Leftovers

• Anne Sturdivant ☛ It's my blog and I'll cry if I want to.

  This is not going to replace complaints elsewhere, I'm sorry to say. Dave's idea might be free, but I doubt that my /nope page will completely quell my "edgelord'ing" no matter how hard I try. For me, I think it is enough that I sequester most of it to my blog(s) and no longer disperse it willy-nilly on social media. Baby steps.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0052 'Projects' vs. 'events'

  Here’s another way to think about the granularity of IDs.

  Let’s arbitrarily divide all of life in to two buckets.

• Lou Plummer ☛ Putting the World in the WWW

  One of the features of the analytics service I use, Tinylytics (highly recommended!) is the ability to see where the computers people are using to read this blog are located. I look at it and wonder what the fine people of Rwanda find interesting in the opinions of an old guy in the American south. When I get up stupid early in the morning like I do (4am), my social media and blogging feeds are usually full of Europeans for whom the hour is more reasonable. I even follow people in Australia and New Zealand and I'm never quite sure what time or even what day it is there.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ My blogging workflow

  Robert told me about this blogging workflow trend that’s currently happening in a bunch of blogs around the web and since I thought it’s a neat idea I’m gonna share mine.

  I’m gonna split it into two because this blog serves as both my home on the web as well as a home for the People and Blogs series.

• TechTea ☛ TechTea - Adding Bookmarks to the Website

  With that in mind I finally started a new section on my website called bookmarks. These are links to other websites that include my comments about whatever the subject is. This way I can comment on more websites without blowing up the other parts of my website, share quality links my readers would otherwise not discover, and I can easily search for things I might want to reference in the future.

• Futurism ☛ Donald Trump's "Truth Social" Admits It Lost $327 Million This Quarter

  How are things going at former President Donald Trump's social media company? Money-wise: astoundingly bad.

  Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns and operates the Twitter clone "Truth Social," posted a staggering net loss of over $327.6 million for the first quarter of 2024, according to its earnings report — perhaps taking some shine off its glitzy, multi-billion dollar valuation.

• Troy Hunt ☛ Troy Hunt: Have I Been Pwned Employee 1.0: Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson

  I suffer somewhat from what I'll call the "founder's paradox", that is I find myself having built something genuinely useful and wanting to see it grow and mature yet also not wanting to let go. I want to be involved in everything, but I also want to go on holidays sometimes and tune out. I like making decisions on every aspect of how the service runs, but I want it to outlive me. Bringing any outside party into any business can be hard to come to terms with, but especially in the case of HIBP where it's become so critical to so many people and deals with so much sensitive data. Which is why I have to trust people like Stefán because if I don't, I'm one shark / snake / croc incident away from disappointing a lot of people.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Getting Things Done: A personal retrospective

  If you imagine projects as single columns of tasks on a spreadsheet, contexts are the rows. They cut across multiple projects, and let you filter tasks depending on where you are, what you’re doing, the time of day, whatever works for you.

• Science

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Scientist Gets 14 Years In Prison On Treason Charge

    [...] At least 12 scientists have been arrested in Russia on treason charges since 2018, mostly for activities considered a normal part of scientific work, such as publishing papers internationally, collaborating with colleagues from other countries, and attending international conferences.

• Education

  • Robert Birming ☛ You Are an Expert - Robert Birming

    No matter how much expertise someone has, they all started from scratch. And no matter what stage you’re at — “beginner” or “pro” — some will consider you an expert.

  • Michał Sapka ☛ Libraries

    [...] with age comes acceptance. I no longer read what I think I should enjoy, but rather what I will enjoy.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Higher Education Isn’t the Enemy

    But there is a threat that is being ignored, one that goes beyond any single issue or political controversy. Transfixed by images of colleges and universities in turmoil, we risk overlooking the foundational role that higher education plays in American life. With its underlying principles of free expression and academic freedom, the university system is one of the nation’s great strengths. It is not to be taken for granted. Undermining higher education would harm all Americans, weakening our country and making us less able to confront the many challenges we face.

  • Harvard University ☛ Time to stand up, defend American higher education, Faust says

    “The upheavals of this past academic year arising from the tragic situation in the Middle East have provided the occasion for those already hostile to the culture of American higher education to escalate their criticism,” said Faust. “The polarizations of race, religion, and politics that grip our country have in recent months focused unceasingly on universities. One might even suggest that universities have become a primary symbol for these larger divisions, as well as the theater in which they are being acted out.

    “But this is not just theater; it represents a genuine and existential threat to the foundational assumptions that have long governed American higher education.”

• Hardware

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Add-on board lets you use four NVMe SSDs at once with Raspberry Pi 5

    Intrepid PCIe investigator and YouTuber Jeff Geerling is already hands on with a test unit (ours is on the way) and he has noted a few things already. Geerling spotted that the PCIe Flat Flexible Cable (FFC, sometimes called "flatflex") is of a similar design to Pimoroni's NVMe Base. The S-shaped FFC means that there is space for users to insert a micro SD card, and that is something that you will need. Right now you will need to boot from micro SD, booting from NVMe with multiple drives is currently not supported. A future firmware change may make this a possibility, but that is just a hope for now.

  • [Repeat] CNX Software ☛ Geekworm X1011 board adds up to four NVMe SSDs to the Raspberry Pi 5 - CNX Software

    While the Raspberry Pi 5’s PCIe interface could be configured up to switch to PCIe Gen 3 x1, this won’t help because the PCIe switch only supports PCIe Gen 2 x1. That means we are left with a solution that delivers about the same sequential read/write performance as SATA hard drives, albeit in a much smaller form factor and random I/Os will still be considerably faster. A wiki has been set up with more technical details and instructions to get started.

  • Liliputing ☛ Connect up to 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs to a Raspberry Pi 5 with the Geekwork X1011 board - Liliputing

    The Raspberry Pi 5 is the first of Raspberry Pi’s single-board computers with a PCIe interface. By default it’s configured to support PCIe 2.0 speeds (topping out at 5 GT/s), but it is possible to configure the Pi 5 to support PCIe 3.0 SSDs as well (up to 8 GT/s). Unfortunately, this board doesn’t support that feature, as its PCI Express chip is limited to Gen 2 speeds, which means you’re unlikely to see data transfer speeds higher than 430MB/s when using the X1011 add-on board.

    Add-on boards like the Geekworm X1011 make it possible to use the little computer as a network-attached storage device, among other things.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Joan Westenberg ☛ Why I pay myself first - with my time.

    But maybe there's a kernel of wisdom in "pay yourself first" that we can apply - not to money, but something far more precious - to our time.

    In the rush and chaos of daily life, in the constant, eroding drumbeat of work and chores and errands, our time vanishes. It slips away, wasted on the trivial, the urgent rather than the important. Emails. Messages. Tweets. Threads. Bullshit.

    What if we paid ourselves first - with our time? What if, before we opened our email, before we stepped into the office, before we invested all our hours on the hamster wheel of busyness, we set aside time for what matters most?

  • US Navy Times ☛ Military supplement users: Beware of tigers masquerading as dogs

    Military personnel and athletes can be misled by claims that these products, some of which are even marketed specifically to troops, are supplements. Meanwhile, these demographics may discover firsthand why these ingredients are considered unsafe.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU signs off on artificial intelligence law

    EU ministers on Tuesday signed off on a landmark law that sets out rules for using artificial intelligence in situations and sectors that are deemed particularly sensitive.

    Under the law, AI systems used in areas such as law enforcement and employment will have to demonstrate that they are adequately transparent and accurate, fulfill cybersecurity standards and meet criteria regarding the quality of the data used to train them.

    The vote by EU countries came two months after the European Parliament backed the AI legislation.

    The bloc's law goes well beyond the voluntary compliance approach to AI in the US, for example, and could have a signal effect across the globe.

  • International Business Times ☛ Self-Driving Tesla Nearly Hits Oncoming Train, Raises New Concern On Car's Safety

    Dashcam footage shows the driver taking desperate action, swerving through the railway crossing sign and slamming on the brakes just meters from the oncoming train.

    Tesla faces mounting legal challenges over its allegedly misleading Autopilot and Full Self-Driving capabilities. Owners claim these features malfunctioned by failing to stop for other vehicles or swerving into objects, causing crashes and some tragically resulting in fatalities.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Five ways criminals are using AI

    Here are five ways criminals are using AI now.

  • The Register UK ☛ Google now 'third-largest' in datacenter processors

    The cloud giant's strategy is to run TPUs for internal workloads and Nvidia GPUs for cloud computing, and TechInsights says it believes Google actually has the largest installed base of AI accelerators across the industry and the largest AI computing infrastructure.

  • 404 Media ☛ University Suspends Students for AI Homework Tool It Gave Them $10,000 Prize to Make

    The students were suspended by the school’s Honor Council because their AI tool “could be used for cheating” and because they connected it to a software platform used by the university to host course reading material, homework, and other assignments without obtaining express permission, though this feature was mentioned at the competition it won $10,000 at. But the school’s Honor Council did not actually find evidence that it was ever used to cheat, and a review of the Honor Council’s writeup shows an incredible misunderstanding of how the specific tool, called Eightball, was designed and a misunderstanding of how large language models are trained and what they can do.

  • Wired ☛ Google Search’s New AI Overviews Will Soon Have Ads

    Google on Tuesday announced plans to test search and shopping ads in the AI summaries, a move that could extend its dominance in search advertising into a new era. Although Google rapidly rolled out AI Overviews to all US English users last week after announcing the feature at its I/O developer conference, it’s unclear how widely or quickly ads will start appearing.

  • Roy Tang ☛ Is Google Killing The Web? [Ed: DuckDuckGo is Microsoft proxy. Never use DuckDuckGo.

    Seriously, there's at least 3 whole pages of those results. None of the links there seem to have the correct answer: use other search engines like DuckDuckGo.

  • Casey Newton ☛ Google’s broken link to the web

    But to everyone who depended even a little bit on web search to have their business discovered, or their blog post read, or their journalism funded, the arrival of AI search bodes ill for the future. Google will now do the Googling for you, and everyone who benefited from humans doing the Googling will very soon need to come up with a Plan B.

  • Modus Create LLC ☛ LLM-based work summaries with work-dAIgest

    Time flies, and while it occasionally drops dead from the sky on Fridays or Monday mornings, that definitely was not the case during an internal two-day hackathon Tweag’s GenAI group held in February. As one of our projects, we wanted to develop a tool that would tell us where exactly time flew to in a given period of time, and so was born work-dAIgest: a Python tool that uses your standard workplace tools (Google Calendar, GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Slack, …) and a large language model (LLM) to summarize what you’ve accomplished.

    In this blog post, we’ll present a proof-of-concept of work-dAIgest, show you what’s under the hood and finally touch quickly on a couple lessons we learned during this short, but fun project.

  • The Register UK ☛ Scarlett Johansson suggets OpenAI copied her voice

    Johansson felt the reference to the film Her in Altman's Xeet was an insinuation the similarity between her voice and that of Sky was intentional, and that the OpenAI boss had therefore acted against her wishes.

  • The Atlantic ☛ OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game

    On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Microsoft Announces Feature That Records Everything You Do on Your Computer for AI

      Microsoft has just unveiled a forthcoming Windows AI feature to help users "recall" all their past activities — by recording everything they do in real-time.

    • The Hill ☛ Microsoft releases PCs ‘designed for AI’

      The Copilot+ PCs include a feature called “Recall” which tracks all activity on the computer to allow users to virtually access what they have seen or done on the computer in the past.

    • The Record ☛ Homeland Security has collected DNA data from 1.5 million immigrants in four years, researchers find

      DHS has begun taking DNA from nearly every immigrant detained, even if only very briefly, the researchers said.

      The authors of the Georgetown report are calling on the Biden administration to reverse the Trump rule and to expunge the data the government now holds on a vast swath of immigrants who have committed no crimes yet have been forced to turn over genetic information.

      Many of the immigrants whose DNA has been collected did not understand that it was being used to populate a criminal database known as the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), according to report co-author Emerald Tse, who said her team interviewed many immigrants and advocates about their experience with the DNA collection program.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag

      In essence, Google’s WPS computes the user’s location and shares it with the device. Apple’s WPS gives its devices a large enough amount of data about the location of known access points in the area that the devices can do that estimation on their own.

      That’s according to two researchers at the University of Maryland, who theorized they could use the verbosity of Apple’s API to map the movement of individual devices into and out of virtually any defined area of the world. The UMD pair said they spent a month early in their research continuously querying the API, asking it for the location of more than a billion BSSIDs generated at random.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ Zoom adds 'post-quantum' encryption for video conferencing

      Kyber 768 is in the process of being standardized by America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the snappily titled Module Lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism, or ML-KEM, in FIPS 203.

      This algorithm was among the first encryption tools to get NIST approval to protect privacy in a post-quantum world — as we said, a hypothetical point in the future when quantum computers may be able to crack traditional encryption methods.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Register UK ☛ Big Tech is not much help when fighting a junta, nor is FOSS

    Myanma people are using tech to organize resistance to the junta. But according to a study by Laura Gianna Guntrum, a research associate at Science and Technology for Peace and Security (PEASEC) in the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, tech services are of limited use in their struggle.

    Guntrum's published research on the issue, titled Keyboard Fighters: The Use of ICTs by Activists in Times of Military Coup in Myanmar, is the result of interviews with and surveys of activists. The research was presented last week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ India’s Neoliberal Crisis Is Fueling Hindu Authoritarianism

    As India’s leader, Narendra Modi has deepened the neoliberal framework in place since the early 1990s. The social crisis arising from that model drives Modi’s government to rely more and more on a dangerous, authoritarian discourse of social division.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ What Will You Do If the Election Is Stolen?

    The US presidential election is less than six months away. I do not know what the outcome will be, and neither do you. What we do know, however, is the range of what very well might happen. Let’s talk about one scenario in particular: Trump loses, but refuses to concede, and makes a concerted effort to steal the election. The time to make a plan for this is now.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Saudi Arabia Implicated in New 9/11 Evidence

    A redacted publicly filed document reveals key details that undermine the entire narrative of the U.S. War on Terror.

  • Newsquest Media Group Ltd ☛ Former secret Spitfire engineer Norman Parker dies aged 98

    Mr Parker was instrumental in telling the story of 'The Secret Spitfires', a 2016 film that brought attention to the hundreds of women, girls and a handful of men who built Spitfires in secret during WW2.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ What is greenwashing?

    In fact, according to a survey of consumers in 16 countries around the world, almost half of people prefer buying products with an environmental label. But the same study also revealed only 3% would always be able to spot false green claims. That is where greenwashing comes into the picture.

  • NPR ☛ New research on Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier could reshape sea-level rise predictions

    "The worry is that we are underestimating the speed that the glacier is changing, which would be devastating for coastal communities around the world," Christine Dow, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada and co-author of the study, said in a press release.

  • Wired ☛ The World Is Ignoring the Other Deadly Kind of Carbon

    CO2 and methane (CH4) get all the attention as planet-warming gases. And rightfully so: Humanity has to massively cut its emissions as fast as possible to slow climate change. At the same time, we’re neglecting easy ways to reduce emissions of black carbon.

    While not a greenhouse gas like CO2 and methane, black carbon has its own significant impacts on the climate. Clouds of dark wildfire smoke, for instance, absorb the sun’s energy, warming the atmosphere. While CO2 stays up there for centuries, and methane for a decade or so, black carbon falls back to Earth after no more than a few weeks.

  • Futurism ☛ Warm Water Rushing Under "Doomsday Glacier," Scientists Warn

    Now, new research indicates that warm ocean water is being forced miles underneath Thwaites, meaning it's even more vulnerable to melting than once believed. The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that this intrusion of saltwater is causing "vigorous melting," calling into question the assumption that the boundary where the glacier meets the seafloor was fixed.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • India Times ☛ Apple supplier Foxconn among firms asked to cut power use in Vietnam

      The request for energy-saving measures, which two other industry sources said was sent to multiple manufacturers, is precautionary and aimed at averting a repeat of last summer when power shortage led to over a billion dollars in lost output.

    • The Register UK ☛ Google's €1B Finnish DC expansion to heat local community

      Google plans to invest €1 billion to expand its datacenter campus in Finland – a move that will both bolster its AI compute capacity and reclaim the thermal energy generated by power hungry accelerators to heat local homes.

      The Nordic region has several advantages for datacenter construction. Its cool climate makes techniques like "free cooling" possible for much of the year, improving efficiency while also reducing water consumption.

    • Lewis Dale ☛ Rebuilding my touring bike

      I’ve now got my perfect road bike, and am planning on selling my old Specialized road bike, so I thought I could use the cash to put together the parts I need to bring the bike back to life. So here’s my plan:

    • University of Michigan ☛ UMich study finds climate change will increase value of residential solar panels

      The study defines the value of solar as the monetary benefits related to reduced electricity bills and sales of excess electricity to a city’s power grid.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ Lake Michigan beach goes high-tech to curb drownings from rip tides

      Beaches across the country have long used colored flags to alert swimmers to unsafe water conditions, with a green flag signaling safe swimming while yellow signals higher hazard, red signals unsafe conditions, and double red means water access is closed.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ Meet the Nigerian Teacher Who Advocates for Family Planning

      Coming from a family of seven children, Chidera Benoit knows better than anyone how challenging it is to grow up in a big family in Nigeria and achieve a good living standard. Convinced that Nigerian women and men should be free to decide their family size, this young and motivated teacher and Executive Director of the Population Explosion Awareness Initiative travels across the country to raise awareness about voluntary family planning, smaller families and a sustainable population.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Wilson Gray of Claremorris, Co. Mayo, linked to secretive military base hosting first autonomous AI drone flight in 2004

    The Gray family moved to Claremorris around 1780. One of the most notable members of the family is Sir John Gray. John Gray was responsible for the Vartry scheme which provides the water supply for the city of Dublin.

    Less well known is John's brother Wilson Gray. Wilson traveled to Australia and New Zealand.

    In Claremorris, there is a plaque commemorating John Gray. In O'Connell Street, Dublin's main thoroughfare, there is a statue. In Australia, Wilson Gray is commemorated in the name of the secretive military facility at Graytown.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ In Pictures: Taiwan's Lai Ching-te sworn in as island's new leader

    In Lai’s first speech as the island’s president, delivered just after 11 am, Lai said Taiwan would continue to work with the world’s democracies to “combat disinformation, strengthen democratic resilience, address challenges and allow Taiwan to become the MVP [Most Valuable Player] of the democratic world.”

  • RIPE ☛ The RIPE Code of Conduct Team Update 2024

    The RIPE community has always aimed to foster an open, supportive atmosphere across its events and communication fora. The RIPE Code of Conduct helps make clear which behaviours cultivate that, and which don't. Here, the RIPE Code of Conduct Team talk about the work they do to help uphold RIPE community values.

  • RTL ☛ Department of Energy: US to sell off strategic gasoline reserves in northeast

    However, the release of a million barrels of gasoline from the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve (NGSR) is likely to have little real impact on prices, given the US consumed roughly nine million barrels of motor gasoline every day last year, on average, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

  • The Hill ☛ Disney laying off 14 percent of Pixar workforce: reports

    Disney is laying off scores of employees from Pixar Animation Studios as part of the largest restructuring in the movie maker’s history.

    Approximately 14 percent of Pixar’s workforce —nearly 200 employees — are expected to be laid off as part of the job reductions, according to multiple Tuesday reports.

  • [Old] Essel Group ☛ Microsoft avoids paying tax in many countries, study finds

    "In many cases, Microsoft has paid zero tax in recent years by moving profits to companies tax-domiciled in Bermuda and other well-known tax havens," Cictar said in a statement.

    The investigation claims that Microsoft Global Finance, an Irish company with tax residency in Bermuda, accumulated more than $100 billion in investments in 2020 while paying no taxes despite having an operating profit of $2.4 billion.

    Another instance is Microsoft Singapore Holdings, which reported $22.4 billion in dividend profits in 2020 but only $15 in tax obligations.

  • [Old] Barrons ☛ Microsoft Avoids Paying Tax In Many Countries: Study

    According to the study, Microsoft Global Finance -- an Irish subsidiary that has tax resident status in Bermuda -- consolidated more than $100 billion in investments and, despite an operating profit of $2.4 billion, paid no tax in 2020.

  • [Old] Business Insider ☛ How Microsoft Avoids $2.4 Billion in U.S. Taxes by Exploiting Loopholes in the Tax Code

    The Senate investigation found that Microsoft reduced its 2011 federal tax bill by a whopping $2.43 billion — or 44 percent — by using a wide, international network of controlled foreign corporations and the exploitation of various loopholes in the U.S. corporate tax code.

    According to Microsoft, the company paid $3.11 billion in federal taxes in 2011.

    According to the full Senate report, Microsoft Corp does 85 percent of its research and development in the United States. Of its 94,000 employees, 36,000 are in product R&D. The company had reported income of $23.2 billion, but with a federal tax liability of $3.11 billion only paid an effective federal tax rate of 13.4 percent. That's much lower than the top statutory rate of 35 percent for corporations.

  • [Old] Michael West Media ☛ A bunch of shifting bastards: how Big Tech goes small on tax

    The report was compiled by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR), an alliance of unions and civil society organisations aiming to provide better information about the tax arrangements of multinationals.

    CICTAR examined how Microsoft has deliberately and systematically reduces profit margins, and therefore the tax it pays, in high-tax jurisdictions such as Australia. A comparison of how profitable – or “unprofitable” Microsoft is in Australia – is that in 2021 its profit margin in this country was around 4.5%, whereas the global profit margin was 42.3%.

    How do they do it? Principally, by shifting profits to low tax jurisdictions, by doing “related party transactions” with other Microsoft entities around the world.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ Google’s Search AI Recommends Changing Your Car’s Blinker Fluid, Which Is a Made Up Thing That Does Not Exist

      Google's AI search wants you to change your car's "blinker fluid." No, dear reader: blinker fluid does not exist.

      Last week, at its yearly I/O conference, Google doubled down on its AI-powered vision for the future of search — a vision that, as it stands, basically involves embedding an AI-paraphrased regurgitation of search results at the top of a user's results page.

    • VOA News ☛ How Kremlin uses false fact checks to spread disinformation

      Fake fact-checking is an effective way of spreading state propaganda and disinformation, according to Roman Osadchuk of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).

      "War on Fakes," he told VOA, is not only a key source of disinformation but a site that aims to counter credible fact-check initiatives.

    • New Yorker ☛ When the C.I.A. Turned Writers Into Operatives

      Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything,” is a pod-maker of the mad-scientist variety: he cooks up projects using his own zeal, research, and audacious notions, then unleashes the results on the world. “Theory of Everything,” which originated in 2004, a decade before the podcast boom, has always been intellectually rigorous, funny, and whimsical, with a format that David Carr, the late Times media reporter, once described as “What are we talking about this week? Who knows! Off we go! 1984! The year, not the book.” Recently, Walker released his magnum opus, a nine-episode miniseries called “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” which he started reporting while hunkered down on a French island in the early days of the pandemic. It bears the marks of the feverish isolation of that time, conjuring a mid-century transatlantic world of left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Cold War, the C.I.A., mass culture, high culture, post-colonialism, and a whiff of conspiracy. Fittingly, it begins with “1984”—the book, not the year.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Private Screening of Hamas Attack Film Canceled for 'Security Threat'

    Sharon Harel-Cohen, WestEnd Films’ co-founder, had organized the now-canceled screening — separate from the actual film festival — for a group of people in the industry in Cannes. The 47-minute film was set to show raw footage from the Oct. 7 attacks, including CCTV and bodycam images.

  • Variety ☛ Hamas Oct. 7 Attack Movie Canceled in Cannes Amid 'Security Risk'

    On May 17, WestEnd Films co-founder Sharon Harel-Cohen organized a screening of “Bearing Witness” for a small group of industryites who were in town for the festival. The 47-minute film shows raw footage from the Oct. 7 terror attack in southern Israel, some of it captured by body cameras and CCTV. The invitation warned: “The footage is extremely graphic and violent, including videos of murder filmed by Hamas terrorists.” It also noted, “For security reasons the location will be released only a few days before the event, to registered participants only.” Attendees received the location, the Exclusive Hotel Belle Plage — located about a mile from the Palais — and were asked not to share it with others. But shortly before the screening, attendees were told that it had been called off.

  • Techdirt ☛ Five Section 230 Cases That Made Online Communities Better

    The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow on “sunsetting” Section 230.

    Despite facing criticism, Section 230 has undeniably been a cornerstone in the architecture of the modern web, fostering a robust market for new services, and enabling a rich diversity of ideas and expressions to flourish. Crucially, Section 230 empowers platforms to maintain community integrity through the moderation of harmful content.

  • Association of Research Libraries ☛ Sunsetting Section 230 Will Limit Free Expression - Association of Research Libraries

    Libraries provide users with internet access, maintain repositories of scholarly works uploaded by members of academic communities, offer interactive programs, and host online discussions. Without Section 230, libraries would be forced to carefully monitor and in some situations restrict this activity to avoid liability. Libraries currently remove defamatory, illegal, or offensive content according to their own policies once they become aware of it, but repealing Section 230 would force them to be much more proactive.

  • Axios ☛ AI shakes up Section 230 debate

    Driving the news: The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on a draft bill from Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Ranking Member Frank Pallone to sunset Section 230.

  • MediaPost Communications ☛ Libraries, Wikipedia And Others Blast Proposal To Repeal Section 230 05/22/2024

    Section 230, passed in 1996, broadly protects social media platforms, web publishers and other interactive service companies from liability when consumers or other third parties post actionable material, such as defamatory reviews.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Pro Publica ☛ ProPublica Selects 10 Journalists for Investigative Editor Training

    We are pleased to announce the 10 journalists chosen as the 2024 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program.

    The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program was established in 2023 to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, with a focus on journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Marshall Allen, former ProPublica Health Care Reporter, Dies at 52

    Marshall Allen, a former ProPublica investigative reporter who relentlessly took on the U.S. health care system and fought for the rights of patients facing unfair medical bills, died Sunday at a hospital in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was 52.

    The cause was a heart attack, said Sonja Allen, his wife of 29 years.

  • VOA News ☛ Free expression in crisis for over half the world’s population, report warns

    More than half of the world’s population lives in a country where free expression is in crisis, according to a new report.

    The downturn comes as dozens of countries in 2024 are scheduled to hold elections, and where Article 19, which published the report, has already documented efforts to restrict access to information.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Freedom of expression and media in crisis for half the world

    Some 4.2 billion people – over half (53%) of the global population – live in 39 countries deemed to be facing a crisis of freedom of expression, meaning that they cannot freely express their views or access information without serious consequences, according to the annual Global Expression Report from human rights NGO, Article 19.

    This is higher than during any time in the current century and up from 34% of people in 2022 – driven largely by the fall of India, the world’s most populous country, into the “crisis” category in 2023.

  • CPJ ☛ Iraqi Kurdish Asayish security forces arrest journalist Shakar Star after smuggling reports

    “Iraqi Kurdish authorities have made a habit out of jailing journalists critical of the ruling parties, and the practice must end,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York. “Iraqi Kurdish authorities must immediately release journalist Shakar Star and all others imprisoned.”

  • CPJ ☛ Israeli authorities confiscate AP equipment broadcasting live feed of Gaza

    On Tuesday, May 21, Israeli Ministry of Communication officials seized a camera and broadcasting equipment belonging to the global news service in the southern town of Sderot, alleging that the agency had violated the country’s new foreign broadcaster law by providing images to Qatari satellite channel Al Jazeera. The feed was broadcasting a general view of northern Gaza.

  • RFERL ☛ Council Of Europe Commission Denounces Georgia's 'Foreign Agent' Law

    The commission, at the request of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, undertook to assess the Georgia legislation, which critics say is similar to laws used in Russia to silence independent media and civil society groups.

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ Pirate MEP on Assange judgement: Encourage whistleblowers, don’t silence them!

    "[...] The fact that EU Commission President von der Leyen remains silent on the case is shameful, but indicative of the mother of chat control plans, who wants to keep her own official text messages with pharmaceutical companies secret. For me as a Pirate, transparency of government action is the indispensable basis of any democracy. Transparency must not be a crime!”

  • The Dissenter ☛ Israeli Government Censors AP Broadcast, Seizes Equipment

    According to AP, Israeli officials accused the news organization of violating the country’s censorship law by providing footage to Al Jazeera.

    The AP is one of numerous news outlets that license or share footage with Al Jazeera. Israeli officials are demonstrating that they will shut down any media organization that has a business relationship with the news network.

  • [Repeat] teleSUR ☛ Julian Assange Wins UK High Court Victory in Extradition Case

    Assange is wanted by the U.S. on allegations of disclosing defense information following WikiLeaks's publication of thousands of leaked military documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars a decade ago, which included an Apache helicopter video footage documenting the U.S. military gunning down journalists and children in Baghdad's streets in 2007.

  • ANF News ☛ Court rules for the release of three journalists jailed in April

    The court dealing with the case ruled for the release of the three journalists on Tuesday.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFA ☛ More than 700,000 Tibetans forced to relocate, report says

    For the past seven years, Tashi and his once-nomadic family have been living in the outskirts of Tibet’s capital Lhasa after they were forcibly moved from their ancestral home in the grasslands of Tibet.

    They had made a living raising yaks and other livestock and engaging in sustainable farming in Damxung county, located two hours away by road from Lhasa, until they and others were forced to move to Lhasa’s Kuro Bridge area, promised “improved living conditions” by Chinese authorities.

    But in reality, they have faced joblessness, economic hardship and social exclusion ever since.

  • Anne Sturdivant ☛ Working for a Living When Your Living isn't Working, Part IV

    Today's morning read, Baldur Bjarnason's The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health -- this is why burnout happens, was bleak, about as bleak as tech takes can be. But the overall feeling it gave me was not new; I have been feeling this way for at least six years. Why had I reached these conclusions years before so many critical thinking web professionals? It's been six months since I wrote a three-part series during NaBloPoMo about my burnout, exit, assessment, and trepid consideration of a re-entry into an industry that continues to cast out its most loyal, talented, and dedicated workers.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Matthew J Ernisse ☛ An Avalanche of Poorly Written Bots

    I did a little sleuthing and sure enough the big overseas clouds that were originating garbage (Alibaba, and Tencent so far, though Huawei is quickly getting to the point where it will get added) all were coming from a single AS each. A quick change to my script allowed me to simply pull their prefixes from a dump of the global routing table and they were added.

    You can look at the code over in my git repository. It's amazing to watch these bots bang their heads against the 403 errors. They are clearly so badly written that most of them just... keep... trying. This ultimately causes them to trip my OpenBSD firewall and go from getting a 403 to getting no response at all from any of my IPs.

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Pew Research On Link Rot

    The Web is an evanescent medium. URLs are subject to two kinds of change:

    • Content drift, when a URL resolves to different content than it did previously.

    • Link rot, when a URL no longer resolves.

    The Pew team found link rot in Common Crawl's collections:

  • Brandon ☛ Fighting the Urge to Change Email Providers

    This got me thinking about making the move. One of the biggest obstacles was worrying about going through the pain of changing all my account logins, and that's when I realized, that is not a problem. I'm using a custom domain, so there really isn't much stopping me.

    But let's look at the pros and cons for a moment.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Linkrot

    Thankfully, someone has plugged the web's memory-hole. Since 2001, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has allowed web users to see captures of web-pages, tracking their changes over time. I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.

    The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder Brewster Kahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic – a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 – is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine: [...]

  • Andy Bell ☛ Manifesto for a Humane Web

    This part really stood out to me:

    "If what we don’t want from the web is increasingly clear, perhaps it’s time to identify what kind of web we do want. How do we define a humane web? "

  • Science Alert ☛ Is The 'Dead Internet Theory' True? Shrimp Jesus Phenomenon Explained

    The dead [Internet] theory essentially claims that activity and content on the [Internet], including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents.

    These agents can rapidly create posts alongside AI-generated images designed to farm engagement (clicks, likes, comments) on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. As for shrimp Jesus, it appears AI has learned it's the current, latest mix of absurdity and religious iconography to go viral.

    But the dead [Internet] theory goes even further. Many of the accounts that engage with such content also appear to be managed by artificial intelligence agents. This creates a vicious cycle of artificial engagement, one that has no clear agenda and no longer involves humans at all.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ EU antitrust fine: Apple fights €1.8 billion EU antitrust fine for curbs on Spotify

  Apple Inc. is challenging a €1.8 billion ($1.9 billion) fine levied by the European Union for thwarting fair competition from music-streaming rivals, including Spotify Technology SA.

  The iPhone maker has filed a suit at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg to topple the March decision, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Jonathan Faber ☛ The Right of Publicity and Scarlett Johannson's response to ChatGPT Sky voice

      [...] Perhaps that fit was so natural that on May 13, 2024 in proximity to the release, Sam Altman issued a one-word tweet: “her.” Past negotiations and this tweet could be the subject of considerable attention, as an example of why “details and context matter” when it comes to the Right of Publicity. [...]

    • France24 ☛ OpenAI to 'pause' voice linked to Scarlett Johansson

      The company explained that it worked with professional voice actors on synthetic voices it named Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and Sky.

    • The Hill ☛ Actors union supports Scarlett Johansson in fight over ChatGPT voice assistant

      “We share in her concerns and fully support her right to have clarity and transparency regarding the voice used in developing the Chat GPT-4o appliance ‘Sky,'” a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson wrote in a statement Tuesday.

      Johansson on Monday said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously spoke with her about voicing an AI assistant, but she declined.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Scarlett Johansson Lawyers Up After OpenAI 'Mimics' Her Voice

      OpenAI said the ‘Sky’ voice was not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson’s voice and that the company hired a professional actor to create it. OpenAI did not share the actor’s name for privacy reasons. However, Scarlett Johansson’s statement about the issue reveals why she believes she has a legitimate copyright [sic] complaint.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Scarlett Johansson insinuates OpenAI stole her voice

      “When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.”

      Johansson added that Altman had “insinuated that the similarity was intentional” by tweeting a reference to Her, the 2013 movie about a man who develops a relationship with an AI assistant voiced by the actress. She said that she had hired legal counsel to ask about the process of creating the voice.

    • Futurism ☛ Scarlett Johansson Says OpenAI Asked to Use Her Voice for ChatGPT, and When She Said No They Did It Anyway

      Now things just got a whole lot more explosive, with Johansson saying that company's leadership asked her permission to use her voice — and then went ahead and did it anyway when she said no.

      Johansson said in a new statement that OpenAI's Sam Altman wanted to hire her to voice the AI assistant, known as "Sky," which is one of five voice options available in the latest update of ChatGPT and was featured prominently in promotional videos.

      The "Lost in Translation" star ultimately declined, and was appalled when she heard how much the finished product sounded like her own voice.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Cox Sues Insurers for Failing to Cover Landmark Piracy Lawsuit

    Internet provider Cox Communication has fought several piracy-related claims in court over the past decade. In one of the lawsuits, against music rights group BMG, it chose to settle, presumably for millions of dollars. The company hoped that its insurers would help cover the costs, but after the companies declined, Cox is now back in court after suing them both.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Seller Domain Names Taken Over in Bulk By ACE/MPA

    The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment regularly 'seizes' domain names from pirate sites and services that have been persuaded it's in their best interests to shut down. However, the anti-piracy coalition officially reports just a tiny minority. During Monday and over the weekend, a batch of pirate IPTV domains came under ACE/MPA control adding to the flood of domains already commandeered in 2024.

  • [Old] EFF ☛ Right-to-Repair Law Proposed ... for Cars

    And the issue goes beyond the importance of being able to get independent repair and maintenance services. The use of technological "locks" against tinkerers also threatens "user innovation" -- the kinds of innovation that traditionally have come from independent tinkerers -- which has increasingly been recognized as an important part of economic growth and technological improvement. MIT Professor Eric Von Hippel has been at the forefront of this research, and has been hosting a fascinating workshop this week entitled "Intellectual Property Law and Open & User Innovation" (being live-blogged by Georgetown Prof. Rebecca Tushnet).

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Writing Around Writing Around Writing

      Ah yes, the last refuge of the blocked writer. When you are having trouble writing you can always write about that trouble, complain about how you can't think of what to write, or that you have not been writing enough lately, or that if you have your writing is no good. There are more than a few entries in my journal that consist only of remarking on how I haven't written much in my journal lately.

    • Converting from teensy to arduino

      For the past few days, I have been converting my weather station firmware to use an Arduino Atmega328P chip instead of a teensy Arm Cortex M7 chip. In my last post, I found that the teensy is significantly overpowered for the job and it could be contributing to why the temperature readings are consistently so high.