Links 03/12/2023: New 'Hey Hi' (AI) Vapouware and Palantir/NHS Collusion to Spy on Patients Comes Under Legal Challenge
Contents
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Leftovers
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SparkFun Electronics ☛ Not Your Mother's Spam Mail
This is a full video player, fit with a screen and speaker, that played this company's commercial immediately upon opening it. Stock footage of people dressed in business professional walking in and out of offices with inspirational orchestral swells in the background and a voiceover with the company's elevator pitch. We tore open the packaging to look at the hardware, and here's what we found: [...]
We'd never seen this type of mail before, and it seemed odd to us that a company would send out something equivalent to junk mail that was so expensive, wasteful and bothersome to whoever opened it. So we did some further research.
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James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Navigation Structure
Over the next 24 days, I am going to share one lesson I have learned when writing technical documents. My experience pertains almost exclusively to software technical writing. I expect that much of what I write will be more applicable in that domain, but I hope my advice can generalise. This series will use a lot of "I"s, because I want to write with direct reference to my experience. You may have your own style that deviates from mine; therein lies the beauty of writing. But perhaps you will learn something from what I write!
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James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Navigation Links
As you write and organize technical documentation, there is an important muscle to build up: creating effective navigation link text. Navigation links are what you may include in a sidebar or a top navigation bar. These may be different than the actual title of a page, since you often have more space in a page title.
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The Verge ☛ Here’s how a bridal photo captured a single person in three poses at once
It’s multiple images, stitched together using Coates’ iPhone 12’s “pano” feature. Faruk figured this out by peeking at the shot’s metadata and seeing its resolution is cropped from the main camera’s normal resolution down to 3028 x 3948, which happens when a picture is taken in panoramic mode.
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Tedium ☛ In Search Of New Lows
Why did seven-string guitars become a nu-metal staple in the late 1990s? It turns out they nearly went forgotten—but a guitar nut in Bakersfield decided he wanted to follow a specific sound.
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Science
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Mark Dominus ☛ Uncountable sets for seven-year-olds
My friend mentioned that his kid had been unhappy with the associated discussion of uncountable sets, since the explanation he got involved something about people whose names are infinite strings, and it got confusing. I said yes, that is a bad way to construct the example, because names are not infinite strings, and even one infinite string is hard to get your head around. If you're going to get value out of the hotel metaphor, you waste an opportunity if you abandon it for some weird mathematical abstraction. (“Okay, Tyler, now let !!\mathscr B!! be a projection from a vector bundle onto a compact Hausdorff space…”)
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Futurism ☛ Scientists Discover Star System So Perfect It Seems Like Art
These "sub-Neptune" exoplanets — planets with a radius larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune — revolve in precise ratios relative to each other. Here, the first and closest planet to the host star completes three orbits in the time the next planet takes to complete two orbits. This is called a 3:2 resonance, repeated here for the first four planets.
Meanwhile, the two outermost sub-Neptunes are in a 4:3 resonance, so the furthest planet completes only one orbit while the closest whizzes through six — like beautiful cosmic art.
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Science Alert ☛ Food Preserving Technique May Have Sparked Human Brain Growth, Scientists Say
Researchers propose that a taste for fermented morsels may have triggered a surprising jump in the growth rate of our ancestors' brains.
In fact, a shift from a raw diet to one that included food items already partially broken down by microbes may have been a crucial event in our brain's evolution, according to a perspective study by evolutionary neuroscientist Katherine Bryant of Aix-Marseille University in France and two US colleagues.
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Education
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Manuel Moreale ☛ More new mindsets, fewer new technologies
Make yourself a blog, write, share, connect with others. Be curious, click around, follow random links, see where they take you. And write to people. Don’t be afraid of sending an email to someone you don’t know. If someone’s out there on the web, it probably means they want to be found.
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Jamie Brandon ☛ 0042: consulting lessons, there are no strings on me, buttondown, focus goof, jsfuck, 1ml
Anyway, I'd be much wealthier if I could just take peoples money and give them what they ask for without caring if I'm delivering something worth the cost.
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Hardware
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Greece ☛ Robots trained to be porters
The project to use robots in airport baggage and shelving has research challenges that need to be addressed. “Training robots to handle more diverse objects is required. Baggage has a very wide variety, from heavy suitcases to backpacks. How the robot will grab them and how to reposition them needs work,” he noted.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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RFA ☛ Pneumonia, bird flu, other outbreaks prompt concerns of new contagion in Asia
Few events have affected states’ security and prosperity more than a pandemic.
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Science Alert ☛ Do You Have Mouth Cancer Symptoms? An Expert Explains How to Check
Early detection saves lives.
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India Times ☛ Government bans "dark patterns" on ecommerce platforms; notifies guidelines
According to the notification, dark patterns have been defined as any practice or deceptive design pattern using user interface or user experience interactions on any platform that is designed to mislead or trick users to do something they originally did not intend or want to do, by subverting or impairing the consumer autonomy, decision making or choice.
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[Old] The Washington Post ☛ Students can’t get off their phones. Schools have had enough.
This year, the district went a step further, expanding to the high school level. There, students slip their phones into locking Yondr pouches (about $16 each) that they carry with them all day and that they can open by tapping it against a magnetic device as they leave.
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The Conversation ☛ PFAS forever chemicals found in English drinking water – why are they everywhere and what are the risks?
To make matters worse, the PFAS chemicals that do degrade often break down into the more recalcitrant PFAS types, which then cycle around the environment endlessly.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas and Missouri have 256,000 lead pipes. EPA wants them removed within 10 years.
“Lead in drinking water is a generational public health issue, and EPA’s proposal will accelerate progress towards President Biden’s goal of replacing every lead pipe across America once and for all,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said in a news release.
For much of the 20th Century, utilities were permitted to install lead service lines, the pipes that carry water from water mains under the street into homes. The EPA banned them in 1986, but utilities have never been required to remove existing pipes.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Gizmodo ☛ Why the Entire AI World Was Talking About "Q" This Week
Still, details surrounding this supposed Q program haven’t been shared by the company, leaving only the anonymously sourced reports and rampant speculation online as to what the true nature of the program could be.
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Futurism ☛ Uber Eats Mocked for Grotesque AI-Generated Food Pictures on Menu
As the web continues to fill up with bottom-tier AI-generated content — see our reporting this week that Sports Illustrated had been publishing articles by fictional authors with AI-generated headshots — here's a new one: Uber Eats seemingly publishing a restaurant's menu with, instead of real photos of the food, ones that were cooked up using some sort of AI system.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Register UK ☛ Health crusaders prep legal challenge over NHS mega contract with Palantir
According to NHS England, the "data platform" is the software it plans to use to help NHS organizations collate the operational data currently stored in separate systems in order to help staff access the information they need. This data includes the number of beds in a hospital, the size of waiting lists for elective care services, or the availability of medical supplies. The idea is every hospital trust and integrated care system (ICS) will have their own platform, but they will be able to connect and share information between them.
The controversial contract is set to last up to seven years. [...]
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Defence/Aggression
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Reason ☛ Montana Fentanylware (TikTok) Ban Likely Violates First Amendment, Intrudes on Federal Foreign Affairs Power
Judge Donald Molloy's opinion Thursday in Alario v. Knudsen (D. Mont.) preliminarily enjoined Montana's ban on TikTok, which the state had defended largely on the theory that Fentanylware (TikTok) was owned by a Chinese corporation and "gathers significant information from its users, accessing data against their will to share with the People's Republic of China" [...]
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LRT ☛ Lithuanian president urges to stop ‘ecocide’ at COP28
The Lithuanian president called for stopping “ecocide” and focusing efforts on mitigating the consequences of harmful actions already taken.
Nausėda said that “Russia's brutal war in Ukraine has caused enormous damage to the environment, and the aggressor’s actions are incompatible with international law and go against the world’s joint efforts to stop climate change”, his office said in a press release.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Western leaders must choose: Arm Ukraine or enable Putin’s genocide
The Kremlin began preparing these genocidal policies well in advance of the full-scale invasion. Russian security officers reportedly compiled detailed lists of Ukrainian community leaders who would be targeted by advancing Russian forces in a bid to prevent any coordinated Ukrainian opposition to the takeover of the country. These registers included elected local officials, priests, journalists, teachers, activists, and military veterans. A clear pattern of abductions and disappearances has subsequently been witnessed in every region of Ukraine under Russian occupation. Meanwhile, in liberated villages, towns, and cities, the Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly encountered mass graves, torture chambers, and widespread reports of missing persons.
Throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine, Ukrainian monuments have been pulled down and replaced with commemorations of Russian imperial and Soviet history, while symbols of Ukrainian statehood have been systematically removed from public spaces. Moscow has imported Russian teachers to indoctrinate Ukrainian schoolchildren, pushing them to reject their nationality and embrace an alternative imperial identity. Entire parks and museums have been created to aid in this process, with children also forced to express thanks and gratitude to the Russian soldiers engaged in destroying their homeland. Predictably, the Ukrainian language is no longer taught in schools and has been banished from public life throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine.
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India Times ☛ TikTok asks EU court to suspend EU gatekeeper label until its ruling
Chinese conglomerate ByteDance's TikTok has asked Europe's second highest court to suspend its designation as a gatekeeper under onerous new EU tech rules until judges rule on its challenge against the label.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) requires TikTok and other designated gatekeepers Alphabet's Google, Meta Platforms, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft to make their messaging apps interoperate with rivals and let users decide which apps to pre-install on their devices.
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EuroNews ☛ ‘Sacrificing us at the altar of their greed’: Richest 10% in EU emit as much carbon as poorest 50%
“Their increasingly luxurious lifestyles and escalating opulence are wreaking havoc on our planet," says Oxfam EU tax expert Chiara Putaturo. “Meanwhile ordinary people are burdened with rising costs and the dire consequences of heatwaves, floods, and landslides caused by human greed.”
These outsized emissions of Europe’s richest will cause 67,800 heat-related excess deaths by 2100, the equivalent of almost 850 deaths every year.
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BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ Amazon Signs Deal With Musk's SpaceX To Launch Internet Satellites
Amazon aims to build a constellation of 3,236 satellites by 2025 in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to beam broadband [Internet] globally under project Kuiper
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India Times ☛ TikTok takes first steps in turning on Norwegian data centre
The Norwegian data centre will be in the town of Hamar where TikTok will store data spread over three buildings and the first phase will start operating from next summer.
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CBC ☛ Former Afghan interpreter for Canadian Armed Forces arrested by the Taliban, family says
He said his father did not like to talk about his work for the military too much, but was always proud of his service.
The family had been in hiding for two years, ever since they were unable to board flights that left Kabul in August 2021 when NATO forces fled Afghanistan following its takeover by the Taliban.
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The Age AU ☛ Roblox used by extremists to recruit children, police warn
Roblox, a virtual universe gaming platform where users can program games for others to play, has seen scenarios such as Nazi concentration camps, Chinese communist re-education camps for Muslims, and Islamic state-style conflict zones.
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New York Times ☛ He Won Election to Canada’s Parliament. Did China Help?
A Canadian rapporteur said there was “well-grounded suspicion” that Han Dong, a member of Parliament from Toronto, may have benefited from support from the Chinese Consulate.
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US News And World Report ☛ COP28: 117 Countries Agree to Triple Renewable Energy, to Push Out Fossil Fuels
The pledge was among a slew of COP28 announcements on Saturday aimed at decarbonizing the energy sector - source of around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions - that included expanding nuclear power, cutting methane emissions, and choking off private finance for coal power.
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TruthOut ☛ Report: Saudi Arabia Plans to Get African Countries “Hooked” on Fossil Fuels
Top Saudi Arabian officials, led by Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, have formulated a covert plan to make countries across Africa and Asia dependent on fossil fuel products, a new bombshell investigation has revealed.
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Essel Group ☛ Riyadh covertly working on plans to artificially boost oil demand globally: Report
The investigation has been carried out by the Centre for Climate Reporting and Channel 4 News, a British TV channel.
It revealed that Riyadh aspires to drive up the use of fossil fuel-powered cars, buses and planes in Africa and elsewhere, under its so-called oil demand sustainability programme (ODSP).
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Putin signs decree to increase Russian military by nearly 170,000 personnel — Meduza
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RFERL ☛ Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Plant's Grid Connection Cut In Another Reminder Of 'Precarious' Safety Situation
Ukraine and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said two power lines connecting the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant to the country’s electricity grid were cut overnight, again highlighting the risk of an accident at the plant.
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RFERL ☛ Ukraine's Security Service Cancels Former President's Trip To Meet With Orban
Ukrainian border guards prevented former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko from leaving the country on what Poroshenko said was a business trip that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said was to start with a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Shelling, Drone Strikes Cause Death, Damage In Ukraine's Donetsk, Kherson, And Odesa Regions
At least two civilians were killed in Ukraine's Donetsk and Kherson regions in shelling by Russian troops that also caused damage to infrastructure and property, regional officials said on December 2.
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Meduza ☛ Estonian prime minister says residents obtaining Russian citizenship after start of full-scale war are security threat, could face deportation — Meduza
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RFERL ☛ Congress Must Pass Aid For Ukraine To Avoid Interruption Of U.S. Support, White House Says
The U.S. Congress should act swiftly to provide aid to Ukraine before the end of the month to avoid an interruption in support provided by the United States, White House national-security spokesman John Kirby said.
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RFERL ☛ Ukraine Repels Russian Drone Attack On Odesa Region
Russian troops attacked the Odesa region with 11 Iranian-made kamikaze drones overnight, the Ukrainian Air Force Command reported early on December 2.
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RFERL ☛ Second Batch Of Ukraine Troops Finish Training On Patriot In Germany
Germany's army, the Bundeswehr, has trained a second group of Ukrainian soldiers on the Patriot air-defense system. After more than six weeks, the training of around 70 men and women was nearing completion.
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YLE ☛ Niinistö: China plans to cooperate in gas pipeline investigation
The Finnish president also posits that Russia's intention to divide the West's support of Ukraine may have the opposite effect and end up bolstering support for Ukraine.
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New York Times ☛ Crossing the Dnipro: What a Ukrainian Military Operation Might Mean
Ukrainian troops have taken positions on the east bank of the Dnipro River, posing a threat to Russia’s dominance of the region. Here is a look at the battlefield and the strategic implications.
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Meduza ☛ Plane with left engine failure makes emergency landing at Moscow airport — Meduza
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Environment
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Latvia ☛ Officials' use of private jets at public expense to be tightened up
The reason is the sharp reaction of the public to the 36 flights made by current Minister of Foreign Affairs Krišjānis Kariņš (New Unity) during his tenure as prime minister, which together cost more than 1.3 million euros to taxpayers.
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Energy/Transportation
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CS Monitor ☛ Is cryptocurrency enabling Hamas? Efforts to halt terror funding revive.
Now U.S. and other Western governments have refocused on the problem. This goes especially for terrorists’ use of digital money – or cryptocurrency – that can be flashed around the world without the scrutiny of banks or regulators.
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Vice Media Group ☛ Physicists Propose Way to Harvest Incredible Energy From Black Holes In Wild Paper
That might not be a problem for the super tiny black holes Mai and Yang describe, since they don’t spin, but instead the black holes don't have charge and therefore wouldn’t work as a battery.
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New York Times ☛ 22 Countries Pledge to Triple Nuclear Capacity in Push to Cut Fossil Fuels
Britain, Canada, France, Ghana, South Korea, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates were among the 22 countries that signed the declaration to triple capacity from 2020 levels.
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NPR ☛ Why solar-powered canoes could be good for the future of the rainforest
The boats, inspired by traditional Indigenous designs, vary in size and can carry up to 20 passengers. With electric motors and roofs covered in solar panels, they can travel at 10 to 12 miles an hour for up to 60 miles. Each cost between $25,000 and $40,000, most of which was provided by U.S.-based foundations such as the Inter-American Development Bank. Kara Solar says that with technological advances, prices are coming down.
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Science Alert ☛ China's Building an Epic Underwater Data Center With The Power of 6 Million PCs
Firstly there's the space saved in terms of land: apparently, the plan is to put 100 of these data center blocks in place by 2025, which will take up around 68,000 square meters (about 732,000 square feet) of construction space, according to Chinese agency CCTV.
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The Conversation ☛ Electric arc furnaces: the technology poised to make British steelmaking more sustainable
Steel is an incredible material and for good reason. It’s the world’s most commonly used metal because it’s strong, durable and recyclable, making it the perfect material for everything from skyscrapers to electric vehicles and solar panels. More than 1.8 billion tonnes of crude steel were produced globally last year. That number is only expected to grow as the world transitions to a more sustainable future.
The UK uses around 12 million tonnes of steel each year. And in 2022, it produced just under 6 million tonnes, contributing to around 2.4% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
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Wildlife/Nature
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El País ☛ Bottlenose dolphins have a seventh sense: They can feel electricity
The Guiana dolphin’s electroreceptive abilities led Guido Dehnhardt, the director of the Marine Science Center of the University of Rostock (Germany), to think that other dolphins could have this seventh sense, too. Dehnhardt, one of those responsible for the 2011 discovery, was convinced that bottlenose dolphins must also have this skill. “Both species follow a benthic feeding strategy,” he explains via email. This means that both eat fish that live at the bottom of the ocean. So, if the Guiana dolphin is capable of detecting the electricity generated by fish, why wouldn’t the bottlenose dolphin be able to do it too?
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New Yorker ☛ How to Still Be Reminded of Your Insignificance Even When Light Pollution Makes It Impossible to See the Stars
Consider how you thoroughly fail to understand how the Internet works.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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France24 ☛ Ukraine blocks ex-president from leaving country amid alleged plan to meet pro-Putin Hungary’s Orban
Ukraine's security service said on Saturday it had prevented former president Petro Poroshenko from leaving the country on grounds that Russia planned to exploit a planned meeting with Hungary's prime minister to hurt Ukrainian interests.
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Futurism ☛ Facebook Has a Gigantic Pedophilia Problem
Earlier this year, the newspaper teamed up with researchers at Stanford and the University of Massachusetts Amherst and found that Instagram's algorithms were connected to an entire distribution network of underage sex content.
At the time, Meta formed a child-safety task force to address the glaring issue — but even after five long months, the company still has a lot of work to do, the WSJ found, with the company's platforms still actively promoting pedophilic content.
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India Times ☛ Microsoft's $3.2 billion UK investment to drive AI growth [Ed: Bribery again]
The funding, first announced at a summit hosted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday, will more than double Microsoft's data centre footprint in Britain, providing the infrastructure crucial for new AI models to work.
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India Times ☛ OpenAI's Sam Altman, sugarcoating the apocalypse
Sam AltmanAP My favorite "Twilight Zone" episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title - "To Serve Man" - and that's reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.
But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize - too late - that it's a cookbook.
That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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VOA News ☛ X Users Falsely Portray Footage From Colombia as Venezuela-Guyana Border Clash
Social media users have seized on these tensions to spread disinformation.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Meduza ☛ Russian singer who burned ID in protest against war in Ukraine sent to pre-trial detention on charges of ‘rehabilitating Nazism’ and ‘insulting believers’ feelings’
Sharlot is charged with two counts of “rehabilitating Nazism” and one count of “violating the right to freedom of conscience and religion.” The case was initiated due to videos posted on Sharlot’s Instagram, including one in which he burned his Russian ID and said he was against the war and one in which nailed his military ID and a photo of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to a crucifix.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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CPJ ☛ CPJ alarmed by disappearance of Yemeni journalist Naseh Shaker
Shaker was last heard from on November 19, when he spoke to his mother at around 5:30 a.m. from the southern city of Aden. He had traveled there overnight from his home in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, to fly to Lebanon, where he was due to attend a security training course on November 21, according to his brother, Abdullah Ahmad Shaker, who spoke to CPJ, and multiple news reports.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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International Business Times ☛ Nine Days of Rail Disruption Unleashed as Aslef Industrial Action Takes Hold
Disputes over working conditions, pay disparities and concerns regarding safety protocols have failed to find a resolution, leading to this protracted period of industrial unrest.
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RFERL ☛ More Than 400 People Punished Under Shari'a Law In Afghanistan, Rights Group Says
Qisas punishments are for offenses seen as violations of the boundaries set by God such as murder, theft, and adultery. Convicts can be executed, flogged, stoned to death, or have limbs amputated.
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The Hindu ☛ Call for a society free of rights violations
Andhra Pradesh High Court Judge K. Manmadha Rao on December 2 (Saturday) emphasised the need to create a society free from oppression of rights. Speaking at a conference on ‘Human Rights Awareness’, organised by the Department of Business Administration in Prasad V. Potluri Siddhartha Institute of Technology, Kanuru, to mark International Human Rights Day (December 8), Justice Manmadha Rao said human rights are not just fundamental entitlements, but they are also safeguards for every individual. He underscored the universal, inalienable nature of human rights and said they were responsibilities rather than mere rights. He urged students to develop awareness on human rights at an early age.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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David Revoy ☛ My brushstrokes against AI-art
But even if it sounds like I'm praising some aspect of AI-generated imagery, make no mistake: I'm still very much against it. I remind you that thousands of my artworks have been analysed over the last 20 years and are part of the LAION-5B database. All without my consent.
In this respect, I could ironically say that all generative AI stuff can be considered derivative of my work, even if only to a 0.00001% degree of derivation.
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Torrent Freak ☛ 80 Pirate IPTV Sellers Face $3.5m Bill After Failing to Charge Customers VAT
Millions of people have moved away from traditional broadcasters and embraced the world of pirate IPTV, where content is plentiful, cheap, and mostly illegal. Pirate suppliers are able to undercut their legal counterparts for numerous reasons, including doing away with irritations such as adding VAT to customers' bills. After attracting attention from tax authorities, 80 pirate IPTV sellers now face a $3.5m tax bill, but the bad news is unlikely to stop there.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technology and Free Software
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AuraGem Chat
I have created a live chat in Gemini. This is obviously not the first time this has been done, but it was a fun project! It does save a history, but only for a day. After 24 hours, the whole history is cleared.
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This week — Blog Customization 2: Electric Boogaloo & Week 10's Revenge
TL;DR: I had a long weekend, so I coded some accessibility and performance improvements for this blog. I also decided to start a Gemini mirror. I finally settled on a Pixelfed instance, and joined several online things.
I have good news: first, I finally got an external learning institution to collaborate with our organization for my training program. YAY! What's left for me to do is wait for management to release the important documents, then I can discuss the details of the program with the trainers from the institution.
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Internet/Gemini
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This Blog is Temporarily Under Construction
TL;DR: The original version of this blog is undergoing a long overdue overhaul; please bear with me.
There's no weekly blog post for today, because I'm overhauling the appearance of old blog posts like I promised way back in Week 16. It's taking longer than I expected, mainly because I overhauled some other parts of the blog as well, so I'm spending the entire weekend for that as well as other tasks for the blog.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.