Links 14/07/2024: Perils for AI PC Hype Train, Further Attacks on Freedom of the Press
Contents
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Leftovers
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Michael Burkhardt ☛ We Need to Let Go of the Dots and Dashes
He also includes this extremely valuable advice:
• Use Farnsworth spacing.
• Learn the sounds of the characters, not the “dots and dashes”
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Tao Security Blog ☛ MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics
As a service academy graduate who had to sit through many lectures on military theory, and who participated in small unit exercises, the idea of tactics as "goals" does not make any sense.
I'd like to share three resources that offer a different perspective on tactics. Although all three are military, my argument does not depend on that association.
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Robert Birming ☛ Re: Embracing the Pain
Accepting that life will throw challenges at us — again and again and again…Not "accept" as in "fuck it, nothing matters”. Accepting as in understanding, truly knowing, that this is the way of the universe. It's a basic requirement for development and continued life. Buds burst and turns into blooming spring, the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and we as humans grow with each new challenge.
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Martin Hähne ☛ #100DaysToOffload I thrive in a low-tech environment
A vacation is a great chance to step back and reevaluate my current situation, maybe try a few new things and also maybe just refill the batteries. I’m still in the middle of the three weeks summer vacation so any reflections are probably not yet solidified enough, but I anyways wanted to put these few little insights here, because the summer vacation part itself is kind of over - the last of my three weeks will be spent visiting my brother and mom.
The main thing that I have realized:
I actually do enjoy a low technology environment and it makes me do the right or interesting thing more often.
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Daniel Miessler ☛ Should You Create a Personal or Business Brand?
I think every creator might need to make a core decision of whether they're doing:
1. A PERSONAL brand on which you post pretty much everything, including possibly having a business aspect.
2. A PROFESSIONAL brand where you mostly only talk about one topic.
I think a lot of people take significant damage in their content efforts by not being clear about which of these they are.
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Science
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The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-08 [Older] IQ tests: can you improve your score by practising?
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The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-09 [Older] The people we like can influence the connections our memory makes
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The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-09 [Older] The five scholars who won two Nobel prizes – and what sets them apart
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The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-11 [Older] How astronomers work out the size of the Solar System
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Hackaday ☛ The NSA Is Defeated By A 1950s Tape Recorder. Can You Help Them?
One of the towering figures in the evolution of computer science was Grace Hopper, an American mathematician, academic, and Naval reservist, whose work gave us the first programming languages, compilers, and much more.
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Hackaday ☛ It's Not Unsual To Love Hacking
Most of what we do here at Hackaday is look out for cool projects and then write them up so that you all know about them. Nothing is better than being really stoked about a clever hack and then being able to share it with tens of thousands of like-minded folks.
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Hackaday ☛ Particle Physics On A Small, Affordable PCB
Experimenting in the world of particle physics probably brings to mind large, expensive pieces of equipment like particle accelerators, or at least exotic elements or isotopes that most of us can't easily find.
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Education
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Robin Rendle ☛ Stop calling yourself an IC
(And hey if you think that your employees can be easily replaced then you do not understand the value of their work! You are bad at your job managing them! You do not deserve to be a manager! Sorry!)
But besides the tone and feeling of this cruel abbreviation, there’s two reasons why I hate calling people who work this whole dumb “IC” thing.
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Lou Plummer ☛ Time is What You Make of It
Taking a low-stress job improved things. Once I settled into that routine, I discovered I still had plenty of downtime. I started by reading tech blogs and eventually created my own on Micro.blog. Through my reading, I learned about another blogging platform, Scribbles, and decided to explore it for non-technical writing. This led me to discover that I could use a subdomain to create another blog for writing app reviews, which I enjoy.
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Hardware
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University of Toronto ☛ Network switches aren't simple devices (not even basic switches)
Back in the old days, a network hub could simply repeat incoming packets out each port, with some hand waving about having to be aware of packet boundaries (see the Wikipedia page for more details). This is not the case with switches. Even a very basic switch must extract source and destination Ethernet addresses out of packets, maintain a mapping table between ports and Ethernet addresses, and route incoming packets to the appropriate port (or send them to all ports if they're to an unknown Ethernet address). This generally needs to be done at line speed and handle simultaneous packets on multiple ports at once.
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Hackaday ☛ Print Wave Metal Casting
Direct 3D printing of metal remains out of reach for the hobbyist at the moment...
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Hackaday ☛ Axial 3D Printer Aces Test Aboard Virgin Spaceplane
Here on Earth, being able to 3D print replacement parts is handy, but rarely necessary.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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From DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) to DNA alteration by vaccines
Here we go again, as I've come across something that leads me repeat a mantra that I've been repeating since the first COVID-19 vaccines started...
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Deccan Chronicle ☛ People worried over online abuse, call for strong action
After the recent incident of insensitive comments passed by YouTuber P. Hanumanthu, many raised concerns over the normalisation of people’s vulgar and vile commentary on social media.
Social media, particularly X, has become a notorious platform for vulgar, insensitive, and vile commentary about women and children. They are frequent targets of online abuse, often facing a barrage of derogatory remarks. This behaviour ranges from body shaming and sexist insults to outright threats.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Extreme Tech ☛ Microsoft Is Struggling to Get Companies Onboard the AI PC Hype Train: Report
Microsoft is trying to generate interest in the latest craze in personal computing, AI PCs. These are computers that include a processor with a built-in neural processing unit (NPU), hardware designed to accelerate certain AI-related tasks. The company launched the first batch of AI PCs in June, but those computers only offered a handful of new "AI features." According to a new report, there was a dearth of new features because some of the biggest names in tech declined to participate at this early stage, citing the market's small current size.
The new report (paywall) from Bloomberg goes right to the central question of the AI PC movement, if you can call it that, which is how an AI PC differs from a regular one and whether anyone cares. To hear Microsoft tell it, these AI PCs (all laptops) can use their built-in NPUs to run optimized apps and access new features that aren't possible on regular PCs. The only problem is that this batch of new apps and features is minuscule. This is why some companies are holding off until there's a bigger market, which is a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario.
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TechXplore ☛ Survey shows most people think LLMs such as ChatGPT can experience feelings and memories
"While most experts deny that current AI could be conscious, our research shows that for most of the general public, AI consciousness is already a reality," said Dr. Clara Colombatto, professor of psychology at Waterloo's Arts faculty.
To understand public attitudes about AI consciousness, Colombatto and her colleague Dr. Steve Fleming at University College London surveyed a stratified sample of 300 people in the U.S. and asked if they thought ChatGPT could have the capacity for consciousness, as well as a variety of other mental states—such as the ability to make plans, reason, and feel emotions—and how often they used the tool.
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Futurism ☛ Ordinary People Are Absolutely Repulsed by AI-Powered Customer Service
The survey, which was conducted in December 2023 and involved over 5,700 customers, found that a whopping 64 percent of respondents said that they would prefer companies not to use AI in customer service.
But over half — 53 percent — took an even harder line: they'd consider switching to a competitor if they learned a company was using AI in a customer service role — a staunch rebuttal to employers trying to automate this sector.
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The Register UK ☛ Three words to chill your blood: Snowflake data breach
From more than 100 million people hit by the staggering AT&T Snowflake storage account intrusion, to the latest marketing claims of AI coming to save our systems from attacks, we've packed a decent amount into 15 minutes – and you can replay our discussion below.
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Six Colors ☛ My prescription for Apple: Hire some ombudspeople
We need some people who can manage from the bottom up. Who can talk to developers directly about App Store issues. Whose responsibilities are the interrelated aspects of customer experience, not just the UX of a single product.
Decades ago, Apple changed its relationship with the community with Apple Evangelists. Maybe it’s time to do so again with a team of Apple Ombudspeople?
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Rlang ☛ Schedule generator with R
This sample R code is an implementation one of possible solutions for generating timetable schedule. The proposed solution is based on methods of evolutionary computing, and it uses (1+1) evolutionary strategy and simulated hardening. The success of solution is estimated on fulfillment of given constraints and criteria. Results of testing the algorithm show that all hard constraints are satisfied, while additional criteria are optimized to a certain extent.
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Misty De Méo ☛ "GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software - The Future Is Now
I’m hardly anti-JavaScript, and I’m not anti-React either. Any tool’s perfectly fine when used in the right place. The problem: this isn’t the right place, and what is to me personally a key feature suddenly doesn’t work right all the time anymore. This isn’t the only GitHub feature that’s felt subtly worse in the past few years—the once-industry-leading status page no longer reports minor availability issues in an even vaguely timely manner; Actions runs randomly drop network connections to GitHub’s own APIs; hitting the merge button sometimes scrolls the page to the wrong position—but this is the first moment where it really hit me that GitHub’s probably not going to get better again from here.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Don Marti ☛ PET projects or real privacy?
In the real world, though, individualized tracking is not the top advertising privacy problem, and it might not even be in the top five. Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence for Check My Ads, said, "Privacy-enhancing tech doesn’t make creepy and disruptive ads less creepy or disruptive in the eyes of the average user." And the user research backs that up. Jereth et al. find that "perceived privacy violations" for a browser-based system that does not target people individually are similar to the perceived violations for conventional third-party cookies. Co-author Klaus M. Miller presented the research at FTC PrivacyCon (PDF): [...]
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Defence/Aggression
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Pro Publica ☛ Inside Ziklag, the Christian-Right Group Trying to Sway the 2024 Election
A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.
These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag's largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ German lay judge challenges a headscarf ban in court
The regional court ruled that any religious symbols worn by the lay judge during a trial would violate the state's requirement of neutrality. It described it as a dilemma, a "collision between the fundamentally protected practice of religion and the state's requirements of neutrality when exercising the office of lay judge."
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[Repeat] New York Times ☛ How Can Europe Reduce Its Military Dependency on the United States?
There is a lot more that the Europeans should do to become less dependent on the United States, NATO officials and analysts said this week during the alliance summit in Washington. That includes committing more money to defense, building up arms manufacturing and coordinating the purchase of weapons systems that could replace those now provided solely by the Americans.
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Vox ☛ American allies have gone from denial to bargaining on Trump’s return
As I reported around the summit this week, it became clear that the talk was less about “Trump-proofing” — likely impossible — than about making a pitch for the alliance and its mission in terms that can be seen as MAGA-friendly. If not quite acceptance, it seemed officials had at least reached the bargaining stage when it came to a Trump return.
At a reception hosted by the European Union on Tuesday night, Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, suggested that what’s good for Ukraine is also good for American business, whoever is occupying the White House. “I’ve heard that Republicans stand for the defense industry. We’re bringing value to the defense industry of the US,” he said.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Rolling Stone ☛ Elon Musk Injects ‘Sizable Amount’ of Cash to Pro-Trump Super PAC
The publication said it is unclear how much Musk contributed to America PAC, but described the donation as a “sizable amount,” according to sources. Bloomberg added that on July 15, the low-profile political group will be required to disclose its donors.
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Environment
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Wired ☛ America’s Aging Dams Are a Catastrophe Waiting to Happen
State and federal officials have warned for years that the nation’s nearly 92,000 dams—many of them built in the early 1900s—are growing increasingly taxed by extreme weather, especially in the Midwest. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released last year, found that annual precipitation increased by 5 to 15 percent across much of the Midwest in the decade leading up to 2021, compared to the previous decade. Some 30 dam failures or near failures have occurred across the Midwest since 2018, the assessment said.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Climate change exposes corpses on Mt. Everest and in Switzerland and Peru.
When they got a little closer, they could tell from the out-of-date clothes and the condition of the skin that the dead man had been there for a very long time. A miraculously well-preserved California driver’s license in the man’s pocket identified him as Bill Stampfl, a mountaineer from Chino who had been buried by an avalanche in 2002.
Avalanches begin as loose, flowing rivers of ice and snow that sweep their victims off their feet and wash them down the mountain. When the frozen debris stops, it quickly solidifies into something like a concrete tomb.
But in recent years, as the planet has warmed and ice has melted at an alarming rate, receding glaciers on the upper reaches of many of the world’s most celebrated and deadly peaks have begun surrendering the bodies of long-lost mountaineers.
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Energy/Transportation
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India Times ☛ AI supercharges data centre energy use-straining the grid and slowing sustainability efforts
At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand.
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Finance
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UiPath Layoffs: 10% of workforce fired after executive reshuffle
Software company UiPath announced today that it is laying off 10% of its workforce, affecting approximately 420 of its roughly 4,200 employees. The layoffs are part of a broader restructuring plan expected to conclude by the fiscal first quarter of 2026.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-05 [Older] Wisconsin Republicans Are Improperly Blocking Conservation Work, Court Says
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ EU prepares to do battle with Musk's X
The move from the EU under its Digital Services Act could eventually pave the way for fines of up to 6% of X’s revenue, if the company fails to appease the EU’s concerns. There is no specific timeframe for the next steps in the probe.
X’s lack of transparency on advertising also potentially breaches the DSA, the European Commission said, as does the platform’s failure to open up its data to researchers.
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The Register UK ☛ CISA broke into US federal agency, wasn't spotted for months
Vulnerabilities added to the KEV catalog mean a few things. First, they are serious, known to be exploited by cybercriminals, and can lead to serious consequences. Second, when bugs are added to the catalog, they also come with deadlines by which FCEB agencies have to patch them.
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Linuxiac ☛ Holly Million Steps Down as GNOME Foundation Executive Director
The choice of psychology is not surprising given Holly Million’s main occupation, namely, professional shaman. Yes, you read that correctly. That’s one of the things that puzzled many open source proponents about her appointment, taking into account Million’s zero experience in open source projects and her main field having nothing to do with it. But no matter. That’s in the past now.
The new leader, Richard Littauer, steps into the interim role with a robust open-source project management and community development background.
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India Times ☛ Meta to roll back some restrictions on Trump's Facebook, Instagram accounts
Trump was also banned from Twitter, now called X, in 2021. Billionaire Elon Musk restored the account shortly after acquiring the company in 2022, though Trump has only posted once since then.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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[Repeat] Press Gazette ☛ UK media facing 'extreme legal hurdles', top lawyer warns
A top media freedom lawyer said the UK press is facing “extreme legal hurdles”, pointing to reporting of allegations against Crispin Odey and Russell Brand.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers specialising in human rights, praised the “power of journalism here in the UK” seen in the past 12 to 18 months.
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VOA News ☛ UN urges release of detained Libyan journalist
The United Nations mission in Libya called Saturday for the "immediate" release of a prominent journalist arrested this week, warning against a "crackdown" on media freedoms in the war-torn country.
Ahmed Sanussi, chief editor of Libyan financial news website Sada, who has long covered corruption in the hydrocarbon-rich country, was arrested in his Tripoli home after returning from Tunisia, his family said.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Amazon Workers in Coventry, England, May Soon Be Union
A year and a half ago, workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, England, launched the first-ever formal strike against the retail giant in British history. Today the workers finish voting on whether to unionize.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ eBay Workers Are Playing the Union Card
Workers at eBay subsidiary TCGplayer, an online trading card marketplace, picketed the company yesterday to protest alleged pregnancy discrimination against one of their own. More than a year after unionizing, they still don’t have a contract.
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India Times ☛ Pakistani Hindus: Pakistani Hindu migrants face eviction threat in Delhi
Nanaki’s husband, Dharmveer, pointed out that there are similar and more permanent establishments in the Tibetan monastery area of Majnu Ka Tila. “Both the Tibetans and we are victims of extremism. Had they not fled their country, the communists would have killed them. Had we not left Pakistan, we would have continued to suffer for being Hindus,” said Dharmveer, who also pleaded for some time to relocate and added that they would protest if the bulldozers came.
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El País ☛ A battlefield called the clitoris: A trip to the country threatening to decriminalize female genital mutilation
But the slow process of transformation that thousands of women have been forging, especially in the last decade — which began to reduce FGM among girls under 15 years of age — is now in danger. Gambia’s Parliament is set to vote on decriminalizing FGM in response to a campaign based on Islam — the majority religion —, rejection of the West, medical fake news and pure misinformation. If the ban is overturned, Gambia will become the first country in the world to roll back protections against the human rights violation that affects 234 million women and is on the rise, according to UNICEF.
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IP Kat ☛ 2024-07-06 [Older] Small cars, big trouble reloaded
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IP Kat ☛ 2024-07-07 [Older] The misadventures of Tintin in the land of parody and freedom of artistic expression
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Yury Molodtsov ☛ What The EU Should Have Done Instead of DMA
The Digital Markets Act is a bad law. I can understand the idea that led to it. Digital tech companies have a lot of power, and existing regulations don’t adequately cover them. But instead of targeting specific examples of overreach, the EU tried to come up with a universal and far-reaching framework that freezes product development for the largest incumbents and prohibits vertical integration.
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The Drone Girl ☛ Arizona Amazon drone delivery service: new details emerge
On July 10, the Federal Aviation Administration released a draft environmental assessment for Amazon Prime Air’s proposed drone delivery operations in Tolleson, Arizona. With it comes critical details around how big this operation might actually be.
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India Times ☛ CCI probe finds Apple abused position in apps market
An investigation by India's antitrust body has found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging "in abusive conduct and practices", a confidential report seen by Reuters showed.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has been investigating Apple Inc since 2021 for possibly abusing its dominant position in the apps market by forcing developers to use its proprietary in-app purchase system.
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Copyrights
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IP Kat ☛ 2024-07-08 [Older] Memelords unite! Eighth Circuit rejects fair use of meme in Griner v. King
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Torrent Freak ☛ Argentina Blocks 50+ Pirate Football Streaming Sites, Operator Arrested
Authorities in Argentina have launched a criminal investigation into a major pirate sports streaming operation. The alleged mastermind, described as a 'pirate streaming consultant', was arrested in the province of Mendoza. In addition to the arrest and an accompanying raid, the authorities also ordered ISPs to block more than 50 pirate streaming domains.
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