Links 12/01/2025: Microsoft Admits It's Laying Off Staff Only Where Staff is "Expensive" (Race to the Bottom)
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Career/Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Pete Zaitcev: Looking for a BSSID
I'm looking for a name for a new WiFi area.The current one is called "Tokyo-Jupiter". It turns out hard to top, it meets all the requirements. It's a geographic area. It's weeb, but from old enough times: not Naruto Shippuuden, Attack On Titan, or Kimetsu no Yaiba. Classy and unique enough."Konoha" is too new, too washed-up, and too short."Kodena" and "Yokosuka" add a patriotic American tint nicely, but also too short."Minas-Tirith" is a place and outstanding in its reference, but not weeb."Big-Sight" is an opposite of the above: too much. I'm a weeb, not otaku.Any ideas are appreciated.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HKFP Lens: All of Hong Kong’s 2,549 outdoor basketball courts as captured by photographer Austin Bell
American photographer Austin Bell’s latest project involved shooting each of Hong Kong’s 2,549 outdoor basketball courts, the fruits of which come together in a book, Shooting Hoops. To coincide with the launch of Bell’s book, Blue Lotus Gallery will host an exhibition of the same name from January 17 until February 23.
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Annie Mueller ☛ False equivalencies
Patriotism, for example, is not an uncritical idolatry of one’s country and unfettered support of your own country’s interests above all other groups, peoples, nations, or moral imperatives. That’s nationalism.
Different things, quite different.
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Chris O'Donnnell ☛ Social Networks versus Social Media
Someone made this point on Mastodon this week, and I thought it was an excellent point. I think what most of us want is a social network, but social networks don't scale to billion-dollar corporations, so what we keep ending up with is social media.
A social network is semi-private. It's you and the people you admit to your network. Another way to think about it is that your social network is the people in your phone contacts. It's the people you'd want to hear from if they happen to be in town. It's the people you'd want to know about if you both happen to be in the same airport at the same time. Not only that, but it's probably 10% of your Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon contacts, plus the people you know in real life.
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Leon Mika ☛ Project Update: DSL Formats For Interactive Fiction
The idea is that the prose will still be Markdown, so things like blank lines will still be respected (the parser strips all the leading whitespace, allowing one to easily indent the prose). Attributes satisfy the key/value requirement for the elements, and I get the features that make this easy to modify by hand, such as comments and good editor support.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Introducing: From Juhis with Love
One activity to work towards that is exploring more of the newsletter realm. Over the years I’ve written a short-lived What’s up with Juhis? newsletter, started and ran Dev Breakfast while working as a developer advocate at Futurice and most recently 1.5 years of Syntax Error, a newsletter about debugging, that I put on hold last July when I ran out of things to write about.
This year I’m returning to the roots and rebooting What’s up with Juhis? with a spiritual successor From Juhis with Love.
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Roy Tang ☛ My 2025 Checklist
Something I've gotten used to as the New Year rolls in: make a checklist of things to do and things I'm looking forward to for the new year. This is my personal list, but maybe you'll enjoy going through it too. Check out the new-years-checklist tag for previous years.
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Sean Goedecke ☛ Writing a tech blog people want to read
By far the most popular things I write about are my thoughts on how to ship projects, what makes an engineer strong (or weak), how to navigate company politics, and so on. In general, I think the recipe for a popular post is to have a clear opinion about working in tech that many people disagree with. That means that people might learn something from the article (or at least that discussion about it will be lively and interesting).
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Two fire experts describe inconvenient truths about L.A. wildfires
“The idea was not to catch the arsonist or the mythical cow that kicked over the lantern in Chicago,” Cohen said. “Experts began to consider the role that our buildings played in creating the problem.”
As a result, Pyne said, “cities began to harden themselves against these terrible conflagrations and were successful. Arguably the last major urban fire in the U.S. was San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake.”
Yet those defenses lapsed as the cities grew. Building codes failed to address the requirements of specific environments, and infrastructure was laid out without attending to potential hazard.
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Science
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Wired ☛ New Superconductive Materials Have Just Been Discovered
Being able to directly see what happens when they add more electrons to a material or slightly weaken its electric field lets physicists quickly try out an unprecedented number of recipes and see which ones lead to superconductivity.
“The real promise,” Dean said, is that each of these devices is “a tunable lab in which we can make basically any other material.”
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Science Alert ☛ Scientists Calculated The Ultimate Lifespan of Earth's Biosphere
Luckily, this won't happen until at least 1.6 billion years from now, suggests new research from University of Chicago geophysicist RJ Graham and colleagues. That potentially doubles the projected lifespan of Earth's plants and animals.
This is great news for anyone hoping for extraterrestrial life, as it significantly extends past estimates of how long Earth can maintain a functioning biosphere – our only data for this in the entire Universe. It therefore expands the estimated length of time complicated life has a chance to evolve within.
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Career/Education
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RFERL ☛ Taliban Shuns Muslim Summit On Girls' Education
On January 11, no Taliban were present among the representatives of some 50 Muslim-majority countries when the two-day conference opened in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
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France24 ☛ Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai returns to Pakistan for Muslim girls' education summit
"Denying education to girls is tantamount to denying their voice and their choice, while depriving them of their right to a bright future."
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Nobel laureate Malala in Pakistan for girls' education talk
Representatives from Muslim-majority countries, where tens of millions of girls are out of school, are set to attend the two-day summit in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
Yousafzai is due to speak and is expected to focus on the prohibition of learning for women and girls in neighboring Afghanistan — the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from attending school and university.
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Elliot C Smith ☛ Manage risks, not methods.
The hardest part of transitioning into management is becoming comfortable with people doing things differently from you. Your job shifts from what you can output to how much output you can generate in others. Many first-time managers make the mistake of thinking their job is to ensure their reports do exactly what they would have done.
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Hardware
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Tom's Hardware ☛ AMD chips now comprise 55 percent of Puget Systems orders — AMD makes big inroads in professional systems
Data from Puget Systems reveals that AMD has dethroned defective chip maker Intel in overall CPU sales for workstations.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Part three: Replacing our PS3 with a PS3 Slim
We’re into our third and final post in my PlayStation 3 shaggy-dog story. In part one I talked about consoles in general, and in part 2 I explained why we ended up with a PS3 years after it was old hat.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Tiny KVMs for one-off colocation
These seem to be the most common/talked about in the last year. Let me know if you know of others!
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Michał Sapka ☛ I may never buy a new electronic device ever again
But then they started adding computers to everything, and this is when I lost my interest. Connected computers, autos, crappers. Did it add anything of value? No, not really. I want my devices be simple - so I can understand them now and when I’m 60. I want a fat guy to come to my apartment and be able to fix everything with nothing more than a hammer. But this not where it all went - in fact, it took the opposite direction.
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VOA News ☛ Taiwan chipmaker starts making 4-nanometer chips in US, official says
"For the first time ever in our country's history, we are making leading-edge 4-nanometer chips on American soil, American workers — on par in yield and quality with Taiwan," Raimondo told Reuters in an interview, saying it had begun in recent weeks.
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Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of the Mac mini
That was the heyday of the Power Mac, and that first Mac mini came with a choice between 1.25 and 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, starting at $499 and $599 respectively. Build-to-order options could expand it to a total of 1 GB memory, with an optical SuperDrive, AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi card, internal Bluetooth, keyboard and mouse.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong home affairs chief defends community care units after report suggests teams inflated numbers
Hong Kong’s home affairs minister has said residents were eager to support the work of district-level community care teams, after a report suggested some teams sought to bolster numbers by inviting event participants to pose as volunteers for group photos.
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France24 ☛ 'The Resilience Myth': Looking at new ways to cope with trauma
Annette Young talks to American feminist writer, Soraya Chemaly, about her latest book, 'The Resilience Myth,' which questions the way we cope with trauma in our lives. Also how the fight against sexism and misogyny online has just got that much tougher due to Meta's decision to drop fact-checkers from Facebook (Farcebook) and Instagram. Plus how women scientists in the Democratic Republic of Congo are seeking to encourage teenage girls to follow their path.
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France24 ☛ A look back at the coronavirus pandemic in 2020
Five years ago, China announced the first death from a new virus in Wuhan. Since then, Covid-19 has officially claimed more than seven million lives in an unrelenting march across the world.
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Stanford University ☛ Stanford Health Care agrees to pay nurses $10 million settlement in class action lawsuit
The suit, filed on Dec. 2, alleged that Stanford Health Care failed to provide meal periods in full and in a timely manner and cut corners on wage statements and meal premiums.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week marks a strange anniversary—it’s five years since most of us first heard about a virus causing a mysterious “pneumonia.”
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Federal News Network ☛ NIH explores the world of quantum sensors and how they can help medicine
Federal and industrial quantum computing pioneers have explored something very specific but very important: quantum sensors in biomedicine.
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Simone Silvestroni ☛ A new plan
Leave all commercial social media.
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Futurism ☛ American Psychological Association Urges FTC to Investigate AI Chatbots Claiming to Offer Therapy
The December letter, per Mashable, was prompted by two alarming lawsuits — the first filed in Florida in October, the second in Texas in December — concerning the welfare of minors who used the Google-funded AI companion app Character.AI, which is incredibly popular among kids and young people. Together, the lawsuits argue that the anthropomorphic AI chatbot platform sexually abused and manipulated tween and teenaged users, causing behavior-changing emotional suffering, physical violence, and one death by suicide.
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Smithsonian Magazine ☛ When the U.S. Surgeon General Shocked Americans by Announcing That Smoking Kills
1964 marked the government’s arrival to the non-smoking movement. A year after the top doctor’s announcement, American smokers arrived in stores to find their cigarette boxes stamped with a mandatory warning label: “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.”
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Scoop News Group ☛ Microsoft moves to disrupt hacking-as-a-service scheme that’s bypassing Hey Hi (AI) safety measures [Ed: Microsoft being painted as anything but the culprit, the enabler etc.]
The defendants used stolen API keys to gain access to devices and accounts with Microsoft’s Microsoft trap Azure Proprietary Chaffbot Company service, which they then used to generate “thousands” of images that violated content restrictions.
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JURIST ☛ US DOJ sues landlords over rent price-fixing algorithms
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a lawsuit Tuesday against six corporate landlords and a software company accused of colluding to fix rent prices by sharing sensitive competitive information through the use of pricing algorithms.
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Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft fixes OneDrive bug causing macOS app freezes
Microsoft has fixed a known issue causing macOS applications to freeze when opening or saving files in OneDrive. As Redmond explained when it first acknowledged the bug in November, it affects only systems running the company’s latest operating system release, macOS 15 Sequoia.
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TheHinduBusinessLine ☛ Microsoft rules out layoffs in India amid global job cuts
“No, not in India,” Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India and South Asia, told businessline when asked about the reports of job cuts
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Adam Newbold ☛ Framing Federation
An example of this that’s been on my mind lately involves Mastodon (and its sibling ActivityPub implementations). We talk about Mastodon as being part of a federated social network, and that word——“federated”——is an interesting one. For something to be “federated” there must be a “federation”, right? And that word conjures up all kinds of well-established mental images: people or groups aligning and agreeing, shaking hands and cooperating. Where ActivityPub services are concerned, this federation has its own label: the Fediverse, which itself conjures up its own fascinating mental imagery.
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CBC ☛ Will we control AI, or will it control us? Top researchers weigh in
While neither new nor simple, the conversation surrounding AI and how it will impact the way we lead our lives can be broken into three parts: whether superintelligence — an entity that surpasses human intelligence — will be produced, how that entity could both improve upon or destroy life as we know it, and what we can do now to control the outcome.
But no matter what, observers in the field say the topic should be among the highest priorities for world leaders.
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Futurism ☛ AI Is Like Tinkerbell: It Only Works If We Keep Clapping So It Doesn't Die
There’s no limit to the promise of artificial intelligence. Or at least, there’s no limit to the promises that the powerful make about AI. We're told by tech companies and their investors that AI has the capacity to transform everything, making us more productive workers and more efficient learners — before eventually making us obsolete by AI agents that “won’t complain about work-life balance” while they automate away the majority of our jobs.
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Tim Bray ☛ AI Noise Reduction
I have a not-terribly-strong preference for the by-hand version. I think both noise reductions add value to the photo. I wonder why the AI decided to enhance the very-slight violet cast? You can look at the rim of one crater or another and obsess about things that nobody just admiring the moon will ever see.
It’s probably worth noting that the static in the original version isn’t “Luminance noise”, which is what you get when you’re pushing your sensor too hard to capture an image in low light. When you take pictures of the moon you quickly learn that it’s not a low-light scenario at all, the moon is a light-colored object in direct sunlight. These pix are taken at F7.1 at 1/4000 second shutter. I think the static is just the Earth’s atmosphere getting in the way. So I’m probably abusing Lightroom’s Luminance slider. Oh well.
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Security
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Police/Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Defence Web ☛ SAPS upping crime fighting skills – Mchunu
South African policemen and women, according to Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, are and will be adequately trained to deal with the growing challenges law enforcement officers face.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Independent UK ☛ Remote-controlled sex toys could be [compromised] to harm users, UK government warns
Harm could also be caused through the disclosure of sensitive personal information such as names, sexual or gender orientation, lists of sexual partners, information about device usage, or intimate photos and video. These could be accessible via the apps that control the devices, the research says.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Judge rejects Google's motion to dismiss privacy lawsuit, trial set for August
The lawsuit was filed in 2020 and accused Google of illegally invading the privacy of millions of its users by tracking their [Internet] activity while using browsers that are set in what is referred to in Google Chrome as “incognito mode.” The gathering of the data was alleged to violate federal wiretapping and California privacy laws, with the plaintiffs seeking damages of $5,000 per user, or three times the actual damages, whichever is greater.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly working on new AI video and social media startup
Former Google LLC Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt is reportedly working on a new artificial intelligence startup that will compete in AI video generation and social media.
Forbes reported that the startup Schmidt is working on is called Hooglee LLC and that Schmidt’s family office, Hillspire, is financing and housing it.
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Wired ☛ Rumble Among 15 Targets of Texas Attorney General’s Child Privacy Probe
Rumble, Quora, and WeChat are among the 15 companies from which Texas has demanded answers by next week about their collection and use of data of people under 18 years old. Paxton announced the investigation in a press release last month but named only four of the companies being probed—Character.AI, Reddit, Instagram, and Discord. WIRED obtained the names of additional targeted companies through a public records request. They also include Kick, Kik, Pinterest, Telegram, Twitch, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and Whisper.
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Wired ☛ Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location
Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement.
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Defence/Aggression
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ Individuality Is A Big Deal
Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a different explanation. This is taken from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
"Soon, there become distinct social classes and strict notions of property, creating conflict and ultimately a state of war not unlike the one that Hobbes describes. Those who have the most to lose call on the others to come together under a social contract for the protection of all. But Rousseau claims that the contract is specious, and that it was no more than a way for those in power to keep their power by convincing those with less that it was in their interest to accept the situation. And so, Rousseau says, “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.”"
Doing what the dominant class tells you to do is a trade-off for relief from fear of chaos. Watching the fearful vote for Trump is just like watching people run to meet their chains.
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The Guardian UK ☛ Trump’s punishment for his crimes? None
Trump was never likely to get jail time, which would have been unusual for any defendant faced with these charges, and over the past days Merchan had signaled that he would not impose probation, either. And maybe that’s just as well – any punishment or sanction at all that he had imposed on Trump would have been likely to be appealed and suspended, at least for the duration of Trump’s time in office. There was, that is, no formal mechanism really available by which the criminal justice system could punish Trump for the crimes he was convicted of. “This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgement of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Merchan said, explaining his reasoning: there is no way to punish a man who is about to be the president. In a sense, the sentencing merely confirms what many of us already know: that by virtue of who he is, Trump is beyond the reach of consequence.
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RTL ☛ 'No to Nazis': German far-right outlines radical programme as protesters rally
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party set out a radical programme on Saturday at a party congress ahead of next month's snap general election as thousands of protesters took to the streets to voice their opposition to the party.
Demonstrators shouting "No to Nazis" outside the venue in the eastern town of Riesa succeeded in delaying the start of the congress by around two hours.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Elon Musk hosts X talk with German far-right AfD's Weidel
Schaake said that Musk is platforming far-right politicians and parties, not only through the streams, but also "through the algorithm, through the ranking and the curation of information on his platform, which is very influential."
It remains to be seen whether that will have a big impact, Schaake said. "But I think the fact that he (Musk), as a confidant of President Trump, is trying to support these fringe parties, these far-right anti-establishment populist parties, says a lot," she added.
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The Korea Times ☛ How Musk's interview with German AfD leader squares with EU laws
The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) is intended to address illegal content such as hate speech and intentional manipulation to influence elections.
X has been under investigation under the DSA since 2023 over suspected dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of its measures to combat information manipulation.
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Lou Plummer ☛ How to Internet - 2025 Edition
Even after it became obvious that Facebook was an invasive cancer on not just the Internet, but all society, I kept my account. There were too many ways it was ingrained into my life. It was the way my cycling club announced rides and planned events. Friends who moved away years ago kept in touch with me through Facebook. So many people on the job where I worked for 20 years had accounts and I could up with them. I had 16 years of photos from family birthday parties, Christmas get-togethers and I could see my grandchildren's first days of school and their graduations. That's what kept me there. It wasn't for the opportunity to look at and post memes or to preach to the choir or lecture people on how to feel about this or that, although I did do some of all of that too. I'd use it occasionally when I got bored to see clips of the Beatles, old boxing matches and baseball games from my youth. It was good for that.
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Atlantic Council ☛ To help build the new Syria, the US needs to better understand the Kurds and Arabs of the northeast
Washington should take note of the complexities in the region and not be bound by the past. The security of the entire region is at stake.
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France24 ☛ Paris says Algeria 'seeking to humiliate France'
Algeria is trying to humiliate France, France's interior minister said on Friday, after several Algerian influencers were arrested for inciting violence in a growing crisis between Paris and its former colony. Four influencers supportive of Algerian authorities have been arrested in recent days over videos that are suspected of calling for violent acts in France. Algeria meanwhile has been holding French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal on national security charges.
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France24 ☛ Venezuela opposition claims leader briefly detained in Caracas protest
Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was briefly detained by security forces Thursday after emerging from months of hiding to lead a protest in Caracas, defiantly promising after her release that her country "will be free!". The protests were aimed at President Nicolas Maduro, due to be sworn in for a third six-year term on Friday despite a disputed election.
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JURIST ☛ Venezuela government arrests prominent opposition leader during anti-government protests
The Venezuelan government arrested María Corina Machado on Thursday during an anti-government protest in Caracas. This incident occurred just one day before President Nicolás Maduro’s inauguration for a third term.
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Makes Romania Part Of Its Online Visa Waiver Program
Romanians will no longer need to visit a U.S. embassy or consulate to obtain a visa before traveling to the United States for business or tourism, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced on January 10.
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New York Times ☛ Biden Officials Say the Truth About Havana Syndrome Is Still Unknown
The White House contradicts a new intelligence assessment on the mysterious ailments that diplomats and spies have reported for years.
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The Straits Times ☛ Japan foreign minister to visit S.Korea to shore up security cooperation
TOKYO - Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya will travel to South Korea on Monday to shore up security cooperation between the East Asian neighbours and their mutual U.S. ally that is meant to counter China's growing regional power.
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The Straits Times ☛ South Korean leader’s security chief warns against violent attempts to arrest Yoon
The short-lived martial law plunged the country into a period of unprecedented political turbulence.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Latvia ☛ Latvia might tighten entry requirements for residents of CIS countries
The Saeima National Security Committee has developed amendments that require citizens from Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries to provide specific information about themselves, their relatives, and the purpose of their travel before entering Latvia.
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Meduza ☛ Yandex founder Arkady Volozh says he hired security detail after Putin hinted at Prigozhin’s demise in a cryptic response to his anti-war remarks — Meduza
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New York Times ☛ Kremlin Confirms Readiness for Putin to Meet Trump
The president-elect had said Russia’s leader wanted to meet him to discuss the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin said it welcomed such dialogue, but a meeting could occur only after Mr. Trump took office.
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Meduza ☛ Russia refuses to remove late opposition politician Alexey Navalny from official list of ‘extremists and terrorists’ — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Doc Searls ☛ Aviation vs. Fire
I should pause here to say I’m just getting acquainted with ADS-B Exchange, the “World’s largest source of unfiltered flight data.” Here’s the About page. Bottom line: “In essence, ADS-B Exchange is more than just a flight-tracking website; it’s a dynamic, collaborative community committed to bringing transparency and inclusivity to the world of aviation.” It has a pile of social channels, and lots of ways to join in.
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Hindustan Times ☛ Elon Musk reacts to OpenAI whistleblower's mother's ‘nonprofit’ claims
The 26-year-old techie was found dead in his San Francisco apartment last year after speaking up against OpenAI’s policies. A medical officer ruled his death as suicide and the San Francisco police said, there are “no evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” However, the 26-year-old Indian-origin techie’s mother has called for an FBI investigation in a post on X, casting doubts on the police’s conclusion that her son’s death was a suicide.
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Environment
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New Yorker ☛ A City on Fire Can’t Be Photographed
The images of a burning Los Angeles won’t last, simply because our ways of seeing are inadequate to our predicament.
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New York Times ☛ 2024’s Record-Breaking Heat Brought the World to a Dangerous Threshold. Now What?
The planet’s record-high average temperature last year reflected the weekslong, 104-degree-Fahrenheit spring heat waves that shuttered schools in Bangladesh and India. It reflected the effects of the bathtub-warm ocean waters that supercharged hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and cyclones in the Philippines. And it reflected the roasting summer and fall conditions that primed Los Angeles this week for the most destructive wildfires in its history.
“We are facing a very new climate and new challenges, challenges that our society is not prepared for,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union monitoring agency.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Acid dissolution of mining waste—a new eco-friendly method for extracting metals
The mine waste is often disposed of in large, open piles at the mine. It is an environmental hazard, because metals in the waste can leach into groundwater, fine windblown waste can spread contaminants, and some chemicals used in metals extraction can also cause pollution. But these wastes also presents an opportunity.
The waste still contains significant quantities of several useful metals. So if we can extract the metals from the waste, we can both reduce environmental pollution and produce more raw materials, says van Wyk, researcher in ecology.
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Wired ☛ These Maps Show Just How Dry Southern California Is Right Now
Ming Pan, a hydrologist at the University of California-San Diego’s Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, tracks the state’s water supplies. He put Southern California’s dryness into perspective using charts and maps.
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Energy/Transportation
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New York Times ☛ Constellation Energy to Buy Power Producer Calpine
Constellation Energy’s deal to buy Calpine is being driven by fast-rising demand for electricity in part by the technology industry’s investments in artificial intelligence.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia and SIA fire back at US gov's new export restrictions on Hey Hi (AI) GPUs to China
The Biden administration aims to restrict shipments of U.S.-developed Hey Hi (AI) GPUs to adversary countries, limit shipments to 'Tier 2' countries.
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'Black boxes' stopped recording 4 minutes before disaster
Flight recorders from the South Korean jet that crashed on December 29, 2024, stopped working four minutes before the disaster, killing 179 people. Investigators had hoped the black boxes would provide insights into the cause. The CVR and FDR are being analyzed in the U.S. after damage prevented data extraction locally. The crash, involving Jeju Air flight 7C 2216, resulted in a deadly fireball upon belly-landing at Muan International Airport. Only two passengers survived. South Korea’s transport minister resigned, citing responsibility.
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Silicon Angle ☛ How Nvidia is creating a $1.4T data center market in a decade of AI
We are witnessing the rise of a completely new computing era. Within the next decade, a trillion-dollar-plus data center business is poised for transformation, powered by what we refer to as extreme parallel computing, or EPC — or as some prefer to call it, accelerated computing. Though artificial intelligence is the primary accelerant, the effects ripple across the entire technology stack.
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New York Times ☛ Trump and Republicans Cannot Stop Electric Vehicles, Experts Say
Still, many auto experts say market forces and technological progress will ultimately drive a long-term transition to electric vehicles regardless of how far Republicans go in undoing President Biden’s climate agenda.
Prices of batteries, the most expensive part of an electric vehicle, are falling fast. Already, many electric cars cost no more to own than comparable gasoline models when savings on fuel and maintenance are taken into account.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ The race to harness nuclear fusion
The way scientists think about fusion changed forever in 2022, when what some called the experiment of the century demonstrated for the first time that fusion can be a viable source of clean energy.
The experiment, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, showed ignition: a fusion reaction generating more energy out than was put in.
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Michigan Advance ☛ Chinese company involved in Ford’s Marshall EV battery plant added to Pentagon blacklist
Michigan Republicans have renewed their assault on a planned electric vehicle battery plant in Calhoun County after the Chinese company affiliated with the $2 billion project was essentially blacklisted by the federal government.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released its annual list of “Chinese military companies” determined to be operating directly or indirectly in the United States. On the list was Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), whose technology Ford Motor Co. plans to license in order to produce low-cost lithium-iron phosphate batteries at the plant near Marshall, which is under construction and expected to begin production in 2026.
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Finance
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New Yorker ☛ The New Season of “Severance” Is All Work and No Play
The sci-fi series was hailed as a dark, timely satire of office life—but its return is bogged down by abstract ethical conundrums and rote emotional ones.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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BIA Net ☛ Akdeniz District Municipality Co-Chairs Hoşyar Sarıyıldız and Nuriye Aslan detained
DEM Party Mersin Member of Parliament Ali Bozan said, “Police told us, ‘Government trustees have been appointed to Akdeniz Municipality, the decree will be published on the Mersin Governorate website. The appointment of trustees to elected positions constitutes usurpation, it is the theft of the people’s will”.
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CNBC ☛ Google donates $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund
"Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage. We're also donating to the inaugural committee," Karan Bhatia, Google's global head of government affairs and public policy, told CNBC in a statement.
The company made its donation on Monday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta both announced $1 million donations to the inaugural fund late last year, and Amazon and Apple CEO Tim Cook have also reportedly contributed.
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Techdirt ☛ Prepare For A Whole Bunch Of Pointless, Harmful Mergers In Streaming By Media Executives All Out Of Original Ideas
I warned about all of this just about a year ago. Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, media giants are struggling to deliver Wall Street their sweet, unrealistic, bottomless quarterly growth. Since it’s impossible to add any more huge blocks of subscribers, they’ve taken to annoying existing consumers with weird restrictions (see: the password sharing crackdowns) and price hikes to goose revenues.
But the primary way they’ll please Wall Street is via more pointless and destructive mergers like the disastrous Time Warner, Discovery, AT&T kerfuffle. Major deals that temporarily goose stock valuations and drive massive tax cuts, but ultimately result in endless layoffs, price hikes, less overall competition, and lower quality product. The trajectory isn’t subtle.
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The Register UK ☛ White House launches consumer smart device security label
The program is overseen by the US Federal Communications Commission. It will be administered by 11 different companies [PDF], with UL Solutions as the lead administrator. Makers of wireless consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be able to submit their products for a security compliance review at an accredited laboratory.
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Kyle Ford ☛ Despicable Me(ta)
It was just a little over a year ago that I briefly softened in my general disdain for Meta (which I held not only for their overall anti-web walled garden approach of the last 20 years, but especially for their role in the last decade’s rise of misinformation).
Watching what was going on with their new Twitter clone, I raised an interested eyebrow as I followed their rapid progress in connecting Threads to the larger Fediverse. While I’d long since kicked Facebook proper to the curb, I was encouraged to see the company at least make baby steps in the direction of interoperability with one of their other products.
Shame on me for giving Zuck a second chance.
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The Hill ☛ Zuckerberg's latest move fails to solve social media dominance
Mark Zuckerberg still doesn’t get it. This week, the billionaire owner of Meta announced that he was doing away with fact-checkers in a supposed move “towards once again prioritizing speech” at Facebook and Instagram. With or without fact-checkers, though, Zuckerberg will still be the one deciding the rules for what billions of people can see and say every day online. That’s the real problem, and no amount of tinkering with his company’s content moderation policies will solve it. We need congressional action, instead.
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The Hill ☛ Joe Biden: Mark Zuckerberg's decision to end Meta fact-checking is 'really shameful'
“The whole idea of walking away from fact-checking as well as not reporting anything having to do with discrimination regarding…I find it to be contrary to American justice. Telling the truth matters,” Biden told reporters on Friday during an unexpected and rare question-and-answer session in the Roosevelt Room.
“I don’t know what that’s all about, it’s completely contrary to what America is about,” he added. “We want to tell the truth. The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say that they won’t fact check, and then you have millions of people reading it — I think it’s really shameful.”
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The Washington Post ☛ Trump attacked Big Tech. Now they’re donating millions to his inauguration.
On Tuesday, exactly four years later, Zuckerberg sang a different tune. As part of an announcement shared first with Fox News, Zuckerberg said that Trump’s win in the November election marked “a cultural tipping point” on speech and that he was terminating Facebook’s “politically biased” fact-checkers, who he said had destroyed public trust. Asked at a news conference that day whether Zuckerberg’s move was a response to Trump’s threats against him, Trump said, “Yeah, probably.”
Meta’s about-face on Trump reflects a broader pattern in Silicon Valley, where tech executives for years had adopted a defensive stance toward the man who had once declared them enemies of the American way of life.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Wired ☛ Latin American Fact-Checkers Brace for Meta's Next Moves
First implemented in the United States and then in the rest of the world, the project seemed to be working. So far, according to its own data, there were more than 100 international organizations actively participating in it. Indeed, last year, in the context of the European Union parliamentary elections, Meta announced the effectiveness of its labeling system: “Between July and December 2023, for example, nearly 68 million posts on Facebook and Instagram had fact-checking labels. When something was labeled as false or misleading, 95 percent of people did not click on the content.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Vietnamese court jails lawyer for 3 years over Facebook (Farcebook) posts
Tran Dinh Trien was found guilty of ‘abusing democratic freedoms.’
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Internet freedom has plummeted under Myanmar’s junta: report
Experts say restrictions have led to losses in education, the economy, healthcare, and social development.
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ACLU ☛ We're Fighting Back Against Efforts to Intimidate Professors into Silence
Last Spring, protests related to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict engulfed universities across the country, with students and faculty weighing in on both sides of the issue. The ACLU expressed its strong opposition to any efforts to stifle free speech and association on college campuses.
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Harish Pillay ☛ Not everything is being censored (yet).
It seems that generative Hey Hi (AI) solution Qwen2.5-Plus has fewer constraints on discussing sensitive historical events compared to Deepseek.com.
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The Straits Times ☛ Vietnam jails ex-lawyer over Facebook (Farcebook) posts
While Vietnam notionally allows free speech, in practice it is very tightly restricted.
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JURIST ☛ European Commission rejects Mark Zuckerberg censorship claims
The European Commission on Wednesday dismissed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that European Union (EU) laws and regulations on online content amount to censorship of social control media platforms. European Commission Spokesperson Thomas Regnier affirmed: “We don’t ask any platform to remove any lawful content.”
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New York Times ☛ Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era
After visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump in November, Mr. Zuckerberg decided to relax Meta’s speech policies. He asked a small team to carry out his goals within weeks. The repercussions are just beginning.
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RFA ☛ Thailand lets autocratic neighbors hunt down opponents on its soil
The hit was the latest in a growing pattern in which governments in Southeast Asia are complicit in the killing or rendition of opposition figures from neighboring countries –- or at least turn a blind eye to extralegal operations of their security forces within their borders.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Digital Music News ☛ Jay-Z Pushes for Dismissal and Sanctions in Jane Doe Sexual Assault Suit: ‘A Cavalier Effort to Destroy Another Person’s Reputation’
Jay-Z is officially urging a federal court to dismiss the sexual assault lawsuit he’s facing and to impose sanctions against the Jane Doe plaintiff’s attorney. The Roc Nation founder just recently moved to toss the much-publicized complaint and to tag attorney Tony Buzbee with monetary sanctions.
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Nebraska Examiner ☛ Nebraska state employees union reaches tentative agreement
The Nebraska Association of Public Employees, known to many in the state as NAPE/AFSCME, is set to meet and vote on the proposed contract for 2025-2027 starting Jan. 13.
The union has said it won’t release the language of the contract until after its members weigh in. But it highlighted some potential changes.
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Techdirt ☛ Court To Cops: If You Can’t Prove A Warrant Existed, You Can’t Expect Us To Consider It ‘Valid’
Call me old-fashioned, but when someone in power aims to deprive someone of their liberty, privacy, or property, they’d better have the legal backing to do so. And not just “well, I thought there was a warrant” legal backing. Dotted i’s, crossed t’s, actual probable cause, etc.
None of that is present here. I’m going to quote quite a bit from the ruling [PDF] because if I just paraphrase it, it’s going to sound like I’m just making shit up.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Video Game Industry Is Unionizing
Last month, 461 video game workers with Microsoft’s ZeniMax Online Studios announced they were unionizing with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees–Communications Workers of America (CODE-CWA). ZeniMax employees join over six thousand workers across the tech and video game industry in the United States and Canada who have now unionized with CODE-CWA since its creation in 2020. That now includes unions at major video game studios like Sega of America, Blizzard, and Bethesda, as well as games like World of Warcraft.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Chris Glass ☛ Two to one – Chris Glass
So I pulled the trigger on a MacBook Pro with an M4 processor, trading in the Studio for a fair price.
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Matt Birchler ☛ This remote has me questioning everything
So yeah, I don’t plan on abandoning my Apple TV or anything, but actively using Android TV and a more beefy remote for a few days has opened my eyes a bit to what else is out there and that it’s not as bad as us Apple-only folks often assume. If nothing else, it’s given me some things to wish for in the next version of tvOS: 120Hz support and quicker interactions would be nice. On the hardware front, I would love a chunkier remote with a better button layout and the ability to more easily avoid accidental swipes. Some more size might also make it easier to implement proper Find My support rather than the vague one we have today, although the added size would also make that feature less needed since it would be harder to slip into just about any crevice it gets anywhere near to.
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India Times ☛ Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg angry, says that Apple is making them pay for “failing iPhone sales”
He thinks Apple is making up for falling iPhone sales by charging app makers too much money. "They do it by basically like squeezing people and having this 30 percent tax on developers," he explained.
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Patents
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Unified Patents ☛ Patent Dispute Report: 2024 in Review
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Kangaroo Courts
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JUVE ☛ Powell Gilbert receives trophy [Ed: UPC propaganda again from a site paid to spread lies and promote an illegality]
Powell Gilbert’s UPC story began with a disappointment. After Brexit, London patent monopoly firms like Powell Gilbert had hoped that the UK would continue to participate in the UPC project.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Tonga! Tonga! Tonga! Online Piracy's Unusual Attraction to ccTLD .to
In terms of popularity and daily usage, the mighty gTLD .com and the lesser-known ccTLD .to sit in stark contrast. DomainTools currently reports over 154 million registered .com domains, 129,000 of those registered in the last day alone. Total number of registered .to domains is just 26,000, available from a website that has barely changed in over 25 years. So if we rule out an appreciation of 1997 web design, what fuels pirate sites' enduring love affair with .to?
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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