Links 24/07/2024: Many New Attacks on Journalists, "Private Companies Own The Law"
Contents
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Leftovers
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Wouter Groeneveld ☛ When Is A Site Considered a Blog?
Robert Birming started collecting links to interesting and inspiring blogging journeys of which most are /timeline “slash pages”. He was kind enough to include a link to my /museum page, even though technically speaking, that’s not my blogging journey but more broadly speaking my [Internet] presence journey. But what exactly is the difference? When is a site considered a blog?
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Matt Webb ☛ The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Interconnected)
There’s a growing coalition around change. Change first, values next. Break the logjam, end the great stagnation, crack the egg on a societal level, whatever you want to call it. The coalition connects ugly politics burning it all to the ground and shitposting inventors on the socials. I mean, it’s not a coalition that can hold, clearly. And I’m sure many in it would deny their participation.
But if we are to (say) get through the climate crisis, the ability to change is a prerequisite. And it is all connected, the opening the Overton window of weirdness is contagious.
Though when things do get moving, we’ll all start arguing about which way. And who knows how it’ll settle out. One side or the other or more likely some unimagined and unimaginable synthesis/detente.
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Education
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Don Marti ☛ surveillance licensing in practice
I wrote about how states should avoid free speech questions around Big Tech by establishing a licensing system for surveillance, and got some questions about how that would work.
The problem to watch out for is that state privacy regulators tend to be diligent high achiever types who aren’t afraid of doing a bunch of extra work. But what we want here is for most of the work of the licensing system to be done on the surveillance company side. The people who are getting paid by the taxpayers should spend as little time on it as possible. So here’s a possible way to do it.
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Low Tech Mag ☛ Low-tech Magazine: The Ebooks
Many of you have asked for ebooks, and now you can download both the chronological and thematic books series in epub version. The files work on any type of device, without restrictions. You can find all ebooks in our online bookshop.
Patrons get free access to all ebooks and PDF archives.
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Goodness Exchange ☛ Why Being Bored Is Wonderful!
The root cause of this unsettlement is mental chatter running amok.
Yes, the world is complex. Yes, there are ‘problems’ we confront that did not exist two decades ago. Yes, we need creative new solutions. But, NO, we do not need to be in a tense, upset state as we deal with all this. Visualize what I am about to share with you. Take a glass beaker with clear water in it. Throw in some gravel and stir vigorously. It becomes cloudy but, in a few minutes, the gravel settles down and the water becomes clear again.
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Baldur Bjarnason ☛ I'd like fewer things to happen. At least for a while. Please and thank you. – Baldur Bjarnason
What I’d like to do is to look a bit deeper. Instead of writing about Crowdstrike or “AI”, I’d like to find and write down clearer thoughts about the underlying decay that is allowing these problems to become so large. Instead of talking about how React is more often than not a bad choice or how to make a site, I’d like to try to find more cohesive thoughts about some of the dynamics that result in these choices and what it might mean if we flipped the usual “what’s the best way for us, a company, to implement this software we think we can sell” question over and instead asked: [...]
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Hardware
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AnandTech ☛ HighPoint Updates NVMe RAID Cards for PCIe 5.0: 50 GBps+ Direct-Attached SSD Storage
The RAID adapters require HighPoint's drivers (available for Linux, macOS, and Windows), and supports RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 10 arrays. On the other hand, the AIC requires no custom drivers. RAID configurations with the AIC will need to be handled by software running on the host OS. On the hardware side, all members of the Rocket series come with an external power connector (as the solution can consume upwards of 75W) and integrate a heatsink. The M.2 version is actively cooled, as the drives are housed within the full-height / full-length cards.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Science Alert ☛ Scientists Reveal The Optimal Number of Daily Steps to Offset Sitting Down
The team found between 9,000 and 10,000 daily steps were optimal to counteract a highly sedentary lifestyle, lowering incident CVD risk by 21 percent and mortality risk by 39 percent.
Regardless of a participant's sedentary time, the researchers discovered that 50 percent of the benefits kicked in at around 4,000 to 4,500 daily steps.
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Task And Purpose ☛ Maine mass shooter showed red flags, Army investigation finds
In the IG report and at the Monday press conference, the Army distanced itself from local reporting on Card’s brain injuries due to military service and a Boston University research analysis of Card’s brain tissue. BU researchers found Card had “significant evidence of traumatic brain injuries” which they suggested could be from his exposure to “thousands of low-level blasts” as an Army instructor for a grenade training range.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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New York Times ☛ G.M. Will Restart Cruise Taxi Operations
G.M.’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said Cruise is now testing autonomous cars in Dallas, Houston and Phoenix. The company said the division is operating a much smaller fleet of cars than it was previously and that the vehicles will not carry paying passengers for now, though the company hopes to open the service to customers later.
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Roger Comply ☛ iSwitched: From GNU/Linux to macOS
Homebrew lets you install and maintain (most of) your favorite open-source applications from the command line as Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie intended. It was a game-changer and enabled me to move over and replicate the workflows from my GNU/Linux environments.
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Michael Tsai ☛ Google Breaking URL Shortener Links
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India Times ☛ Hugging face's Jeff Boudier discusses India's ascendance in AI development and open-source innovation
India is a leading nation for AI builders, second only to the USA in terms of users of the Hugging Face Hub, Jeff Boudier, chief product and growth officer of Hugging Face says. In his first interaction with Indian media, he talked about the benefits of open-source versus closed-source AI,
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Security Week ☛ Telegram Zero-Day Enabled Malware Delivery
Threat actors have used a vulnerability in Telegram for Android to distribute malicious files disguised as videos, ESET warns.
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Rlang ☛ Augmenting RNA-Ligand Binding Prediction With Machine Learning: A Leap Towards Enhanced Drug Discovery
Researchers provided us with comprehensive datasets, which we utilized, applying our expertise in machine learning, to develop predictive models for RNA-ligand binding.
This collaboration led to very promising results: our models achieved Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC) values between 0.65-0.68 on test sets, surpassing the molecular docking techniques (which currently deliver state-of-the-art results and are widely utilized for virtual screenings) that reach between 0.50-0.60 on the same RNAs. This approach marks a significant step forward in RNA-targeted drug discovery.
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Microsoft, other multinationals exit Nigeria due to economy crisis
Microsoft is also on the list of companies affected. After reducing its workforce in Nigeria by half, Microsoft plans to scale back its office space...
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Data breaches linked to mass layoffs: How corporate cuts could cause cybersecurity crisis
...IBM weren’t spared, leaving thousands of skilled workers suddenly jobless.
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Market Watch ☛ SAP shares surge as job-cut plan now seen impacting up to 10,000 workers
SAP shares surged on Tuesday after the German software developer said its artificial intelligence driven overhaul will boost its profits by an extra €200 million and see it reduce at least 1,000 more jobs than previously expected.
The Weinheim, Germany-headquartered firm, which employs more than 105,000 people worldwide, first outlined plans for the company-wide restructuring in January when it said the overhaul would impact around 8,000 of its staff at a cost of €2 billion ($2.2 billion).
SAP — which is currently Europe’s second largest tech company after ASML — has said it now expects the restructuring plans will see 9,000 to 10,000 staff reductions at a cost of around €3 billion.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Register UK ☛ FTC asks 8 big names to explain surveillance pricing tech
In other words, the regulator is concerned about the use of software to artificially push up prices for people based on their perceived circumstances, something that incognito mode can counter by more or less cloaking your online identity.
The FTC on Tuesday ordered eight companies who offer those surveillance pricing systems to turn over information on the effect they may have on folks' pocketbooks as well as privacy and competition.
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Federal Trade Commission ☛ FTC Issues Orders to Eight Companies Seeking Information on Surveillance Pricing | Federal Trade Commission
The orders are aimed at helping the FTC better understand the opaque market for products by third-party intermediaries that claim to use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and other technologies, along with personal information about consumers—such as their location, demographics, credit history, and browsing or shopping history—to categorize individuals and set a targeted price for a product or service. The study is aimed at helping the FTC better understand how surveillance pricing is affecting consumers, especially when the pricing is based on surveillance of an individual’s personal characteristics and behavior.
“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”
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Cyble Inc ☛ FTC Fires Warning Shot At Surveillance Pricing
In a move that could reshape the digital advertising landscape, the Federal Trade Commission has issued orders to eight major companies involved in surveillance pricing. These firms – which include tech giants and financial institutions leveraging advanced algorithms, AI, and troves of personal data – are accused of creating a shadowy ecosystem where consumers may be charged different prices based on their digital footprints.
The FTC’s action shines a spotlight on a growing concern: that personal data, once thought to be a digital currency, is now being weaponized for profit. By demanding detailed information about these practices, the commission aims to understand how deeply surveillance pricing has penetrated the market and its potential impact on consumers.
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The Verge ☛ The FTC is investigating AI-powered surveillance pricing
Surveillance pricing — often called “dynamic pricing,” “personalized pricing,” or “price optimization” — involves offering individual consumers different prices for the same products based on a combination of factors, including the device they’re shopping on, their location, demographic information, credit history, and browsing and shopping history.
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Popular Science ☛ Swimming, soccer, and surveillance: Paris preps for an AI-monitored Olympics
When this year’s Summer Olympics kicks off in Paris, France next week, nearly 100 floats filled with the world’s leading athletes are expected to chug their way across the Seine River. Around half a million fans will cheer as their nation’s sporting ambassadors pass their way through the Louvre, by the Eiffel Tower, and a travel guide book worth of other historical monuments. But fans won’t be the only ones watching. Thousands of CCTV cameras overlooking the river will monitor the proceedings in real-time. Behind the scenes, powerful new artificial intelligence models will churn through the footage searching for any signs of danger hidden in the crowds. The controversial new AI-enabled surveillance system, which critics argue may violate broader European Union privacy laws, is one of several ways France is using technology to make this year’s Olympic Games one of the most tightly monitored in memory.
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United States Spied on Lula for Decades, US Government Documents Reveal
US authorities monitored Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for five decades, amassing an enormous amount of data on his political and union activity, with at least 819 documents totaling 3,300 pages.
The Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported that this information was provided by the US government at the request of Fernando Morais, Lula’s biographer. In early 2023, Lula began his third presidential term, after the previous two during 2003-2011.
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Defence/Aggression
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Site36 ☛ Germany blocks asylum applications from Palestinians, sharply criticised by leftists, human rights activists, doctors
Over 1,200 Palestinians are seeking asylum in Germany, but their applications are not being processed. An aid campaign for injured children from Gaza also remains unsuccessful. Seven of them have now died.
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The Register UK ☛ Nvidia said to be prepping Blackwell GPUs for China
Nvidia has reportedly tapped Chinese system builder Inspur as the prime distributor for the chip, with shipments allegedly slated to begin in the second quarter of next year. Inspur's position on the US Entities List, a prize it allegedly won by flogging off US tech to the Chinese military, could however prove problematic, assuming of course the report turns out to be accurate.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Shipments of advanced processors to Russia reportedly drop 20% — Hong Kong remains a key hub for smuggling
The decline in illicit shipments is attributed to aggressive enforcement by U.S. authorities and proactive engagement with companies whose products were being diverted to Russia. The U.S. has accused China of indirectly supporting Russia's military by providing essential parts and equipment. This accusation has led to several rounds of sanctions targeting global companies with commercial ties to Russia's defense industry, including shell companies in Hong Kong.
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CJEU ☛ Digital Markets Act: The General Court dismisses the action brought by Bytedance (TikTok) against the decision of the Commission designating it as a gatekeeper [PDF]
Bytedance Ltd is a company which, via its subsidiaries, provides the online social networking platform TikTok. By decision of 5 September 2023, the Commission designated Bytedance as a gatekeeper pursuant to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) 1. In November 2023, Bytedance brought an action for annulment of that decision. The Court, at Bytedance's request, decided to rule on the present case under the expedited procedure.
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Reuters ☛ ByteDance must keep gatekeeper label, EU court says in boost for regulators
"The Commission was fully entitled to consider that Bytedance was a gatekeeper," judges said. The judges said the company met the DMA's quantitative thresholds, regarding its global market value, the number of TikTok users within the EU and the number of years during which that threshold relating to user numbers had been met.
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The Hill ☛ Van Jones: TikTok helped Kamala Harris go from 'cringe to cool'
“She’s gone from cringe to cool in 24 hours as a whole generation has taken all that content and remixed it in all these incredible TikTok videos,” he added.
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Reuters ☛ Exclusive: China's ByteDance working with Broadcom to develop advanced AI chip
China's ByteDance is working with U.S. chip designer Broadcom (AVGO.O), opens new tab on developing an advanced AI processor, two sources familiar with the matter said, a move that would help TikTok's owner secure sufficient supply of high-end chips amid U.S.-Sino tensions.
The 5 nanometre chip - a customised product known as an application-specific integrated chip (ASIC) - would be compliant with U.S. export restrictions and manufacturing work would be outsourced to Taiwan's TSMC (2330.TW), opens new tab, the sources added.
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Techdirt ☛ Congress Wants To Let Private Companies Own The Law
We’ve discussed a lot of this before, but it’s pretty deep in the wonky weeds, so let’s do a quick refresher. There are lots of standards out there, often developed by industry groups. These standards can be on all sorts of subjects, such as building codes or consumer safety or indicators for hazardous materials. The list goes on and on and on. Indeed, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a database of over 27,000 such standards that are “included by reference” into law.
This is where things get wonky. Since many of these standards are put together by private organizations (companies, standards bodies, whatever), some of them could qualify for copyright. But, then, lawmakers will often require certain products and services to meet those standards. That is, the laws will “reference” those standards (for example, how to have a building be built in a safe or non-polluting manner).
Many people, myself included, believe that the law must be public. How can the rule of law make any sense at all if the public cannot freely access and read the law? Thus, we believe that when a standard gets “incorporated by reference” into the law, it should become public domain, for the simple fact that the law itself must be public domain.
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RFERL ☛ 'Don't Even Whisper In Your Language': Russian Course For Central Asians Lays Down Strict Rules
A Russian agency is pushing new rules of conduct on Central Asian migrants that severely restrict usage of their native languages and warn them about praying in public and sacrificing animals for religious purposes.
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University of Michigan ☛ Young Americans have lost respect for politicians; bad behavior in Washington is to blame
American politicians used to be associated with distinguished class and education. As American culture has developed, our elected officials have adopted principles that are less tasteful and more associated with immature, unpolished behavior. Where we once had publicly dignified, respectable leaders, we now have individuals — like Lauren Boebert and Jamaal Bowman — who devote their time to peddling conspiracy theories and appear on the news for all the wrong reasons. These declining levels of respect for the positions they hold, and the dignity that should be associated with it, have made young people increasingly frustrated with their government, giving rise to broader suspicions that our current representatives are unqualified and incapable of solving the problems America faces today. If elected officials in the U.S. want the public to see the government as a serious and respectable body, they must first act with more reverence for their roles and integrity.
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International Business Times ☛ What Would A Second Term With Donald Trump Look Like? Agenda47 and Project 2025 Explained
The Republican Party has championed two major plans if Trump is elected in November: Trump's official policy manifesto, Agenda47, and a 900-page proposed reconstruction of the US government called Project 2025. Although not officially endorsed by Trump himself, Project 2025 is backed by many Republicans and has significant potential consequences for American governance.
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The Walrus ☛ Why Canada Should Worry about Trump’s Second Coming | The Walrus
On January 6, 2021, a joint session of Congress had begun counting electoral college votes to formalize Joe Biden’s victory. Trump demanded that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject the election results and keep him in power. That morning, at a “Save America” rally held not far from the Capitol in Washington, the outgoing president urged thousands of right-wing activists to “fight like hell” in support of his false, unsupported contention that the election had been “stolen” from him. In response, a well-organized crowd of hundreds, many with military training, breached police perimeters and streamed into the heart of the United States Congress. They occupied, vandalized, and looted parts of the building. They erected a gallows on the grounds, and some, blaming the vice president for not acting illegally to reinstate Trump, wandered the building chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Others looted the office of Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi.
Reports indicate that, safe in the White House, watching on television, Trump was thrilled to see what he had instigated. Initially, he resisted dispatching the National Guard. He released a video calling the rioters “very special” and, while reiterating his false claim that the election had been stolen, urged them to “go home in peace.” Meanwhile, five people lost their lives. The injured included 138 police officers—among them four who later took their own lives.
Initially, Republican House leader Mitch McConnell, a long-time Trump ally, called the storming of the Capitol a “failed insurrection” inspired by the president’s lies and said the Senate “will not bow to lawlessness or intimidation.” Soon enough, he himself would be bowing and scraping.
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Environment
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Pro Publica ☛ New HUD Rule Aims to Limit Storm Drain Deaths in Flood-Prone Areas
A new federal rule aims to keep people from being pulled into storm drains during heavy rains.
It comes after ProPublica’s 2021 reporting on how dangerous and uncovered storm drains were responsible for at least three dozen deaths across the country in a six-year span.
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Energy/Transportation
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South Africa has a new cheapest electric car
Starting at just R399 900, the Dayun Yuehu S5 is now the most affordable EV available, undercutting its nearest competitor, the BYD Dolphin, by more than R100 000.
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CSIS ☛ The Chinese EV Dilemma: Subsidized Yet Striking
The global war over electric vehicles (EV) has heated up in the past few weeks and threatens to get even hotter in the coming months. On June 12, 2024, the European Commission announced provisional penalty tariffs ranging from 17.4% to 38.1% against EVs imported from China. The European Union’s (EU) move to counter Chinese subsidies followed the Biden administration’s imposition of tariffs in mid-May against a range of high-tech products from China, including 100% tariffs on EVs and 25% on EV batteries.
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France24 ☛ EU slaps Chinese electric cars with tariffs of up to 38%
"Our investigation... concluded that the battery electric vehicles produced in China benefit from unfair subsidisation, which is causing a threat of economic injury to the EU's own electric car makers," the EU's trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis said.
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The Register UK ☛ Meta says all new Llama 3.1 405B model bests OpenAI's GPT-4
In total, the Facebook giant says training the 405-billion-parameter model required the equivalent of 30.84 million GPU hours and produced the equivalent of 11,390 tons of CO2 emissions.
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University of Michigan ☛ The West must change its EV strategy to compete with China
Due in large part to the economic support described above, Chinese EV manufacturers can sell cars at a dramatically lower cost than manufacturers anywhere else in the world. As a result, the price of an EV in China continues to drop, currently only costing consumers an average of $33,000, meanwhile European and U.S. manufacturers’ EV cost $70,700 and $72,000, respectively, in late 2023. This staggering difference explains why EV sales in the West continue to lag behind those of combustion engines. Combustion car manufacturing in the West is so cheap for much the same reason EV manufacturing is cheap in China, namely well-established supporting infrastructure, a vast supply of components and a wide array of manufacturers producing affordable combustion cars for the masses.
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Wildlife/Nature
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EcoWatch ☛ Fruit Bats Have Cognitive Abilities Previously Believed to Be Exclusive to Humans, Research Finds
The study focused specifically on mental time travel, episodic memory, delayed gratification and planning ahead, a press release from TAU said.
“For many years, the cognitive abilities to recall personal experiences (episodic memory) and plan ahead were considered exclusive to humans. But more and more studies have suggested that various animals also possess such capabilities, but nearly all of these studies were conducted under laboratory conditions, since field studies on these issues are difficult to perform. Attempting to test these abilities in wild animals, we designed a unique experiment relying on the colony of free-ranging fruit bats based in TAU’s I. Meier Segals Garden for Zoological Research,” said Dr. Yossi Yovel, a lead researcher of the study and a professor in TAU’s School of Zoology and Sagol School of Neuroscience, in the press release.
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Overpopulation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ How to solve water shortage in cities
With half the world’s populations now living in urban areas and that number projected to swell to around 6.5 billion by mid-century, shoring up city water supplies represents a significant challenge. Failure to do so could result in widespread shortages.
Delhi, Cape Town and Mexico City have already experienced the implication of dwindling supplies and responded, at least in part, by rationing drinking water. But as our climate continues to change, longer-term management strategies will come into play. These include measures such as saving water, adapting existing infrastructure and making better use of natural sources. How effective can different solutions be?
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Finance
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BBC ☛ Rise in cash-only spenders driven by cost of living crisis - BBC News
But young shoppers are far more likely to use their phones to pay for things, despite stretched budgets.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Register UK ☛ How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust
Last year, the package started to get a reputation for robustness, and was finding its way into production in some significant places. It had attracted hundreds of contributors, it had some performance advantages, and it has a more permissive [sic] license – MIT in place of GPL. You can do that if you re-invent. There are a ton more interesting details in the interview about implementation and distribution – did we say it's a must-see? – but the most significant aspect of the project is the long term implication.
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New York Times ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Stumps for ‘Open Source’ A.I.
In an open letter on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, reinforced what some said was a risky stance taken by his company: that open source development of artificial intelligence would allow technologists to learn how powerful A.I. models are created and use that knowledge to build their own A.I. programs.
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New York Times ☛ Congress Calls for Tech Outage Hearing to Grill CrowdStrike C.E.O.
CrowdStrike sent a faulty security update to its customers Thursday night, resulting in millions of Microsoft Windows devices shutting down and disruptions to airlines, hospitals, logistics companies and others.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ How's AI self-regulation going?
But AI nerds may remember that exactly a year ago, on July 21, 2023, Biden was posing with seven top tech executives at the White House. He’d just negotiated a deal where they agreed to eight of the most prescriptive rules targeted at the AI sector at that time. A lot can change in a year!
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ How the "Working Class Republican" Scam Works
The Republican Party under Trump would like to opportunistically cast itself as a “working class” or “pro-worker” party. As a starting point to today’s conversation: this is bullshit, and the pundits who give it credence only help the bullshit spread more widely. Many labor journalists including myself have written long pieces laying out the policy reasons why this is bullshit. (Here’s one by me on the awful labor elements of Project 2025, here’s Dave Jamieson on JD Vance’s bullshit, here’s Steve Greenhouse on the Republicans’ bullshit, and you can Google for many, many more.) I’m not going to belabor, hehehe, the reasons why it is bullshit here. What I want to do today is to briefly sketch out what actually makes up the alleged shift in the GOP, and what is going to happen, generally speaking, if we allow it to flourish.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare
It's been many years since I had to shave and stuff myself into a suit and tie and go to Geneva, and I don't miss it – and thankfully, I have colleagues who do that work, better than I ever did. Yesterday, I heard from one such EFF colleague, Katitza Rodriguez, about the Cybercrime Treaty, which is about to pass, and which is, to put it mildly, terrifying:
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Security Week ☛ What to Know About the Kids Online Safety Act and Its Chances of Passing
If passed, KOSA would create a “duty of care” — a legal term that requires companies to take reasonable steps to prevent harm — for online platforms minors will likely use.
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India Times ☛ What to know about the US' Kids Online Safety Act and its chances of passing
The last time Congress passed a law to protect children on the [Internet] was in 1998 - before Facebook, before the iPhone and long before today's oldest teenagers were born. Now, a bill aiming to protect kids from the harms of social media, gaming sites and other online platforms appears to have enough bipartisan support to pass, though whether it actually will remains uncertain.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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CNBC ☛ Chinese regulators begin testing GenAI models on socialist values
The review is being carried out by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the government's chief [Internet] regulator, and will cover players across the spectrum, from tech giants like ByteDance and Alibaba to small startups.
AI models will be tested by local CAC officials for their responses to a variety of questions, many related to politically sensitive topics and Chinese President Xi Jinping, FT said. The model's training data and safety processes will also be reviewed.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ Chinese tech firms train AI systems to be more communist
Tech companies in China are being tested by government officials to ensure their artificial intelligence (AI) functions speak the language of the Communist Party and embodies its “socialist values”.
Big names like ByteDance and Alibaba, as well as small startups, are being subjected to a review to check whether they are toeing the party line on politically sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square massacre and the rule of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ Combating Misinformation and Ensuring Security
In a recent press conference, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) of the Pakistan Army addressed the pressing issues of misinformation against the Pakistani armed forces and detailed the extensive counter-terrorism operations carried out this year. His statements shed light on the challenges faced by the military in maintaining national security amidst a growing wave of digital propaganda.
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VOA News ☛ Cambodian authorities falsely claim environmental activists justly convicted
That is false.
U.N. Human Rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said, “many aspects of the trial procedure” in the case against the activists may have failed to comply “with international human rights standards binding on Cambodia.”
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MIT Technology Review ☛ How to access Chinese LLM chatbots across the world
For users in the West, finding these Chinese models and trying them out can feel challenging, owing to language barriers and registration requirements. And indeed, there are still hoops to jump through if you don’t have a valid Chinese phone number.
But in fact, a lot of the chatbots support conversations in English and are surprisingly easy to access. Whether you’re just curious to find out how well they perform or want to conduct more serious experiments for work, there are lots of ways to access Chinese LLM-powered chatbots.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Editorial: Trump and oil companies are lying about electric cars
Oil companies are worried that federal incentives and the growing popularity of electric vehicles will eat into their profits and threaten their stranglehold over energy consumption. Former President Trump and other Republican politicians want to exploit consumer and autoworker anxieties about the transition to zero-emission vehicles to help them win in November.
That’s why both the fossil fuel industry and the GOP are spreading the same lie that the Biden administration is banning gas cars. This self-serving effort to deceive voters is shameful, even for those whose peddling of disinformation has become sadly expected.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Hill ☛ Nadler says X [nee Twitter] users being blocked from following Harris campaign account
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) called on the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday to investigate the social media platform X after the site appeared to prevent users from following Vice President Harris’ campaign account on Monday.
Nadler’s letter calls on Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to look at the “serious and time-sensitive censorship issue” on the platform.
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RFERL ☛ Russian's Conviction Of Distribution Of False Information About Military Cancelled
The court's collegiate on appeals ruled on July 23 that Vedel's case must be sent back for retrial and ordered him to remain in custody at least until September before his case is retried.
Vedel was the first Russian citizen to face the charge in 2022 right after Russia adopted a law criminalizing any expression of opinion about the war in Ukraine that differs from official statements by Moscow. The law has been used to stifle even minor expressions of dissent.
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RFA ☛ Propaganda video warns North Koreans not to watch South Korean media
Authorities in North Korea are showing propaganda videos meant to scare people off watching media from rival South Korea, residents in the country told Radio Free Asia.
The videos show footage of people getting sentenced to long stints in prison or in labor camps to atone for the “anti-socialist” crime of watching South Korean TV shows, which are routinely smuggled into the country through China via easily concealable SD cards or USB flash drives.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Atlantic Council ☛ Putin accused of jailing US journalists as 'bargaining chips' for prisoner swap
The Russian authorities have a long record of targeting journalists. These efforts have gained further momentum since February 2022 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the Kremlin using draconian new legislation to silence anti-war voices and shut down any remaining independent Russian media outlets. In May 2024, the United Nations human rights office reported that the number of journalists imprisoned in Russia had reached an all-time high.
While the Putin regime is notorious for seeking to censor the media, that may not actually be the main motive in this case. Instead, there has been widespread speculation that the Kremlin ultimately aims to use Gershkovich and Kurmasheva as bargaining chips in negotiations with the US to secure the release of Russian citizens currently serving prison sentences in the West.
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CPJ ☛ Russia sentences journalist Mikhail Zygar to 8½ years in absentia on ‘fake’ news charges
“The punitive sentence handed down by Russian authorities to exiled journalist Mikhail Zygar is the latest in a long list of repressive actions against independent voices,” said CPJ Director of Advocacy and Communications Gypsy Guillén Kaiser. “Russian authorities must immediately cease their transnational repression of journalists who report truthfully on the war in Ukraine.”
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Embassy Urges Russia To Free RFE/RL's Kurmasheva After 6 1/2-Year Sentence
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has called for the release of Alsu Kurmasheva, a veteran RFE/RL journalist who holds dual U.S.-Russian citizenship, after she was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison by a Russian court on charges she, her employer, the U.S. government, and her supporters reject as politically motivated.
Responding a day after news of Kurmasheva's sentencing broke, the embassy said it was "a sad day for journalism in Russia."
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The Moscow Times ☛ Exiled Russian Journalist Mikhail Zygar Jailed 8.5 Years in Absentia for Bucha ‘Fakes’
The criminal case against Zygar stems from his April 2022 Instagram post in which he spoke about the Russian army’s atrocities against civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha in the early weeks of the invasion. Russia denies that its troops committed atrocities against civilians in Bucha and has instead accused Kyiv and its Western allies of staging the scenes.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Journalist Zygar Sentenced To 8 1/2 Years In Absentia
[...] The charge stemmed from Zygar's online posts about alleged atrocities committed by Russian armed forces against Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha near Kyiv in 2022. [...]
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CPJ ☛ Turkish Kurdish photojournalist Murat Yazar detained for 8 days in Iraqi Kurdistan
“Iraqi Kurdish authorities have made a habit out of detaining and harassing journalists,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s Interim MENA Program Coordinator, in Washington D.C. “We are deeply concerned over the detention of prominent photojournalist Murat Yazar in the region for eight days and call on the authorities to immediately stop harassing members of the press and let them do their jobs freely.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Papers Please ☛ What “consent” really looks like for the DEA and TSA
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been working together for years to steal travelers’ money.
The DEA pays informers to finger people who might be flying with large amounts of cash, and gets the TSA to identify these people when they go through TSA checkpoints at airports, claims that they “consent” to be searched, and then finds any money they are carrying and seizes it through “civil forfeiture”.
The DEA carries out similar cash-seizure operations on Amtrak trains — mostly domestic trains that don’t cross the US border — in collaboration with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
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RFA ☛ Tibetan parents forced to enroll children at state-run residential schools
Chinese authorities are requiring the parents of students who attend a Buddhist school in a Tibetan area of western China to enroll their children in state-administered residential schools, Tibetans with knowledge of the situation said.
Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia learned that Chinese authorities had closed down the Buddhist school of Lhamo Kirti Monastery in Dzoge county, Sichuan province, affecting about 600 students. Another school at Kirti Monastery in Ngaba county was also shut down, affecting 1,000 students.
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Futurism ☛ Elon Musk's X Fighting Not to Give Up Information in Epstein Victim Case
Lawyers for X-formerly-Twitter are, for some reason, refusing to provide one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims with information from her own account.
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Business Insider ☛ Elon Musk's X Fights Twitter Subpoenas in Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Case - Business Insider
X (formerly Twitter) has been fighting subpoenas in a lawsuit between two Jeffrey Epstein accusers.
One of them, Rina Oh Amen, wants to get records from her own accounts for the discovery process.
X has refused, gumming up the case, lawyers told BI.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ These thieves are stealing L.A.'s history, and our sense of place
They harken back to a time when city fathers thought the public amenities should look as nice as the private property. That everyone should share in the wealth. I drive down Wilshire Boulevard and can’t help but admire a city that took the care to frame lanterns in the shape of sleek nude women. On Olympic Boulevard, I look up and smile at the metal piece in the shape of a serpent that presents the street light to motorists.
So thieves are stealing from all of us — and from the ideal of what our city can look like.
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Judge says Meta's mass layoff separation agreements were unlawful
The separation agreements that Meta had thousands of its former employees sign during a mass layoff in 2022 were unlawful, according to a recently published decision from a judge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Meta laid off 7,511 of its U.S.-based employees between August 21, 2022, and February 20, 2023. About 96% of those former employees — 7,236 — voluntarily signed a separation agreement that offered more severance pay and other benefits in exchange for waiving their rights to speak publicly about their employment or termination.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Stealth Piracy App Evaded Apple Again? Just the Tip of the Evasion Iceberg
It recently emerged that yet another pirate movie streaming app managed to evade Apple's stringent vetting process for more than a year. With incidents like this running in parallel with apps that are blatantly infringing, a new discussion paper asks what more can be done to prevent apps and app stores being used for infringing purposes. We also suggest a free tool to limit exposure to app-related risks.
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Torrent Freak ☛ UK 'Crackdown' on Pirate IPTV Streaming Leads to Three Arrests & 40 Warnings
Anti-piracy group FACT assisted UK police to deliver cease-and-desist notices to 40 alleged pirate 'IPTV operators'. The 'crackdown' further resulted in three arrests in Nottingham, Widnes, and Stockton-on-Tees in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Sky reportedly removed more than 3,000 IPTV advertisements from social media platforms since June.
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404 Media ☛ The Backlash Against AI Scraping Is Real and Measurable
The analysis, published Friday, is called “Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons,” and has found that, in the last year, “there has been a rapid crescendo of data restrictions from web sources” restricting web scraper bots (sometimes called “user agents”) from training on their websites.
Specifically, about 5 percent of the 14,000 websites analyzed had modified their robots.txt file to block AI scrapers. That may not seem like a lot, but 28 percent of the “most actively maintained, critical sources,” meaning websites that are regularly updated and are not dormant, have restricted AI scraping in the last year. An analysis of these sites’ terms of service found that, in addition to robots.txt restrictions, many sites also have added AI scraping restrictions to their terms of service documents in the last year.
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India Times ☛ AI data: The data that powers AI is disappearing fast
Web data restrictions impact AI models like ChatGPT. MIT's study finds 25% of top-quality data restricted. Smaller firms use synthetic data due to licensing costs. Deals with AP and News Corp are struck. Researchers worry about a consent crisis, as robots.txt compliance varies. Perplexity AI addresses this issue.
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Futurism ☛ Crisis Looms as AI Companies Rapidly Losing Access to Training Data
AI companies typically build their AI models on lots of publicly available content, from YouTube videos to newspaper articles. But many of these content hosts have now started to put up restrictions on their content.
Those new restrictions could bring about a "crisis" that would make these AI models less effective, according to a new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Data Provenance Initiative.
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Digital Music News ☛ Judge Refuses to Toss SoundExchange vs. SiriusXM
After SoundExchange sued SiriusXM last year for more than $150 million in unpaid royalties, the satellite radio giant moved to dismiss the case for “lack of personal jurisdiction,” or at least requested that the case should be transferred to a different venue. Now, the court has denied SiriusXM’s request for dismissal, but has agreed to move the trial to the Southern District of New York.
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The Register UK ☛ What does Google Gemini do with your data? It's complicated
Meanwhile, it appeared the AI had access to more than just Bankston's tax documents. "Doing a little more testing, it appears this is happening with any PDF of mine that I open from Drive," he said. "Thankfully not (yet?) automatically happening with Google Docs."
It took nearly a week, and conversations with real people at Google, before Bankston, who teaches AI law at Georgetown University, was able to solve the issue – and that doesn't bode well for normal users, who likely neither have Bankston's technical knowledge nor visibility to get Google's attention when things go wrong.
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The Verge ☛ Adobe rolls out new generative AI features to Illustrator and Photoshop
Adobe’s latest Firefly Vector model powers new Illustrator features like Generative Shape Fill, which allows users to add detailed vectors to shapes via descriptive text prompts. The updated model also improves the Text to Pattern beta feature, which can be used to create scalable, customized vector patterns for things like wallpapers; and Style Reference, which generates outputs that mirror existing styles.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.