Links 22/12/2023: Microsoft Against the Environment, 2023 Year in Review
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- 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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Hackaday ☛ Desalinating Water With The Sun
Getting fresh water from salt water can be difficult to do at any kind of scale. Researchers have developed a new method of desalinating water that significantly reduces its cost. [via Electrek]
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James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Consistent Examples
When you are writing a blog post that documents how to use a versatile piece of software, having an intuitive example that is relevant to your product is crucial. Clear examples aid understanding in what a piece of software does and how it solves a problem, in the case of both code products (libraries) and products with user interfaces.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ Recapturing early [Internet] whimsy with HTML
Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. Anchored in the concept of “HTML Energy,” a term coined by artists Laurel Schwulst and Elliott Cost, the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics. It focuses on the tactile process of coding in HTML, exploring how the language invites self-expression and empowers individuals to claim their share of the web. Taking shape in small Discord channels and digital magazines, among other spaces, the HTML Energy movement is about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences.
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Brandon ☛ Cleaning Up for 2024 🧹🎉
I haven't decided on my blog posts yet, but if I do remove them, I will provide a .epub or .pdf of the posts as part of an archive.
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David Revoy ☛ Production Report: Episode 39 entered Alpha 1
Hey, earlier this week I posted a first version of the upcoming episode 39 to the development forge of the Pepper&Carrot project. It's an important milestone for a new episode and I'm really happy that this one finally arrived in this state!
However, the episode is far from being ready for public release. I call this version Alpha 1 because many things will change. The artwork of this 11-page episode is still undetailed and in grayscale; it's an intermediate step in the production. Dialogue and storytelling will also be improved.
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Science
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El País ☛ Study identifies the 14 dead ends threatening humanity
If an insect is attracted to an artificial light and dies upon approaching it, the animal has been the victim of an evolutionary trap. These traps are used to study how non-human species respond to signals from the human environment. If, instead of an insect, it is humanity that falls into one of these traps, society could find itself stuck in one of the 14 evolutionary dead ends identified by a group of researchers from Stockholm University. This list includes short-termism, overconsumption, biosphere disconnect and lack of social cohesion, as the authors reveal in their study, published by the Royal Society.
The Anthropocene — the proposed geological stage in which humans are the main driver of change on the planet — is showing more and more cracks. This period is characterized by quickening change and increasingly complex global challenges, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, food insecurity, financial crises and conflicts. Could the Anthropocene itself be an evolutionary trap?
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Education
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ Helping refugees in Europe with The Odyssey and Don Quixote
From literary gatherings and mathematics lessons to gardening and theatre, the project ran 46 activities in the six countries, reaching more than 10 000 people.
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Zach Flower ☛ Work-Life Imbalance
I've always struggled with work-life balance.
It's a habit borne out of loving the coding and problem solving part of my earlier, non-managerial jobs, but also—if I'm being perfectly honest—stems from some deep-seated anxieties associated with failure.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Brandon ☛ The Playstation 5 Controller 🎮
A quick Kagi search led me to dozens of articles and posts where people talked about the Playstation controller causing similar thumb issues and pain, and I figured between getting older, using my phone a bit more and then extending my thumb in such an unnatural position, I'd done this to myself.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Omicron Limited ☛ Computer vision and neural networks to help detect crop diseases
A research team from Skoltech and Saint-Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation have presented a paper in which they pioneered an alternative method for detecting decayed and moldy apples at the post-harvest stage, when fruits are stored and then delivered to the customer. A computer vision system will determine different defects at the early stage, when they can be invisible to the human eye. The paper is published in the journal Entropy.
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The Register UK ☛ Artificial intelligence is a liability
So far, the dollar damage has been minor. In 2019, a Tesla driver who was operating his vehicle with the assistance of the carmaker's Autopilot software ran a red light and struck another vehicle. The occupants died and the Tesla motorist last week was ordered to pay $23,000 in restitution.
Tesla around the same time issued a recall of two million vehicles to revise its Autopilot software in response to a US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) investigation that found the Autopilot's safety controls lacking.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ 2023 was the year of generative AI – what’s coming in 2024
AI uses and functions have also shifted over the past 12 months as technological development, regulation and social factors have shaped what’s possible. Here’s where we’re at, and what might come in 2024.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Spar on why its big SAP project went pear-shaped
Spar has now halted other SAP projects it had planned, leading to a write-off of R94.1-million of “SAP assets under construction”.
According to the annual report, this decision was taken so that mistakes from the KZN project would not be transferred to the rest of the group’s operations. Spar identified shortfalls in “solution readiness”, “master data construction” and change management relating to the project as key setbacks to its implementation.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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[Repeat] EDRI ☛ 2023: A good year for privacy, a bad year for chat control
“The European Parliament has shown that it's possible to protect children online without resorting to dangerous and authoritarian mass surveillance methods. It’s positive to see that there’s no majority in the Council to supports the intrusive and unwarranted search of our private communications. It’s now time for the EU institutions to abandon the CSA Regulation proposal and permanently close this chapter of mass surveillance. Instead, we urge lawmakers to use this opportunity to pursue effective and sustainable laws and policies that will actually help protect children.”
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India Times ☛ PayPal amends terms and conditions to comply with EU law
PayPal's terms and conditions had been too difficult to understand and unfair to consumers.
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Futurism ☛ Scary AI Can Look at Photos and Figure Out Exactly Where They Were Taken
They also note some of its potentially game-changing applications, such as assisting in biological surveys or quickly identifying roads with downed power lines.
For all its very useful potential, though, it sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, with some experts fearing the abuse of such AI tools in the hands of the wrong people.
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NPR ☛ Artificial intelligence can find your location in photos, worrying privacy experts
The project, known as Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON, for short) was designed by three Stanford graduate students in order to identify locations on Google Street View.
But when presented with a few personal photos it had never seen before, the program was, in the majority of cases, able to make accurate guesses about where the photos were taken.
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The Register UK ☛ Europe classifies three adult sites as worthy of its toughest internet regulations
VLOPs must also publish transparency reports on content moderation decisions and risk management practices every six months, and file reports on their systemic risks and audit results once a year.
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Vox ☛ Apple thinks the next big thing is ... journaling?
What’s interesting about the Journal app is a new protocol that lets other journaling apps suggest entries based on the photos and recent activity on your iPhone. It’s part of a set of privacy options Apple is rolling out that let third-party apps surface your photos without accessing much of the associated data. (Think of it this way: Instead of giving Instagram full access to all your photos, the new privacy option could mean that Instagram can show you thumbnails of the photos without getting full access to the image metadata.) And as artificial intelligence continues its steady march into your everyday life, this little bit of extra control might feel meaningful. There’s no indication that Apple has big AI-based dreams behind its new journaling prompts, but I like the idea of giving a tech company only as much information about me as I want and still getting a personalized experience. At the very least, these slightly more automated entries could make my journaling goal more attainable.
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Federal News Network ☛ VA plans facial recognition pilot for health care employees to reduce log-in burden
The Department of Veterans Affairs is looking at facial recognition technology for its frontline medical workers to log into their workstations more quickly, and spend more time treating veterans.
VA Chief Information Security Officer Lynette Sherrill said the department plans on piloting facial recognition tools next year at VA hospitals, particularly for frontline clinicians working in intensive care units.
The pilot, if successful, would give VA health care employees an alternative to using their Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards to securely log onto the department’s network.
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Defence/Aggression
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Site36 ☛ German police has hundreds of Gaza postings deleted, Europol removes content during “action day”
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The Atlantic ☛ Why the U.S. Is Pumping More Oil Than Any Country in History
Here’s something else America is leading the world in: oil production. This year, the United States pumped out more oil than any other country in history, producing millions more barrels than Russia or Saudi Arabia ever have and accounting for almost a fifth of the world’s total oil production. And the Biden administration played a part in making it happen.
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Cyberattack on Ukraine’s Kyivstar Seems to Be Russian Hacktivists
This is one of the most significant cyberattacks since Russia invaded in February 2022.
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Scheerpost ☛ How Big Oil Is Taking Us for a Fossil-Fuelized Ride
The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it’s just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you’ll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber served as president of the Dubai-based 28th Conference of Parties — countries that had signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While his green bona fides include his role as chairman of the board of the UAE’s green energy firm Masdar, controversy swirled around him because he’s also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s national petroleum company. Worse yet, he’s committed to expanding the oil and gas production of his postage-stamp-sized nation of one million citizens (and eight million guest workers) in a big-time fashion. He wants ADNOC to increase its daily oil production from its present four million barrels a day to five million by 2027, even though climate scientists stress that global fossil-fuel production must be reduced by 3% annually through 2050 if the world is to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.
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Janes ☛ US Navy secretary notes use of EW in current conflicts
Recent global conflicts highlight the increasing use of electronic warfare (EW) in military operations, US Navy (USN) Secretary Carlos Del Toro said on 12 December during a keynote speech at the Association of Old Crows' (AOC's) 60th Annual International Symposium & Convention at National Harbor, Maryland.
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Site36 ☛ Attack against helpers of refugees: New EU package criminalises aiding and abetting of “smuggling”
The agreement reached by the Council and Parliament on an “Asylum and Migration Pact” is indeed “historic”, as the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, exulted on Wednesday: In over a dozen directives and regulations, the rights of refugees have been massively dragged down since 2020. However, another legislative package was lost in the fuss surrounding the CEAS reform: On 28 November, the Commission proclaimed a “Global Alliance to Combat Migrant Smuggling” and presented two proposals at a conference of the same name.
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Scoop News Group ☛ IRS has compliance issues with government TikTok ban, report finds
OMB’s “No TikTok on Government Devices” guidance was issued last February, but the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s review revealed that the tax agency’s CI division hadn’t cut off workers’ access to the app as of August, nor had it sought an exemption from the rule from the Treasury Department.
Criminal Investigation officials told TIGTA that they did not plan to pursue a law enforcement exception for the 900 employees who could access TikTok via agency computers because the app could only be used “via a third-party software, which does not directly connect IRS devices to TikTok.”
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US Treasury Inspector General ☛ The Internal Revenue Service Is Not Fully Complying With the No TikTok on Government Devices Implementation Guidance
On February 27, 2023, the OMB issued M-23-13, “No TikTok on Government Devices” Implementation Guidance, which outlines the time frame and steps to be taken to remove TikTok from Federal Government devices. The IRS took a number of steps to comply with the OMB requirement for the removal of TikTok from IRS devices. According to IRS management, they have always blocked access to TikTok on IRS computers. In October 2022, the IRS took steps to block Internet access to TikTok on 6,300 mobile devices and also noted that the TikTok application is not available for download on mobile devices.
However, TIGTA determined 23 mobile devices used by the IRS’s Communications and Liaison group to monitor social media sites had access to the TikTok website and could download the TikTok application. We notified management of this concern on May 12, 2023, and in response, the IRS took corrective action to add these devices to the existing mobile device management software to ensure that the 23 devices could not access TikTok.
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The Verge ☛ Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content
This latest clash over moderation comes after The Atlantic reported on Substack publications with “overt Nazi symbols” in their logos, several from prominent white nationalists, and other posts on Substack supporting those views. McKenzie’s response explains that absent an incitement to violence, Substack’s “decentralized approach to content moderation” response to that material is to publish it, monetize it, and continue to take a cut of the profits.
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[Old] The Atlantic ☛ Substack Has a Nazi Problem
At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.
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JURIST ☛ ACLU challenges new Texas law criminalizing illegal entry from abroad
Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging a recently enacted Texas law, which gives state officials broad powers to arrest, prosecute and deport people who illegally cross the US-Mexico border. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB4 into law on Monday as the latest escalation of confrontations between the state and the federal government over illegal entries.
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Democracy Now ☛ “Fascism Out Loud”: Trump’s Escalating Racist Rhetoric & the Far Right’s Plan for a Slow Civil War
As the 2024 presidential election campaign heats up, Republican front-runner Donald Trump is escalating his racist rhetoric, repeatedly saying in recent days that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” drawing comparisons to Hitler. Journalist Jeff Sharlet says, “Even more important than the substance is the spectacle, the drama, that makes him the exciting and, in fascist terms, the man of action.” Sharlet explains Project 2025, an agency-by-agency plan backed by a coalition of conservative groups for implementing fascism if Trump regains power, and how the former president is giving the far right the national stage they’ve always wanted.
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Democracy Now ☛ Colorado Disqualifies Trump from Ballot, Triggering Battle over Constitution’s Insurrection Clause
In a historic decision, the Colorado State Supreme Court has ruled 4-3 to bar Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential primary ballot because his actions during the January 6 insurrection violated the 14th Amendment. Trump has vowed to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority. “If we ignore this provision of the Constitution, we make it a dead letter, and we set a very dangerous precedent going forward that people can ignore their oath of office and engage in future insurrections,” says John Bonifaz, co-founder and president of Free Speech for People, which has filed legal challenges to Trump’s eligibility to appear on the ballot in a number of states, including Minnesota, Michigan and Oregon.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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FAIR ☛ US Media Suppressed Their Government’s Role in Ousting Brazil’s Government
In this article, I will make the same call to US journalists who lived in Brazil during this period who remained silent about their government’s role in removing Brazil’s front-running presidential candidate in the 2018 elections, opening the door for the right-wing extremist No. 2 candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.
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Environment
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India Times ☛ Microsoft ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million PCs to landfills: report
The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars.
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NDTV ☛ Microsoft Ending Windows 10 Support To Affect 240 Million Computers: Report
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the environmental impact of disposal of Windows 11-incompatible devices.
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[Repeat] RFA ☛ Taiwan amends law to fight Chinese illegal sand dredging
The amendments to Article 36 of the Sand and Gravel Excavation Act and to Article 18 of the Act on the Exclusive Economic Zone and the Continental Shelf of the Republic of China were passed on Monday. Republic of China (ROC) is the official name of Taiwan.
They stipulate that “vessels or other machinery involved in illegal activities can be confiscated, regardless of whether they belong to the perpetrator.” This is to prevent offenders from escaping punishment by claiming that their dredging vessels and equipment belong to someone else.
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Omicron Limited ☛ As the Arctic warms, its waters are emitting carbon: Study
When it comes to influencing climate change, the world's smallest ocean punches above its weight. It's been estimated that the cold waters of the Arctic absorb as much as 180 million metric tons of carbon per year—more than three times what New York City emits annually—making it one of Earth's critical carbon sinks. But recent findings show that thawing permafrost and carbon-rich runoff from Canada's Mackenzie River trigger part of the Arctic Ocean to release more carbon dioxide (CO2) than it absorbs.
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AGU ☛ Biogeochemical River Runoff Drives Intense Coastal Arctic Ocean CO2 Outgassing
Arctic warming alters land-to-sea fluxes of nutrients and organic matter, which impact air-sea carbon exchange. Here we use an ocean-biogeochemical model of the southeastern Beaufort Sea (SBS) to investigate the role of Mackenzie River biogeochemical discharge in modulating air-sea CO2 fluxes during 2000–2019. The contribution of six biogeochemical discharge constituents leads to a net CO2 outgassing of 0.13 TgC yr−1, with a decrease in the coastal SBS carbon sink of 0.23 and 0.4 TgC yr−1 due to riverine dissolved organic and inorganic carbon, respectively. Years with high (low) discharge promote more CO2 outgassing (uptake) from the river plume. These results demonstrate that the Mackenzie River modulates the capacity of the SBS to act as a sink or source of atmospheric CO2. Our work suggests that accurate model representation of land-to-sea biogeochemical coupling can be critical for assessing present-day Arctic coastal ocean response to the rapidly changing environment.
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Science Alert ☛ A Grave Warning About Antarctica Is Encoded in Octopus DNA
Scientists who sequenced the genomes of octopus populations in both the Weddell and Ross Seas found evidence of ancestral gene flow between the two populations roughly 70,000 years ago, suggesting that "ancient seaways were likely opened across the West Antarctic Ice Sheet".
"[This] could only be facilitated by West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse during past interglacials," they write.
If it happened then, it could very well happen again, especially since global temperatures are reaching a similar threshold today.
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New York Times ☛ He Has Fished Out Grenades, Bikes and Guns. Can Fame Be Far Behind?
He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens, and he spent a year staring at the shore when he had a job with NYC Ferry. He also pulled shifts as a crane operator for a sanitation company, an education in just how much stuff is at the bottom of places like the East River. For the past five months, he has been treating magnet fishing as a full-time job.
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Energy/Transportation
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DeSmog ☛ Revealed: Ads Urging Canadians to Oppose Climate Laws Paid for by Gas Industry
A national industry group representing gas producers is quietly paying for digital advertisements urging Canadians to “speak up” to their elected officials against laws addressing climate change and public health, DeSmog can reveal.
“Voice of Energy” is a new ad campaign and website featuring photos of diverse and well-dressed young people, explainers making the case for natural gas while downplaying its massive contribution to climate change, and videos urging viewers to join in an effort to “protect” the fossil fuel against laws restricting new gas hookups in buildings.
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DeSmog ☛ Inaction on Climate Change Is a Death Sentence for Emperor Penguin Chicks
My fellow cruise ship passengers toasted to their luck for being able to partake in a celebratory barbeque on the ship’s deck after visiting Snow Hill — a remote island in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea that is home to an emperor penguin colony. While it was warm enough to dine outdoors that evening on November 21, I couldn’t bring myself to raise a glass.
The unseasonably high temperature that made outdoor dining possible was also melting snow and ice at all of the emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica, condemning to death many of the chicks that we just travelled long distances to observe. Despite the great lengths emperor penguins go to protect their chicks — made famous by the movie March of the Penguins — if the sea ice where they hatch and grow breaks up before they are done fledging they will drown or freeze to death.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Europe’s electric car sales boom
Electrified vehicles — either fully electric models, plug-in hybrids or full hybrids — accounted for over 47.6% of all new passenger car registrations in the EU as of November, up from 43% in the same period last year, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) said.
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Vice Media Group ☛ The Great American Train Wreck Isn’t Going Away
What the hell is going on with mass transit in America?
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BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ EU, UK Extend Trade Rules To Avoid Tariffs On Electric Vehicles
The European Union and Britain on Thursday agreed to give electric vehicle (EV) makers until the end of 2026 to comply with local content rules, delaying the imposition of tariffs on EVs traded with the UK.
The extension from the previous 2024 deadline would save manufacturers and consumers up to USD 5.45 billion in additional costs, the British government said.
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Finance
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Tom MacWright ☛ Homeownership
I don’t want to buy a house. Maybe I’ll need to, but I can’t help but think that the milestone is vastly overrated in public imagination and there are problems with it on a personal and societal level.
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[Repeat] Federal News Network ☛ Congress wants spy agencies to hire more experts in financial intelligence, emerging technology
Congress is pushing the Central Intelligence Agency and other members of the intelligence community to make a concerted effort to hire individuals with expertise in financial intelligence and emerging technologies, as spy agencies ramp up recruiting efforts across different technological backgrounds.
The fiscal 2024 intelligence authorization bill, included in the defense bill passed by lawmakers this week, would require the director of national intelligence to work with the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to submit to lawmakers “a plan for the intelligence community to recruit, train, and retain personnel who have skills and experience in financial intelligence and emerging technologies in order to improve analytic tradecraft.”
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Pro Publica ☛ Los Angeles Orders More Residential Hotels to Stop Renting to Tourists
The Los Angeles Housing Department has ordered the owners of four buildings meant to house some of the city’s poorest residents to stop renting rooms to tourists, following a review that was prompted by reporting by Capital & Main and ProPublica.
The news organizations documented how some owners of the buildings, known as residential hotels, were advertising short-term rentals online despite a 2008 law aimed at preserving the rooms as residential. Landlords who convert the buildings to other uses or demolish them must replace the units or pay into a city housing fund.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Supreme Connections
Search Supreme Court financial disclosures for organizations and people that have paid justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more.
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The Nation ☛ Sweet Jesus
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The Register UK ☛ Intel trims a few hundred workers in Cali just in time for Christmas
The largest of these layoffs comes from Intel's Folsom offices, where the chipmaker operates a test floor and lab space. According to a WARN notice, received by the California EDD last week, 235 employees have been laid off permanently. In four separate filings, Intel said it planned to lay off another 76 workers at its headquarters in Santa Clara. All 311 of the layoffs take effect December 31. Intel employs about 110,000 people worldwide.
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Federal News Network ☛ Air Force’s program to pick new cyber officers is highly competitive; only few are selected
The program is intended to tap highly qualified enlisted members and civilians and let them commission as officers up to the rank of colonel utilizing constructive service credit.
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International Business Times ☛ Brazil President's Wife Clashes With Elon Musk, Threatens To Sue X
The war of words began after the first lady's account was hacked on December 11. The hackers posted several messages, including insults against Janja and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
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Scoop News Group ☛ AI talent wanted: The federal government is searching far and wide to fill new cutting-edge positions
“If you’re going to be training the talent in our universities here, then obviously it makes a lot of sense for us to try to recruit them to stay here to benefit the United States,” Parker said. “Since there’s such a huge shortfall of talent, I think there’s that emphasis on immigration, [which] is a recognition of the fact that … a high percentage of people who are getting that expert-level training [in AI] are coming from overseas. That’s where I think the most immediate pipeline of available talent is.”
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El País ☛ Tech giants pursue ethical and legal AI development
Technology consultancy Entelgy highlights three important considerations for AI companies to comply with the new law. First, organizations handling personal, medical, recruitment or decision-making data must disclose in a European registry how their algorithms work to generate content. Second, while not mandatory, mechanisms for human supervision should be implemented. And third, security systems should be implemented for large language models (LLMs), and developers must be transparent about the copyrighted material they use.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Vice Media Group ☛ Scientists Explain Why ‘Doing Your Own Research’ Leads to Believing Conspiracies
While conventional wisdom holds that researching the veracity of fake news would reduce belief in misinformation, a study published on Wednesday in Nature has found that using online search engines to vet conspiracies can actually increase the chance that someone will believe it. The researchers point to a known problem in search called "data voids." Sometimes, there's not a lot of high-quality information to counter misleading headlines or surrounding fringe theories. So, when someone sees an article online about an “engineered famine” due to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines, and conducts an unsophisticated search based on those keywords, they may find articles that reaffirm their bias.
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Nature ☛ Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to understanding belief in online misinformation, with a particular focus on social networks. However, the dominant role of search engines in the information environment remains underexplored, even though the use of online search to evaluate the veracity of information is a central component of media literacy interventions3,4,5. Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation would reduce belief in it, there is little empirical evidence to evaluate this claim. Here, across five experiments, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them. To shed light on this relationship, we combine survey data with digital trace data collected using a custom browser extension. We find that the search effect is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information. Our results indicate that those who search online to evaluate misinformation risk falling into data voids, or informational spaces in which there is corroborating evidence from low-quality sources. We also find consistent evidence that searching online to evaluate news increases belief in true news from low-quality sources, but inconsistent evidence that it increases belief in true news from mainstream sources. Our findings highlight the need for media literacy programmes to ground their recommendations in empirically tested strategies and for search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified here.
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RFA ☛ China uses AI to generate propaganda on YouTube, report finds
These voices and their “good news” about China are evidence that the Chinese Communist Party and its overseas proxies are using artificial intelligence to flood YouTube with propaganda videos, according to a new report that describes a "coordinated inauthentic influence campaign" on the platform.
The videos are part of at least 30 channels identified by researchers as being part of the "Shadow Play" network promoting pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
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The Hill ☛ Defunct social media app Parler planning 2024 comeback
The company was acquired Friday by PDS Partners, a limited liability company owned by Parler’s former chief marketing officer, Elise Rhodes-Pierotti, and Ryan Rhodes, among others. They expect to relaunch the platform in the first quarter of next year, Rhodes-Pierotti told The Hill.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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EFF ☛ EFF Urges Supreme Court to Set Standard for How Government Can and Can’t Talk to Social Media Sites About Censoring Users’ Posts
“Government co-option of content moderation systems is a serious threat to freedom of speech,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene. “But there are clearly times when it is permissible, appropriate, and even good public policy for government agencies and officials to inform, communicate with, attempt to persuade, or even criticize sites—free of coercion—about the user speech they publish.”
In Murthy v. Missouri, Louisiana, Missouri, and several individuals have accused federal agencies and officials of illegal “jawboning”—urging private persons and entities to censor another’s speech. The suit alleges agencies pushed the platforms to censor content about COVID safety measures and vaccines, elections, and Hunter Biden’s laptop, among other issues.
In a brief filed today with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), EFF urged the court to rely on the First Amendment test in its 1963 Bantam Books v. Sullivan ruling to determine whether the government contacts were permissible or impermissible. The test says the Constitution bans not only direct government demands for censorship, but also indirect means, like hinting at legal sanctions to intimidate or coerce a private party into censorship.
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Gizmodo ☛ Robert De Niro Says Apple Asked Him to 'Dial Down' Anti-Trump Remarks, He Didn't Get the Message
“What happened was I was working on the speech with a writer, Lewis Friedman, and he gave it to them, and then one of the consultants had put something in the speech about how kids in Oklahoma aren’t even able to read the book Killers of the Flower Moon,” the two-time Oscar winner explained to Rolling Stone. “And then I didn’t hear anything. They gave me the script, and I looked at the prompter, and I asked after, ‘What happened?’ And they assumed that I had spoken to Marty [Scorsese] or somebody about it, but I hadn’t. They assumed that I would be OK with it, and maybe I’m still getting it wrong, and I wasn’t. Marty and I spoke about it the next day and he said, ‘Yeah, I had sent you a text and [Apple] asked if you could dial it down, respectfully.’”
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BIA Net ☛ Erdoğan's son-in-law sues T24 news portal
Erol Önderoğlu, Representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in Turkey and BİA Media Monitoring Reporter, commented on the case, highlighting the economic pressure on journalists in Turkey. He pointed out that numerous reporters, including Barış Pehlivan, Furkan Karabay, and Ceren Sözeri, face hefty compensation lawsuits, indicating the economic challenges journalists endure.
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[Repeat] RFA ☛ Hong Kong plummets in freedom index, descends 'into tyranny'
Hong Kong has plummeted in the Cato Institute's Human Freedom Index, with the annual rights report describing China's crackdown in the city as a "descent into tyranny."
The city – once ranked in the top 10 freest territories in the world – dropped from 3rd place in 2010 to 46th place in 2021 out of 165 countries, the Cato Institute said in its 2023 report. It fell 17 spots from 2020.
"The territory was once one of the freest places in the world, but the Chinese Communist Party’s escalating violations of Hong Kong’s traditional liberties have caused its ranking ... to fall," the report said, blaming Beijing's imposition of a draconian security law and its subsequent "aggressive takeover of Hong Kong."
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong media summit forced to go online after venue cancellations, as organiser suggests self-censorship to blame
Chan described the cancellation as “sudden,” saying the foundation had given the academy information about the summit when the contract was signed. The organiser had to two weeks to scramble for a replacement venue before the summit, she said.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Reason ☛ Stella Assange: Why Isn't Julian Assange a Free Man?
Stella Assange—an attorney specializing in international law, a human rights activist, and the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom she has two children—joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on episode three of Just Asking Questions to talk about the toll that imprisonment has taken on Assange and his family. They also discuss the threat to freedom of speech that the United States' Espionage Act case against Assange poses, why she believes that the Swedish sex charges [sic] against him were bogus, and why many in the U.S. media seem hostile to Assange and WikiLeaks.
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Spies Wanted To Assassinate London-Based Journalists, ITV Investigation Finds
The plot was foiled in the autumn of last year by the people smuggler, named by ITV as Ismail, who became a double agent working for an unnamed Western intelligence agency, the broadcaster reported.
IRGC operatives wanted to hit Iran International to force it off the air because its journalists were subjecting Tehran to “a lot of humiliation in the media,” Ismail said.
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BIA Net ☛ 'Journalists have been targeted with the Disinformation Law'
The International Press Institute (IPI) presented the report titled "A Victory Comes with Some Damage: A Look at Turkey's Press History on the 100th Anniversary of the Republic" yesterday (December 19). Alongside IPI, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also introduced the 2023 International Mission Report on Press Freedom.
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Scheerpost ☛ US Press Freedom Tracker: Reporters Criminalized for ‘Routine Journalism’ in 2023
As documented in an annual report from the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, several U.S. reporters were criminalized for “routine journalism.”
It shows that “authorities either do not understand newsgathering practices,” or worse, officials do understand and “use prosecutions as a cudgel to chill future reporting.”
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Hindustan Times ☛ Israel-Hamas war 'most dangerous ever' for journalists: Rights group
A May report by CPJ found that Israeli soldiers had killed at least 20 journalists in the last 22 years and none had ever been charged or held accountable.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Associated Press ☛ Utah officer who arrested nurse over blood test put on leave
A Utah nurse said she was scared to death when a police officer handcuffed and dragged her screaming from a hospital after she refused to allow blood to be drawn from an unconscious patient.
After Alex Wubbels and her attorneys released dramatic video of the arrest, prosecutors called for a criminal investigation and Salt Lake City police put Detective Jeff Payne on paid leave Friday.
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RFERL ☛ Rights Groups Slam Iran For Executing 'Child Bride'
The Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) group said Sabzian was a child bride who had married her husband at the age of 15 and had been a victim of domestic violence, according to relatives.
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Iran Human Rights ☛ Samira Sabzian Executed in Ghezelhesar Prison
Iran is the biggest executioner of women. In 2022, at least 16 women were executed. Samira is the 18thwoman to be executed in 2023. According to Iran Human Rights’ report on Women and Death Penalty in Iran on the occasion of World Day Against the Death Penalty, at least 164 women were executed between 2010-October 2021. In 66% of the known murder cases, the women were convicted of killing their husband or partner. Within the marriage, a woman does not have the right to divorce, even in cases of domestic violence and abuse, which are hidden in cultural codes and language.
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EFF ☛ 2023 Year in Review
The legislative, court, and agency fights around the world this year also helped us see and articulate a common thread: the need for a "privacy first" approach to laws and technology innovation. As we wrote in a new white paper aptly entitled "Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms," many of the ills of today’s internet have a single thing in common, and it is that they are built on a business model of corporate surveillance and behavioral advertising. Addressing that problem could help us make great strides in a range of issues, and avoid many of the the terrible likely impacts of many of today's proposed "solutions."
Instead of considering proposals that would censor speech and put children's access to internet resources at the whims of state attorneys general, we could be targeting the root cause of the concern: internet companies' collection, storage, sales, and use of our personal information and activities to feed their algorithms and ad services. Police go straight to tech companies for your data or the data on everyone who was near a certain location. And that's when they even bother with a court-overseen process, rather than simply issuing a subpoena, showing up and demanding it, or buying data from data brokers. If we restricted what data tech companies could keep and for how long, we could also tackle this problem at the source. Instead of unconstitutional link taxes to save local journalism, laws that attack behavioral advertising--built on collection of data--would break the ad and data monopoly that put journalists at the mercy of Big Tech in the first place.
Concerns about what is feeding AI, social media algorithms, government spying (either your own or another country's), online harassment, getting access to healthcare--so much can be better protected if we address privacy first. EFF knows this, and it's why, in 2023, we did things like launch the Tor University Challenge, urge the Supreme Court to recognize that the Fifth Amendment protects you from being forced to give your phone's passcode to police, and work to fix the dangerously flawed UN Cybercrime Treaty. Most recently, we celebrated Google's decision to limit the data collected and kept in its "Location History" as a potentially huge step to prevent geofence warrants that use Google's storehouse of location data to conduct massive, unconstitutional searches sweeping in many innocent bystanders.
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EFF ☛ Surveillance and the U.S.-Mexico Border: 2023 Year in Review
In early 2023, EFF staff completed the last of three trips to the U.S.-Mexico border, where we met with the residents, activists, humanitarian organizations, law enforcement officials, and journalists whose work is directly impacted by the expansion of surveillance technology in their communities.
Using information from those trips, as well as from public records, satellite imagery, and exploration in virtual reality, we released a map and dataset of more than 390 surveillance towers installed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the U.S.-Mexico border. Our data serves as a living snapshot of the so-called "virtual wall," from the California coast to the lower tip of Texas. The data also lays the foundation for many types of research ranging from border policy to environmental impacts.
We also published an in-depth report on Plataforma Centinela (Sentinel Platform), an aggressive new surveillance system developed by Chihuahua state officials in collaboration with a notorious Mexican security contractor. With tentacles reaching into 13 Mexican cities and a data pipeline that will channel intelligence all the way to Austin, Texas, the monstrous project is unlike anything seen before along the U.S.-Mexico border. The strategy adopts nearly every cutting-edge technology system marketed at law enforcement: 10,000 surveillance cameras, face recognition, automated license plate recognition, real-time crime analytics, a fleet of mobile surveillance vehicles, drone teams and counter-drone teams, and more. It also involves a 20-story high-rise in downtown Ciudad Juarez, known as the Torre Centinela (Sentinel Tower), that will serve as the central node of the surveillance operation. We’ll continue to keep a close eye on the development of this surveillance panopticon.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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RIPE ☛ The Historical Record of the Internet
Understanding outages and shutdowns and how the Internet as a whole came to be vulnerable to - but also resilient against - these kinds of events requires more than a snapshot of things as they are today. In this episode, Jim Cowie talks about how historical measurement data can help us acquire a better understanding of the Internet.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Troy Patterson ☛ Ownership, Anti-Ownership, and Deleting “Your” Stuff
In the “good old days”, one went to a bookstore and bought a physical copy of the book (this also applied to movies). Once one had read the book, one was free to give that to a friend. Or, you put it on your bookshelf. Or donate it to a library. You also have/had the legal right to sell the book (in order to get money to buy more books – 🙂 ). The ability to sell the book is known as First Sale Doctrine.
In the digital age, that has all changed. Legally, when you “buy” a book (again, same for movies) through an online site, you are really just acquiring permission to access it. That permission to access the “book” (or movie) will have limitations. These resources are for your “personal, non-commercial” use only (i.e. you can’t share it, or in the case of movies, show it to a group).
The landscape has changed, but the expectations of many people haven’t. Yet, this is important to note.
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EFF ☛ The Great Interoperability Convergence: 2023 Year in Review
But all over the world and across different government departments, policymakers are converging on a set of muscular, effective solutions to Big Tech dominance.
This convergence spans financial regulators and consumer protection agencies; it’s emerging in Europe, the USA, and the UK. It’s kind of a moment.
To understand what’s new in Big Tech regulation, we should talk briefly about what’s old. For many years, policymakers have viewed the problems of Big Tech as tech problems, not big problems. From disinformation to harassment to copyright infringement, the go-to policy response of the past two decades has been to make tech platforms responsible for policing and controlling their users.
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El País ☛ Warner Bros. Discovery explores merger with Paramount
The merger between the companies would create a new industry giant. The companies could join forces by merging their digital platforms, Max and Paramount+, which would be a serious competitor to the market leaders, Netflix and Disney+. In the news market, CNN, which has gone through a series of profound changes in recent years, would be reinforced with CBS, one of the most traditional and emblematic television networks in the United States.
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New York Times ☛ Why a Warner Bros.-Paramount Merger Does (and Doesn’t) Makes Sense
News that David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery, expressed interest in combining with Paramount set tongues wagging about a possible union of Hollywood’s top deal candidates. But it’s unclear whether this will be the combination that gets completed, DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch and Michael de la Merced write.
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The Verge ☛ Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount in discussions for a max merger
A merger would narrow the number of players in the entertainment and streaming industry even more after Warner Bros. Discovery just completed its massive merger with Discovery last year.
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CNBC ☛ Warner Bros. Discovery merger talks with Paramount Global may draw out NBCUniversal
Deal structure will be important here. If Comcast spins out NBCUniversal to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery, it could theoretically give Zaslav debt-free earnings to strengthen the combined company's balance sheet.
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Variety ☛ Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global in Merger Talks
Terms of a possible merger of the companies could not be learned. Both companies have enlisted bankers but the status of the talks are described as very preliminary. As of the end of Q3, Paramount Global reported long-term debt of $15.6 billion, considerably less than WBD — whose debt load stood at $43.5 billion. But in terms of market value, Warner Bros. Discovery is the bigger fish, with a market capitalization of $28.4 billion as of close of trading Dec. 20 compared with $10.3 billion for Paramount Global.
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Patents
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EFF ☛ Stupid Patent of the Month: Selfie Contests
This month’s Stupid Patent, No. 8,655,715, continues the tradition of trying to use software language to capture a monopoly on a basic human cultural activity–in this case, contests.
A company called Opus One, which does business under the name “Contest Factory,” claims this patent and a related one cover a huge array of online contests. So far, they’ve filed five lawsuits against other companies that help build online contests, and even threatened a small photo company that organizes mostly non-commercial contests online.
The patents held by Contest Factory are a good illustration of why EFF has been concerned about out-of-control software patents. It’s not just that wrongly issued patents extort a vast tax on the U.S. economy (although they do—one study estimated $29 billion in annual direct costs). The worst software patents also harm peoples’ rights to express themselves and participate in online culture. Just as we’re free in the physical world to sign documents, sort photos, store and label information, clock in to work, find people to date, or teach foreign languages, without paying extortionate fees to others, we must also be free to do so online.
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Trademarks
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Techdirt ☛ Eminem, After Opposing A Trademark App Over The Word ‘Shady’, Is Ducking Deposition
Earlier this year we discussed a trademark fight between rapper Eminem and two stars of The Real Houswives of Potomac, Gizelle Bryant and Robyn Dixon. At issue was the trademark application for Bryant and Dixon’s podcast, which is entitled “Reasonably Shady.” Em’s legal team opposed that application, arguing essentially that all things “shady” belong to the rapper. As we said at the time, that’s plainly ridiculous, as evidenced by a bunch of other similar entities out there that have that word in their names. Beyond that, the word “shady” does not necessarily point every person directly back to Eminem, and for someone seeking out a podcast in particular, the idea that any of this will confuse the public seems quite silly.
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TTAB Blog ☛ CAFC Hears Oral Argument in In Re Chestek PLLC, the "Where Do You Sleep at Night?" Case
On December 7th, the CAFC heard oral argument in In re Chestek PLLC. As you may recall, Pamela Chestek, sometimes known as the IP Ownership Maven (blog), applied to register the mark CHESTEK LEGAL on behalf of her law firm, for "legal services." However, she declined to provide the "domicile address" of applicant, instead furnishing a post office box number in Raleigh, North Carolina. The USPTO refused registration, citing violation of Trademark Rules 2.189 and 2.32(a)(2) because a post office box is not a street address. Chestek PLLC argued that the applicable rules were unlawfully promulgated and should not be enforced.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ "Home Alone" Enjoys Seasonal Piracy Spike as Christmas Draws Near
After 33 years, "Home Alone" remains one of the most watched movies around Christmas. The film is also the absolute favorite Christmas classic on pirate sites. Newly collected data show that the seasonal interest begins at the end of November and typically reaches its peak at the end of the year.
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Futurism ☛ Man Horrified When Someone Uses AI to Reword and Republish All His Content, Complete With New Errors
A website has found itself the victim of a pernicious new online scheme that its perpetrators are shamelessly bragging about: an "SEO heist," the latest example of how generative AI is being used to accelerate the deterioration of the search engines that form the backbone of the Internet.
The website in question is Exceljet, a hub on everything to know about Microsoft Excel. Its owner David Bruns started noticing a dip in its traffic starting last year. This fall, he found out why. Someone was using an AI to imitate nearly all of his website's articles with inferior and often error-riddled copies designed solely to please search engines, hijacking Exceljet's traffic.
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Business Insider ☛ Audacious new schemes known as 'SEO heists' are posing thorny questions for Google
Then, in the fall of 2023, a friend flagged a social-media post to him, and it all made sense. Bruns has been the victim of an "SEO heist," one of the first of the new generative-AI era. It was an audacious plot to copy his website and siphon away hard-earned Google referral traffic using powerful new artificial-intelligence tools.
The heist was part of a wildly successful campaign that sent traffic to the perpetrator's client up an estimated 60-fold, even as Exceljet's online visits halved.
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Tedium ☛ Fall Of The Mouse House
I pointed out, for example, that there is evidence that Steamboat Willie, which finally, officially hits the public domain in two weeks, has likely been in the public domain since its release due to the quirks of copyright law. And I think that the frustration with Disney for so aggressively taking away some of the public’s rights to the public domain will begin to show itself with the release of the early iterations of Mickey Mouse into the public domain.
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Techdirt ☛ Money Talks In The World Of Copyright Legislation; And That’s A Big Problem For Ordinary Internet Users
It’s good news for the music industry that streaming now brings in $5.5 billion a year, an increase of $800 million over 2021. But it’s unlikely much of that boost reached the people who made it possible – the musicians. In 2021, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the UK Parliament published its second report on the Economics of Music Streaming, which noted: [...]
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The Hill ☛ Plagiarism charges against Harvard’s president throws school into more investigations
Harvard University President Claudine Gay faces plagiarism accusations on old papers, throwing her and the college under a spotlight on the heels of her controversial answers in a congressional hearing on antisemitism.
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Reason ☛ If You Ignore Claudine Gay's Plagiarism, Shame on You
Claudine Gay is the president of Harvard University. In recent weeks, she has come under fire for plagiarizing portions of her 1997 doctoral dissertation, as well as published articles she had authored in recent years.
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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.