Links 19/12/2023: Client Side Encryption for Gemini, Self-Driving [sic] Cars Mass Layoffs Again
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Gizmodo ☛ Obituary: Godzilla Suit Actor Kenpachiro Satsuma Has Passed Away
Satsuma was born May 27, 1947 under the name Yasuaki Maeda. He started acting in the 1960s in bit parts for movies like Incident at Blood Pass. In 1971, he made his debut in the monster movie scene with Godzilla vs. Hedorah, where he played the latter monster. He would then go on to be the suit actor for Gigan in Godzilla vs. Gigan the following year, along with 1973's Godzilla vs. Megalon and the tokusatsu series Zone Fighter.
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RetailWire ☛ Are Layoffs Worth the Trouble?
According to a survey conducted in late November by BizReport, 71% of workers who have survived a round of corporate layoffs say their motivation at work has declined [...]
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New York Times ☛ Guy Stern, Who Fled Germany and Then Interrogated Nazis, Dies at 101
Mr. Stern was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys, a group named for a secret Army camp in Maryland that served as a training center where an estimated 11,000 soldiers — 2,000 to 3,000 of them European Jews, mostly from Germany — completed a full course of instruction.
They learned, among other things, how to interrogate, interpret and translate for foreign officials; recognize the details of imprisoned German and Italian prisoners’ uniforms; and extract vital information from documents drafted in bureaucratic German.
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The Washington Post ☛ Guy Stern, Holocaust refugee who interrogated Nazi POWs, dies at 101
By the end of the war, more than 60 percent of the “actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield” was collected by their members, David Frey, the founding director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2021.
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Click On Detroit ☛ Guy Stern, Holocaust survivor, WWII ‘Ritchie Boy,’ dies at 101
In 2021, Stern told Local 4 that the Ritchie Boys didn’t like being called heroes. They were soldiers doing their job. They had a war to fight and they did it.
Stern detailed some of what he experienced, including his escape from Nazi German in a memoir titled “Invisible Ink.” While Stern was able to escape, his parents, younger brother, and sister were forced from their home, deported, and later killed.
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Nico Cartron ☛ Reducing the number of tags I'm using
BashBlog allows specifying tags for each article I'm writing, and I'm using it extensively.
I've tried not using too many tags, but at the same time I want topics to be well covered, so it's a tricky tradeoff to find.
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Science
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Axios ☛ The global web of science collaboration is expanding
China generated the most scientific publications in 2022 — about twice as many as the U.S. The share of articles from China that were highly cited grew from 0.4% in 2006 to 1.3% in 2020, while the share of U.S. articles that were highly cited dropped to 1.7% in 2020 and Japan slipped as well.
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Adafruit ☛ These Bricks Can Absorb Traffic Noise – Thesis Presentation on Helmholtz Resonators
Joe Makes was looking for solutions for his Masters Thesis from University College London. Very interesting project combing design, 3D printing, and lots of trial and error: [...]
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Education
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Times Higher Education ☛ How the West fell out of love with international students
Experts have long predicted a regulatory overreaction to the burgeoning numbers of students lured by lax regulation during the Covid years. Asked whether she would consider capping overseas student numbers, home affairs minister Clare O’Neil said she was confident that the measures in the migration strategy would contain the growth.
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Hardware
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Science Alert ☛ World's First Human 'Brain-Scale' Supercomputer Will Go Online in 2024
The supercomputer, known as DeepSouth, is being developed by Western Sydney University.
When it goes online next year, it will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, which rivals the estimated rate of operations in the human brain.
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Eerie Linux ☛ The TEK Cleave: A unique typing experience
This post was originally meant to be called “Two weeks with the TEK Cleave keyboard” and to be published at the end of January 2021. I wasn’t happy with the article, though and so I delayed it. Eventually I scrapped what I had written and started over after more than half a year of using my new keyboard on a daily basis. However… I didn’t publish it then, either.
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Hackaday ☛ Remembering Ed Roberts, The Home Computer Pioneer You Should Have Heard Of But Probably Haven’t
We’re pretty familiar with such names as Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Jack Tramiel, Nolan Bushnell, and the other movers and shakers of the 1970s home computer world. But there’s one person who towered among them for a few years before cashing out and leaving the computer business to pursue the life he’d always wanted. [Gareth Edwards] for Every has a fascinating profile of Ed Roberts, the man who arguably started the home computer boom but is now an obscure figure.
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Hackaday ☛ Second Life UPS Mark II: A UPS For Low-Voltage DC Applications
When you have a whole stack of devices and appliances that all have an AC to DC adapter and which you’d like to put on an uninterruptable power supply (UPS), you could do the obvious thing and get an off-the-shelf UPS with myriad AC outputs. In the case of a 19″ rack this means wrangling a power strip or two and any combination of differently sized AC/DC adapters into the rack, with questionable efficiency and waste heat dumped into the rack. This is where a DC-only UPS like [Maciej Grela]’s Second Life UPS Mark II provides an interesting alternative.
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Hackaday ☛ The Hot Chocolate Effect Explained
This is the time of year when people in the Northern Hemisphere like to enjoy hot beverages like hot chocolate. [The Action Lab] uses hot chocolate to demonstrate an odd acoustic effect. Tapping a container of hot chocolate — or even just hot water — will make a sound at a certain frequency. But if you keep tapping, the frequency of the sound will gradually increase. Don’t know why? Don’t worry, neither did scientists until around 1980.
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Eerie Linux ☛ The TEK Cleave: A unique typing experience
In this article I compare the new TEK Cleave to the classic TEK (Truly Ergonomic Keyboard).
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Hackaday ☛ Storage Media Forgotten
These days, cheap removable storage is no problem. USB sticks are virtually free at moderate capacity and not unreasonable, even at relatively large sizes. They are rugged, work across platforms, and don’t require any exotic interfaces. But this hasn’t always been the case. In the 1990s, people wanted to store too much data for floppies, but weren’t willing to shell out for removable hard drives or tapes. Many companies identified this opportunity with, perhaps, the most successful being Iomega with the Zip drive. But there were others, including the Avatar Shark that [This Does Not Compute] remembers in a video you can see below.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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India Times ☛ Less social media use found to improve mental health, job satisfaction: Study
Reducing social media usage by 30 minutes improves mental health, job satisfaction while frequent users find it difficult to focus on their work, a study has found.
Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum and the German Center for Mental Health, Germany, found that less social media use led to individuals feeling less overworked and lower levels of "fear of missing out" - popularly known as FOMO - on important happenings in their network when they aren't online.
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Antivaxxers think they understand frame shifting. They do not.
One unexpected consequence of the infodemic of misinformation and disinformation that has accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic is that it’s given me a chance to reacquaint myself with some molecular biology and genetics that I hadn’t been using nearly as much, thanks to a chance in my research focus several years ago. My lab used to do experiments studying microRNAs and how they regulate gene expression. I even studied how transcription factors regulate gene expression and did a dissection of the functional domains of a transcription factor, but over time I’ve moved towards projects that involve more cellular biology and repurposing drugs approved for other indications for use treating breast cancer. Thanks to antivaxxers, though, I now get the opportunity to go back to my scientific roots, as when James Lyons-Weiler tried to claim that he had found plasmid sequences in the (then) newly-published sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and that this was slam-dunk evidence that he had “cracked the coronavirus code” and proven that SARS-CoV-2 had been artificially engineered in a laboratory as the result a misadventure trying to produce a SARS vaccine. Let’s just say that a careful look at the actual sequences that he examined was not consistent with his conclusions. Then there were so many articles claiming that the mRNA vaccines “permanently alter your DNA” (they don’t) and that contaminating plasmid DNA with short sequences from the SV40 promoter from one of the plasmids used in the Pfizer manufacturing process were getting into the nucleus, inserting themselves into the genome, and causing insertional mutagenesis leading to cancer., (There’s no evidence that they do any of that.) Now they’ve discovered frame shifting. Let the hilarity ensue!
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YLE ☛ Monday's papers: Phone freakout, paper packaging and neck protectors
Parents largely blamed smartphones for Finland's Pisa ranking decline.
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Science Alert ☛ Long COVID Rate in Africa Is Almost 50% of Cases, Researchers Warn
Shocking new figures.
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JURIST ☛ UK peer admits she stands to benefit from government contract for PPE equipment made during Covid pandemic
UK Baroness Michelle Mone, a Scottish businesswoman and a Conservative Party-appointed life peer who later left the party, admitted in an interview with the BillBC published on Sunday that she stands to benefit from millions of pounds of profit received by personal protective equipment (PPE) company PPE Medpro [...]
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The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia not reinstating lockdown restrictions despite rise in Covid-19 cases, health minister says
The Health Ministry hopes the country can deal with the situation without resorting to restrictions.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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TechCrunch ☛ Cruise cuts a quarter of its self-driving workforce, another e-scooter startup folds and a special year-end message
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free.
Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.
Hello! And goodbye! Well, at least until 2024. The Station is going to take a little break through the end of this year. I want to thank you all for reading our weekly newsletter and reaching out to me with suggestions, tips and criticism. Yes, I even appreciate the thoughtful pushback.
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EuroGamer ☛ You can't talk about 2023 in games without talking about layoffs
How is it that 2023 can have been one of the best years in memory for games but also one of the worst years in memory for games, and for the gaming industry. I can't balance this equation - I've been trying all year and it gives me a headache.
We should be talking about 2023 as one of the years that will go down in history for games, like 2007 did. We've had Baldur's Gate 3, Zelda 2 (Bertie that is not what it's called), Cocoon, Alan Wake 2, Banished Vault, and - genuinely - so many more. We've been giddy all year at Eurogamer at the relentless quality on show. We ought to be celebrating now during this end of year period, and we will celebrate. We can't do that alone, because there's another story we cannot ignore: layoffs.
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Interesting Engineering ☛ Tesla’s Autopilot under fire after recall and lawsuits
Tesla, the world’s most valuable carmaker, is facing a legal backlash over its Autopilot system, which has been linked to several fatal crashes. The company has recalled over 2 million electric vehicles over software glitches that could affect the driver-assistance feature.
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Axios ☛ Why Silicon Valley doesn't agree on AI's future
The divide among venture capitalists over the development of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly crystalized.
Why it matters: "It's the new [Internet]," VCs say, regardless of which camp they fall into.
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IT Wire ☛ GlobalData predicts $1.1 billion growth in medical device cybersecurity market ‘amid rising threats’
According to the recent report, Cybersecurity in Medical Devices, the market for cybersecurity in medical devices is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.2% between 2022 and 2027, reaching $1.1 billion, forecasts GlobalData.
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RFERL ☛ Software Problem Disrupts Iranian Gas Stations
Services have been disrupted at about 70 percent of Iran's gas stations, Oil Minister Javad Owji told state TV on December 18, adding that outside interference is a possibility.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google will stop sharing user location data with police
Google is changing its Maps tool so that the company no longer has access to users’ individual location histories, cutting off its ability to respond to law enforcement warrants that ask for data on everyone who was in the vicinity of a crime.
Google is changing its Location History feature on Google Maps, according to a blog post. The feature, which Google says is off by default, helps users remember where they’ve been. The company said on Thursday that for users who have it enabled, location data will soon be saved directly on users’ devices, blocking Google from being able to see it, and, by extension, blocking law enforcement from being able to demand that information from Google.
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Kev Quirk ☛ A Moment of Madness
Why offer the ability to sign up with an email address if you have no fucking intention of honouring it?
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Axios ☛ Lawmakers push surveillance debate to 2024
Currently, intelligence officials rely on the FISA court to review whether their use of the Section 702 program is legal.
Those certifications, which advocates say can be granted in early 2024, could last a whole year.
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The Hill ☛ Prince Harry wins phone hacking case: What to know about bombshell ruling
Prince Harry, along with 100 others, sued MGN and and the Sunday People tabloids in 2019, accusing them of knowingly engaging in phone hacking and illegal deception on an “industrial scale” between 1991 and 2011.s
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Adriaan Roselli ☛ Baseline Does Not Really Cover Baseline Support
The relatively new Web Platform Baseline offering does not track browser support for accessibility features built into the web platform. If you need to understand whether browsers support accessibility features as your own base level set of requirements, for legal or other compliance reasons, then Web Platform Baseline does not represent a baseline.
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Futurism ☛ DNA Tests Are a Fun Holiday Gift... Unless They Reveal a Horrifying Secret
The holiday season means presents galore — but in the case of at-home DNA tests, some gifts may be better left unopened.
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Gannett ☛ Ancestry, 23&Me and when genetic screening gifts aren't fun anymore
Fisher says uncertainty often remain after the DNA dust settles. "Many changes we face in life are a mixed bag; at times they will feel positive and negative, and we oscillate between those perceptions," Fisher says. "In life, we often cannot prepare ourselves for how we will react to unexpected change, but with these services, we can by asking about the intention to use them, and what we are prepared to do, and feel, if unexpected results are provided."
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EFF ☛ EFF Joins Forces with 20+ Organizations in the Coalition #MigrarSinVigilancia
On this International Migrants Day (December 18), we join forces with a key group of digital rights and frontline humanitarian organizations to coordinate actions and share resources in pursuit of this significant goal.
Governments increasingly use technologies to monitor migrants, asylum seekers, and others moving across borders with growing frequency and intensity. This intensive surveillance is often framed within the concept of "smart borders" as a more humanitarian approach to address and streamline border management, even though its implementation often negatively impacts the migrant population.
EFF has been documenting the magnitude and breadth of such surveillance apparatus, as well as how it grows and impacts communities at the border. We have fought in courts against the arbitrariness of border searches in the U.S. and called out the inherent dangers of amassing migrants' genetic data in law enforcement databases.
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Defence/Aggression
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Site36 ☛ More than 60 dead in boat accident: British merchant ship pushbacks survivors to Libya
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India Times ☛ Tencent turns to ByteDance in gaming showdown with NetEase
Tencent released on Friday mobile party game "DreamStar" that it hopes to challenge "Eggy Party", a similar offering from NetEase which has become a surprise hit this year with 100 million monthly active users.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Tencent turns to ByteDance in gaming showdown
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Atlantic Council ☛ 2024 preview: The West must decide if it wants Ukraine to win
The European Union for its part has contributed around $80 billion in overall aid, but much of this has been in the form of financial assistance rather than military supplies. A closer look shows that the burden has not been fairly shared across Europe. As a percentage of GDP, contributions from Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, and Norway, all of whom share a border with the Russian Federation, far outstrip wealthier states like Germany, France, and Italy.
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Salon ☛ Trump recirculates Hitler rhetoric at campaign event in New Hampshire
Speaking to a crowd of MAGA supporters, Trump said, "We got a lot of work to do. They're poisoning the blood of our country," which MTN points out is a near direct quote to a line in Hitler's Mein Kampf: "All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning."
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Reuters ☛ Trump repeats 'poisoning the blood' anti-immigrant remark
Trump used the same "poisoning the blood" language during an interview with The National Pulse, a right-leaning website, that was published in late September. It prompted a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, called the language "racist, xenophobic and despicable."
Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of a book on fascism, said Trump's repeated use of that language was dangerous. He said Trump's words echoed the rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who warned against German blood being poisoned by Jews in his political treatise "Mein Kampf".
"He is now employing this vocabulary in repetition in rallies. Repeating dangerous speech increases its normalization and the practices it recommends," Stanley said. "This is very concerning talk for the safety of immigrants in the U.S."
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The Economist ☛ When the New York Times lost its way
Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
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New Statesman ☛ Capitalism will kill us all: Fossil fuel companies are destroying the planet – not saving it.
Between 30 November and 12 December, at the end of a year that has experienced the hottest temperatures and witnessed the highest fossil fuel emissions on record, world leaders gathered in Dubai for Cop28, the UN climate conference. As a climate negotiation hosted by a leading petrostate and chaired by the CEO of one of the world’s largest oil companies, it was an event uniquely beset by controversy and contradiction. And yet, as observers simultaneously celebrate and denounce a final agreement that both mentions fossil fuels for the first time and fails to commit to their urgent and vital “phase-out”, it is clear that these negotiations are predicated on a contradiction: the task of agreeing a programme of radical global economic transformation is allocated to those – including, this year, a record 2,500 fossil fuel industry representatives – who stand to lose the most from disrupting the current economic model.
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RFERL ☛ Putin Warns Finland Of Unspecified 'Problems' As Helsinki Closes Border Again
The timing and number of immigrants who’ve massed at several border points has bolstered Finland’s contention that Russian authorities are deliberately encouraging migrants to travel to Finland in a bid to destabilize the country.
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NBC ☛ Historic climate deal does the ‘bare minimum’ as the world warms, burns and floods
It was a historic deal but one that once again fell short for many climate activists, who saw it as further evidence that efforts to address climate change are moving too slowly and are being compromised by fossil fuel interests.
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Pro Publica ☛ Utah Women Who Tried to Report Sexual Assaults to Provo Police Faced Delays, Language Barriers
In June 2022, Yanett Bernal walked into the police station in Provo, Utah, to report that her OB-GYN had sexually assaulted her. She said after making a written statement she told a detective over the phone how David Broadbent conducted painful vaginal and rectal exams during her last pregnancy.
A month later, Bernal went back to the station to ask for a copy of her report. A worker at the reception desk told her that a report didn’t exist, she recalled.
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New York Times ☛ Pressure Mounts on Israel, and Putin Profits Off Boycott
Hear the news in five minutes.
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New Yorker ☛ Mosab Abu Toha’s Harrowing Detention in Gaza
The Palestinian writer and New Yorker contributor was wrongly accused of being a Hamas activist by Israeli forces while he tried to flee Gaza with his family.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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AntiWar ☛ The Myth That Putin Was Bent on Conquering Ukraine and Creating a Greater Russia
There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022.
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Atlantic Council ☛ 2024 preview: The West must decide if it wants Ukraine to win
If Western leaders fail to provide Ukraine with the weapons to defeat Putin in 2024, this will significantly increase the likelihood of a direct military confrontation between Russia and NATO, writes Richard D. Hooker Jr.
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RFERL ☛ Film Director Otar Iosseliani Dies At 89, Was Vehement Critic Of Putin, Russia Wars
Georgia-born film director and screenwriter Otar Iosseliani has died in France, close friend Yury Rost reported on December 17.
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RFERL ☛ Putin Warns Finland Of Unspecified 'Problems' As Helsinki Closes Border Again
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of unspecified “problems” with Finland and said he had ordered the establishment of a new military district in regions bordering the Nordic nation.
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The Straits Times ☛ Where is democracy headed in 2024? Trump may have the final word
Russia's Vladimir Putin looks set to remain in power until at least 2030; India's Narendra Modi seems certain to extend his rule to 2029; and Donald Trump could return to the White House despite charges of subverting U.S. democracy.
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YLE ☛ Putin: Russia will concentrate more military units near Finland
According to the Russian president, Finland was “dragged” into Nato.
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s ruling party unanimously backs Putin’s bid for reelection — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Putin says Russia will have problems with Finland now that it has joined NATO — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Wagner Group fighter recruited from prison receives six-year prison sentence after opening fire on police — Meduza
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France24 ☛ Ukraine probes suspected spying device found in army command office
Ukraine's security service said on Sunday it had launched a criminal probe under a law on information gathering after a "technical device" was found in an office that could have been used in the future by Commander in Chief Valery Zaluzhnyi.
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LRT ☛ Lithuania becomes repair hub for German tanks damaged on battlefield in Ukraine
“In a Ukrainian Leopard through a Lithuanian forest,” Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas wrote in the caption of a video he posted on Facebook (Farcebook) on Friday after he was given a ten-minute tank ride over rough terrain in one of Lithuanian military training areas.
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RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Says Kyiv Plans To Move Quickly On Pushing Forward EU Membership Talks
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on December 17 said Kyiv will soon officially initiate the process he hopes will lead to membership in the European Union, following the bloc’s decision on December 14 to open such talks with Ukraine and also Moldova.
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RFERL ☛ Third Ukrainian Trucker Dies At Polish-Ukrainian Border During Blockade
A Ukrainian truck driver has died at the Polish-Ukrainian border, becoming ill while standing in line due to the strike by Polish carriers on December 16.
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RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Forces Reportedly Press Fight Inside Russia, Target Air Base, Battle Near Border Village
Ukraine targeted an air base and surrounding areas inside Russia on December 17 with what one regional official called "mass drone strikes" while both sides' forces reportedly exchanged gunfire outside the village of Terebreno -- also inside Russia and a short distance to the border.
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New York Times ☛ Fear and Suspicion Stalk Russian Speakers in Latvia
In response to the war in Ukraine, Latvia has targeted residents with Russian passports as part of efforts to combat Moscow’s influence.
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New York Times ☛ How Hungary Undermined an E.U. Effort to Give More Aid to Ukraine
Prime Minister Viktor Orban used E.U. rules on unanimous decisions to sink a $52 billion package strongly backed by larger countries.
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Meduza ☛ Financial Times: E.U. could suspend Hungary’s voting rights to pass new Ukraine aid package — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russians who fled to Serbia to escape the war against Ukraine now find themselves persecuted by local police and hunted by Moscow’s intelligence community — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Governor of Russia’s Belgorod region reports clashes near border, Ukraine says attack launched by ‘opponents of Kremlin regime’ — Meduza
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LRT ☛ Lithuanian government looking for ways to block Russian athletes from international competitions
Lithuania’s Minister of Education, Science and Sport Gintautas Jakštas is holding a meeting on Monday to discuss possible ways to prevent Russian and Belarusian athletes from participating in international competitions.
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RFERL ☛ Russia's Navalny Still Missing As Court Again Postpones Hearing
A court in the Russian city of Vladimir has again postponed a hearing into complaints filed by imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny “until his whereabouts are ascertained.”
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Meduza ☛ Russian courts suspend proceedings in Navalny cases until his ‘location is established’ — Meduza
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RFERL ☛ Moldova Holds Military Maneuvers Near Russia-Backed Breakaway Region Of Transdniester
Pro-Western Moldova on December 17 launched military exercises near the Russia-backed breakaway region Of Transdniester, the Defense Ministry said, adding that the maneuvers were to run through December 22.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Not Interested In Extending Black Sea Grain Deal
Russia has no interest in extending the Black Sea grain deal, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on December 17, citing Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Eyes Additional Oil Export Cuts In December
Russia on December 17 said it would deepen oil export cuts in December by potentially 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) or more, earlier than promised, as the world's biggest exporters try to support declining global oil prices.
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YLE ☛ Russian war crimes suspect faces remand hearing in Helsinki on Monday
Two previous trials held in Finland for war crimes committed abroad ended in acquittals.
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Meduza ☛ Voters’ committee supports nominating Russian journalist Yekaterina Duntsova as presidential candidate — Meduza
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YLE ☛ Two illegal entries over Russian border
The Finnish Border Guard said that two people had crossed at Vaalimaa on Saturday evening, a day after the crossing point was closed.
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Meduza ☛ Russian State Duma’s Health Protection Committee opposes ban on abortions in private clinics — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Pro Publica ☛ Bodycam Videos of Police Killings Remain Out of Public View
In the last 10 years, taxpayers have spent millions to outfit police officers across the country with body-worn cameras in what was sold as a new era of transparency and accountability. But a survey by ProPublica shows that when civilians die at the hands of police, the public usually never sees the footage.
At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.
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Futurism ☛ SpaceX Furious That Government Won't Give It Free Handout of Nearly a Billion Dollars
The Federal Communications Commission just rejected SpaceX's appeal to reinstate an $886 million grant to bring high-speed broadband to rural areas using Starlink satellites — and the Elon Musk-led space company is absolutely furious.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Mark Twain’s biographer was a mysterious stranger from Kansas. A century later, secrets remain.
There was a time when Paine needed no introduction, as he was a nationally celebrated biographer and author. He wrote some books for children, others for adults, and also tried his hand at poetry, painting and photography. He liked to canoe and camp, played a little guitar, and was plagued by bad teeth all his life. He yearned for fame from a young age and when he finally made the leap to the footlights of American celebrity as Mark Twain’s official biographer, literary executor and friend, his jumping off place was Fort Scott, Kansas.
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Environment
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ What COP28 Means for the Climate-AI Dilemma
Nations are already using AI for climate objectives, from mapping the carbon absorption capacity of forests in Indonesia to providing communities in Malawi with flood warnings fifteen days in advance, enabling them to evacuate. But much more remains to be done to respond to UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ call to ‘develop AI that is reliable and safe and that can … supercharge climate action’.
That’s why the UN Climate Technology Mechanism has this year created a dedicated Initiative on Artificial Intelligence for Climate Action (AI4ClimateAction). The Initiative provides space for policy discussions on climate and AI, supports capacity-building for developing countries to harness AI and will develop regional networks of actors that can support AI for climate action.
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Science Alert ☛ A Perfect Storm of Culture And Climate Gave Us Pro Skateboarding, Study Says
The annual construction of around 20,000 new curved wall pools, mandated water conservation, and advances in technology like digital photography and industrial polyurethane all contributed to skateboarding's boom in popularity.
Surfers turned the empty pools into skateboarding havens, which started a new trend in LA in the late '70s.
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The Revelator ☛ Why Dam Removal Is a Climate Solution
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Democracy Now ☛ “Tragically Historic”: The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani on the Failure of Yet Another U.N. Climate Summit
After some 200 countries at COP28 agreed to phase down fossil fuels, nations are facing pressure to block new oil and gas projects. A growing number of Democrats are calling on President Biden to stop massive new fossil fuel developments, and climate groups in the U.K. filed a lawsuit to block a massive new oilfield in the North Sea, saying it violates obligations to target net-zero carbon emissions. “Without means of implementation, these are just words,” says The Guardian’s senior climate reporter Nina Lakhani, who covered COP28. She says the COP28 deal continues a tragic history of powerful, polluting countries denying their responsibility for climate change and refusing to support those most impacted. “Equity is not anywhere to be seen in that final document that we got.”
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Energy/Transportation
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Ruben Schade ☛ Exploring a separated cycle path in St Leonards
This weekend we discovered another stretch, this time snaking from Artarmon to St Leonards. It’s entirely grade separated, and while it does run alongside an ugly motorway for a few hundred metres, it’s otherwise completely surrounded by bush and parkland. It’s gorgeous!
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Hackaday ☛ Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity
Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage.
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Overpopulation
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RFERL ☛ Iran's Climate Migration Crisis Could Turn Into National 'Disaster'
Iranian officials have blamed worsening water scarcity and rising desertification on climate change. But experts say the crisis has been exacerbated by government mismanagement and rapid population growth.
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New York Times ☛ Who Gets the Water in California? Whoever Gets There First.
To understand one reason California struggles so mightily to track its water, you might visit a small room in Sacramento that is jam-packed with some of the state’s most valuable mysteries.
There are documents written in the ornate cursive of bygone times. Corduroy-bound ledgers. Maps whose labels have come unglued. Sepia photos of charmingly unphotogenic subjects: dirt fields, pear orchards, wooden sluices.
These are the water board’s records of every water right it has handed out since the early 20th century. Millions of musty files, smelling of history. And they are unwieldy, unsearchable — a mess.
Starting next month, all of this forgotten paper will, for the first time, be scanned and made accessible online to help resolve water disputes and better parcel out supplies during droughts. But soon, the board could go even further, demanding more information from farmers who hold the state’s oldest water claims, those dating back to the pioneer era.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ California prepares to transform sewage into pure drinking water under new rules
The Metropolitan Water District functions as Southern California’s wholesaler, delivering supplies to cities and agencies that serve 19 million people in six counties.
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San Fancisco ☛ California poised to allow ‘toilet to tap’ projects, in landmark water rule
Plenty of water is already reused in California, but it is not immediately funneled back into taps after treatment.
Treated wastewater is increasingly widely used for irrigation, including in the Napa Valley, and for industrial uses.
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USDOI ☛ Biden-Harris Administration Announces Several New Water Conservation Agreements in California to Protect the Colorado River System
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton joined federal, Tribal and state leaders in Nevada today to announce the execution of new water conservation agreements, including an agreement with the Coachella Valley Water District to save up to 105,000 acre-feet of water through 2025 and an agreement with the Quechan Indian Tribe to save up to 39,000 acre-feet through 2025. The event also commemorated a recently signed agreement with the Imperial Irrigation District to conserve approximately 100,000 acre-feet of water in 2023. The leaders also announced that additional system conservation agreements with the Palo Verde Irrigation District, Bard Water District – in cooperation with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California – and a second agreement with the Coachella Valley Water District are expected to be finalized in the coming weeks.
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Finance
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[Old] Bloomberg ☛ LBRY, Winding Down, Drops Appeal of Crypto Ruling for SEC (2)
Debt-burdened LBRY decided not to continue a fight against the SEC at the First Circuit, where it sought to reverse a lower court holding that its cryptocurrency was a security.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ Zuckerbunker
Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Top-Secret Hawaii Compound: [...]
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Ruben Schade ☛ An IT paper trail saving your butt? Well, maybe
When expectations aren’t met, no amount of correctness will dissuade someone from being angry, and drop you as an employee, client, or supplier. “It’s not my fault, but it’s now my responsibility”, as Marco Arment once put it on an old episode of Build and Analyse. Legal documents, strictly speaking, only protect you from liability.
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Pro Publica ☛ Clarence Thomas’ Money Complaints Sparked Resignation Fears
In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Futurism ☛ Channel 1 Says It'll Use AI-Generated News Anchors
One stiffly assures the viewer that Channel 1's output is "not fake news." Rather than creating its own stories, says the AI anchor assuming the form of a man in a suit, Channel 1 will rely on content gathered from human-made, "trusted news sources" around the world, repackaged and personalized to each viewer's tastes and interests.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Register UK ☛ Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network
Usenet predated the world wide web by more than a decade and comprised a federated set of newsgroups – threaded conversations that weren't vastly different to the format still used by communities like the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Most newsgroups used the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) so its content could be shared across the constellation of servers accessed by end users. Those servers were needed because in the early days of the public internet it was not always easy to retrieve info from distant servers without waiting an eternity. And with early internet accounts usually limited by connection time rather than download capacity, federated content made a lot of sense.
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Equal Times ☛ As digital censorship concerns cloud DR Congo’s crucial election, elsewhere in Francophone Africa, [Internet] shutdowns also threaten livelihoods and democracy
The authorities in many French-speaking African countries, however, often disrupt or shut down access to the [Internet], particularly during elections and political crises. This was the case, for example, during the August 2023 elections in Gabon, where the government justified cutting off [Internet] access for several hours as a means of preventing “calls for disorder and violence”. Senegal has also experienced several episodes of restricted access to social networks in recent years during times of political tension in the country.
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Hollywood Reporter ☛ Iranian Film ‘No End’ Dropped From Hainan Island Festival, Claims Chinese Censorship
“[We] acknowledge the pressures that festivals under oppressive regimes face and applaud those that are able to maintain high artistic standards despite state censorship,” ArtHood said. “Nevertheless, [we are] disappointed and shocked by the decision of the authorities.”
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Seattle Times ☛ Free speech on campus: ‘Censorship is not the answer’
I agree with Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, and Howard Gillman, chancellor of UC Irvine and law professor, about the need for universities to return to the principles of free speech.
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New York Times ☛ Arrested in 2020, Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Tycoon Gets His Day in Court
Mr. Lai has been charged with “collusion with foreign forces” under the national security law and faces up to life in prison if convicted. He is currently serving a five-year sentence in a fraud case, apparently held in solitary confinement. Human rights activists as well as the United States and British governments have denounced the charges against Mr. Lai as spurious and politically motivated.
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Meduza ☛ Russia charges writer Boris Akunin with ‘justifying terrorism’ — Meduza
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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CBC ☛ E-readers were supposed to kill printed books. Instead, they're booming
Print book sales are up 10‒14 per cent over three years in most major English-speaking markets, says Duncan Stewart, a consumer forecasting analyst for Deloitte who lives in Toronto and specializes in media and technology. He says those are quite nice numbers "for an industry that many people thought was dying."
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CPJ ☛ CPJ calls for a thorough investigation into killing of Mozambican journalist João Chamusse
New York, December 14, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for authorities in Mozambique to thoroughly investigate the killing of journalist João Chamusse outside his home his home in KaTembe, in the province of Maputo, on Thursday.
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The Dissenter ☛ Resolution In US Congress Calls For End To Assange Case As Extradition Nears
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Civil Rights/Policing
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New York Times ☛ Why We’re Helping Yazidi Americans Get Justice
ISIS was one of the most brutal terrorist organizations in modern history. At its peak, it exercised control of territory the size of Britain, recruited tens of thousands of fighters and carried out or inspired attacks in over two dozen countries. It relied on a network of financiers to realize such global ambitions. But most of that network’s members have yet to face justice, and most ISIS victims have yet to receive any compensation for their losses.
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JURIST ☛ Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad leads Yazidi-Americans in lawsuit against French cement manufacturer
Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and veteran US diplomat Lee Wolosky represent the plaintiffs in this case. Amal Clooney has called for a formal investigation into the Islamic State for the crime of genocide and demands justice for the Yazidi people. In a statement, Wolosky said: “While last year’s guilty plea was unprecedented, it is not enough. Lafarge needs to be held to account by those harmed by its unlawful conduct.”
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ You Should Know About Minnesota Labor and Civil Rights Hero Nellie Stone Johnson
Johnson’s esteem within Minnesota’s political culture also speaks to the success of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFL) in becoming a major player in the state’s politics, and arguably one of the most successful third-party efforts in US history. Nellie dedicated her life to the DFL, acting as a link between the party and important labor and civil rights constituencies.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Techdirt ☛ Knoxville Is Building The Biggest Community-Owned Broadband Network In U.S. History
Knoxville, Tennessee is making progress on an ambitious, $700 million plan to deliver $65 gigabit fiber connections to every last city resident. With no usage caps, weird fees, or long-term contracts. Once completed, the city-owned fiber network, run through the city’s existing city-owned electrical utility, will be the biggest community-owned broadband network in the U.S.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Jason Dyer ☛ Crime Stopper: On Computer Disk Preservation
Apple II preservation history is long and complicated as the first emulator goes back to 1990 (!) and the emulator I typically use, AppleWin, goes back to 1994. Early files were in DSK, PO, or DO format, which copied file content but not necessarily their exact layout on the disk; much later, technology was developed to dump the disk as a whole including disk structures that don’t port over with DSK (NIB files). In 2018 things went even further to allow dumps at the individual magnetic flux level and the WOZ file format.
The big catch here to all this which makes Apple II emulation tricky is copy protection. Piracy was rampant (as well as methods of circumventing copy protection) but copy protection bypasses also sometimes broke the software in subtler ways. The most amusing I’ve encountered is how The Queen of Phobos has the nuke in the game get set off right away if you’re running off a disk sector other than 000.
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The Nation ☛ Lina Khan’s Anti-Monopoly Power
Not only is Khan reviving the FTC’s powers, but she is working hard to shed the agency’s technocratic past and invite the public in. She regularly holds open commission meetings in which anyone can speak directly to the commissioners and has opened public dockets that allow Americans to submit comments about the unfair business practices they’re experiencing. She has also held a series of listening sessions, something that was infrequent under many previous chairs. At a recent session in Colorado about the proposed merger between the Kroger and Albertsons grocery chains, she heard from workers who had suffered under other such deals. “They promised us we would keep our jobs. That we would have better benefits, a pension for retirement,” said Christine Martinez, who worked at a grocery store that was sold as part of the Safeway-Albertsons merger. Two months later, she said, “I was told our stores were closing.” When Khan asked the audience if anyone there supported the merger and wanted to speak, the only response was laughter.
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Patents
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Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Bolstered by 5th Circuit, Federal Circuit Again Rejects WTDX Judge Albright’s Venue Analysis
The Fifth Circuit in In re TikTok granted TikTok’s petition for a writ of mandamus, directing the Western District of Texas to transfer a copyright monopoly infringement case brought against Fentanylware (TikTok) by a Chinese company to the Northern District of California. The court applied the test for mandamus review of improper venue decisions established in In Re Volkswagen, requiring the movant to show the transferee venue is “clearly more convenient.” After analyzing each of the eight court created private and public interest factors that govern transfer, the Fifth Circuit concluded that the district court’s denial of transfer amounted to a clear abuse of discretion leading to a patently erroneous result.
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Copyrights
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Hackaday ☛ Mickey Shall Be Free!
The end of the year brings with it festive cheer, and a look forward into the new year to come. For those with an interest in intellectual property and the public domain it brings another treat, because every January 1st a fresh crop of works enter the public domain.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Premier League Targets Dozens of Illegal Streaming Sites in U.S. Court
It's relatively rare for the English Premier League to venture into the United States in search of pirates, but a new court filing makes up for lost time. An application filed at a California court seeks assistance from Cloudflare to identify the operators of dozens of illegal streaming sites after they provided access to matches featuring big clubs including Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Torrent Site Switched Domains 39 Times This Year to Evade ISP Blocks
Spanish torrent site DonTorrent has taken the domain name whack-a-mole game to a new level. Responding to local site blocking measures, the site has used 40 domain names this year. Anti-piracy forces are also trying to frustrate the site in other ways but, thus far, without much result.
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Variety ☛ Licensed Content Is the New Currency in Hollywood
The proceeds, in this case, include another piece of content the Disney CEO is evidently hoping will bolster the company’s newly integrated streaming offering.
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ Dark Rock of Mothrir Unsealed: Mickey Mouse Is Public Domain
The doors slam open. Cory Doctorow enters, papers streaming from his unlatched briefcase. "I have been preparing for this blog post for my entire life!" he exclaims: [...]
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding: ADKRMNL Wordo: BEADY
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I peeved six
So we have ourselves another Monday.
Last night I seeming fixed an issue on my Chromebook that's been nagging away for something like half a year. I don't even know what lingo to use to describe it. But if you're familiar with a Chromebook, you might be familiar with its "crosh" shell (which surfaces a command line interface to do things one apparently can't do on the Chromebook graphically (NOTE: accessed via Ctrl-Alt-t)) and its "Terminal" app (which presents a Linux environment).
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2023 Recap - A Year of Simplification
2023 is about to come to an end, so I figure I would write a post about the "theme" that sort of appeared for me this year. That theme has been "Simplification", especially in terms of technology. I was getting sick of technology controlling me when I felt like I should be the one controlling the technology. I am a programmer after all...
The following are things I changed quite drastically over 2023 and am happier in the longrun about changing. Some of these changes are more digital in nature and some are more analog.
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Technology and Free Software
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Using dynamic input shapes on RKNN/RK3588
Today, I dabbled into accelerating TTS using the RK3588's NPU. It works really well! I'm seeing a real time factor (RTF) of 0.15 during my initial tests, and I believe I can push it even further. One thing I had to do was to use dynamic input shapes. RKNN traditionally requires you to specify the input shape of the model during build time. This doesn't work for me as it is really impossible to force sentences to be of a certain length. I'm using VITS and tryign to accelerate the decoder part of the model. Even with manual chunking, I still need the model to be able to accept variable length inputs to be efficient.
Say the input to the decoder is of shape `[1, 192, 55]`, where 55 is the number of compressed speech frames. If I compile the model to always accept 55 frames, then I will have to pad the input to 55 frames when I don't have enough. This can be especially slow when synthesizing short sentences. The RKNN user guide mentions that you can use dynamic input shapes, but the documentation is not very clear. I ended up messing around with the RKNN API and found out how to do it.
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Hello USENET, well hello USENET
Well, we'll see. A bit of browsing about the "place" revealed a pretty weak ratio of spamiliciousness to legitimate interaction (you know, via inline quoting). So I gots to cross the phalanges and hope there might be a few decent people up for textual fun in the several newsgroups where I can imagine participating.
Looks like the locale we moved from received more snowfall overnight than I'm ready to get with, so sighs of relief.
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Sock Hell
Last summer, I used my phone to buy socks at the mall. And that's when the hell gates opened. Since then, whenever I'm connected to the internet, no matter what service I'm using, as long as the site has an ad area, there's almost always an ad for socks. It's safe to say that the world has been divided into two worlds: one with sock ads and one without. Before that, I honestly didn't realize there were so many sock brands in the world. I'm tired of these ads, so I hit the block button and give feedback like I already bought them or I'm not interested, but it doesn't help. A few days later, Google starts talking to me again.
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Internet/Gemini
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Dragonlady: Client Side encryption for Gemini
This proposal would enable to have client side encryption to gemini with an addon. This is backward compatible with clients not supporting it. We are looking for feedback and we are curious to know what the gemini community thinks about it.
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I miss the snow!
Hello, everyone. I guess I should say, firstly, that I'm new here! Though admittedly I'd gaze upon word after word every so often before deciding, "yeah, I'll be a part of this!" If there's any sort of etiquette I'm forgetting, please don't hesitate to let me know! I don't want to step on any toes.
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Ignorance is bliss until it isn't
So I've been posting in a few USENET newsgroups. Got some pleasant interaction sooner than I expected.
So far I've stuck to simply throwing posts over the wall, i.e. not keeping copies thereof. I should probably do that in Gemini spaces as well. The mania of archiving writing has proven unnecessary/useless the vast majority of the last several decades.
Never mind that becoming that way in general per "giving up attachment(s)" is long overdue. I'm seeing significant purging of crap I've been holding onto and/or carting around this spring (much is in storage, hence the delay).
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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.