Leftovers

• Keenan ☛ Dare I commit to trying to post once a day for an entire month when we all know that my tolerance for obligation is basically nonexistent?

  Have you really considered what it would be like to see a post from me once (or more!) a day for 31 days? Neither have I. We’re both in for disappointment! If there’s anything I love more than publicly committing to trends, it’s publicly abandoning them in a very short timeframe.

• Lee Peterson ☛ My content starts on my blog

  Maybe it’s because I’m old and remember the days before social media and influencers but I still love writing on my own site and following others that are doing the same.

• Lee Peterson ☛ Are you serving the algorithm or your audience?

  I found this podcast from Cal Newport fascinating. He talks about artists leaving social media and moving to their own sites, obviously as someone that runs a blog it’s of interest to me. What I found fascinating is the thinking that creators (especially YouTube and Instagram) are creating content for the algorithm, not the readers. It’s something I know I’ve done when creating content for YouTube, something I’ve completely stepped back from recently.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Light Waves Brought to a Stop in a Crystal Promises New Ways to Control Photons

    In a cunning trap made from a silicon crystal tweaked to behave as if it's deformed, scientists have found a flexible new way to make light waves stand absolutely still.

    Light can be brought to a halt in a few different ways, such as by cooling clouds of atoms or even braiding light waves together. This new method, from AMOLF and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has advantages that could bring new technological applications to reality.

• Education

  • New Yorker ☛ Academic Freedom Under Fire

    The right at stake in these events is that of academic freedom, a right that derives from the role the university plays in American life. Professors don’t work for politicians, they don’t work for trustees, and they don’t work for themselves. They work for the public. Their job is to produce scholarship and instruction that add to society’s store of knowledge. They commit themselves to doing this disinterestedly: that is, without regard to financial, partisan, or personal advantage. In exchange, society allows them to insulate themselves—and to some extent their students—against external interference in their affairs. It builds them a tower.

    The concept originated in Germany—the German term is Lehrfreiheit, freedom to teach—and it was imported here in the late nineteenth century, along with the model, also German, of the research university, an educational institution in which the faculty produce scholarship and research. Since that time, it has been understood that academic freedom is the defining feature of the modern research university.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ The chip that changed my world – and yours

    The Z80, however, was compatible with a rival, Intel 8080. Both supported the early CP/M operating system, which had the majority of the business applications of the time, at least outside the Apple ecosystem, and unlike Apple, CP/M's creator Digital Research would license its products to anyone. The Z80 wasn't just 8080 code compatible, it was easier to design a computer around. It eliminated the need for extra circuitry to control dynamic RAM chips, it only needed a single power supply voltage whereas the 8080 needed three, and it had additional instructions to simplify common software functions. Most chip companies at the time assumed their products were good enough to establish their own niche; the Z80 was designed to be attractive to the existing market and grow from there.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Strategist ☛ Our drug policies aren’t working. The evidence is in wastewater

    Everyone knows illicit drug use in Australia is worsening, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we had precise numbers for gauging the scale of the problem? How useful it would be if we could measure consumption, perhaps even knowing just how much of each substance was being used in what locations and how patterns were changing.

    In fact, we do have those figures, through analysis of wastewater; we’re just not paying enough attention to them. They show our current means of minimising harm from drug use isn’t working. We must look beyond treating it as a mainly law enforcement problem.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Cigna Pressured Her to Review Patients’ Cases Too Quickly, Says Former Cigna Medical Director

    In late 2020, Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna gave her a stark warning. Work faster, or the company might fire her.

    That was a problem for Day because she felt her work was too important to be rushed. She was a medical director for the health insurer, a physician with sweeping power to approve or reject requests to pay for critical care like life-saving drugs or complex surgeries.

  • Antivaxxers just aren’t giving up on their ridiculous “turbo cancer” nonsense

    As I like to bore my readers by endlessly repeating it, there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to antivaccine misinformation. Every single antivax trope about COVID-19 vaccines that so surprised many of my colleagues when it first showed up has been directly traceable to old antivax tropes going back decades. That includes claims that vaccines somehow “permanently alter your DNA”—”homologous recombinaltion tiniker” and “molecular mimicry,” anyone?—and thereby cause a host of problems, such as autoimmune diseases and even cancer. Last week, I discussed how antivaxxers twisted a study to falsely blame COVID-19 vaccines for “accelerated aging” leading to—you guessed it!—cancer. This week, I’m going to look at some more of the “evidence” being promoted by antivaxxers as “proof” that the evil COVID-19 vaccines are killing younger people left and right by causing cancer, a 14,000% increase in “turbo cancer,” even.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • The Verge ☛ Meta’s ‘set it and forget it’ AI ad tools are misfiring and blowing through cash

    Williams told The Verge that the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal. A usual CPM of under $28 had inflated to roughly $250, way above the industry average. That would have been bad enough if the revenue earned from those ads wasn’t nearly zero. If you’re not a marketer, this might feel like spending a week’s worth of grocery money on a prime cut of wagyu at a steakhouse, only for the waiter to return with a floppy slider.

  • Vox ☛ The AI ebook foraging grift that can literally poison you

    The books were shorter than most foraging guides were, and way, way cheaper, says Trybuch. He’s a software engineer and volunteer secretary for the New York Mycological Society, a nonprofit devoted to “spreading knowledge, love and appreciation of fungi.” He knows mushrooms and he knows AI, and he thought the covers of these books were probably AI-generated.

    “They had mushroom structures that don’t quite make sense,” says Trybuch. They were the mycological equivalent of a picture of a hot blonde with six fingers and too many teeth.

    Most disturbing was the information inside the books was totally wrong. “They aren’t even giving you descriptions of real mushrooms. They’re giving you something completely made up,” Trybuch says. Any readers looking to try to use these books to figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat and which weren’t would be out of luck, which to Trybuch was seriously concerning. “It could literally mean life or death” if you eat the wrong mushroom, he says.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Why your car has never been so at risk from theft – and what you can do about it

    “Car companies do a risk assessment on new models. It all goes into a computer and an algorithm decides what’s worth doing. We’ve seen examples where car makers have saved pennies on the chips in keyless fobs but their lower level of encryption then makes the car easier to steal.”

  • EFF ☛ Congress Should Just Say No to NO FAKES

    We’ve already explained the problems with the House’s approach, No AI FRAUD. The Senate’s version, the Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe, or NO FAKES Act, isn’t much better.

    Under NO FAKES, any person has the right to sue anyone who has either made, or made available, their “digital replica.” A replica is broadly defined as “a newly-created, computer generated, electronic representation of the image, voice or visual likeness” of a person. The right applies to the person themselves; anyone who has a license to use their image, voice, or likeness; and their heirs for 70 years after the person dies. It’s retroactive, meaning the post-mortem right would apply immediately to the heirs of, say, Prince, Tom Petty, or Michael Jackson, not to mention your grandmother.

    Boosters talk a good game about protecting performers and fans from AI scams, but NO FAKES seems more concerned about protecting their bottom line. It expressly describes the new right as a “property right,” which matters because federal intellectual property rights are excluded from Section 230 protections. If courts decide the replica right is a form of intellectual property, NO FAKES will give people the ability to threaten platforms and companies that host allegedly unlawful content, which tend to have deeper pockets than the actual users who create that content. This will incentivize platforms that host our expression to be proactive in removing anything that might be a “digital replica,” whether its use is legal expression or not. While the bill proposes a variety of exclusions for news, satire, biopics, criticism, etc. to limit the impact on free expression, interpreting and applying those exceptions is even more likely to make a lot of lawyers rich.

  • Google Python team layoffs: Tech giant plans hiring cheap labour outside US

    Google has fired the entire Python team in the United States, reports said. The tech giant is contemplating reducing its costs by hiring less expensive labour outside America. The recent pink slips have come as a shocker for the Google employees who have been associated with the company for several years. The latest round of layoffs also saw people associated with Flutter and Dart getting pink slips.

    Google has reportedly said that the latest layoffs are part of its organisational restructuring efforts. The US-headquartered company is reportedly offering the sacked employees to join other teams. However, it seems far from reality as the Python team, which has been handed over pink slips, has a specific expertise. The team handles the demands and issues faced by the programming language which is used in various Google products and keeps them running stable.

  • India Today ☛ Ex-Google employee says job security is a myth, got layoff mail at 3 am after spending 13 years at company

    The tech world has been witnessing a series of layoffs for more than a year. From Google and Microsoft to Twitter (X), Meta and Amazon, several companies have laid off thousands of employees till now. Many employees have time and again shared their stories on LinkedIn, hoping to inspire and connect with others who have suffered the same fate. A former Google employee took to LinkedIn and recalled the time when he was handed the pink slip at the company. He mentioned how he suddenly received the layoff mail at 3:00 am, after being loyal to the company for 13 years.

    He began his post by expressing reluctance towards writing posts of this nature and highlighting the staggering number of layoffs in big tech since 2022. He then questioned the concept of job security, labelling it as a myth. "Do you still believe in job security? Job security is a myth," his post read. Reflecting on his own experience of being laid off after 13 years of loyalty, the ex-Google employee added, "My layoff day is still clear in my memories, 3 am, Friday, 13 years of loyalty. All gone in one email. It hit a lot of us hard."

  • India Times ☛ Jobs cuts at Flutter, Dart and Python teams at Google

    Google laid off employees from teams working on various technologies to streamline operations. Job cuts were confirmed by Google spokesperson, not company-wide. Impacted employees can apply for other roles, with support provided by Google.

  • Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led tech giant cuts jobs in THESE teams as part of rejig

    According to García-Kummert, Python, Dart and Flutter are among the teams that have faced a reduction in the employee count due to the latest round of layoffs. The decision has been taken to make the company “more efficient”, the spokesperson reportedly said.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Google techie, laid off on H-1B visa, shares 5 ways immigrants can ‘embrace’ job loss

    The Google employee, who is in the US on H-1B visa, was laid off last week. Half of his team and his manager too were laid off.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Atlantic ☛ America Lost the Plot With TikTok

      You may never have heard of Section 702, but the sweeping, George W. Bush–era mandate gives intelligence agencies the authority to track online communication, such as text messages, emails, and Facebook posts. Legally, Americans aren’t supposed to be surveilled through this law. But from 2020 to 2021, the FBI misused Section 702 data more than 278,000 times, including to surveil Americans linked to the January 6 riot and Black Lives Matter protests. (The FBI claims it has since reformed its policies.)

    • El País ☛ Kashmir Hill: ‘They shouldn’t be collecting photos from social media without people’s consent, but they keep doing it and nobody’s stopping them’

      Until then, no one had dared to develop anything like this. An application capable of identifying strangers was too much. It could be used, for example, to photograph someone in a bar and find out in seconds where they live and who their friends are. Hill, a reporter for The New York Times, published the story about this small company, which in a few months went from being a total unknown to receiving the support of Peter Thiel, one of the godfathers of Silicon Valley, and becoming a service coveted by police forces in the U.S. and abroad. She reached Hoan Ton-That, the inscrutable engineer and co-founder of Clearview AI, who made the tool with Richard Schwartz, a politician with a long career behind the scenes in the Republican Party. Hill’s research informed her book Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy.

    • Mark Nottingham ☛ No One Should Have That Much Power

      The current crop of suggestions seem to concede that governments shouldn’t have direct access. Instead, they want services to backdoor themselves and act as gatekeepers to law enforcement. That’s not an improvement; it’s still centralized, and it makes these companies responsible for any misuse of the data that they have access to, requiring everyone on the planet to trust a few big tech companies with our private and most intimate conversations – hardly a direction that society wants to go in in 2024. ‘Trust me, I’m in charge’ is a poor model of governance or security.

      These ‘solutions’ also ignore the reality that the ‘bad guys’ will just use other tools to communicate; information is information. That will leave law abiding people giving up their privacy and security for little societal gain.

    • Wired ☛ The Latest Online Culture War Is Humans vs. Algorithms

      At the same time, awareness of the potential downsides of this techno-dictatorial approach has never been higher. The US Congress recently probed whether social media algorithms are threatening the well-being of children, and new scholarship and books have focused fresh attention on the broad cultural consequences of letting algorithms curate our feeds. “I do think it reifies a lot of our cultural tastes in a way that at least I find concerning,” says Ryan Stoldt, an assistant professor at Drake University and member of the University of Iowa’s Algorithms and Culture Research Group.

• Defence/Aggression

  • CS Monitor ☛ A tender way to treat armed militias

    As violent organized crime spreads more widely across South America, events in two countries – Ecuador and Colombia – illustrate how the region has become a laboratory for divergent approaches to peace and security.

  • Science News ☛ Three reasons why the ocean's record-breaking hot streak is devastating

    Human-caused climate change has done this (SN: 3/10/22). Since 1971, the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, or more than 380 zettajoules of heat. For comparison, that’s about 1.5 million times as much energy as was released during the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in 2022, or 25 billion times as much energy as was released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Mali Forces Kill Senior Figure in Islamic State Affiliate

    Over the past decade, attacks by groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State have killed thousands of people in Mali, Niger, and neighbouring Burkina Faso, destabilising West Africa's central Sahel region.

    As of March, the protracted security and humanitarian crisis had displaced over 3 million people in the region, according to the International Organization for Migration.

  • The Verge ☛ TikTok has a tricky legal case to make against the ban law

    After failing to stop a bill that could ban TikTok in the US unless it separates from its China-based owner ByteDance, the company now faces two big hurdles: the US judicial system and the Chinese government.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘We’re losing our homeland’ Armenians protest government’s decision to return four villages to Azerbaijan, in photos

    “We’re losing our homeland. Every Armenian needs to understand: our old enemy, the one who committed genocide against us, could come knocking on any door at any moment,” local resident Mariam Simonyan told Meduza. Even if the protests don’t change anything, she wants her descendants to know that she opposed the land’s transfer to Azerbaijan.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Why is the EU still buying Russian gas?

    Countries in Central and Eastern Europe were especially dependent. When the EU mooted a ban, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was quick to voice his opposition. "Europe has deliberately exempted energy supplies from Russia from sanctions. At the moment, Europe's supply of energy for heat generation, mobility, power supply and industry cannot be secured in any other way," he said.

    Vladimir Putin seized on this. Throughout 2022, Russia cut gas imports to Europe. European leaders fretted about a winter energy shortage. These fears were never realized, but crucially, they meant the EU never actually sanctioned Russian gas.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Watch: Protesters call for Islamic state in Germany during Hamburg march

    Joe Adade Boateng, leader of Muslim Interaktiv which organised the march, said in a speech at the march that Germany needed a “righteous caliphate” to remedy the misrepresentation Muslim groups have faced in the media.

    He was greeted with cheers of “Allahu akbar”, or God [sic] is great, by a mostly male crowd, some of whom were holding up signs reading “Caliphate is the solution” and “Stop the media hate”.

    People were also holding up copies of the local tabloid newspaper, Bild, with stories about Islam that had been smeared with red paint.

  • SCMP ☛ Israel-Gaza war: antisemitism on the rise in Germany, across Europe, as ‘Jews today are again living in fear’

    Islamist slogans like “the caliphate is the solution,” seen most recently at a protest in the western city of Essen, have also shocked Germany.

  • Baltics, Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Ethically ambiguous’ New law makes it harder for draft-age Ukrainian men to get passports — Meduza

    • Latvia ☛ 'Riga Wagner Theater' reconstruction takes step forward

      The future 'Riga Wagner Theater' is moving on to the next stage of works as demolishing has been completed and the technical design has been finalized, the Riga Richard Wagner Society said in a release on April 29.

    • Latvia ☛ Security Service detains person glorifying war on social control media

      One person was detained by the State Security Service (VDD) on April 25 for alleged public defense of Russia's war against Ukraine, as well as an act aimed at provoking national and ethnic hatred and intolerance, the security service told media in a statement.

    • The Strategist ☛ As aid heads to Ukraine, Russia must be hoping for Trump’s return

      The news this month must have been met with relief in Kyiv and grief in the Kremlin.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Expect a new ‘bridge’ to NATO membership for Ukraine at the Washington summit, says Julianne Smith

      Smith spoke at an Atlantic Council curtain-raiser event ahead of the NATO Summit, where she said to expect a measure to "institutionalize" bilateral support to Ukraine.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Bombs and disinformation: Russia’s campaign to depopulate Kharkiv

      Russia is deploying disinformation alongside bombs as it seeks to demoralize Kharkiv residents and depopulate Ukraine's second city, writes Maria Avdeeva.

    • France24 ☛ Russian missile slams educational institute in Ukraine's Odesa, kills four

      A Russian missile attack on an educational institution in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odesa on Monday killed four people and injured 28 others, local officials said. On an unnanounced visit to Kyiv, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said months-long delays in US military aid to Ukraine had "serious consequences on the battlefield", but that victory over Russia was still possible.

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine, Gaza wars to top agenda during Chinese leader Xi's visit to France

      Chinese President Pooh-tin Jinping is due to make a state visit to France on May 6 and 7, Paris announced on Monday, with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East expected to be high on the agenda.

    • France24 ☛ Polish farmers lift months-long blockade of Ukraine border

      Polish farmers called off their protest at the last border crossing with Ukraine on Monday, lifting a blockade that has dragged on for months, soured bilateral relations and buffeted Ukraine's trade.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Xi Jinping to discuss Ukraine with France’s Macron during China leader’s visit next week

      By Francesco Fontemaggi Chinese President Pooh-tin Jinping is due to make a state visit to France on May 6 and 7, Paris announced on Monday, with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East expected to be high on the agenda. The visit to France, which will be followed by trips to Serbia and Hungary, marks […]

    • JURIST ☛ Telegram restores Ukraine security agencies’ chatbots after short-term suspension

      Messaging app Telegram restored access to a number of chatbots used by Ukrainian security agencies to gather information about Russia’s military actions after their short-term suspension, the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security said on Monday.

    • LRT ☛ Russia has deported over 19,000 children from Ukraine – Rada official in Vilnius

      Russia has deported more than 19,000 Ukrainian children over the past two years, says Olena Kondratiuk, vice speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, Verkhovna Rada, citing official Ukrainian data.

    • LRT ☛ Lithuanian leaders in favour of sending military-age men back to Ukraine

      Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė believe that Lithuania should help Ukraine get back its military-age men living abroad.

    • LRT ☛ ‘There are few opportunities for us here‘: Ukrainians start leaving Lithuania for home

      The number of Ukrainian residents in Lithuania is going down. Some have left Lithuania for other European countries, but many have decided to return to Ukraine despite the ongoing war.

    • RFERL ☛ Duchess Sophie Visits Ukraine In First Trip By British Royal Since Start Of War

      Sophie, Britain's duchess of Edinburgh, has visited Ukraine, meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his wife in the first trip to the country by a British royal since the conflict with Russia began.

    • RFERL ☛ Russian Arrested In Germany For Allegedly Killing 2 Ukrainians

      Police in Germany said on April 28 that they had arrested a 57-year-old Russian man on suspicion of stabbing two Ukrainian soldiers to death in a shopping center in the Bavarian city of Murnau a day earlier.

    • RFERL ☛ Russian Charged With Discrediting Military Over Dyed Hair

      Moscow resident Stanislav Netyosov was charged with discrediting the Russian military after he dyed his hair blue and yellow, which police considered support for Ukraine due to its national flag of the same colors.

    • RFERL ☛ Strike On Odesa Kills 5; Zelenskiy Urges Allies To Hasten Weapon Deliveries

      A Russian missile attack on the Black Sea port city of Odesa killed four people and injured 28 on April 29, just hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged faster deliveries of desperately needed weapons for depleted and outgunned Ukrainian troops.

    • teleSUR ☛ Russian Army Liberates the Town of Semenivka

      After the failed 2023 Ukrainian military counteroffensive, Russian forces took the initiative and continue to gradually advance into eastern Ukraine.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Says It Has Captured A Village In Donetsk

      The Russian Defense Ministry said on April 29 that it has captured a village in Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk, and is advancing westwards as depleted and outgunned Ukrainian forces retreat.

    • RFERL ☛ Kyrgyz Man Convicted Of Being Mercenary To Get Russian Citizenship

      A Kyrgyz man who was handed a suspended seven-year prison term for joining Russian armed forces invading Ukraine is expected to obtain Russian citizenship.

    • New York Times ☛ Jeffries’s Hint of a Lifeline Bolstered Johnson on Ukraine. Will He Need It?

      The House Democratic leader has suggested his members would protect Speaker Mike Johnson if right-wing Republicans tried to oust him over Ukraine aid, strengthening the speaker’s hand.

    • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Warns of Dire Situation Against Russia as It Awaits U.S. Aid

      Ukraine’s top commander said his outgunned troops were facing a dire situation as Russia tried to push its advantage before the first batch of an American military package arrives.

    • New York Times ☛ Tuesday Briefing: Hope Rises for New Cease-Fire Talks

      Also, Russia advances in eastern Ukraine.

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine partially suspends participation in European Convention on Human Rights due to martial law — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ On the brink: Ukraine’s line of defense under pressure as Russia gains footholds on the eastern front — Meduza

    • New Yorker ☛ How to Play Putin

      Will Keen and Michael Stuhlbarg, the stars of the play “Patriots,” about the rise of the Russian President, studied how Putin plays table tennis and why his hand trembles.

    • Latvia ☛ LTV's De Facto probes Latvian engineering works linked to Russian oligarchs

      The Riga Electrical Engineering Plant (Rīgas Elektromašīnbūves rūpnīca, RER), which is owned by Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin, has received 1.25 million euros from European funds, reported Latvian Television's De Facto investigative show April 28.

    • NYPost ☛ Ex-NSA employee sentenced to 21 years after selling classified documents to FBI agent posing as Russian agent

      A former employee of the National Security Agency was sentenced to more than 21 years in prison Monday for selling classified material to a person he believed to be a Russian agent.  The individual that Jareh Sebastian Dalke thought was a Russian official was actually a covert FBI agent.  Dalke, who pleaded guilty last year...

• Environment

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Hindu ☛ AI cameras to be installed at 90 conflict points across T.N.’s Gudalur forest division to curb human-elephant conflict

      The AI cameras are to be installed at 90 different conflict points across the division, where elephants are known to venture out from the forests and into human habitations. The cameras, which Mr. Prabhu hopes will also be fitted with thermal sensors, will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) software to pick up on the movement of elephants that stray too close to human settlements and send out alerts to local residents as well as to the Forest Department’s Command and Control Center which is to come up at the Gene Pool in Nadugani.

      Forest Department field staff will be notified through the centre and can drive the animals back into the wild if necessary, officials said.

    • The Revelator ☛ Environmental Change, Written in the DNA of Birds

• Finance

  • Quartz ☛ Netflix and other streamers charge you forever. Here's how

    Visa’s not entirely wrong about this. If your electricity or internet bill is tied to your credit card, you could be in a real bind if you forget to update your new card. However, practices like these can also keep people bound in endless cycles of payments that follow them everywhere.

    Visa did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Federal News Network ☛ White House looks to add 500 AI experts to federal workforce by 2025

    The report shows agencies are expected to bring on at least 500 AI hires between now and the end of fiscal 2025. That doesn’t include the 2,500 AI hires the Defense Department is looking to make this year, and the more than 9,000 new hires it plans on making next year.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • JURIST ☛ Burkina Faso suspends several more international news organizations following HRW report

    Burkina Faso, together with the neighboring Mali and Niger, is one of the three Sahel countries that have been combating Islamist insurgencies. Burkina Faso fell under the control of the military after a successful coup d’état in October 2022. Since then, armed forces have continued terror campaigns across the territory that insurgents mostly control. In 2023, HRW observed an increasing number of human rights violations and a humanitarian crisis in the country following the coup.

  • RTL ☛ Human Rights Watch: Burkina Faso suspends more international news media

    Burkina Faso has suspended several international news organisations, some of them for an indefinite period, said a statement from communications regulator the CSC.

    Among those named in the weekend order are French newspaper Le Monde, British publication The Guardian, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and French broadcaster TV5 Monde.

  • RFERL ☛ 2 More Russian Journalists Arrested As Crackdown On Independent Media Heightens

    Russian courts on April 27-28 ordered the detention of Konstantin Gabov in Moscow and Sergei Karelin in Murmansk on charges that they worked with the Navalny Live YouTube channel.

  • Yahoo to lay off journalists, social media executives in Singapore

    Global media and technology company Yahoo in Singapore is reportedly laying off all of journalists and social media executives, according to a recent report from The Edge Singapore. In total, 17 staff members will be leaving the company’s digital news publication arm by May 7.

    According to staff familiar with the matter, affected staff will receive slightly more than two weeks’ pay per year of service. It was also reported that affected staff members were met with a HR representative, with Simon Wheeler, Yahoo’s senior director of content, Australia and Southeast Asia, reportedly being also present in those meetings.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ Human rights organizations urge Saudi Arabia to end executions of child offenders

    In an open letter, the advocacy groups argued that Saudi Arabia’s decision to move forward with the executions of several young men for crimes committed when they were minors flies in the face of the nation’s planned reforms and international standards.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Frank Meeuwsen ☛ True! The web is not dying | Frank Meeuwsen

  Thank you Manu for a great reasoning why the web as we know it is still alive and kicking!

  "The web is not dying. The web is huge. The web is ever-expanding. The fact that the web is just the same 5 big websites is a fucking lie. It’s like saying the restaurant industry is the same 5 fast food chains. It is not. It’s up to you to decide to stop visiting those 5 sites and stop ingesting their fast food content."

• The Verge ☛ iPads join iPhones in requirement to follow strict EU rules

  Under the DMA, which came into force on March 7th, iPadOS will now have to comply with a broad range of rules that allow users in Europe to download apps from outside the Apple App Store, uninstall apps preloaded on iPads, and select default services like browsers from choice screens. If Apple fails to comply with the DMA rules for operating systems, the company could face fines of up to 10 percent of its global revenue, or up to 20 percent for repeat infractions.

• Copyrights

  • Chris Coyier ☛ Forbidden Links

    I’m also not clear on the law here. I suppose it would be national laws? Are there any countries that have laws on the books this way one way or another? There was a recent ruling regarding website accessibility in the US, but that surely doesn’t weigh in on what you’re allowed to link to. It’s something too dumb for a law to even be relevant right‽ It’s like how there isn’t a law about licking 9-volt batteries.

  • India Times ☛ Second global AI safety summit faces tough questions, lower turnout

    Thornier questions around the use of copyright material, data scarcity and environmental impact also look unlikely to attract such a star-studded congregation.

    While organisers have trailered an event comparable to Bletchley, a number of its key attendees have turned down invitations to Seoul.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ DISH Sued Two IPTV Resellers: First Case Dismissed, Second Owes $30m

    Most civil lawsuits against alleged IPTV pirates end badly for the defendants, something easily predicted after a single read of the initial complaint. Two separate lawsuits filed by DISH against two IPTV resellers in recent months were classic examples, at least until they weren't. One reseller has just been ordered to pay damages of $30m. The second, a reseller in the astrology business, just had his case suddenly dismissed. Nobody could've predicted that.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Court Keeps DMCA Subpoena Shortcut Closed, Restricts Piracy Settlements

    Earlier this year, a Hawaiian District Court blocked movie companies' efforts to unmask alleged BitTorrent pirates using a DMCA subpoena 'shortcut'. The filmmakers asked the court to reconsider its position but without success; the 'DMCA shortcut' will remain closed. The rightsholders will appeal the order but won't be able to use evidence previously obtained through settlements with pirating subscribers.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • Duolingo Progress

      I started learning Irish on Duolingo mid last year. Not with the intention of becoming fully fluent, as most things I've read indicate that you'd normally have to supplement Duo practice with other means - courses, one-on-one conversations, and so on.

  • Science

    • Smol Earth in five cold points

      Still ridin' this thought train, sorry! Last post on this topic for several months, I'd wager.

      The impetus comes, once again, from adiabatic's scrawlspace[1], where on 2024-04-24 they wrote "something of an exploration on how the smol.earth crowd is at least onto something, even though (it seems) I’m diving in deep into one aspect of a ten- or twenty-point desiderata list and ignoring all the rest". I'm responding mostly here to the subtle jibe that, yeah, Smol Earth *is* kind of a pile of loosely related points without much in the way of really explicit connections or underlying principles or priorities or anything. I mean, sometimes a project just has to be that way (I guess?), but it can't hurt to really knuckle down and try for a kind of minimum description length summary, right?

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Instancing, Indy Classic, and surviving the capitalist nightmare

      It's been a while since I put out a video or text update on the Eternal game engine. That's because I've been busy on implementing some tricky stuff (instancing), and I've also had to take on some part-time work in order to make ends meet, which is unfortunately eating into a lot of my time.