Links 26/07/2024: "AI" Hype Debunked and Elon Musk's "X" Already Spreads Political Disinformation
Contents
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Leftovers
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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CoryDoctorow ☛ AI's productivity theater
When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!
Related: countries around the world limit advertising to children, for two reasons:
1) Kids may not be stupid, but they are inexperienced, and that makes them gullible; and
2) Kids don't have money of their own, so their path to getting the stuff they see in ads is nagging their parents, which creates a natural constituency to support limits on kids' advertising (nagged parents).
There's something especially annoying about ads targeted at getting credulous people to coerce or torment other people on behalf of the advertiser. For example, AI companies spent millions targeting your boss in an effort to convince them that you can be replaced with a chatbot that absolutely, positively cannot do your job.
[...]
Bosses are Bizarro-world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss's worldview is organized around the principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn't available for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends. That's why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software. Software is cheaper, and it doesn't advocate for higher wages.
That makes your boss such an easy mark for AI pitchmen, which explains the vast gap between the valuation of AI companies and the utility of AI to the customers that buy those companies' products. As an investor, buying shares in AI might represent a bet the usefulness of AI – but for many of those investors, backing an AI company is actually a bet on your boss's credulity and contempt for you and your job.
[...]
85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;
49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;
77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.
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Head Topics ☛ World of Warcraft devs form alliance against big tech layoffs
World of Warcraft developers have joined those from Bethesda Game Studios and formed a union to protect themselves from greedy corpos.
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The Express Tribune ☛ AI to replace 85 million jobs by 2025: WEF report [Ed: Articles about "AI" are composed either by bots or people whose mental capacity does not exceed bots'. Basically, the economy is sagging, jobs cannot be provided, so they need to blame some buzzword for it.]
IBM is planning to lay off around 10,000 employees across Europe.
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Nature ☛ AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data
Stable diffusion revolutionized image creation from descriptive text. GPT-2 (ref. 1), GPT-3(.5) (ref. 2) and GPT-4 (ref. 3) demonstrated high performance across a variety of language tasks. ChatGPT introduced such language models to the public. It is now clear that generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as large language models (LLMs) is here to stay and will substantially change the ecosystem of online text and images. Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ and show that it can occur in LLMs as well as in variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity among all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it must be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of LLM-generated content in data crawled from the Internet.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Guardian UK ☛ Israel tried to frustrate US lawsuit over Pegasus spyware, leak suggests
Officials seized documents from NSO Group to try to stop handover of information about notorious hacking tool, files suggest
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ Human Rights Violations in the Misuse of Personal Data
In an increasingly advanced digital era, personal data has become one of the most valuable assets in the world. With the development of information and communication technologies, this data is collected from various online and offline activities individuals engage in. Personal data includes a wide range of information such as shopping habits, social media preferences, health records, and even daily locations. Every time someone shops online, uses social media, visits websites, or even just carries their phone, the digital trail they leave provides a highly detailed picture of their life.
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Zimbabwe ☛ Zimswitch Payments Conference 2024: Cash vs Digital: The battle for Zim’s payment future
The Zimswitch Payments Conference 2024, with its theme ‘Thriving and Shaping the Future in an Era of Continuous Change,’ brought together key players in the financial and tech industries to discuss the future of digital payments.
Technology moves fast and the Zimbabwean economic landscape shifts by the minute. So, this year’s conference highlighted the importance of staying adaptable and forward-thinking.
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Wired ☛ At the Olympics, AI Is Watching You
For critics and supporters alike, algorithmic oversight of CCTV footage offers a glimpse of the security systems of the future, where there is simply too much surveillance footage for human operators to physically watch. “The software is an extension of the police,” says Noémie Levain, a member of the activist group La Quadrature du Net, which opposes AI surveillance. “It's the eyes of the police multiplied.”
Near the entrance of the Porte de Pantin metro station, surveillance cameras are bolted to the ceiling, encased in an easily-overlooked gray metal box. A small sign is pinned to the wall above the bin, informing anyone willing to stop and read that they are part of an “video surveillance analysis experiment.” The company which runs the Paris metro RATP “is likely” to use “automated analysis in real time” of the CCTV images “in which you can appear,” the sign explains to the oblivious passengers rushing past. The experiment, it says, runs until March 2025.
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India Times ☛ VPN: To hide your internet activity or your IP address, use a virtual private network
On the move and looking for an internet connection to check email or post a video to TikTok? It's tempting to jump onto the free Wi-Fi at the coffee shop or the shopping mall. But don't do it unless you've got protection.
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Defence/Aggression
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FAIR ☛ Crime Is Way Down—But NYT Won’t Stop Telling Voters to Worry About Crime
In a piece factchecking Donald Trump’s claims in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention, the New York Times‘ Steven Rattner (7/24/24) responded to Trump’s claim that “our crime rate is going up” by pointing out:
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Site36 ☛ US military stockpiles cluster munitions in Germany, which thus could be in breach of the Oslo Convention
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Site36 ☛ Classical music for Gaza: “Make Freedom Ring” organises benefit concerts for emergency aid in the Strip
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[Repeat] Scoop News Group ☛ Cyber firm KnowBe4 hired a fake IT worker from North Korea
Detailing a seemingly thorough interview process that included background checks, verified references and four video conference-based interviews, KnowBe4 founder and CEO Stu Sjouwerman said the worker avoided being caught by using a valid identity that was stolen from a U.S.-based individual. The scheme was further enhanced by the actor using a stock image augmented by artificial intelligence.
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Rolling Stone ☛ Kamala Harris Officially Launches TikTok
“Getting the vice president up on TikTok means she’ll be able to directly [sic] engage with a key constituency in a way that’s true [sic] and authentic [sic] to the platform and the audience,” he added.
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The Hill ☛ Kamala Harris joins TikTok following candidacy announcement
“Well, I’ve heard that recently I’ve been on the ‘for you’ page, so I thought I would get on here myself,” Harris said in a Thursday post on TikTok, alluding to her recent popularity on the platform.
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[Old] Foundation for Defense of Democracies ☛ It’s not just a theory. TikTok’s ties to Chinese government are dangerous.
To the casual observer, TikTok might seem like just a hub for content and commerce, but it’s far more than that.
Beneath the veneer of viral dances and trends, the app also plays a significant role in advancing China’s larger geopolitical ambitions, marrying the Chinese Communist Party’s quest for narrative influence with its push for artificial intelligence supremacy.
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Wired ☛ How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer—and Shook the World
At that point, it would take many decades for the currents to grind to a halt. Even so, a shutdown would trigger, as one paper put it, “a profound global-scale reorganization” in Earth’s climate systems. The effects would be devastating—plunging northern Europe into a deep cold spell, crushing food systems, condemning big regions to drought. It’s so, so bad.
It follows, then, that you’d wonder how close we humans are to that threshold. Perhaps you’d heard about the AMOC’s frailty; the shutdown threat; maybe even the decades of fighting among scientists as they try to fathom this gigantic, interconnected, barely understood current. But it was only rather recently that someone dared to go right to the core and ask: How much time do we have left before the AMOC breaks?
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VOA News ☛ Nigerian military rescues Chibok girl
Ehi Abdul, a Chibok schoolgirl kidnapped along with 275 others nearly a decade ago, is finally free. She spent about 10 years in the Sambisa Forest, where she says she was forced to marry eight Boko Haram fighters and bear them two children.
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Influence Equation of Social Media
It would not be an exaggeration to say that no technology has ever been weaponized at such an unprecedented global scale as social media, proving to be an effective instrument for non-state actors to conduct terrorist activities. For instance, for over a decade, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula used social media and online propaganda to launch its English-language digital magazine, which inspired the Boston Marathon bombers in 2010. A UNDP report (2018) found evidence of ISIS using Twitter, Telegram, and online propaganda magazines to recruit, radicalize, and coordinate attacks in Africa.
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The Barents Observer ☛ Finland mulls an end to Barents cooperation
With Russia out of the picture, the Barents cooperation changed focus to a north Nordic cooperation between the remaining member states Finland, Sweden and Norway. ADVERTISEMENT
The new format was underscored as more important than ever due to the security situation during the Kirkenes conference in 2023.
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India Times ☛ UK fines TikTok over child safety data reporting
Ofcom criticised the platform, which is owned by Chinese group ByteDance, saying it communicated inaccurate information last year and failed swiftly to address that.
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404 Media ☛ Navy Ad: Gig Work Is a Dystopian, Unregulated Hellscape, Build Submarines Instead
The ad portrays gig work as an overwhelming unregulated dystopian hellscape, which is ironic, considering it was paid for by the same U.S. government that has so completely failed to regulate gig work that a U.N. poverty expert called the situation a human rights issue.
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Axios ☛ J.D. Vance wrote foreword of upcoming book from Project 2025 leader
Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) wrote the foreword of an upcoming book from the architect of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican administration.
Why it matters: Former President Trump, who chose Vance as his running mate last week, has attempted to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation-backed plan after Democrats seized on it to mobilize voters.
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New York Times ☛ In Burkina Faso, ‘Nowhere Is Safe’ from Terrorists or Troops
Burkina Faso has long been known for its international film festival and arts scene. But as extremists affiliated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have turned a swath of West Africa into the world’s epicenter of terrorism, Burkina Faso has been the hardest hit.
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Environment
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teleSUR ☛ Zambia: [UN] Calls for Urgent Action to Address Climate Change - teleSUR English
The UN representative said the initiative, supported by the United Nations Democracy Fund and implemented by the Center for Environment Justice, an organization whose goal was to address social and environmental injustices.
On Thursday, the United Nations (UN) in Zambia called for urgent action to address climate change in the southern African nation, saying it was one of the most critical challenges of the time.
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Axios ☛ Kamala Harris blasts Trump's Mar-A-Lago meeting with oil executives
State of play: Trump asked some of the industry's top executives to help raise $1 billion for his campaign as he outlined his pro-drilling agenda for a second term, the Washington Post first reported.
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CBC ☛ Researchers say oxygen is being produced on the ocean floor. The mining company funding them isn't happy
The discovery has profound implications for our understanding of the deep ocean and its ecology. Scientists say the organisms that inhabit those ocean depths — which are also a mystery — may depend on oxygen from this newly discovered source.
But the study, published in Nature Geoscience, was funded in part by The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based mining firm that has spent years arguing that mining in the deep ocean has a relatively low environmental impact, and is a better way to extract valuable minerals needed in green energy technology.
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NPR ☛ Scientists may have discovered 'dark oxygen' being created without photosynthesis
Companies conducted exploratory missions for deep-sea mining in the 1970s and '80s, he said, and recent research suggests that those missions may have had repercussions on marine life in the area for decades.
"A few years ago, a team of marine biologists went back to those areas that were mined 40 years ago and found essentially no life," Geiger said. "And then a few hundred meters over to the left and right, where the nodules were intact, plenty of life."
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Energy/Transportation
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DeSmog ☛ Tory Leadership Contender Robert Jenrick’s Pro-Coal and Anti-Net Zero Record
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The Verge ☛ The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is [cryptocurrency] — a16z started a $4.5 billion [cryptocurrency] fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden administration has been deeply unfair to [cryptocurrency]. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the [cryptocurrency] industry.”
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J Pieper ☛ Electrical power reporting with moteus
Brushless motor controllers like moteus act like step down DC/DC converters. Their input is a higher voltage and low current, while the output to the motor is low voltage and higher current. If working properly, the output current is driven so as to produce torque at the output shaft.
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Canada ☛ Province hits pause on electrical connections for cryptocurrency mining
“Cryptocurrency mining consumes massive amounts of electricity to run and cool banks of high-powered computers 24/7/365, while creating very few jobs in the local economy,” said Josie Osborne, Minister of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation. “We are suspending electricity connection requests from cryptocurrency mining operators to preserve our electricity supply for people who are switching to electric vehicles and heat pumps, and for businesses and industries that are undertaking electrification projects that reduce carbon emissions and generate jobs and economic opportunities.”
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[Old] Inside Climate News ☛ US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining
The fast-growing cryptocurrency industry is a major consumer of electricity, but no one—not even the U.S. government—knows exactly how much energy goes into the armada of computers used to ‘mine’ Bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates that cryptocurrency mining uses between 0.6 percent and 2.3 percent of all electricity per year, but the agency may soon be able to access more precise information.
In the coming months, the EIA is planning to release the draft of a new survey that will require disclosure from companies in the cryptocurrency mining industry. On Wednesday, during a “listening session,” EIA officials laid out the process for creating the survey, which is typical of how EIA collects energy consumption data from manufacturers and commercial buildings.
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David Rosenthal ☛ Matt Levine Explains Cryptocurrency Markets
Kanav Kariya Matt Levine's superpower is his ability to describe financial issues in wonderfully simple terms, and in a section of Monday's column entitled Crypto is for fun he is on top form:
"In many cases, the essential attribute of a crypto token is liquidity: What you want, often, is a token that trades a lot, because your goal for the token is to trade it a lot. Real-world utility, a sensible business model, acceptance in real transactions, etc., are all less important than just trading if you think of crypto as a toy market for traders to play with. If a token trades a lot at a high price, that in itself justifies the price, because that is all that is asked of a token: It doesn’t need to have a good underlying business or cash flows; it just has to trade a lot at a high price. "
Below the fold I discuss the astonishing story behind this explanation of why wash trading is so rife in cryptocurrencies.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ John DeLorean built the 'car of the future.' Then came the briefcase full of cocaine
Tamir Ardon, a documentary filmmaker, got close to the DeLorean family during the 15 years he spent bringing the 2019 documentary “Framing John DeLorean” to the screen. He called the cocaine case “Entrapment 101,” playing out against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs.
“Morally, John was corrupt. Legally, he didn’t do anything wrong,” Ardon told The Times in a recent interview. “He wasn’t doing drug deals. It just happened to be that’s how they structured the case so it would seem super nefarious and it would be super splashy for Reagan. ... They thought, as long as they get this splashy video of John in a room with cocaine, that was going to be damning enough to a group of 12 regular jurors.”
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Nebraska Examiner ☛ America must do whatever it takes to prevent a looming crisis induced by low-cost Chinese EVs
We’re likely going to need the same action on automobiles. Low-cost Chinese electric cars that could be assembled in Mexico for export across the border pose a dire threat to America’s automobile industry.
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The Register UK ☛ Datacenters gobble over a fifth of Ireland's electricity
The latest statistics published by CSO reveal that the total metered electricity consumption by datacenters in the Emerald Isle has risen from 5 percent back in 2015 to 21 percent last year.
By comparison, all urban households in the country accounted for 18 percent of metered electricity use during 2023, and all rural households added up to 10 percent.
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[Old] RTE ☛ What is a data centre - and what does it actually do?
There are currently more than 8,000 data centres globally, with about 33% located in the United States, 16% in Europe and close to 10% in China. We have 82 data centres in Ireland, with a further 14 under construction and planning approved for 40 more, meaning a 65% growth in coming years.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Ferrari to accept cryptocurrency payments in Europe
"By the end of 2024, Ferrari will expand cryptocurrency transactions to other countries in its international dealer network, where cryptocurrencies are legally accepted," the company added.
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Futurism ☛ Tesla Buyers Disgusted by Elon Musk’s Endorsement of Donald Trump
In a new report based on findings from an analytics firm called CivicService, Yahoo Finance reports that Tesla's favorability among registered Democrats — who are far more likely to purchase electric vehicles than their oil-loving Republican counterparts — has dropped precipitously from 39 percent in January to 16 percent in July.
Interestingly, the EV company's favorability is also down from 36 percent in January to 23 percent in July among GOP voters, suggesting that Musk isn't winning himself any new buyers with his sudden turn of support for Trump and regressive social ideas.
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Overpopulation
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Greece ☛ Experts call for urgent conservation strategy as Crete faces water shortages
Similar problems with drought and water shortages are being reported all over the country, including more recently in Corinth, in Messinia in the southwestern Peloponnese and on the island of Kythera, an increasingly popular tourist destination, off the coast of the southeastern Peloponnese.
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Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Is Venice's Controversial Entry Fee Working?
“They brag that they raised a lot of money with this contribution, but that shows the opposite,” Martini tells the Times. “If you made that much, it means you can’t control [tourism].”
He adds that cell phone data, which estimates the number of tourists in the city, suggests that the numbers increased on peak days despite the fee. (At a recent news conference, city officials said they would publish a more comprehensive report on their data in the fall.)
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Scoop News Group ☛ Tax watchdog says IRS has work to do on Login.gov security controls
In findings released this week, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration applauded the cybersecurity function within the tax agency’s Information Technology unit for completing an initial analysis of Login.gov’s FedRAMP security in a “timely” fashion. TIGTA also gave the IRS kudos for its transparency in how it uses the sign-on tool, posting a Privacy and Civil Liberties Impact Assessment for the Secure Access Digital Identity system to its website.
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TechTea ☛ CrowdStrike | TechTea
CrowdStrike provides cybersecurity [sic] products for enterprise customers. Think anti-virus, data recovery, training, etc, but very expensive and they do a lot of the work for you when you need to prove to a government agency that your system is compliant with security [sic] requirements.
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Nebraska Examiner ☛ Protection of kids on social media platforms advances in U.S. Senate
But the rare bipartisan effort by Senate lawmakers did not escape criticism from advocates who warn the legislative package would curtail free speech online.
The body voted 86-1 on a procedural vote to move ahead with the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. Both were rolled into one legislative vehicle. Nebraska Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts both supported the measure.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the sole no vote.
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Vox ☛ Flight delays and cancellations? The Crowdstrike internet outage could have been much worse
Regulations require companies in critical industries, like health care and banking, to protect people from harm, which means they must follow cybersecurity guidelines and use endpoint security [sic] software, which protects internet-connected devices from cyberattacks. CrowdStrike tends to be the default option to comply with these regulations, and in 2021, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) even picked CrowdStrike to secure multiple government agencies. CrowdStrike now controls nearly 25 percent of the market for endpoint security. So when CrowdStrike pushes out a bad update, a lot of people are affected. This particular incident affected 8.5 million Windows devices, according to Microsoft.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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VOA News ☛ Ruto falsely accuses Ford Foundation of funding violence in Kenya
"I want to call out those who are behind the anarchy in Kenya, those who are behind sponsoring chaos in the Republic of Kenya. Shame on them, because they are sponsoring violence against our democratic nation. I want to ask the Ford Foundation if that money they are giving out to fund violence, how is it going to benefit them?"
That is misleading.
The U.S.-based NGO Ford Foundation has no history of sponsoring violence since its creation over 85 years ago, but there is ample evidence that it provides grants to human rights, press freedom and anti-corruption initiatives and groups worldwide. It opened its first office in Kenya in 1963, when the nation gained independence from Britain.
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OS News ☛ No, Southwest Airlines is not still using Windows 3.1 – OSnews
A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who dislikes Southwest Airlines can point and laugh at the bumbling idiots working there for still using Windows 3.1. It’s like a perfect storm of technology news click and ragebait.
Too bad the whole story is nonsense.
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Omicron Limited ☛ How AI bots spread misinformation online and undermine democratic politics
Before your day has even begun, a burst of disparate ideas coalesces in your mind in response to the appearance of a single word or catchphrase. It's a scenario repeated daily, where snippets of information mold themselves onto our views and biases, influencing how we interpret online discourse and those who engage in it.
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ADF ☛ Experts Warn of AI-Powered Disinformation
Information warfare has become a ubiquitous threat in nearly all of Africa’s violent conflicts.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and the Sahel region, social media platforms have augmented hate speech and disinformation campaigns.
Experts such as Somali economist Abdullahi Alim are warning that new technology, specifically those powered by artificial intelligence (AI), have the power to bring far greater devastation and war to a continent already struggling with ethnic, communal and racial fractures.
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[Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Researchers find that AI-generated web content could make large language models less accurate
The paper appeared today in the scientific journal Nature. It’s based on a recently concluded research initiative led by Ilia Shumailov, a computer scientist at the University of Oxford. Shumailov carried out the project in partnership with colleagues from the University of Cambridge, the University of Toronto and other academic institutions.
AI models produce a growing portion of the content available online. According to the researchers, the goal of their study was to evaluate what would happen in a hypothetical future where LLMs generate most of the text on the web. They determined that such a scenario would increase the likelihood of so-called model collapses, or situations where newly created AI models can’t generate useful output.
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New York Times ☛ X Uses Community Notes on Election Posts, but Misinformation Spreads
The false assertion spread quickly. Under one post with the untrue claim about Ms. Harris, which was shared thousands of times and received nearly 137,000 views, another X user quickly added a warning that the post was wrong and that Ms. Harris was eligible to run as a U.S. citizen.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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EPIC ☛ Utah Federal District Court Beats Back NetChoice’s Typically Overbroad Section 230 Arguments
In this case, NetChoice v. Reyes, NetChoice—a tech industry trade and lobbying association—is suing to stop the enforcement of a Utah law that seeks to protect children online. The lawsuit is complicated and ongoing; this stage involved a challenge to a portion of the law that prohibits online platforms from using certain design features on child users that have been shown to incentivize addictive behavior, such as autoplaying videos, using infinite feeds, and sending frequent push notifications.
NetChoice’s argument is identical to ones it has made in cases across the country: A website’s choice about how to design its online platform is publishing activity, so no government can regulate it (and no harmed user can sue over it) because Section 230 protects publishing activities. As EPIC has explained in many amicus briefs, this is a shockingly overbroad test that exceeds what Congress meant to achieve with Section 230.
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Amnesty International ☛ Egypt: Authorities Escalate Attacks on Media Freedom Rounding Up a Journalist and a Cartoonist
The Egyptian authorities subjected a journalist and a cartoonist to night-time house raids, enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention within a matter of days signalling an escalation in their crackdown on the right to freedom of expression and independent media, Amnesty International said today.
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Historian Who Escaped Persecution At Risk Of Being Sent Back To Iran
A historian who fled Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 protests is at risk of being sent back.
Ali Asghar Haqdar, a published author who has been living in Turkey for 13 years, was detained on June 13 in Istanbul and sent to a refugee camp.
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Semafor Inc ☛ Salman Rushdie’s attacker charged with supporting militant group Hezbollah
Rushdie has been the victim of numerous death threats and assassination attempts — including a 1989 fatwa issued by the former Supreme Leader of Iran that called for “all brave Muslims of the world” to kill him — over depictions of Islam in his novel “The Satanic Verses” that some considered blasphemous.
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VOA News ☛ Iran sentences woman activist to death
This marks the second death sentence for a female political prisoner in Iran in recent weeks. Earlier, Sharifeh Mohammadi, a labor activist held in Lakan Prison in Rasht, was sentenced to death by the city's Islamic Revolutionary Court, also on charges of rebellion.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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EFF ☛ Electronic Frontier Foundation to Present Annual EFF Awards to Carolina Botero, Connecting Humanity, and 404 Media
The EFF Awards recognize specific and substantial technical, social, economic, or cultural contributions in diverse fields including journalism, art, digital access, legislation, tech development, and law.
The EFF Awards ceremony will start at 6:30 pm PT on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024 at the Golden Gate Club, 135 Fisher Loop in San Francisco’s Presidio. Guests can register at https://www.eff.org/event/eff-awards-2024. The ceremony will be livestreamed and recorded.
For the past 30 years, the EFF Awards—previously known as the Pioneer Awards—have recognized and honored key leaders in the fight for freedom and innovation online. Started when the internet was new, the Awards now reflect the fact that the online world has become both a necessity in modern life and a continually evolving set of tools for communication, organizing, creativity, and increasing human potential.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ California newspapers are disappearing. This city is living what comes next
Richmond has not had its own daily newspaper for years. The loss came during a period of profound struggles for the town, which has dealt with fluctuating crime, economic problems and environmental challenges. Zepeda and others say there is a lot of good and bad going on in Richmond, but the dearth of local news coverage offers a skewed view of the city — oversimplified and years out of date — as an impoverished and violent community.
“The lack of coverage puts us into deserts of everything. We have a hospital desert. We have a grocery store desert,” Zepeda said. “Just the lack of any coverage, it affects the perception.”
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The Atlantic ☛ Evan Gershkovich's Soviet-Era Show Trial
In video taken at his trial in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich looked older, gaunter, and grimmer than he did before his arrest last year. His head was shaved, and his eyes were flat and unsmiling. The change in his affect was hardly surprising: He had endured a year of questioning by Russia’s internal security agency, the FSB, and was facing almost two decades in prison.
Gershkovich’s case makes visible to Americans what those following human rights in Russia have already clocked: Russian prosecutions of political prisoners have become particularly brutal in the past couple of years, as the FSB has been reviving Soviet tactics of times gone by.
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The Hill ☛ Judge denies dismissing Trump’s defamation suit against ABC, Stephanopoulos
The ruling enables Trump’s suit against the network and Stephanopoulos to move forward over the anchor repeatedly stating on-air while interviewing a lawmaker that the former president had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit brought by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. The jury had found Trump liable for sexual abuse, but not rape.
In a 21-page ruling issued on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga rejected several defenses ABC mounted to Trump’s suit, including that they were protected by a fair reporting privilege.
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The Walrus ☛ Journalists Are Becoming Cogs in the Outrage Machine
It is a dire time for Canadian media: only 37 percent of English-speaking Canadians trust the news, a decline of twenty percentage points since 2018, according to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute. News outlets are hemorrhaging jobs; the latest blow came from Corus Entertainment, which operates radio stations and TV news networks across the country, with its announcement that it would be cutting around 800 jobs by August. Everywhere, reporters are trying to do more with less, under tremendous pressure and amid mounting resentment and hostility from a growing segment of the population. As media outlets grapple with these complex intersecting challenges, they are also racing to be the first to publish stories that will reach as many people as possible; striving for virality is a survival tactic, particularly when you rely on digital advertising revenue.
As the industry decays, social media has become a go-to place for tips and quotes. In the wake of the Toronto Star’s deeply and thoughtfully reported coverage of the late author Alice Munro’s complicity in silencing the sexual abuse of her youngest child, Andrea Robin Skinner, a number of outlets picked up the story and, in lieu of adding original reporting, quoted from X posts by members of the literary community expressing their reaction to the Star’s reporting.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFA ☛ Tibetans forced to remove religious structures outside their homes
For the first time, Chinese authorities are forcing ordinary Tibetans to remove religious symbols and destroy such structures from the exteriors and roofs of their homes in several villages in a Tibetan area of Sichuan province, two sources with knowledge of the situation said.
Authorities also are prohibiting Tibetans in Sichuan province and elsewhere from organizing and participating in prayer sessions online, said the sources who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
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ANF News ☛ 69 Nobel Prizes winners call for freedom for Abdullah Öcalan
In his article, journalist Michael Völker wrote: "69 Nobel Prize winners from different disciplines called for the release of Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Öcalan and the peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Kurds in the letter they sent to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan."
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New York Times ☛ Microsoft’s World of Warcraft Workers Vote to Unionize
An arbitrator determined on Wednesday that a majority of the World of Warcraft workers, including designers, engineers, artists and quality testers, supported the C.W.A., the union said in a statement.
Blizzard Entertainment recognized the union, increasing the number of unionized game workers at Microsoft to more than 1,750, the C.W.A. said.
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VOA News ☛ UN expert urges probe of Iran 'atrocity crimes,' 'genocide' in 1980s
Rehman lamented that "the targeting and victimizing of religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities and political opponents continued with complete impunity during, and since, the first decade of the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979."
He highlighted attacks on the Bahai — Iran's largest non-Muslim minority — which he said was "targeted with genocidal intent and persecution."
Human Rights Watch warned back in April that Iranian authorities' persecution of the Bahai minority constituted a crime against humanity.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The Verge ☛ The Supreme Court made net neutrality more vulnerable than ever
But now, judges will be empowered to make their own interpretations and throw out old ones. And with a dysfunctional Congress that can barely pass any laws as it is, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright is a major power grab for the judiciary over the other two branches of government.
It’s a very big deal, with some far-reaching consequences for basically everything, including the environment, labor law, and all manner of regulation. Here at The Verge, our policy team has been tracking this outcome for a long time, so I wanted to have Sarah come on the show to break down how we got here and what it means for the future.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ [remark] Infineon TPM firmware update on the HP t620 thin client
So, one would expect to just download some disk image, write it to a USB, boot it, follow the next-next-next instructions, hope the update doesn't brick your system (not that such a thing happened to me in the past), and be done with it.
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Silicon Angle ☛ EU reportedly set to fine Meta over allegedly anticompetitive Marketplace Facebook integration
The news comes 18 months after the European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, issued a statement of objections to Meta over its business practices in the classified ad market, specifically how Meta’s business practices make it hard for competitors in the classified advertising marketing.
The statement in December 2022 highlighted two business practices that were said to have breached antitrust rules.
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The Verge ☛ Adobe exec compared Creative Cloud cancellation fees to ‘heroin’
The FTC sued Adobe a little over a month ago, alleging that the company had failed to clearly and conspicuously disclose the early termination fee and also failed to have a simple process for canceling a Creative Cloud subscription. The majority of the FTC’s complaint is about early termination fees for annual Creative Cloud plans billed monthly — unlike a regular monthly subscription, these “annual billed monthly” plans have a significant fee if you cancel early, and the specific fee is not disclosed anywhere on the order screen. These plans have cheaper listed monthly prices than the regular monthly price (because they’re actually discounted annual plans), and they’re preselected on the order screen.
All of that, the FTC says, adds up to deceptively enrolling consumers in Adobe’s “default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.”
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Patents
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Software Patents
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Inside Towers ☛ Automakers Call for Fair 5G Patent Licensing
As 5G technology makes its way into cars made around the world, manufacturers are concerned about how much they will be paying for the patents. The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) and five top automotive groups recently pushed for transparency in the licensing process in a letter to Avanci, the leading patent pool operator for licensing essential for 5G use in connected vehicles.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ If Z-Library Scam Did Deceive Millions, Exploiting a Lack of Research Was Ironic
If a new security report is correct, millions of people hoping to access Z-Library may have been lured to a phishing campaign instead. As we take a closer look at the report, which suggests that the personal details of millions could be at risk, the irony is unavoidable. Information on how to spot this scam is readily available, yet the scam itself relies on a steady stream of people eager to research on Z-Library, having done no research at all on the potential pitfalls.
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Torrent Freak ☛ New Site Blocking Push Aims to Curb Italy's Growing Stream-Ripping Numbers
Following a complaint from a local anti-piracy group, Italian telecoms watchdog AGCOM has given the green light to blocking measures against several popular stream-ripping platforms. The sites received millions of monthly visitors in Italy, where stream-ripping from sites such as YouTube has grown to become the most popular method for obtaining pirated music.
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Read the Docs Inc ☛ AI crawlers need to be more respectful - Read the Docs
We have been seeing a number of bad crawlers over the past few months, but here are a couple illustrative examples of the abuse we're seeing: [...]
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Get paid or sue? How the news business is combating the threat of AI
“There’s something that’s very fundamentally unfair about this,” said Danielle Coffey, president and chief executive of the News/Media Alliance, which represents publications including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. “What will happen is there won’t be a business model for us in a scenario where they use our own work to compete with us, and that’s something we’re very worried about.”
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404 Media ☛ AI Video Generator Runway Trained on Thousands of YouTube Videos Without Permission
A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films, according to a massive internal spreadsheet of training data obtained by 404 Media.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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