and broadcasters stand to be the biggest beneficiary of the Online News Act), there has been practically no interest or discussion of the risks to consumers and competition that could come from significant new regulatory costs.

  • Vox ☛ The Israel-Hamas war is tearing American cultural institutions apart

    Balancing the need to be current, especially in the midst of major political moments, is tricky, says Mary Elizabeth Williams, a former museum professional who’s written about how museums should approach political activism and protest art. “As people become more divided in the United States, there’s voices calling for action, but museums need to balance that and find a way to engage in their communities but not alienate certain members of the population.” Cultural organizations risk losing funders and even their nonprofit status if they make the wrong move, she says.

  • CS Monitor ☛ EU leaders in a race against time to agree on first AI regulations

    Some 85% of the technical wording in the bill already has been agreed on, Carme Artigas, AI and digitalization minister for Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said at a press briefing Dec. 5 in Brussels.

    If a deal isn’t reached in the latest round of talks, starting the afternoon of Dec. 6 and expected to run late into the night, negotiators will be forced to pick it up next year. That raises the odds the legislation could get delayed until after EU-wide elections in June – or go in a different direction as new leaders take office.

    One of the major sticking points is foundation models, the advanced systems that underpin general purpose AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot.

    Also known as large language models, these systems are trained on vast troves of written works and images scraped off the [Internet]. They give generative AI systems the ability to create something new, unlike traditional AI, which processes data and completes tasks using predetermined rules.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Sam Altman’s return sparks fears of the AI apocalypse

    However, just four days later, OpenAI announced that Altman would be reinstated in his previous role as CEO. The news came as a shock to many, considering a letter was signed by nearly 600 OpenAI employees threatening to resign if Altman was not brought back as CEO. Left with no other choice than to backtrack on their original decision, OpenAI quickly rehired Altman, stirring up a media frenzy. Altman “now has more power—and fewer constraints—than ever,” one article warned.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ Russia’s Latest Disinformation Tactic Exploits American Celebrities

      “Russian cyber and influence operators have demonstrated adaptability throughout the war on Ukraine, trying new ways to gain battlefield advantage and sap Kyiv’s sources of domestic and external support,” Microsoft wrote in its report, referring to Ukraine’s capital.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ DOJ Will Show that Trump’s Campaign Intended to Cause a Riot at TCF Center in Detroit

      According to the Election Integrity Project, Roman was also one of the most efficient spreaders of disinformation during the post-election period, wildly out of proportion to his number of Twitter followers (suggesting he had offline ways to help make things go viral).

    • Quartz ☛ A disinformation scholar claims Meta is the reason her time at Harvard was cut short

      Donovan’s lawyers at Whistleblower Aid allege that the school “began to target Dr. Donovan’s team, their work, and her personally in an effort to diminish—if not destroy—their research and public engagement” after receiving funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the foundation that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, run together.

      Donovan’s alleged gagging and eventual firing violated her civil rights, including her freedom of speech and freedom of association, her lawyers argue.

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Truth Won’t Matter

      Facts are work. They require study; they require curiosity; they require patience; they require humility. Democracy requires the same. The demands of both become greater in an information environment teeming with stories that are ever more suspect—a place where truth has plausible deniability. Trump will ease the burden, he suggests: You can outsource your mind to his gut. You would be foolish not to. Science lies to you. Hollywood lies to you. The media lie to you. Books lie to you. Courts lie to you. Teachers lie to you. Other people lie to you. Democracy lies to you. The only thing you can trust, in this dizzying world, is the inveterate liar who would never lie to you.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Whistleblowers and Journalists Under Attack

  • EFF ☛ The Latest EU Media Freedom Act Agreement Is a Bad Deal for Users

    Last year, the EU Commission presented the EMFA as a way to bolster media pluralism in the EU. It promised increased transparency about media ownership and safeguards against government surveillance and the use of spyware against journalists—real dangers that EFF has warned against for years. Some of these aspects are still in flux and remain up for negotiation, but the political agreement on EMFA’s content moderation provisions could erode public trust in media and jeopardize the integrity of information channels. 

    Millions of EU users trust that online platforms will take care of content that violates community standards. But contrary to concerns raised by EFF and other civil society groups, Article 17 of the EMFA enforces a 24-hour content moderation exemption for media, effectively making platforms host content by force.  

    This “must carry” rule prevents large online platforms like X or Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, from removing or flagging media content that breaches community guidelines. If the deal becomes law, it could undermine equality of speech, fuel disinformation, and threaten marginalized groups. It also poses important concerns about government interference in editorial decisions.Imagine signing up to a social media platform committed to removing hate speech, only to find that EU regulations prevent platforms from taking any action against it. Platforms must instead create a special communication channel to discuss content restrictions with news providers before any action is taken. This approach not only undermines platforms’ autonomy in enforcing their terms of use but also jeopardizes the safety of marginalized groups, who are often targeted by hate speech and propaganda. This policy could also allow orchestrated disinformation to remain online, undermining one of the core goals of EMFA to provide more “reliable sources of information to citizens”.  

  • Press Gazette ☛ Barclays take back control of Telegraph and Specator, for now

    Telegraph readers today woke up to the news that the Barclay family is back in control of the publisher, some six months after Lloyds bank repossessed it.

    The full outstanding debt has been repaid by Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund Redbird IMI.

    But the future ownership of both the Telegraph and Spectator titles is still far from certain.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ German train drivers to strike from Thursday

    The strike is the fourth to hit Deutsche Bahn this year and comes on the heels of a 20-hour GDL work disruption that forced the cancellation of nearly 80% of all long-distance and regional trains in Germany on November 15-16.

  • Axios ☛ Fully remote work is on the decline in the U.S.

    Why it matters: While far more Americans work remotely now than before the pandemic, the share of those who are fully remote has been steadily declining.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Malala Yousafzai demands action against Taliban’s ‘gender apartheid’

    Since their takeover, the Taliban have banned education for girls beyond the sixth grade and imposed severe restrictions on women, barring them from work and most public spaces and seeking to implement their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia.

    “Afghanistan has only seen dark days after it fell to the Taliban,” Ms. Yousafzai said in the AP interview. “It has been two and half years and most girls have not seen school again.”

    Ms. Yousafzai appealed to the United Nations to “recognize the current state of Afghanistan as a gender apartheid” and cited recent reports of “women being detained, put into prisons and beaten and even put into forced marriages.”

  • University of Michigan ☛ Exonerated: Freeing the wrongly accused from prison

    What makes the clinic different is that it exclusively handles non-DNA cases whereas other innocence projects typically deal with DNA cases.

    Moran said if the case appears to turn entirely on DNA, they will refer it to the Cooley Innocence Project, which handles DNA cases. With a non-DNA case, the lawyers are looking for new evidence to determine their clients’ innocence, he explained.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Taliban’s Abusive Education Policies Harm Boys as Well as Girls in Afghanistan, Rights Group Says

    Because the Taliban have dismissed all female teachers from boys’ schools, many boys are taught by unqualified people or sit in classrooms with no teachers at all.

  • New York Times ☛ Tesla Is Fighting With Sweden’s Unions. Here’s What to Know.

    Unions say Tesla is flouting Sweden’s tradition of collective agreements. About 90 percent of Swedish workers are covered by these agreements, which apply to nonunion employees and set work conditions across industries. They have a long history in Nordic countries and are widely seen as crucial to maintaining social cohesion and a high standard of living.

  • BIA Net ☛ 'Ban all aid that would contribute to the maintenance of the Taliban regime'

    In the letter, women from EŞİK addressed UN officials, drawing attention to the report's alleged disregard for "the gender-based apartheid regime of the Taliban."

    The letter expressed the following: [...]

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Gizmodo ☛ Apple Will Reportedly [Ship] New M3-Powered iPads and MacBook Airs in 2024

    All those devices will get access to the latest M3 silicon. The MacBook Air will also receive the M3 upgrade. All of these devices could launch in March at the earliest. Apple’s iPadOS will see the jump to version 17.4, while the new MacBooks will get upgraded to macOS 14.3. Both those software patches should arrive within the first few months of 2024.

  • Chris Hannah ☛ Sony Playstation Removes Access to Already Purchased Content

    I’m so glad this didn’t affect me. Because something like this would annoy me so much I’d stop buying things digitally. And I’m not quite ready for that yet.

  • Sony ☛ Legal update notice

    As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Verge ☛ Amazon slams Microsoft’s business practices in UK cloud market probe

  Amazon’s concerns regarding Microsoft follow similar criticisms made by Google to the CMA in October. In the letter published on Tuesday, Google claims Microsoft’s licensing practices were harmful to UK customers because they leave them with “no economically reasonable alternative but to use Azure as their cloud services provider, even if they prefer the prices, quality, security, innovations, and features of rivals.” Google said these licensing practices were the biggest issue preventing competition in the UK cloud-computing market.

• AWS accuses Microsoft of clipping customers' cloud freedoms

  AWS has publicly called out Microsoft's software licensing terms, claiming they "restrict choice" and make it "financially unviable" for customers to choose anyone other than Microsoft – something Google and other rivals have complained of.

  This was one among the many points addressed by Amazon in its submission [PDF] to Competition Markets Authority, the regulator charged with inspecting the health of the UK cloud sector with special attention to be given to egress fees; committed special discounts; interoperability; and cloud software policies.

  Amazon reckons that the first of these four "hypotheses" are "based on fundamental misconceptions about the IT sector, global networking technology, the actual interoperability of IT services, and discounts on offer."

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Operation Dismantled, 9 Arrested, 43 Customers Investigated

    Greek police say they have dismantled a pirate IPTV operation after carrying out coordinated raids in five areas of the country. A criminal case was filed against 12 members of the illegal organization, of which 9 were arrested during the raids. A reported 43 customers of the IPTV service are reportedly under investigation for viewing illegal streams.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ EU Mulls Expansion of Geo-Blocking 'Bans' to Video Streaming Platforms

    A recent report from the European Parliament's Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection urges the EU Commission to review its current geo-blocking policies. One suggestion is to expand geo-blocking restrictions to the audiovisual sector, including streaming platforms. This has spooked some stakeholders who warn that a ban on geo-blocking would put the entire industry at risk.

  • git setup-email

    Here’s a li’l three line shell script that tries to help you guess and set format.subjectPrefix and sendemail.to in a git repo.

    Normally it uses completing-read and all its dependencies, but you can edit the script to instead use gum choose or whatever you want.

  • OpenBSD in a CI environment with sourcehut/a>

    If you ever required continuous integration pipelines to do some actions in an OpenBSD environment, you certainly figured that most Git "forge" didn't provide OpenBSD as a host environment for the CI.

    It turns out that sourcehut is offering many environments, and OpenBSD is one among them, but you can also find Guix, NixOS, NetBSD, FreeBSD or even 9front!

    Let's see how this works.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • 🔤SpellBinding — ACLNUTP Wordo: HAVES

    • [Old] Lost a Bike, Made a Bag, Bought Trousers

      Yesterday we had some colleagues from Stockholm visit the local office. It was great fun; there was a lot of socialising and pizza involved. Anecdotally a pizza place owner becomes very very happy if you order 20 pizzas on an otherwise slow Tuesday night.

      When I was to go home at around 22:00 I couldn't find my bike. Anywhere within a 500 metre radius. Even though I'd parked it just outside. Oh, well.

      Now I'm using an old commuter bike that we had in storage. It's not bad. Definitely a lot slower than the 27 gear hybrid I had, but I do need to practice slowing down in general for my well-being so that's not necessarily a bad thing. I just hope it holds up better than my last commuter bike which eventually just couldn't handle the, uhm, urban terrain...

    • I Have a Lot To Write Here

      Just haven't had the time. I mean I've prioritized other things, obviously. But there are a lot of topics I'd like to share, for fun and (absolutely no) profit.

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Make a StealthBox with Devuan and Libre Computer Renegade

      This allows you to browser on internet privately and if for some reason the board is lost or stolen your data is encrypted thus inacessible. It is important to mention than usually the images provided for those SBC do not support installation over any encrypted the filesystem.

    • Home-built Tech

      Many low-tech and small-tech movements have a focus on stewardship. They embrace old technology because they argue that throwing away a tool before its useful life is over is wasteful. Similarly, keeping a small technological footprint and replacing inefficient electrical systems with mechanical or human-powered ones reduces out impact on the planet.

      There are other sides of low tech that interest me more. I'm fascinated with old, small, and alternative tech because of its DIY potential. Instead of needing to rely on a massive supply chain and an intricate global logistics network to get the things we use, we might be able to make other tools ourselves that can do just fine.

    • Internet/Gemini

      • The Gemtext Print Hurdle

        The oldest pages on my website date back to about 1997. I was in school, my ISP provided webspace for me as part of their service, so I learned to write HTML to take advantage of that. The School of Business at this university had recently decided that the ability to work well with others in group setting was a very important skill for their graduates to acquire. Nearly every course included a group project of some sort, and having a place to easily share files with group members proved to be very helpful.

        HTML soon became my primary document format. I used word processor software for documents that required more than what HTML offered, but nearly everything else I wrote was done as HTML; in fact I soon started writing drafts of papers in HTML and then imported the HTML into a word processor for the final edit.

      • The past is in the past except on the web

        Over on the HTTP/HTML/CSS/JS web, there used to be well-designed pages and badly designed pages.

        There used to be some really poorly designed pages that were just one big pixmap or Flash file.

        And some that were nice and gentle and straight-forward; your good old “body, h1 hi, p hello how are you” type sites. Nothing fancy, just set up the way the web was meant to work.

    • Programming

      • cozify-window

        Here’s a li’l mini function for Emacs that when called sets the window width to one space wider than the current cursor position: [...]

      • Audio Programming

        I've been privileged enough to have the time to try learn a few musical instruments, but never got any good at them. But there's another way to play music, by writing programs, that is like my day job? I've just started looking into this so I'm sure I've missed quite a bit. I recommend the interactive manual to start: [...]

      • My mind is on the blink

        Last night I wrote some C for the first time in ages. The impetus was some post I read, which had me wondering how much I remembered. I was able to bang out a simple "hello world", getting spacing and naming of things the way I settled on back in the days of prowess.

      • Unit testing from inside an assembler, part III

        I'm done with the “unit testing” backend for my 6809 assembler [1]. The mini-Forth engine [2] is working out fine, although the number of words increased from 41 to 47 to support some conveniences (like indexing and string comparison). It took some work to support, but the number of assertions one can make in the code is extensive.