Leftovers

• Roy Tang ☛ Two Weeks in Japan

  This trip is busier than the first two: this time we plan to visit five different cities. We bought the JR Sanyo-San'in Area Pass to cover the shinkansen travels for most of the trip.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Erica Fustero

  This is the 67th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Erica Fustero and her blog, ericafustero.com

• Linus Åkesson ☛ Withering Bytes

  This is a live reinterpretation of the SID tune that I submitted to the C64 Music compo at Mysdata 2024. The breaking filter sound is achieved by playing the melody on all three voices at the same time, loudly and in different octaves, and routing them all through the filter.

• Doc Searls ☛ Remembering Dewayne Hendricks

  Dewayne also did a lot of what academics call fieldwork: in Tonga, tribal lands in New Mexico, the Dakotas, Montana. Nepal. Anywhere wireless was the only way to address extreme connectivity challenges. A huge sci-fi fan, he was always “a step beyond,” as one friend put it. I can’t think of anyone more grounded equally in the future and the present, the far-out and the right-here, the possible future and the impossible present—and seeing paths forward between those extremes.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ Thoughts on service and tech startups

  The rest of this post will only make sense if we’re on the same page about what a technology and service business is. The scenarios I am describing combine human-delivered specialty service and a technology platform enabling that service delivery. In the long term, these companies tend to either become large tech-enabled service companies or large marketplaces. In the early stages, before either of those paths is determined, things are a little more fuzzy.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-11-26 [Older] Their DNA survives in diverse populations across the world – but who were the Denisovans?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-11-27 [Older] Naked singularities: how quantum black holes explain why we don’t see the end of space and time

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-11-28 [Older] Black Friday: why our brains love a bargain

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-12-02 [Older] Trump may cancel Nasa’s powerful SLS Moon rocket – here’s what that would mean for Elon Musk and the future of space travel

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-12-03 [Older] Better ways to recover metals needed for technology from electronic waste could benefit the environment and human health

  • The Conversation ☛ How primate eye tracking reveals new insights into the evolution of language

    Cross-linguistic studies have revealed similar biases when people view images of events. In tasks where people have to describe an image depicting an action, they are rapidly able to identify the agent, and spend more looking at the agent than the patient.

    This points to the possibility that our ability to “deconstruct” events such as these, and our apparent bias for agents, might have its roots in an era before language evolved.

  • Ignacio Brasca ☛ Entropic Reduction Solver

    Today (2024), generative artificial intelligence allows us to generate infinite solutions, but the problem is that we cannot prove that these solutions are related to a particular real output. We can, correlate them and approximate the solution as a function of a given distance in a latent space, but we cannot prove this as a fact.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Telescope Spooks

    How do you know what you're not allowed to see?

  • The Atlantic ☛ When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk

    Next, an automated system would compare the image with previous images of the same tile. It would cut out small “postage stamp” pictures of any new objects it finds, be they asteroids, exploding stars, or spy satellites. It would filter out the postage stamps that might depict secret U.S. assets and, one minute later, send all the rest, together with their coordinates, to an alert service available to astronomers worldwide. Three days and eight hours later, the entire tile image would be released to astronomers, untouched by black marker or any other technology of redaction.

• Career/Education

  • Kodsnack ☛ Kodsnack 618 - This chaos element, with Ingrid af Sandeberg

    Recorded on-stage at Øredev 2024, Fredrik talks to Ingrid af Sandeberg about AI and people’s perception of it. While it’s very powerful to be able to interact with models through natural language, that interface in itself hides a lot of what’s actually going on.

• Hardware

  • University of Toronto ☛ Common motherboards are supporting more and more M.2 NVMe drive slots

    Back at the start of 2020, I wondered if common (x86 desktop) motherboards would ever have very many M.2 NVMe drive slots, where by 'very many' I meant four or so, which even back then was a common number of SATA ports for desktop motherboards to provide. At the time I thought the answer was probably no. As I recently discovered from investigating a related issue, I was wrong, and it's now fairly straightforward to find x86 desktop motherboards that have as many as four M.2 NVMe slots (although not all four may be able to run at x4 PCIe lanes, especially if you have things like a GPU).

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • 404 Media ☛ Moderators Across Social Media Struggle to Contain Celebrations of UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassination

    While Reddit mods and admin try to keep up with the site's "no violence" terms of use, Facebook and LinkedIn is reacting with tens of thousands of laughing emojis.

  • Vox ☛ The United Healthcare CEO’s shooting exposed people’s hatred of American health care. Here’s how things got so bad.

    Put every aspect of this tragic episode together and you have the rotten core of American health care. The cruelties of the US medical system and the ongoing blame game between the private industries that profit from it have left patients angry and confused — and looking for someone, anyone, to blame, fairly or not.

    There is not one man nor even one industry responsible for the failures of US health care. The finger-pointing is a distraction. Every party bears responsibility. The only way forward is to reckon with that collective failure. We need to begin working toward a more rational and just system if we are to have any hope of creating a world in which Thompson’s shooting would be truly unimaginable.

  • Greg Morris ☛ Babysitting Yourself

    It puts just enough friction between me and something that won’t benefit my future self, and still being able to use the app if I need to. I have set downtime for the times I want to switch off and also limits to some apps for each day. Babysitting myself works really well, because my monkey mind just can’t stay away.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • EFF ☛ FTC Rightfully Acts Against So-Called “AI Weapon Detection” Company Evolv

    The FTC alleged in their complaint that despite the lofty claims made by Evolv, the technology is fundamentally no different from a metal detector: “The company has insisted publicly and repeatedly that Express is a ‘weapons detection’ system and not a ‘metal detector.’ This representation is solely a marketing distinction, in that the only things that Express scanners detect are metallic and its alarms can be set off by metallic objects that are not weapons.” A typical contract for Evolv costs tens of thousands of dollars per year—five times the cost of traditional metal detectors. One district in Kentucky spent $17 million to outfit its schools with the software. 

    The settlement requires notice, to the many schools which use this technology to keep weapons out of classrooms, that they are allowed to cancel their contracts. It also blocks the company from making any representations about their technology’s:

  • The Washington Post ☛ AI chatbots claim to cure loneliness, but some bonds have ended in suicide

    Researchers have long warned of the dangers of building relationships with chatbots. But an array of companies now offer AI companions to millions of people, who spend hours a day bonding with the tools.

  • Ars Technica ☛ $1 phone scanner finds seven Pegasus spyware infections

    In recent years, commercial spyware has been deployed by more actors against a wider range of victims, but the prevailing narrative has still been that the malware is used in targeted attacks against an extremely small number of people. At the same time, though, it has been difficult to check devices for infection, leading individuals to navigate an ad hoc array of academic institutions and NGOs that have been on the front lines of developing forensic techniques to detect mobile spyware. On Tuesday, the mobile device security firm iVerify is publishing findings from a spyware detection feature it launched in May. Of 2,500 device scans that the company's customers elected to submit for inspection, seven revealed infections by the notorious NSO Group malware known as Pegasus.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ AI, self-driving, and evolving your opinions on new tech over time

    As is a common theme on this blog, I come back to the idea that internet discourse causes people to fall into very binary views of current events. There’s plenty of appetite for AI boosters who think it’s a bigger invention than fire and critics who think it’s just autocorrect with new branding, but nuanced opinions are harder to come by. For my part, I’m skeptical of many of the hype beasts’ claims, especially in how they want to apply AI to everything even if it’s not actually bringing user value, but I feel like I’d have to stick my head in the sand to say that it’s useless and just a glorified autocorrect.

  • Markup from Hell ☛ HTMHAIL - HTMHell

    For the briefest of moments, I caught myself thinking even ChatGPT couldn't get this wrong. The element is probably the most talked about HTML element in accessibility. Literally all you have to do is use it, give it an accessible name, attach some JavaScript to get it to do something if it isn't part of a form, and you don't even need to think about keyboard accessibility because the browser takes care of all that for you.

    Then reality kicked me in the shins and told me to snap out of it, and, as if to prove reality's point, ChatGPT burbled: [...]

  • Emmanuel Maggiori ☛ My advice on building AI-based products

    Since the GenAI boom, there’s been a wave of interest in building AI-based products. Many of these are B2B products which intend to make an old-school industry, like law and accounting, more efficient. For example, they try to process paperwork, verify regulatory compliance, or handle customer service requests automatically.

    Over the last few months, many companies have approached me to ask for my advice on the matter, as they were facing technical issues—they couldn’t make their products work quite as intended. After discussing with them, I often found myself identifying the same problems and giving the same advice again and again. So, I’ve now decided it was time to write a blog article summarizing my advice. Here we go!

  • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro — maybe there’s a market! – Pivot to AI

    Sam Altman’s OpenAI can’t make money by spending $2.35 for every $1 of ChatGPT it sells. It makes a loss on every query.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Managing kernel extensions

    In case the message isn’t clear yet, third-party kernel extensions are on their way out, particularly in Apple silicon systems. Although macOS continues to extend the capabilities of its kernel using nearly 700 of them, for almost all purposes user apps and devices should now have switched to using modern system extensions and their equivalents. This article considers how you can clean your Mac of those old kernel extensions (kexts), particularly in preparation for a new Mac.

  • Benjamin Sandofsky ☛ The End of The Twitter Era

    I've been thinking a lot about how social networks die, these past two years. It's an unusually personal topic. In 2009, I picked up my life to move to San Francisco and work for Twitter. I joined a startup you could fit around a giant lunch table, and left a corporation with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users.

    I resigned from Twitter ten years ago, but the company will always be an important chapter in my life. Watching its decline, my mind keeps returning to a graveyard of networks past.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • PC Mag ☛ To Stop China's Salt Typhoon, FCC to Force Telecoms to Shore Up Defenses

      The FCC announced the proposal after White House officials said the Chinese [cracking] group breached at least eight US telecommunications firms in a spying campaign that began up to two years ago. Making matters worse is that the [intruders] remain inside US networks when there’s no clear timeframe on when they’ll be booted out.

      In response, outgoing FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said: “We need to put in place a modern framework to help companies secure their networks and better prevent and respond to cyberattacks in the future.”

    • Nextgov ☛ Chinese telecom espionage began with ‘much broader’ aims, officials say

      Forensic analysis for two of the victims “indicated that the actors were on other parts of their network conducting reconnaissance before pivoting to the CALEA system and surrounding devices,” the FBI official said.

      The official declined to categorize which systems governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, were accessed, but noted that CALEA includes court orders for Title I of FISA, which allows the U.S. to electronically surveil foreign powers and their agents, including Americans acting as agents of a foreign power.

    • The Record ☛ FBI, CISA say Chinese [intruders] are still lurking in US telecom systems | The Record from Recorded Future News

      In some cases, the [intruders] were able to intercept audio and text. The group targeted officials from both presidential campaigns, including President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance.

      But the officials admitted that there are still many unanswered questions, including the extent of the breach itself.

    • Inside Towers ☛ Senators Vow Action After U.S. Telecom [Breach]

      U.S. government agencies held a classified briefing for all senators on Wednesday concerning China’s alleged efforts known as Salt Typhoon to burrow deep into American telecommunications companies and steal data about U.S. calls. The FBI, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, the National Security Council, and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) were among the participants in the closed-door briefing, officials told Reuters.

    • The Register UK ☛ Salt Typhoon forces FCC's hand on making telcos secure

      The proposal centers on a draft Declaratory Ruling that puts a new interpretation on section 105 of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) as requiring telcos to take action to lock down their networks.

      This particular legislation was passed 30 years ago during the presidency of Bill Clinton and ensures telcos have the ability to comply with wiretapping requests from law enforcement. Section 105 requires a carrier to make certain that any interception of communications can only be carried out with lawful authorization.

    • US FCC ☛ FACT SHEET: IMPLICATIONS OF SALT TYPHOON ATTACK AND FCC RESPONSE [PDF]

      Affirming Cybersecurity Obligations and Increasing Accountability: FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed a Declaratory Ruling that would clarify that Section 105 of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) creates a legal obligation for telecommunications carriers to secure their networks against unlawful access and interception. The proposal clarifies that telecommunications carriers’ duties extend not just to the equipment they use but how they manage their networks.

    • The Washington Post ☛ FCC warns telecoms to bolster defenses against China [intruders] or be fined after “Salt Typhoon”

      Rosenworcel said the FCC’s authority in this matter comes from Section 105 of CALEA — a single sentence that stipulates, without elaboration, that telecommunications carriers should ensure systems security “in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Commission.” As one of the measures, she is seeking to require network providers to submit an annual certification to the FCC that they are implementing a cybersecurity risk management plan.

      In addition to imposing fines, the FCC could coordinate with other agencies to pursue criminal penalties against carriers deemed too careless on cybersecurity.

    • The Record ☛ Cooperate with Salt Typhoon probe, House chairman tells telecoms | The Record from Recorded Future News

      Green noted there is bipartisan “frustration” on Capitol Hill about the scope of the most recent breach.

      “I urge affected companies to cooperate in this investigation so we have a comprehensive and thorough understanding of this intrusion, which will position the CSRB to develop potential recommendations for improving overall U.S. telecom network resiliency,” he added.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • International Business Times ☛ Balancing Innovation And Security: How Online Businesses Can Protect User Data

      For individuals concerned about their data being shared by third parties, tools like digital data removal services can help by requesting data brokers to remove personal information, offering a proactive way to regain control over privacy.

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ The correct amount of ads is zero

      The correct amount of ads for a publication that’s directly supported is zero. That’s the amount we should get. I don’t care about the rationale behind it. I’m giving you money, you decided how much money I should be giving you for your product, you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side. I’ll say it again: the correct amount of ads, in this case, is zero. Get your shit together verge people.

    • The Verge ☛ Data brokers may be banned from selling your social security number

      In the wake of high-profile [breaches] affecting hundreds of millions of Americans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is proposing a rule limiting data brokers’ ability to sell Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information.

      Under the proposed rule, data brokers that sell information about consumers’ income, credit history, credit score, or debt payments would be considered consumer reporting agencies. As such, they’d be required to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), a law limiting how these agencies can obtain and use the information provided in consumer reports. In other words, they’d be treated like credit bureaus and background check companies, which already have to comply with the FCRA.

    • Doc Searls ☛ The Interknit

      The question in today’s now is how we make Whitman’s knit of identity work when everyone everywhere also lives on a giant zero of absent distance between everything.

      I suggest we do that by making an Interknit: a truly social network of networks comprised of everyone’s social graph. (That’s what somebody drew in the top right corner of the whiteboard above, not far past “digital avatars.” Not bad for thirteen years ago.)

  • Confidentiality

    • Alex Haydock ☛ Connecting to Tor from IPv6-only clients

      As an addendum to my recent post about running an IPv6-only network, I wanted to share some things I learned recently about connecting to Tor from an IPv6-only host.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Stephen Smith ☛ Social Media Wars

    In this article we’ll look at where the various platforms are, how they are used and what some of the controversies are.

  • Nick Heer ☛ TikTok Loses U.S. Divest-or-Ban Appeal

    The court’s opinion (PDF) is not particularly long. As this is framed as a question of national security, the court gives substantial deference to the government’s assessment of TikTok’s threat. It also views the legislation passed earlier this year to limit data brokers as a complementary component of this TikTok divest-or-ban law.

  • US Court of Appeals, DC Circuit ☛ No. 24-1113 TIKTOK INC. AND BYTEDANCE LTD., PETITIONERS v. MERRICK B. GARLAND, IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES, RESPONDENT Consolidated with 24-1130, 24-1183 [PDF]

    Content moderation decisions involve a combination of machine and human actions. According to TikTok every video on the TikTok platform goes through “automated moderation” and if deemed potentially problematic is sent to a human moderator for review. TikTok’s Head of Operations and Trust & Safety approves the “community guidelines” that drive content moderation on the platform.

    Video promotion (also called “heating”) and demotion (also called “filtering”) decisions are used to advance TikTok’s commercial or other goals. These decisions involve promoting or limiting specific videos on the platform. According to TikTok, each video that is promoted is first reviewed by a human. Review teams are regionalized so that videos promoted in the United States are reviewed by U.S.-based reviewers. With respect to filtering, the platform follows “a set of rules to filter out and disperse certain content.”

  • JURIST ☛ Federal appeals court upholds TikTok divestiture law, setting stage for potential US ban

    In its opinion, the court rejected challenges from TikTok and its users who argued the law violated various constitutional protections, including their First Amendment rights to free speech. The court’s decision means TikTok must complete a qualified divestiture from ByteDance by January 19, 2025, or its platform will effectively become unavailable to US users.

    The court found that the government presented compelling national security justifications for the law, specifically citing concerns about the Chinese government’s ability to collect data on Americans and manipulate content through the platform. While acknowledging the significant impact on TikTok and its estimated 170 million US users, the court determined that these security concerns justified the strict measures.

  • PC World ☛ Could a VPN circumvent the TikTok ban? What you need to know

    Ever since ByteDance bought the app in 2017, national security officials in the U.S. have been concerned about the Chinese government’s relationship with the company, and how the app the could be tapped to collect data on Americans, and even influence our social fabric.

  • New York Times ☛ Why TikTok Faces a U.S. Ban, and What’s Next?

    President Biden signed into law legislation that gives ByteDance up to a year to divest from TikTok. The company lost its first legal effort to overturn the law on Dec. 6, when a panel of three federal judges unanimously rejected TikTok’s argument that the law violated the First Amendment. The company pledged to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

  • US News And World Report ☛ 100-Year-Old Pearl Harbor Survivor Recalls Confusion and Chaos During Japanese Bombing 83 Years Ago

    Two survivors of the bombing — each 100 or older — are planning to return to Pearl Harbor on Saturday to observe the 83rd anniversary of the attack that thrust the U.S. into World War II. They will join active-duty troops, veterans and members of the public for a remembrance ceremony hosted by the Navy and the National Park Service.

  • New York Times ☛ Trump Still Faces 8 Civil Lawsuits Over the Jan. 6 [Insurrection]

    There is, however, one endeavor that is still alive and moving forward, albeit somewhat gingerly: a suite of eight civil lawsuits, accusing Mr. Trump of inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6.

  • New York Times ☛ Iran Accelerates Production of Near-Bomb-Grade Uranium, IAEA Says

    In a text message, he said that his inspectors had seen a quadrupling of production of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, just shy of the levels needed to produce a weapon.

    “These actions by Iran are worrying,” added Mr. Grossi, who visited Tehran last month and left the country in hopes that he had won its agreement to freeze new production of the fuel that has put Iran at the threshold of being able to produce a bomb.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Federal appeals court upholds rapidly approaching TikTok ban

    The order from a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals preserves the bipartisan law President Joe Biden signed in April forcing ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to cease operations in the United States over concerns the platform’s data gathering could be obtained and used by the Chinese Communist Party.

  • Wired ☛ A Federal Appeals Court Just Upheld the TikTok Ban. Here’s What Could Happen Next

    In reality, the app is most likely to survive a few more months. A 90-day extension of the deadline remains on the table for the Biden administration, which would leave the issue in Trump’s hands. What’s more certain to happen is that ByteDance would appeal the court decision today and take it to the Supreme Court next, which is expected to take the case and issue its decision later next year.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Appeals court upholds nationwide TikTok ban-or-sale law

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday sided with the Justice Department, which argued that the U.S. government has the authority to ban TikTok based on the national security risk that the app could be pressured by the Chinese government to expose Americans’ data or influence what they see. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is based in China.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Faces U.S. Ban After Appeals Court Denies Bid to Overturn New Law

    The judges disagreed with TikTok’s argument. They said the law was “carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary,” and didn’t run afoul of the First Amendment. “The government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States,” the judges wrote on Friday.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungary requests exemption from sanctions against Gazprombank, Putin signs new decree

      Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree allowing foreign buyers to pay for Russian gas through more than one financial institution. The financial institution is Gazprombank, sanctioned in the United States -- causing serious concerns for the Hungarian government, 444 reports quoting Meduza.

      This amended the decree of 31 March 2022, which obliged foreign buyers to open ruble accounts with Gazprombank. Settlement can be reached through other financial institutions until the sanctions against Gazprombank are lifted.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Wired ☛ A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas

      In South Texas, groundwater management officials have fought for almost 15 years against a planned uranium mine. Administrative law judges have ruled in their favor twice, finding potential for groundwater contamination. But in both cases those judges were overruled by the state’s main environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

      Now local leaders fear mining at the site appears poised to begin soon as momentum gathers behind America’s nuclear resurgence.

    • Drew Breunig ☛ Will Surging [Cryptocurrency] Prices Damper Interest in AI?

      Which brings us to today: BTC prices are at all-time highs, besting their levels during the first boom. Will this steal resources from the AI ecosystem? Will it become harder to find AI talent, harder to fund new AI applications – resources AI needs now as they look for ways to get past the wall models are hitting?

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Species Spotlight: Renewed Hope for the Charismatic Thick-Billed Parrot

    • TruthOut ☛ 2024-11-29 [Older] Ecuador’s Indigenous Communities Face Renewed Battle Over Amazon Oil

    • Southeast Ohio ☛ Arc of Appalachia Preserves What It Can – Southeast Ohio

      She and her husband purchased the land for $203,000 by working with the state through the Clean Ohio initiative. The Clean Ohio program will pay up to 75% of the acquisition costs through grants. The program also helps with the purchase itself and assists with applying protection to the land while allowing Stranahan to remain in charge of upkeep.

      Unlike many other regions, the land that is owned and preserved under the Arc of Appalachia has ownership of the area’s mineral rights, protecting the land from extraction of natural resources and ecologically harmful practices, such as fracking.

      Stranahan continues to build the Arc of Appalachia through a network of sponsors that she discovers through word of mouth and local connections.

• Finance

  • Justin Duke ☛ Hidden settings are for cowards

    At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing traffic; rolling out a new feature or code path; exposing a specific path for a cohort of users during a closed beta) and gates, which were meant to be explicitly permanent (overriding a statement descriptor for a Thingish merchant; preserving historical functionality in a neglected API endpoint).

  • DNA Lounge ☛ DNA Lounge: 6-Dec-2024 (Fri): Wherein we drown in a sea of "one-time expenses"

    I've talked about the surprise $20,000 SVOG audit and the $80,000 Content Mafia shakedown, but here are a few other "exceptional", "one-off" expenses we've had to endure this year. The thing is, these aren't exceptional: this kind of thing happens constantly. Even when we have a few consecutive weeks of good shows, it feels like we can just never get ahead because crap like this is always popping up.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Verge ☛ What Arm’s CEO makes of the Intel debacle

    Why Intel’s longtime ‘frenemy’ thinks the chipmaker getting out of its mess ‘may be too big of a hill to climb.’ Plus: the scoop on Samsung’s leadership shuffle, Bezos kisses the ring, and Altman lowers the AGI bar.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Defense tech firms establish AI-focused consortium

    Palantir and Anduril, two leading defense technology firms, announced today they’re creating an industry consortium to address what they see as hurtles impeding the Defense Department’s adoption of AI.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Privatized America - by Hamilton Nolan - How Things Work

    The ability of anyone to buy into public companies does not solve the problem of the consolidation of corporate power. It does not solve the problem of corporate union busting. It does not solve corporate environmental pollution or corporate corruption of politics or unjust CEO pay ratios or the way that corporate branding renders our physical world into a landscape of unendurable chain store signs. It does not, by itself, imply that corporations are forces for justice in the world. It does, however, create a frictionless way for regular people to get some of the profits that corporations go to great trouble to produce. It broadens the scope of who corporations are accountable to, and who they can be said to benefit. I don’t want to make it sound like public financial markets are some sort of socialist utopia—but I do think that their very existence has more progressive characteristics than many people on the left have ever considered. If this sounds odd, the easiest way to make the point is simply to say: Consider the alternative.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Wrapstodong

      My third-most-favorited post of the year was much funnier.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Papers Please ☛ Court stays deadline for IDs and mug shots of corporate principals

    A Federal District Court in Texas has issued a nationwide injunction against enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) of 2021.

    This injunction is only temorary, pending a decision by the court on the merits of a lawsuit challenging the Consittutionality of the law, which could take months or years. But until that ruling, the preliminary nationwide injunction stays the January 1, 2025, deadline for officers and owners of all types of corporations to obtain ID documents from government agencies and submit copies of those documents, including photos, to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the US Department of the Treasury.

    Another US District Court in Alabama has already ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act is unconstitutional. But that ruling only applied to the plaintiffs in that case.

  • Wired ☛ She Escaped an Abusive Marriage—Now She Helps Women Battle Cyber Harassment

    Dad used her degree to win custody of her only child. In the process, she realized how many women in Pakistan were facing years of violence and systemic injustice. But the thing that bothered her most was the digital divide.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ How AT&T Plans to Retire Copper

    AT&T plans to retire its copper network by 2029, aligning with its goal to expand fiber broadband to 50 million locations. The carrier said during an investor update this week it intends to transition customers from copper-based services like voice and DSL to fiber and fixed wireless options, such as Internet Air, which offers speeds up to 25 times faster than DSL.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tom MacWright ☛ Bandcamp wrapped

    Since I last wrote about it, Bandcamp was acquired by Epic games (?) and then acquired from them by Songtradr, and its employees are trying to get recognized as a union. Times are changing and Bandcamp is no longer a lovely indie company, but it’s still a heck of a lot better than Spotify.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CBC ☛ 2024-11-26 [Older] Why some book fans are leaving Amazon-owned Goodreads in wake of the U.S. election

• International Business Times ☛ 2024-11-28 [Older] Amazon Workers In 20 Countries To Strike Under 'Make Amazon Pay': Will UK Shoppers Be Affected?

• The Age AU ☛ 2024-11-27 [Older] ‘A cheap magic trick’: Amazon, Google, Meta accused of dodging Senate questions

• US News And World Report ☛ 2024-11-28 [Older] EU Closes Investigations Into Amazon, Starbucks and Fiat Tax Rulings

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Scoop News Group ☛ How the Global Engagement Center hopes to fight deepfakes abroad

      The documents, obtained by FedScoop via a public records request, show that the GEC has custom-built artificial intelligence to detect these kinds of images, including an algorithm that one presentation says identifies “which accounts are using AI-synthesized images of people.” Still, the GEC has not found significant use of deepfakes in its research, one undated presentation notes. Another presentation, dated February 2023, noted that deepfakes weren’t a current concern, but should be revisited in the next six months or so.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ ACE Seizes Sports Piracy Domains including Crackstream and Streameast Clones

    The ACE anti-piracy coalition sidelined dozens of sports streaming sites this week with action against dozens of domain names including Crackstream and various Streameast clones. The official Streameast was targeted by the U.S. Government earlier this year, but the copycat takedowns are just as important, as these sites drew more traffic than the original.