Links 13/12/2023: COP28 and GAFAM Monopolies/Monopsonies Under Some More Fire
Contents
- Leftovers
- 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/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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[Old] Robert OCallahan ☛ Blog Migrated
The main reason to do this is to ensure the longevity of the blog content. The new setup is simple and I can easily move the hosting elsewhere if Github becomes infeasible at some point. However, the immediate motivation for the move is that Google has stopped allowing updates to "classic" sites.google.com, which I was using as my CDN for images. I figured that since I had to change my setup anyway, I may as well do a complete migration.
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James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Facilitating Ideas
A significant portion of the ideas on which I work come from discussion with the rest of our marketing team.
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James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Placeholders
When you are focused on writing documentation, leaving your editing tool to find an appropriate graphic can be distracting. You have to answer questions like "Do I have an asset I could use here already? Where can I find it? Or do I need to take another screenshot?" Sometimes, you want to keep writing because you know what you want to say and how you want to say it.
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Education
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Jean-Mark Wright ☛ Dear manager of the employee with Imposter Syndrome
I close with a petition to give your employee thoughtful and thorough feedback. Your feedback is often the only compass in the conversation that has the potential for accuracy. The internal compass of a budding imposter is deeply skewed. I don't know that compasses are repaired, but loaning your compass can create the environment for our compasses to heal.
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Hardware
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The Drone Girl ☛ Florida spraying drone company attracts US Army attention for surprising reason
Apellix says their drones can clean a contaminated truck on a battlefield in 10 minutes, a sharp time-savings over what can amount to up to 10 hours using current methods. On top of the time savings, soldiers can stay farther away from contaminants, equipment can get back in use post-cleaning more quickly and even water is conserved.
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RFA ☛ S Korea, Netherlands to form ‘chip alliance’ for supply chain coordination
The “chip alliance” between the two states already began to take shape with South Korea’s tech giant Samsung Electronics and Netherland’s AMSL signing an memorandum of understanding (MOU) vowing a joint investment of US$760 million (1 trillion won), to establish a next-generation semiconductor manufacturing technology R&D center in South Korea, according to the South’s Chief Economic Secretary, Park Chun-sup, Tuesday.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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International Business Times ☛ UK Health Security Agency Warns of Tropical Disease Risks Amidst Rising Temperatures
As global warming continues to reshape weather patterns, the UK finds itself increasingly vulnerable to the spread of diseases traditionally confined to tropical regions.
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Democracy Now ☛ Texas Woman Denied Abortion for Nonviable Fetus, Flees State, “One of Thousands” in Similar Position
A Texas woman has had to flee to another state to have an emergency abortion after the state Supreme Court ruled against her. Kate Cox fled Monday after she had petitioned a judge to get an exemption from the state’s near-total abortion ban when her fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition and doctors warned her carrying to term could endanger her fertility. “Unfortunately, it’s one of hundreds, if not thousands, of comparable stories,” says Dr. Bhavik Kumar, an abortion provider in Texas. “While these politicians say there are exceptions, somebody really has to be at death’s door before we can reasonably act in their favor.” We also speak with Tamarra Wieder, Kentucky state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, who says the Texas case could have a “chilling effect” on people seeking abortions elsewhere in the country, including in Kentucky, where a pregnant woman is the lead plaintiff in a new class-action lawsuit that argues the state’s ban on abortion violates its constitution. “These laws, restrictions and attacks don’t happen in a vacuum,” says Wieder.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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OS News ☛ Broadcom stops selling perpetual VMware licenses, subscription-only from now on - OSnews
This sucks. Every few years, I would buy a cheap VMware license on eBay for like €10 or something, to keep my Windows virtual machine going for the incredibly rare cases where I need one for my job because some popular CAT tools are Windows-only. I really do not wish to buy a subscription for that.
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The Nation ☛ The Antitrust Lessons of the OpenAI Saga
Coverage of the widespread adoption of [chatbot] software has made it seem as though it represents the latest Wild West frontier of tech innovation. That impression was reinforced in the recent corporate melodrama surrounding the abrupt dismissal, and later rehiring, of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; surely this must be another example of nimble startups and brash entrepreneurs moving fast and breaking things.
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CNN ☛ Sports Illustrated publisher fires CEO after AI debacle
A spokesperson for The Arena Group declined to go into further detail to explain the ouster of Ross Levinsohn, who served as chief executive for three years. But the move came after an embarrassing debacle in which Sports Illustrated was caught publishing stories with fake author names and profile photos generated by artificial intelligence.
Levinsohn was replaced, effective immediately, by interim chief executive Manoj Bhargava, the 5-Hour Energy founder who owns a majority stake in The Arena Group, said Vince Bodiford, a spokesperson for Bhargava.
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EFF ☛ No Robots(.txt): How to Ask ChatGPT and Google Bard to Not Use Your Website for Training
We've talked before about how these models use art for training, and the general idea and process is the same for text. Researchers have long used collections of data scraped from the internet for studies of censorship, malware, sociology, language, and other applications, including generative AI. Today, both academic and for-profit researchers collect training data for AI using bots that go out searching all over the web and “scrape up” or store the content of each site they come across. This might be used to create purely text-based tools, or a system might collect images that may be associated with certain text and try to glean connections between the words and the images during training. The end result, at least currently, is the chatbots we've seen in the form of Google Bard and ChatGPT.
It would ease many minds for other companies with similar AI products, like Anthropic, Amazon, and countless others, to announce that they'd respect similar requests.
If you do not want your website's content used for this training, you can ask the bots deployed by Google and Open AI to skip over your site. Keep in mind that this only applies to future scraping. If Google or OpenAI already have data from your site, they will not remove it. It also doesn't stop the countless other companies out there training their own LLMs, and doesn't affect anything you've posted elsewhere, like on social networks or forums. It also wouldn't stop models that are trained on large data sets of scraped websites that aren't affiliated with a specific company. For example, OpenAI's GPT-3 and Meta's LLaMa were both trained using data mostly collected from Common Crawl, an open source archive of large portions of the internet that is routinely used for important research. You can block Common Crawl, but doing so blocks the web crawler from using your data in all its data sets, many of which have nothing to do with AI.
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Unicorn Media ☛ How to Keep Your Site’s Content From Being Used to Train AI
We thought we’d pass along this article published today by the folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Here’s a little sample to let you know what it’s about:
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Austin Gil ☛ AI for Web Devs: Prompt Engineering
In this post, we’re going to cover prompt engineering, which is a way to modify your application’s behavior without changing the code. Since it’s challenging to explain without seeing the code, let’s get to it.
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Dedoimedo ☛ The demise of digital voice assistants
I'm not a spiteful person. I hath no pride. But sometimes, I do enjoy a good moment of "I told ya so". After all, when, in the course of your life as a techie at a tech firm, you're occasionally forced to listen to lectures on the future, with words like DevOps and AI/ML thrown into the grinder, by "inspired" managers who just read about the new and cool thing on their Linkedin digest in between important meetings, it's only natural that one would feel vindicated when things out turn out, inevitably, as they should. Case in point, the impractical reality of digital assistants.
In the past year or so, reports and stories have come about un-profitability of digital assistants, and as a result, the culling of teams and technology involved. Once upon a time, Siri and Cortana and Alexa were all the rage, and now, they are sort of not. To me, this outcome was obvious from the start. I just had to wait a few years to be, once again, inevitably, proven right. Let me tell why.
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Vice Media Group ☛ A U.S. Politician Is Robocalling Voters With an AI Chatbot Named 'Ashley'
The chatbot, called “Ashley,” has already begun making calls to voters in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional district on behalf of Shemaine Daniels, a Democrat running for a seat in the state’s House of Representatives in 2024. The AI robocaller is made by a company called Civox, which claims “Ashley” is the first such bot to be used in a political campaign. The company claims the bot is capable of having two-way conversations in real time, and says that it has already contacted “thousands” of people in the Pennsylvania district.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ "An off switch? She'll get years for that."
These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second. The data is then used for content recommendations and ad targeting, which is a huge business; advertisers spent an estimated $18.6 billion on smart TV ads in 2022, according to market research firm eMarketer.
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The Markup ☛ Your Smart TV Knows What You’re Watching
If you bought a new smart TV during any of the holiday sales, there’s likely to be an uninvited guest watching along with you. The most popular smart TVs sold today use automatic content recognition (ACR), a kind of ad surveillance technology that collects data on everything you view and sends it to a proprietary database to identify what you’re watching and serve you highly targeted ads. The software is largely hidden from view, and it’s complicated to opt out. Many consumers aren’t aware of ACR, let alone that it’s active on their shiny new TVs. If that’s you, and you’d like to turn it off, we’re going to show you how.
First, a quick primer on the tech: ACR identifies what’s displayed on your television, including content served through a cable TV box, streaming service, or game console, by continuously grabbing screenshots and comparing them to a massive database of media and advertisements. Think of it as a Shazam-like service constantly running in the background while your TV is on.
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India Times ☛ Apple now requires a judge's consent to hand over push notification data
The new policy was not formally announced but appeared sometime over the past few days on Apple's publicly available law enforcement guidelines. It follows the revelation from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden that officials were requesting such data from Apple as well as from Google, the unit of Alphabet that makes the operating system for Android phones.
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Privacy International ☛ Stop GILAB
Privacy International joined civil society efforts to call the South African Parliament not to approve the draft General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill 2023 (GILAB), which was approved by the Cabinet and introduced in Parliament.
The Bill was proposed by the South African government, after the Constitutional Court found the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act of 2002 (RICA) unconstitutional on multiple grounds.
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EPIC ☛ EPIC Provides Feedback to Colo. AG on Possible Universal Opt-Out Mechanisms
In comments filed December 11, EPIC urged the Colorado Attorney General and Department of Law to approve use of Global Privacy Control (GPC) as a Universal Opt-Out Mechanism (UOOM) under the Colorado Privacy Act in advance of the Department’s January 1 deadline, to gather more information about OptOutCode for possible future approval as a UOOM, and to deny approval of The Opt-Out Machine for use as a UOOM.
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Defence/Aggression
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Futurism ☛ Scientists Warn That the Dubai Climate Conference Is Full of Crap
And experts are calling bull. In interviews with The Guardian, climate scientists and advocates said the "solutions" offered at the COP28 conference, which include such goofiness as a panel on "responsible yachting," are "distractions" at best and "frightening" at worst.
Troublingly, the conference is presided over by Dubai's Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who also runs the United Arab Emirates' national oil company in what seems very much like a massive conflict of interest.
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The Verge ☛ The world came tantalizingly close to a deal to phase out fossil fuels
This was the closest yet that countries have gotten to striking a global deal to phase out the use of coal, oil, and gas. But the summit was arguably still a home game for fossil fuel interests who threw their weight around the United Nations climate conference, called the 28th Conference of the Parties or COP28, where tens of thousands of delegates and activists from nearly every nation on Earth have gathered over the past two weeks to wrangle over the future of fossil fuels.
Now that the dust has settled, these are some of the biggest decisions made in Dubai that could determine how we power our world in the future.
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DeSmog ☛ Oil Industry Battles Push for ‘Phase-out’ Deal At COP28 With Promises To Capture Carbon
As negotiations at the COP28 climate talks in the United Arab Emirates head into overtime, oil and gas interests are aiming to exclude a fossil fuel phase-out from any final deal by promoting carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a viable climate solution.
But as research and advocacy group Oil Change International details in a new brief, Carbon Capture’s Publicly Funded Failure, almost 80 percent of current CCS operations use captured carbon dioxide (CO2) to pump more fossil fuels out of the ground through a process known as enhanced oil recovery.
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Democracy Now ☛ Climate Activists Outraged as COP28 Draft Text Drops Call for Fossil Fuel Phaseout
At the COP28 U.N. climate summit, a draft agreement released Monday omits a call to phase out fossil fuels, proposing “reductions” instead. The United States, Canada and other rich countries have loudly championed a phaseout but are simultaneously approving new oil and gas projects eating up the planet’s remaining carbon budget, says Meena Raman, head of programs at Third World Network and president of Friends of the Earth Malaysia. “Developed countries must take the lead, and they must end fossil fuel production and consumption now, not in 2030, 2040 or 2050,” Raman says. We also speak with South African climate and energy expert Tasneem Essop, who says any phaseout of fossil fuels must be “just and equitable,” giving poorer countries room to develop and putting the onus on the rich Global North to decarbonize first.
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Axios ☛ Tumultuous COP28 heads into overtime as sides battle over fossil fuels
Between the lines: The biggest point of contention relates to the section setting out expectations for the fate of fossil fuels.
The Monday draft made no mention of "phase out" or "phase down," instead giving countries a choice from a list of actions they "could" choose to pursue (including none of these options).
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CBC ☛ COP28 reaches climate deal in Dubai calling for 'transitioning away from fossil fuels'
Specifically, the text calls for a "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science."
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The Age AU ☛ COP28 ends with deal on transition away from fossil fuels
The global climate talks have ended with compromise text supporting a historic “transition away from fossil fuels”, but including support for the use of controversial abatement technologies such as carbon capture and storage.
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The Conversation ☛ Digital platforms like TikTok could help China extend its censorship regime across borders
China’s drive to expand its influence through soft power mechanisms like censorship is coming into sharper focus, especially under Xi Jinping’s leadership. Recently, the social media app TikTok has become a prominent symbol of this global strategy.
The platform consistently denies that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is close to China’s government. “ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government. It is a private company,” TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew said. However, US congressional hearings and discussions about potential bans this year may suggest that there are suspicions in some quarters of other countries suspect a deeper, more intricate connection.
The crux of the matter lies in understanding how TikTok, and platforms like it, fit into China’s wider interests in spreading its culture, enhancing its global influence and censoring views it objects to across national borders.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Fossil-Fuel Industry Has a Rosy Idea of Its Future
This type of doublethink is at the foundation of this year’s COP. Any language to come out of the negotiations about decreasing fossil-fuel use would go further than the world ever has on this point; at the same time, the conference has essentially doubled as a trade show for the energy industry, with oil executives holding sessions on carbon capture and OPEC hosting a pavilion. It has been a strange portmanteau of visions for the future, but in the final days, the outcome has seemed to lurch to the side of oil interests. Some amount of change may still yet come out of COP, but for now it is still minimal and incremental enough that one Canadian oil-industry group executive, Mark Cameron, told me that “we’re not losing sleep” over any agreement that nudges the world to decrease its use only of “unabated” fossil fuel.
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The Atlantic ☛ Is Hamas Waging a Religious War?
Hardly a minute passes without Hamas supporters draping themselves literally or figuratively in Islamic idioms. Arabic conversation is filled with little stock phrases that mention God, and that through constant use can lose their religious sense. (English does the same: Few Americans have God on the mind when we say goodbye, literally “God be with ye.”) Even by this standard, though, the group’s religious references are frequent, and far from perfunctory. The GoPro videos from the massacre include footage Hamas could not have planned to leak, and it shows killers using religious language with one another, while alone, and with their dying breath. In one case the bearer of a GoPro is shot in the chest, and as his lungs fill with blood, he issues a last, wet, gurgled prayer.
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Security Week ☛ Cyberattack Cripples Ukraine’s Largest Telecom Operator
“The attack won’t be as damaging to military communications as the VIASAT hack,” noted security researcher Thaddeus Grugq, also known as the Grugq. “Ukraine’s mobile telecommunications systems have been configured for increased resilience to disruption.”
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Overpopulation ☛ No need to hold COP 29: Just follow Japan’s lead!
In fact, Japan should be featured at COP 28, as a country that actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions instead of just talking about it. All 70,000 attendees should wake up, take note, and return to their respective countries and implement the same strategy.
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Environment
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Omicron Limited ☛ Natural gas is actually migrating under permafrost, and could see methane emissions skyrocket if it escapes
Because Svalbard's geological and glacial history is very similar to the rest of the Arctic region, these migrating deposits of methane are likely to be present elsewhere in the Arctic.
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Axios ☛ Report: Arctic experienced warmest summer on record
Driving the news: The average surface air temperature in the Arctic this past year was 20 degrees Fahrenheit – the sixth warmest since 1900.
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Energy/Transportation
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David Rosenthal ☛ Why Worry About Resources?
But that's not all. de Vries has joined a growing chorus of researchers showing that the VC's pivot to AI wastes similar massive amounts of power. Can analysis of AI's e-waste and water consumption be far behind?
Below the fold I discuss papers by de Vries and others on this issue.
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[Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Bangkok MRT monorail open to passengers
Giving people a viable alternative to driving is the only solution to traffic problems, and boy does Bangkok need it. I’m stoked to see continued investment in public transport, juast as I was to see the new MRT lines in KL.
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El País ☛ Why Jaguar will never be the same again
However, the most noticeable revolution will be that of the iconic Jaguar, which will become an exclusively emission-free and luxury car brand, with prices that will start above £100,000 ($125,000). This will be a reality in the second half of 2025 with the arrival of its first model, a four-door GT body that will become the most powerful Jaguar ever made, capable of offering a range of 435 miles between charges.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Energy announces new office to handle AI, quantum and more
Fu served on the National Security Council and with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, with additional federal experience on environment planning projects. She will also serve as the DOE’s chief AI officer and assume responsibility for coordinating the department’s use of AI, managing risks with AI usage and promoting innovation, according to the DOE press release.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Hackaday ☛ Some Bacteria Could Have A Rudimentary Form Of Memory
When we think of bacteria, we think of simple single-celled organisms that basically exist to consume resources and reproduce. They don’t think, feel, or remember… or do they? Bacteria don’t have brains, and as far as we know, they’re incapable of thought. But could they react to an experience and recall it later?
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Finance
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Washington Examiner ☛ Hasbro laying off over 20% of employees due to low toy sales
At what should be its busiest time of the year, Hasbro, one of the biggest toy makers in the industry, has announced it will be laying off 1,100 employees.
The cuts, which represent 20% of its workforce. are being made due to low toy sales, which Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said is expected to continue into 2024. The toy company is known for various iconic brands, such as Mr. Potato Head, Transformers, and Play-Doh, along with board games including Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering.
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An Estimated 9,000 Employees in the Video Game Industry Have Been Laid Off in 2023 - News
An estimated 9,000 employees have been laid off in the video game industry in 2023, according to a website keeping track of layoffs called Video Game Layoffs.
Unity has had the most layoffs in 2023 with 1,165, followed by ByteDance at 1,000, and Embracer Group at 954. Epic Games has laid off 830 employees and Amazon Games has laid off 715.
Of the big three console makers, some studios at PlayStation and Xbox have been hit with layoffs, however, Nintendo hasn't laid anyone off.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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YLE ☛ Nokia to acquire US defence comms firm Fenix Group
Privately held, the Fenix Group markets tactical communications products, as well as wireless, augmented reality-enabled battlefield robot technologies, according to the company.
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Nokia ☛ Nokia to acquire Fenix Group, strengthening wireless offering in the Defense segment
Nokia is a leading global provider of commercial 5G mobile broadband technology and private wireless solutions for ultra-reliable, mission-critical applications. The addition of Fenix’s tactical communications capabilities will allow Nokia to offer a more comprehensive suite of solutions to its defense customers.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Most agency AI inventories are ‘not fully comprehensive and accurate,’ GAO reports
The Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday focuses on how 23 agencies — the civilian agencies under the Chief Financial Officers Act — have progressed with a requirement that they must annually inventory their current and planned deployments of AI and disclose non-sensitive, non-classified uses publicly. That obligation stems from a Trump-era executive order (EO 13960) focused on AI.
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International Business Times ☛ Democrats Are Still Pumping Ad Dollars Into Elon Musk-Owned X, Report
After analysing ad disclosure data provided by X, The Washington Post found that Democrats have been spending a considerable amount of money to run several political ads on X since the platform stopped blocking such messages earlier this year under Musk's leadership.
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International Business Times ☛ Firing Of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Spurs Debate Among Silicon Valley CEOs
The WhatsApp group reportedly includes tech moguls like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Dropbox chief Drew Houston. Just days after being ousted from the company, Altman was reinstated as OpenAI CEO. However, it is still unclear what he might have done to get the chop.
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International Business Times ☛ EU's AI Act Will Require OpenAI, Google To Share Previously Hidden Details About Their AI Models
Notably, the law is slated to come into force in 2025 after EU member states approve it. The law forces companies to shed more light on the development process of their powerful, "general purpose" AI systems that are capable of generating images and texts.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Gizmodo ☛ Taylor Swift Is Shadowbanned From Google's 2023 Year In Trending Searches List
Taylor Swift is so popular that seismologists measured recent tour dates in Seattle as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. You wouldn’t know it from the latest edition of Google’s annual annual “Year In Search” roundup, though. Every December, the company publishes a list of the year’s most popular search terms. But one name is conspicuously absent from the 2023 edition.
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Neritam ☛ Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official western narratives over the last few years.
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Caitlin Johnstone ☛ Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
“My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares,” Cook writes. “Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. ‘Going viral’ is a distant memory.”
“I won’t be banned,” he adds. “I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.”
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RFERL ☛ Request For Early Release Of Chechen Opposition Bloggers' Mother Denied
The Shali City Court ruled on December 12 that Musayeva cannot be granted an early release because the administration of the correctional facility she is held in opposed it, claiming that Musayeva failed to be rehabilitated.
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ANF News ☛ Aba: They are stripping us of our right to speak
Murat Aba from the human rights organization TIHV reported an increase in torture and attacks by the regime in Turkey. Society would be deprived of fundamental rights such as the right to vote and stand for election, he said.
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CBC ☛ Where is Alexei Navalny? Allies lose contact with jailed Russian politician
He had been serving his latest sentence at Russia's Penal Colony No. 6, east of Moscow. But on Monday, prison officials told Navalny's lawyers that he had been moved from the colony and is no longer on the inmate roster.
The officials didn't say where Navalny went, and nobody has heard from him since.
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Meduza ☛ Alexey Navalny has been missing for a week, probably because he’s being transferred between prisons. Meduza describes this grueling process in Russia’s penitentiary system.
Unless something truly tragic has happened, Alexey Navalny’s disappearance likely means that he’s being transferred to a high-security penal colony (Russia’s supermax prisons) to serve his 19-year sentence handed down in August 2023 for the crime of “extremism.” Prisoner transfers are a grueling, dangerous, and unpredictable process. It’s also one of the most humiliating experiences of being incarcerated in Russia, say human rights activists and former inmates.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Insight Hungary ☛ The "Sovereignty Protection Authority" is harmful and against the rule of law, yet it cannot intimidate independent media
Although the newly adopted "Sovereignty Protection" law does not expressly regulate the operation of media companies, it is capable of severely restricting the freedom of the press, potentially making it difficult or even impossible for independent newsrooms, journalists and media companies to operate.
The so-called "Sovereignty Protection Authority" will be an arbitrarily appointed body with unlimited powers, operating without any oversight. This office will have the means to threaten and harass the individuals and organizations it targets, in a way that is nominally lawful but in fact arbitrary. It does not even need sanctions to do so; the damage caused by investigations without limits or legal guarantees may in itself be enough to destroy those in the crosshairs.
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BIA Net ☛ Journalist Sinan Aygül faces trial for ‘insulting’ those who attacked him
Aygül, who chairs the Bitlis Journalists’ Union, was attacked in Tatvan, Bitlis, allegedly for his critical reporting on Tatvan District Mayor Mehmet Emin Geylani. The assailants were revealed to be a municipal employee and a police officer, both relatives of the mayor.
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CPJ ☛ Taliban intelligence forces detain Afghan journalist Abdul Rahim Mohammadi
Mohammadi, who has been working as a journalist for 10 years, reports on local current affairs in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city. In February, armed Taliban members raided the headquarters of Tamadon TV in the capital, Kabul, beat several staff members, and held them for a half hour.
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Truthdig ☛ Noam Chomsky Continues To Expose Conformist Media
With few exceptions, in major U.S. media — notably unlike major media in most of the rest of the world — Chomsky has been persona non grata.
A key reason is Chomsky’s implacable opposition to the many wars of aggression that the U.S. government has launched or supported. And a particularly unacceptable deviation from approved views has been his illuminating condemnations of Israel’s historic and ongoing suppression of Palestinian rights. For several decades, as a result, vast quantities of hostility and distortion have been directed at him.
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Press Gazette ☛ Why building resilient newsrooms is a necessity, not a luxury
One key element in managing the pressures of hybrid working is the use of advanced communication technologies. Utilising video conferencing, collaborative platforms, and instant messaging can bridge the physical gap between team members.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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ANF News ☛ Sakharov Prize awarded to Jina Mahsa Amini and the ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ movement in Iran
The laureates were represented by Saleh Nikbakht, academic and lawyer representing Jina Mahsa Amini’s family; and Afsoon Najafi and Mersedeh Shahinkar, Iranian women's rights defenders who left Iran in 2023.
Opening the award ceremony, President Metsola declared: "This years’ Sakharov prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded to Jina Masha Amini and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, serves as a tribute to all the brave and defiant women, men and young people in Iran, who despite coming under increasing pressure, are continuing the fight for their rights and push for change. The European Parliament hears you and supports you. You are not alone.ʺ
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CBC ☛ Supreme Court begins hearing arguments in secret trial case that challenges open courts principle
The Supreme Court heard Tuesday that in the initial trial, the judge decided that providing details of the case to the public could compromise the identity of the informant and the trial should remain secret.
As a result, the case was not given a docket number and its details were kept secret — including the nature of the crime, where it allegedly took place, the name of the judge involved and the names of the lawyers.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Jeff Geerling ☛ Forget spaceships; I just want my music
This isn't the first time I've seen a song disappear from Apple Music. And this kind of thing happens on Spotify and other streaming services too.
I can't get too mad, because I never actually "bought" those songs directly. I just rented them. That's the model for video streaming too, like on Netflix. Even though it's super annoying to have shows and music disappear, I am renting, so it's not like I have a right to anything.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Train DRM
Speaking of trains! We all know how digital-restrictions management (DRM) schemes prevent people accessing what they paid for, encourages the very piracy they’re nominally designed to avoid, are questionably legal, and represent a potential privacy and security risk.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google defeated in Epic antitrust battle
Jurors found for Epic on all counts, a court filing showed, after more than a month of trial in Epic’s lawsuit, which accused Google of taking action to quash competitors and charge unduly high fees of up to 30% to app developers. The court in January will begin work on what remedies to implement.
The ruling marks a stunning defeat for Google, which alongside Apple operates one of the world’s largest app stores. If the ruling holds, it has the potential to give developers more sway over how their apps are distributed and how they profit off them.
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CBC ☛ Fortnite maker Epic Games wins antitrust case against Google
Epic Games, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game, filed a lawsuit against Google three years ago, alleging that the internet search giant has been abusing its power to shield its Play Store from competition in order to protect a gold mine that makes billions of dollars annually.
Just as Apple does for its iPhone app store, Google collects a commission ranging from 15 per cent to 30 per cent on digital transactions completed within apps.
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India Times ☛ Google's loss to Epic Games may cost billions but final outcome years away
Epic Games will now have a chance to submit a court filing on how it wants Google's Play Store to be fixed - potentially putting at risk what Wells Fargo estimates is $10 billion in annual revenue from app sales and in-app purchases for the tech giant.
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India Times ☛ Apple offers to settle EU antitrust charges on Apple Pay, sources say
The EU competition enforcer is likely to seek feedback next month from rivals and customers before deciding whether to accept Apple's offer, the people said.
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New York Times ☛ Google’s Antitrust Loss to Epic Could Preview Its Legal Fate in 2024
There were 11 antitrust claims that Epic Games, the maker of the hit videogame Fortnite, had brought against Google’s Play Store for Android mobile devices, and the jury found Google to be at fault in every one of them.
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Copyrights
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India Times ☛ Meta used copyrighted books for AI training despite lawyers' warnings, allege authors
A new complaint, filed on Monday, includes chat logs of a Meta-affiliated researcher discussing the procurement of the dataset in a Discord server, a potentially significant piece of evidence indicating that Meta was aware that its use of the books may not be protected by US copyright law.
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Walled Culture ☛ How copyright exceptionalism in France risks undermining the EU legal system
Back in May, Walled Culture wrote about an important case before the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It involved the “High Authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of rights on the Internet” (Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur internet – the infamous HADOPI), and concerned the question whether copyright was more important than privacy. Disappointingly, one of the CJEU’s key advisers, the Advocate General (AG) Szpunar, had already issued an opinion that essentially came down on the side of copyright. The same adviser has now issued a second opinion on the matter, and a post on the European Law Blog argues that it is even worse than the first: [...]
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Torrent Freak ☛ BeStreamWise 'Piracy=Malware' Campaign Site Blocked By Security Vendors
The BeStreamWise anti-piracy campaign run by Sky, Premier League, FACT, ITV, CrimeStoppers, and the UK Intellectual Property Office, aims to deter piracy by linking illegal streaming services with criminality and malware. In an ironic twist, multiple security vendors are flagging the campaign's website for suspected suspicious activity. On closer inspection, this unusual and unlikely situation may pre-date the campaign's official launch.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Music Piracy Remains a Widespread Problem, Particularly in Emerging Countries
Music industry group IFPI has released its latest music consumption report, revealing that people are listening to more music in more ways than ever before. The report also stresses that piracy remains a threat. The problem is most pronounced in emerging countries, where well over half of the online population pirates music.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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RMS liked this tune (seriously)
Home at last after five days away: got in some important friends 'n family socializing, accomplished an important piece of a home purchase puzzle. The driving was a bit grueling, but surprising my aunt (turns 80 tomorrow) in a restaurant in her home town by my wife and I starting singing "Happy Birthday" while not yet in her line of sight, and finishing right in front of her was absolutely priceless.
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🔤SpellBinding — FGUNORL Wordo: TROOP
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Politics and World Events
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Just Don't Buy It!
I've been casually monitoring the COP28 talks and I am more and more becoming convinced that they are primarily for show. Fossil fuel exporting nations won't accept (for good reason, from their perspective) any language in the agreements that includes the phrase "phase out" in relation to fossil fuels. Most other nations insist that such language is crucial to reaching an agreement.
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Be aware of Energy Transition doom proficy
So, I came across this Simon Michaux guy on YouTube yesterday. He is a geologist and claims that the energy transition is doomed to fail because of the lack of (rare earth) metals. Off by multiple orders of magnitude. His presentation was convinvcing to me at first. WHile I have some but very limiteds knowledge about engineering the power gird. Howerver, upon firther research. I found that his BIG claims are just wrong.
The blogger goes by "Eclipse Now" did a good job of debunking his claims. I will link to his blog post below. I will not link to the video inorder to not boost YouTube's algorithm. But they are easy to find.
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Technology and Free Software
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🎧 Rip, Mix, Burn Baby, Burn...
Not sure what’s prompted this, but a few of my friends have ended up on Apple Music recently. This is OK! Fuck Spotify.
And bad. iTunes is a rotting piece of crap, the Apple Music web-frontend is merely “OK” on its best day, and holy-shit-why-can’t-I-copy-an-MP3-onto-my-bastard-iPhone-and-just-play-it *without it being connected to a fucking Mac*…
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Custom dictionaries on Kobo e-readers
I do most of my reading on a Kobo Clara e-reader. As I've written about over gopher, I also produce ebooks for Standard Ebooks[1] and opperate a magazine that releases books in ebook format. While working on proofing a Richard Jefferies novel I decided it would be easier to look up words that I don't know and thus, sometimes, look like misspellings in a dictionary rather than flagging them with an annotaion and then comparing to page scans (to make sure there was not a transcription or OCR error).
[...]
I do not ever turn on WiFi. I am happy with how the device runs and am not interested in firmware updates, phoning home, or other shenanigans.
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Internet/Gemini
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One Year in Geminispace
Well, one year of gemlogging. My actual start sometime in November 2022. Conversations with a mutual back on Twitter lead to a discussion of the slow web, Geminispace, and other things. An invitation to join this strange place of pubnixes and community. I was intrigued. I was resistant. It would be a year and a half until I did.
In the meantime, the idea sat there. I read about the small web. I read about Geminispace. It seemed wonderful, the kind of community that has been wholly lacking since the beginning of the social media age of the web. A community of everyone isn't a community. Knowing half the people I've ever met might read a Facebook post doesn't encourage me to write. Meanwhile, everyone kept creating subreddits. That's community, right? Individual forums slowly died. Google kept upranking subreddits. People discover via Google. If you aren't shown, you may as well be gone.
[...]
So I'm still here, still writing. Sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes I wonder who's reading. And every now and then, I get an email to my RTC address to chat about something. And it's wonderful.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.