Links 04/11/2023: 'Now and Then', Raspberry Pi Seems to be 'Guarded' Against RISC-V by ARM
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Digital Restrictions (DRM)
- Monopolies
- Gemini* and Gopher
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Leftovers
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Zach Flower ☛ Happy Halloween from 1998
In a world where we're all rushing to get shit done faster in order to just do more shit, the inherent inefficiencies of older technology is definitely a feature, not a bug. When you have to slow down just to accomplish something that would normally take microseconds in 2023, you can actually take the time to appreciate it more.
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Gregory Hammond ☛ How I would build a better ticketing website
With many concert’s happening around the world every year, you would think ticketing companies would get better at how to handle all those people who want tickets. Yet, it seems every year the ticketing experience is worse, and more people are vocally disappointed with the experience of not getting tickets. Here’s how I would build a better ticketing website.
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NL Times ☛ Young [criminal] from Zandvoort sentenced to 4 years in jail for cybercrimes
The court in Amsterdam sentenced 21-year-old [criminal] Pepijn van der S. to four years in prison on Friday, one year of which is conditional. The man from Zandvoort was found guilty of hacking into corporate computer systems, extortion, and blackmail, among other charges. The court concluded that he also laundered over one and a half million euros.
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Science
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Futurism ☛ Fox News Host Tries to Mock Biden By Claiming Webb Telescope Isn't Real
It's hard to tell which is more ironic: that a pair of Fox News talking heads who were complaining about the president tamping down American innovation were apparently unaware of one of the country's biggest and most innovative space project since we landed on the Moon, or that while trying to make fun of the president's intelligence, Ingraham revealed her own lack thereof.
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Education
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NPR ☛ 7 surprising ways the public library can help you save money
The resources that your library has to offer will depend on its size and funding, which comes in part from taxpayer dollars and donor funds. These perks are part of the public library's mission to serve the needs of the local community, says Joan Johnson, library director at Milwaukee Public Library. "The hope is that people use our services and resources to educate and inform themselves, and gain wisdom about any topic under the sun."
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Positech Games ☛ Programming in just ONE language should be lauded.
If you have under ten years experience in using a programming language, let me be blunt and tell you that you don’t REALLY know that language. 20 years is better. 30+ years is ideal. Do you really think you speak French like a native after speaking if for a few hours a day for a few years? Of course not. Thats laughable. And here is the thing: A mistake in a language can cause confusion and maybe embarrassment, but unless you are a lawyer writing contracts, its not CRITICAL. Miss-using C++ can cause rockets to crash, reactors to overload, and god knows what else.
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Hardware
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The Drone Girl ☛ The top reason people are using drones in 2023 (it’s not photography)
The survey found that the rate of people using drones in 2023 for mapping and surveying projects claimed a 37% share among Business-Internal-Service (BIS) companies. It also claimed a 33% share among Drone Service Providers (DSPs).
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi
Arm Holdings plc today announced that it has made a strategic investment, a minority stake in Raspberry Pi Ltd — the arm of Raspberry Pi responsible for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and past Raspberry Pi products.
Arm's minority stake extends the long-term partnership between Arm and Raspberry Pi, which has seen Arm CPUs feature in all of the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico SoC. The partnership began way before the Raspberry Pi was available for sale, in 2008 — when the original board was still just a dream. Fast-forward to 2023 and we have a generation of learners who have taken their first steps with coding, science and electronics thanks to the Raspberry Pi.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Big Tech's "attention rents"
Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.
But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.
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Omicron Limited ☛ How can we avoid drinking forever chemicals and arsenic?
What is this omnipresent "it"? "It" is per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or forever chemicals, which are used to protect clothing, cookware, cosmetics, and other products from water, grease, or oil. But those chemicals can leach out of those goods to haunt our food, air, plants, and drinking water. So far, scientists have found that PFAS exposure could lead to liver and immune system damage, increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer, birth defects, and other health and environmental problems.
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El País ☛ ‘A 12-year-old is not ready’: Why thousands of parents are teaming up to delay their children’s first cell phone use
She gave the chat group a name with her neighborhood and a slogan: “Poblenou_adolescència lliure de mòbil [”Poblenou_cell-phone-free adolescence”]. Barely a month later, the group has exploded in popularity, reaching the WhatsApp limit of 1,024 participants. They are not only from her neighborhood; there are members from all over Barcelona. There are two overlapping objectives behind this movement: to remove cell phones from the neighborhood schools and to ensure that more families do not automatically buy a cell phone with [Internet] on it for their children as soon as they turn 12 and start high school.
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YLE ☛ Inspectors find bird flu on three more fur farms
Avian influenza has been found on a total of 32 fur farms across five regions since the summer.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Futurism ☛ Godfather of AI Warns That Powerful Companies Are Seizing Control of It
In a lengthy post on X-formerly-Twitter, the computer scientist argued that there's a far bigger threat hovering over the burgeoning industry: powerful companies seizing control of the future of AI and using it to prop up their wealth and influence.
It's a pertinent point, as an increasingly smaller number of AI companies are starting to emerge as the early winners in the AI race, claiming an ever-growing slice of the highly lucrative AI pie.
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Futurism ☛ Scarlett Johansson Taking Legal Action Against AI App for Cloning Her Voice Without Permission
No, it's about a 22-second ad posted to X-formerly-Twitter by an AI image-generating app called Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook & Avatar, which allows users to create AI avatars or apply artistic filters to images. The ad shows the "Black Widow" star's face in several AI-generated images and mimics her voice as well.
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NPR ☛ The Beatles' 'Now and Then' is a wistful curiosity, 45 years in the making
SHAPIRO: OK. John Lennon died in 1980. George Harrison died in 2001. How does this song exist?
THOMPSON: Well, John Lennon recorded a demo of this song at home in the late '70s. It's just him at a piano. There's actually a TV on faintly in the background. And in the '90s, the surviving Beatles tried to clean up the song and finish it the way they did with a couple of other songs during a reissue campaign. George Harrison even recorded a guitar part for the song in 1995, but they ultimately couldn't salvage the track. Since then, the technology was developed to kind of separate and clean up the raw vocal using software that uses artificial intelligence. And just last year Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded their own contributions to the song to kind of flesh it out, get all four people involved and make it sound like a true Beatles song.
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Rolling Stone ☛ The Beatles Return for One More Masterpiece With New Song ‘Now and Then’
The song is possible because of the sound-separation technology that Peter Jackson and his audio team used for the Get Back documentary in 2021. Just as the movie did with the murkily recorded dialogue, “Now and Then” separates John’s voice from the tape hiss and background noise. “There’s no A.I. recreating the vocals,” Martin says. “It’s the old-school approach for us. I think it’s about deliberately trying not to try—it’s much easier to just let people be themselves. That’s what gives the song its heart, in a way.”
The 12-minute documentary “Now and Then — The Last Beatles Song,” written and directed by Oliver Murray, tells the story in the words of Paul, Ringo, Sean Ono Lennon, and Peter Jackson. As Paul says, “We listened to the track. There’s John in his apartment in New York City, banging away at his piano, doing a little demo. Is it something we shouldn’t do? Every time I thought like that, I thought, wait a minute. Let’s say I had a chance to ask John, ‘Hey John, would you like us to finish this last song of yours?’ I’m telling you—I know the answer would have been ‘yeah!’ He would have loved that.”
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Axios ☛ Teens exploited by fake nudes illustrate threat of unregulated AI
Zoom out: Westfield is but one example of an issue all school districts are grappling with as the omnipresence of technology — including artificial intelligence — impacts students' lives, the district's superintendent Raymond González said in a statement.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Silicon Angle ☛ Despite earnings and revenue beats, Cloudflare shares fall on outlook miss
Business highlights in the quarter include Cloudflare announcing an expansion to its artificial intelligence platform offerings for developers in late September. The announcement included the addition of infrastructure that allows the deployment of AI inference at large scale, vector databases and observability.
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Techdirt ☛ EU Tries To Slip In New Powers To Intercept Encrypted Web Traffic Without Anyone Noticing
The EU is currently updating eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services), an EU regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the European Single Market. That’s clearly a crucial piece of legislation in the digital age, and updating it is sensible given the fast pace of development in the sector. But it seems that something bad has happened in the process. Back in March 2022, a group of experts sent an open letter to MEPs [pdf] with the dramatic title “Global website security ecosystem at risk from EU Digital Identity framework’s new website authentication provisions”. It warned: [...]
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Defence/Aggression
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The Nation ☛ Is Peace Possible?
Check out all installments in the OppArt series.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ ‘Hacking the electorate’: the tech threat to the 2024 election
The country has more than 25 million active social media users in South Africa: a largely urban mobile electorate that is potentially susceptible to “coordinated inauthentic activity” online.
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El País ☛ Irregular migration: The worst business in the world
In short, the cycle that begins with a Guatemalan migrant borrowing $10,000 to pay a coyote, followed by an uncertain border crossing, their detention after some time of settling in and the internment, legal process and deportation to the country from which they left involves another additional expense of $10,000, in this case paid for by the U.S. government and its taxpayers. This roundtrip has the same effect — and makes as little economic sense — as setting $20,000 on fire. It is ruinous business for anyone — conservative or progressive — who contemplates it.
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India Times ☛ TikTok CEO to meet EU industry, digital, antitrust chiefs next week
TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew will meet EU industry chief Thierry Breton, EU digital chief Vera Jourova and EU antitrust chief Didier Reynders in Brussels next week, TikTok said on Friday.
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India Times ☛ TikTok denies pushing pro-Palestine content
The app, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, also said it took down 24 million fake accounts.
False claims about the conflict have spread on social platforms including X, Facebook and TikTok, Reuters previously reported.
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Associated Press ☛ Cyprus is sending Syrian migrants back to Lebanon. The UN is concerned but Cypriots say it’s lawful
The Cyprus government said such returns are being lawfully carried out in line with a bilateral agreement the island nation and neighboring Lebanon signed in 2004.
According to senior Interior Ministry official Loizos Hadjivasiliou, the agreement obligates Lebanon to prevent and stop illegal border crossings and illegal migration of individuals who depart from Lebanon.
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ANF News ☛ U.S. investigating whether New York City Mayor received illegal donations from Turkey
According to The New York Times, There was no indication that the investigation was targeting the mayor, and he is not accused of wrongdoing. Yet the raid apparently prompted him to abruptly cancel several meetings scheduled for Thursday morning in Washington, D.C., where he planned to speak with White House officials and members of Congress about the migrant crisis.
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Environment
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Quartz ☛ The 10 US companies emitting the most carbon from industrial facilities
A total of nearly 6 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions were produced by 100 companies or entities in the US in 2020 alone, according to analysis from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Energy/Transportation
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[Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Giving up on a forever crossing
I’ve been talking a lot about crossings and roads again recently. I wouldn’t say they’d been on my mind lately, so much as they’ve forced themselves upon me. They’re also a fascinating physical system anyone can watch evolve and change in real time: a car-switched network you could say.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Omicron Limited ☛ Large herbivores such as elephants, bison and moose shown to contribute to tree diversity
Maintaining species-rich and resilient ecosystems is key to preserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change. Here, megafauna—the part of the animal population in an area that is made up of the largest animals—plays an important role. In a new study published in the journal One Earth, an international research team, of which Lund University is a part, has investigated the intricate interplay between the number of voracious herbivores and the diversity of trees in the world's protected areas.
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Finance
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Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Was Staggeringly Wrong About Sam Bankman-Fried
And while many were able to predict his fate, other high-profile figures were dead wrong about whether he'd face justice.
Case in point is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who predicted just under a year ago — around the time the exchange collapsed in on itself — that due to Bankman-Fried's donations to the Democratic party, there would be "no investigation."
The tweet exemplifies Musk's continuous slide toward the right, as well as a growing willingness to engage with and further conspiracy theories. And at the heart of it, isn't his whole thing supposed to be predicting the future?
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NL Times ☛ Court orders online casinos to pay back gamblers after illegal online betting
Unibet and an undisclosed online casino have been ordered by a court to reimburse significant amounts of money to players who lost money while online gambling was still illegal in the Netherlands. This was reported by Nieuwsuur on Friday.
Until October 2021, online gambling was illegal in the Netherlands, and players who gambled and lost substantial sums prior to legalization have taken legal action, claiming their losses were illegal.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Nation ☛ Tuesday’s Election Will Determine if Virginia Becomes the Next Florida
At 33, former Virginia delegate Joshua Cole has seen everything, at least in terms of state politics. In 2017, Virginia’s off-year state elections offered the first test case of the riled-up Democratic anti–Donald Trump resistance. The party did better than anyone’s wildest dreams, winning an astonishing 15 seats in the House of Delegates—11 of the winning candidates were women—and missed taking control from Republicans by only one seat. That might have been Cole’s; he ran for a Fredericksburg seat and lost by only 73 votes. Democrats won the governor’s, lieutenant governor’s and attorney general’s races that year.
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Project Censored ☛ Colonialism Today: From The Crisis in Congo to Capsizing Boats in the Mediterranean
The Official Project Censored Show Colonialism Today: From The Crisis in Congo to Capsizing Boats in the MediterraneanPlay EpisodePause EpisodeMute/Unmute EpisodeRewind 10 Seconds1xFast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 /SubscribeShareThe Official Project Censored Show Colonialism Today: From The Crisis in Congo to Capsizing Boats in the MediterraneanPlay EpisodePause EpisodeMute/Unmute EpisodeRewind 10 Seconds1xFast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 /SubscribeShare
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New Yorker ☛ Donald Trump’s Sons Get Challenged on the Witness Stand
Eric and Donald, Jr., claim they had nothing to do with the fraudulent financial statements that inflated their father’s worth, but prosecutors provided evidence to the contrary.
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JURIST ☛ UK MP files defamation lawsuit against fellow MP over backlash to pro-Palestine statements
UK Member of Parliament (MP) Andy McDonald launched legal proceedings on Friday against fellow MP Chris Clarkson over Clarkson’s “highly defamatory statement” about McDonald’s involvement in a pro-Palestine rally amidst the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Clarkson claimed that McDonald’s comments at a pro-Palestine rally were an attempt to “justify the murderous actions of Hamas.”
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Reason ☛ Illinois Family Files Lawsuit After Police Execute Wrong-Door Raid and Allegedly Detain Them for 6 Hours
"I asked them to show me a warrant; they didn't show me nothing," a grandmother said.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Explainer: Hong Kong’s national security crackdown – month 40
In the 40th month since the national security law was enacted, Hong Kong’s courts oversaw several sedition hearings. Although separate from the Beijing-imposed security legislation, prosecutions under the colonial-era sedition law have risen in lockstep since the former came into effect in June 2020.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Quillette ☛ Faking Hope: AI Art as Propaganda
The 2014 resurgence of the faked 1993 photo is an excellent example of how propaganda works. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines propaganda as “the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth).” Propagandists “deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in ways they think will have the most effect.” Hence the use of children (innocent of prior history and symbolizing the future) in the headwear of the two respective groups (representing the collective) in the Maclean’s photo. Propagandists often envision themselves as educators, believing that “they are uttering the purest truth,” while the recipients of propaganda may see the message as both truthful and educational. Not realizing it was a fake, Rihanna must have thought that the photo was a constructive symbol of the hope for peace, and a good way to compensate for her earlier #FreePalestine tweet, which she deleted due to backlash after only eight minutes. According to the Britannica, “‘true believers’—dogmatic reactors to dogmatic religious, social or political propaganda”—are conditioned to trust whatever is being preached, because they are already sitting in the choir stalls.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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BIA Net ☛ 'The disinformation law makes everyone a potential offender'
Ceren Uysal, a legal expert from PEN and the Progressive Lawyers Association pointed out that the law used in judicial pressure against journalists provides a broad interpretation, allowing for the punishment of any expression that is incompatible with the government.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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KSHB TC ☛ City of Marion refuses to turn over records following newsroom raid that should be publicly available
In an email on Oct. 31, Jennifer Hill, an attorney hired by the city following the raids denied the request by writing: "The City has no custody over personal cell phones and KORA provides no enforcement mechanism to obtain text messages from personal cell phones. As such, obtaining text messages from the personal property of the listed individuals would place an unreasonable burden on the City and, to the extent any such records even exist, the City is under no obligation to produce such records."
Max Kautsch, a media attorney based in Lawrence and the president of the Kansas Coalition for Open Government called the denial, in which Hill provided no exemptions to Kansas's open record's laws, "mind blowing."
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BIA Net ☛ Journalist Cengiz Erdinç released with international travel ban
Cengiz Erdinç, a veteran journalist residing in Ayvalık, Balıkesir, was taken into custody in his home yesterday. During the house search, his digital devices were seized, and he was prevented from contacting his lawyer, Vural Ergül, to inform him about the detention.
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BIA Net ☛ bianet editor Evrim Kepenek also charged with disinformation
The investigation is related to a post made by Evrim Kepenek after the 6th of February Earthquakes.
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RFERL ☛ Former Photographer For Navalny's Team Sentenced To Eight Years In Prison In Moscow
[...] The charges stem from Strukov's posts on Telegram criticizing President Vladimir Putin and his government. Strukov was arrested in late January last year. [...]
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BIA Net ☛ Journalist Cengiz Erdinç released with international travel ban
Erdinç was detained following his comments on an alleged “judiciary report” by the country’s intelligence agency.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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EPIC ☛ EPIC Letter to Attorney General Garland Re: ShotSpotter Title VI Compliance
On behalf of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), we write to you concerning the discriminatory impacts of automated decision-making and surveillance systems, particularly acoustic gunshot detection tools, funded in part by the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. Acoustic gunshot detection tools have disparate impacts on majority-minority neighborhoods, increasing police activity in neighborhood where sensors are placed, perpetuating patterns of policing practices.[1] Specifically, to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI), EPIC requests that you: [...]
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Indonesia Is Stepping Up Its Repression of West Papua’s Freedom Movement
A recent military escalation in West Papua is the latest episode in a long history of repression and dispossession since the island came under Indonesian control. But the authorities in Jakarta still haven’t been able to stabilize their rule over West Papua.
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ABC ☛ Iran sentences a woman to death for adultery, state media say
Iran is under international pressure for its extensive use of the death penalty. On Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Iran was executing people at “an alarming rate.” He said at least 419 people received capital punishment in the first seven months of this year, an increase of 30% from the same period last year
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Woman Sentenced To Death For Having Affair
The penalties have raised concern at a time when the number of executions in Iran is skyrocketing. Adding to the issue, Iran's Penal Code, based on Islamic law, traditionally prescribes stoning for adultery. However, Islamic leaders have shifted toward execution as an alternative.
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The Kent Stater ☛ ‘There is no school for girls’: Afghans who fled to Pakistan sent back to a homeland that is foreign to many
Since seizing control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the radical Islamist group has cracked down on women’s rights, closed secondary schools for girls, banned women from attending university or entering many public spaces, and prohibited them from working in most sectors. Under its watch the country has also been grappling with widespread hunger, disease and lack of clean water.
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RFERL ☛ Tehran Universities Report Deployment Of 'Hijab Enforcers'
The Student Guild Councils of Iran reported on November 2 that the presence of hijab enforcers had become more pronounced on the campuses of Tehran University. They noted that alongside the patrols, dozens of female students had been summoned to the disciplinary committee in the past week. They face a range of penalties from reprimands to suspensions for hijab-related infractions.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Gizmodo ☛ Legacy Ad-Free Max Subscribers Will Soon Lose Access to 4K Streams
Starting December 5, the email reads, “the price of your subscription will stay the same, but some of your plan features will change. You can still stream all your favorite blockbuster movies, fresh originals, and iconic series.” The fine print is below, noting the specific changes: instead of streaming on three devices at once, the number will now drop to two—and the option of “full HD video resolution with select titles in 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos” will be downgraded to “full HD video resolution.” Not changing is the ability to “download up to 30 titles to watch on the go.”
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ YTMP3 Wants Google to Identify Alleged DMCA Fraudsters
YTMP3.nu, one of the largest YouTube ripping sites on the web, has requested Google's help to identify senders of allegedly fraudulent takedown notices. The site's parent company CreativeCode hopes the search engine can provide additional information to identify the suspected fraudsters, who are being sued in a California federal court.
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Creative Commons ☛ Announcing CC’s Open Infrastructure Circle
CC’s Legal Tools are a free and reliable public good. Yet most people are unaware that their infrastructure and stewardship takes a lot of money and work to maintain.
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El País ☛ Mariah Carey faces second copyright suit over ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’
Stone’s lawsuit claims that his song became a Christmas hit in 1993 and that it was frequently played on the radio, so much so that by 1994 it was on the Billboard list of best country songs. It argues that Carey was inspired by Stone’s song, “given its wide commercial and cultural success.” The lawsuit points out that Carey released her song in 1994 — the same year that Stone’s track was on the Billboard list. The 54-year-old singer, however, claimed that she wrote All I Want for Christmas is You on her Casio keyboard as a child. The song has become a global smash hit, reaching more than one billion streams on Spotify.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding — BCUJSTE Wordo: SERFS
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Another goblin story
Don't worry, I'm not going to pester you with a new goblin fiction every other day. It happens that I have a few of those drafted and I'm on vacation, a bit late in the year.
But this is an odd one. You see, hold for his full name, “Don Alfonso de Tierraparda y Caninia, which is also known as the noble Dunland, son of Gulluk the Bold”, is a goblin who might not be that sane. But it's not his fault. You see, his father captured a few of these Sureñan humans, making them his slaves. And the young Don Alfonso grew up with his stories about brave knights and honorable kings of old. So he decided to become one of those, a noble aspiration for any Sureñan kid, but perhaps a bit far-fetched for a goblin.
Then we have this fatty boy, Oribio, a Sureñan kid living in the Northern Kingdom, where his father has a law office. He, as Don Alfonso, has a dream, but that's to become a priest, much to his parents dismay.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.