Links 04/01/2024: Release of Epstein Files Has Begun, Year Starts With Mass Layoffs Again
Contents
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Leftovers
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James G ☛ Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook
In December 2023, I wrote a series called Advent of Technical Writing, in which I published a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th about technical writing. I am excited to announce the series is now available as an e-book. The e-book contains the 24 articles in the original Advent of Technical Writing series, bonus articles, an exercise, and articles about technical writing I published before the series.
The book is available as a PDF and an epub document, licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.
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Connor Tumbleson ☛ A Year of Blogging (2023)
Little did I know how quick attackers could react when releasing an IP into the world. I deleted an old server which left a dangling DNS record to an IP I no longer controlled. The new owner of this IP quickly determined that fact - validated their ownership of a domain the didn't own and proceeded to submit millions of SEO spam to Google. It cost damage to this domain (connortumbleson.com) and took a few days to unwind how the attack occurred.
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David Buchanan ☛ 2024 Will Be the Year of the Blog
I'm inevitably forgetting a lot of things here, and I have many more projects sitting around waiting for completion—not to mention all the new projects I'll start in 2024!
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Jakub Steiner ☛ Looking Back at 2023
Congratulations on finishing yet another ride around the Sol with me. Here’s some noteworthy events from it from the perspective of a dust spec.
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Cendyne Naga ☛ How 2023 came and went, and the new year of 2024 is here
Ever since COVID-19 reached the U.S.A., my sense of time has been forced into a combination of constant whiplash at the intense events of the world and taking things day by day. The seasons change, the events and wars of the world change, and yet nearly every day feels the same.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ Create more. Consume less.
I spend a lot of time online. One could argue it’s too much time. And in that time, I consume content. Mountains of content. Huge mountains of content. Maybe insurmountable mountains of content. No matter how much I try, there will always be another interesting blog post, YouTube video, or podcast episode. I consume a lot more than I create. I suspect I’m not alone in this. And I think there’s a good balance to be found here. Right now I feel the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the consumption and I have to bring it back towards the middle.
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Matt Mullenweg ☛ Birthday Gift
Publish a post. About anything! It can be long or short, a photo or a video, maybe a quote or a link to something you found interesting. Don’t sweat it. Just blog. Share something you created, or amplify something you enjoyed. It doesn’t take much. The act of publishing will be a gift for you and me.
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Education
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ The Year in Review: 2023 in The Scholarly Kitchen
2023 was a year of change in the world of scholarly communications, a continuing increase in what I started calling “The Great Acceleration” back in 2019. 2024 will mark the end of many of the provisions in Plan S, although its founders seem to have already given up on it and moved on to the next thing. We’ll also see all US federal agency policies toward the Nelson Memo officially published by year’s end. Personally, I have great concern about the impact this policy is going to have on researchers as there seems to have been little financial analysis and from what I’ve been hearing, little interest in doing any further such preparation for a set of complex policies that are going to shift significant amounts of funds out of research budgets.
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CS Monitor ☛ Children were thirsting for stories. This couple built them a library.
The biblioburro, or library mule, was just the start.
Today the couple run A Mano Manaba, a full-fledged library and community center that has become a space of refuge and learning for this tiny fishing village.
“This library has been a really positive change for the community,” says Adriana Vaca, who joined the A Mano Manaba team in 2021. “The learning children do here gives them more self-confidence and security. It empowers them.”
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Hardware
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The Drone Girl ☛ Drones might solve one of the biggest 2024 Summer Olympics controversies
While every other Olympic event will be held either in Paris or elsewhere in France (for example, sailing will be held in the Mediterranean city of Marseille), surfing is set to occur in French Polynesia. The Tahitian surfing venue is nearly 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) and 10 time zones away from Paris. And that far away location is proving to be one of the biggest 2024 Summer Olympics controversies.
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Data Swamp ☛ NovaCustom NV41 laptop review
Hello! Today, I present you a quite special blog post, resulting from a partnership with the PC Manufacturer NovaCustom. I offered them to write an honest review for their product and also share my feedback as a user, in exchange for a NV41 laptop. This is an exceptional situation, I insist that it's not a sponsorship, I actually needed a laptop for my freelance work, and it turns they agreed. In our agreements, I added that I would return the laptop in the case I wouldn't like it, I don't want to generate electronic wastes and company's money for nothing.
I have no plans to turn my blog into an advertisement platform and do this on a regular basis. Stars aligned well here, NovaCustom is making the only modern laptop Qubes OS certified, and the CEO is a very open source friendly person.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Parasites cause cancer? 1990s cancer quackery reappears in 2024
Does anyone remember Hulda Regehr Clark? I mention her because she was one of the very first cancer quacks—if not the first cancer quack—whom I ever started writing about, going way, way back to my Usenet days in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, I first started writing about her on the first version of this blog nearly 20 years ago. Longtime readers and people who’ve combatted cancer quackery for a long time might remember that Hulda Clark’s brand of quackery, which dated back decades before I ever discovered it, involved the claim that all cancer—yes, all cancer—was caused by an intestinal parasite, specifically Fasciolopsis buski, which causes fasciolopsiasis, in which the parasites can cause abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss, allergic reactions, fever, and even intestinal obstruction in severe cases. F. buski itself, which can infect pigs and humans, is called a giant intestinal fluke because it is exceptionally large fluke that can grow to as large as 7.5 cm. long and 2 cm wide. Note that there is zero evidence that this particular parasite causes cancer.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ Yet another year of living without
Years ago, inspired by Leo Babauta, I did a year of living without. Each month I tried to live without something to see if it was actually something I needed in my life. It’s a fun experiment, one I personally recommend to anyone.
This year, I’m gonna do it again but with the same twist I tried—very unsucessfully—last year. Instead of doing twelve one-month long experiments, I’m just going to do two but for the entire year. The two things I’m going to live without are: [...]
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Axios ☛ ChatGPT had a high error rate for pediatric cases
Researchers found ChatGPT incorrectly diagnosed over 8 in 10 selected pediatric case studies, raising questions about some bots' suitability for helping doctors size up complex conditions.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Scoop News Group ☛ AI watermarking could be exploited by bad actors to spread misinformation. But experts say the tech still must be adopted quickly
But there is no clear consensus regarding what a digital watermark is, or what common standards and policies around it should be, leading many AI experts and policymakers to fear that the technology could fall short of its potential and even empower bad actors.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Off Guardian ☛ Moscow to prioritize Davos-endorsed plan to cattle-tag the planet
“Digital public infrastructure” is a friendly space lizard euphemism for “you will be cattle-tagged and you will like it.”
Probably you’ve read about the joys of DPI while browsing the websites of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other benevolent reservoirs of international altruism dedicated to creating a safe, convenient, equitable, inclusive, and extremely sustainable world.
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Gizmodo ☛ Meet ‘Link History,’ Facebook’s New Way to Track the Websites You Visit
Facebook recently rolled out a new “Link History” setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. You can opt out if you’re proactive, but the company is pushing Link History on users, and the data is used for targeted ads. As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Facebook debuts Link History as a new way to keep tabs on users’ browsing habits
According to Meta, Link History will store all of the links a user has clicked on for a duration of 30 days. However, it only does so for mobile users, meaning those browsing through Facebook on their personal computers will not have their link histories stored. It should also be noted that any links sent via Messenger and clicked on by users will also not be saved.
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Confidentiality
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The Verge ☛ LastPass will finally enforce a 12-character minimum master password
LastPass’ security woes are well documented — breaches in 2022 allowed [crackers] to steal customer vault data. If you were affected, this meant the only thing between a bad actor and all of your passwords was the master password used to secure your LastPass account. The company claimed that so long as customers followed its “best practices” when setting a master password, their data would be secure — even as some subscriber accounts were still using weaker passwords.
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Defence/Aggression
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El País ☛ Will the media elite help Trump again?
According to data from the Tyndall Report, which tracks nightly news content, between January and November 2015, Trump alone accounted for more than a quarter of all 2016 election coverage in the evening newscasts of NBC, CBS, and ABC, more than the entire Democratic contest combined. The same thing is happening months before the 2024 election. Trump is the omnipresent trickster that won’t go away. He looms over the American experience like a Zeppelin full of hot air.
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Site36 ☛ Elite unit open to women: German military introduces new recruitment test for special forces
Instead of muscles, the Bundeswehr wants to look more at the brain when recruiting special forces. Applicants can score points with drone experience.
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Salon ☛ “This is unacceptable”: Maine’s secretary of state stands defiant in the face of “non-stop threats"
Bellows added in our interview, “For anyone who’s upset with the law that requires the Secretary of State to hold a hearing and issue a ruling on the eligibility of a presidential candidate, there’s a mechanism for changing the law. But to attack me for doing my job, and to attack, more importantly, my staff, the people around me, and my family, is wrong, and it needs to stop. It’s incredibly dangerous. It’s symptomatic of what’s happening right now in our country. We need to stand up and urge everyone, our friends and family members, to bring civility and respect to these conversations.”
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ABC ☛ Migrant encounters along southwest border reach all-time high of 302,000
There were 302,000 encounters along the southwest border in December, marking the highest monthly total ever recorded, sources told ABC News.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Cases Against Trump: A Guide
In all, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. He’s also dealing with a civil suit in New York that could force drastic changes to his business empire, including closing down its operations in his home state. Meanwhile, he is the leading Republican candidate in the race to become the next president—though lawsuits in several states seek to have him disqualified from the presidency. If the criminal and civil cases unfold with any reasonable timeliness, he could be in the heat of the campaign trail at the same time that his legal fate is being decided.
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BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ Russia's Gazprom Breaks Daily Record For Gas Supply To China
Gazprom said the 2023 export figure was 700 million cubic metres - or 3.2 per cent - more than it was contractually obliged to ship to China through the Power of Siberia. It restated that the pipeline will reach the full export capacity of 38 bcm in 2025.
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ADF ☛ Extremist Group Increases Attacks in Western Uganda
Uganda claimed a significant victory over the Islamic State group (IS) in November when it captured a senior commander known as “Njovu” during a raid in which six members of his group were killed.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Six ways for the US to put democracy back on the global agenda in 2024
Looking ahead at this year, the Biden administration must continue to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian influence overseas and associated undermining of democracy in strategically important areas—and it must allocate more resources to do so. In addition, here are six strategic areas that the White House should focus on as part of a bolder democracy agenda. Further US leadership in these areas is necessary to address critical challenges around the world that affect core US interests.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Latvia ☛ Rinkēvičs: National security and civil protection top issues for 2024
In an interview with Latvian Television's “Morning Panorama” newscast on January 3, Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs outlined several things that should be accomplished nationally this year.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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EFF ☛ Victory! Police Drone Footage is Not Categorically Exempt From California’s Public Records Law
The decision by the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District came after a journalist sought access to videos created by Chula Vista Police Department’s “Drones as First Responders” (DFR) program. The police department is the first law enforcement agency in the country to use drones to respond to emergency calls, and several other agencies across the U.S. have since adopted similar models.
After the journalist, Arturo Castañares of La Prensa, sued, the trial court ruled that Chula Vista police could withhold all footage because the videos were exempt from disclosure as law enforcement investigatory records under the California Public Records Act. Castañares appealed.
EFF, along with the First Amendment Coalition and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Castañares, arguing that categorically excluding all drone footage from public disclosure could have troubling consequences on the public’s ability to understand and oversee the police drone program.
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Papers Please ☛ “No-Fly” case to be argued Jan. 8th in the Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument this Monday, January 8, 2024 on an appeal brought by the FBI challenging a Circuit Court decision in favor of Yonas Fikre. It’s the second case on the Supreme Court’s 10 a.m. EST calendar for oral argument Monday.
You can listen live online, attend a live watch party in DC if you can’t get into the Supreme Court, or listen to recorded audio that should be posted by the end of the day on Monday.
The complete Supreme Court docket and links to the pleadings in FBI v. Fikre are here.
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NPR ☛ Court documents reveal names of powerful men allegedly linked to Jeffrey Epstein
The documents include references to [...] among others.
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Axios ☛ What to know about list of unsealed names in Jeffrey Epstein case
Between the lines: Some of the names, a handful of which Preska has ordered remain sealed, include other accusers, witnesses and alleged perpetrators, per ABC.
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Axios ☛ Epstein court documents unsealed
Court filings from a lawsuit related to Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking conspiracy case were unsealed on Wednesday.
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Hindustan Times ☛ Jeffrey Epstein list live updates: Bill Clinton, Stephen Hawking and other 170 big names revealed
The recently revealed documents consist of emails, transcripts from depositions, and various legal records.
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Hindustan Times ☛ Jeffrey Epstein's list exposes Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Michael Jackson, and more
On Wednesday, a 950-page court document revealing the names of some of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates was made public. The documents were part of a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and accomplice.
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CBC ☛ Documents from lawsuit connected to Jeffrey Epstein unsealed
Still, the records — which included transcripts of interviews with some of Epstein's victims — contained reminders that Epstein surrounded himself with famous and powerful figures, including a few who have also been accused of misconduct.
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The Hill ☛ Documents connected to Jeffrey Epstein, lawsuit unsealed
“The filing of these documents ordered unsealed will be done on a rolling basis until completed,” a court order dated Wednesday said.
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The Hill ☛ Unsealed court records offer new detail on old sex abuse allegations against Jeffrey Epstein
Social media has been rife in recent weeks with posts speculating the documents amounted to a list of rich and powerful men who were Epstein’s “clients” or “co-conspirators.”
There was no such list. The first 40 documents in the court-ordered release largely consisted of already public material revealed through nearly two decades of newspaper stories, TV documentaries, interviews, legal cases and books about the Epstein scandal.
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Court Listener ☛ Giuffre v. Maxwell (1:15-cv-07433)
Page 1 of 8
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RFERL ☛ The Photographer Who Broke Into Communist Hungary's Prison System
No one had entered with a camera before and whatever happened behind the high walls of the correctional facility near Budapest was unlikely to fit the image that Hungary’s communist government wanted to project to the world.
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404 Media ☛ Download the Newly Unsealed Jeffrey Epstein Documents Here
Hundreds of pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were unsealed Wednesday. Here they are.
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Environment
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Silicon Angle ☛ AI reveals that up to 75% of large fishing vessels avoid being tracked
The enormous global map of vessels was compared with a database of ships that publicly broadcast their location using automatic identification systems or AIS devices that automatically broadcast their identity, position, course and speed. The researchers found that up to 75% of vessels were not using their AIS systems. Such avoidance is not necessarily prohibited, but the fact they’re not being used indicates that some of the vessels may be engaged in illegal fishing or other illicit activities.
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Energy/Transportation
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[Repeat] Rlang ☛ R To trade or not to trade with Shitcoins and Memecoins (part 1)
It took me long time to muster the motivation to write this post. I greedily dreamed of putting something together that would unveil the secret to crypto trading while amassing a fortune thank to my R skills. The title of the article would then be “How to get rich using R and how to get even richer talking about it” or the likes of that.
Well, it turned out to be a very different article.
In this series I will share what I had in mind and why it didn’t work. Perhaps, someone can shed some light on how to conduct a better analysis or more suitable tools for this purpose.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ How electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain
Industrial-scale cement is a multifaceted climate conundrum. Making it is energy intensive: the inside of a traditional cement kiln is hotter than lava in an erupting volcano. Reaching those temperatures typically requires burning fossil fuels like coal. There’s also a specific set of chemical reactions needed to turn crushed-up minerals into cement—and those reactions release carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
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Rlang ☛ Cryptocurrency Market Data in R
Getting cryptocurrency OHLCV data in R without having to depend on low-level coding using, for example, curl or httr2, have not been easy for the R community.
There is now a high-level API Client available on CRAN which fetches all the market data without having to rely on web-scrapers, API keys or low-level coding.
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The Verge ☛ Fun new deepfake consequence: more convincing [cryptocurrency] scams
“There has been a substantial increase in deepfakes and other AI-generated content recently,” says Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation. (He notes it is not just a [cryptocurrnecy] problem.) He told me that Solana takes these fakes seriously, reporting them as quickly as possible. But Solana isn’t in charge of actually taking down the fakes. That’s up to platforms like YouTube and X. And they’re poky about it — Solana reported that video to YouTube last night.
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Jeff Geerling ☛ Minivans are better than trucks
...at least if you have a family, and need to transport datacenter racks.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Otter is Estonia's animal of the year 2024
"In Estonia, the otter is doing quite well currently, but we can still lead to it becoming endangered as a result of our carelessness, hence the requirement to constantly monitor the population here," Meel went on.
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Overpopulation
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Quartz ☛ A Stanford economist says we should think of water like radio waves
But not everyone is a fan of turning water into a more readily tradeable financial commodity. Arizona has already been seeing waves of big-money investors flooding into the state to buy up water-rich land to cash in selling liquid gold to desperate municipalities. And there has been some movement in Washington, DC to ban the trading of water amid fears that a basic need should not be a commodity. Spectrum-style auctions would be much more complicated and politically fraught when water becomes the central good.
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Finance
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CNN ☛ US national debt hits record $34 trillion | CNN Business
The US government's debt has topped $34 trillion for the first time, just weeks ahead of deadlines for Congress to agree to new federal funding plans.
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The Register UK ☛ Xerox prints pink slips for 15% of workforce
2024 isn't starting off that well for Xerox: first it said it suffered an IT security breach, and now it's laying off 15 percent of staff.
Xerox confirmed to The Register that its planned workforce reduction will take place sometime in the first quarter of 2024. As for specifics, the US corporation only told us cuts would come "across all levels and areas of our organization," so watch out for that pink slip no matter where you work. Happy New Year.
"The decision to reduce our global workforce was a difficult but necessary step toward establishing long-term viability for Xerox," a spokesperson told us. "Xerox is committed to providing transition support for affected employees."
In announcing the cutbacks today, the biz said these layoffs are part of the "reinvention" plans teased in the company's third-quarter earnings report that, per CEO Steven Bandrowczak, were necessary to keep the Silicon Valley stalwart moving forward.
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Axios ☛ Big Tech layoffs shattered industry, worker confidence
Sweeping layoffs across Big Tech over the past two years have left a permanent impression on leaders and workers.
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RetailWire ☛ A Recap of Workforce Layoffs, From Google to the Banking Industry
The turnover from 2023 to 2024 was marked by significant layoffs within the global work landscape, fueled in part by artificial intelligence.
Google began the year with significant strategic changes in light of AI advancements. A key part of this metamorphosis was the potential axing of 30,000 roles within the ad sales division “as it plans to restructure teams, with AI aiming to boost operational efficiency.” The information comes from Sean Downey, head of ad sales for major accounts in the U.S., who hinted at the possible reorganization. This initiative is largely driven by the company’s interest in exploiting AI’s potential to streamline operations, evident in the recent introduction of AI-powered ads.
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Report: Google AI layoffs 2024 to hit 30000 jobs
Google is on the brink of a substantial overhaul within its ad sales division, potentially impacting a substantial workforce of 30,000 employees. This sweeping transformation is in response to Google’s recent strides in artificial intelligence, notably, the integration of generative AI into the Performance Max ad tool.
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Seattle Times ☛ For many job seekers, WA job market still far from a pre-pandemic norm
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The Nation ☛ Rocky Mountain Lie
For a while, everything seemed to be going incredibly well—too well—for Roger.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Democracy Now ☛ “This Is the Republican Party”: Khalil Gibran Muhammad Says Nikki Haley’s Slavery Flub Was No Accident
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is facing backlash after she failed to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War during a town hall event in New Hampshire last week. She later clarified that “of course the Civil War was about slavery,” but her initial reluctance to say so is indicative of how Republican leaders have long avoided reckoning with the country’s past, says Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad. “Nikki Haley has consistently denied the relevance of the history of racism in this country and the presence of racism in this country,” he says. “This is the Republican Party.”
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Silicon Angle ☛ Xerox to lay off 15% of its workforce amid broad restructuring initiative
Xerox Holdings Corp.’s stock plunged 12% today after the printer maker announced plans to let go 15% of its workforce, which comprised more than 20,000 employees at the end of 2022.
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India Times ☛ Google, Meta and Tiktok's debts removed from Russian database
Following the invasion, Twitter and Meta Platforms' Facebook and Instagram were blocked, and Google-owned YouTube became a particular target of the Russian state's ire.
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International Business Times ☛ What Kind Of Artificial Intelligence Technological Development Trend Can We Expect In 2024?
A number of these technologies look set to dominate 2024 and drive new legal developments in artificial intelligence (AI) regulation.
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Truthdig ☛ The Big Lie: What’s Good for Corporate America Is Good for You
Hanauer, Walsh and Cohen show how corporations and their allies used the “crying wolf” strategy to claim that raising the minimum wage would harm the poor, that Social Security was a slippery slope towards socialism, and that the government has gone “too far” in regulating carbon emissions. “Let’s face it; the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” an Exxon executive declared in a 1997 ad in the New York Times.
The authors don’t offer a comprehensive plan for combating corporate propaganda, but they do have some common sense advice: Expose those who fund right-wing messaging, push back in whatever way we can, and urge progressives to shape and deliver our own compelling stories.
Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine, spoke to Capital & Main from her home in New York. Cohen, founder and executive director of the policy center In the Public Interest, spoke to Capital & Main from his home in Los Angeles.
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Hindustan Times ☛ Mark Zuckerberg sold nearly half billion dollars of Meta stock in last two months
The Meta chief executive sold shares on every trading day between Nov. 1 and the end of the year, unloading nearly 1.28 million shares for about $428 million, according to a Tuesday regulatory filing.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Press Gazette ☛ Generative AI in the newsroom: Tips and tactics for 2024 from Reuters, Newsquest and BBC
Generative AI chatbots can alter their output depending on prompts given to them by a user. Doherty-Smith showed attendees a table showing the sorts of prompts that can be given to an AI, including requests to restructure or reformat given information, to fetch information from elsewhere or to brainstorm more information on a given topic.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Fact check: These earthquake videos from Japan are recycled
The video is not from the 2024 earthquake, but was recorded back in 2011 during the Tohoku earthquake (also known as the Great East Japan Earthquake) that triggered a tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. With the help of a reverse image search using search engines Google and Yandex, we found the original video, which was used by US broadcaster CNN, for example, to report on the extent of that earthquake.
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Axios ☛ Welcome to the generative AI election era
Why it matters: Conditions are ripe for bad actors to use generative AI to amplify efforts to suppress votes, libel candidates and incite violence.
[...]
What we're watching: How social media companies work to stop floods of AI-generated misinformation from reaching our screens — if they can't, their platforms may either become useless or dangerous to democracy.
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Science Alert ☛ A Desire For Chaos Fuels The Human Obsession With Conspiracy Theories
While we all engage in conspiracy thinking to a certain degree, some of these beliefs can become dangerous. The increasing propagation and power of misinformation online, some fueled by vested interests, has created a strong motivation to investigate the psychology behind conspiracy thinking.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Meduza ☛ Russian woman who burned passport on New Year’s Eve placed under house arrest
A court in the Russian city of Bryansk has placed blogger Yevgenia Hoffman, who set her passport on fire outside of a nightclub on New Year’s Eve, under house arrest until February 2. The 22-year-old is also forbidden from using her phone or the Internet.
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Meduza ☛ Russian family charged with ‘discrediting’ the Russian army after possibly hacked holiday decoration displays ‘Glory to Ukraine’
Police in Russia’s Veliky Novgorod have charged a family with “discrediting” the Russian army after a smart garland on their balcony displayed the inscription “Glory to Ukraine,” reports TASS.
The apartment owners told the police that the Wi-Fi-controlled garland was supposed to display a New Year’s message.
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BBC ☛ Book releases 2024: From RuPaul to Salman Rushdie
Where else to start but with Salman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. The renowned author recounts the horrific attack which caused both physical and emotional trauma, including leaving him blind in one eye. 16 April, Penguin Random House.
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New Indian Express ☛ Books to look out for in 2024
The big one coming from internationally-renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie is a searing, deeply personal account of enduring and surviving an attempt on his life 30 years after the fatwa that was ordered against him. This is the first time Rushdie will be sharing the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, when he was stabbed multiple times, which resulted in him losing vision in one of his eyes.
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[Old] NYPost ☛ Salman Rushdie publishing memoir, ‘Knife,’ about horror stabbing at NY event: ‘Answer violence with art’
Salman Rushdie announced Wednesday that he is releasing a book about the horrifying upstate New York knife attack by an Islamic fanatic that left him blind in his right eye and with a damaged left hand.
“This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened and to answer violence with art,” the 76-year-old author said of his account of the onstage attack last summer at a literary event in Chautauqua.
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The Atlantic ☛ What Happens Where Free Speech Is Unprotected
I was still following his posts intermittently when the coronavirus pandemic struck. Then the latent libertarian side of Hopkins’s leftism emerged as he became a vociferous critic of lockdowns and an opponent of vaccinations, both of which he claimed were elements of a nefarious GloboCap plot. In posts titled “The Germans Are Back” and “The Covidian Cult,” Hopkins blasted what he termed the “New Normal” of mass obedience, “pathologized totalitarianism,” and demonization of dissenters like him. Hopkins inevitably brought his writings over to Substack, and though not the movement-joining type, he expressed sympathy toward the Querdenker, a group of fringe self-styled “lateral thinkers” whom Germany’s domestic-intelligence service placed under surveillance for their sometimes-violent anti-lockdown protests. A self-published 2022 collection of his essays, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, features a blurb on its cover from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. praising Hopkins as “our modern Jeremiah.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Pro Publica ☛ Pleasantville, N.Y., Struggles to Handle an Influx of Kids in Crisis
If you talk to town officials — the supervisor, the elected board members, the chief of police — they will tell you that mayhem has arrived in Pleasantville.
A quiet, leafy village in the town of Mount Pleasant, less than 20 miles north of New York City, Pleasantville feels like the movie-set version of an affluent Northeastern suburb. Five-bedroom homes overlook tranquil cul-de-sacs and freshly mowed lawns. Kids really do ride their bikes in the street after school. The village is less than two square miles, so if you hit an errant ball at the Pleasantville Tennis Club, you could almost smack a neighbor teeing off at the Pleasantville Country Club.
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RFA ☛ No new monks allowed at Buddhist monastery in Tibet
This is the first time Chinese authorities have prohibited the enrollment of monks of all ages, though previously only minors, or those below the age of 18, were restricted from joining the monastic order in Tibet, said a source from inside the region.
“Now, authorities have issued an order forbidding the intake of any new monks into Khyungbum Lura Monastery in Markham [county],” said the source who requested anonymity for safety reasons.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Eugene V. Debs’s Wisdom for the New Year
During World War I, Eugene V. Debs saw socialism as the “star of hope” that might redeem a world wracked by violence. Read his message of renewal as we leave a war-torn year behind and head into a new one.
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Snopes ☛ Did Lyndon B. Johnson Say This About The 'Lowest White Man' and 'Best Colored Man'?
Claim: President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
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ANF News ☛ Two-day conference in Stockholm will discuss women's resistance in Iran and Rojhilat
A conference titled "Towards women's revolution with Jin Jiyan Azadi" will take place on 20 and 21 January in Stockholm to discuss the women’s resistance in Iran and Rojhilat (East Kurdistan).
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The Register UK ☛ What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines
On the surface, these cases are about alleged copyright infringement by Big Tech at a time when it's still up in the air as to how that law intersects generative models. Do the plaintiffs have a solid legal footing, or not; can they be fairly compensated if necessary, and how would that work; and does the law need to change, why should it change, and how?
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New York Times ☛ SpaceX Illegally Fired Workers Critical of Musk, Federal Agency Says
According to a complaint issued by a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board, the company fired the employees in 2022 for calling on SpaceX to distance itself from social media comments by Mr. Musk, including one in which he mocked sexual harassment accusations against him.
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Silicon Angle ☛ SpaceX accused of illegally firing staff who criticized CEO Elon Musk
“Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks,” the letter said. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX — every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company. It is critical to make clear to our teams and to our potential talent pool that his messaging does not reflect our work, our mission, or our values.”
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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NPR ☛ People in prison explain what music means to them — and how they access it
Users can pay money to send messages, make video calls, play games, download books and stream music, among other functions.
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Trademarks
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Politico ☛ How to snatch the EU’s best office? Know your trademarks
Sitting in the sunny seaside town of Alicante, one European Union agency might just have it all. And it's now also poised to become a real power player in global technology disputes.
The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), on the Spanish Costa Blanca, has an executive office the size of an average one-person Brussels apartment, with floor-to-ceiling views of the Mediterranean Sea and a balcony to really take them in.
EUIPO is one of the EU's largest agencies, with a yearly budget of around €455 million and roughly 1,200 staff. It's self-funded, deriving revenue from trademark registrations and leaving it free to invest in its sprawling offices with sweeping sea views, deluxe sports grounds and a ritzy restaurant.
“Everything is possible,” its new Executive Director João Negrão said in an interview from his spacious office overlooking the Spanish coastline. EUIPO "has the capacity to implement whatever the legislator wants to give us."
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Copyrights
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Democracy Now ☛ From Plagiarism to Gaza: Khalil Gibran Muhammad on How a GOP Campaign Ousted Harvard’s Claudine Gay
We look at the resignation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, the first African American and second woman to lead the Ivy League school, after conservative-led allegations of plagiarism and backlash over her testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism that is part of a broader effort to censor pro-Palestinian speech on college campuses. “This is a terrible moment for higher education,” says Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He says plagiarism became a “pretext” to oust Gay, and discusses the larger right-wing war on education aimed at undoing progress on race, gender and addressing inequality.
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The Atlantic ☛ Claudine Gay’s Resignation Was Overdue
Claudine Gay engaged in academic misconduct. Everything else about her case is irrelevant, including the silly claims of her right-wing opponents.
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ Phineas
cow: The true villains are the legal mechanisms pushing for the extension of copyright law and the continued servitude of Mickey - lobbyists, whoever sent those lobbyists, and the politicians who welcomed them.
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The Verge ☛ Mickey Mouse has left the house: Steamboat Willie enters the public domain
In the world of copyright, there are few companies that share Disney’s reputation for fiercely protecting how its IP is used. When the company pushed to extend copyright length from 75 years to 95 years back in 1998, the law even became known as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” because it prevented the iconic character from entering the public domain.
But that was then — now, as of January 1st, 2024, the earliest versions of the character seen in the 1928 animations Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy can finally be used and referenced by anyone in the US without Disney’s permission, alongside other characters like an early version of Minnie Mouse and Peg Leg Pete.
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Torrent Freak ☛ BitTorrent Tracker Blocks Thousands of 'Infringing' Hashes
OpenTrackr is a content-neutral torrent tracker that facilitates millions of BitTorrent transfers. The service doesn't store any files and is not privy to what people share. However, when asked to, it will block 'infringing' hashes that may lead people to pirated files. To prevent abuse, several thousand hashes were banned over the past year.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Premier League Players Ask Fans to Dump Piracy, Pirate Sites Seem Oblivious
Unlike the UK, where Premiership stars are effectively firewalled from the national piracy controversy, players from Manchester United, Liverpool, and Everton publicly support the Premier League's 'Boot Out Piracy' campaign in Asia. In parallel, the Vietnamese government has just published a list of sites subject to an advertising ban, which includes some of the most resilient football piracy sites. To cite a Jaws analogy, Casemiro and friends need a bigger boat.
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The Atlantic ☛ A New Era for Mickey Mouse
In 1998, Congress extended copyright periods for a range of works. The Copyright Term Extension Act—sometimes snarkily called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” due to Disney’s role in lobbying Congress—lengthened the period of copyright for many materials published before 1978 to 95 years (Steamboat Willie, along with other creative works such as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, turns 95 this year). That law “transferred wealth to a tiny subset of rights owners,” Jennifer Jenkins, a clinical law professor at Duke University and the director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, told me in an email, and “stymied” the public’s ability to access and build on American cultural heritage.
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The Nation ☛ Mickey Mouse Loses It!
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Gizmodo ☛ Of Course the First Steamboat Willie Horror Movie Is Already Here
Although not on the release scope that Blood and Honey managed to achieve last year, Mickey’s Mouse Trap follows a young woman named Alex on her 21st Birthday, who finds herself working a late shift at an amusement arcade—only to find it haunted by a masked killer dressed as the Steamboat Willie star. It’s a bit Five Nights at Freddy’s, it’s a bit Saw, it’s very much a bit skirting around what you can actually do with Steamboat Willie. The movie’s name just about dances around what Disney still owns about Mickey as a character in trademark (i.e., his name), and it’s very telling that Mickey isn’t uttered once in the trailer—although we do get to see snippets of Steamboat Willie playing, of course.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Politics and World Events
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Antenna Censorship (publ. 2024-01-03)
If you are conservative-leaning yourself, or if you want to believe that the posts you are seeing on Antenna roughly represent the broad spectrum of perspectives and opinions out there in the Gemiverse, then you should be troubled by this censorship.
[...]
If it doesn't bother you — fine — but be aware that the feed list you are seeing is really just a curated representation of opinions that are comfortable for the site administrator.
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The Paradox of the Radical and the Conservative
This is a section from the section on the principle "Use Small and Slow Solutions" from David Holmgrens 'Permaculture Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability'.
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Technology and Free Software
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re: AI is like fire 🔥
Generative AI, as in "creating" texts and images based on previously existent stuff is a constant pursue of automation. "How can I remove the human to reduce time and cost?" (with all the good and worse parts of it, rights, emotions, harms and benefits)
[...]
Obviously the person extracting water by hand became unemployed. In a few years everyone in the town will forget that water was drawn by people whose main employment was pulling a rope in a well, as a few years ago there were telegraphs, letter carriers, horse riders and lamplighters... And we open a faucet ignoring the miracle behind piped water 🚰, we are so used to it!
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AI is like fire
This moment of AI advancement feels like what the discovery of fire was probably like. Fear on the one hand, and potential on the other. It also feels like what the invention of the wheel was probably like: Some people stared at it and scratched their heads, and others were out there on day 1 making wheelbarrows, neither side quite able to wrap their minds around what just happened. As far as future impact, both were a net-positive.
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NovaCustom NV41 laptop review
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NovaCustom NV41 laptop review
Hello! Today, I present you a quite special blog post, resulting from a partnership with the PC Manufacturer NovaCustom. I offered them to write an honest review for their product and also share my feedback as a user, in exchange for a NV41 laptop. This is an exceptional situation, I insist that it's not a sponsorship, I actually needed a laptop for my freelance work, and it turns they agreed. In our agreements, I added that I would return the laptop in the case I wouldn't like it, I don't want to generate electronic wastes and company's money for nothing.
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Internet/Gemini
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An ode to dead end webpages
There are millions of webpages on the internet, specifically on the wbe, which are dead-end. I find this quite poetic that among a sea of hypertextual movement those pages stand still, with little to no links towards them, and no links at all from them to the outside. They are dead ends that beg you to check them out, ones that have nothing to offer but themselves. Hermit pages. There is poetry in this. Sometimes, they are pages which exist, but whose domain doesn't exist by itself, with no way of tracing them back to a bigger context or circumstances, other than what their contents say about them.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.