Links 19/01/2024: US Military Bailing Out Microsoft Again ('Open' 'AI'), CI Games Lays Off 10% Of Its Staff
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Dave Rupert ☛ Where have all the flowers gone?
So where have all the websites gone? Well, the people who make them have all gone to war for the capitalist machine. They grew up and got jobs. A natural part of growing up. Silos came and plucked their voices. Invasive memes and short form content grew in their place. Hustle overtook leisure. Harassment overtook openness. Influence overtook creativity. An economy of interestingness replaced by one of followers, likes, and engagement metrics.
One important thing to note; websites aren’t extinct. In fact, you’re on one now! Uploading your own words is ancient technology but still works.
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Sumana Harihareswara ☛ This Is A Part Of My Self, Too
This came up because a new friend mentioned that they prefer not to read my site -- okay, many of my friends don't -- because they prefer to get information in person.
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Pro Publica ☛ When Families Need Housing, Georgia Will Pay for Foster Care Rather Than Provide Assistance
Brittany Wise ran through the options in her head.
It was a sunny April morning in Cobb County, Georgia, a suburban area northwest of Atlanta. Wise was heading back to the cul-de-sac of budget motels where her family was staying after receiving an eviction notice from her landlord in January when the blue lights appeared in her Chevy Tahoe’s rearview mirror.
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Pro Publica ☛ The Failed Promise of Independent Election Mapmaking
Washington state’s mapmakers had been working for almost a year to draw the lines that would shape the state’s elections for the next decade. Now they had five hours until the midnight deadline and they’d made little progress.
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Science
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Science Alert ☛ We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For The Last 300 Years
Revisiting the archives, Hoek realized this common paraphrasing featured a misinterpretation that flew under the radar until 1999, when two scholars picked up on the translation of one Latin word that had been overlooked: quatenus, which means "insofar", not unless.
To Hoek, this makes all the difference. Rather than describing how an object maintains its momentum if no forces are impressed on it, Hoek says the new reading shows Newton meant that every change in a body's momentum – every jolt, dip, swerve, and spurt – is due to external forces.
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Brr ☛ Redeployment Part Three
Hello and welcome back! We’re going to pick up right where we left off. In Redeployment Part Two, we got our first flight of the season and handed over responsibilities to the summer crew. Then, finally, I departed South Pole for McMurdo.
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Vice Media Group ☛ Scientists Discovered an 'Ultra-Large Structure' in Space That Shouldn't Exist
The Big Ring is on par with other huge space structures astronomers have found before (measuring in at 1.3 billion light years across or 15 Earth moons) but dwarfed by the undisputed biggest structure, called the Giant GRB Ring, which clocks in at 5.6 billion light years in diameter.
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Education
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Forrest Brazeal ☛ Leaving Google Cloud
So I handed in my resignation before Christmas, walking away from what was (to me, anyway) a significant amount of money. I’m still not sure this was a smart thing to do, but it was certainly exhilarating.
What’s next for me after Google?
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Greece ☛ Universities occupied by students protesting private higher education
More than half of the faculties in universities are under occupation by students in protest at planned education reforms that would allow private universities to operate in Greece.
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Reason ☛ Millions of Kids Are Chronically Absent From School. The Problem Isn't Going Away.
While frequent absences were a problem before pandemic school closures, the lasting effects of online learning have led to consistently high absenteeism rates.
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Hardware
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Luke Harris ☛ A mouse for your mouth
The fact that they’re a VC-funded hardware startup leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I hope they haven’t bitten off more than they can chew.
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Hackaday ☛ How To Spend A Million Dollars On The Ultimate Stereo
We’ve all seen the excesses that the Golden Ears set revel in; the five-figure power conditioning boxes, the gold-plated HDMI cables. As covered by the Washington Post, however, [Ken Fritz] may have gone farther than most. Before he passed away, he estimated that he spent a million dollars on the greatest possible hi-fi setup he could imagine.
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Hackaday ☛ Turning A 1:150 Scale Model Car Into A Real Driving Car With Lights
For many people having a miniature version of something like a car is already a miracle in itself, but there’s always the possibility to take matters a bit further, as YouTube channels like [diorama111] demonstrate. In this particular case, they took a 1:150 scale model of a Nissan Micra and installed a microcontroller, battery, remote steering and front, rear and indicator lights. Considering the 24.5 x 11.4 x 10.5 mm (LxWxH) size of the scale model, this is no small feat.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Jason Kratz ☛ About that David Sparks article on social media...
Anecdote 1? The high school teacher who had to take phones away? Uh, why not just have a no-phones policy when the kid walks into class or something similar?
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David Sparks ☛ The Growing Tide Against Social Media
Now that science has had a few years to study social media and its impact on humans, particularly younger humans, it’s clear there are negative consequences. I’d argue that these consequences equally apply to older humans if they’re not careful.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Game Informer ☛ Lords Of The Fallen Publisher CI Games Lays Off 10% Of Its Staff
CI Games, the publisher behind last year's Lords of the Fallen and the Sniper Ghost Warrior franchise, has laid off 10 percent of its staff, as first reported by GamesIndustry.biz. The publication says its sources pointed to laid-off staff posting about the job cuts on LinkedIn, but has since received confirmation from CI Games.
It's currently unclear how many people 10 percent of the company translates, too, considering CI Games is a publisher that also owns studios like Lords of the Fallen developer Hexworks and Sniper Ghost Warrior developer Underdog Studio.
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI Axes Ban on Military Contracts, Reveals Deal With Pentagon
It's an especially notable change considering OpenAI's largest investor, Microsoft, already has several high-profile contracts with the US military in place.
OpenAI has also revealed it's collaborating with the US Defense Advanced Research Agency.
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The Register UK ☛ Pentagon using ChatGPT? Oh sure, for cyber-things and veterans, says OpenAI
The public about-face on working with the armed forces comes days after a change in OpenAI's policy language, which previously prohibited using its generative AI models for "military and warfare" applications, as well as "the generation of malware," with its technology. Those restraints have now disappeared from the ChatGPT maker's fine print. That said, the super lab stressed that its technology still isn't supposed to be used for violence, destruction, or communications espionage.
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404 Media ☛ Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles
The presence of AI-generated content on Google News signals two things: first, the black box nature of Google News, with entry into Google News’ rankings in the first place an opaque, but apparently gameable, system. Second, is how Google may not be ready for moderating its News service in the age of consumer-access AI, where essentially anyone is able to churn out a mass of content with little to no regard for its quality or originality.
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David Rosenthal ☛ A Lesson Learned
After a long, agonizing wait the backup finished with still quite a lot of battery left, so I powered off the M1 Air and used the disk to initialize the M2 Air. Apple's Migration Assistant worked flawlessly, and I relaxed. The best thing about the M2 Air is that Apple went back to powering it with MagSafe! Their fragile USB hardware could no longer prevent the machine charging.
So the lesson was that I needed to have two Time Machine disks and use them alternately, so even if the most recent one failed I would have a backup only one day older.
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Vice Media Group ☛ A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine
The study, which was submitted to the pre-print server arXiv last Thursday, generated a corpus of 6.38 billion sentences scraped from the web. It looked at patterns of multi-way parallelism, which describes sets of sentences that are direct translations of one another in three or more languages. It found that most of the internet is translated, as 57.1 percent of the sentences in the corpus were multi-way parallel in at least three languages.
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arXiv ☛ A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism
We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.
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Emmanuel Maggiori ☛ Technological superiority is NOT a competitive advantage
The core of the technology behind ChatGPT was not invented by OpenAI; it was invented by a group of Google researchers five years before, who described it in an article in detail. OpenAI adapted that methodology to create ChatGPT. Because the core of the technology is publicly known, other companies like Meta and Google soon launched their own competitors to the chatbot, and open-source alternatives also appeared.
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[Repeat] Data Swamp ☛ This blog is AI free
Hi! This is a short informative blog post about Artificial Intelligence.
I just got approached by a company who wants to help me to add some generative AI in my blog workflow to "boost the quality" of my content.
I like generative AI and I think it's an interesting tool, but I have just no interest using it for my blog.
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Xe's Blog ☛ AI: the not-so-good parts
Now in our system of law, things are generally lawful unless there's some law or precedent that says it's not. At the time of me speaking this, we aren't sure if training AI models on copyrighted data is fair use or not. The courts and lawmakers need to battle this out (if they'll be allowed to because there is a lot of money behind the AI industry right now).
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Daniel Lemire ☛ How much memory bandwidth do large Amazon instances offer?
In my previous post, I described how you can write a C++ program to estimate your read memory bandwidth. It is not very difficult: you allocate a large memory region and you read it as fast as you can. To see how much bandwidth you may have if you use multithreaded applications, you can use multiple threads, where each thread reads a section of the large memory region.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Zach Flower ☛ The Old Web Is a Slowly Decaying Corpse
The Internet has a limited and fallible memory just like everything else does. Sure, that website you loved as a kid might still be around, and the content might be the same, but... it also probably isn't. The things you link out to can disappear, redirect, or change without you ever knowing.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Techdirt ☛ San Francisco Bets Big On Surveillance, Blankets City With 400 Automatic License Plate Readers
There’s nothing more urbane than omnipresent surveillance, apparently. London is considered one of the classiest places on earth, what with its wealth of history, iconic landmarks, and… thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras. It’s also home to knife crime, pervasive racism, and soccer hooligans, with plenty of residents exhibiting all three of these traits simultaneously.
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[Repeat] Reason ☛ Want to Use Social Media? Utah Wants You to Hand Over Your ID.
The law, The Utah Social Media Regulation Act, was passed last March and aims to restrict minors' access to social media and the kind of content they can encounter once online. The law will require all social media users to verify their age through privacy-invading methods such as a facial scan, uploading their driver's license, or giving the last four digits of their social security number. Additionally, minors will be required to obtain parental permission before they can create a social media account. Once online, the law forces social media companies to severely restrict minors' ability to find new content and accounts, and limit when they can message others on the platforms.
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Patrick Breyer ☛ European Parliament to extend voluntary chat control with some modifications
“Instead of taking up the EU Parliament’s new approach for more effective and court-proof child protection without chat control mass surveillance, EU Commissioner ‘Big Sister’ Johansson is incorrigibly insisting in the destruction of digital privacy of correspondence, playing for time and hoping to manipulate critical EU states into agreeing by running infamous campaigns and spreading misinformation. This approach has gotten us into deadlock politically, failing children and abuse victims alike. We should clearly reject this strategy and insist on finding better solutions than mass surveillance, as proposed by the European Parliament last year.”
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Neritam ☛ CIA has been secretly collecting information on US citizens for decades
On Wednesday, a partially declassified letter from Democratic Party Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico to CIA Director William Burns dated April 13, 2021, was released, showing that the secret surveillance program has been operated by the CIA under the authority of an executive order originally issued in 1981 during the Reagan Administration.
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[Old] WSWS ☛ CIA has been secretly collecting information on US citizens for decades
The letter from the two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee states that the CIA program has been conducted in defiance of congressional efforts that have been “expressed over many years and through multiple pieces of legislation, to limit and, in some cases, prohibit the warrantless collection of Americans’ records, as well as the public’s intense interest in and support for these legislative efforts.”
Furthermore, the senators say, the CIA’s secret bulk collection program has been operated “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress, and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection,” and the nature of this operation “has been kept from the public and from Congress.”
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Confidentiality
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RIPE ☛ A Quantum-Safe Cryptography DNSSEC Testbed
DNSSEC was created to provide authentication and integrity for the DNS, an important piece of Internet infrastructure. DNSSEC relies on cryptography to guarantee those properties. With research making considerable progress in designing quantum computers, it is time to consider the scenario that usable quantum computing becomes a reality in the future. In this blog, we discuss the testbed that we are setting up to empirically evaluate the impact of quantum-safe cryptography algorithms on DNSSEC.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Quantum computing will spark ‘cybersecurity Armageddon’
Businesses are not equipped to utilise quantum machines or deal with the disruption they will cause, SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary said on the panel. Most “companies do not have a robust road map yet as to how they’re going to use AI and quantum together to solve core problems”, Hidary said.
He said a “trainwreck” is unfolding, estimating that it will take banks eight to 10 years to transfer to post-quantum protocols, while scalable quantum computers will be available by 2029 or 2030. Anything that uses encryption, from e-commerce to online banking, is at risk, according to Hidary.
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Defence/Aggression
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teleSUR ☛ US Justifications for Bombing Yemen Are Pathetic: Lavrov
The U.S. and its allies have violated all norms of international law, the Russian FM pointed out.
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teleSUR ☛ BRICS Symbolizes the Richness of a Multipolar World: Lavrov
Historical development allowed the emergence of new centers of economic and political influence, the Russian FM stated.
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The Straits Times ☛ North Korea threat could change 'drastically' given Russia cooperation, says US official
January 19, 2024 1:31 AM
The nature of the security threat posed by North Korea could change \"drastically\" in the coming decade as a result of its unprecedented cooperation with Russia, the White House's senior director for arms control Pranay Vaddi said on Thursday.
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New York Times ☛ Iran’s Missile Capability Is Forcing the West to Weigh a Response
Last year, the world discovered that Iran’s drones were becoming world-class threats and a favorite of the Russians. Now, its revived missile fleet is drawing attention, too.
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Vice Media Group ☛ Knockoff Iranian Drone Sold on Alibaba Was Meant for War, Documents Show
Earlier this week, a Chinese manufacturer listed a knockoff of an Iranian suicide drone on Alibaba, then removed it after being contacted by Motherboard. The XHZ-50 Fixed Wing UAV was marketed for use with “survey mapping inspection,” and other models came with similar disclaimers on the e-commerce website.
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The Nation ☛ A Second Trump Term Will Bring an End to the American Century
In the world that a second Trump term might face in 2025, American global power will probably be far less imposing than it was when he came into office in 2016. The problem won’t be that this time around he’s already appointing advisers determined to let Trump be Trump or, as The New York Times put it recently, who are “forging plans for an even more extreme agenda than his first term.” By every significant metric—economic, diplomatic, and even military—US power has been on a downward slide for at least a decade. In the more unipolar world of 2016, Trump’s impulsive, individualized version of diplomacy was often deeply damaging, but on at least a small number of occasions modestly successful. In the more multipolar world he would have to manage nearly a decade later, his version of a unilateral approach could prove deeply disastrous.
After taking his second oath of office in January of 2025, President Trump’s “thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal,” might indeed fulfill the prediction I made some 15 years ago: “The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”
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The Hill ☛ Former NATO chief says recent US administrations laid groundwork for global conflicts
He warned last year that the GOP nominating former President Trump would be a “geopolitical catastrophe,” as it could influence foreign affairs including the Russia-Ukraine war. A nomination for Trump could erode Republican support for the U.S.’s continued aid to Ukraine, Rasmussen argued at the time.
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The Hill ☛ Iowa sues TikTok, alleging app misleads parents about inappropriate content
The Hawkeye State also accused TikTok of making “misleading, deceptive, and unconscionable” statements about the app’s Restricted Mode, which is meant to limit inappropriate content, as well as in its Community Guidelines and on the Google Play and Microsoft stores.
“TikTok has kept parents in the dark,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R) said in a statement. “It’s time we shine a light on TikTok for exposing young children to graphic materials such as sexual content, self-harm, illegal drug use, and worse.”
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NPR ☛ How social media algorithms 'flatten' our culture by making decisions for us
In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka examines the algorithmic recommendations that dictate everything from the music, news and movies we consume, to the foods we eat and the places we go. He argues that all this machine-guided curation has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.
"For us consumers, they are making us more passive just by feeding us so much stuff, by constantly recommending things that we are unlikely to click away from, that we're going to tolerate [but] not find too surprising or challenging," Chayka says.
What's more, Chayka says, the algorithms pressure artists and other content creators to shape their work in ways that fit the feeds. For musicians working through Spotify or TikTok, this might mean recording catchy hooks that occur right at the beginning of a song — when a user is most likely to hear it.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Fewer than 1% of schools in England have full policies on second languages, language learning and English
"In some schools, even individual teachers seem to be unaware of how their colleagues are handling issues like expectations concerning English, or EAL student support," Forbes said. "Much of that could be resolved by developing shared principles and practices. That will need to come from schools themselves, so that it is meaningful in their own settings."
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Atlantic Council ☛ The Houthis are again ‘specially designated global terrorists.’ Here’s what that means.
Foreign terrorist organization (FTO) sanctions are the gold standard of terrorism sanctions. An FTO designation has three unique features that a specially designated global terrorist (SDGT) designation lacks. First, federal law makes it a crime to provide “material support or resources” to a designated FTO, making the group radioactive and causing global banks, insurers, and other companies to cut all ties with the group. Second, members of an FTO are automatically inadmissible to the United States. Third, victims of terrorist attacks and their survivors are able to file civil lawsuits against FTOs and the entities that support them, ensuring justice for victims and increasing financial pressure on the groups.
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The Verge ☛ TikTok can generate AI songs, but it probably shouldn’t
TikTok is not the only platform to lean into generative AI features for its users. YouTube began testing a music creation functionality that lets users make songs from either text prompts or a hummed tune. Dream Track allows for 30-second snippets in the style of other popular artists.
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France24 ☛ Sweden's call for population to prepare for war sparks panic and criticism
It’s been described as a bombshell moment. The upper echelons of Sweden’s government and defence forces last week shocked the nation by explicitly warning that war might come to Sweden, and that each and every Swede should prepare themselves. While some have taken the warning seriously and flocked to the stores to stock up on fuel and survival kits, others have accused the country’s leaders of fear-mongering.
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Pro Publica ☛ DOJ Blasts Law Enforcement Response to Uvalde Shooting in New Report
Law enforcement agencies across the country should immediately prioritize active shooter training, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday as he released a scathing report about the handling of the 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which lives could have been saved if training protocols had been followed.
The Justice Department’s long-anticipated report about the shooting found that “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” led to the bungled response, which Garland said should never have happened. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed on May 24, 2022.
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The Gray Zone ☛ Israeli army gassed my son ‘like Auschwitz,’ mother of slain Israeli soldier says
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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RFERL ☛ Appeals Of Members Of Popular Belarusian Rock Group Against Prison Sentences Denied
A local court in the southeastern Belarusian city of Homel has rejected appeals filed by three members of the popular rock group Tor Band against prison sentences they were handed in late October 2023, state television reported.
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New York Times ☛ Protests in Russia Put Spotlight on Wartime Ethnic Grievances
The trial and conviction of an activist in the Ural Mountains region sparked one of the biggest outbreaks of social unrest since the start of the war.
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Meduza ☛ Novaya Gazeta Europe: At least 2,500 scholars have left Russia since start of full-scale invasion — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ For the first time since start of full-scale war, Russian Defense Ministry reports drone downed over Russia’s Leningrad region — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ ‘You made her into a walking bomb’ Husband of woman charged with pro-Kremlin blogger’s murder pleads with Kyiv-based journalist to confess to framing his wife — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ ‘My old Sunday school is making camouflage nets’ How anti-war Russian priests are persecuted for their views and who helps them survive — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ St. Petersburg nurse sentenced to eight years in prison for attempting to set fire to military enlistment office — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russia adds four Ukrainian groups and ‘Glory to Ukraine’ salute to register of ‘fascist organizations and associated symbols’ — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ European Parliament calls for withholding E.U. funds from Hungary, condemns Orban for blocking Ukraine aid — Meduza
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Off Guardian ☛ Understanding Power Dynamics & Moving Beyond Divisions: Covid19, Ukraine & Israel/Palestine
This piece – originally published by UKColumn – challenges the position of OffG (and others) on the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel.
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Latvia ☛ Rinkēvičs in Davos: Russia wants to renew empire
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's ambition is rebuilding the Russian Empire as it was in the early 19th and early 20th centuries, Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs said in a breakfast discussion dedicated to Ukraine at the World Economic Forum in Davos, LETA reports.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Europe steps up support for Ukraine in fight against Putin’s Russia
There is now a growing realization across the continent that Putin is a European problem, and it is primarily up to Europe to stop him, writes Diane Francis.
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RFERL ☛ Prosecutor Seeks Almost Five Years In Prison For Russian Nationalist Putin Critic Girkin
The prosecution has asked a court in Moscow to convict and sentence Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), once a leader of Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine's east, to almost five years in prison on a charge of making public calls for extremist activities.
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RFA ☛ S Korea calls for UN action amid escalating N Korean provocations
Beijing and Moscow defended Pyongyang’s position in the latest U.N. Security Council meeting, says source.
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The Straits Times ☛ North Korea envoy returns after meeting Putin in Moscow
January 19, 2024 9:06 AM
North Korea's foreign minister returned from Russia on Friday after a rare official visit and meeting with President Vladimir Putin as part of closer cooperation that Washington said could drastically change the security threat posed by Pyongyang.
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Off Guardian ☛ Interrogating “Multipolarity”: A Response to “Understanding Power Dynamics”
This piece is a response to an article originally published by UKColumn which challenges the position of OffG (and others) on the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel, maintaining that “traditional” geopolitics remains a vital topic for the alternate media, and that multipolarity continues to represent a positive alternative [...]
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Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine seeks future role as EU’s eastern customs hub
The ongoing reform of Ukraine’s customs service and the implementation of EU standards are fundamental for the country’s further European integration, writes Vladyslav Suvorov.
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France24 ☛ Paris dismisses Russian claim of French 'mercenaries' in Ukraine
France on Thursday denied Moscow's claim that Russian forces had bombarded French "mercenaries" in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, saying it does not employ guns-for-hire.
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teleSUR ☛ The Ukrainian War Benefits the French Arms Industry: Lecornu
The wartime economy is an opportunity for "job creation," the Defense Minister acknowledged.
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JURIST ☛ Fleeing human rights violations in North Caucasus region of Russia increasingly risky: Amnesty International
Amnesty International found that it is now riskier to flee persecution in the North Caucasus region of Russia due to the ongoing war in Ukraine and stigmatization in Europe. In a report published on Thursday, Amnesty International urged European governments should stop transferring at-risk individuals to Russia to protect their human rights.
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France24 ☛ Ukraine warns ammunition low as allies launch 'artillery coalition' at Paris talks
Ukraine's defence minister warned Thursday that the country faced a "very real and pressing" ammunition shortage in its grinding near-two-year battle against Russia as Western allies met in Paris to agree new artillery supplies.
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LRT ☛ West must support Ukraine with ‘whatever it takes’ to deter Russia – Lithuanian FM in Davos
The West must change the message it sends to Russia from supporting Ukraine for “as long as it takes” to “whatever it takes” if it wants to deter Moscow from attacking the Baltic states, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Rejects U.S. Arms Control Talks, Citing U.S. Support For Ukraine
Russia on January 18 rejected U.S.-Russian arms control talks because of U.S. support for Ukraine, a stance Washington said cast doubt on Moscow's openness to a successor to the last treaty limiting their strategic nuclear arsenals.
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RFERL ☛ Shooter Of Enlistment Officer In Siberia Says He Was Tortured In Custody
Ruslan Zinin, who shot a military commissioner at an enlistment center in Siberia in 2022 amid protests against a mobilization to the war in Ukraine, told a court that he was tortured by police before investigators questioned him.
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RFERL ☛ Transdniester Slaps Trade Duties On Moldovan Farmers In Tit-For-Tat Move
Moldova's breakaway Transdniester region on January 17 announced trade duties for Moldovan farmers after Chisinau earlier this month introduced import and export duties for the Moscow-backed separatist region.
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RFERL ☛ Romanian Farmers Block Another Border Crossing With Ukraine
Dozens of Romanian farmers on January 18 blocked a northwestern border crossing with Ukraine with their tractors and called for a stop to cheap grain imports from its neighbor.
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New York Times ☛ At Davos, War Is on the Agenda, but the Focus Is on Hey Hi (AI) and Elections [Ed: Microsoft moles and Famous Criminal Bill Gates setting the agenda... HEY HI etc.]
The leaders and executives gathering at the World Economic Forum are obsessed with elections and artificial intelligence, not Ukraine or Gaza.
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s Defense Ministry says Russian forces have captured village of Vesele in Ukraine’s Donetsk region — Meduza
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Latvia ☛ Ban on Russia's grain imports to be debated in Latvian parliament
On January 18 the Saeima submitted for committee discussion amendments to the Agriculture and Rural Development Law prepared by the National Alliance (NA), which provides for a ban on the supply of agricultural and processed agricultural products in Latvia from Russia and Belarus.
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Latvia ☛ Latvia annuls legal agreement with Russia
In the final reading on January 18, the Saeima decided to annul the agreement on legal assistance and legal relations in civil, family, and criminal matters that was signed with Russia 30 years ago.
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LRT ☛ No more Lithuanian citizens with family ties to EU-sanctioned persons found
The Migration Department’s probe, launched after it emerged that two children of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich hold Lithuanian passports, has not found any more Lithuanian citizens with family ties to individuals subject to EU sanctions.
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RFERL ☛ NATO To Hold Biggest Drills Since Cold War With 90,000 Troops
NATO is launching its largest exercise since the Cold War, rehearsing how U.S. troops could reinforce European allies in countries bordering Russia and the alliance's eastern flank if a conflict were to flare up.
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Imposes Sanctions On U.A.E. Shipping Firm For Violating Russian Oil Price Cap
The U.S. Treasury Department on January 18 issued new Russian-related sanctions targeting a United Arab Emirates shipping company and 18 vessels that the department said have shipped Russian seaborne oil priced above the $60-per-barrel cap set by a U.S.-led international coalition.
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RFERL ☛ Police Search Moscow Offices Of Wildberries Retailer Over Recent Warehouse Fire
Police searched the Moscow offices of Russian online clothing retailer Wildberries, confiscating documents related to the company's large warehouse near St. Petersburg that was burned to the ground in a fire last weekend, the SHOT Telegram channel linked to the government said on January 18.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The Gray Zone ☛ Internal prison files suggest Epstein ‘suicide’ coverup
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ John Pilger Was a Tireless Critic of Western Imperialism
He made sixty documentary films and wrote extensively in the press, most famously in the Daily Mirror and the Guardian, the two most significant left-liberal newspapers in the UK. For his work, the industry rewarded him with countless awards, including Emmy’s and citations as Journalist of the Year and Reporter of the Year.
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Environment
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Idiomdrottning ☛ The Green Wedge
That’s the thought I had for a few seconds until I painfully remembered how FOSS got commodified and we all became free workers in the tech giants’ code mines. The same thing could happen to the climate issue.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Report: Warmer planet will trigger increased farm losses
Extreme heat is already harming crop yields, but a new report quantifies just how much that warming is cutting into farmers' financial security. For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, yields of major crops like corn, soybeans and wheat fall by 16% to 20%, gross farm income falls by 7% and net farm income plummets 66%.
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Environmental Defense Fund ☛ Extreme Heat's Impacts on Farm Financial Outcoms in Kansas [PDF]
In this study, we examined the impacts of extreme heat on the financial outcomes of Kansas farms to inform future adaptation solutions. This analysis required detailed farm-level data. We utilized a unique Kansas Farm Management Association, known as KFMA, dataset with detailed information on farm production and finances from 1981 to 2020 across 6,958 unique Kansas farms. The KFMA provides financial analysis and accounting services to Kansas producers and has a partnership with Kansas State University that allows research to be conducted with the data. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the KFMA sample across 105 counties in Kansas.
[...]
Increased farm exposure to extreme heat negatively impacted crop yields across our study period. For ease of interpretation, we translated the impacts of EDDs into impacts associated with a 1°C uniform temperature increase during the 40-year dataset. Our study finds that 1°C of warming reduces major crop (corn, soybean and wheat) yields by approximately 16-20%. Our analysis finds that extreme heat exposure negatively impacts gross and net farm income. We find that a 1°C of warming is associated with a 7% reduction in gross income and a 66% reduction in net income.
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El País ☛ The drop in Panama Canal traffic due to a severe drought could cost up to $700 million
One of the most severe droughts to ever hit the Central American nation has stirred chaos in the 50-mile (80-kilometer) maritime route, causing a traffic jam of vessels, casting doubts on the canal’s reliability for international shipping and raising concerns about its affect on global trade.
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[Old] Shipping and Freight Resource ☛ What is happening in the Panama Canal..??
This shortage has compelled the Panama Canal Authority to drastically reduce the number of ships passing through daily, leading to long queues and diverted routes, significantly impacting global shipping..
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[Old] PNAS ☛ Bundling ecosystem services in the Panama Canal watershed
Land cover change in watersheds affects the supply of a number of ecosystem services, including water supply, the production of timber and nontimber forest products, the provision of habitat for forest species, and climate regulation through carbon sequestration. The Panama Canal watershed is currently being reforested to protect the dry-season flows needed for Canal operations. Whether reforestation of the watershed is desirable depends on its impacts on all services. We develop a spatially explicit model to evaluate the implications of reforestation both for water flows and for other services. We find that reforestation does not necessarily increase water supply, but does increase carbon sequestration and timber production.
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DeSmog ☛ New Shell Files Could Aid Climate Cases, Attorneys Say
And a 1998 report spells out Shell’s reasons for leaving the Global Climate Coalition, a now defunct lobby group that worked to undermine climate science. The document shows that Shell had acknowledged the need to adopt “prudent precautionary measures” to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis — even as it continued to push for more production of oil and gas.
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Energy/Transportation
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DeSmog ☛ Conservative Faction Receives £50,000 from GB News Owner
The ‘New Conservatives’ group of Tory MPs received a £50,000 donation in December from the investment fund behind GB News, DeSmog can reveal.
New Electoral Commission records show that the Legatum Institute Foundation gave the sum in December last year, the joint-largest recorded donation to the Conservative faction.
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Martin Gunnarsson ☛ Making a case for commuting by bike
This post is mostly a way for me to start considering biking to work as a realistic option, rather than a theoretical possibility, but I hope it can also inspire others to change up their daily commutes.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Trump blasts the idea of a digital dollar
The Fed has said it’s studying a potential digital dollar but hasn’t made a decision on whether to recommend the establishment of one. The central bank has also said it won’t move ahead without the backing of lawmakers and the executive branch. Neither the Biden White House, nor congress has done that.
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CBC ☛ Edmonton man and his cryptocurrency company sanctioned for breaching Alberta securities laws
In a hearing decision posted to its website on Jan. 12, the Alberta Securities Commission ordered that Devon Christopher Edwards, as the director of KB Crypto Inc., engaged in "serious misconduct" that resulted in "considerable financial losses" to investors estimated at more than $400,000.
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RFA ☛ Renewable energy surge: Southeast Asia’s wind, solar power grow by 20% in a year
Operating solar and wind capacity in Southeast Asia grew in 2023 by a fifth, reaching over 28 gigawatts (GW), accounting for 9% of the total electricity generation capacity, a new report by Global Energy Monitor said.
The ASEAN countries, which include Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Timor Leste, added 3 GW of solar capacity and 2 GW of wind power in 2023, according to GEM’s report.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Revelator ☛ Species Spotlight: Development Threatens African Savanna Elephants
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Omicron Limited ☛ Feds want boats to slow down to protect whales
In the coming months, NOAA officials are expected to expand a lower boat speed limit imposed on large ships—65 feet and longer—during whale calving season to include vessels as small as 35 feet. The move is meant to curb the number of whale vessel strikes, such as the one reported Wednesday involving a calf. Fishermen spotted the injured newborn off the South Carolina coast swimming with its mother on Jan. 3 and submitted photographs showing wounds consistent with those caused by a boat propeller.
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CBC ☛ SUV stolen from Toronto driveway shows up 50 days later — and 11,000 km away
Using Apple AirTags he had hidden in the vehicle, Andrew tracked the 2022 GMC Yukon XL to a nearby rail yard, then to the Port of Montreal, and ultimately to a used car lot in the United Arab Emirates.
After pleading with police to help retrieve the truck, he hired a private investigator and even contacted Interpol, to no avail.
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Finance
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Reason ☛ The World Economic Forum Is Begging You To Trust the Science
"There has been a deliberate attempt to inflame the public against experts," warned one Davos panelist.
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New York Times ☛ The Snickers Bar Is the Economic Indicator We Need [Ed: Wall Street Times thinks that people can just eat candy?]
A Snickers bar illustrates how humans don’t think about inflation rationally.
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[Old] US Senate ☛ 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act Fact Sheet [PDF]
The original Glass-Steagal, the Banking Act of 1933, was introduced in response to the financial crash of 1929. [...]
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[Old] US Federal Reserve ☛ Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall)
The Glass-Steagall Act effectively separated commercial banking from investment banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, among other things. It was one of the most widely debated legislative initiatives before being signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in June 1933.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Common Dreams ☛ Yuge: On Teeny Tinpot Triumphs Served In Popcorn Tubs To Boot
We know, we know: Per Dylan, "It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there." Still, we call bullshit on that "historic," "landslide," "resounding" win by the Bad Orange Guy at Iowa's GOP caucus. In truth - SAD! - in an abysmally low turnout, he won an underwhelming 56,260 votes from just half of 14% of Iowa's Republicans who, in a surreal touch, stuffed their hand-ripped, unvetted, "downright Rockwellian" ballots into grocery bags and popcorn buckets. Behold, stately American democracy at work.
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India Times ☛ Amazon lays off about 5% of workforce at Buy with Prime unit
The e-commerce giant laid off several hundred employees in its streaming and studio operations last week. Many jobs were also cut in its Twitch live-streaming platform and Audible audiobook unit, according to media reports.
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La Quadature Du Net ☛ EU AI Act will fail commitment to ban biometric mass surveillance
On 8 December 2023, EU lawmakers celebrated reaching a deal on the long-awaited Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. Lead Parliamentarians reassured their colleagues that they had preserved strong protections for human rights, including ruling out biometric mass surveillance (BMS).
Yet despite the lawmakers’ bravado, the AI Act will not ban the vast majority of dangerous BMS practices. Instead, it will introduce – for the first time in the EU – conditions on how to use these systems. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and EU Member State ministers will vote on whether they accept the final deal in spring 2024.
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El País ☛ Everything we know about the gigantic complex—complete with a bunker—that Mark Zuckerberg is building in Hawaii
But even before construction began, opposition to the project went global. A petition on Change.org calling for a halt to the Facebook CEO’s “colonialism” in Hawaii gathered one million signatures. “He is suing Native Hawaiians in Kauai for their land so he can build a mansion. They have built lives there. They have built families there…He’s building a mansion to what? Live in Kauai for two months out of the year? This is inhuman. It is sick,” the petition read. At the time, Zuckerberg was trying to take over the parcels that resisted him, pushing to limit the right-of-way through his newly acquired land and fencing off his properties so no one could know what was going on inside. Locals were superfluous to Zuckerberg, and that went over very badly with them.
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404 Media ☛ Pornhub Wants Proof of Consent From Every Single Performer on Its Platform
Pornhub is introducing an even more stringent performer verification policy, and will soon require performers upload proof of consent from their scene partners in addition to their IDs.
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Digital Music News ☛ YouTube Layoffs Impact Ad Team—Google CEO Says Expect More
YouTube’s advertising business has been impacted by layoffs—becoming the latest round of tech layoffs announced in 2024. The partnerships side of YouTube is undergoing a corporate restructuring, with massive changes coming to the creator management and operations teams.
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Quartz ☛ Google says more layoffs are coming after slashing 100 YouTube jobs
The memo came only a day after another leaked memo showed that Google would cut hundreds of jobs on its advertising sales team, and just hours after an announcement that the company was slashing 100 jobs at YouTube. So far, Google has likely laid off more than 1,000 workers in 2024 — though it has not specified a number.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Sheryl Sandberg steps down from Meta board
Sandberg’s decision came in after she spent more than 14 years as the company’s chief operating officer, in addition to 12 years on its board. Sandberg stepped down from her position as Meta’s operations chief in 2022.
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ABC ☛ Sandberg, who helped turn Facebook into digital advertising empire, to leave board
Sandberg left Google to join Facebook in 2008, four years before the company went public. As the No. 2 executive at Meta under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sandberg also took a lot of heat for some of its biggest missteps.
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Gizmodo ☛ Sheryl Sandberg Is Stepping Down From Meta's Board
It’s not clear what’s next for Sandberg. She joined Facebook in 2008, after previous stints in government and at Google. During her tenure as the company’s COO, she helped its social media platforms grow in major ways, while also helping the company weather some of its more unfortunate controversies—including the Cambridge Analytica scandal. She stepped down from her position as COO in 2022 but has remained on Meta’s board since then.
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India Times ☛ Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March
Reddit, which filed confidentially for its IPO in December 2021, is planning to make its public filing in late February, launch its roadshow in early March, and complete the IPO by the end of March, two of the sources said.
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The Hill ☛ YouTube cuts 100 employees, continuing tech layoffs trend
The latest round of cuts comes as Google undergoes a restructuring of its organization. Last week, Google eliminated hundreds of employees working on Google Assistant, and hundreds working on Google’s knowledge and information product teams, a spokesperson told The Hill, declining to specify the specific numbers.
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India Times ☛ Meta bringing together AI research and product teams
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday that the company was bringing its AI research team "closer together" with a more business-focused generative AI team launched last year, doubling down on a push to get the technology into products.
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India Times ☛ YouTube cuts 100 employees as tech layoffs continue
The tech giant Wednesday notified workers from YouTube's operations and creator management teams that their positions had been eliminated, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times. YouTube, the world's most popular video service, employed 7,173 people Tuesday, a person with knowledge of the total said.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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APNIC ☛ The LLM misinformation problem I was not expecting
Not long into the autumn 2023 semester, students began to cite blogs and vendor materials that made sense but were partly or entirely incorrect. This problem traces back to LLMs providing ‘hallucinations’. In some cases, vendor content creators incorporate these untrue materials directly into their published content without vetting or correcting them.
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CBC ☛ AI-powered disinformation is spreading — is Canada ready for the political impact?
Those concerns are playing out around the world this year in what's being described as democracy's biggest test in decades.
Billions of people in more than 40 countries are voting in elections this year — including what's expected to be a bitterly disputed U.S. presidential contest. Canadians could be headed to the polls this year or next, depending on how much longer the Liberal government's deal with the NDP holds up.
"I don't think anybody is really ready," said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley specializing in digital forensics.
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Cybergeeks ☛ Attackers target Romania using AI-generated videos
We advise users to not enter credentials on suspicious websites, and to report suspicious ads on YouTube. The methods used to identify additional domains in this campaign were described in the previous article. The list of all domains identified in this campaign: [...]
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Haaretz ☛ Exposed: Telegram Group With Thousands of pro-Palestinian Volunteers Spreading Disinformation
'We're playing with Israelis' minds': An Egyptian exile from the Muslim Brotherhood is operating a Telegram group where volunteers pose as Israelis and spread disinformation in Israel ■ Activists include digital experts, graphic designers, Hebrew speakers, AI experts and more
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Meduza ☛ RT employee poses as resident of heatless Russian apartment and gives fake interview to discredit TV Rain
Konstantin Pridybailo, a correspondent for the Russian state media network RT, posed as a resident of Lipetsk and gave a fake interview to the independent news channel TV Rain about the city’s recent heating outage in an effort to discredit the outlet.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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RFERL ☛ Russian Rights Defender Sentenced To Three Years In Prison Over Ukraine War Posts
A court in the northwestern Russian city of Cherepovets on January 18 sentenced a local human rights defender, Gregory Vinter, to three years in prison on a charge of distributing "false" information about Russia's armed forces.
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Stanford University ☛ Freedom of thought is being threatened by states, big tech and even ourselves. Here’s what we can do to protect it
The idea of free speech sparked into life 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece – in part because it served a politician’s interests. The ability to speak freely was seen as essential for the new Athenian democracy, which the politician Cleisthenes both introduced and benefited from.
Today, we debate the boundaries of free speech around kitchen tables and watercoolers, in the media and in our courtrooms. The right to freedom of thought, however, is more rarely discussed. But thanks to the growing influence of social media, big data and new technology, this “forgotten freedom” needs our urgent attention.
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JURIST ☛ Malaysia charges filmmakers with blasphemy, drawing condemnation from human rights groups
The film, Mentega Terbang, debuted at a film festival in 2021. It centers around a Muslim girl dealing with questions about life after death. The film contained religious themes and scenes that received criticism from conservative groups who “complained that the film went against Islamic religious doctrine.” The film was subsequently banned in September 2023 under Section 26 of the Film Censorship Act 2002.
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RFA ☛ Chinese police hold dissident who pledged allegiance to Taiwan
Taiwan, which recently saw a Democratic Progressive Party president elected for an unprecedented third consecutive term, has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, nor formed part of the People's Republic of China, although Beijing claims the island as its own.
It has been governed as a sovereign state called the Republic of China since the Kuomintang government fled to the island after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's communists on the mainland in 1949.
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Meduza ☛ Russian activist sentenced to three years in prison for online posts, fears won’t survive term due to illness
Winter was charged for a comment he made on the Russian social networking site VKontakte about civilian deaths in Bucha and for eight reposts about the Russian airstrike on Mariupol’s drama theater, where civilians were sheltering, reports human rights advocacy group OVD-Info.
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Techdirt ☛ Ousted Prosecutor’s First Amendment Lawsuit Against Ron DeSantis Revived By Appeals Court
Ron DeSantis continues to govern Florida as though the Constitution doesn’t exist. It may froth the voting base a bit, but it’s doing almost nothing for DeSantis, much less the people he’s supposed to be serving.
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Techdirt ☛ Florida Has Yet Another Unconstitutional Social Media Bill; Wants To Ban Kids From Social Media
The Florida legislature (with the support of goon-in-chief Ron DeSantis) really has a thing for unconstitutional bills that piss on the 1st Amendment. I mean, the state is still in a 1st Amendment fight with Mickey Mouse, which should tell you something.
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JURIST ☛ Uganda opposition leaders under house arrest after calling for anti-government protests
Ugandan opposition leader and former presidential candidate Bobi Wine said on Thursday that police had surrounded his residence and put him “under house arrest” ahead of opposition protests planned to take place later that day.
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JURIST ☛ LGBTQ+ organization helps gay man escape Russia after being tortured
Russian LGBTQ+ rights organization SOS Crisis Group reported on Wednesday that Rizvan Dadaev, a Chechen who was detained due to his sexual orientation, managed to escape from Russia with assistance from the organization after being tortured. LGBTQ+ people have a history of persecution in Russia and its Chechnya region.
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RFERL ☛ Estonia's Top Russian Orthodox Clergyman Told To Leave Country
Estonia has told the head of its branch of the Russian Orthodox Church to leave the country, calling him a threat to national security, Estonian public broadcaster ERR reported on January 18.
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Meduza ☛ Estonia opts not to extend residence permit of Russian-affiliated Estonian Orthodox Church leader, citing his support for war — Meduza
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RFERL ☛ Eight Men In Russia's Bashkortostan Handed Jail Terms Amid Unprecedented Rallies
A court in Ufa, the capital of Russia's Bashkortostan region, has sentenced six men to up to 13 days in jail for taking part in an unprecedented rally earlier this week to support the former leader of the banned Bashqort movement.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Jimmy Lai trial: Ex-US diplomat in Hong Kong advised Fashion Company Apple Daily on story about US meeting, ex-publisher says
A former US top diplomat in Hong Kong advised Apple Daily newspaper on its coverage of a March 2019 meeting between then-US vice-president Mike Pence and a pro-democracy delegation from the city, a witness told the trial of the former newspaper owner Jimmy Lai.
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Federal News Network ☛ What whistleblowers will need from Congress in 2024
Improper payments, fraud in nearly every major federal program, contracting irregularities and false claims. These problems roll on and on, year after year.
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Ambassador To Russia Visited Imprisoned Reporter Evan Gershkovich, Embassy Says
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy visited Evan Gershkovich, the American reporter held in Moscow on espionage charges, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow announced.
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JURIST ☛ 2023 CPJ prison census shows incarceration of journalists near record high
The Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) 2023 prison census shows near-record levels of journalist imprisonment, with Israel jumping from being tied at 24th place to ranking at sixth place amongst the world’s leading jailers of journalists.
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Truthdig ☛ How Twitter Turned Journalism Into a High School Cafeteria
This basic mechanism for creating conformity was right out in the open; you could see people bend to the popular consensus in real time. If you said something people liked, they’d take a fraction of a second to hit that fav button. If you said something unpopular, people would yell at you, like really yell at you! For the average person, if those yelling people are your professional peers, that’s going to influence your work. It just will.
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uni Northwestern ☛ Saving Community Journalism: The Path Ahead
After working for more than three decades as a journalist and senior business executive at some of the nation’s smallest and largest news organizations, I became a professor at the University of North Carolina in 2008, at the very moment that the Great Recession was exposing the fragility of the last remaining vestiges of the business model that had supported local news for so long. It was all the motivation I needed to commit to reviving and reimagining local news for the digital age, tapping the knowledge and expertise gained from a professional journey that had begun in my teen years, when I snagged a summer reporting job with my local hometown weekly in rural North Carolina and culminated with stints at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
In two books – “Saving Community Journalism” and “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” – and six major reports on the State of Local News published in the last decade, I’ve documented the relentless expansion of “news deserts” and “ghost newspapers,” the rise of hedge-fund and private equity ownership, and the persistence and resilience of entrepreneurs who have sought to develop new business models to replace the old one. I’ve been joined in this pursuit by industry and academic researchers in multiple disciplines – including political science, economics, law, business, history and communication – who are tracking how the loss of local journalism affects our society.
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Variety ☛ Pitchfork Is Being Folded Into GQ, as Condé Nast Seeks ‘Best Path Forward’ for Music Publication
Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director of Vogue, announced the changes in a memo to company staff Wednesday. Pitchfork, which has cultivated a brand geared around music criticism doling out spare praise, was founded in 1996 by indie-music fan Ryan Schreiber.
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The Verge ☛ Pitchfork to be absorbed into GQ
Pitchfork, the acerbic music site that defined album reviews in the early blogging era, is being hollowed out. Owner Condé Nast has decided to merge the music magazine with GQ, the men’s interest publication, according to a staff memo circulated by Max Tani of Semafor. Launched back when CDs were a thing, Pitchfork outlasted the age of music piracy and mp3s and through the rise of digital streaming. Its future as a brand post-merge is now uncertain.
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NPR ☛ Pitchfork faces layoffs and restructuring under Condé Nast
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Pitchfork is changing. Back in 2015, Conde Nast bought the highly influential website for music reviews, interviews and news. Now the company is folding Pitchfork into the men's magazine GQ and laying off staff. NPR music critic and correspondent Ann Powers is here to talk about what the world of music stands to lose if Pitchfork as we know it disappears. Hey, Ann.
ANN POWERS, BYLINE: Hey. How are you doing?
SHAPIRO: Good. To start with some context, how did Pitchfork start and evolve into this go-to music website that we know today?
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Hollywood Reporter ☛ Pitchfork Folded Into GQ as Condé Nast Makes Cuts at Music Publication
The cuts are connected to larger changes at Condé announced by CEO Roger Lynch last year. The restructuring will affect about 5 percent of employees and include a new reporting structure.
Pitchfork was founded in 1996 as a blog by music journalist Ryan Schreiber. Like many publications, it has evolved over the years to include live events (the Pitchfork Music Festival) and other editorial projects.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Nation ☛ Murder?
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Techdirt ☛ Study: Field Drug Tests Generate Nearly 30,000 Bogus Arrests A Year
Field drug tests often seem to be more a triumph of imagination than a triumph of science. They’re cheap. Some popular tests run less than $3/per. That’s the literal selling point. When in doubt, a cop can get probable cause by grabbing a substance, dumping it into a field test, and deciding whatever results are generated are evidence of guilt.
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The North Lines IN ☛ The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s iconic ‘I Have a Dream’
King was the last speaker. By the time he reached the podium, many in the crowd had started to leave. “I tell students today, ‘There were no Jumbotrons back then,'” Rachelle Horowitz, who as a young activist had organized transport to the march, told me. “All people could see was a speck and they listened to it.”
Not all those who remained could hear him properly, but those who could stood rapt. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed,” said King as though he were wrapping up. “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.”
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Futurism ☛ As Google Pivots to AI, CEO Warns He Will Fire Even More Staff
In the more recent memo, the CEO said that although the more recent and forthcoming "role eliminations" will not be "at the scale of last year’s reductions" — a reference to the 12,000 jobs Google cut around this time last year — the company will continue down the path of "removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas."
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ To the Corporate Media, Workers May as Well Not Exist
Working-class people are systematically left out of mainstream media coverage. So the stories we get are incomplete, skewed, or even complete distortions of reality.
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Ottawa ☛ Police must return phones after 175 million passcode guesses, judge says
Ontario Superior Court Justice Ian Carter heard that police investigators tried about 175 million passcodes in an effort to break into the phones during the past year.
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Vice Media Group ☛ Filming Your Remote Layoff Is the Hottest Dystopian Trend (for A Very Good Reason)
Rodehorst suspects that Cloudflare and Discord will probably look more closely at their dismissal processes moving forward. Whether that is true is unclear. When we reached out, Discord declined to comment, and CloudFlare only clarified that Pietsch had been dismissed as part of a regular quarterly review of employees’ performances.
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La Quadature Du Net ☛ Predictive Policing in France: Against opacity and discrimination, the need for a ban
Here we summarize the main criticisms of the systems studied, most of which use artificial intelligence techniques.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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EFF ☛ EFF’s 2024 In/Out List
Accordingly, here’s what we’d like to see a lot more of, and a lot less of, in 2024.IN1. Affordable and future-proof internet access for all
EFF has long advocated for affordable, accessible, and future-proof internet access for all. We cannot accept a future where the quality of our internet access is determined by geographic, socioeconomic, or otherwise divided lines. As the online aspects of our work, health, education, entertainment, and social lives increase, EFF will continue to fight for a future where the speed of your internet connection doesn’t stand in the way of these crucial parts of life.2. A privacy first agenda to prevent mass collection of our personal information
Many of the ills of today’s internet have a single thing in common: they are built on a system of corporate surveillance. Vast numbers of companies collect data about who we are, where we go, what we do, what we read, who we communicate with, and so on. They use our data in thousands of ways and often sell it to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement. So whatever online harms we want to alleviate, we can do it better, with a broader impact, if we do privacy first.
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Techdirt ☛ Error 402: Gone Native
We’re back with another post in our ongoing series on web monetization, the Error 402 series. Before the holidays, we had talked about some of the earlier attempts at monetizing content, which included paywalls, banner ads, search ads, and eventually concepts around upselling into premium services under the banner of “freemium.” I originally was going to do the next entry in the series on other types of subscription models, but a few people raised other things that they wondered about, so this week and next I want to cover some of those.
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ABC ☛ Biden to promote [Internet] access in North Carolina, a state he hopes to win
President Joe Biden is going to North Carolina on Thursday to highlight $82 million in new investments that would connect 16,000 households and businesses to high-speed [Internet].
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[Old] Gannett ☛ With poor data, deficient requirements and little oversight, massive public spending still hasn't solved the rural [Internet] access problem
The FCC can't readily identify where high-speed [Internet] is missing in rural areas because there are no accurate maps of address-by-address coverage.
If even one home or business in a census block has access, the agency considers the entire block served. In rural areas, some of those blocks, not to be confused with the larger census tracts, cover hundreds of square miles. Many places are shown as having broadband when, in reality, they don't.
"That means in the United States we lack an honest picture of the communities that are consigned to the wrong side of the digital divide, and the people and places most at risk of falling further behind," FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said last summer in a memo of dissent over the agency's rush to spend billions on rural [Internet] projects based on flawed maps.
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[Old] Techdirt ☛ Shocker: Billions In Broadband Subsidies Wasted As Government Turns Blind Eye To Fraud
And here’s the kicker: the Politico report doesn’t even highlight some of the worst fraud seen in the program. Earlier this year we noted how West Virginia was the poster child for this program’s dysfunction, with Verizon, Cisco and Frontier convincing the state to spend millions in broadband subsidies on over-powered, unused routers, redundant, useless consultants, and “upgrades” that appear to have benefited nobody. The state then buried a consultant’s report highlighting how companies and state leaders engaged in systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime. Nothing much has happened since.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Demon-haunted computers are back, baby
It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing": [...]
The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.
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Brandon ☛ I Just Want to Watch Gladiator in 4k
I mean, the 4k release of Gladiator came out in 2018, almost four years ago. Why is this not streaming in 4k? I paid for the annual Paramount+ subscription with Showtime, so you'd think I could watch a movie that probably benefits from 4k in 4k with my subscription? No, of course it's not that easy.
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The New Leaf Journal ☛ Provocative Out-Of-Context Headlines
Taken together, one can see that I feel no need to feel comfortable with not owning my games. I do not think I need to own every single game that I play no more that I need to own every book I read or movie I watch (I am a long-time subscriber to Crunchyroll for anime streaming). However, I am nevertheless very much in favor of end user game ownership – both in the physical and digital spheres – and I make a point of trying to buy games from pro-ownership sources. Moreover, while I only write about libertarians and do not personally identify as one, the libertarian in me has a reflexive distaste for being told what I need to do by some video game executive.
But I digress.
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The Verge ☛ Plex is about to launch a store for movies and TV shows
The new store will mark a major addition for Plex, especially following the company’s layoff of 20 percent of its staff in June 2023. At the time, the company’s CEO told staffers that Plex’s ad business had been “significantly impacted” by a downturn in global advertising markets, but chief product officer Scott Olechowski told Roettgers that its ad business is growing.
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Techdirt ☛ Telecom Monopolies Are Once Again Funding Covert, Sleazy Local Attacks On Community Broadband Networks
We’ve long established that U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.
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The Washington Post ☛ Apple opens gates to $1.1 trillion in app payments — for a steep price
Previously, Apple required developers to use its in-house system to accept payments, charging hefty fees of up to 30 percent. But Apple still intends to take a 27 percent cut for the link-out to external payment systems, and the company declared a right to audit developers’ accounts to verify they are paying up.
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India Times ☛ Apple loosens grip on iPhone apps - with a catch
Apple said it will permit developers to include buttons or links in apps that direct users to alternative purchasing venues such as websites.
However, it told the court it would still collect a fee of 27 percent on transactions made using payment systems other than its own.
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Stephen Hackett ☛ U.S. Developers Can Now Offer Payments Options Outside of App Store
These changes are outlined in Section 3.1.1(a) of the App Store Review Guidelines, which points to the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement (US), which developers can request from Apple.
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MacRumors ☛ U.S. Developers Can Now Offer Non-App Store Purchasing Option, But Apple Will Still Collect Commissions
There are several requirements that developers need to adhere to maintain the privacy and security of the App Store ecosystem, and notably, Apple will collect a commission on purchases made using these Entitlement Links. Rather than 30 percent, Apple will collect a 27 percent fee on user purchases or year-one subscriptions made through the link. On the second year of a subscription, the commission fee drops to 12 percent, which is three percentage points lower than the 15 percent fee that Apple collects from second-year or longer subscriptions made through the in-app purchase system. Apps that participate in the App Store Small Business Program will be charged a 12 percent commission rate.
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Trademarks
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Techdirt ☛ Trader Joe’s Bullshit Trademark Suit Against Its Employees’ Union Dismissed
Last summer, we brought to you the delightful news that Trader Joe’s had joined the list of bad-acting companies that were attempting to play stupid trademark games with their own employees’ unions through bullshit trademark disputes and lawsuits. This appears to be something of a trend brewing, with other companies engaging in this same sort of bullshit. Medieval Times tried the same thing, for instance, only to have the court laugh off any claims of potential customer confusion and dismiss the suit. Notably, Trader Joe’s made essentially all the same arguments: the use of the chain’s name, plays on its branding, and references to real-life store locations would somehow confuse the public into thinking Trader Joe’s endorses or is affiliated with its employees’ union.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Sky's Industrial-Scale Pirate IPTV Blocking Becomes a War of Attrition
Last summer, Sky TV obtained a somewhat mysterious pirate IPTV blocking injunction at the High Court in London. In the months up to November 2023, that led to UK ISPs blocking at least 400 IPTV domains/subdomains, potentially many more. Available data today suggests a perpetual war of attrition on an unprecedented scale. In the last four weeks alone, Sky blocked almost 4,200 IPTV service URLs; the pirates' response is simple: churn out more.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Publishers Target Z-Library Domains With Millions of DMCA Takedowns
Little over a year ago, the U.S. Government attempted to shut down Z-Library. Two suspects were arrested and both risk lengthy prison sentences. While that could act as a deterrent, the shadow library remains online today. Hoping to make it less accessible, publishers are now turning to Google, which has received millions of takedown notices for the site's domain names.
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Digital Music News ☛ My Music Royalties Were Stolen, What’s My Recourse?—DMN Asks Exploration Group’s Alexander Baynum
Keeping the music industry fair for all is a constant tug-of-war against many types of fraud. From preventing false royalty claims, stopping automated bot streaming, and keeping platforms accountable—our music administration infrastructure is the glue that keeps the industry together. Today we’re speaking with Alexander Baynum of Exploration Group on a range of challenges threatening transparency and accurate payments in the music industry.
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Gizmodo ☛ DC Is Already Preparing For Its Heroes' Public Domain Era
Three of DC’s biggest and most influential characters—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—will have their earliest appearances enter the public domain in 2034, 2035, and 2037, respectively. Each will represent a scenario akin to what Disney has currently faced with Steamboat Willie, even just weeks into its public domain debut: a world where DC still has many of the grips on the elements that make those characters the ones we know and love, while that same world rushes to put its own stamp on some of the most legendary comics characters in existence.
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Variety ☛ When Superman and Batman Copyrights Expire in a Decade, Will It Be Kryptonite for DC?
A sad fact of Hollywood is that while superheroes never truly die, all copyrights do. On Jan. 1, Disney lost control of “Steamboat Willie,” and within 24 hours two horror-comedies starring Mickey Mouse were announced. The DC characters are the next major expirations looming on the horizon. Superman and Lois Lane will enter the public domain in 2034, followed by Batman in 2035, the Joker in 2036 and Wonder Woman in 2037.
Chris Sims, a comic book author and Batman expert, expects a flood of unauthorized [sic] Batman comics to hit the stands as soon as the copyright expires.
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The Conversation ☛ How a New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI could potentially transform how AI and copyright work
In the months prior to the complaint being lodged by the New York Times, OpenAI had entered into agreements with large media companies such as Axel-Springer and the Associated Press, although notably, the Times failed to reach an agreement with the tech company.
The NYT case is important because it is different to other cases involving AI and copyright, such as the case brought by the online photo library Getty Images against the tech company Stability AI earlier in 2023. In this case, Getty Images alleged that Stability AI processed millions of copyrighted images using a tool called Stable Diffusion, which generates images from text prompts using AI.
The main difference between this case and the New York Times one is that the newspaper’s complaint highlighted actual outputs used by OpenAI to train its AI tools. The Times provided examples of articles that were reproduced almost verbatim.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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#Lore24 - Day 18 - On Folding
Folding[1] magic is a general category to describe one of the most interesting aspects of magic for me: teleportation, gates, and pocket dimensions. However, I intentionally made it a rare form of magic, along with healing, because I feel that both of them are used to shortcut stories, reduce tension, and basically bypass plot with easy answers. Call it the giant eagle plot of Lord of the Rings or a desire not to map the entire world (I really should have made speedsters also difficult).
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Purpose in life
So not what you'll ever find online.
I've never had a better reason to awaken.
In both senses.
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Vowel play
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Technology and Free Software
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The Green Wedge
In the downhill battle era, I used to think there was no way FOSS could be exploited. I saw the sharing-is-caring mentality as our new mindmelting way out of the quid-pro-quo market’s artificial scarcity shackles.
Three seconds later the triple whammy of smartphones (as we had hit hit feature parity on desktop, boom here’s a new goalpost of ever-obsolete pocket porcelain) and silo sites (can’t easily fork Facebook or YouTube) and DRM’d streaming sites.
All three fueled by the dev practice of appropriating FOSS for non-free projects; Apple was leading that charge with their mix of proprietary and oh-so-exploitable FOSS.
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RE: Things I miss about the old Internet
For me the old Internet started in the mid-90's when I occasionally got access to the internet through:
a) the 'one' computer connected to the net on my mothers workplace
b) at the library
c) at a cybercafé
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Building a Linux box for the living room
I've been thinking about building a small Linux box for the living room.
I like playing PC games with friends when I have them over—usually one of us driving and the other watching. Typically we'll use the TV in the living room, and I'll just lug my desktop from my room.
I spent a long time researching different methods for streaming games through two walls to the living room—preferably without needing any special hardware on that side—and concluded that the fastest, simplest, and cheapest solution was to pick up my tower and move it back and forth.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.