Links 31/03/2024: Experts Warn of "AI" Bubble, RFA Departs Hong Kong
Contents
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Leftovers
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James G ☛ Sounds of making coffee
The ritual of making coffee is fascinating to me. I enjoy all of the steps in pursuit of the final cup: weighing and grinding the beans, putting the coffee in my espresso portafilter, making sure the coffee is even, tamping the coffee, brewing the coffee, steaming the milk, pouring the milk. Every step requires attention: you don't want to spill beans or coffee or milk anywhere.
On Friday, while watching a friend make coffee, I took notes of various sounds of the coffee making experience. Whereas I am usually so immersed in making my coffee that I am less cognizant of the sounds around me, watching someone else make coffee was the experience I needed to stop and pay attention. I do this in cafes, too: I hear the whir of the grinder or the whoosh of the steam wand and the thoughts on my mind slip away.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Soundtrack of our time: 300 years of Bach's St. John Passion
A 33-year-old man is accused of a crime. He is arrested, tortured and dies on a cross. His loved ones, including his mother, are forced to watch his torture, powerless to intervene. The darkest chapter in the history of Christianity is described personally and vividly by a witness, the evangelist John, a close friend of the victim.
That is how one could summarize the theme of the "St. John Passion" by Johann Sebastian Bach. The composition, alongside Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, is considered by many to be one of the greatest works of European music ever written.
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Thorsten Ball ☛ Noticing & Writing
When you sit in front of your computer and, through wires and waves, talk to people you’ve never seen and never met and never heard, people that live in more time zones than you know of, and you talk to them about programming machines and you use words like wonderful and beautiful and elegant — you might just pause and think that, hey, isn’t this a miracle?
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Standards/Consortia
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Full-text RSS feed is an offline-friendly act
There are two schools of thought in RSS world: one to offer the full post in the feed so it can be directly read in the feed reader and another to only offer an excerpt (or even just title) so the reader needs to navigate to your blog and read it there.
Please, make your posts fully available through RSS ❤️
An excerpt-only feed is unreadable when there is no Internet access.
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Henrique Dias ☛ Changing Phone Numbers Is Hard
Changing phone number within the same country is hard. But it is definitely not as hard as when changing to a foreign number. If you’ve ever moved abroad or live abroad, and wanted to mostly ditch your previous phone number, you know what I am talking about.
I’ve been living in the Netherlands for more than 3.5 years. Some people could think that, because it’s within the EU, that I could keep using my Portuguese number indefinitely. However, that is not true. I can still use it, but it can’t be my main number due to fair usage policies.
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Science
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University of Michigan ☛ Arthur Lupia will serve as interim VP for research and innovation
Arthur Lupia, a professor of political science and longtime leader in science-focused institutions, has been appointed U-M's interim vice president for research and innovation, effective April 1.
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New Yorker ☛ Black Holes Are Even Weirder Than You Imagined
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
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Science Alert ☛ Still Hungry After a Big Meal? The Trigger Could Be in The Brain
The cravings are real.
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Science Alert ☛ World-First Pig Kidney Transplant Was a Huge Breakthrough, But Is It The Future?
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Science Alert ☛ Staying in School Linked to Living Longer And Slower Aging
Can education add years to your life?
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JURIST ☛ Poland president vetoes amendment that would increase access to contraception pills
Polish President Andrzej Duda on Friday vetoed a proposed amendment to the Pharmaceutical Law that would allow young women aged 15 and up to purchase emergency contraception pills without a prescription.
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Science Alert ☛ A Shape Called a 'Sphinx' Could Explain Handedness in Biology
A true biological riddle.
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Science Alert ☛ Lots of People Die Every Year During or After Sex. An Expert Explains Why.
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Science Alert ☛ Shocking Extent of Cyberbullying Among Kids Revealed in Major Report
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Education
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Tom's Hardware ☛ World Backup Day is this weekend — here are the best hard drive and SSD deals we can find
No national holiday, but what about a deal on some storage instead? Sunday, March 31st, 2024 is World Backup Day and a reminder to regularly back up all your important data and documents, a byproduct of this day is storage manufacturers offering consumers the chance to pick up some storage deals with money off some of the most popular SSD, HHD, USB, microSD, and other storage solutions. Over the last six months, we've seen the prices of SSDs steadily rise as the memory shortages continue. NAND flash prices have jumped 50% and that extra cost has been passed on to the consumer.
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No-IP ☛ How Will You Celebrate World Backup Day? - No-IP Blog
It’s easy to continue storing those precious pictures and videos on the device you’re using to take them, or to rely on a cloud solution to keep your files at immediate reach. According to the World Backup Day website, “A backup is a copy of all your important files — for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails. Instead of storing it all in one place (like your computer or smartphone), you keep a copy of everything somewhere safe.”
Unfortunately, there is a long list of scenarios where your information can be compromised, and many people realize or catch it when it’s too late for recovery. Don’t fret! Take a look below at some tips and tricks to make sure you are backing up your information efficiently: [...]
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The Atlantic ☛ The FAFSA Fiasco Is a Really Big Deal
The trouble began last fall. First, the Department of Education announced that the FAFSA, which usually launches October 1, wouldn’t be online until December. It went live on December 30, just days before the deadline set by Congress—then went dark less than an hour later. By the second week of January, the FAFSA was up around the clock, but that didn’t mean the problems were over. Students and parents reported being randomly locked out of the form. Because of some mysterious technical glitch, many students born in the year 2000 couldn’t submit it. And students whose parents don’t have a Social Security number couldn’t fill out the form. The department reported “extraordinary wait times” as its helpline was clogged with calls.
On January 30, the day before the department was set to transmit the completed forms to colleges, it announced that the forms actually wouldn’t go out until mid-March. It used the time to change its aid formulas to account for inflation (its failure to do so had left some $2 billion in awards on the table). “We always knew it was going to be rocky, because the changes were so big and significant,” Amy Laitinen, the director for higher education at the think tank New America, told me. “But I don’t think anybody could have imagined how rocky. I don’t even know if rocky is the right word at this point.” Other experts suggested alternatives: “nightmare,” “unprecedented,” and “a mess all around.”
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USMC ☛ Here’s why shooting ‘expert’ may get harder for Marines
The system, which has been purchased for experimentation at the depot level and is not a program of record, provides an automatic trigger reset, eliminating the need to pull back a rifle’s charging handle. The system also includes a sensor that feeds information to a smartphone or tablet about a shooter’s trigger-pulling behavior, Jones said.
“If you’re a right-handed shooter, and you pull the trigger to the right, and you do that over time, that’ll show up on an iPad, and it’ll tell you that you don’t have good trigger control,” he said.
While the depots have yet to decide about how to integrate MantisX into standard training, Jones said the device already has yielded enough efficiency through the automatic trigger reset to cut down the annual rifle training used at entry-level schools from 14 days to 12 days without any loss of lethality.
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Hardware
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Hackaday ☛ How Much Bandwidth Does CW Really Occupy?
Amateur radio license exams typically have a question about the bandwidths taken up by various modulation types. The concept behind the question is pretty obvious — as guardians of the spectrum, operators really should know how much space each emission type occupies. As a result, the budding ham is left knowing that continuous wave (CW) signals take up a mere 150 Hertz of precious bandwidth.
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Hackaday ☛ Too Much Over-optimization Is Never Enough!
A discussion came up on the Hackaday Discord PCB design channel about resistor networks, and it got me thinking about whether we (the hacker community) use them in designs or not. These handy devices often take the shape of an IC, SMD or otherwise, but between the pins are a bunch of resistors instead of active silicon. They come in all sorts of configurations and tolerances, but the point is usually the same: When you need a bunch of similar resistors, it’s cheaper to go with a network package.
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Hackaday ☛ SMD Soldering, Without The Blobs
Hand soldering of surface mount components is a bread-and-butter task for anyone working with electronics in 2024. So many devices are simply no longer available in the older through-hole formats, and it’s now normal for even the most homebrew of circuits to use a PCB. But how do you solder your parts? If like us you put a blob of solder on a pad and drop the part into it, then [Mr. SolderFix] has some advice on a way to up your game.
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Hackaday ☛ Using Electroadhesion To Reversibly Adhere Metals And Graphite To Hydrogels And Tissues
The usual way to get biological tissues and materials like gels and metals to stick together is using sutures, adhesives or both. Although this generally works, it’s far from ideal, with adhesives forming a barrier layer between tissues and the hard or impossible to undo nature of these methods. A viable alternative might be electroadhesion using cation and anion pairs, which uses low-voltage DC to firmly attach the two sides, with polarity reversal loosening the connection with no permanent effects. This is what a group of researchers have been investigating for a few years now, with the most recent paper on the topic called Reversibly Sticking Metals and Graphite to Hydrogels and Tissues by [Wenhao Xu] and colleagues published this year in ACS Central Science.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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France24 ☛ Red Cross and USAID urge global action on threat from extreme heat
Extreme heat is one of the most deadly problems from climate change even though it receives less attention than other knock-on effects like hurricanes and flooding, two of the world's leading humanitarian organisations warned Thursday.
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India Times ☛ Canadian school boards social media giants: Canadian school boards sue social media giants for over $3 billion in damages
Four Canadian school boards have sought more than C$4 billion ($2.96 billion) in damages from social media firms such as Meta Platforms and Snap in a lawsuit, alleging that their products harmed students.
The products are "negligently designed for compulsive use, have rewired the way children think, behave and learn", a joint statement by the boards said on Thursday.
That has caused learning and mental health crises in students, resulting in the schools having to invest more in support programs, they said.
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Chuck Grimmett ☛ What’s in my first aid kits?
This is a list of what is in my family’s first aid kits, not necessarily what should be in yours. Feel free to take inspiration, but I encourage you to think about your specific needs.
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France24 ☛ Medical cannabis could soon get the green light in France after unprecedented trial
During a years-long experiment that ended on Tuesday, French health authorities gave patients suffering from serious illnesses the chance to use prescribed medical cannabis. As France prepares to put cannabis-based medicines on the market, patients look back at their experience of the trial.
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Fun with Excel, or: Steve Kirsch is an antivax fool
Ever since I first discovered him in 2021 weaponizing the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database to demonize COVID-19 vaccines, tech bro turned rabidest of rabid antivaxxers Steve Kirsch has been an all too frequent topic of this blog, if only for the simple reason that he is the living epitome of the arrogance of ignorance and black hole density Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Even back then, Kirsch’s most annoying characteristic was on display, an utter ignorance about the scientific topics that he was rambling on about combined with supreme overconfidence that led him not only to confidently proclaim that he knew better than experts who had dedicated their lives to a scientific discipline. I soon found that this arrogance of ignorance was coupled with a pugilistic streak that led Kirsch to go on the attack when criticized without the slightest self-reflection that might lead him to ask whether he might have made a mistake or not. This is yet another example of this tendency. It involves a FOIA request and an amusing (for a tech bro) inability to properly understand Excel spreadsheets.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Google Podcasts Shutting Down, Content Producers Urged To Migrate To YouTube Music
Google has told its podcast app’s users to migrate subscriptions to YouTube Music by April 2 to stream their favorite shows.
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Wired ☛ How to Resist the Temptation of AI When Writing
The story ran later that day, and it led to other assignments. Here are some tips I’ve learned that you should consider mastering before you turn to automated tools like generative AI to handle your writing work for you.
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Futurism ☛ Experts Concerned by Signs of AI Bubble
As investors pour billions of dollars into the AI frenzy, analysts are starting to become wary of an "AI bubble" that could leave investors out to dry.
In a research note spotted by CNBC, tech stock analyst Richard Windsor used a colorful metaphor to describe what would happen if such a bubble were to burst.
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India Times ☛ us congress ban microsoft ai copilot: US Congress bans staff use of Microsoft's AI Copilot: report
The U.S. House's chief administrative office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Policymakers have been looking at potential risks in federal agency adoption of artificial intelligence and the adequacy of safeguards to protect individual privacy and ensure fair treatment.
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India Times ☛ OpenAI Voice Engine: OpenAI unveils voice cloning tool Voice Engine: All you need to know
Voice Engine uses text input and a single 15-second audio sample to generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles the original speaker.
Still in its testing stage, OpenAI said in a blog post that partners testing Voice Engine have agreed to rules including requiring explicit and informed consent of any person whose voice is duplicated using the tool. AI-generated voices must be clearly marked for the audiences, the company said.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Fabio Alessandro Locati: Please stop using VPN services for privacy!
For many years, VPN companies have advertised their VPNs as a necessary tool for all people who want to preserve their privacy. For the same amount of time, I tried to explain to the people that this view made no sense if not for those company’s sales.
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Malwarebytes Labs ☛ YouTube ordered to reveal the identities of video viewers
Federal US authorities have asked Google for the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of accounts that watched certain YouTube videos, according to unsealed court documents Forbes has seen.
Of those users that weren’t logged in when they watched those videos between January 1 and 8, 2023, the authorities asked for the IP addresses.
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[Old] Forbes ☛ Google Ordered To Identify Who Watched Certain YouTube Videos
The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos. The cops argued, “There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators.”
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Defence/Aggression
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New York Times ☛ Iran and Its Proxies: a Common Link in Mideast Conflicts
A monitoring group said that an Israeli strike on Syria hit multiple targets, including a weapons depot belonging to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia. Here’s a closer look at Iran’s proxies in the region.
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teleSUR ☛ Israeli Airstrikes in Aleppo Leave 42 Dead
Since the offensive against Gaza began, Israel has also intensified its actions against Syria.
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New York Times ☛ Airstrikes Kill Soldiers in Syria in Apparent Israeli Attack
Israel’s military did not immediately comment on the Syria strikes, but its defense minister said Israel would pursue Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia, “every place it operates.”
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TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ UNLV releases video of campus shooter killed by police after 3 professors shot dead
New video has been released of a shootout between a campus police officer and a gunman that ended a deadly rampage last December at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Campus surveillance footage was among about 20 hours of video and audio files that were released Thursday. The footage also shows Las Vegas police officers aiding a badly wounded professor who walked out of the UNLV business school and collapsed on a sidewalk. That man survived, but three professors in the building died before the gunman was killed. Authorities later identified the shooter as a 67-year-old former business professor from North Carolina whose applications to teach at UNLV were rejected.
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RFA ☛ Fleeing war and hardship, Myanmar youth seek jobs in South Korea
But those seeking seasonal work face uncertainty and exploitation risks.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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France24 ☛ Ukraine says Russian shelling kills two in east, urges civilians to evacuate
Ukraine said Saturday that Russian shelling overnight and in the morning killed two elderly people in the eastern town of Krasnogorivka, and urged civilians still living there to evacuate.
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RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Dismisses More Advisers In Reshuffle As Russian Attacks Intensify
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed a top aide and several advisers in an ongoing reshuffle on March 30 as Russia launched new drone and missile attacks that killed at least two people.
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JURIST ☛ Netherlands court asks EU Court of Justice for clarification on Ukraine refugee protection
The Hague District Court of the Netherlands on Friday called on the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to give a preliminary ruling on questions regarding the extension of the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) under Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
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New York Times ☛ Troop-Starved Ukrainian Brigades Turn to Marketing to Attract Recruits
Many units, which say the official conscription system is dysfunctional and unwieldy, have started their own recruitment campaigns to fill ranks depleted in the war with Russia.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Accelerates Deportations As Many Tajik Migrants Leave On Own Accord
Russia is deporting hundreds of foreigners for immigration violations in the wake of the deadliest terrorist attack in nearly two decades.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Adds Two Managers Of LGBT Nightclub To 'Terrorist' List
Russia has added the art director and administrator of an Orenburg nightclub to its list of terrorists and extremists amid accusations the venue promoted so-called "nontraditional sexual relationships."
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RFERL ☛ Ambassadors Lay Flowers At Site Of Moscow Concert Hall Massacre
Foreign diplomats in Russia laid flowers on March 30 at the site of last week’s attack on a suburban Moscow concert hall that killed 144 people.
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Ambassador Issues Rare Statement On Warning Before Russia's Crocus Massacre
The U.S. ambassador to Russia on March 29 issued an unusual diplomatic statement refuting Russian government claims about information that the United States shared with Russia ahead of the terrorist attack last week on a concert hall outside Moscow that killed more than 140 people.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ HP ends ties with Russia, shutting down its Russian website — website redirects to Kazakhstan with no support
To complete its obligations with the U.S. sanctions against Russia, HP has closed its Russian website and redirected its portal to Kazakhstan, where one of its spoken languages is Russian, but with no online support.
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Environment
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Omicron Limited ☛ Abrupt climate fluctuations in Tibet as imprints of multiple meltwater events during the early to mid-Holocene
Paleoclimate records and model simulations indicate that glacial meltwater input to the Northern Atlantic during early Holocene ice-sheet decay could weaken the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), leading to abrupt and widespread climate change, such as the widely known 8.2 ka event. After examining a wide range of paleoclimate records, Hongxi, and his colleagues found similar climate fluctuations in many existing records during the early to mid-Holocene, as observed in the ZK isotopic record.
"The most exciting is the rapid four sea-level jumps documented in other records corresponding well with the large fluctuations of the ZK isotopic record; we believe the meltwater forcing during the final stage of LIS dominated the large climate fluctuations in the early to mid-Holocene," Hongxi says.
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Variety ☛ 'The Fisherwoman' star Emma Thompson praises Finnish crew
“They had no snow [in Minnesota] owing to the changing climate, [so] the decision was taken to shoot all the exteriors in Finland. I had no idea how lucky I was but upon arrival in Koli, greeted by the piney, snow-laden sentinels that guard that magical hillside, I started to sense what a huge privilege and adventure this was to become,” she wrote.
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RFERL ☛ Torrential Rains, Landslides Kill At Least 7 In Pakistan
Heavy rains and landslides have killed at least seven people and injured nine others in Pakistan’s northwestern Kyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, rescue officials said on March 30.
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Wildlife/Nature
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RFA ☛ Facebook videos show Lao fishermen using grenades to boost catch
The practice is illegal, and experts warn it threatens fish populations in the region.
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The resident said the use of explosives and electric shocks should be eradicated because “we should conserve fish for our children.”
He said that “professional” fishermen in the area using traditional methods might stay out on the water “all day and all night,” but only catch a few fish.
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Finance
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RFA ☛ China’s state-owned developer vows to cut debt as financial woes rise
Banks with long-term ties are Vanke’s ‘allies in risk prevention,’ says CEO.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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New York Times ☛ Is Garry Tan San Francisco’s ‘Twitter Menace’ or True Believer?
The deep pockets of the tech investor Garry Tan are valued by his allies, but his pugnacious online habits are creating plenty of enemies in the city he says he wants to save.
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RFA ☛ Indonesian President-elect Prabowo to visit China in first official post-polls foreign trip
China strikes before the United States in wooing future leader of Southeast Asia’s largest economy, analysts say.
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CNBC ☛ Reddit shares plunge 25% in two days, end week below first day close
Reddit shares are plummeting after experiencing a rally stemming from the social media company's IPO last week.
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Futurism ☛ Reddit's Stock Is Already Collapsing
Reddit has centered its IPO on AI, an attempt to cash in on the hype surrounding the tech. But in its 20-year history, the company has yet to turn a profit. In 2023, the platform lost a whopping $90.8 million.
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Axios ☛ National Archives gives new tranche of Biden emails to House GOP
Driving the news: In a pair of letters to Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) dated March 26, the National Archives' general counsel Gary Stern said the agency turned over 211 emails totaling 5,860 pages.
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JURIST ☛ South Korea ambassador resigns amid allegations of investigation interference
South Korean Ambassador to Australia Lee Jong-seop resigned on Friday after 25 days in office. Lee is under investigation for his alleged interference in the investigation of Marine Sergeant Choi Su-geun’s death. Upon his resignation, Lee called upon authorities to quickly conduct an investigation and said he would cooperate.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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TMZ ☛ Donald Trump Shares Video of Joe Biden Restrained, Hogtied On Back Of Truck
The horrific, albeit fake image of the current prez and Democratic presidential nominee was part of a 20-second clip posted Friday to Trump's account on Truth Social -- the platform founded by Trump himself.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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RFA ☛ Hong Kong lawmaker deletes Facebook (Farcebook) posts under new security law
Paul Tse deletes posts criticizing the government after his comments are labeled 'dangerous' by the city's leader.
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Reason ☛ FBI Agent Says He Hassles People 'Every Day, All Day Long' Over Facebook (Farcebook) Posts
"It's just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will," he claimed.
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VOA News ☛ How Taiwan Breaches Censors' Barriers
Breaking the barriers of censorship in China, Myanmar and North Korea is a daunting task, as these countries have built almost impenetrable firewalls against outside news and information. But Radio Taiwan International is successfully using shortwave radio to break through.
“We potentially have 70 million to 1.2 billion listeners who rely on shortwave to get information [from] outside of their country,” said Isis Lee, RTI’s vice president.
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NPR ☛ Radio Free Asia closes its Hong Kong operation over safety concerns for its staff
The city's Beijing-backed legislature passed Article 23 legislation earlier this month and comes atop an already existing national security law that the central government imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. Article 23 refers to the part of Hong Kong's post-handover constitution, the Basic Law, that requires the territory to enact national security legislation.
Hong Kong's most prominent pro-Democracy paper, Apple Daily, shut down in June 2021 after its accounts were frozen and its publisher, Jimmy Lai, arrested. The last pro-Democracy paper, Stand News, closed in December 2021 after it was raided and its leadership arrested.
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Reason ☛ Journal of Free Speech Law: "Protecting Public Knowledge Producers," by Prof. Heidi Kitrosser
The third of twelve articles from the Knight Institute’s Lies, Free Speech, and the Law symposium.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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AntiWar ☛ Assange’s ‘Reprieve’ Is Another Lie, Hiding the Real Goal of Keeping Him Endlessly Locked Up
The interminable and abhorrent saga of Julian Assange’s incarceration for the crime of journalism continues. And once again, the headline news is a lie, one designed both to buy our passivity and to buy more time for the British and US establishments to keep the Wikileaks founder permanently disappeared from view.
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RFERL ☛ British Police Investigate Stabbing Of Iran International TV Host
No arrests have yet been made. Police said it was not immediately clear why Zeraati was attacked, adding that they were “keeping an open mind as to any motivation” behind the assault.
London police said its Counter Terrorism Command had been assigned due to "the victim's occupation as a journalist at a Persian-language media organization based in the U.K. and coupled with the fact that there has been a number of threats directed towards this group of journalists in recent times.”
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VOA News ☛ RFA Departs Hong Kong, Citing Press Freedom Concerns
After nearly three decades in Hong Kong, VOA's sister outlet Radio Free Asia has closed its physical bureau in the city and no longer has full-time staff there due to the declining press freedom landscape, the outlet announced in a statement Friday.
"Concerns about the safety of RFA staff and reporters in Hong Kong have led us to restructure our on-the-ground operations there. While RFA will retain its official media registration, at this time we no longer have full-time personnel in Hong Kong and have closed our physical bureau," RFA President Bay Fang said in the statement.
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Press Gazette ☛ Buzzfeed UK staff to move over to The Independent in multi-year licensing deal
Editorial and commercial staff at Buzzfeed UK (which includes Huffpost UK) are to move over to The Independent as part of a multi-year licensing deal.
Buzzfeed Inc and Independent Digital News and Media Ltd (IDNM) said the partnership will see the businesses combine their publishing, data and advertising platforms “to allow commercial partners to seamlessly buy across their sites”.
As part of the agreement The Independent will take over Buzzfeed’s sub-brands in the UK including food vertical Tasty UK, black British identity brand Seasoned and Huffpost UK.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFA ☛ Young activists recall abuse at Hong Kong juvenile correctional facility
They tell of beatings and anal rape amid a rise in the youth prison population and clampdown on dissent.
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Futurism ☛ University Leadership Suggest Using AI to Replace Striking Grad Students
The head-scratching proposition was made in a Wednesday email to university faculty and was one of several suggestions regarding how to "manage course discussion sections and labs" impacted by the Boston University Graduate Worker Union's (BUGWU) ongoing protests, according to the Beast. It was sent by Stan Sclaroff, who serves as the university's Dean of Arts & Sciences.
In addition to some reportedly very normal recommendations for more effectively managing workloads without the help of their grad students, Sclaroff inexplicably decided to throw in a few more "creative ways in which, we have heard, some faculty are adapting their course formats and using technology to serve their students."
Among those suggestions? Per the Beast, the recommendation that professors "engage generative AI tools to give feedback or facilitate 'discussion' on readings or assignments."
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University of Michigan ☛ More than 2,300 U-M health workers unionize
According to a statement released by SEIU on Wednesday, the newly organized workers include “patient care techs, phlebotomists and phlebotomist specialists, unit clerks, unit hosts, patient service assistants, patient services intermediate, and patient services associates, and patient services senior.” They joined a group of 283 Michigan Medicine respiratory therapists and techs, who unionized with the SEIU in July 2023.
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The Hindu ☛ Church leaders slam attacks on Christians in Manipur and North India
Church leaders on March 29 slammed the attacks on Christian communities in Manipur and North India, and called for a united stand against divisive forces that seek to terrorise people in the name of religion and race.
Archbishop Thomas J. Netto of the Latin Archdiocese of Thiruvananthapuram underscored the need to fight and defeat narrow-minded approaches expressed through legislations such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Dark forces are unleashing violence upon Christians in Manipur and North India, yet there is no effective intervention on the part of the authorities, he said.
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[Old] ABC ☛ Judge: Gates a Napoleon
The federal judge who ordered Microsoft split in two last year compares Bill Gates to Napoleon — even musing that the company founder should be required to write a book report on him — and said Microsoft executives behave like children.
“I think he has a Napoleonic concept of himself and hiscompany, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyedsuccess, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses,” JudgeThomas Penfield Jackson says of Gates in the Jan. 8 issue of TheNew Yorker.
Of company officials, Jackson says, “They don’t act likegrown-ups!”
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Patents
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Unified Patents ☛ Umbra Tech firewall patent monopoly challenge instituted
On March 29, 2024, less than three months after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 10,574,482, owned and asserted by Umbra Technologies Ltd. The ’482 patent monopoly is relevant to systems using a multi-perimeter firewall in a cloud-based system.
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Copyrights
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Terence Eden ☛ Who owns the copyright to my medical images?
Afterwards, I asked the dentist if I could have a copy of the scan. She wasn't terribly sure. She thought that she had to charge me for it. Then wondered if there was a data protection problem. Then started talking about copyright and the licence that they had signed with the machine's manufacturer.
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Torrent Freak ☛ ACE Targets MagisTV and Other Piracy Apps Through Cloudflare
Anti-piracy coalition ACE continues its crackdown on pirate sites with a series of new DMCA subpoenas. The latest wave targets several apps and sites that were in the news this month. Piracy streaming service MagisTV is included, as well as Zoroxtv.to, the new home of Zorox.to, that had its domain suspended by Namecheap recently.
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Techdirt ☛ Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Millions Of Cats
We’re closing in on the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut winner Solar Storm 1928, and today we’re looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Millions of Cats by Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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ten fiction pileup
There's also going to be a Lindwyrm supplement in the nearish future, because fuck patronizing arseholes basically. (still debating if I can write an adventure; maybe another small dungeon ...)
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Technology and Free Software
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KISS high-availability with OpenBSD
I have always wanted a highly available setup for my personal websites. I could have used off-the-shelf hosting solutions or hosted my sites in an AWS S3 bucket. I have used technologies like (in unsorted and slightly unrelated order) BGP, LVS/IPVS, ldirectord, Pacemaker, STONITH, scripted VIP failover via ARP, heartbeat, heartbeat2, Corosync, keepalived, DRBD, and commercial F5 Load Balancers for high availability at work.
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MIDI Player
So how difficult is it to write a MIDI player? Here the goal is to read a MIDI file and get the events off to a synthesizer, with suitable delays between the MIDI events. Mostly this is motivated by the dire state of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) on OpenBSD, which is mostly LMMS that cannot detect any relevant synthesizer via MIDI. There is the old clunker laptop with Alpine Linux (mostly working spacebar, sometimes wi-fi) that can connect to synths, but using that is annoying, and anyways fiddling around with low-level MIDI details is the sort of thing a postmodern hedge wizard might dabble with.
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This is why we can't have nice things
As far as anyone's concerned, I'm essentially a nobody in the industry. Yet, I feel the desire to comment on the current xz backdoor issue. Except, it isn't from a technical standpoint. But a social one.
Humanity's diversity is amazing. But it's also the reason why we can't have nice things. This xz backdoor issue feels like a wake-up call. I wanted to work on open source projects, but reality of this issue have made it clear that I do not want more mental health issues piled on top. My desire to contribute to the open source community have diminished greatly until people learn to stop applying capitalist values to something that's essentially given away for free.
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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.