Leftovers

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Celebrating failure

  Failure should be shared. Trying and failing at something should be celebrated. Not because of the failure itself but because that’s the only way to achieve something worthwhile. Failing is inevitable. Everyone has to go through it and confront it one way or another. It’s part of the process and it’s something we should be more upfront and open about it. And again, it should be celebrated.

• Brandon ☛ On Adding A Blogroll Slashpage

  With Junited 2024 going strong, I've decided to try a different type of blogroll. It will actually be a /postroll, kind of like Junited 2024. I'm going to aim to have the 50-602 currently most impactful posts (for whatever reason - whether it's a recipe I want to try, a deep dive into a topic of interest or just something fun).

• Kev Quirk ☛ On This Site & Financial Stability

  Over time, this site has become my gateway to the internet. As well as blog posts, I post my notes here, which are distributed to my socials automatically. It's the same story for my watch log. Then there's things like my projects and my guestbook.

  This is the single source of truth for pretty much everything I do online. So making this thing sustainable is very important to me as the site grows.

• Education

  • International Business Times ☛ Teacher Of 11 Years Quits Job To Join Costco: 'Now I'm Paid Fairly And Have Great Benefits'

    Despite her passion for teaching, she reached her breaking point in 2022, citing extreme burnout from teaching elementary students and sought a new path. Reflecting on her decision, Schuurman emphasised that teachers must be supported and paid reasonably to stay in the classroom.

    Her story is similar to what many people in the workforce are experiencing, not just in education. Here, we highlight the top reasons why people leave stable jobs and how companies can address these concerns to retain their employees:

  • Mandy Brown ☛ The gift of accountability.

    If we want to make accountability something people are grateful to accept rather than eager to pass on, then we’re going to have to shift our mindset and practices towards storytelling and away from retribution. Maybe you can’t change your boss’s or your boss’s boss’s thinking on this, at least not overnight. But you can start to practice the kind of accountability you want to partake in, you can work to bring that future a little closer to hand.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Displays We Love Hacking: DSI

    We would not be surprised if DSI screens made up the majority of screens on our planet at this moment in time. If you own a smartphone, there’s a 99.9% chance its screen is DSI. Tablets are likely to use DSI too, unless it’s eDP instead, and a smartwatch of yours definitely will. In a way, DSI displays are inescapable.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Tiny X-Ray vision chip can peer through nearby objects, like cardboard boxes and even walls — researchers say it is small enough to fit into a smartphone

    A Superman-inspired, CMOS-powered X-ray vision imager chip emerges.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Laughing gas: How dangerous is the party drug?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Myanmar's civil war drives up drug production

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-02 [Older] Many Canadians experience trauma, but most don't develop PTSD. Here's why

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-02 [Older] Canada's 1st full-scale free grocery store to open in Regina

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-02 [Older] Admitting I was an addict was hard. Then came the even harder part

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-03 [Older] Why isn't the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy covered in Canada?

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-03 [Older] Canada's dental care program expands June 27 to cover children, people with disabilities

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] German study shows 1 in 6 develop antidepressant withdrawal

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Germany: Cannabis limit set for drivers

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-03 [Older] Health card catch-22 stymies Ottawa handyman

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-03 [Older] Ottawa to make it easier for caregivers to gain residency when coming to Canada

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Are scientists finally beating antimicrobial resistance?

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • TechRadar ☛ Bad news GPT fans — Abusive Monopolist Microsoft is only allowing some users access to this Copilot Pro feature now

    Microsoft has surprisingly announced it will be removing GPT Builder, also known as Copilot GPTs, from its Copilot Pro subscription service.

  • Meta Cuts Lagos Office Space After Layoffs Hit Nigerian Team

    Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is reducing its office space in Lagos, Nigeria, in response to global layoffs that affected its local team, including the entire engineering workforce.

  • International Business Times ☛ Police Arrest Teenage Boy Who Circulated AI-Generated Nude Images Of 50 High School Girls

    A teenager in Australia was arrested for creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of over 50 female students at their school.

    Bacchus Marsh Grammar School in Victoria reported that images of their students were manipulated with artificial intelligence to create highly offensive and explicit content. These altered images were then shared on social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ LLMs Acting Deceptively

    We conduct a series of experiments showing that state-of-the-art [...] LLMs are able to understand and induce false beliefs in other agents, that their performance in complex deception scenarios can be amplified utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning, and that eliciting Machiavellianism in LLMs can trigger misaligned deceptive behavior. [...]

  • Mandaris Moore ☛ For bios, not bots

    Corporations are now crawling the World Wide Web in order to get data that they could use to train LLMs. That’s not to say they value the writings of a 40+ year old man from California whose average post size is around 45 words per post more than the thousands of artists and writers available, but having perfectly structured data1 would be nice. In the grand scheme of things, I’m not significant and not singular as far as data points go. I regularly see people who walk, talk, and dress like. I listen to at least two podcasts that not only have the same views that I have but talk in similar vocal range and cadence2.

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ Misleading ARRIS Modem Login Instructions

    I recently published an article about purchasing a new modem – the ARRIS SURFboard SB8200 – and getting it set up with Spectrum, my Internet Service Provider. After a minor hiccup, the set-up was successful. But that was not the end of my modem story. Below, I will tell you about my second and final modem challenge: Signing in.

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging Websites that excessively internally link annoy me so much. Somehow I have managed to have two...

    I come across this at work sometimes, where we have to do things to appease search engines at the cost of user experience and I will never not argue against it (even when I know I'm going to lose!). Your users don't care about your clicks or interactions or bounce rate. And if you really cared about those things, you'd make good content instead of tricking people into clicking around your site and farming false positives.

    I hate making things that are not as good as they could be, just because Google Says. Google says to put glue on pizza, so maybe we shouldn't be following Google.

  • Drew Breunig ☛ Sober AI is the Norm

    If you see people defaulting to existing habits when presented with a new technology, there’s likely an opportunity for innovation.

    When data scientists, engineers, and product managers use LLMs in workflows that look like their existing workflows, perhaps that’s due to a lack of vision.

  • Derek Kędziora ☛ A tale of two UX thought leaders

    One of my favorite UX thought leaders has turned to writing exclusively about AI. He’s absolutely enamored with it.

    This makes me wonder about his previous work and whether it had much depth at all. At least for the stuff I do in UX, AI is embarrassingly superficial and amateurish. But for the type of person who likes Miro boards and presentations more than actually working, I can see the appeal.

  • India Times ☛ Amazon adds $230 million in cloud credits to AI startups

    Amazon said it is investing $230 million in the form of Amazon Web Service (AWS) credits in artificial intelligence startups, the latest example of cloud providers trying to capture AI clients from nascent stages.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Cyble Inc ☛ CISA Warns Of Employee Impersonation Phone Campaign

      The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an alert about a recent impersonation scam in which scammers posed as its representatives and employees. Fraudsters in the campaign may extort money in various ways, such as bank transfers, gift cards or cryptocurrency payments.

    • Tripwire ☛ Watch Out! CISA Warns It Is Being Impersonated By Scammers

      The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned that scammers are impersonating its employees in an attempt to commit fraud.

      In an alert posted on the CISA website, the organisation warned that so-called impersonation scams are on the rise.

    • Federal News Network ☛ How the Army is always testing, training on zero trust

      The recent Yama Sakura 85 exercise demonstrated how the Army, the Australians and the Japanese could securely share information by using an architecture based on zero trust principles.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ EFF to Ninth Circuit: Abandoning a Phone Should Not Mean Abandoning Its Contents

      Law enforcement should be required to obtain a warrant to search data contained in abandoned cell phones, EFF and others explained in a friend-of-the-court brief to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

      The case, United States v. Hunt, involves law enforcement’s seizure and search of an iPhone the defendant left behind after being shot and taken to the hospital. The district court held that the iPhone’s physical abandonment meant that the defendant also abandoned the data stored on the phone. In support of the defendant’s appeal, we urged the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court’s ruling and hold that the Fourth Amendment’s abandonment exception does not apply to cell phones: as it must in other circumstances, law enforcement should generally have to obtain a warrant before it searches someone’s cell phone.

      Cell phones differ significantly from other physical property. They are pocket-sized troves of highly sensitive information with immense storage capacity. Today’s phone carries and collects vast and varied data that encapsulates a user’s daily life and innermost thoughts.

    • EFF ☛ Encode Justice NC - the Movement for a Safe, Equitable AI

      At its core, Encode Justice is more than just a name. It’s a guiding philosophy: they believe we must encode justice and safety into the technologies we build. Young people are critical stakeholders in conversations about AI, and presently, as we find ourselves face-to-face with challenges like algorithmic bias, misinformation, democratic erosion, and labor displacement; we simultaneously stand on the brink of even larger-scale risks that could result from the loss of human control over increasingly powerful systems. Encode Justice believes human-centered AI must be built, designed, and governed by and for diverse stakeholders, and that AI should help guide us towards our aspirational future, not simply reflect the data of our past and present.

      Currently three local chapters of Encode Justice have joined the EFA: Encode Justice North Carolina, Oregon, and Georgia. Recently I caught up with the leader of Encode Justice NC, Siri, about her chapter, their work, and how other people (including youth) can plug in and join the movement for safe, equitable AI:

      Can you tell us a little about your chapter, its composition, and its projects?

    • New York Times ☛ Clearview AI Used Your Face. Now You May Get a Stake in the Company.

      The litigation has proved costly for Clearview AI, which would most likely go bankrupt before the case made it to trial, according to court documents. The company and those who sued it were “trapped together on a sinking ship,” lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote in a court filing proposing the settlement.

    • The Verge ☛ Microsoft’s all-knowing Recall AI feature is being delayed

      Microsoft is planning to launch its new Copilot Plus PCs next week without its controversial Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on these new laptops. The software maker is holding back Recall so it can test it with the Windows Insider program, after originally promising to ship Recall as an opt-in feature with additional security improvements.

    • Privacy International ☛ Generative AI won't take over the world, surveillance capitalism already has | Privacy International

      Is the AI hype fading? Consumer products with AI assistant are disappointing across the board, Tech CEOs are struggling to give examples of use cases to justify spending billions into Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and models training. Meanwhile, data protection concerns are still a far cry from having been addressed.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong man with autism handed 12 months probation over inciting others to kill city’s leader and police online

    A Hong Kong man with autism has been sentenced to a 12-month probation order, after he pleaded guilty to inciting others to kill the chief executive and police officers. District Judge Josiah Lam on Wednesday ordered defendant Chan Chun-ho, 21, to follow a probation order of 12 months, during which he must abide by the […]

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-06-01 [Older] Canada Raised Foreign Interference Concerns With China, Defence Minister Says

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-02 [Older] Canada sending naval ships to Pacific exercises as part of new strategic plan

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Taliban open to cooperating with Germany on Afghan deportations

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Germany's Scholz seeks to deport criminals from Afghanistan

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] UK's Sunak apologizes for leaving D-Day commemoration early

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Sudan crisis: Fears of potential genocide are growing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Sudan: 'Up to 100' killed in RSF attack on village

  • Democracy Now ☛ From Gaza to Sudan, Number of Global Armed Conflicts Reach New Post-WWII High

    The world saw the highest number of state-based conflicts last year since the end of World War II, as fighting raged in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and other areas. That’s the finding of a new report from the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Siri Rustad, research director at the Norwegian think tank, tells Democracy Now! that it’s a worrying trend. “The three past years are the three most violent years since the Cold War,” she says.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] LGBTQ+ activists warn against normalizing Europe's far right

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Mannheim holds silence for murdered policeman

  • VOA News ☛ Islamic State-linked rebels in east DRC kill dozens, authorities say

    Between June 1 and 11, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for about 15 attacks on villages and roads near Beni that have killed 125 people, almost all of them civilians.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ War and Peace

    We really don't talk too much about the hidden cost of war. The trillions of dollars we wasted go unmentioned while people moan and complain about social spending. It's the American way to buy everyone their own cruise missile while screaming about the cost of school lunches for poor kids.

  • CS Monitor ☛ To fight terrorism, Russia is making nice with the Taliban

    Earlier this month, a Taliban delegation wandered the halls of Russia’s showcase economic forum in St. Petersburg, rubbing shoulders with Russian officials and giving interviews to the media – despite the fact that any public contact with the Taliban is illegal in Russia.

  • VOA News ☛ Iran expanding enrichment capacity after IAEA resolution, diplomats say

    Iran bristles at such resolutions by the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation Board of Governors, and it reacted to the previous one 18 months earlier by enriching to up to 60% purity, close to weapons grade, at a second site and announcing a large expansion of its enrichment program.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania’s social security minister resigns over links with fintech co

    Social Security and Labour Minister Monika Navickienė has announced that she is resigning from her post after media published details about her ties with with a fintech company under investigation.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania mulls stripping dual nationals of citizenship for backing aggressors

    In light of the geopolitical situation and emerging new threats, the Interior Ministry is proposing to strip all dual citizens of their Lithuanian citizenship if they support aggressors and pose a threat to national security.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Netzpolitik ☛ Going Dark: EU States Push for Access to Encrypted Data and Increased Surveillance

    The recently published recommendations of an high level expert group on the topic of going dark were also discussed in the Standing Committee on Internal Security (COSI). On May 29, several EU member states spoke out in favor of access to encrypted data and communications, as well as Europe-wide data retention. We are publishing the secret minutes of the meeting in full (in German).

    The Going Dark expert group („High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement“), dominated by security authorities, called for backdoors to encrypted data and many other surveillance options in 42 recommendations at the end of May this year. We published the full text of the categorized document (PDF) last week, and the expert group’s demands can also be derived from a freedom of information request.

    The group’s topic was how investigating authorities deal with encryption. The authorities fear a scenario in which large parts of communication are encrypted and they are therefore no longer able to investigate. Police forces and intelligence services call this phenomenon „going dark.“ However, studies doubt the negative effects, partly because digital technologies provide the security authorities with a wealth of data that they did not have in the past.

  • 404 Media ☛ ‘Remote’ Amazonian Tribes Have Been Using the Internet for a Long Time

    It is true that installing high-speed internet in the Amazon rainforest is a level of connection that the tribe didn’t have before, and there’s nothing wrong with writing an article about what that means (and I found much of the article to be pretty interesting). But what the Times did not stress and should have stressed is that what the Marubo people are experiencing now is a difference of degree and scale, not of kind. They are also not wholly new problems to the tribe. What I have learned over the years is that there are very few parts of the world that are not touched by technology, and that many Amazonian tribes, in particular, have made the choice to intentionally interact with non-Indigenous society (or have felt, at times, that they have to interact with the non-Indigenous world and technology) in order to represent and advocate for themselves in political systems that seek to seize or exploit their land or otherwise marginalize them. They also use these technologies for the same reasons everyone else does, have for years, and have been grappling with what it might mean for their culture all this time.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Global temperatures smash records for 12 months in a row

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Oil’s Favorite Democrats Are Fighting Biden’s New Climate Policy

    As methane pollution has emerged as one of the greatest threats to the oil and gas industry’s reputation, the industry has strategized around how to downplay its severity. A recent joint report from the Senate Budget Committee and House Oversight Committee, based on thousands of subpoenaed corporate documents, exposed how fossil fuel companies internally recognized the severity of methane’s impact while developing messaging strategies for protecting gas in the long-term energy mix beyond 2050.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ L.A. neighborhood seeks help amid plague of coyotes

    In previous years, the occasional coyote would pass through the area at dusk. But this year is different, she said, as the pack grows bolder, with coyotes trailing after people as they walk their dogs and lunging at pets and children.

  • [Repeat] Science Alert ☛ NASA Confirms: Every Month For Last Year Was Hottest on Record

    NASA has confirmed that May 2024 followed April, March, February, and January in hitting new highs in terms of average global temperatures. Before that, June through December 2023 had done exactly the same.

    A streak like this has never been seen before for as long as records have been kept, and it's an indication of the rapid warming that our planet is now experiencing. What's even more sobering is that there's worse to come. Changing temps

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Is Japan's car testing scandal the new Dieselgate?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Several killed in Czech train crash, dozens injured

    • India Times ☛ EV component maker Indigrid Technology raises $5 million in funding from Cactus Partners

      Cactus Partners will acquire a low double-digit percentage stake in Indigrid, post-funding. This is the firm’s maiden institutional funding, having raised $1.5 million from angel investors in previous rounds.

    • US News And World Report ☛ US Railroad Amtrak on Track to Break Passenger Records in 2024

      Ridership was 20% higher in the first seven months of Amtrak's budget year that began Oct. 1, and ticket revenue was up 10% versus the same period in 2023, according to written testimony by Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner to be presented at a hearing of a U.S. House of Representative subcommittee on Wednesday.

      "We are on target to set a new all-time ridership record by exceeding the 32.3 million passengers" in 2019, Gardner said in the written testimony.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2024-06-03 [Older] Speed limits, fishery rules aim to protect southern killer whales

  • Overpopulation

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ ‘Time for a reckoning.’ Kansas farmers brace for water cuts to save Ogallala Aquifer

      Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Kansas created the fundamental problem that allows aquifer depletion by granting farmers the right to pump more water out of the aquifer each year than returns to it via rainfall. But the state has largely left it up to locals to find solutions to the problem.

      The state charged the three groundwater management districts over the Ogallala with protecting both the agricultural economy and aquifer water. But their five-decade histories primarily have been marked by further decline of the Ogallala Aquifer. Two districts have made progress in recent years and helped farmers to slow, or even stop, the decline.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Record number of dollar millionaires worldwide, study says

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Bank of Canada cuts key interest rate to 4.75%

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Cutting interest rates was easy. But the Bank of Canada still has a credibility problem

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] German exports gather pace, boosting recovery hopes

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] ECB cuts interest rates for first time since 2019

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Are all Commonwealth countries releasing King Charles banknotes?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Latin America's anger grows over China's economic clout

  • The Register UK ☛ Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

    Wells Fargo fired a bunch of employees accused of pretending to work, by using some tech to fake their keyboard typing, instead of doing their actual jobs, it emerged today.

    The California-based enormo-bank disclosed the terminations to the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority on May 6, saying the employees were "discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work."

    According to Bloomberg on Thursday, at least a dozen employees at Wells Fargo's wealth and investment management units got the boot after being probed.

    However, there are few details surrounding the exact circumstances of the firings, such as whether the employees worked from home or in the office, and the methods that were used to fake the alleged keyboard activity.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ UK judge says he did not quit top Hong Kong court sooner as he wanted ‘to see how things develop’ post-security law

    British judge Lord Sumption has said he did not quit Hong Kong’s top court sooner, as he “wanted to see how things will develop,” following Beijing’s imposition of the 2020 security law.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Cancelling Hong Kong democracy activists’ passports not a breach of UN rights treaty, security chief says

    The government has not violated a UN human rights treaty that protects people’s freedom of movement by cancelling the passports of six UK-based Hong Kong activists, the city’s security chief has said.

  • RFA ☛ Hong Kong revokes exiled activists' passports over UK spying charge

    Security chief targets 6 UK-based 'fugitives' after a trade official is accused of spying.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong cancels passports of 6 ‘fugitive’ activists in UK, inc. Nathan Law, under new security law provision

    The Hong Kong authorities have cancelled the passports of six “fugitive” self-exiled activists in the UK, including Nathan Law, exercising new powers under a recently-enacted security law for the first time.

  • Democracy Now ☛ ProPublica Reporter Defends Work After Samuel Alito Accuses Outlet of Politically Motivated Coverage

    Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, caught on a secret recording, recently attacked ProPublica for its reporting on Supreme Court ethics. The nonprofit investigative news outlet has spearheaded coverage of possible conflicts of interest among judges on the nation’s top court, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who has accepted millions in gifts and trips from conservative billionaires. Alito told a filmmaker posing as a conservative activist that ProPublica “gets a lot of money” to dig up “any little thing they can find,” suggesting the reporting was politically motivated. That notion “is just wrong,” says Justin Elliott, one of the lead ProPublica journalists reporting on the Supreme Court. “We took a very hard look at the Democratic-appointed justices, and we simply haven’t found anything close to similar to what we found when it came to Justice Thomas and Justice Alito.” He also says the Senate Judiciary Committee has power it is not currently using to investigate the court amid the ongoing ethics scandal. “There’s really no reason to believe that we actually know all the facts about what these justices have gotten.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ Secret Recording of SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito Offers “Window” into His Conservative Ideology

    We speak with filmmaker Lauren Windsor, whose recorded conversations with U.S. Supreme Court justices have sparked the latest firestorm over how the country’s top jurists are ruling on consequential cases. Windsor posed as a conservative activist to speak with Justice Samuel Alito at a June 3 event of the Supreme Court Historical Society, where he appeared to endorse running the U.S. as a Christian theocracy and said he was doubtful about living peacefully with political opponents. In a separate recording from the same event, Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, complained about rainbow flags during Pride Month and made other incendiary remarks. Alito has refused to recuse himself from cases involving Donald Trump and the January 6 insurrection even after photos emerged of two flags associated with election deniers flying in front of his homes. “It wasn’t hard to speak with either of them,” says Windsor, who collected the recordings as part of her upcoming film Gonzo for Democracy and paid a total of $650 to get into the event. “These are individuals who have to operate professionally at the highest degree of discretion,” she says of Supreme Court justices. “It should tell you something that [Alito] felt comfortable enough to make these admissions to an almost virtual stranger.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ Harlan Crow Provided Clarence Thomas Additional Private Jet Flights: Senate Investigators

    Billionaire political donor Harlan Crow provided at least three previously undisclosed private jet trips to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in recent years, an investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats has found.

    The flights, which were detailed by Crow’s lawyer in response to inquiries from the committee, took the justice to destinations including the region near Glacier National Park in Montana and Thomas’ hometown in Georgia.

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Budapest mayor calls for new election after recount decision

    Budapest opposition Mayor Gergely Karácsony, called for a repeat of the recent mayoral election, 444 reports. In a  press conference held on Thursday afternoon, Karácsony also announced plans for a public demonstration on Friday evening.

    Karácsony secured re-election on Sunday, beating his main rival Dávid Vitézy by 324 votes. Vitézy was previously a state secretary for transport in the Orbán government, was nominated by LMP. The final tally showed Karácsony with 47.53% (371,466 votes) against Vitézy's 47.49% (371,142 votes). However, Vitézy has questioned the validity of some votes and called for a recount, which the National Election Commission approved on June 12. The recount is set on June 14.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ GAO reminds White House of cyber backlog

    The White House has yet to implement 567 out of 1,610 cybersecurity-related recommendations the government watchdog has issued since 2010, according to the report.

    “A lot of them are really, really critical to securing the cybersecurity of our nation,” said Marisol Cruz Cain, director of information technology and cybersecurity at the GAO.

    One of the biggest recent recommendations focused on implementing the national cybersecurity strategy. The GAO reported in February that the White House’s cybersecurity strategy implementation plan lacked performance measures and estimated costs, limiting the ability to determine the effectiveness of the strategy — a particularly salient point since the strategy is an evolving document meant to be updated once a year to keep up with the fast-changing field.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ High-Risk Series: Urgent Action Needed to Address Critical Cybersecurity Challenges Facing the Nation: Report to Congressional Addressess [PDF]

    Risks to our nation’s essential technology systems are increasing. Threats to these systems can come from a variety of sources and vary in terms of the types and capabilities of the actors, their willingness to act, and their motives. Federal agencies reported 30,659 information security incidents to the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team in fiscal year 2022. Such attacks could result in serious harm to human safety, national security, the environment, and the economy.

  • Terence Eden ☛ Hack advertising regulations by forming a political party?

    They might not get many votes, and it might cause enormous backlash to their brand, and I dare say the law would tighten after a stunt like this. But what would stop a group of mad billionaires from funding a political party in order to circumvent advertising restrictions?

  • Michael Geist ☛ Government Court Filing on Bill C-11: “The Act Does Allow For the Regulation of User-Uploaded Programs on Social Media Services”

    The public outcry over the Online Streaming Act is largely in the rear view mirror as the law is now at the CRTC facing years of regulatory and court battles. Last week, the Commission issued its first major ruling on mandated payments by Internet streaming services, a decision that, as I’ve written and discussed, is likely to increase consumer costs with limited benefit to the film and television sector. While Bill C-11 may ultimately become associated with the consumer implications and the CRTC’s failure to consider the market effects, for many Canadians the bill is inextricably linked to fears of user content regulation. For the better part of two years, a steady parade of government ministers and MPs insisted that user content regulation was out of the bill even as a plain reading made it clear that it was in. This week Ministry of Justice lawyers provided their take, arguing on behalf of the government in a court filing that “the Act does allow for regulation of user-uploaded programs on social media services.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Register UK ☛ Oracle Ads have had it: $2B operation shuts down after dwindling to $300M

      Oracle Advertising is shutting down, CEO Safra Catz said during the database goliath's fiscal 2024 Q4 earnings call with Wall Street this week.

      "...in Q4, we decided to exit the advertising business, which had declined to about $300 million in revenue in fiscal year 2024," said Catz.

      That's down from a reported $2 billion in 2022.

      Investors appear undaunted, as Oracle's stock has soared in the past few days. The announcement of deals with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI has eclipsed the earnings miss and the ad business exit.

      Oracle as a whole recorded [PDF] $53 billion in sales in the past 12 months, up six percent year on year, and a profit of $10 billion, up 24 percent.

    • Vox ☛ Generative AI makes your social media diet easier to exploit

      It’s weird and often a bit scary to work in journalism right now. Misinformation and disinformation can be indistinguishable from reality online, as the growing tissues of networked nonsense have ossified into “bespoke realities” that compete with factual information for your attention and trust. AI-generated content mills are successfully masquerading as real news sites. And at some of those real news organizations (for instance, my former employer) there has been an exhausting trend of internal unrest, loss of confidence in leadership, and waves of layoffs.

    • Science Alert ☛ A Quarter of All Americans Still Believe The Biggest Vaccine Lie

      The stats are based on a survey of 1,522 people carried out by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania last April, fuelling concerns that the false beliefs will lead to fewer vaccinations and put a far greater percentage of the population at risk of preventable diseases.

      More than a quarter of a century has passed since the former physician Andew Wakefield famously published a fraudulent study linking autism spectrum disorder with MMR vaccines. Though the paper has since been retracted, the APPC team suggests the echoes of the ensuing debate continue to sow concern and confusion.

    • The Hill ☛ Sandy Hook families want to seize Alex Jones’ social media accounts

      Jones, who was held liable for nearly $1.5 billion in damages for his false claims that the 2012 massacre was in some way faked, has attempted to avoid losing all of his assets in the bankruptcy process.

    • VOA News ☛ Google AI Gemini parrots China’s propaganda

      VOA’s Mandarin Service recently took Google’s artificial intelligence assistant Gemini for a test drive by asking it dozens of questions in Mandarin, but when it was asked about topics including China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang or street protests against the country’s controversial COVID policies, the chatbot went silent.

      Gemini’s responses to questions about problems in the United States and Taiwan, on the other hand, parroted Beijing’s official positions.

    • New York Times ☛ Fake News Still Has a Home on Facebook

      Mr. Blair has survived Facebook’s tweaks by pivoting away from politicians and toward culture war topics like Hollywood elites and social justice issues.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Condé Nast is enhancing the reader experience through recommendation models

      Building on its relationship with Databricks Inc., Condé Nast is increasingly looking toward implementing artificial intelligence with recommendation models in an effort to engage readers who may not be interested in print offerings.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Dissident Sepehri Sentenced To Further 18 1/2 Years For Comments About Israel

    Asghar Sepehri, the dissident's brother, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Mashhad convicted Fatemeh Sepehri on multiple counts: seven years for supporting Israel, seven years for conspiring against internal security, three years for insulting the supreme leader, and one year and six months for propaganda activities against the regime.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • FAIR ☛ Kristof’s Burden: Global Journalist Supports Closed Borders

    Nicholas Kristof is that guy at the party who reminds you that you haven’t really lived. While you maintain a regular, nine-to-five existence, driving from Point A to Point B, the world has been Kristof’s oyster. With a fully stamped passport, the New York Times columnist can embarrass everyone with his tales from Africa and Asia, marking himself as a true global citizen who yearns for adventure.

  • RFERL ☛ Russia To Try Jailed U.S. Journalist Gershkovich On Espionage Charge

    Russian authorities have not provided any evidence to support the espionage charges, which The Wall Street Journal and the U.S. government have vehemently rejected. They say Gershkovich was merely doing his job as an accredited reporter when he was arrested.

  • Axios ☛ WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich will stand trial in Russia on espionage charges

    Why it matters: A trial would likely resemble other sham proceedings against Americans detained in Russia and political opponents of the Kremlin. Moscow may use it to ratchet up pressure on the U.S. in ongoing prisoner swap talks for Gershkovich.

  • VOA News ☛ American journalist Gershkovich to stand trial in Russia

    Russian authorities on Thursday said American journalist Evan Gershkovich will stand trial in the city of Yekaterinburg, where he was detained over a year ago on charges his employer says are bogus.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Is Canada a back door to goods produced from forced labour? A U.S. senator says yes

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Some progress made at bargaining table, TTC union local says as strike deadline looms

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Police use tear gas on crowd as pro-Palestinian activists occupy McGill University building

  • The Hindu ☛ Captured, tortured, and coerced to commit cybercrime

    Police estimate that more than 5,000 Indians are being held captive in Cambodia, in the coastal Sihanoukville, the hub of cyber fraud companies. This was according to the complaints lodged by Indians, who were trafficked to that country. Over 400 trafficked people had managed to come back to India, including 30 from Andhra Pradesh. And 90 more from Andhra Pradesh are yet to return, police said.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Apple sued by female employees: ‘Company pays women less, men given more bonuses’

    A lawyer representing the employees said, “Apple’s policy and practice of collecting such information about pay expectations and using that information to set starting salaries has had a disparate impact on women, and Apple’s failure to pay women and men equal wages for performing substantially similar work is simply not justified under the law."

  • RFERL ☛ Taliban's Education Ban On Afghan Girls Fuels Spike In Child Marriages

    Activists say the Taliban’s education ban has contributed to the surge in early and child marriages. A devastating humanitarian crisis and the lack of educational and professional prospects for women have fueled the sharp uptick, they say.

  • BIA Net ☛ Students not allowed to attend graduation ceremony for wearing “inappropriate dress”

    The administration of Alaettin Kurt Anatolian High School in Kirazpınar neighborhood of Gebze district of Kocaeli did not admit students wearing dresses to the graduation ceremony on the grounds of 'inappropriate dress'.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Hammer, Not the Handshake - by Hamilton Nolan

    In February, Starbucks finally agreed to sit down at the bargaining table with their workers’ union. They agreed to this not out of the goodness of their shriveled heart, but after being dragged by their hair, kicking and screaming and union busting the whole time. They agreed to bargain after the union spent two years organizing hundreds of stores, and filed hundreds of unfair labor practice charges against the company, and did strikes all over the country, and got Bernie Sanders to berate Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in front of a Congressional subcommittee. Starbucks did their absolute utmost to illegally fire and intimidate and retaliate against workers who were organizing, and then to stubbornly refuse to bargain in good faith with those who did, and to lie wildly about all of it the whole time. Thousands of Starbucks workers and thousands of their allies across the country had to fight and claw for months and years to get this $90 billion company just to sit down and begin negotiating, as they are required to by law.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Korean American family called for help. LAPD shot mentally ill son

    Yong had less than 10 seconds to comply with a Los Angeles police officer’s commands before he was shot three times and died.

  • Stat ☛ Alexander Morris lawsuit: Four Tops singer claims racist treatment at hospital

    When he got to the ER, Morris told a nurse and a security guard that he was a member of The Four Tops and that he had security concerns due to stalkers and fans. Morris’ complaint says shortly after check-in, he explained his medical history to an emergency room doctor and told him about his current symptoms.

    When he shared his celebrity status, Morris claims that the ER doctor assumed he was mentally ill. He removed Morris’ oxygen and ordered a psychological evaluation “despite his clear symptoms of cardiac distress and significant medical history,” the complaint said.

    As this was happening, Morris explained to the staff around him, including the nurse and security guard, that he had identification and could show them who he was. Instead, the security guard told him to “sit his Black ass down.” Morris’ lawsuit said the comment was made in front of at least four staff members, but none of them intervened to stop the mistreatment. To his knowledge, none of them reported the use of a racial slur to a supervisor.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Foreign streamers must pay into fund to boost Canadian content, CRTC says

  • CBC ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] Israel denies link to Islamophobic campaign in Canada that Meta says originated there

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] From COVID conspiracies to bug meat: Fake news on EU ballot

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Notes on Apple TV Plus, streamer business models, and the Foundation series – Baldur Bjarnason

    Streaming services effectively have a cap for how much money they get from each viewer every month: they’re unlikely to ever get more than what the monthly plan costs. They also have less variability in audience numbers. You don’t need to follow reported subscriber numbers for the various streaming services for long to notice that individual blockbuster successes don’t really have that much an effect on the numbers. A breakout success like The Mandalorian might bump up the numbers but over time subscriber bases tend to revert to the mean. Growth, or lack thereof, seems to be a function of the service as a whole, not individual items in their catalogue.

    Before streaming, a blockbuster success would normally result in a massive increase in viewership and and a corresponding increase in revenue for those making and distributing it. Ad revenue increased. More people bought tickets. DVDs sold like hotcakes.

    A success meant more money for everybody involved.

    Streaming has disconnected success from revenue.

    This is as stupendously dumb and destructive as you’d imagine.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ Montana Has More Cows Than People. Why Are Locals Eating Beef From Brazil?

  “The beef packers have a lot of control,” said Neva Hassanein, a University of Montana professor who studies sustainable food systems. “They tend to influence a tremendous amount throughout the supply chain.” For the nation’s ranchers, whose profits have shrunk over time, she said, “It’s kind of a trap.”

  Cole Mannix is trying to escape that trap.

• Trademarks

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-06 [Older] McDonald's loses Chicken Big Mac trademark in Europe

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention

    A French court has ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to poison their DNS resolvers to prevent circumvention of blocking measures, targeting around 117 pirate sports streaming domains. The move is another anti-piracy escalation for broadcaster Canal+, which also has permission to completely deindex the sites from search engine results.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ UEFA Targets Pirate EURO 2024 Live Streams Before They Start

    European football federation UEFA is cracking down on pirate EURO 2024 live streams, before they've even started. The enforcement actions show that the organization is on high alert. Meanwhile, the EU Intellectual Property Office adds support by clarifying that cheers of legitimate viewers 'mean more' than those from pirates.