Links 14/11/2023: Nepal Is Banning TikTok (Fentanylware) and Trump Imitates Fascism
Contents
- Leftovers
- Gemini* and Gopher
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Leftovers
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John Goerzen ☛ It’s More Important To Recognize What Direction People Are Moving Than Where They Are
Pick your favorite cause. Whatever it is, consider your strategy: What do you do with someone that is very far away from you, but has taken the first step to move an inch in your direction? Do you yell at them for not being there instantly? Or do you celebrate that they have changed and are moving?
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El País ☛ Tove Jansson, the ‘radically free’ artist who created the Moomins comic strip and lived outside of social conventions
Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1914. She lived until the age of 86, traveled the world and made an international name for herself, thanks to the Moomins: a friendly family of white-tailed trolls that she created. They first became a phenomenon in the Commonwealth, as Jansson’s comic strips began to run in the Evening News by the 1950s. Eventually, theme parks dedicated to the creatures appeared in Finland and Japan.
The profoundly kind characters that Jansson created at the beginning of World War II spoke about ecology, acceptance and coexistence. They also warned about the danger of nuclear weapons and the fear of the other. Jansson’s work — while appearing simple and naive — actually hid many layers and interpretations.
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Education
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[Old] Muted.IO ☛ ✨ magical collection of interactive music theory tools & visual references to learn music online for free.
🔤 Music theory is essentially the language of music (think alphabet, words, sentences, paragraphs,...) It's the set of guidelines and principles that we use to understand and describe how music works.
🎵 Music theory helps us understand things like melody, harmony, and form in music, and it also helps us communicate about music with each other.
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Hardware
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Tom's Hardware ☛ SK Hynix Ships 'Turbo' LPDDR5T Smartphone Memory
After developing LPDDR5T for mobile in January 2023, SK Hynix begins properly shipping it in November 2023.
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Hackaday ☛ Obsolete E-Reader Gets New Life
For those who read often, e-readers are a great niche device that can help prevent eye fatigue with their e-ink displays especially when compared to a backlit display like a tablet or smartphone, all while taking up minimal space unlike a stack of real books. But for all their perks, there are still plenty of reasons to maintain a library of bound paper volumes. For those who have turned back to books or whose e-readers aren’t getting the attention they once did, there are plenty of things to do with them like this e-book picture frame.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Spiegel ☛ "Grasshoppers Are More Valuable than Caviar"
One kilo of live grasshoppers goes for 400 Thai baht, the equivalent of about 10 euros. But a kilo of grasshopper eggs is worth 5,000 Thai baht, or 130 euros.
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New York Times ☛ An ‘Unsettling’ Drop in Life Expectancy for Men
The life expectancy gap between men and women reached its widest in nearly three decades, driven by more men dying of Covid and drug overdoses.
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TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Ramsey County to unveil plaque dedicated to lives lost to COVID-19 pandemic
Ramsey County on Tuesday will unveil a plaque commemorating the people who died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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India Times ☛ IT Act needs stronger provisions to curb deepfake menace: Experts
Experts said India could collaborate internationally to explore content labelling solutions or watermarking of AI-generated content, similar to the UK which is considering legislation that incorporates transparency and accountability through labelling deepfake images and videos.
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Futurism ☛ Tesla Vows to Sue Anyone Who Resells Their Cybertruck
In a section titled "For Cybertruck Only" in its Motor Vehicle Order Agreement customers have to sign, Tesla is instructing owners to "not sell or otherwise attempt to sell the Vehicle within the first year following your Vehicle's delivery date."
If somebody were to break that rule, "Tesla may seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of title of the Vehicle or demand liquidated damages from you in the amount of $50,000 or the value received as consideration for the sale or transfer, whichever is greater."
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Futurism ☛ AI Companies Are Running Out of Training Data
It's a precarious situation for AI firms, given how much data AI systems need to operate and improve. AI models have advanced drastically as developers have poured in more and more data. If the data supply stagnates, so may the models — and thus, perhaps, the industry.
Though Matulionyte offers the use of synthetic data — or data generated by AI models — to train new models as a possible mitigation technique for data-hungry AI companies, that might not be a viable solution either. Indeed, using synthetic content might actually wreck a given model entirely; there's some research to show that training AI models on AI-generated content causes a distinct inbreeding effect, with the lack of variance in the dataset resulting in garbled, uncanny outputs. (That said, as Matulionyte points out, some companies are already experimenting with synthetic training sets.)
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NPR ☛ Worried about AI hijacking your voice for a deepfake? This tool could help
The video has since been taken down. But many such "deepfakes" can float around the Internet for weeks, such as a recent one featuring MrBeast, in which an unauthorized likeness of the social media personality can be seen hawking $2 iPhones.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Patrick Breyer ☛ Former CJEU judge: EU Chat Control plans for indiscriminately searching private messages and breaking secure encryption are doomed to fail in court
In another blow to the EU Commission’s proposed child sexual abuse regulation, a former judge of the EU’s top court of justice finds that the proposed mass scanning of private messages for suspected content would likely be struck down by the Court for violating the fundamental right to privacy. The ex judge dismisses the defence put forward by the Commission in response to similar findings by the EU Council’s legal service earlier this year. Adding to those findings, the former judge concludes that the proposed extension of scanning obligations to end-to-end encrypted communications services also violates EU law for lacking legal certainty (pages 35-37 of the legal analysis).
“EU governments in Council must accept now that the only way forward with this dystopian Chat Control bill, both politically and legally, is to remove indiscriminate mass scanning and end-to-end encrypted services from the proposal. I call on EU governments to stop pursuing chat control and the destruction of secure encryption! An overwhelming majority in the EU Parliament will tomorrow propose limiting surveillance to suspects and safeguarding secure encryption. No child is helped with legislation that will inevitably fail in court even before its implementation. Do you really want to repeat the disaster caused by the Data Retention Directive?” comments Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer, who commissioned the legal opinion and co-negotiated the European Parliament’s position on the proposed Chat Control regulation.
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Papers Please ☛ Advance Travel Authorization (ATA) and the “CBP One” app
As we’ve discussed before in this blog, asylum requires traveling to a border. Since you can only apply for asylum after you arrive in a country of refuge, freedom to travel from a place where you are subject to persecution to a country of refuge is a prerequisite for asylum.
But as we have also noted, including in comments earlier this year to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights concerning the rights of migrants, governments including the US government have steadily increased their efforts to undermine the right to asylum by preventing asylum seekers from traveling to their borders.
The latest step in this direction is the Advance Travel Authorization (ATA) system operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Under this program, asylum seekers can request permission through the CBP One mobile app to travel to the US. CBP is already operating this system under a temporary “emergency” authorization from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but is seeking OMB approval to make it permanent.
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EFF ☛ Reauthorizing Mass Surveillance Shouldn’t be Tied to Funding the Government
In September, President Biden signed a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government preventing a full shutdown. This week Congress must pass another bill to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But this time, we understand that Congress wants to vote on a "clean" renewal of Section 702—essentially, kicking the can down the road, as they've done before.
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Defence/Aggression
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Omicron Limited ☛ Faster Arctic warming hastens 2-degree-Celsius rise by eight years, finds modeling study
The Arctic is currently warming nearly four times faster than the global average rate. The new study, published in the journal Earth System Dynamics, aimed to estimate the impact of this faster warming on how quickly the global temperature thresholds of 1.5 C and 2 C, set down in the Paris Agreement, are likely to be breached.
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The Washington Post ☛ Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said in an email to The Washington Post that “calling people 'vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”
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TruthOut ☛ Trump’s Threat to Handle the “Vermin” Is Straight Out of the Nazi Playbook
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NPR ☛ Migrants are showing up at the U.S. Southern border in historic numbers. Here's why
In the past year, the Southwest border has received historic numbers of migrants. More than 2.4 million people. It's been record-breaking numbers for the past few years. San Diego alone has received more than 230,000 people this year. That's a 30% increase from the year before.
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YLE ☛ Finland to raise concerns over border crossings at EU foreign ministers’ meeting
Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen (NCP) said that she will raise the issue of immigrants on Finland's eastern border with colleagues at an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels on Monday.
She added that Finland is well prepared for situations related to possible hybrid influence.
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Axios ☛ Trump's "vermin" speech again draws scrutiny to extreme rhetoric
He also posted the same message on Truth Social — confirming that the incendiary language was deliberate, not a heat-of-the-moment miscue.
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New York Times ☛ After Calling Foes ‘Vermin,’ Trump Campaign Warns Its Critics Will Be ‘Crushed’
The former president’s remarks drew criticism from some liberals and historians who pointed to echoes of dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by fascist dictators like Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
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The Kent Stater ☛ Hamas has command node under Al-Shifa hospital, US official says
A US official with knowledge of American intelligence says Hamas has a command node under the Al-Shifa hospital, uses fuel intended for it and its fighters regularly cluster in and around Gaza’s largest hospital. The information comes after comments made Sunday by a top White House official that Hamas is using hospitals and civilian facilities.
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Truthdig ☛ Trump’s Transition to Fascism is Complete
Trump’s fixation on Hitlerian imagery, memes and tropes is not an accident. The orange-haired demagogue has had a longstanding fascination with Hitler. According to a 1990 Vanity Fair article, Trump’s first wife Ivana, who died last year, told her divorce attorney that the former president kept a compilation of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender remarked on Trump’s interest in Hitler in his book on the 2020 presidential campaign, “Finally We Did Win This Election.” Bender writes that Trump told his then-chief of staff Gen. John Kelly during a 2018 trip to Europe that “Hitler did a lot of good things,” particularly for the German economy. (Trump vehemently denied Bender’s account.)
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New Eastern Europe ☛ Bulgaria must seize the moment and tackle Russian influence
A “transparency consensus” seems to be emerging on the Eastern Flank of both NATO and the EU. Until recently, the illiberal trajectory of Poland and Hungary, combined with the inability of other former Soviet republics and satellite states to eradicate corruption, served as evidence to many that Eastern Europe had not yet bridged the divide with Western Europe in terms of good governance. In recent months, Moldova’s reformist government and, particularly, Ukraine’s unwavering determination to intensify its efforts in combatting corruption, even amidst ongoing warfare, have cast doubt on this prevailing narrative. The agreement reached in June to establish a coalition government in Bulgaria, featuring rotating prime ministers and an explicit mandate to address corruption, suggests a potential shift in course and a genuine commitment to tackling its reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in the EU.
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India Times ☛ Nepal to ban China's TikTok, alleges damaging social impact
Nepal's Minister for Communications and Information Technology Rekha Sharma said the decision to ban TikTok had been made at a cabinet meeting earlier on Monday.
"Colleagues are working on closing it technically," Sharma told Reuters.
Nepal Telecom Authority chair Purushottam Khanal said that [Internet] service providers have been asked to close the app.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Nepal bans TikTok citing 'indecent materials'
Nepal has banned TikTok, the government said on Monday, in a bid to preserve "social harmony."
Communications Minister Rekha Sharma said the decision had been made at a cabinet meeting on Monday and that internet providers had already started blocking access to the Chinese video-sharing app.
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The Straits Times ☛ Nepal is banning Fentanylware (TikTok) over hate content, officials say
It is said to have stoked religious hate, violence and sexual abuse and led to clashes offline.
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New York Times ☛ Nepal Is Banning TikTok Over Hate Content, Officials Say
TikTok has more than a billion users globally, so the ban by a Himalayan country with a population of about 30 million is unlikely to significantly affect the app, but it is another ominous sign for the Chinese-owned company of broader efforts by governments around the world to restrict its use.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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The Straits Times ☛ UN states concerned China and Russia helping North Korea: Austin
Mr Austin was speaking at a meeting in South Korea.
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YLE ☛ Finland raises concerns over border crossings with EU foreign ministers; Migri braces for more asylum seekers
More than 100 citizens of third countries have arrived at Finnish border-crossing points without proper documentation this autumn, signalling a shift in Russian policy.
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Meduza ☛ Russian state media outlets unpublish reports of Russian troops ‘regrouping’ away from Dnipro River Russian Defense Ministry calls it ‘provocation’ — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ What’s going on around the Dnipro? Russian state media reports of a redeployment drew the military’s ire. Here’s what’s really happening in the area in question. — Meduza
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New York Times ☛ Thousands of Ukrainian Refugees Risk Returning Home for Medical Care
Hundreds of thousands who fled after Russia invaded make brief visits back, often to reconnect with family but also for health care that can be cheaper and more familiar.
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New York Times ☛ Ukraine Says Russian Officers Are Killed in Melitopol Attack
In the latest strike, Kyiv said three Russian officers were killed in a bombing in the southern city of Melitopol.
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CS Monitor ☛ Ukraine’s creativity edge
Russia’s invasion sparked feats of technological innovation that have saved Ukraine and may help it win.
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Latvia ☛ Latvian-Russian border fence construction to restart soon
In the open competition for the construction of the fence on the Latvian-Russian border, the companies “Citrus Solutions” and “Hagberg Construction” submitted the best tenders and will construct 16 kilometers and 12.5 kilometers, respectively, Renārs Griškevičs, board chair of the State Real Estate (VNĪ) told news agency LETA on November 13.
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LRT ☛ Latest Russia sanctions package ‘quite optimistic’, says Lithuanian FM
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said on Monday that the EU’s new sanctions package against Russia is “pretty good” and makes him “quite optimistic”.
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The Straits Times ☛ Blinken, new UK foreign minister discuss Israel, Ukraine and China
November 14, 2023 7:40 AM
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and newly appointed British foreign minister David Cameron discussed the Israel-Hamas conflict, relations with China and help for Ukraine during a telephone call on Monday, the State Department said.
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RFERL ☛ Russian State News Agencies Publish, Then Immediately Retract Story On Troops 'Regrouping' East Of Dnieper
Russian state-news agencies published, then abruptly retracted a news item suggesting Russian forces had ordered a tactical withdrawal in a location of intense fighting in southern Ukraine.
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RFERL ☛ Training Center Where Ukrainian Pilots Will Learn To Fly F-16s Opens In Romania
The Romanian and Dutch defense ministers on November 13 opened a training center for F-16 pilots some 150 kilometers east of Bucharest where Ukrainian pilots will learn how to fly the U.S.-made fighter jets.
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RFERL ☛ Kharkiv Resident Gets Life In Prison For Coordinating Deadly Russian Missile Attack
A court in Ukraine’s eastern city of Kharkiv sentenced a local resident to life in prison for helping coordinate a deadly Russian missile attack in March 2022, the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General's Office said on November 13.
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RFERL ☛ Hungary Reiterates Block On Disbursing Military Aid Tranche To Ukraine
Hungary will block the disbursement of the next tranche of military aid to Ukraine under the European Peace Facility (EPF) until Kyiv provides "guarantees" that the OTP bank or other Hungarian firms will not be blacklisted as "international sponsors of war," the country's foreign minister said.
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RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Awards Veteran Crimean Tatar Leader Mustafa Dzhemilev With Hero Of Ukraine Title On His 80th Birthday
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy awarded the Golden Star Order and the title of the Hero of Ukraine to longtime Crimean Tatar leader and human rights activist Mustafa Dzhemilev, who spent much of his life fighting Soviet and later Russian repression.
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RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Court Sentences Former Lawmaker To 14 Years In Prison In Absentia
A court in Ukraine's western city of Lviv on November 13 sentenced former lawmaker Illya Kyva to 14 years in prison in absentia after finding him guilty of high treason and public calls to seize power and change the constitutional order among other crimes.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Seeks To Amend Law To Charge Volunteer Fighters For Ignoring Orders, Desertion
Russia may charge volunteer fighters who surrender, desert, or refuse to carry out orders with a crime as the Kremlin seeks to maintain discipline on the front lines in Ukraine.
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LRT ☛ Lithuanian defence minister meets with Ukrainian President Zelensky
Lithuanian Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Friday and briefed him on Lithuania’s current military assistance and further support plans.
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LRT ☛ Lithuanian parliament speaker discusses aid to Ukraine with Pope Francis
Seimas Speaker Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen met with Pope Francis in the Vatican on Monday to discuss relations between Lithuania and the Holy See, the role of the Catholic Church, and aid to Ukrainian war refugees.
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Meduza ☛ Lithuania launches process of revoking citizenship from Russian ballerina for pro-Putin comments — Meduza
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France24 ☛ Ukrainian troops train for front line in France
From learning to storm trenches, to fighting house by house to recapture a village from enemy hands, Ukrainian troops have been training at a secret location in the French countryside to help boost their skills before deployment to the front lines. It is part of a European-wide programme to assist Ukraine in battling the Russian invasion involving 24 countries.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine braces for another winter of Russian attacks on power grid
While the Ukrainian authorities have had over half a year to prepare for a new wave of Russian air strikes, the country’s civilian energy infrastructure remains vulnerable, writes Aura Sabadus.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine’s top general believes technology can defeat Putin’s Russia
Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny believes technology holds the key to defeating Russia's invasion and argues that drones and electronic warfare can help secure Ukrainian victory, writes Mykola Bielieskov.
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Environment
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NPR ☛ The world is awash in plastic. Oil producers want a say in how it's cleaned up
Almost every piece of plastic is made from chemicals derived from fossil fuels. Now, there's growing concern among those who want deep cuts in plastic waste that plastic producers and some consumer goods companies could weaken the treaty.
A constellation of groups trying to shape the negotiations can be traced back to the oil and gas industry. That includes some of the world's largest oil and gas companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and France's TotalEnergies. And major oil-producing nations, such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, are at the negotiating table. They push a similar message: The problem of plastic pollution can be solved through recycling and other forms of waste management rather than through substantial cuts in new plastic production.
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France24 ☛ Nations negotiate terms of global plastic pollution treaty in Kenya
Some 175 countries agreed last year to conclude by 2024 a UN treaty to address the plastic blighting oceans, floating in the atmosphere, and infiltrating the bodies of animals and humans.
While there is broad consensus a treaty is needed, there are very different opinions about what should be in it.
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Energy/Transportation
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New York Times ☛ Exxon Mobil Plans to Produce Lithium in Arkansas
Coming just a month after Exxon said it would spend $60 billion to buy Pioneer Natural Resources, the announcement signals that the large oil company intends to hedge its big bets on conventional fossil fuels with at least some investments in cleaner forms of energy that are needed to combat climate change.
The announcement does not represent a fundamental shift in corporate strategy, but it is an acknowledgment that battery-powered vehicles will increasingly compete with cars and trucks fueled by gasoline and diesel. It could also open the door for southern Arkansas to emerge as a major source of lithium. Most of the metal today comes from Australia and South America, and much of it is processed in China.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Evening Standard UK ☛ Space to grow: with 30,500 Londoners on allotment waitlists here's how to nab a plot of your own
Sixteen boroughs are currently closed for applications and even if you were lucky enough to get on a list, there could be more than 3,000 people ahead of you if you had applied in Newham, Richmond, Lewisham or Harrow.
Greenpeace also found you could wait as long as 15 years in Islington, which has only 106 plots available for about 17,000 households with no access to a garden.
The average waiting time was just over five years.
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Overpopulation
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VOA News ☛ France’s Poorest Island is Parched Due to Drought, Underinvestment
The government is pinning its hopes on the upcoming rainy season, though residents say it won't be enough to fix the deep-seated water problems. On a crisis visit last week, France's minister for overseas territories thanked the people of Mayotte for "accepting the unacceptable."
The water taps determine the rhythm of life in Mayotte, an island territory of about 350,000 people northwest of Madagascar.
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Finance
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DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.
The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that many Venezuelan migrants were shocked that they came here and there’s nothing for them and they’ve been sleeping on the floor at the airport or in a tent city in a public park for months.
It’s starting to get cold and it’ll only get worse.
Many of them now apply for funds from the State through Catholic Charities to self-deport back to Venezuela, or to give up and go back down to a State where they won’t freeze to death.
They all got snookered in thinking it would be better in America for them than it would be in Venezuela, and the news quoted one man who came to Chicago as saying, “The American Dream no longer exists. […] If I’m going to sleep on the ground in Chicago I’d rather do it in Venezuela.”
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Paul Thurrott ☛ Amazon to “Refine” Prime Gaming Perks After New Layoffs
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YLE ☛ Soste: Spending cuts to force 68,000 into poverty
The government's plans to cut spending on social benefits will push some 68,000 people into the low-income bracket next year, according to Soste, a confederation of organisations involved in social and healthcare.
Calculations published on Tuesday suggest that some 805,000 people will be defined as low-income in 2024.
Soste says that the increased number of low-income earners would also push up the cost of income support, which is Finland's social benefit of last resort intended to pay for essential outgoings when there is no other source of income.
The report evaluates the effect of spending cuts planned by the government. It defined as low-income anyone whose disposable income is less than 60 percent of the median.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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India Times ☛ Amazon cuts games unit jobs in broader restructuring
Amazon last week also began cutting jobs in its streaming music and podcast division, people familiar with the matter said. It also cut a very small number of jobs in its human resources unit known as People Experience and Technology, or PXT, the sources added.
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Quartz ☛ Why tech giants are hedging their bets on OpenAI
Microsoft owns a 49% stake in OpenAI, having invested billions of dollars in the maker of ChatGPT. But the tech titan is also an investor in Inflection AI, which has a chatbot called Pi and is seen as a rival to OpenAI.
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Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Google in talks to invest in AI startup Character.AI
Founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI allows people to chat with virtual versions of celebrities like Billie Eilish or anime characters, while creating their own chatbots and AI assistants. It is free to use, but offers subscription model that charges $9.99 a month for users who want to skip the virtual line to access a chatbot.
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Off Guardian ☛ Stop Drinking the Political Kool-Aid, America: Voting Will Not Save Us
Yet what is being staged is not an election.
It’s a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle, and “we the people” are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls.
We’re being duped into believing that this mockery of a choice between two candidates who are equally unfit for office actually translates to having some say in how the government is run.
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ In His House Judiciary Committee Testimony, John Durham Confessed that Michael Horowitz Was Right
In his June testimony about his report, John Durham admitted that the reason he said Michael Horowitz was wrong to say Crossfire Hurricane was properly predicated was that he thought Horowitz should consider his own conspiracy theory based on Russian intelligence that defied physics.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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VOA News ☛ Four-Year-Old Hezbollah Missile Video Recycled to Stir Up Israel Offshore Threat
Despite the appearance of a community note that added this context, Nexta kept the video up, and it now has over 750,000 views.
A fact-check by Indian media organization BOOM confirmed the community note, adding that “the video is from 2019 and shows a documentary about how Lebanon-based political party and militant group Hezbollah attacked Israeli ships during the 2006 war.”
Still, other blue-checked X users with an active subscription to the platform likewise posted the same video, either explicitly identifying it as new or otherwise failing to note the video is at least four years old.
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Vice Media Group ☛ TikTok Says It's Not the Algorithm, Teens Are Just Pro-Palestine
TikTok has come under GOP fire in recent weeks after the app showed an apparent spike in pro-Palestine content after the IDF began its bombing campaign of Gaza following Hama’' Oct. 7 attack. Republican politicians have publicly claimed that the company is intentionally promoting pro-Palestine content with the goal of “brainwashing our [American] youth” into supporting Hamas.
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New York Times ☛ Fake Reviews Are Rampant Online. Can a Crackdown End Them?
Only the writer was not an actual patient, and there was no procedure. His review was fake — part of an effort to boost the online ratings for Dr. Mohrmann’s business using phony positive reviews, according to an analysis by Fake Review Watch, an industry watchdog. Last month, Dr. Mohrmann agreed to pay a $100,000 penalty to settle with New York’s attorney general on charges of deceiving the public with fake reviews.
The fake review for Dr. Mohrmann is just one example of the billion-dollar fake review industry, where people and businesses pay marketers to post fake positive reviews to Google Maps, Amazon, Yelp and other platforms, and deceive millions of customers each year.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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RFA ☛ Dystopian YouTube animation draws on themes from today's Hong Kong
The film is published as police patrols start boarding buses and a top university warns students not to protest.
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VOA News ☛ Russia to Limit Only VPN Services That Pose a 'Threat' to Security, State Media Say
Many VPN services remain widely in use throughout Russia and there has been a public debate among lawmakers about how much further to go in blocking VPN services that still allow access to banned information but also a host of other information.
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RFERL ☛ Navalny Says Prison Administration Blocks His Wife's Letters
Imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's Telegram channel said on November 13 prison administration has been blocking correspondence from his wife Yulia Navalnaya.
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RFERL ☛ Navalny Says Prison Administration Blocks His Wife's Letters
Imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's Telegram channel said on November 13 prison administration has been blocking correspondence from his wife Yulia Navalnaya. [...]
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RFERL ☛ Siberian Lawmaker, Former Navalny Associate Confined To Detention Center
A court in Siberia on November 13 ordered Ksenia Fadeyeva, a local lawmaker and the former head of jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny's regional team, to be sent to pretrial detention.
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Meduza ☛ Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny says prison administrators have stopped delivering his wife’s letters — Meduza
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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The Dissenter ☛ Bipartisan Group Of Congress Members To Biden: Don't Extradite Assange
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Journalist Rahimi Facing New Charges After Commenting On Teen's Death
Rahimi is the fifth journalist to face legal action after commenting on the death of Garavand, highlighting government's crackdown on dissenting voices in the media and its concern that the teen's death may spark unrest similar to the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini.
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BIA Net ☛ Kurdish journalist Ahmed Azad Çağan risks deportation in Switzerland
Çağan had sought asylum in Switzerland last year, stating that his life was under threat in Turkey. Switzerland detained Çağan on November 6 and decided to deport him.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Education Minister Proposes Transformation Of System With Introduction Of Gender-Specific Textbooks
Meanwhile, Jalal Mahmoudzadeh, a Sunni representative from Mahabad in the Iranian parliament, criticized the "purification" in the government program presented last month, stating that in less than five months 15,000 to 20 thousand school principals in Iran have been sidelined for "political and ideological reasons."
Iran's schools, particularly girls' schools, became focal points for unrest over the past year after the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody for a hijab violation.
The government has responded by cracking down violently on student campuses, while firing and imprisoning many educators for their support of the demonstrators.
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[Old] HTML First ☛ HTML First
The range of things that browsers support out of the box is large, and growing. Before adding a library or framework to your codebase, check whether you can achieve it using plain old html/css.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Workplace 'slavery' still embedded in supply chain, researcher says
In his new article "Modern Day Slavery in Your Supply Chain," Walden estimates the number of workers living in slavery conditions between 17-21 million worldwide. Although some countries have laws that prevent slave labor and/or require audits of their supply chains, he offers further recommendations to fix this global crisis. The article appears in Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal.
"I define 'slavery' in today's environment as being forced to work in a job that you either are coerced to work in, not paid to work in or held in an environment where you don't have a choice but to work in," he said.
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University of Michigan ☛ Kinesiology professor brings compassion, hope to refugee children
Michal Lorenc, clinical assistant professor of sport management in the School of Kinesiology, has been helping Ukrainian refugees in Poland and in Ukraine.
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RFERL ☛ Patriarch Kirill Calls For Ban On 'Inducement' To Abortion In Russia
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has called for the adoption at federal level of a law banning the "inducement" of women to have abortions that was previously adopted by local authorities in two regions.
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Meduza ☛ Motherhood, no exceptions How a Russian organization takes state money to lie to women about abortion — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian judge postpones hearing in case against anti-war protester Sasha Skochilenko after audience ‘claps too hard’ for defense lawyer’s speech — Meduza
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Reason ☛ "Strangers on the Internet" Podcast Episode 47: The Hardships of Single Life
How to make it as a single person in a society often seemingly built for couples
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 184: Philip Palmer on the Constitutional Doubts About the Government’s Internet Laws
Is the Canadian government’s Internet legislation constitutional? That question arose during the hearings on Bills C-11 and C-18, but has taken on a new urgency given the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision involving an Alberta challenge to federal environmental assessment legislation. With limits on federal powers back in the spotlight, the vulnerability of the legislation requires further examination.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ The (open) web is good, actually
The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification: [...]
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APNIC ☛ Don’t put all your Internet infrastructure in one basket
While 34 IIGs might seem like a high number, the reachability of international Internet transit providers in Bangladesh is not distributed equally. As per IIJ’s Internet Health Report (Figure 2), more than half of Bangladesh’s Internet networks are connected through Hurricane Electric’s network (AS6939), while 22% obtain transit via Summit Communications (AS58717), Bangladesh’s largest domestic ISP. These high percentages are behind Bangladesh’s relatively poor Transit Provider Diversity (Figure 1).
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Monopolies
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US News And World Report ☛ Google's Expert in US Antitrust Trial Defends Billions Paid to Device Makers
In what is expected to be the last week of trial, Kevin Murphy, who teaches at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued Apple and others played Google and Microsoft, which has the Bing search engine, off against each other in order to win big payments from Google.
The government, which has filed four major antitrust lawsuits against three Big Tech companies since 2020, has accused Google of paying billions - $26.3 billion in 2021 - to ensure that its search is the default on smartphones and browsers and to keep its market share in the stratosphere. It alleges the payments are an abuse of monopoly.
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New Yorker ☛ Will the Government Rein in Amazon?
The Federal Trade Commission is suing the company. Lina Khan, the chair of the F.T.C., tells David Remnick that Amazon exploits its position as a monopoly to invisibly drive up costs.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Disney Pulls TV Channels From Vietnam, Govt. "Concerned" Piracy Will Run Riot
A newspaper run by the Communist Party of Vietnam is reporting the “disappearance” of a number of popular channels from pay TV packages. Citing National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild as examples, the paper notesthey're owned by Disney. Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications is said to be "concerned" that the withdrawal will allow piracy to run rampant in Vietnam. Multiple high-level trade reports in the U.S. note that piracy has been rampant for years.
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Digital Music News ☛ The Beatles Arrive on YouTube Shorts ‘For the Very First Time’ Amid Push for Younger Listeners
A portion of The Beatles’ catalog, including the recently released “Now and Then,” has officially been licensed for YouTube Shorts. YouTube global head of music Lyor Cohen announced The Beatles’ YouTube Shorts arrival in a brief blog post today.
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Digital Music News ☛ Got a YouTube Copyright Claim? YouTube Is Now Streamlining the Process
Got a YouTube copyright monopoly claim? The company is making efforts to streamline the process while steering creators toward its Creator Music to mitigate the amount of infringing content that appears on the platform.
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Techdirt ☛ ISPs Launch Legal Attack On Italy’s ‘Pirate Shield,’ Blocking Law
The copyright industry’s war on the Internet and its users has gone through various stages (full details and links to numerous references in Walled Culture the book, free digital versions available).
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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He had a dream
... he'd hoped for a modicum of attention to his latest post, thinking there ought to be at least one more like-minded individual out there who happened to read in places where he might write, who would recognize his style and leanings as though they were more than merely roughly their own... and soon enough both would spend weeks expressing back and forth to each other how relieved they were to have finally found each other, and thus could *finally* exchange text with another with whom there was *finally* greater than a point oh oh oh oh oh two percent chance of genuinely understanding what the other had written for having such irresistible contextural overlap.
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🔤SpellBinding — GHILYSP Wordo: VACUA
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Date: 1974-11-14
Dear unknown friend, you haven't replied to my first letter, but I won't hold it against you as it's impossible it could have reached you. Specially as I haven't sent it, as if I ever could, the mail service is a distant memory.
I've reached my family, they're alright and in two days we'll be all at the secret hut to pass the winter. It's the trend here in the land of the ghosts, disperse in winter so there's more food around and the bad people can't kill us all. We practice so silent Christmas, you see, but it isn't Christmas yet.
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Politics and World Events
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Re: A wee bit ambivalent
It feels like such a lost opportunity when someone who is otherwise close to being on the same page around something that so few people grok is so fuddled on climate change, the most important issue of all time.
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Technology and Free Software
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Retro markdown-mode for Emacs
This fork of markdown-mode exists since the commands in the upstream version only works for active regions or transient-mark-mode.
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NIH with a ribbon bookmark
Sometimes you get a contribution to your git project and you love their idea but you want to implement things your own way because you’ve got NIH.
Here’s how to do it politely so they still get credit in the git log.
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a conversation with one of my bot
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.